From Daily Mail this is an absolutely fascinating story from a man who "died" was in a coma for several days - and went to heaven. Fascinating READ:
Part 1 - What heaven's really like:
When I was a small boy, I was adopted. I grew up remembering nothing of my birth family and unaware that I had a biological sister, named Betsy. Many years later, I went in search of my biological family, but for Betsy it was too late: she had died.
This is the story of how I was reunited with her — in Heaven.
Before I start, I should explain that I am a scientist, who has spent a lifetime studying the workings of the brain.
My adoptive father was a neurosurgeon and I followed his path, becoming an neurosurgeon myself and an academic who taught brain science at Harvard Medical School.
Although nominally a Christian, I was sceptical when patients described spiritual experiences to me.
My knowledge of the brain made me quite sure that out-of-body experiences, angelic encounters and the like were hallucinations, brought on when the brain suffered a trauma.
And then, in the most dramatic circumstances possible, I discovered proof that I was wrong. Six years ago, I woke up one morning with a searing headache. Within a few hours, I went into a coma: my neocortex, the part of the brain that handles all the thought processes making us human, had shut down completely.
At the time, I was working at Lynchburg General Hospital in Virginia, and I was rushed to the emergency room there. The doctors ascertained that I had contracted meningitis — a rare bacterial strain of E coli was in my spinal fluid and eating into my brain like acid. My survival chances were near zero.
I was in deep coma, a vegetative state, and all the higher functions of my brain were offline. Scans showed no conscious activity whatever — my brain was not malfunctioning, it was completely unplugged.
But my inner self still existed, in defiance of all the known laws of science.
For seven days, as I lay in that unresponsive coma, my consciousness went on a voyage through a series of realms, each one more extraordinary than the last — a journey beyond the physical world and one that, until then, I would certainly have dismissed as impossible.
For thousands of years, ordinary people as well as shamans and mystics have described brief, wonderful glimpses of ethereal realms. I'm not the first person to have discovered that consciousness exists beyond the body.
What is unique in my case is that I am, as far as scientific records show, the only person to have travelled to this heavenly dimension with the cortex in complete shut-down, while under minute observation throughout.
There are medical records for every minute of my coma, and none of them show any indication of brain activity. In other words, as far as neuroscience can say, my journey was not something happening inside my head.
Plenty of scientists have a lot of difficulty with this statement. My experience undermines their whole belief system. But the one place I have found ready acceptance is in church, where my story often tallies with people's expectations.
Even the deep notes of the church organ and the glorious colours of the stained glass seem to echo faintly the sights and sounds of Heaven.
Here, then, is what I experienced: my map of Heaven.
After the blinding headache, when I had slipped into the coma, I gradually became aware of being in a primitive, primordial state that felt like being buried in earth.
It was, however, not ordinary earth, for all around me I sensed, and sometimes heard and saw, other entities.
It was partly horrific, partly comforting and familiar: I felt like I had always been part of this primal murk.
I am often asked, 'Was this hell?' but I don't think it was — I would expect hell to be at least a little bit interactive, and this was a completely passive experience.
I had forgotten what it was even to be human, but one important part of my personality was still hard at work: I had a sense of curiosity. I would ask, 'Who? What? Where?' and there was never a flicker of response.
After an expanse of time had passed, though I can't begin to guess how long, a light came slowly down from above, throwing off marvellous filaments of living silver and golden effulgence.
It was a circular entity, emitting a beautiful, heavenly music that I called the Spinning Melody. The light opened up like a rip in the fabric of that coarse realm, and I felt myself going through the rip, up into a valley full of lush and fertile greenery, where waterfalls flowed into crystal pools.
There were clouds, like marshmallow puffs of pink and white. Behind them, the sky was a rich blue-black.
This world was not vague. It was deeply, piercingly alive, and as vivid as the aroma of fried chicken, as dazzling as the glint of sunlight off the metalwork of a car, and as startling as the impact of first love.
I know perfectly well how crazy my account sounds, and I sympathise with those who cannot accept it. Like a lot of things in life, it sounds pretty far-fetched till you experience it yourself.
There were trees, fields, animals and people. There was water, too, flowing in rivers or descending as rain. Mists rose from the pulsing surfaces of these waters, and fish glided beneath them.
Like the earth, the water was deeply familiar. It was as though all the most beautiful waterscapes I ever saw on earth had been beautiful precisely because they were reminding me of this living water. My gaze wanted to travel into it, deeper and deeper.
This water seemed higher, and more pure than anything I had experienced before, as if it was somehow closer to the original source.
I had stood and admired oceans and rivers across America, from Carolina beaches to west coast streams, but suddenly they all seemed to be lesser versions, little brothers and sisters of this living water.
