So here’s another interesting report we found on Dailymail….the story of a leading brain surgeon, Dr Eben Alexander who claims he has been to heaven. Read his interesting experience in “heaven” below:
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.
in Heaven.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
long, a light came slowly down from above, throwing off marvellous
filaments of living silver and golden effulgence.
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.
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
flowing in rivers or descending as rain. Mists rose from the pulsing
surfaces of these waters, and fish glided beneath them.
earth, the water was deeply familiar. It was as though all the most
beautiful waters capes I ever saw on earth had been beautiful precisely
because they were reminding me of this living water.
travel into it, deeper and deeper.
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.
In Heaven, everything is more real — less dense, yet at the same time more intense.
infinitely more so. But in all this vast variety, there is not that
sense of otherness that characterizes our world, where each thing is
alone by itself and has nothing directly to do with the other things
around it.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
sadness and fear I had ever suffered was a result of my somehow having
forgotten this most central of facts.
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.’
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.
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.
biological family, a relative had sent me a photograph of my sister
Betsy — the sister I’d never known.
total. This was the face of the woman on the butterfly wing.The moment I
realised this, something crystallised inside me.