Proof of Heaven. Real experience of a neurosurgeon Eben Alexander
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Title: Proof of Heaven. Real experience of a neurosurgeon
Author: Eben Alexander
Year: 2013
Genre: Esoteric, Religion: other, Foreign esoteric and religious literature
About the book “Proof of Paradise. Real experience of a neurosurgeon" Eben Alexander
The existence of Heaven and Hell is still debated. And not only religious people, but even scientists. Both supporters and opponents have their own arguments, and even evidence. Of course, everyone chooses for themselves whether to believe in it or not, but I think it will be interesting for everyone to learn that there are people who have evidence of the existence of Paradise.
Eben Alexander's book “Proof of Paradise. The real experience of a neurosurgeon" is precisely that Heaven exists. This story is told by a neurosurgeon who has worked at the hospital for more than 25 years and is also a professor at Harvard Medical School and other educational institutions. As you know, most doctors do not even allow the thought that Heaven and Hell exist. They approach this from a scientific point of view and have clear explanations for all phenomena associated with the movement of the human soul.
Of course, you can believe in Heaven and Hell or not, but we can find out whether they really exist only after our death. But Eben Alexander’s arguments are truly amazing and make you believe the author. So, he said that while he was in a coma, his brain was practically dead. That is, the brain could not show him all the pictures that Eben saw. So it really happened.
But on the other hand, our brain is capable of such things that sometimes doctors themselves are surprised. Even in the situation with Eben Alexander, who almost miraculously managed to survive from a severe and unknown form of meningitis. Therefore, it is not surprising that even a practically dead brain continues to send impulses that paint amazing pictures.
The book “Proof of Paradise. Real experience of a neurosurgeon” definitely deserves attention. There are facts here that cannot be refuted. Death always interests people, because we are afraid of the unknown, we want to learn more about what awaits us later, beyond Life.
Read this amazing story very easy. Of course, you will often be amazed, surprised and even frightened, but in general Eben Alexander says that death is not something to be afraid of. In another world it is good and beautiful, almost the same as is commonly believed.
The book “Proof of Paradise. The real experience of a neurosurgeon" will appeal to everyone. Those who believe in Paradise will find one more proof of it. Those who do not believe may reevaluate their beliefs, or perhaps find a logical explanation for all the things that happen to people after death. In any case, the book is both interesting and very useful. You will gain new knowledge about the brain, as well as what awaits each of us at the end of the tunnel.
On our website about books, you can download the site for free or read online the book “Proof of Paradise. Real experience of a neurosurgeon" by Eben Alexander in epub, fb2, txt, rtf, pdf formats for iPad, iPhone, Android and Kindle. The book will give you a lot of pleasant moments and real pleasure from reading. You can buy the full version from our partner. Also, here you will find the latest news from the literary world, learn the biography of your favorite authors. For beginning writers, there is a separate section with useful tips and tricks, interesting articles, thanks to which you yourself can try your hand at literary crafts.
Quotes from the book “Proof of Paradise. Real experience of a neurosurgeon" Eben Alexander
Undoubtedly, love is the basis of everything. Not some abstract, incredible, illusory love, but the most ordinary love, familiar to everyone - the same love with which we look at our wife and children and even our pets. In its purest and most powerful form, this love is not jealous, not selfish, but unconditional and absolute. This is the most primal, incomprehensibly blissful truth that lives and breathes in the heart of everything that exists and will exist. And a person who does not know this love and does not invest it in all his actions is not able to even remotely understand who he is and why he lives.
A person must see things as they are, and not as he wants to see them.
Indifference to the outcome only increased the feeling of one’s own invulnerability.
The newly published book by Harvard professor Eben Alexander, “Proof of Heaven,” has gone on sale in the United States.
Dr. Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon with 25 years of experience and a professor who taught at Harvard Medical School and other universities, claims that he has personally visited the next world. Believes that, most likely, he looked into heaven. The doctor remembered what he saw there. And after some time, he outlined his “travel notes” in a book, which he named accordingly: “Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife”. At the end of October 2012, the book arrived on sale in the USA at a very modest price, not exceeding $15.
Talking about his journey in an interview with Newsweek magazine, Eben emphasized that he had never before believed in an afterlife. Moreover, he sympathized with those who believe and believed that there was a reasonable scientific explanation for the strange visions that people who almost died described. However, when he himself found himself in a coma - on the verge of life and death, there was somehow no time for scientific explanations - what he had to face looked so amazing.
When the brain turned off
Alexander looked into the next world in the fall of 2008, while in a comatose state at Lynchburg General Hospital in Virginia, where he himself then worked as a neurosurgeon. He was brought into a coma by bacterial meningitis caused by E. coli bacteria entering the brain. As a result, according to the traveler, his body stopped responding to external stimuli, his brain turned off, and the cerebral cortex, which is responsible for thoughts and emotions, stopped functioning. Alexander spent 7 days in this state. And supposedly visited another Universe. According to him, larger than ours, in which a person is something more than just body and brain. And where death is not the end of conscious existence, but only part of an endless journey.
Of course, the most complete presentation of what was seen in the next world is contained in the book, which, however, is also replete with philosophical reflections. In Newsweek magazine - a kind of summary - (a very good and almost complete translation of what the awakened neurosurgeon told the magazine can be found here. Or see below). The point is that in the world that Alexander visited, representatives of the highest form of life live - “transparent, shimmering creatures that fly across the sky and leave long, line-like trails behind them, like airplanes.” The neurosurgeon met a flock of these creatures when he himself soared high into the clouds. In addition, I heard sounds made by the creatures, similar to a song. Alexander liked the song. It seemed that the creatures were using it to express the joy that overwhelmed them.
Something higher that includes all types of love
However, it was not a transparent and flickering creature that came into contact with the traveler, but a creature of a more familiar form that appeared nearby.
“... A woman,” Alexander recalls, “Young... High cheekbones and dark blue eyes. The beautiful face is framed by golden-brown braids. When I first saw her, we were riding on horseback over a complex patterned surface, which after a while I recognized as the wing of a butterfly. Millions of butterflies circled around us, flying out of the forest and returning back. It was a river of life and color flowing through the air. The woman's clothes were simple, like those of a peasant woman, but her color, blue, indigo and orange-peach, was as bright as everything that surrounded us. She looked at me with such a look that if you were under it for even five seconds, your whole life would be filled with meaning, regardless of what you experienced. It was not a romantic view. It wasn't the look of a friend. It was a look beyond it all. Something higher, including all types of love, and at the same time much more.”
Blinding darkness
The woman communicated with the neurosurgeon telepathically. And in the end she made it clear that he would return to where he came from.
Before they returned, Alexander found himself at the entrance to a void, “completely dark, infinite in size, but incredibly calming. Despite the blackness, the void was filled with light. It seemed to come from a shining ball that I felt next to me. This ball was like a translator between me and the outside world. It seemed that this world was much larger than the Universe, which seemed to me like a gigantic cosmic womb.”
Later, after waking up and reflecting, the neurosurgeon decided that that same calming emptiness was the home of God himself. According to Alexander, the most accurate description of this amazing place he found in the 17th century metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan in the line “There is, some say, in God a deep but dazzling darkness...” In it, Vaughan seemed to would, paradoxically, place God in deep and blindingly shining... darkness.
“That’s how it was,” recalls the neurosurgeon.
The materialistic view is doomed
Eben Alexander irrevocably believed that the journey was real. And he wasn't delirious. He proved this to himself. And now, citing his scientific authority, he is trying to convince others, especially those who still doubt, that life after life exists. Therefore God exists
“Today, many believe that spiritual truths have lost their power and that the path to truth is science, not faith,” the scientist said in an interview with Newsweek magazine. - Before my experience, I thought so myself. But now I understand that such an opinion was too simple. The fact is that a materialistic view of our body and brain is doomed. A new way of looking at mind and body will take its place.
Neurosurgeon perceives heaven as a real place Photo: bajanreporter.com
It will take a long time to put together this new picture of reality. Neither I nor my sons will be able to finish it. Reality is too vast, complex and mysterious. But, in essence, it will show the Universe developing, multidimensional and studied down to the last atom by God, who cares for us as no parent cares for his child. I am still a doctor and a man of science. But on a deep level, I am very different from the person I was before because I saw this new picture of reality. And, you can believe me, every stage of the work that we and our descendants will have to do is worth it."
Overall: something is confusing
The neurosurgeon's words generally sound good. But something about them confuses me. In my opinion, of course. Alexander has the habits of a Catholic missionary preacher, one of those who came to us at the end of the USSR to campaign from stages and stadiums for Jesus Christ. He preaches very beautifully, even pathetically. But intrusive. As a potential guru of some mystical sect - some new realists, which he himself had already planned to create.
Returning from paradise, Dr. Alexander continued his medical practice Photo: AR
And the neurosurgeon looks suspicious. If he hadn’t preached, he could easily have been mistaken for an agent who was about to offer to buy a vacuum cleaner or turn in money for a time share. But maybe I'm wrong? I just don’t understand anything about honest Americans?
Dr. Alexander outlined his travel notes in a book Photo: Ozon
INSTEAD OF A COMMENT
The closest thing to the “underworld” is the “kingdom of Morpheus”
But what if we still adhere to that same doomed materialistic view of our body and brain? Can the nature of Eben Alexander's journey be rationally explained? And prove that he never flew beyond his own head?
Kevin Nelson, almost a colleague of the traveler, a neurophysiologist from the University of Kentucky (Lexington, USA), has a hypothesis on this matter. He believes that Alexander's visions and other so-called near-death experiences are a type of... sleep. Specifically, a violation of one of its phases - the so-called “rapid eye movement” sleep, which is accompanied by rapid eye movements - REM.
“Sometimes such states arise,” Nelson explains, “when the brain is partially awake and partially immersed in the REM sleep phase.” Such “REM intrusions” produce hallucinations that are very convincing. So much so that parts of the brain that are awake or still not switched off are able to confuse them with real events.
Scientists' conclusion: the illusion of traveling to the “Underworld” is created by a combination of effects arising from the invasion of the REM sleep phase while simultaneously disrupting brain function.
What remains is a mere “trifle” - to explain what resuscitators observe. More precisely, they do not observe. Namely, brain activity. Encephalographs, working while people are “absent” from this world and supposedly remain on “Tom,” draw smooth lines without any impulses. It was as if my brain had completely switched off. Isn't it a strong argument for those who believe in the ability of the soul to leave the body?
“No mysticism,” Nelson assures. - After all, the brain does not turn off instantly - it takes a few seconds. They are quite enough to fall into the REM sleep phase, and in it already make a fairly long “journey”. After all, in a dream the perception of time changes. It's like it's stretching. Sometimes moments turn into not only minutes, but hours and weeks. As it happened with the most famous visitor to “The Other World”, who, it seems, had a near-death experience without dying at all.
“They report with surprise about Mohammed that he fell asleep, seeing the first vibrations of the falling vessel, in a dream he went through all seven branches of paradise with a detailed inspection and, waking up upon returning to earth, still managed to prevent the vase from falling. Life in a dream... has a much faster course than in reality...,” Russian researcher Nikolai Grot wrote in his book “Dreams as a Subject of Scientific Analysis” (Kyiv, 1878).
rest in peace
Where do dying people get the feeling of being immersed in an incredibly calming substance that Alexander talked about?
Recently, the German scientist Alexander Wutzler offered his explanation. His research team found in the brains of dying people a threefold increase in the level of serotonin, one of the main neurotransmitters that controls many functions in the body and affects the perception of pain and creates a feeling of euphoria. Serotonin is also called the hormone of happiness.
Wutzler blamed this hormone for the dying visions.
Perhaps another physiological mechanism of near-death experiences was stumbled upon by Zalika Klemenc-Ketic from the University of Maribor in Slovenia.
The researcher monitored the condition of patients suffering from acute heart failure. 52 of them died but were resurrected. While the patients reached the threshold of the other world, stayed there and returned back, the researcher took their blood for tests.
