As a
neurosurgeon, I did not believe in the phenomenon of near-death experiences. I
grew up in a scientific world, the son of a neurosurgeon. I followed my
father’s path and became an academic neurosurgeon, teaching at Harvard Medical
School and other universities. I understand what happens to the brain when
people are near death, and I had always believed there were good scientific
explanations for the heavenly out-of-body journeys described by those who
narrowly escaped death.
The
brain is an astonishingly sophisticated but extremely delicate mechanism.
Reduce the amount of oxygen it receives by the smallest amount and it will
react. It was no big surprise that people who had undergone severe trauma would
return from their experiences with strange stories. But that didn’t mean they
had journeyed anywhere real.
Although
I considered myself a faithful Christian, I was so more in name than in actual
belief. I didn’t begrudge those who wanted to believe that Jesus was more than
simply a good man who had suffered at the hands of the world. I sympathized
deeply with those who wanted to believe that there was a God somewhere out
there who loved us unconditionally. In fact, I envied such people the security
that those beliefs no doubt provided. But as a scientist, I simply knew better
than to believe them myself.
In the
fall of 2008, however, after seven days in a coma during which the human part
of my brain, the neocortex, was inactivated, I experienced something so
profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after
death.
I know
how pronouncements like mine sound to skeptics, so I will tell my story with
the logic and language of the scientist I am.
Very
early one morning four years ago, I awoke with an extremely intense headache.
Within hours, my entire cortex—the part of the brain that controls thought and
emotion and that in essence makes us human—had shut down. Doctors at Lynchburg
General Hospital in Virginia, a hospital where I myself worked as a
neurosurgeon, determined that I had somehow contracted a very rare bacterial
meningitis that mostly attacks newborns. E. coli bacteria had penetrated my
cerebrospinal fluid and were eating my brain.
When I
entered the emergency room that morning, my chances of survival in anything
beyond a vegetative state were already low. They soon sank to near nonexistent.
For seven days I lay in a deep coma, my body unresponsive, my higher-order
brain functions totally offline.
Then, on
the morning of my seventh day in the hospital, as my doctors weighed whether to
discontinue treatment, my eyes popped open.
There is
no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my
mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my
cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked
them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the
universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me
would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.
But that
dimension—in rough outline, the same one described by countless subjects of
near-death experiences and other mystical states—is there. It exists, and what
I saw and learned there has placed me quite literally in a new world: a world
where we are much more than our brains and bodies, and where death is not the
end of consciousness but rather a chapter in a vast, and incalculably positive,
journey.
I’m not
the first person to have discovered evidence that consciousness exists beyond
the body. Brief, wonderful glimpses of this realm are as old as human history.
But as far as I know, no one before me has ever traveled to this dimension (a)
while their cortex was completely shut down, and (b) while their body was under
minute medical observation, as mine was for the full seven days of my coma.
All the
chief arguments against near-death experiences suggest that these experiences
are the results of minimal, transient, or partial malfunctioning of the cortex.
My near-death experience, however, took place not while my cortex was
malfunctioning, but while it was simply off. This is clear from the severity
and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement
documented by CT scans and neurological examinations. According to current
medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I
could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in
the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I
underwent.
It took
me months to come to terms with what happened to me. Not just the medical
impossibility that I had been conscious during my coma, but—more
importantly—the things that happened during that time. Toward the beginning of
my adventure, I was in a place of clouds. Big, puffy, pink-white ones that
showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky.
Reliving
History: The search for the meaning of the afterlife is as old as humanity
itself. Over the years Newsweek has run numerous covers about religion, God,
and that search. As Dr. Alexander says, it’s unlikely we’ll know the answer in
our lifetimes, but that doesn’t mean we won’t keep asking.
Higher
than the clouds—immeasurably higher—flocks of transparent, shimmering beings
arced across the sky, leaving long, streamerlike lines behind them.
Birds?
Angels? These words registered later, when I was writing down my recollections.
But neither of these words do justice to the beings themselves, which were
quite simply different from anything I have known on this planet. They were
more advanced. Higher forms.
