Photography courtesy of Dr. Eben Alexander.
“Mystics and mediums, ministers and medics” gather at The Afterlife Awareness Conference (afterlifeconference.com), June 21 through 23 at the Sheraton Westport Plaza Hotel. But the hottest attraction will be Dr. Eben Alexander, a respected neurosurgeon who’s taught at Harvard Medical School. Meningitis sent him into a coma in 2008, and he woke with memories of an ethereal voyage, a state of consciousness he’s convinced is far grander than anything our lumpy little brains could produce. Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey Into the Afterlife was published last fall; it rose instantly to the top of the New York Times best-seller list.
Did you expect the vehement critiques that followed? Bill Maher was pretty scathing. That’s not serious criticism. My story has to do with the hard problem of consciousness. The critics, especially those in medicine, are showing that they don’t know what they’re talking about. Any doctor who takes care of severe meningitis will tell you I should have had no experience whatsoever.
So the famous neurologist, Dr. Oliver Sacks, was off base too? Yeah, exactly. He’s not paying attention to the details of this. When you have little potshots from people, I don’t care if it is Oliver Sacks—he didn’t really do his homework. He doesn’t have a clue about non-local consciousness.
Meaning? Consciousness is not simply created by the brain. It’s a much deeper mystery, which is what quantum mechanics has been trying to tell us for years.
Did you believe in heaven before this? I wanted to when I was younger, but through more than 20 years of neurosurgery, I just couldn’t see how any form of consciousness could live beyond the brain and the body. Now it makes sense. Soul and spirit are eternal; consciousness is primary. The brain is involved with consciousness, but it doesn’t create it. It filters it, dumbs it down.
What if you’re wrong? If somebody showed me evidence, I’d say, “Well, isn’t that wonderful?” It’s all about getting the truth. I’m not here to sell dogma. But reductive science has gotten us further from any solution. Our soul is not produced by the brain at all. And that goes a long way toward solving some of the most vexing problems of philosophy: the hard problem of consciousness and the enigma of quantum mechanics. I’m not the only one who ever had a near-death experience, you know. If I were, I’d be on pretty thin ice.
Skeptics roll their eyes at the clouds and butterflies in your book. Are those just symbols? What I would have told you a year ago is, I think that gateway realm had some earthly trappings, but it is somewhat influenced. It’s very real, but trying to bring it back into this realm—time travel is very difficult. We come back and try to use earthly words to describe it.
And now? I would liken it to Plato’s world of ideal forms. The very fact that I found out who my companion on the butterfly wing was, that’s not something that came from my brain. People complain about the butterflies. Well, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross saw butterflies in the children’s barracks of a concentration camp. The children had carved them into the wood. In Joplin, the children said butterfly angels saved them. And of course it’s not a butterfly some entomologist could give you genus and species for. These are idealized forms. You can sit there and say, “Oh, it’s a literary metaphor,” or you can realize that they are there for a reason. They inhabit that realm. And they often come in this world to send us very important messages.
You formed Eternea to research this further. What kind of scientific inquiry do you plan? We are setting up a database for all different kinds of spiritually transformative experiences, so scientists who study consciousness can go in there and pull out the details. We are trying to partner with philanthropic organizations to share our vision.
Will it be tough to find one willing to risk its reputation? Well, so far we haven’t found one who decided they want to be our partner, but I’m sure there will be some out there. It’s not a reputation thing. This is the world of the future, and people are finally getting that. If you didn’t care about your reputation, you might want to stick with the old Cro-Magnon worn-out thinking.
Who will be at the Afterlife conference that you respect? I have been so, so busy, I have not had one second to think about that, but I’m sure they’ve gotten a good crowd together.
Can you rattle off a bit of your busy schedule? I don’t even have time to tell you. Just go to my website (lifebeyonddeath.net). I’ve been in Florida, Seattle, France, Palm Beach, New York, Boston, just all over the place, every day a new presentation. It’s far beyond what you can imagine.