Of the resurrected people, 11 reported that they had been somewhere and talked about the tunnel, light, angels and other miracles. This is slightly less than 20 percent. Which corresponds to world statistics: according to various sources, from 8 to 20 survivors report traveling to the next world and back.
Next, Zalika looked at how the blood of those who have seen and those who have not seen the afterlife is fundamentally different. It turned out that there was only one thing: the concentration of dissolved carbon dioxide. In those who survived clinical death, it increased sharply. It turned out: if dying visions are hallucinations, then carbonated blood causes them. Just…
By the way, similar sensations, even visions, are sometimes experienced by both climbers at high altitude and divers diving to great depths without scuba gear. They also have problems with carbon dioxide in the blood.
People who have been to the next world tell what they saw. Many people see the same thing
What the neurosurgeon said in an interview with Newsweek magazine (abbreviated translation of the site http://www.yoki.ru):
“As a neurosurgeon, I did not believe in the phenomenon of “after death” experiences. As the son of a neurosurgeon, I grew up in the scientific world. I followed my father's example and became an academic neurosurgeon, teaching at Harvard Medical School and other universities. I understand what happens to the brain when people are on the verge of death, and I have always believed that the journeys beyond the boundaries of one's own body, which are described by those who managed to escape death, have a completely scientific explanation. The brain is an amazingly complex and extremely delicate mechanism. Reduce the amount of oxygen it needs to a minimum and the brain will respond. It was not news that people who had suffered severe traumas returned from their “journeys” with strange stories. But this did not mean that their journeys were real.
Although I considered myself a Christian, I was more called one than I really was. I didn't envy those who believed that Jesus was more than just a good man who was wronged by society. I felt deeply for those who believed that there was a God out there somewhere who truly loved us. In fact, I envied the sense of security that their faith gave these people. But as a scientist, I simply knew, and did not believe. However, in the fall of 2008, after seven days in a coma during which my cerebral cortex (CMC) did not function, I experienced something so profound that it gave me scientific reasons to believe in life after death. I know that such statements cause skepticism, so I will tell my story in the language of a scientist and with his own logic.
Early one morning four years ago, I woke up with a severe headache.
For several hours, the cerebral cortex, which controls thoughts and emotions and essentially makes us human, was “closed.” Doctors at Virginia Lynchburg General Hospital, where I myself worked as a neurosurgeon, decided that I had somehow contracted a very rare disease - bacterial meningitis, which mainly attacks newborns. E. coli bacteria had entered my spinal fluid and was eating my brain. When I arrived at the emergency room, my chances of living and not being a vegetable were extremely low. Soon they dropped to almost zero. For seven days I lay in a deep coma, my body unresponsive and my brain unable to function. Then, on the morning of the seventh day, as the doctors were deciding whether to continue treatment, my eyes opened.
There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body was in a coma, my mind and my inner world were alive and well. While the neurons of the cerebral cortex were defeated by bacteria, my consciousness went to another, much larger Universe - a dimension that I could not even imagine and which my pre-comatose mind would prefer to call “unreal”. But this dimension is the same , described by countless people who have experienced clinical death and other mystical states, exists. It is there, and what I saw and learned literally opened up a new world for me: a world in which we are much more than just the brain and body, and where death is not the fading of consciousness, but rather the chapter of a larger and very positive journey. I am not the first person to discover evidence that consciousness exists outside the body. These stories are as old as human history. But, as far as I know, no one before me had ever been in this dimension while a) their cerebral cortex was completely non-functional and b) their body was under medical supervision.
All the main arguments against afterlife experiences are based on the fact that these events are the result of a “malfunction” of the CGM. However, I went through my own experience with a completely non-functional cortex. According to modern medical understanding of the brain and mind, there was no way I could have experienced anything even remotely close to what I had experienced.
I spent several months trying to understand and come to terms with what had happened to me. At the beginning of my adventures I was in the clouds. Large, fluffy, pinkish-white, floating across the blue-black sky. A flock of transparent shimmering creatures flew high, high above the clouds, leaving long trails behind them, like airplanes. Birds? Angels? These words came up later when I was writing down my memories. But none of these words can describe those creatures. They were simply different from anything else on this planet. They were more advanced. The highest form of life.
There was a sound from above, like a beautiful choir singing, and I thought, “Is this from them?” Later, thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that the sound came from the joy of these beings growing up together - they simply could not contain it. The sound was palpable and almost tangible, like the rain you feel on your skin without getting you wet to the bone.
For most of my journey, someone was with me. Woman. She was young and I remember in detail what she looked like. She had high cheekbones and dark blue eyes. Golden-brown braids framed her beautiful face. When I first saw her, we were driving together along a complex patterned surface, which after a while I recognized as the wing of a butterfly. Millions of butterflies circled around us, flying out of the forest and returning back. It was a river of life and color flowing through the air. The woman's clothes were simple, like those of a peasant woman, but her color, blue, indigo and orange-peach, was as bright as everything that surrounded us. She looked at me with such a look that if you were under it for even five seconds, your whole life would be filled with meaning, regardless of what you experienced. It was not a romantic view. It wasn't the look of a friend. It was a look beyond it all. Something higher, including all types of love, and at the same time much more.
She spoke to me without words. Her words passed through me like the wind, and I immediately knew it was true. I knew this just as I knew that the world around us was real. Her message consisted of three sentences, and if I had to translate them into earthly language, they would mean the following: “You are always loved and cared for, dear. You have nothing to fear. There's nothing you can do wrong."
Her words gave me a huge feeling of relief. It was as if someone had explained to me the rules of a game that I had been playing all my life without understanding them. “We’ll show you a lot of things,” the woman continued. “But then you’ll come back.”
After that, I only had one question left: where will I go back? A warm wind was blowing, like what happens on a warm summer day. Wonderful breeze. It changed everything around, as if the world around me sounded an octave higher and acquired higher vibrations. Although I could speak, I began to silently ask the wind questions: “Where am I? Who am I? Why am I here?” Every time I silently asked my questions, the answer came instantly in the form of an explosion of light, color, love and beauty passing through me in waves. What is important is that these explosions did not “shut up” me, but responded, but in such a way as to avoid words - I directly accepted the thoughts. Not the way it happens on Earth - vaguely and abstractly. These thoughts were hard and fast, hot as fire and wet as water, and as soon as I accepted them, I instantly and effortlessly understood concepts that in my normal life would have taken me years to understand.
I continued to move forward and found myself at the entrance to a void, completely dark, infinite in size, but incredibly calming. Despite the blackness, it was filled with light, which seemed to emanate from the shining ball that I felt next to me. He was like a translator between me and the outside world. The woman with whom we walked on the wing of a butterfly guided me with the help of this ball.
I know very well how unusual and frankly unbelievable this all sounds. If someone, even a doctor, told me such a story, I would be sure that he was in captivity of some kind of delusion. But what happened to me was far from crazy. It was as real as any event in my life - like my wedding day and the birth of my two sons. What happened to me requires an explanation. Modern physics tells us that the Universe is one and indivisible. Although we seem to live in a world of divisions and differences, physics tells us that every object and event in the Universe is made up of other objects and events. There is no true separation. Before I had my experience, these ideas were abstractions. Today they are realities. The universe is defined not only by unity, but also - now I know this - by love. When I felt better, I tried to tell others about my experience, but their reaction was polite disbelief. One of the few places where I did not encounter this problem was church. Entering there for the first time after the coma, I looked at everything with different eyes. The colors of the stained glass windows reminded me of the sparkling beauty of the landscapes that I saw in the upper world, and the bass of the organ reminded me of the thoughts and emotions that I experienced there. And most importantly, the image of Jesus sharing bread with his disciples awakened in me the memory of the words that have accompanied my entire journey - that God loves me unconditionally. Today many believe that spiritual truths have lost their power and that the path to truth is science, not faith. Before my experience, I thought so myself. But now I understand that such an opinion was too simple. The fact is that a materialistic view of our body and brain is doomed. A new way of looking at mind and body will take its place. It will take a long time to put together this new picture of reality. Neither I nor my sons will be able to finish it. Reality is too vast, complex and mysterious. But, in essence, it will show the Universe developing, multidimensional and studied down to the last atom by God, who cares for us as no parent cares for his child. I am still a doctor and a man of science. But on a deep level, I am very different from the person I was before because I saw this new picture of reality. And, you can believe me, every stage of the work that we and our descendants will have to do is worth it."
In this book, Dr. Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon with 25 years of experience, a professor who taught at Harvard Medical School and other major American universities, shares with the reader his impressions of his journey to the next world. His case is unique. Stricken by a sudden and unexplained form of bacterial meningitis, he miraculously recovered after a seven-day coma. A highly educated physician with extensive practical experience, who previously not only did not believe in the afterlife, but also did not allow the thought of it, experienced the transfer of his “I” to the higher worlds and there encountered such amazing phenomena and revelations that, upon returning to earthly life, , considered it his duty as a scientist and healer to tell the whole world about them.
* * *
The given introductory fragment of the book Proof of Heaven. The Real Experience of a Neurosurgeon (Eben Alexander, 2013) provided by our book partner - the company liters.
Protected by the legislation of the Russian Federation on the protection of intellectual rights. Reproduction of the entire book or any part thereof is prohibited without written permission from the publisher. Any attempts to violate the law will be prosecuted.
A person must see things as they are, and not as he wants to see them.
Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955)When I was little, I often flew in my dreams. It usually happened like this. I dreamed that I was standing in our yard at night and looking at the stars, and then suddenly I separated from the ground and slowly rose up. The first few inches of lift into the air happened spontaneously, without any input on my part. But I soon noticed that the higher I rise, the more the flight depends on me, or more precisely, on my condition. If I was wildly jubilant and excited, I would suddenly fall down, hitting the ground hard. But if I perceived the flight calmly, as something natural, then I quickly flew higher and higher into the starry sky.
Perhaps partly as a result of these dream flights, I subsequently developed a passionate love for airplanes and rockets - and indeed for any flying machine that could again give me the feeling of the vastness of the air. When I had the opportunity to fly with my parents, no matter how long the flight was, it was impossible to tear me away from the window. In September 1968, at the age of fourteen, I gave all my lawn-mowing money to a glider flying class taught by a guy named Goose Street at Strawberry Hill, a small grassy "airfield" near my hometown of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. I still remember how excitedly my heart was pounding when I pulled the dark red round handle, which unhooked the cable connecting me to the tow plane, and my glider rolled out onto the tarmac. For the first time in my life, I experienced an unforgettable feeling of complete independence and freedom. Most of my friends loved the thrill of driving for this reason, but in my opinion, nothing could compare to the thrill of flying a thousand feet in the air.
In the 1970s, while attending college at the University of North Carolina, I became involved in skydiving. Our team seemed to me like something like a secret brotherhood - after all, we had special knowledge that was not available to everyone else. The first jumps were very difficult for me; I was overcome by real fear. But by the twelfth jump, when I stepped out the door of the plane to free-fall for over a thousand feet before opening my parachute (my first skydive), I felt confident. In college, I completed 365 skydives and logged more than three and a half hours of free-fall flying time, performing mid-air acrobatics with twenty-five comrades. And although I stopped jumping in 1976, I continued to have joyful and very vivid dreams about skydiving.
I liked jumping most of all in the late afternoon, when the sun began to set on the horizon. It is difficult to describe my feelings during such jumps: it seemed to me that I was getting closer and closer to something that was impossible to define, but which I desperately longed for. This mysterious “something” was not an ecstatic feeling of complete solitude, because we usually jumped in groups of five, six, ten or twelve people, making various figures in free fall. And the more complex and difficult the figure was, the greater the delight that overwhelmed me.
