"Proof of Heaven - A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife"

An incredible story of a journey to the realm of consciousness and back

I had some homework today in order to prepare for an invitation to speak to and with Dr. Eben Alexander on Tommy’s podcast which will take place tomorrow. My homework was to read his book entitled: “Proof of Heaven - A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife”.

Tommy and I had previously spoken - multiple times actually - about the nature of consciousness, and hearing my thoughts on its potential nature, he insisted I needed to read this book and went so far as to offer to introduce me to the author whom he had interviewed previously, which will happen tomorrow at 10am EST. I will post it, don’t worry.

As promised. Please click on the photo for the rumble link to our conversation.

I read his book in one go today. I understood much of what he wrote. I don’t know why exactly, I have never had a near-death experience. I can say that I have never feared death, or felt that it was in any way ‘an end’ when the physical body no longer ‘moves’ through time and space. The way that he describes the different levels is akin to many depictions I have seen described visually in the movie Insidious, and also in a movie I watched only last night (for some reason) called Alien Code.

In the latter movie, there is a scene when the producers depict the ‘communal space’ - that exists outside of space and time - where a human being can communicate with an inter-dimensional being from a higher-dimensional realm (what some people know as ‘men-in-black’). It is… an ok depiction. Not surreal enough for me, but it was fine. What struck me about the scene was a comment made by the inter-dimensional being about ‘his’ species’ interest in humans. He said that there was no causality - no cause and effect - in their realm since time was a point. The past is the present is the future. There are no decisions that ever need to be made. So the fact that humans live in a three-dimensional realm with linear time, free will and consequences fascinated them. In the movie.

The inter-dimensional being said:

“We do not understand decision. We exist in one single moment. One blink of instantaneity. We understand everything there is to be understood in our world. Therefore causality, probability and consequence are a mystery to us.”

“If man’s experience of time was like ours, would he remain?”

The first quote in Dr. Alexander’s book I would like to write down relates to this sentiment but contradicts it. I find this fascinating.

Cause and effect exist in these higher realms, but outside of our earthly conception of them.

So Dr. Alexander found out that there is such a thing as causality in the higher realm that he visited, but that causality itself was different from our understanding of it.

A lot of what Dr. Alexander wrote down about his other world experience resonated with me. I don’t know why. His conclusion - his boiled down simplicity of an experience so complex - down to a single word: love was very resonant.

From here, I leave you with some more quotes from his book that struck me in this ‘point in time’, starting with one that challenges the little mole man who works for schwabby who recently publicly stated that if you physically ripped open a human being, you would be unable to find free will, thus proving that there is no such thing as free will. What an unenlightened and encapsulated mind that person has.

This quote seems appropriate here:

Evil was necessary because without it free will was impossible, and without free will there could be no growth—no forward movement, no chance for us to become what God longed for us to be. Horrible and all-powerful as evil sometimes seemed to be in a world like ours, in the larger picture love was overwhelmingly dominant, and it would ultimately be triumphant.

Free will, contrary to what the little minion for schwabby believes, is very real and very important, as so poignantly written here by Dr. Alexander.

Free will is of central importance for our function in the earthly realm: a function that, we will all one day discover, serves the much higher role of allowing our ascendance in the timeless alternate dimension.

I actually never before examined the possibility that it was the human brain itself that forms the psychic blocks or barriers.

We can only see what our brain’s filter allows through. The brain - in particular its left-side linguistic/logical part, that which generates our sense of rationality and the feeling of being a sharply defined ego or self - is a barrier to our higher knowledge and experience.

To understand how the brain might actually block our access to knowledge of the higher worlds, we need to accept—at least hypothetically and for the moment—that the brain itself doesn’t produce consciousness.

I believe I am actually close to living my truest self.

Our truest, deepest self is completely free. It is not crippled or compromised by past actions or concerned with identity or status. It comprehends that it has no need to fear the earthly world, and therefore, it has no need to build itself up through fame or wealth or conquest.

It is so strange that as I read this book, the same torrential rains - strange for where I live - were non-stop for days. This next quote precedes the end to the rain and a rainbow becoming present just when Dr. Alexander is ‘born back’ into this world.

A cold, driving rain from low-hanging clouds that never let up and never let the sun peek through.

This is a very interesting comment about the clear difference between the dream world and the ‘after this world’ world.

Some of the dreams I had during this period were stunningly and frighteningly vivid. But in the end they served only to underline how very, very dissimilar my dream state had been compared with the ultra-reality deep in coma.

This is remarkable. I have repeatedly tried to help my colleagues understand why I don’t read others’ (including their) work religiously - it is not out of lack of interest. Quite the contrary. He describes how I myself feel perfectly here with his son’s words:

“Write it down. Write it all down—all your memories, as accurately as you can remember them. But don’t read any books or articles about other peoples’ near-death experiences, or physics, or cosmology. Not until you’ve written down what happened to you. Don’t talk to Mom or anyone else about what happened while you were in coma, either—at least to the degree that you can steer clear of it. You can do that all you want later, right? Think how you always used to tell me that observation comes first, then interpretation. If you want what happened to you to be scientifically valuable, you need to record it as purely and accurately as you can before you start making any comparisons with what has happened to others.”

A comment on what it actually means to be skeptical. I am a skeptic.

And as such, I can tell you that most skeptics aren’t really skeptics at all. To be truly skeptical, one must actually examine something, and take it seriously. And I, like many doctors, had never taken the time to explore near-death experiences (NDEs). I had simply “known” they were impossible.

So very yes to Eccles.

I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition . . . . we have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world. SIR JOHN C. ECCLES (1903–1997)

Wisdom.

A story - a true story - can heal as much as medicine can.

Amen.

Hearing [his] story [gives us all] license [that we all long for] someone to give [us]: the license to believe that our eternal spiritual self is more real than anything we perceive in this physical realm, and has a divine connection to the infinite love of the Creator.

Something that most people, including the people attempting to create AIs and sentient beings, don’t understand, in my opinion, is the following.

Far from being an unimportant by-product of physical processes (as I had thought before my experience), consciousness is not only very real - it’s actually more real than the rest of physical existence, and most likely the basis of it all. But neither of these insights has yet been truly incorporated into science’s picture of reality. Many scientists are trying to do so, but as of yet there is no unified “theory of everything” that can combine the laws of quantum mechanics with those of relativity theory in a way that begins to incorporate consciousness.

Yes.

This other, vastly grander universe isn’t “far away” at all. In fact, it’s right here - right here where I am, typing this sentence, and right there where you are, reading it. It’s not far away physically, but simply exists on a different frequency. It’s right here, right now, but we’re unaware of it because we are for the most part closed to those frequencies on which it manifests. We live in the dimensions of familiar space and time, hemmed in by the peculiar limitations of our sensory organs and by our perceptual scaling within the spectrum from subatomic quantum up through the entire universe. Those dimensions, while they have many things going for them, also shut us out from the other dimensions that exist as well.

You can find his words here.