That's not to denigrate the seas and lakes and thunderstorms that I've marvelled at throughout my life. It is simply to say that I now see all the earth's waters in a new perspective, just as I see all natural beauties in a new way.
In Heaven, everything is more real — less dense, yet at the same time more intense.
Heaven is as vast, various and populated as earth is ... in fact, infinitely more so. But in all this vast variety, there is not that sense of otherness that characterises our world, where each thing is alone by itself and has nothing directly to do with the other things around it.
Nothing is isolated in Heaven. Nothing is alienated. Nothing is disconnected. Everything is one.
I found myself as a speck of awareness on a butterfly wing, among pulsing swarms of millions of other butterflies. I witnessed stunning blue-black velvety skies filled with swooping orbs of golden light, angelic choirs leaving sparkling trails against the billowing clouds.
Those choirs produced hymns and anthems far beyond anything I had ever encountered on earth. The sound was colossal: an echoing chant that seemed to soak me without making me wet.
All my senses had blended. Seeing and hearing were not separate functions. It was as if I could hear the grace and elegance of the airborne creatures, and see the spectacular music that burst out of them.
Even before I began to wonder who or what they were, I understood that they made the music because they could not contain it. It was the sound of sheer joy. They could no more hold it in than you could fill your lungs and never breathe out.
Simply to experience the music was to join in with it. That was the oneness of Heaven — to hear a sound was to be part of it. Everything was connected to everything else, like the infinitely complex swirls on a Persian carpet or a butterfly's wing. And I was flying on that carpet, riding on that wing.
Above the sky, there was a vast array of larger universes that I came to call an 'over-sphere', and I ascended until I reached the Core, that deepest sanctuary of the Divine — infinite inky blackness, filled to overflowing with indescribable, unconditional love.
There I encountered the infinitely powerful, all-knowing deity whom I later called Om, because of the sound that vibrated through that realm. I learned lessons there of a depth and beauty entirely beyond my capacity to explain.
During this voyage, I had a guide. She was an extraordinarily beautiful woman who first appeared as I rode, as that speck of awareness, on the wing of that butterfly.
I'd never seen this woman before. I didn't know who she was. Yet her presence was enough to heal my heart, to make me whole in a way I'd never known was possible. Her face was unforgettable. Her eyes were deep blue, and her cheekbones were high. Her face was surrounded by a frame of honey-brown hair.
She wore a smock, like a peasant's, woven from sheer colour — indigo, powder-blue and pastel shades of orange and peach. When she looked at me, I felt such an abundance of emotion that, if nothing good had ever happened to me before, the whole of my life would have been worth living for that expression in her eyes alone.
It was not romantic love. It was not friendship. It was far beyond all the different compartments of love we have on earth. Without actually speaking, she let me know that I was loved and cared for beyond measure and that the universe was a vaster, better, and more beautiful place than I could ever have dreamed.
I was an irreplaceable part of the whole (like all of us), and all the sadness and fear I had ever suffered was a result of my somehow having forgotten this most central of facts.
Her message went through me like a breath of wind. It's hard to put it into words, but the essence was this: 'You are loved and cherished, dearly, for ever. You have nothing to fear. There is nothing you can do wrong.'
It was, then, an utterly wonderful experience.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, I had been in my coma for seven days and showing no signs of improvement. The doctors were just deciding whether to continue with life support, when I suddenly regained consciousness. My eyes just popped open, and I was back. I had no memories of my earthly life, but knew full well where I had been.
I had to relearn everything: who, what, and where I was. Over days, then weeks, like a gently falling snow, my old, earthly knowledge came back.
Words and language returned within hours and days. With the love and gentle coaxing of my family and friends, other memories emerged.
By eight weeks, my prior knowledge of science, including the experiences and learning from more than two decades spent as a neurosurgeon in teaching hospitals, returned completely. That full recovery remains a miracle without any explanation from modern medicine.
But I was a different person from the one I had been. The things I had seen and experienced while gone from my body did not fade away, as dreams and hallucinations do. They stayed.
Above all, that image of the woman on the butterfly wing haunted me.
And then, four months after coming out of my coma, I received a picture in the mail.
As a result of my earlier investigations to make contact with my biological family, a relative had sent me a photograph of my sister Betsy — the sister I'd never known.
The shock of recognition was total. This was the face of the woman on the butterfly wing.
The moment I realised this, something crystallised inside me.
That photo was the confirmation that I'd needed. This was proof, beyond reproach, of the objective reality of my experience.
From then on, I was back in the old, earthly world I'd left behind before my coma struck, but as a genuinely new person.
I had been reborn.
Science cannot explain the afterlife. For many people who use scientific evidence as the sole basis of their belief system, this must mean the afterlife doesn’t exist.