On a beautiful fall day in 1975, the guys from the University of North Carolina and some friends from the Parachute Training Center and I gathered to practice formation jumps. On our penultimate jump from a D-18 Beechcraft light aircraft at 10,500 feet, we were making a ten-person snowflake. We managed to form this figure even before the 7,000-foot mark, that is, we enjoyed the flight in this figure for eighteen whole seconds, falling into a gap between the masses of high clouds, after which, at an altitude of 3,500 feet, we unclenched our hands, leaned away from each other and opened our parachutes.
By the time we landed, the sun was already very low, above the ground. But we quickly boarded another plane and took off again, so we were able to capture the last rays of the sun and make one more jump before it completely set. This time, two beginners took part in the jump, who for the first time had to try to join the figure, that is, fly up to it from the outside. Of course, it's easiest to be the main jumper, because he just has to fly down, while the rest of the team has to maneuver in the air to get to him and lock arms with him. Nevertheless, both beginners rejoiced at the difficult test, as did we, already experienced parachutists: after training the young guys, we could later make jumps with even more complex figures.
Out of a group of six people who had to make a star over the runway of a small airfield located near the town of Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, I had to jump last. A guy named Chuck walked in front of me. He had extensive experience in aerial group acrobatics. At an altitude of 7,500 feet the sun was still shining on us, but the street lights below were already shining. I've always loved twilight jumping and this one was going to be amazing.
I had to leave the plane about a second after Chuck, and in order to catch up with the others, my fall had to be very rapid. I decided to dive into the air, as if into the sea, upside down, and fly in this position for the first seven seconds. This would allow me to fall almost a hundred miles an hour faster than my companions, and be on the same level with them immediately after they began to build a star.
Usually during such jumps, after descending to an altitude of 3,500 feet, all skydivers unclasp their arms and move as far apart as possible. Then everyone waves their hands, signaling that they are ready to open their parachute, looks up to make sure that no one is above them, and only then pulls the release rope.
- Three, two, one... March!
One by one, four parachutists left the plane, followed by Chuck and me. Flying upside down and picking up speed in free fall, I was elated to see the sun set for the second time that day. As I approached the team, I was about to skid to a stop in the air, throwing my arms out to the sides - we had suits with wings of fabric from the wrists to the hips, which created powerful resistance, fully expanding at high speed.
But I didn't have to do that.
As I fell vertically towards the figure, I noticed that one of the guys was approaching it too quickly. I don't know, maybe the rapid descent into a narrow gap between the clouds frightened him, reminding him that he was rushing at a speed of two hundred feet per second towards a giant planet, barely visible in the gathering darkness. One way or another, instead of slowly joining the group, he rushed towards it like a whirlwind. And the five remaining paratroopers tumbled randomly in the air. Besides, they were too close to each other.
This guy left behind a powerful turbulent wake. This air current is very dangerous. As soon as another skydiver hits him, the speed of his fall will rapidly increase, and he will crash into the one below him. This in turn will give both paratroopers a strong acceleration and throw them towards the one even lower. In short, a terrible tragedy will occur.
I twisted my body away from the randomly falling group and maneuvered until I was directly above the “spot,” the magical point on the ground above which we would open our parachutes and begin our slow two-minute descent.
I turned my head and was relieved to see that the other jumpers were already moving away from each other. Chuck was among them. But to my surprise, it moved in my direction and soon hovered right below me. Apparently, during the erratic fall, the group passed 2,000 feet faster than Chuck expected. Or maybe he considered himself lucky, who might not follow the established rules.
“He shouldn’t see me!” Before this thought had time to flash through my head, a colored pilot chute jerked upward behind Chuck’s back. The parachute caught Chuck's one-hundred-and-twenty-mile-per-hour wind and blew him toward me while pulling the main chute.
From the moment the pilot chute opened over Chuck, I had only a split second to react. In less than a second I was about to crash into his main parachute and, most likely, into himself. If at such a speed I run into his arm or leg, I will simply tear it off and at the same time receive a fatal blow. If we collide bodies, we will inevitably break.
They say that in situations like this, everything seems to happen much slower, and this is true. My brain registered the event, which took only a few microseconds, but perceived it like a slow-motion movie.
As soon as the pilot chute rose above Chuck, my arms automatically pressed to my sides, and I turned upside down, bending slightly. The bending of the body allowed me to increase my speed a little. The next moment, I made a sharp jerk to the side horizontally, causing my body to turn into a powerful wing, which allowed me to rush past Chuck like a bullet just before his main parachute opened.
I rushed past him at over one hundred and fifty miles per hour, or two hundred and twenty feet per second. It is unlikely that he had time to notice the expression on my face. Otherwise he would have seen incredible amazement on him. By some miracle, I managed to react in a matter of seconds to a situation that, if I had time to think about it, would have seemed simply insoluble!
And yet... And yet I dealt with it, and as a result, Chuck and I landed safely. I had the impression that, faced with an extreme situation, my brain worked like some kind of super-powerful computer.
How did it happen? During my more than twenty years as a neurosurgeon—studying, observing, and operating on the brain—I have often wondered about this question. And in the end I came to the conclusion that the brain is such a phenomenal organ that we are not even aware of its incredible abilities.
Now I already understand that the real answer to this question is much more complex and fundamentally different. But to realize this, I had to experience events that completely changed my life and worldview. This book is dedicated to these events. They proved to me that, no matter how wonderful the human brain is, it was not the brain that saved me on that fateful day. What came into play the second Chuck's main parachute began to open was another, deeply hidden side of my personality. She was able to work so instantly because, unlike my brain and body, she exists outside of time.
It was she who made me, a boy, rush into the sky. This is not only the most developed and wise side of our personality, but also the deepest, most intimate. However, for most of my adult life I did not believe this.
However, now I believe, and from the following story you will understand why.
My profession is neurosurgeon.
I graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1976 with a degree in chemistry and received my doctorate from Duke University School of Medicine in 1980. For eleven years, including medical school, residency at Duke, and fellowships at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, I specialized in neuroendocrinology, studying the interactions between nervous system and endocrine, consisting of glands that produce various hormones and regulate the body’s activities. For two of those eleven years, I studied the pathological response of blood vessels in certain areas of the brain when an aneurysm ruptures, a syndrome known as cerebral vasospasm.
After completing my postgraduate training in cerebrovascular neurosurgery in Newcastle upon Tyne in the UK, I spent fifteen years teaching at Harvard Medical School as an Associate Professor in Neurology. Over the years, I have operated on a huge number of patients, many of whom were admitted with extremely severe and life-threatening brain diseases.
I paid great attention to the study of advanced treatment methods, in particular stereotactic radiosurgery, which allows the surgeon to locally target a specific point in the brain with radiation beams without affecting surrounding tissue. I took part in the development and use of magnetic resonance imaging, which is one of the modern methods for studying brain tumors and various disorders of its vascular system. During these years, I wrote, alone or with other scientists, more than one hundred and fifty articles for major medical journals and gave presentations on my work more than two hundred times at scientific and medical conferences around the world.
In a word, I devoted myself entirely to science. I consider it a great success in life that I managed to find my calling - learning the mechanism of functioning of the human body, especially the brain, and healing people using the achievements of modern medicine. But just as important, I married a wonderful woman who gave me two wonderful sons, and although work took up a lot of my time, I never forgot about my family, which I always considered another blessed gift of fate. In a word, my life was very successful and happy.
However, on November 10, 2008, when I was fifty-four, my luck seemed to change. A very rare illness left me in a coma for seven days. All this time, my neocortex - the new cortex, that is, the upper layer of the brain hemispheres, which, in essence, makes us human - was turned off, did not function, practically did not exist.
When a person's brain turns off, he also ceases to exist. In my specialty, I heard many stories from people who had unusual experiences, usually after cardiac arrest: they allegedly found themselves in some mysterious and great place, talked with deceased relatives and even saw the Lord God himself.
All these stories, of course, were very interesting, but, in my opinion, they were fantasies, pure fiction. What causes these “otherworldly” experiences that people who have had near-death experiences talk about? I didn’t claim anything, but deep down I was sure that they were associated with some kind of disturbance in the functioning of the brain. All our experiences and ideas originate in consciousness. If the brain is paralyzed, switched off, you cannot be conscious.
Because the brain is a mechanism that primarily produces consciousness. The destruction of this mechanism means the death of consciousness. With all the incredibly complex and mysterious functioning of the brain, this is as simple as two. Unplug the cord and the TV will stop working. And the show ends, no matter how much you liked it. That's pretty much what I would have said before my own brain shut down.
During the coma, my brain didn’t just work incorrectly—it didn’t work at all. Now I think it was the completely non-functioning brain that led to the depth and intensity of the experience clinical death(OCS), which I suffered during a coma. Most stories about ACS come from people who have experienced temporary cardiac arrest. In these cases, the neocortex is also temporarily switched off, but does not suffer irreversible damage - if within four minutes the flow of oxygenated blood to the brain is restored using cardiopulmonary resuscitation or due to spontaneous restoration of cardiac activity. But in my case, the neocortex showed no signs of life! I was faced with the reality of the world of consciousness that existed completely independent of my dormant brain.
Personal experience clinical death was a real explosion and shock for me. As a neurosurgeon with extensive experience in scientific and practical work, I, better than others, could not only correctly assess the reality of what I experienced, but also draw the appropriate conclusions.
These findings are incredibly important. My experience has shown me that the death of the body and brain does not mean the death of consciousness, that human life continues after the burial of its material body. But most importantly, it continues under the watchful gaze of God, who loves us all and cares about each of us and about the world where the universe itself and everything that is in it ultimately goes.
The world where I found myself was real - so real that compared to this world, the life we lead here and now is completely illusory. However, this does not mean that I do not value my current life. On the contrary, I appreciate her even more than before. Because now I understand its true meaning.
Life is not something meaningless. But from here we are not able to understand this, at least not always. The story of what happened to me while I was in a coma is filled with the deepest meaning. But it is quite difficult to talk about it, since it is too alien to our usual ideas. I can't shout about her to the whole world. However, my conclusions are based on medical analysis and knowledge of the most advanced concepts in the science of the brain and consciousness. Having realized the truth underlying my journey, I realized that I simply had to tell about it. Doing this in the most dignified manner became my main task.
This does not mean that I left the scientific and practical activities of a neurosurgeon. It’s just that now that I have the honor to understand that our life does not end with the death of the body and brain, I consider it my duty, my calling to tell people about what I saw outside my body and this world. It seems especially important to me to do this for those who have heard stories about cases similar to mine and would like to believe them, but something prevents these people from completely accepting them on faith.
My book and the spiritual message contained in it are addressed primarily to them. My story is incredibly important and completely true.
Dr. Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon with 25 years of experience, a professor who taught at Harvard Medical School and other major American universities, shared with readers his impressions of his journey into the other world.
This case is truly unique. Stricken with a severe case of bacterial meningitis, he inexplicably recovered after a seven-day coma. A highly educated physician with extensive practical experience, who previously not only did not believe in the afterlife, but also did not allow the thought of it, experienced the transfer of his “I” to the higher worlds and there encountered such amazing phenomena and revelations that, upon returning to earthly life, , considered it his duty as a scientist and healer to tell the whole world about them.
On November 10, 2008, a very rare illness left me in a coma for seven days. All this time, my neocortex - the new cortex, that is, the upper layer of the brain hemispheres, which, in essence, makes us human - was turned off, did not function, practically did not exist.
When a person's brain turns off, he also ceases to exist. In my specialty, I heard many stories from people who had unusual experiences, usually after cardiac arrest: they allegedly found themselves in some mysterious and beautiful place, talked with deceased relatives, and even saw the Lord God himself.
All these stories, of course, were very interesting, but, in my opinion, they were fantasies, pure fiction. What causes these “otherworldly” experiences that people who have had near-death experiences talk about? I didn’t claim anything, but deep down I was sure that they were associated with some kind of disturbance in the functioning of the brain. All our experiences and ideas originate in consciousness. If the brain is paralyzed, switched off, you cannot be conscious.