A sound,
huge and booming like a glorious chant, came down from above, and I wondered if
the winged beings were producing it. Again, thinking about it later, it occurred
to me that the joy of these creatures, as they soared along, was such that they
had to make this noise—that if the joy didn’t come out of them this way then
they would simply not otherwise be able to contain it. The sound was palpable
and almost material, like a rain that you can feel on your skin but doesn’t get
you wet.
Seeing
and hearing were not separate in this place where I now was. I could hear the
visual beauty of the silvery bodies of those scintillating beings above, and I
could see the surging, joyful perfection of what they sang. It seemed that you
could not look at or listen to anything in this world without becoming a part
of it—without joining with it in some mysterious way. Again, from my present
perspective, I would suggest that you couldn’t look at anything in that world
at all, for the word “at” itself implies a separation that did not exist there.
Everything was distinct, yet everything was also a part of everything else,
like the rich and intermingled designs on a Persian carpet ... or a butterfly’s
wing.
It gets
stranger still. For most of my journey, someone else was with me. A woman. She
was young, and I remember what she looked like in complete detail. She had high
cheekbones and deep-blue eyes. Golden brown tresses framed her lovely face.
When first I saw her, we were riding along together on an intricately patterned
surface, which after a moment I recognized as the wing of a butterfly. In fact,
millions of butterflies were all around us—vast fluttering waves of them,
dipping down into the woods and coming back up around us again. It was a river
of life and color, moving through the air. The woman’s outfit was simple, like
a peasant’s, but its colors—powder blue, indigo, and pastel orange-peach—had
the same overwhelming, super-vivid aliveness that everything else had. She
looked at me with a look that, if you saw it for five seconds, would make your
whole life up to that point worth living, no matter what had happened in it so
far. It was not a romantic look. It was not a look of friendship. It was a look
that was somehow beyond all these, beyond all the different compartments of
love we have down here on earth. It was something higher, holding all those
other kinds of love within itself while at the same time being much bigger than
all of them.
Without
using any words, she spoke to me. The message went through me like a wind, and
I instantly understood that it was true. I knew so in the same way that I knew
that the world around us was real—was not some fantasy, passing and insubstantial.
The
message had three parts, and if I had to translate them into earthly language,
I’d say they ran something like this:
“You are
loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”
“You
have nothing to fear.”
“There
is nothing you can do wrong.”
The
message flooded me with a vast and crazy sensation of relief. It was like being
handed the rules to a game I’d been playing all my life without ever fully
understanding it.
“We will
show you many things here,” the woman said, again, without actually using these
words but by driving their conceptual essence directly into me. “But
eventually, you will go back.”
To this,
I had only one question.
Back
where?
A warm
wind blew through, like the kind that spring up on the most perfect summer
days, tossing the leaves of the trees and flowing past like heavenly water. A
divine breeze. It changed everything, shifting the world around me into an even
higher octave, a higher vibration.
Although
I still had little language function, at least as we think of it on earth, I
began wordlessly putting questions to this wind, and to the divine being that I
sensed at work behind or within it.
Where is
this place?
Who am
I?
Why am I
here?
Each
time I silently put one of these questions out, the answer came instantly in an
explosion of light, color, love, and beauty that blew through me like a
crashing wave. What was important about these blasts was that they didn’t
simply silence my questions by overwhelming them. They answered them, but in a
way that bypassed language. Thoughts entered me directly. But it wasn’t thought
like we experience on earth. It wasn’t vague, immaterial, or abstract. These
thoughts were solid and immediate—hotter than fire and wetter than water—and as
I received them I was able to instantly and effortlessly understand concepts
that would have taken me years to fully grasp in my earthly life.
I
continued moving forward and found myself entering an immense void, completely
dark, infinite in size, yet also infinitely comforting. Pitch-black as it was,
it was also brimming over with light: a light that seemed to come from a
brilliant orb that I now sensed near me. The orb was a kind of “interpreter”
between me and this vast presence surrounding me. It was as if I were being
born into a larger world, and the universe itself was like a giant cosmic womb,
and the orb (which I sensed was somehow connected with, or even identical to,
the woman on the butterfly wing) was guiding me through it.