According to them, death is the end and heaven is a convenient lie we tell to ourselves and our children.
My 25-year career as an academic neuroscientist, studying the workings of the brain, led me to the conclusion that life after death was a brain-based illusion — until I experienced a journey into the hereafter during a coma after developing meningitis.
Now I hold a very different view: the afterlife is real. If science doesn’t recognise this fact, then it is doing two things wrong.
First, science often uses the wrong tools to make measurements. And second, even the most open-minded scientists are a long way from understanding what the right tools will be.
We simply haven’t discovered the scientific answers to spiritual questions yet.
As a simple example, imagine a young couple at their wedding. As the ceremony ends, they look deep into each other’s eyes — the windows of the soul, as Shakespeare called them.
Deep. It’s a funny word to describe an action that can’t be ‘deep’ at all. Sight is a physical affair: photons of light strike the retinal wall at the rear of the eye, just behind the pupil, and the information they deliver is translated into electrochemical impulses.
These messages travel along the optic nerve to the visual processing centre in the rear of the brain. It’s an entirely mechanical process.
Ask an optometrist to measure how ‘deep’ we’re really looking and the answer will be an inch or so.
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What heaven's really like - by a top brain surgeon who slipped into a coma and went there
But, of course, everyone knows what you mean by ‘looking deep into someone’s eyes’.
You are seeing that person’s soul — that part of the human being that the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus was talking about 2,500 years ago when he wrote: ‘You would not find the limits of the soul even if you travelled for ever, so deep and vast is it.’
Never mind an inch; the depths of our eyes are too great to be measured in light years. They are infinite.
We see this depth manifested when we fall in love — and when we see someone die. Most people have experienced the first, while fewer, in our society where death is shunted out of sight, have experienced the second.
But medical and hospice staff who see death regularly will know what I’m talking about.
Suddenly, where there was depth, there is now only surface. The living gaze — even if the person in question was very old and that gaze was vague and flickering — goes flat.
So, imagine that bride and groom looking into each other’s eyes and seeing that bottomless depth.
Now jump ahead half a dozen decades. Imagine they had children, who had children of their own, who have grown up.
The husband has died and his widow lives alone in sheltered accommodation. Her children visit her and she has friends, but sometimes, like right now, she feels lonely.
It’s a rainy afternoon and the woman, sitting by her window, has picked up her wedding photograph from a side table. Like the woman, it has taken a long journey to get there.
It started out in a photo album that was passed on to one of their children, then went into a frame and came with her when she moved to the home. Though it’s fragile, yellowed and bent at the edges, it has survived.
She sees the young woman she was looking into the eyes of her new husband and remembers how at that moment he was more real to her than anything else in the world. Where is he now? Does he still exist?
Science cannot detect the existence of loved ones who have passed over to the other side. But just as we can sense the soul behind the eyes, we can also intuitively register the loving presence of those we have lost.
And sometimes they manifest themselves in the most extraordinary ways. The image of a butterfly was very important to me during my near death experience.
As I sailed through a verdant valley with swooping orbs of golden light above me leaving sparkling trails of music in their wake, I was not in my human shape.
I was not any shape at all — I was a speck of awareness, perched on the wing of a butterfly.
That memory came back to me powerfully when I received a letter from a man called Don, an American whose wife Lorraine had died after 21 years of marriage. She had been a deeply spiritual woman who worshipped regularly.
After she died, it was too painful for Don to remain in the home they had shared. He tried to pack away his possessions, ready for a move, but grief kept overwhelming him.
One afternoon, he went to sit in the garden, where he saw a monarch butterfly. It isn’t such an unusual sight in North America.
At certain times of the year, clusters of these brightly coloured insects flutter around plants. But this one had appeared out of season — and, uniquely, it was alone.
Don watched it for a while, then went indoors. When he came out later, it was still there. The next day, it was back again.
Watching it was strangely calming and Don found the strength to start packing up his wife’s belongings.
He had never realised how much Lorraine loved butterflies. The motif appeared on jewellery, box lids, book covers and clothes.
She was a collector and her husband was well acquainted with her fondness for dolls and ceramic cows, which were displayed everywhere on shelves. But this was the first time that he had registered the butterflies.
The monarch butterfly kept fluttering around and Don was sorry to say goodbye to it when he finally left the house.
After two weeks in his new home, he felt he was ready to scatter his wife’s ashes, and contacted a friend who owned 13 unspoilt acres on a hillside.
After driving to his friend’s house, Don set out over the fields in search of a tree to mark his wife’s final resting place.
He knew he had found the right one when he spied a monarch butterfly flitting around the branches.
‘I had always been sceptical about anything bordering on spirituality,’ Don told me.