Because the brain is the mechanism that primarily produces consciousness. The destruction of this mechanism means the death of consciousness. With all the incredibly complex and mysterious functioning of the brain, this is as simple as two. Unplug the cord and the TV will stop working. And the show ends, no matter how much you liked it. That's pretty much what I would have said before my own brain shut down.
During the coma, my brain didn't just work incorrectly - it didn't work at all. I now think that it was a completely non-functioning brain that led to the depth and intensity of the near-death experience (NDE) that I suffered during the coma. Most stories about ACS come from people who have experienced temporary cardiac arrest. In these cases, the neocortex is also temporarily switched off, but does not suffer irreversible damage - if within four minutes the flow of oxygenated blood to the brain is restored using cardiopulmonary resuscitation or due to spontaneous restoration of cardiac activity. But in my case, the neocortex showed no signs of life! I was confronted with the reality of a world of consciousness that existed completely independently of my dormant brain.
My personal experience of clinical death was a real explosion and shock for me. As a neurosurgeon with extensive experience in scientific and practical work, I, better than others, could not only correctly assess the reality of what I experienced, but also draw the appropriate conclusions.
These findings are incredibly important. My experience has shown me that the death of the body and brain does not mean the death of consciousness, that human life continues after the burial of its material body. But most importantly, it continues under the watchful gaze of God, who loves us all and cares about each of us and about the world where the universe itself and everything that is in it ultimately goes.
The world where I found myself was real - so real that compared to this world, the life we lead here and now is completely illusory. However, this does not mean that I do not value my current life. On the contrary, I appreciate her even more than before. Because now I understand its true meaning.
Life is not something meaningless. But from here we are not able to understand this, at least not always. The story of what happened to me while I was in a coma is filled with the deepest meaning. But it is quite difficult to talk about it, since it is too alien to our usual ideas.
Darkness, but visible darkness - as if you are immersed in mud, but you can see through it. Yes, perhaps this darkness is better compared to thick jelly-like mud. Transparent, but cloudy, vague, causing suffocation and claustrophobia.
Consciousness, but without memory and without a sense of self - like a dream, when you understand what is happening around you, but do not know who you are.
And another sound: a low rhythmic knock, distant, but strong enough that you feel every blow. Heartbeat? Yes, it seems, but the sound is duller, more mechanical - reminiscent of the knocking of metal on metal, as if somewhere far away some giant, an underground blacksmith is hitting an anvil with a hammer: the blows are so powerful that they cause vibration of the earth, dirt or some incomprehensible the substance I was in.
I didn't have a body - at least I didn't feel it. I just... was there, in this pulsating darkness, permeated with rhythmic beats. At that time I could have called it the primal darkness. But then I didn’t know these words. In fact, I didn’t know the words at all. The words used here appeared much later, when, having returned to this world, I wrote down my memories. Language, emotions, the ability to reason - all this was lost, as if I had been thrown far back, to the starting point of the origin of life, when a primitive bacterium had already appeared, which in an unknown way had taken over my brain and paralyzed its work.
How long have I been in this world? I have no idea. It is almost impossible to describe the feeling you experience when you find yourself in a place where there is no sense of time. When I later got there, I realized that I (whatever this “I” was) had always been and would be there.
I didn't mind this. And why would I object if this existence was the only one I knew? Not remembering anything better, I was not very interested in where exactly I was. I remember wondering whether I would survive or not, but indifference to the outcome only increased the feeling of my own invulnerability. I did not know about the principles of the world in which I was, but I was in no hurry to learn them. Who cares?
I can’t say exactly when it started, but at some point I began to be aware of some objects around me. They looked like both plant roots and blood vessels in an incredibly huge dirty womb. Glowing with a dull red light, they stretched from somewhere far above to somewhere far below. Now I can compare it to how a mole or earthworm, deep underground, could somehow see the intertwined roots of grasses and trees around it.
That's why, remembering this place later, I decided to call it Habitat as Worm Sees It (or Worm Country for short). For quite a long time I assumed that the image of this place could be inspired by some memory of the state of my brain, which had just been attacked by a dangerous and aggressive bacteria.
But the more I thought about this explanation (I remind you that this was much later), the less sense I saw in it. Because - how difficult it is to describe all this if you have not been to this place yourself! - when I was there, my consciousness was not clouded or distorted. It was simple. limited. I wasn't a person there. But he was not an animal either. I was a being earlier and more primitive than animal or man. I was just a lonely spark of consciousness in a timeless red-brown space.
The longer I stayed there, the more uncomfortable I became. At first I was so deeply immersed in this visible darkness that I did not feel the difference between me and this simultaneously vile and familiar matter surrounding me. But gradually the feeling of deep, timeless and limitless immersion gave way to a new feeling: that in fact I was not part of this underground world at all, but had simply somehow ended up in it.
From this abomination, the faces of terrible animals emerged like bubbles, uttered howls and squeals, and then disappeared. I heard an intermittent dull growl. Sometimes this growl turned into vague rhythmic chants, both frightening and strangely familiar - as if at some point I knew them myself and sang them.
Since I had no memory of my previous existence, my stay in this country seemed endless. How long did I spend there? Months? Years? Eternity? One way or another, the moment finally came when my former indifferent carelessness was completely swept away by chilling horror. The more clearly I felt myself - as something isolated from the cold, dampness and darkness surrounding me - the more disgusting and terrible the animal faces that emerged from this darkness seemed to me. Muffled by the distance, the uniform knocking became sharper and louder, reminiscent of the labor rhythm of some army of underground troll workers performing endless, unbearably monotonous work. The movement around me became more noticeable and palpable, as if snakes or other worm-like creatures were making their way past in a dense group, sometimes touching me with smooth skin or the like of hedgehog thorns.
Then I noticed a stench that was a mixture of feces, blood and vomit. In other words, the smell is of biological origin, but of a dead, not a living creature. As my consciousness became more acute, I was increasingly overcome by fear and panic. I didn't know who or what I was, but this place was disgusting and alien to me. It was necessary to get out of there.
Before I had time to ask this question, something new appeared from above from the darkness: it was neither cold, nor dead, nor dark, but was the complete opposite of all these qualities. Even if I spent the rest of my days doing this, I would not be able to do justice to the entity that was now approaching me, or even partially describe how beautiful it was.
But I continue my attempts.
Something appeared in the darkness.
Slowly rotating, it emitted the finest rays of golden-white light, and gradually the darkness surrounding me began to split and disintegrate.
Then I heard a new sound: the live sound of beautiful music, saturated with a richness of tones and shades. As this clear white light descended on me, the music became louder and drowned out the monotonous knocking, which, for what seemed like an eternity, was the only thing I heard here.
The light was getting closer and closer, as if revolving around an invisible center and spreading around tufts and threads of pure white radiance, which, now I clearly saw, glittered with gold.
Then something else appeared in the very center of the glow. I strained my mind, trying my best to understand what it was.
Hole! Now I was looking not at the slowly rotating radiance, but through it. Having barely realized this, I began to rapidly rise upward.
A whistle was heard, reminiscent of the whistle of the wind, and a moment later I flew out into this hole and found myself in a completely different world. I have never seen anything more strange and at the same time more beautiful.
Shining, reverent, full of life, stunning, causing selfless delight. I could endlessly pile up definitions to describe what this world looked like, but there are simply not enough of them in our language. I felt like I had just been born. He was not reborn or reborn, but came into being for the first time.
Below me lay an area covered with dense, luxurious vegetation, similar to the Earth. This was the Earth, but at the same time it was not. The feeling can be compared to how your parents brought you to some place where you lived for several years in early childhood. You don't know this place. At least that's what you think. But, looking around, you feel how something attracts you, and you understand that in the very depths of your soul the memory of this place is stored, you remember it and are glad that you are here again.
I flew over forests and fields, rivers and waterfalls, from time to time noticing people and children playing happily below. People sang and danced, and sometimes I saw dogs next to them, who also ran and jumped joyfully. The people were wearing simple but beautiful clothes, and it seemed to me that the colors of these clothes were as warm and bright as the grass and flowers that dotted the entire area.
A beautiful, incredible ghostly world.
But this world was not ghostly. Although I did not know where I was or even who I was, I felt absolutely certain of one thing: the world in which I suddenly found myself was completely real, real.
I can’t say exactly how long I flew. (Time in this place differs from the simple linear time here on Earth, and it is hopeless to try to convey it clearly.) But at some point I realized that I was not alone in the heights.
Next to me was a beautiful girl with high cheekbones and dark blue eyes. She was dressed in the same simple and loose dress that the people below wore. Her pretty face was framed by golden brown hair. We were flying in the air on some kind of plane, painted with an intricate pattern, shining with indescribably bright colors - it was the wing of a butterfly. In general, millions of butterflies fluttered around us - they formed wide waves, falling on the green meadows and soaring up again. The butterflies stayed together and seemed like a living and vibrant river of flowers flowing in the air. We slowly soared in height, flowering meadows and green forests floated below us, and when we descended towards them, buds opened on the branches. The girl's dress was simple, but its colors - light blue, indigo, light orange and delicate peach - gave rise to the same jubilant and joyful mood as the whole area. The girl looked at me. She had a look that, if seen for just a few seconds, gives meaning to your entire life up to the present moment, regardless of what happened before. This look was not just romantic or friendly. In some mysterious way, something was visible in him immeasurably superior to all types of love that are familiar to us in our mortal world. He simultaneously radiated all varieties of earthly love - maternal, sisterly, conjugal, daughterly, friendly - and at the same time an infinitely deeper and more chaste love.
The girl spoke to me without words. Her thoughts penetrated me like a stream of air, and I instantly understood their sincerity and truthfulness. I knew this just as I knew that the world around me was real, and not at all imaginary, elusive and transitory.
Everything “said” could be divided into three parts, and translated into our earthly language I would express its meaning in approximately the following sentences:
“You are forever loved and protected.”
"You have nothing to fear."
"There's nothing you can do wrong."
I felt an incredible sense of relief from this message. It was as if I had been handed a list of rules to a game I had played my entire life without fully understanding them.
We will show you a lot of interesting things here,” the girl said, without resorting to words, but directly sending me their meaning. - But then you will come back.
I only had one question for this:
Where back?
Remember who is talking to you now. Believe me, I do not suffer from dementia or excessive sentimentality. I know what death looks like. I know human nature and, although not a materialist, I am a fairly decent specialist in my field. I am able to distinguish fantasy from reality and I know that the experience that I am now trying to convey to you, albeit rather vaguely and chaotically, was not only special, but also the most real experience in my life.
Meanwhile I was in the clouds. Huge, lush, pinkish-white clouds that stood out brightly against the dark blue sky.
Above the clouds, at an incredible height in the sky, creatures glided in the form of transparent shimmering balls, leaving behind them traces like a long trail.
Birds? Angels? These words come to my mind now as I write down my memories. However, not a single word from our earthly language can convey the correct idea of these creatures, they were so different from everything I know. They were more perfect, higher beings.
From above came rolling and booming sounds, reminiscent of choral singing, and I wondered if these winged creatures were making them. Reflecting on this phenomenon later, I assumed that the joy of these creatures soaring in the heavenly heights was so great that they had to make these sounds - if they did not express their joy in this way, they simply could not contain it. The sounds were tangible and almost material, like raindrops that seemed to casually touch your skin.
In this place where I now found myself, hearing and vision did not exist separately. I heard the visible beauty of these sparkling silver creatures on high and saw the excitingly beautiful perfection of their joyful songs. It seemed that here it was simply impossible to perceive anything with hearing and sight without merging with it in some mysterious way.
And I would like to emphasize once again that now, looking back, I would say that in that world it was really impossible to look at anything, because the very preposition “on” implies a look from the outside, a certain distance from the object of observation, which was not there . Everything was completely distinct and at the same time part of something else, like some curl in the variegated weave of a Persian carpet pattern or a tiny stroke in the pattern of a butterfly’s wing.
