By Mark Hughes, New York 09 Oct 2012
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9597345/Afterlife-exists-says-top-brain-surgeon.html
A prominent scientist who had previously dismissed the possibility of the
afterlife says he has reconsidered his belief after experiencing an out of body
experience which has convinced him that heaven exists.
Dr Eben Alexander, a Harvard-educated neurosurgeon, fell into a coma for seven
days in 2008 after contracting meningitis.
During his illness Dr Alexander says that the part of his brain which controls
human thought and emotion "shut down" and that he then experienced
"something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in
consciousness after death." In an essay for American magazine Newsweek,
which he wrote to promote his book Proof of Heaven, Dr Alexander says he was
met by a beautiful blue-eyed woman in a "place of clouds, big fluffy
pink-white ones" and "shimmering beings".
He continues: "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." The doctor adds
that a "huge and booming like a glorious chant, came down from above, and
I wondered if the winged beings were producing it. the sound was palpable and
almost material, like a rain that you can feel on your skin but doesn't get you
wet."
Dr Alexander says he had heard stories from patients who spoke of outer body
experiences but had disregarded them as "wishful thinking" but has
reconsidered his opinion following his own experience.
He added: "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." He added: "I've spent decades as a neurosurgeon at some
of the most prestigous 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."