‘But now I began to believe Lorraine had come back to earth as a butterfly. This was the beginning of my quest for faith and peace of mind.’
He dug a hole, said his prayers and remembered his wife as he buried the ashes. Then he bid farewell to the butterfly and drove away.
But grief is a powerful thing, and two weeks later Don was back, desperate for anything that would make him feel his wife’s presence again.
Imagine his delight when he sat down beneath the tree — and a monarch butterfly fluttered by. I believe that instinct plays a great part in helping us to recognise messages from the afterlife.
It is certainly not the rational side of our brains at work. Don was a sceptic and when he first saw that solitary butterfly, his scientific mind was inclined to dismiss it as an insect and nothing more.
But his intuitive mind was awake and aware to a significance in the sight that his conscious brain had failed to register.
And as the coincidences piled up, his rational intelligence could not ignore them any longer.
When I awoke in heaven during my coma, it was wholly new to me — but also strangely, paradoxically familiar. I felt I had been there before, not as the man I am now, Eben Alexander, but as the spiritual being I had been long before I took this human form.
I will be that spiritual being again, when the earthly elements that make up my physical body have gone their different ways.
What I do know is that the worlds above this one flow with emotion, with warmth that is more than simply physical. And they are unforgettably vivid, existing with an intensity that makes our ordinary world seem pallid.
For people who have experienced deep, transcendental near death experiences, their memories do not fade as most brain-derived memories do.
I’ve had people come up to me after presentations and offer detailed descriptions of near death experiences they have undergone decades earlier, in some cases 70 years ago, as if they had happened yesterday.
The veil that lies between this world and the next is cleverly constructed, I am convinced, by an intelligence infinitely greater than our own. It is there for a reason.
This earthly realm is where we are meant to learn the lessons of unconditional love, compassion, forgiveness and acceptance. Many people who attend my talks are puzzled to hear there are trees, animals, birds and flowers in heaven.
These things need earth, air, water and warmth to thrive — how can they exist in a realm that is purely ethereal?
The easiest way to understand is to use a ‘map of heaven’ used in many ancient traditions, but especially by the mystics of ancient Persia. This map sees the universe as wide at the bottom and pointy at the top, like a wizard’s hat.
Picture such a hat sitting on the ground. The bottom part, the wide flat circle of ground that the hat covers, is the earthly realm.
Now imagine that the hat has a series of floors inside it, floors that get narrower and narrower as we move up.
This is how the soul ascends the spiritual worlds. These worlds don’t get less significant as we ascend — just the opposite. They get more vast, more impossible to comprehend from the base level where we currently exist.
Space no longer exists in the way it does here in our dimension. Space becomes an illusion. This was vividly confirmed by the internationally acclaimed movie critic Roger Ebert, who reviewed films for 46 years until his death from cancer in 2013.
Roger was an agnostic. He would say ‘he didn’t know if he could believe in God’. But during the last week of his life, he began to tell his wife Chaz that he had glimpsed another place, a world beyond this one.
At first, she was concerned that these were hallucinations, perhaps brought on by his medication.
But Roger was calm and adamant about what he had seen — heaven was ‘a vastness that you can’t even imagine . . . a place where the past, present and future were all happening at once’.
The day before he died, Roger placed a note in his wife’s hand. It said simply: ‘This is all an elaborate hoax.’ He wasn’t talking about his illness — he was referring to the world itself.
The following day, with a seraphic, Buddha-like smile on his face, Roger slipped out of consciousness for the last time.
Chaz put on his favourite music by the Dave Brubeck Quartet and sat holding his hand for hours until he had passed.
She says: ‘I have this feeling we’re not finished. Roger’s not finished. I’m still waiting for things to unfold.’
The realms above us in the wizard’s hat are full of vast spaces — vistas that dwarf the most sweeping and inspiring we can find anywhere here on Earth.
These spaces are full of objects and beings we recognise from earthly life. They are real.
But the space they inhabit is a higher space than this one, so nothing works as it does here.
The moment that you start to describe this heavenly realm you run into problems. It’s real, but it doesn’t behave in any kind of way that we are used to.
Traditional wisdom tells us that at the tip of the hat, all of our earthly categories of space and time and movement vanish altogether. The one thing we know here on Earth that does remain is love.
God is love, and so are we, at our deepest level. This is not abstract love: there is no such thing.
This love is harder than a rock and louder than a full orchestra and more vital than a thunderstorm and as fragile and moving as the weakest, most innocent suffering creature, and as strong as a thousand suns.
This is not a truth we can ever put into words that begin to do it justice. But fortunately, it is a truth that every one of us will experience.
Heaven is real Part 1 here.
Heaven Part 2 here.
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