There was a warm breeze that gently swayed the leaves of the trees on a beautiful summer day and was delightfully refreshing. Divine breeze.
I began to mentally question this breeze - and the divine being that I felt was behind it all or within it.
"Where is this place?"
“Why did I end up here?”
Every time I silently asked a question, it was immediately answered in the form of flashes of light, color, love and beauty that passed through me in waves. And here’s what’s important: these flashes did not drown out my questions, absorbing them. They answered them, but without words. I perceived these thought-answers directly, with my whole being. But they were different from our earthly thoughts. These thoughts were tangible - hotter than fire and wetter than water - and were transmitted to me in an instant, and I perceived them just as quickly and effortlessly. On Earth it would take me years to understand them.
I continued to move forward and found myself in an endless void, absolutely dark, but at the same time surprisingly cozy and peaceful.
In complete darkness, it was full of light, seemingly emitted by a shining ball, whose presence I felt somewhere nearby. The ball was alive and almost as tangible as the singing of angelic beings. My position was strangely reminiscent of that of a fetus in the womb. The fetus in the womb has a silent partner - the placenta, which nourishes it and serves as an intermediary in its relationship with the omnipresent and yet invisible mother. In this case, the mother was God, the Creator, the Divine Beginning - call it what you want, the Supreme Being who created the Universe and everything that exists in it. This Being was so close that I almost felt merged with Him. And at the same time, I felt Him as something immense and all-encompassing, I saw how insignificant and small I was in comparison with Him. In what follows, I will often use the word “Om” rather than “He,” “She,” or “It” to refer to God, Allah, Jehovah, Brahma, Vishnu, the Creator, and the Divine. Om - that’s what I called God in my initial notes after the coma; “Om” is a word that in my memory was associated with God. The omniscient, omnipotent and unconditionally loving Om has no gender, and no epithet can convey His essence.
The very incomprehensible immensity that distinguishes me from Om, as I understood, was the reason why the Ball was given to me as a companion. Unable to fully comprehend this, I was still sure that Shar served as a “translator,” a “mediator” between me and this extraordinary entity surrounding me. It was as if I was being born into a world immeasurably larger than ours, and the Universe itself was a gigantic cosmic womb, and the Ball (which somehow remained connected with the Girl on the Butterfly Wing and which in fact was her) guided me in this process.
I kept asking and getting answers. Although the answers were not perceived by me in words, the “voice” of the Creature was gentle and - I understand, this may seem strange - reflecting His Personality. It understood people perfectly and possessed their inherent qualities, but on an immeasurably larger scale. It knew me thoroughly and was filled with feelings that, in my mind, were always associated only with people: it had warmth, sympathy, understanding, sadness, and even irony and humor.
With the help of the Ball, Om told me that there is not one, but an incomprehensible multitude of universes, but at the core of each of them is love. Evil is present in all universes, but only in small quantities. Evil is necessary, because without it the manifestation of human free will is impossible, and without free will there can be no development - there can be no movement forward, without which we cannot become what God wants us to be.
No matter how terrifying and all-powerful evil may seem in a world like ours, in the picture of the cosmic world love has a crushing power and, in the end, triumphs.
I saw an abundance of life forms in these innumerable universes, including those whose intelligence was far more developed than that of man. I saw that their scales incredibly exceed the scales of our Universe, but the only possible way to know these magnitudes is to penetrate into one of them and feel them for yourself. From a smaller space they can neither be recognized nor comprehended. Causes and effects also exist in these higher worlds, but they are beyond our earthly understanding. The time and space of our earthly world in the higher worlds are linked to each other by an inextricable and incomprehensible connection for us. In other words, these worlds are not completely alien to us, since they are part of the same all-encompassing divine Essence. From the higher worlds you can get to any time and place of our world.
It will take my entire life, if not longer, to understand what I have learned. The knowledge given to me was not taught as in a history or mathematics lesson. Their perception occurred directly; they did not need to be memorized or memorized. Knowledge was acquired instantly and forever. They are not lost, as is the case with ordinary information, and I still have full control of this knowledge - unlike the information received at school.
But this does not mean that I can apply this knowledge with the same ease. After all, now, having returned to our world, I am forced to pass them through my material brain with its limited capabilities. But they remain with me, I feel their inalienability. For someone who, like me, has spent his entire life assiduously accumulating knowledge in the traditional way, the discovery of such a high level of learning provides food for thought for centuries.
Something pulled me. Not as if someone grabbed your hand, but more weakly, less noticeably. This could be compared to how the mood immediately changes as soon as the sun disappears behind a cloud. I was returning back, flying away from the Focus. Its shining black darkness was quietly replaced by the green landscape of the Gate. Looking down, I again saw people, trees, sparkling rivers and waterfalls, and above me, angel-like creatures still hovered in the sky.
And my companion was there too. She was, of course, there during my journey to the Focus, taking the form of a Ball of Light. But now she has again acquired the image of a girl. She was wearing the same beautiful attire, and when I saw her, I felt the same joy that a child feels when he gets lost in a huge foreign city when he suddenly sees a familiar face.
We will show you a lot, but then you will come back.
This message, wordlessly instilled in me at the entrance to the inscrutable darkness of the Focus, was remembered now. Now I already understood what “back” meant.
This is the Country of the Worm, where my odyssey began.
But this time everything was different. Descending into the gloomy darkness and already knowing what was above it, I did not feel anxious.
As the magnificent music of the Gate faded away, giving way to the pulsating beats of the lower world, I perceived with hearing and sight all its phenomena. This is how an adult sees a place where he once experienced unspeakable horror, but is no longer afraid. The gloomy darkness, the emerging and disappearing animal faces, the roots descending from above, intertwined like arteries, no longer inspired fear, since I understood - I understood without words - that I did not belong to this world, but was simply visiting it.
But why am I here again?
The answer came as instantly and silently as in the upper, shining world. This adventure was a kind of excursion, a grand overview of the invisible, spiritual side of existence. And like any good excursion, it included all floors and levels.
When I returned to the lower kingdom, the peculiar flow of time there continued. A weak, very distant idea of it can be formed by remembering the feeling of time in a dream. After all, in a dream it is very difficult to determine what happens “before” and what happens “after”. You may be dreaming and know what will happen next even though you have not experienced it yet. The “time” of the lower kingdom is something like that, although I must emphasize that what happened to me had nothing to do with the confusion of earthly dreams.
How long was I in the “underworld” this time? I do not have an exact idea - there is no way to measure this period of time. But I know for sure that after returning to the lower world, for quite a long time I could not understand that I was now able to control the direction of my movement - that I was no longer a prisoner of the lower world. By concentrating my efforts, I could return to the upper spheres. At some point during my stay in the dark depths, I really wanted to return the Flowing Melody. After several attempts to remember the melody and the rotating Ball of Light that produced it, beautiful music began to sound in my mind. Enchanting sounds pierced the icy darkness, and I began to rise.
So I discovered that in order to move towards the upper world, it is enough just to know something and think about it.
The thought of the Flowing Melody caused it to sound and fulfilled the desire to be in the higher world. The more I knew about the higher world, the easier it was for me to find myself there again. During the time I spent outside my body, I developed the ability to move back and forth without hindrance, from the murky darkness of the Land of the Worm to the emerald glow of the Gate and into the black but shining darkness of the Focus. I cannot say how many times I have made such movements - again due to the discrepancy between the sense of time there and here on Earth. But each time I reached the Center, I moved deeper than before, and learned more and more - without words - the interconnectedness of all things in the higher worlds.
This does not mean that I saw something like the entire Universe while traveling from the Land of the Worm to the Center. The main thing is that every time I returned to the Center, I learned a very important lesson - the incomprehensibility of everything that exists - neither its physical, that is, visible, side, nor its spiritual, that is, invisible (which is immeasurably greater than the physical), not to mention the infinite number of other universes, that exist or ever existed.
But none of this mattered, because I had already learned the only truth that mattered. The first time I received this knowledge was from a beautiful companion on the wing of a butterfly during my first appearance at the Gate. This knowledge was imparted to me in three silent phrases:
“You are loved and protected.”
"You have nothing to fear."
"You can't do anything wrong."
If we express them in one sentence, it turns out:
"You are loved."
And if you shorten this sentence to one word, you get, naturally:
"Love".
Undoubtedly, love is the basis of everything. Not some abstract, incredible, illusory love, but the most ordinary love, familiar to everyone - the same love with which we look at our wife and children and even our pets. In its purest and most powerful form, this love is not jealous, not selfish, but unconditional and absolute. This is the most primal, incomprehensibly blissful truth that lives and breathes in the heart of everything that exists and will exist. And a person who does not know this love and does not invest it in all his actions is not able to even remotely understand who he is and why he lives.
Not a very scientific approach, would you say? Sorry, but I don't agree with you. Nothing can convince me that this is not only the single most important truth in the entire Universe, but also the single most important scientific fact.
For several years now I have been meeting and talking with those who study or have experienced near-death experiences. And I know that the concept of “unconditional, absolute love” is very common among them. How many people are able to understand what this really means?
Why is this concept used so often? Because a lot of people have seen and experienced what I have. But, like me, upon returning to our earthly world, they did not have enough words, precisely words, to convey the feeling of what words simply cannot express. It's like trying to write a novel using only part of the alphabet.
The main difficulty that most of these people face is not in adjusting again to the limitations of earthly existence - although that is quite difficult - but in the fact that it is incredibly difficult to convey what the love they knew there really is like. upstairs.
Deep down we already know her. Just as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz can always return home, we have the opportunity to renew our connection to this idyllic world. We simply don’t remember this, because in the phase of our physical existence the brain blocks and hides the boundless cosmic world to which we belong, just as in the morning the light of the rising sun eclipses the stars. Imagine how limited our understanding of the universe would be if we never saw the star-studded night sky.
We see only what our filtering brain allows us to see. The brain - especially the left hemisphere, which is responsible for logical thinking and speech, generating a sense of common sense and a clear sense of self - is a barrier to higher knowledge and experience.
I am confident that we are currently at a critical moment in our existence. It is necessary to recover much of this vital knowledge hidden from us while we live on Earth, while our brain (including the left, analytical hemisphere) is fully functioning. The science to which I have devoted so many years of my life does not contradict what I learned up there. But too many still do not think so, because members of the scientific community, who have become hostages of a materialistic view, stubbornly insist that science and spirituality cannot coexist.
They are mistaken. That is why I am writing this book. It is necessary to make people aware of an ancient but extremely important truth. Compared to it, all other episodes of my story are secondary - I mean the mystery of the disease, how I maintained consciousness in another dimension during a week-long coma and how I managed to recover and completely restore all brain functions.
The first time I found myself in the Country of the Worm, I was not aware of myself, I did not know who I was, what I was, or even whether I existed at all. I am there - a tiny point of consciousness in a viscous, black and cloudy something that seemed to have neither end nor beginning.
However, then I realized myself, I understood that I belonged to God and that nothing - absolutely nothing - could take this away from me. The (false) fear that we might somehow be separated from God is the cause of all and every fear in the Universe, and the cure for it - which I received initially at the Gate and finally at the Center - was the clear, confident understanding that nothing and never cannot separate us from God. This knowledge - it remains the only important fact I ever learned - took the horror out of the Land of the Worm and allowed me to see it for what it was: an unpleasant but necessary part of the universe.
Many, like me, visited the higher world, but most of them, being outside the earthly body, remembered who they were. They knew their name and did not forget that they lived on Earth. They realized that their relatives were waiting for their return. Many more met deceased friends and relatives there, and they immediately recognized them.
Those who experienced clinical death said that pictures of their lives passed before them, they saw good and bad deeds that they committed during their lives.
I have never experienced anything like this, and if you analyze all these stories, it becomes clear that my case of clinical death is unusual. I was completely independent of my earthly body and personality, which is contrary to typical near-death experiences.