Later,
when I was back, I found a quotation by the 17th-century Christian poet Henry
Vaughan that came close to describing this magical place, this vast, inky-black
core that was the home of the Divine itself.
“There
is, some say, in God a deep but dazzling darkness ...”
That was
it exactly: an inky darkness that was also full to brimming with light.
I know
full well how extraordinary, how frankly unbelievable, all this sounds. Had
someone—even a doctor—told me a story like this in the old days, I would have
been quite certain that they were under the spell of some delusion. But what
happened to me was, far from being delusional, as real or more real than any
event in my life. That includes my wedding day and the birth of my two sons.
What
happened to me demands explanation.
Modern
physics tells us that the universe is a unity—that it is undivided. Though we
seem to live in a world of separation and difference, physics tells us that
beneath the surface, every object and event in the universe is completely woven
up with every other object and event. There is no true separation.
Before
my experience these ideas were abstractions. Today they are realities. Not only
is the universe defined by unity, it is also—I now know—defined by love. The
universe as I experienced it in my coma is—I have come to see with both shock
and joy—the same one that both Einstein and Jesus were speaking of in their
(very) different ways.
I’ve
spent decades as a neurosurgeon at some of the most prestigious medical
institutions in our country. I know that many of my peers hold—as I myself
did—to the theory that the brain, and in particular the cortex, generates
consciousness and that we live in a universe devoid of any kind of emotion,
much less the unconditional love that I now know God and the universe have
toward us. But that belief, that theory, now lies broken at our feet. What
happened to me destroyed it, and I intend to spend the rest of my life
investigating the true nature of consciousness and making the fact that we are
more, much more, than our physical brains as clear as I can, both to my fellow
scientists and to people at large.
I don’t
expect this to be an easy task, for the reasons I described above. When the
castle of an old scientific theory begins to show fault lines, no one wants to
pay attention at first. The old castle simply took too much work to build in
the first place, and if it falls, an entirely new one will have to be constructed
in its place.
I
learned this firsthand after I was well enough to get back out into the world
and talk to others—people, that is, other than my long-suffering wife, Holley,
and our two sons—about what had happened to me. The looks of polite disbelief,
especially among my medical friends, soon made me realize what a task I would
have getting people to understand the enormity of what I had seen and
experienced that week while my brain was down.
One of
the few places I didn’t have trouble getting my story across was a place I’d
seen fairly little of before my experience: church. The first time I entered a
church after my coma, I saw everything with fresh eyes. The colors of the
stained-glass windows recalled the luminous beauty of the landscapes I’d seen in
the world above. The deep bass notes of the organ reminded me of how thoughts
and emotions in that world are like waves that move through you. And, most
important, a painting of Jesus breaking bread with his disciples evoked the
message that lay at the very heart of my journey: that we are loved and
accepted unconditionally by a God even more grand and unfathomably glorious
than the one I’d learned of as a child in Sunday school.
Today
many believe that the living spiritual truths of religion have lost their
power, and that science, not faith, is the road to truth. Before my experience
I strongly suspected that this was the case myself.
But I
now understand that such a view is far too simple. The plain fact is that the
materialist picture of the body and brain as the producers, rather than the
vehicles, of human consciousness is doomed. In its place a new view of mind and
body will emerge, and in fact is emerging already. This view is scientific and
spiritual in equal measure and will value what the greatest scientists of
history themselves always valued above all: truth.
This new
picture of reality will take a long time to put together. It won’t be finished
in my time, or even, I suspect, my sons’ either. In fact, reality is too vast,
too complex, and too irreducibly mysterious for a full picture of it ever to be
absolutely complete. But in essence, it will show the universe as evolving,
multi-dimensional, and known down to its every last atom by a God who cares for
us even more deeply and fiercely than any parent ever loved their child.
I’m
still a doctor, and still a man of science every bit as much as I was before I
had my experience. But on a deep level I’m very different from the person I was
before, because I’ve caught a glimpse of this emerging picture of reality. And
you can believe me when I tell you that it will be worth every bit of the work
it will take us, and those who come after us, to get it right.
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