I understand that it is a little strange to claim that I did not know who I was or where I came from. After all, how could I recognize all these incredibly complex and beautiful things, how could I see a girl next to me, flowering trees, waterfalls and villages, and not realize that it was I, Eben Alexander, who was experiencing all this? How could I understand all this, but not remember that on Earth I was a doctor, a doctor, had a wife and children? A man who saw trees, rivers and clouds not for the first time when he was in the Gate, but many times, starting from childhood, when he grew up in a very specific and earthly place, in the city of Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
The best I can come up with as an explanation is that I was in a state of partial but blissful amnesia. That is, I forgot some important facts about myself, but only benefited from this short-lived forgetfulness.
What did I gain from forgetting my earthly self? This allowed me to fully experience the worlds beyond our own without worrying about what was left behind. All the time I was in other worlds, I was a soul that had nothing to lose. I didn’t yearn for my homeland, I didn’t grieve for lost people. I came out of nowhere and had no past, so I accepted the circumstances in which I found myself with complete calm, even the initially gloomy and disgusting Land of the Worm.
And because I had completely forgotten my mortal identity, I was given full access to the true cosmic soul that I truly am, as we all are. I will say again that in a sense, my experience can be compared to a dream in which you remember something about yourself, but completely forget something. And yet, this analogy is only partly fair, since - I never tire of reminding - both the Gate and the Focus were not in the slightest degree imaginary, illusory, but, on the contrary, extremely real, truly existing. It seems that my lack of memory of earthly life during my stay in the higher worlds was deliberate. Exactly. At the risk of oversimplifying the problem, I will say: I was allowed to die, as it were, more completely and irrevocably and to penetrate into another reality more deeply than most patients who experienced clinical death.
Familiarity with the extensive literature on near-death experiences was very important in understanding my journey during the coma. I don’t want to seem somehow special and self-confident, but I will say that my experience was truly original and specific and thanks to it now, three years later, having read mountains of literature, I know for sure that penetration into the higher worlds is a step-by-step process and requires that the person was freed from all the attachments he had before.
This was easy for me to do because I lacked any earthly memories, and the only time I experienced pain and sadness was when I had to return to Earth, where I began my journey.
Most modern scientists are of the opinion that human consciousness is digital information, that is, almost the same kind of information that is processed by a computer. Although some pieces of this information—like watching a picturesque sunset, listening to a beautiful symphony, even falling in love—may seem very serious and special to us compared to the countless other pieces stored in our brain, it is actually an illusion. All particles are qualitatively the same. Our brain shapes external reality by processing the information it receives from our senses and transforming it into a rich digital tapestry. But our sensations are just a model of reality, and not reality itself. Illusion.
Of course, I also adhered to this point of view. Back in medical school, I remember hearing arguments in favor of the view that consciousness is nothing more than a very complex computer program. Disputants argued that ten billion neurons in the brain, constantly firing, were capable of providing consciousness and memory throughout a person's life.
To understand how the brain can block our access to knowledge about the higher worlds, we must assume - at least hypothetically - that the brain itself does not produce consciousness. That, rather, it is a kind of safety valve or lever that, for the duration of our earthly life, switches the high, “non-physical” consciousness that we possess in the non-physical worlds to a lower one with limited abilities. From an earthly point of view, this makes some sense. All the time we are awake, the brain works hard, selecting from the stream of sensory information entering it the material necessary for a person to exist, and therefore the loss of memory that we are only temporarily on Earth allows us to live more effectively “here and now.” Ordinary life already gives us too much information that needs to be absorbed and used for our own benefit, and constant memory of worlds beyond earthly life would only slow down our development. If we already had all the information about the spiritual world now, it would be even more difficult for us to live on Earth. This does not mean that we should not think about it, but if we are too acutely aware of its grandeur and immensity, then this can adversely affect our behavior in earthly life. From the point of view of the great plan (and now I know for sure that the universe is the great plan), it would not be so important for a person endowed with free will to make the right decision in the face of evil and injustice if, while living on Earth, he remembered all the beauty and the splendor of the higher world awaiting him.
Why am I so sure of this? For two reasons. First, this was shown to me (by the beings who taught me in the Gate and in the Focus). Secondly, I actually experienced it. While out of body, I gained knowledge of the nature and structure of the Universe that is beyond my comprehension. And I received it mainly because, not remembering my earthly life, I was able to perceive this knowledge. Now that I am back on Earth and aware of my physical essence, the seeds of this knowledge of the higher worlds are again hidden from me. And yet they are there, I feel their presence. IN earthly world It will take years for these seeds to sprout. More precisely, it will take me years to understand with my mortal physical brain everything that I so easily and quickly learned in the higher world, where the brain did not exist. Still, I am confident that if I work hard, knowledge will continue to be revealed.
It is not enough to say that there is a huge gap between our modern scientific understanding of the Universe and the reality that I saw. I still love physics and cosmology, and study our vast and wonderful Universe with the same interest. But now I have a more accurate idea of what “immense” and “wonderful” means. The physical side of the Universe is a speck of dust compared to its invisible spiritual component. Previously, during scientific conversations, I did not use the word “spiritual,” but now I believe that we should under no circumstances avoid this word.
From the Radiant Focus I received a clear understanding of what we call “dark energy” or “dark matter”, as well as other, more fantastic components of the Universe, to which people will direct their inquisitive minds only after many centuries.
But this does not mean that I am able to explain my ideas. It’s paradoxical, but I myself am still trying to understand them. Perhaps the best way to convey some of my experience is to say that I have a hunch that in the future, even more important and vast knowledge will be accessed by a large number of people. Now, the attempt at any explanation can be compared to the same as if a chimpanzee, who for one day turned into a person and gained access to all the wonders of human knowledge, and then returned to his relatives, wanted to tell them what it means to speak several languages. foreign languages, what is calculus and the immense scale of the Universe.
Up there, as soon as I had a question, the answer immediately appeared, like a flower blooming nearby. Just as in the Universe not a single physical particle exists separately from another, in the same way there is no unanswered question in it. And these answers were not in the form of short “yes” or “no”. These were widely expanded concepts, stunning structures of living thought, as complex as cities. Ideas are so vast that they cannot be comprehended by earthly thought. But I was not limited by it. There I threw off its limitations, like a butterfly sheds its cocoon and emerges into the light of day.
I saw the Earth as a pale blue dot in the endless blackness of physical space. It was given to me to know that good and evil are mixed on Earth and that this is one of its unique properties. There is more good on Earth than evil, but evil is given greater power, which is absolutely unacceptable at the highest level of existence. The fact that evil would sometimes prevail was known to the Creator and allowed by Him as a necessary consequence of endowing man with free will.
Tiny particles of evil are scattered throughout the universe, but the total amount of evil is like one grain of sand on a huge sandy beach compared to the goodness, abundance, hope and unconditional love that literally washes the universe. The very essence of the alternative dimension is love and benevolence, and anything that does not contain these qualities immediately catches the eye and seems out of place.
But free will comes at the price of loss or falling out of this all-encompassing love and benevolence. Yes, we are free people, but surrounded by an environment that makes us feel unfree. Having free will is incredibly important to our role in earthly reality - a role that - one day we will all know - greatly determines whether we will be allowed to ascend into an alternate timeless dimension.
Our life on Earth may seem insignificant because it is too short in comparison with eternal life and other worlds with which the visible and invisible universes are full. However, it is also incredibly important, since it is here that a person is destined to grow, to rise to God, and this growth is carefully watched by beings from the upper world - souls and luminous balls (those creatures that I saw high above me in the Gate and which, I think, are the source of our idea of angels).
In reality, we make a choice between good and evil as spiritual beings temporarily inhabiting our evolved mortal bodies, derivatives of the Earth and earthly circumstances. Real thinking does not originate in the brain. But we have been so conditioned, in part by the brain itself, to associate it with our thoughts and sense of self that we have lost awareness of the fact that we are more than just the physical body, including the brain, and must fulfill our purpose.
Real thinking arose long before the appearance of the physical world. It is this ancient, subconscious thinking that is responsible for all the decisions we make. Real thinking is not subject to logical constructs, but quickly and purposefully operates with an innumerable amount of information at all levels and instantly produces the only correct decision. Compared to the spiritual mind, our ordinary thinking is hopelessly timid and clumsy. It is this ancient mentality of intercepting the ball in the goal area that manifests itself in scientific insights or the writing of an inspired hymn. Subconscious thinking always manifests itself at the most necessary moment, but we often lose access to it and faith in it.
In order to experience thinking without the participation of the brain, it is necessary to find yourself in a world of instantaneous, spontaneous connections, in comparison with which ordinary thinking is hopelessly inhibited and cumbersome. Our deepest and true self is completely free. It is not corrupted or compromised by past actions, and is not preoccupied with its identity and status. It understands that there is no need to fear the earthly world, and therefore there is no need to exalt itself with fame, wealth or victory. This “I” is truly spiritual, and one day we are all destined to resurrect it within ourselves. But I am convinced that until that day comes, we must do everything in our power to reconnect with this miraculous entity - to nurture it and identify it. This entity is the soul that resides in our physical body, and it is what God wants us to be.
But how can you develop your spirituality? Only through love and compassion. Why? Because love and compassion are not abstract concepts as they are often thought to be. They are real and tangible. It is they who constitute the very essence, the basis of the spiritual world. To return to it, we must rise to it again - even now, while we are tied to earthly life and with difficulty make our earthly path.
When thinking about God or Allah, Vishnu, Jehovah or whatever you like to call the Source of absolute power, the Creator who rules the Universe, people make one of the greatest mistakes - they imagine Om as dispassionate. Yes, God is behind the numbers, behind the perfection of the Universe, which science measures and strives to comprehend. But - another paradox - Om is human, much more human than you and I. Om understands and deeply sympathizes with our situation, because he knows what we have forgotten, and understands how scary and difficult it is to live, even forgetting about God for a moment.
My consciousness became wider and wider, as if I perceived the entire Universe. Have you ever listened to music on the radio accompanied by atmospheric noise and crackling? You are used to this, believing that it cannot be otherwise. But then someone tuned the receiver to the desired wavelength, and the same piece suddenly acquired an amazingly clear and full sound. It amazes you how you didn’t notice the interference before.
Such is the adaptability of the human body. I have had occasion to explain to patients that the feeling of discomfort will subside when their brain and entire body get used to the new situation. If something happens long enough, the brain gets used to ignoring it or simply accepting it as normal.
But our limited earthly consciousness is far from normal, and I received the first confirmation of this when I penetrated into the very heart of the Focus. My lack of memory of my earthly past did not make me an insignificant nonentity. I realized and remembered who I was there. I was a citizen of the Universe, amazed by its infinity and complexity and guided only by love.
Ultimately, no person is an orphan. We are all in the same position I was in. That is, each of us has another family, creatures that watch over us and take care of us, creatures that we have forgotten about for a while, but which, if we open up to them, are always ready to guide us in our life on Earth. There is no person who is unloved. Each of us is deeply known and loved by the Creator, who tirelessly cares for us. This knowledge should not continue to remain a secret.
Every time I found myself back in the gloomy Land of the Worm, I was able to remember the beautiful Flowing Melody that opened access to the Gate and the Focus. I spent a lot of time - which strangely felt like its absence - in the company of my guardian angel on the wing of a butterfly and for an eternity absorbed the knowledge emanating from the Creator and the Ball of light in the depths of the Focus.
At some point, approaching the Gate, I discovered that I could not enter it. The flowing Melody - which was my passport to the higher worlds - no longer led me there. The Gates of Heaven were closed.
How can I describe what I felt? Think about times when you felt disappointed. So, all our earthly disappointments are in fact variations of the only important loss - the loss of Paradise. On that day, when the Gates of Heaven closed in front of me, I experienced incomparable, inexpressible bitterness and sadness. Although all human emotions are present there, in the higher world, they are incredibly deeper and stronger, more comprehensive - they are, so to speak, not only inside you, but also outside. Imagine that every time your mood changes here on Earth, the weather changes along with it. That your tears cause a powerful downpour, and because of your joy the clouds instantly disappear. This will give you a vague idea of how large and effective the mood change is taking place there. As for our concepts of “inside” and “outside,” they are simply inapplicable there, because there is no such division there.
In a word, I plunged into endless sorrow, which was accompanied by decline. I was descending through huge stratus clouds. There was whispering all around, but I couldn’t understand the words. Then I realized that I was surrounded by kneeling creatures that formed arches stretching into the distance, one after another. Remembering this now, I understand what these barely visible and tangible hosts of angels were doing, stretching up and down in a chain in the darkness.
They prayed for me.
Two of them had faces that I remembered later. It was the faces of Michael Sullivan and his wife Paige. I only saw them in profile, but when I could speak again, I immediately named them. Michael was present in my room, constantly saying prayers, but Paige was not there (although she was also praying for me).
These prayers gave me strength. Perhaps that’s why, no matter how bitter I was, I felt strangely confident that everything would be fine. These ethereal beings knew that I was experiencing displacement, and they sang and prayed to support me. I was carried into the unknown, but by this moment I already knew that I would no longer be alone. This was promised to me by my beautiful companion on the wing of a butterfly and by an infinitely loving God. I knew for sure that, wherever I went from now on, Paradise would be with me in the form of the Creator, Om, and in the form of my angel - the Girl on the Butterfly Wing.
I was going back, but I was not alone - and I knew that I would never feel alone again.
When I plunged into the Land of the Worm, then, as always, not animal faces, but human faces appeared from the muddy mud. And these people were clearly saying something. True, I could not make out the words.
When my descent took place, I could not call any of them by name. I just knew, or rather felt, that for some reason they were very important to me.
I was especially drawn to one of these faces. It began to attract me. Suddenly, with a jolt that seemed to reverberate throughout the circle of clouds and praying angels I was descending past, I realized that the Gate and Focus angels—whom I had apparently fallen in love with forever—were not the only beings I knew. I knew and loved the beings below me - in the world to which I was quickly approaching. Creatures that I had no memory of until that moment.
This awareness focused on six faces, one in particular. It was very close and familiar. With surprise and almost fear, I realized that this face belonged to a person who really needed me. That this man will never recover if I leave. If I leave him, he will suffer unbearably from loss, as I suffered when the Gates of Heaven closed in front of me. That would be a betrayal I could not commit.
Until this moment I was free. I traveled through the worlds calmly and carelessly, not caring at all about these people. But I wasn't ashamed of it. Even while in the Focus, I did not feel any anxiety or guilt for leaving them below. The first thing I learned while flying with the Girl on the Butterfly Wing was the thought: “You can do no wrong.”
But now it was different. So different that for the first time during the entire journey I felt real horror - not for myself, but for these six, especially for this man. I couldn't tell who he was, but I knew he was very important to me.
His face became increasingly clear, and finally I saw that it - that is, he - was praying that I would return, not be afraid to make a dangerous descent into the lower world, in order to be with him again. I still did not understand his words, but somehow I understood that I had a deposit in this lower world.
This meant that I was back. I had connections here that I had to respect. The clearer the face that attracted me became, the more clearly I realized my duty. As I got even closer, I recognized this face.
The face of a little boy.
All my relatives, doctors and nurses came running to me. They looked at me with wide eyes, literally speechless, and I calmly and joyfully smiled at them.
Everything is fine! - I said, all glowing with joy. I peered into their faces, aware of the divine miracle of our existence. “Don’t worry, everything is fine,” I repeated, reassuring them.
For two days I raved about skydiving, airplanes and the Internet, addressing those who would listen. While my brain was recovering, I was immersed in a strange and painfully abnormal universe. As soon as I closed my eyes, I began to be overcome by terrible “Internet messages” appearing out of nowhere; sometimes, when my eyes were open, they appeared on the ceiling. Closing my eyes, I heard a monotonous grinding sound, strangely reminiscent of chants, which usually disappeared immediately as soon as I opened them again. I kept poking my finger into space, as if pressing keys, trying to work on a computer floating past me with a Russian and Chinese keyboard.
In short, I was like crazy.
Everything was a little reminiscent of the Land of the Worm, only more terrible, since fragments of my earthly past burst into everything I saw and heard. (I recognized my family members even if I couldn't remember their names.)
But at the same time, my visions lacked the amazing clarity and vibrating vividness - reality in the highest sense - the Gate and the Center.
I was definitely getting back into my brain.
Despite the first moment of apparent full consciousness when I first opened my eyes, I soon again lost the memory of my human life before the coma. I remembered only the places I had just visited: the dark and disgusting Land of the Worm, the idyllic Gates and the heavenly blissful Center. My mind - my true self - was shrinking again, returning to the too-close physical form of existence with its space-time boundaries, linear thinking and scant verbal communication. Just a week ago I believed that this was the only possible type of existence, but now it seemed to me incredibly miserable and unfree.
Gradually the hallucinations went away and my thinking became more reasonable and my speech clearer. Two days later I was transferred to the neurology department.
As my temporarily blocked brain began to work more and more, I watched in amazement at what I was saying and doing and wondered: how did this happen?
After a few more days, I was already talking briskly with the people who visited me. And it didn't require much effort on my part. Like an airplane on autopilot, my brain guided me along the increasingly familiar path of my earthly life. Thus, I became convinced from my own experience of what I knew as a neurosurgeon: the brain is truly an amazing mechanism.
Day after day, more and more of my “I” returned to me, as well as the speech, memory, recognition, and penchant for mischief that had previously been characteristic of me.
Even then I understood one immutable fact, which the others soon had to realize. No matter what experts or people uninformed in neurology thought, I was no longer sick, my brain was not damaged. I was completely healthy. Moreover - although only I knew it at that moment - for the first time in my entire life I was truly healthy.
Little by little, my professional memory also returned to me.
One morning I woke up and found that I again had a full body of scientific and medical knowledge that I had not felt the day before. This was one of the strangest aspects of my experience: opening my eyes and feeling that all the results of my training and practice had returned to me.
While the neurosurgeon's knowledge returned to me, the memory of what had happened to me while out of body also remained completely clear and vivid. Events that took place outside of earthly reality gave me a feeling of incredible happiness, with which I woke up. And this blissful state did not leave me. Of course, I was very happy to be with my loved ones again. But added to this joy was - I will try to explain this as clearly as possible - an understanding of who I am and what kind of world we live in.
I was overcome by a persistent - and naive - desire to tell about this, especially to my fellow doctors. After all, what I experienced completely changed my understanding of the brain, consciousness, even my understanding of the meaning of life. It would seem, who would refuse to hear about such discoveries?
As it turned out, a lot of people, especially people with medical education.
Don't get me wrong - the doctors were very happy for me.
This is wonderful, Eben, they said, just as I used to respond to my patients who tried to tell me about otherworldly experiences they had, for example, during surgery. -You were very seriously ill. Your brain was full of pus. We still can’t believe that you are with us and talking about this. You yourself know what state the brain is in when things go this far.
But how can I blame them? After all, I wouldn’t have understood this before.
The more the ability to think scientifically returned to me, the more clearly I saw how radically my previous scientific and practical knowledge diverged from what I had learned, the more I understood that the mind and soul continue to exist even after the death of the physical body. I had to tell my story to the world.
The next few weeks were the same. I woke up at two or two and a half hours in the morning and felt such joy from the mere knowledge that I was alive that I immediately got up. Having lit the fireplace in the office, I sat down in my favorite leather chair and wrote. I remembered all the details of the journey to and from the Center and all the lessons learned that could change my life. Although the word “remembered” is not entirely correct. These pictures were present in me, alive and distinct.
The day came when I finally wrote down everything I could, even the smallest details about the Land of the Worm, the Gate and the Focus.
Very quickly I realized that both in our time and in distant centuries, what I experienced was experienced by countless people. Stories about a black tunnel or a gloomy valley, replaced by a bright and living landscape - absolutely real - existed back in the times of Ancient Greece and Egypt. Stories of angelic beings - sometimes with wings, sometimes without - come from at least the ancient Near East, as does the idea that these beings were guardians who watched over the lives of people on Earth and met the souls of these people when they left her. Ability to see in all directions simultaneously; the feeling that you are outside of linear time - outside of everything that you previously considered determining human life; the ability to hear music reminiscent of sacred hymns, which there were perceived by the whole being, and not just by the ears; direct transmission and instant assimilation of knowledge, the understanding of which on Earth would take a lot of time and effort; feeling of all-encompassing and unconditional love...
Again and again, in modern confessions and in the spiritual writings of early centuries, I felt the narrator literally struggling with the limitations of earthly language, wanting to convey his experience as fully as possible, and saw that he did not succeed.
And, getting acquainted with these unsuccessful attempts to find words and our earthly images in order to give an idea of the immense depth and inexpressible splendor of the Universe, I exclaimed in my soul: “Yes, yes! I understand what you wanted to say!”
All of these books and materials that existed before my experience were things I had never seen before. I emphasize that I not only didn’t read it, but I didn’t even see it. After all, before I had never even thought about the possibility of the existence of some part of our “I” after the physical death of the body. I was a typical doctor who was attentive to his patients, although I was skeptical about their “stories.” And I can say that most skeptics are not really skeptics at all. Because before denying any phenomenon or refuting any point of view, it is necessary to seriously study them. I, like other doctors, did not consider it necessary to spend time studying the experience of clinical death. I just knew that it was impossible, that it couldn’t exist.
From a medical point of view, my complete recovery seemed completely impossible and was a real miracle. But the main thing is where I visited...
I vividly remembered being outside the body and, finding myself in a church where I had not been particularly attracted to before, I saw pictures and heard music that evoked the sensations I had already experienced. Low rhythmic chants shook the gloomy Land of the Worm. Mosaic windows with angels in the clouds recalled the heavenly beauty of the Gate. The image of Jesus breaking bread with his disciples evoked a bright feeling of communion with the Center. I shuddered, remembering the bliss of endless unconditional love that I had known in the higher world.
I finally understood what true faith is. Or at least what it should be. I didn't just believe in God; I knew Om. And I slowly walked to the altar to receive communion, and could not hold back my tears.
It took about two months for all my scientific and practical knowledge to finally return to me. Of course, the very fact of their return is a real miracle. Until now, in medical practice there is no analogue to my case: for the brain, which has been under the powerful destructive effect of the gram-negative bacterium E. coli for a long period, to completely restore all its functions. So, based on my newfound knowledge, I tried to comprehend the deep contradiction between everything I had learned in forty years of study and practice about the human brain, about the Universe and about the formation of ideas about reality, and what I experienced during seven days of a coma. Before my sudden illness, I was an ordinary doctor, working in the most prestigious scientific institutions in the world and trying to understand the relationship between the brain and consciousness. It's not that I don't believe in consciousness. I just understood more than others the improbability that it exists independently of the brain and, in general, of everything!
In the 1920s, physicist Werner Heisenberg and other founders of quantum mechanics, while studying the atom, made such an unusual discovery that the world is still trying to comprehend it. Namely: during a scientific experiment, an alternating action, that is, a connection, occurs between the observer and the observed object, and it is impossible to separate the observer (that is, the scientist) from what he sees. In everyday life we do not take this factor into account. To us, the Universe is filled with countless isolated, separate objects (for example, tables and chairs, people and planets) that interact with each other in one way or another, but remain essentially separate. However, when viewed from the point of view of quantum theory, this universe of separately existing objects turns out to be a complete illusion. In the world of microscopic particles, every object in the physical universe is ultimately connected to every other object. In fact, there are no objects in the world - only energy vibrations and interactions.
The meaning of this is obvious, although not for everyone. Without the involvement of consciousness it was impossible to study the very essence of the Universe. Consciousness is not at all a minor product of physical processes (as I thought before my experience) and not only really exists - it is even more real than all other physical objects, but - quite possibly - is their basis. However, these views have not yet formed the basis of scientists’ ideas about reality. Many of them are trying to do this, but a unified physical and mathematical “theory of everything” has not yet been built that would combine the laws of quantum mechanics with the laws of relativity in such a way that it includes consciousness.
All objects in the physical Universe are made of atoms. Atoms are made up of protons, electrons and neutrons. Those, in turn (as physicists established at the beginning of the 20th century), consist of microparticles. And microparticles consist of... In truth, physicists do not yet know exactly what they consist of.
But they know for sure that in the Universe every particle is connected to another. They are all interconnected at the deepest level.
Before OCS, I had a very general understanding of these scientific ideas. My life flowed in the atmosphere of a modern city with dense traffic and densely populated residential areas, in intense work at the operating table and anxiety for patients. So, even if these facts of atomic physics were reliable, they did not affect my daily life in any way.
But when I broke free from my physical body, the deepest interconnectedness between everything that exists in the Universe was completely revealed to me. I even consider myself entitled to say that, being in the Gates and in the Center, I “created science,” although at that time, of course, I did not think about it. A science that is based on the most accurate and complex tool of scientific knowledge that we have, namely consciousness as such.
The more I reflected on my experience, the more I became convinced that my discovery was not just interesting and exciting. It was scientific. The views of my interlocutors regarding consciousness were of two types: some considered it the greatest mystery for science, others did not see a problem here at all. It is surprising how many scientists adhere to the latter point of view. They believe that consciousness is just a product of what happens in the brain biological processes. Some go even further, arguing that it is not only secondary, but that it simply does not exist. However, many leading scientists involved in the philosophy of mind will not agree with them. Over the past decades, they have had to acknowledge the existence of the “hard problem of consciousness.” David Chalmers was the first to present his idea of the “hard problem of consciousness” in his brilliant 1996 work, The Conscious Mind. The “hard problem of consciousness” concerns the very existence of mental experience and can be summarized in the following questions:
How are consciousness and a functioning brain related?
How does consciousness relate to behavior?
How does sensory experience relate to actual reality?
These questions are so complex that, according to some thinkers, modern science is unable to answer them. However, this does not make the problem of consciousness any less important - to understand the nature of consciousness means to understand the meaning of its incredibly serious role in the Universe.
Over the past four hundred years, the main role in understanding the world has been given to science, which has studied exclusively the physical side of things and phenomena. And this has led to the fact that we have lost interest and approaches to the deepest mystery of the basis of existence - to our consciousness. Many scientists argue that ancient religions perfectly understood the nature of consciousness and carefully protected this knowledge from the uninitiated. But our secular culture, in its reverence for the power of modern science and technology, has neglected the precious experience of the past.
For the progress of Western civilization, humanity has paid a huge price in the form of the loss of the very basis of existence - our spirit. The greatest scientific discoveries and high technologies have led to catastrophic consequences, such as modern military strategies, senseless killings and suicides, sick cities, environmental damage, sudden climate change, misuse of economic resources. This is all terrible. But even worse is that the exceptional importance that we attach to the rapid development of science and technology robs us of the meaning and joy of life, deprives us of the opportunity to understand our role in the great plan of the entire universe.
It is difficult to answer questions regarding the soul, the afterlife, reincarnation, God and Heaven using conventional scientific terms. After all, science believes that all this simply does not exist. In the same way, such phenomena of consciousness as distant vision, extrasensory perception, telekinesis, clairvoyance, telepathy and precognition stubbornly resist being solved using “standard” scientific methods. Before the coma, I myself doubted the reliability of these phenomena, since I had never personally experienced them, and my simplified scientific worldview could not explain them.
Like other scientific skeptics, I refused to even consider information about these phenomena - due to a persistent prejudice against the information itself and those from whom it came. My limited views did not allow me to catch even the slightest hint of how these things could happen. Despite the enormous amount of evidence for the phenomenon of expanded consciousness, skeptics deny their evidentiary nature and deliberately ignore them. They are confident that they have true knowledge, so they do not need to take such facts into account.
We are tempted by the idea that scientific knowledge of the world is rapidly approaching the creation of a unified physical and mathematical theory that explains all known fundamental interactions, in which there is no place for our soul, spirit, Heaven and God. My journey during a coma from the earthly physical world to the higher realms of the Almighty Creator revealed the incredibly deep gulf between human knowledge and the awe-inspiring kingdom of God.
Consciousness is so familiar and integral to our existence that it still remains incomprehensible to the human mind. There is nothing in the physics of the material world (quarks, electrons, photons, atoms, etc.) and especially in the complex structure of the brain that gives us the slightest hint about the nature of consciousness.
The most important key to understanding the reality of the spiritual world is unraveling the deepest secret of our consciousness. This mystery still defies the efforts of physicists and neuroscientists, and therefore the deep relationship between consciousness and quantum mechanics, that is, the entire physical world, remains unknown.
To understand the Universe, it is necessary to recognize the fundamental role of consciousness in the concept of reality. Experiments in quantum mechanics amazed the brilliant founders of this field of physics, many of whom (just to name Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger, Sir James Jeans) turned to a mystical view of the world in search of an answer.
For me, beyond the physical world, I discovered the indescribable enormity and complexity of the Universe, as well as the indisputable fact that consciousness lies at the core of everything that exists. I was so merged with him that I often did not feel any difference between my “I” and the world in which I moved. If I had to briefly describe my discoveries, then, firstly, I would note that the Universe is immeasurably larger than it appears when we look at directly visible objects. This is, of course, not news, since mainstream science accepts that 96 percent of the Universe is “dark matter and energy.”
What are these dark structures? No one knows for sure yet. My experience is unique in that I instantly acquired knowledge, not expressed in words, about the leading role of consciousness, or spirit. And this knowledge was not theoretical, but factual, exciting and tangible, like a breath of cold wind on your face. Secondly, we are all connected in an extremely complex and inextricable way to the vast Universe. She is our real home. And giving primary importance to the physical world is like locking yourself in a cramped closet and imagining that there is nothing behind its doors. And thirdly, faith plays a key role in understanding the primacy of consciousness and the secondary nature of matter. As a medical student, I was often amazed at the power of placebos. It was explained to us that approximately 30 percent of the benefits of medications should be attributed to the patient's belief that they will help him, even if they are completely inert drugs. Instead of seeing the hidden power of faith and understanding its impact on our health, doctors saw the glass as “half empty,” that is, they considered placebos to interfere with determining the benefit of the drug being studied.
At the center of the mystery of quantum mechanics is a false idea of our place in space and time. The rest of the Universe, that is, the largest part of it, is actually not distant from us in space. Yes, physical space seems real, but at the same time it has its limits. The dimensions of the physical Universe are nothing compared to the spiritual world that gave birth to it - the world of consciousness (which can be called the power of love).
This other universe, immeasurably larger than the physical one, is not at all separated from us by distant spaces, as it seems to us. In fact, we are all in it - I am in my city, typing these lines, and you are at home, reading them. She is not distant from us in a physical sense, but simply exists on a different frequency. We are not aware of this because most of us do not have access to the frequency at which it reveals itself. We exist on the scale of familiar time and space, the limits of which are determined by the imperfection of our sensory perception of reality, to which other scales are inaccessible.
The ancient Greeks understood this a long time ago, and I was just discovering what they had already defined: “Explain like with like.” The Universe is designed in such a way that to truly understand any of its dimensions and levels, you must become part of that dimension. Or, to put it more precisely, you need to realize your identity of that part of the Universe to which you already belong, of which you are not even aware.
The universe has no beginning or end, and God (Om) is present in every part of it. Most discussions about God and the higher spiritual world bring them down to our level, rather than elevate our consciousness to their heights.
Our imperfect interpretation distorts their true essence, which is worthy of reverence.
But although the existence of the universe is eternal and infinite, it has punctuations designed to call men into existence and enable them to participate in the glory of God. The Big Bang that gave birth to our Universe was one of these “punctuation marks.”
Om looked at this from the outside, covering with his gaze everything created by Him, inaccessible even to my large-scale vision in the higher worlds. To see there was to know. There was no difference between the sensory perception of objects and phenomena and the understanding of their essence.
“I was blind, but now I have seen” - this phrase took on a new meaning for me when I realized how blind we earthlings are to the creative nature of the spiritual universe. Especially those of us (I used to belong to them) who are sure that the main thing is matter, while everything else - thoughts, consciousness, ideas, emotions, spirit - is only its derivative.
This revelation literally inspired me, it gave me the opportunity to see the boundless heights of spiritual unity and what awaits us all when we go beyond the boundaries of our physical body.
Humor. Irony, Pathos. I have always thought that humans developed these qualities in order to survive in the often difficult and unfair earthly world. This is partly true. But at the same time, they give us an understanding of the truth that, no matter how hard it may be for us in this world, suffering will not affect us as spiritual beings. Laughter and irony remind us that we are not prisoners of this world, but only pass through it, as through a dense forest full of danger.
Another aspect of the good news is that in order to look beyond the mysterious veil, a person does not have to be on the verge of life and death. We just need to read books and attend lectures on spiritual life, and at the end of the day, through prayer or meditation, dive into our subconscious to access higher truths.
Just as my consciousness was individual and at the same time inseparable from the Universe, in the same way it either narrowed or expanded, embracing everything that exists in the Universe. The boundaries between my consciousness and the surrounding reality sometimes became so unsteady and blurry that I myself became the universe. Another way to put it is this: at times I felt completely identical with the Universe, which was integral to me, but which I had not understood until then.
To explain the state of consciousness at this deep level, I often resort to the comparison of a chicken egg. During my stay in the Center, when I found myself alone with the Luminous Ball and the entire incredibly grandiose Universe and in the end left alone with God, I clearly felt that He, as the creative original aspect, is comparable to the shell around the contents of an egg, which are intimately connected ( how our consciousness is a direct continuation of God), and yet infinitely beyond absolute identification with the consciousness of his creation. Even when my “I” merged with everything and with eternity, I felt that I could not become completely fused with the creative principle of the creator of all things. Behind the deepest and most penetrating unity, duality was still felt. Perhaps such palpable duality is a consequence of the desire to return expanded consciousness to the boundaries of our earthly reality.
I did not hear Om's voice, did not see his appearance. Om seemed to speak to me through thoughts that rolled through me like waves, causing vibrations in the world around me and proving that there is a finer fabric of existence - a fabric of which we are all a part, but of which we are usually unaware.
So have I communicated directly with God? Undoubtedly. It sounds pretentious, but it didn't seem that way to me at the time. I felt that the soul of any human being that has left its body is capable of communicating with God, and that we are all capable of living righteously if we pray or resort to meditation. It is impossible to imagine anything more sublime and sacred than communication with God, and at the same time this is the most natural act, for God is always with us. Omniscient, omnipotent and loving us without any conditions or reservations. We are all bound together in a sacred connection with God.
I understand that there will be people who will try in any way to devalue my experience; some will simply dismiss it, refusing to see any scientific value in it, considering it just feverish delirium and fantasy.
But I know better. For the sake of those who live on Earth, and for the sake of those whom I have met beyond this world, I consider it my duty - the duty of a scientist striving to get to the bottom of the truth, and the duty of a doctor called to help people - to say that what I experienced was genuine and the present that it is filled with enormous significance. This is important not only for me, but for all humanity.
I, as before, am a scientist and a doctor, and therefore I am obliged to honor the truth and heal people. And this means telling your story. As time goes by, I become more and more convinced that this story happened to me for a reason. My case demonstrates the futility of attempts by reductionist science to prove that only this material world exists and that consciousness or the soul - whether mine or yours - is not the greatest and most important mystery of the Universe.
I am a living refutation of this.
