Near Death Experience: Summary of 35 Years Research

Respected Neurosurgeon Describes Life-Changing NDE

http://ndestories.org/dr-eben-alexander/

*Dr. Eben Alexander III*

/Dr. Eben Alexander III has been an academic neurosurgeon for the last
25 years, including 15 years at the Brigham & Women’s Hospital and
Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. Over those years he
personally dealt with hundreds of patients suffering from severe
alterations in their level of consciousness. Many of those patients were
rendered comatose by trauma, brain tumors, ruptured aneurysms,
infections, or stroke. While many comatose patients died, there were
occasional ones who recovered. None of them was able to provide much
insight concerning their experience./

/In the predawn hours of November 10, 2008, Dr. Alexander himself became
a comatose patient. For reasons that remain obscure, he was overcome by
a fulminant bacterial meningitis and was comatose on a ventilator in the
Intensive Care Unit within hours. His physicians were stunned to find
that the culprit was a bacteria that almost never causes spontaneous
meningitis in adults! After six days on triple antibiotics, showing no
response and with little neurological function remaining, his physicians
had few words of encouragement for his family./

/On day seven he said “Thank you” when the breathing tube was removed!
However, his earliest recollections were strange and involved no recall
of his life before coma. Like a newborn, he had no functioning language,
nor knowledge of this world, our culture, or the loved ones surrounding
him. Foggy-minded for several days, he steadily improved and began
writing and organizing his recollections of the experience. Memories
from the time in coma were inexplicable. They were like a patchwork
quilt, with no apparent sequence, nor temporal relationship to one
another. The purest and most extraordinary part of his journey happened
deep in coma. How, then, was it possible for that rich experience to
originate in his badly infected brain?/

/Reports of “Near Death Experiences” (NDEs) have been limited in their
value of elucidating what occurs after actual death. The treasure trove
is in teasing out what death is like, not near-death. The discussions
many scientists have about “Near Death Experiences” still conclude that
“when the brain actually dies, so does the mind/soul/self etc.” That is
why Dr. Alexander’s experience is so important. In the midst of his week
in coma, he had a remarkable spiritual experience. His will be a key
addition to the NDE literature! That is why he is writing the book./

/The ramifications of his quest were life-changing! He has spent the
last two years trying to solve the riddles from his journey. In
analyzing his experience, including the scientific possibilities and
grand implications, he envisions a profound reconciliation of modern
science and spirituality as a natural product. He has been blessed with
a complete recovery and is now writing a book about this most powerful,
life-changing story./

*Websites & Background Information:*

.Life Beyond Death

………………..

*154. Neurosurgeon Dr. Eben Alexander’s Near-Death Experience Defies
Medical Model of Consciousness*
Alex Tsakiris Interviews Dr. Eben Alexander
Skeptiko
November 22, 2011

Original Link

Download MP3 Recording Of This Interview

/Today we welcome Dr. Eben Alexander to Skeptiko. Dr. Alexander has been
an academic neurosurgeon for more than 25 years, including 15 years at
Harvard Medical School in Boston. In November of 2008, he had a
near-death experience that changed his life and caused him to rethink
everything he thought he knew about the human brain and consciousness./

Dr. Alexander, welcome to Skeptiko.

*Dr. Eben Alexander:*Thank you. It’s good to be here.

*Alex Tsakiris:*Well, your story is really quite amazing. For those who
haven’t heard of it and aren’t aware of what you went through, do you
want to tell us a little bit about your experience?

*Dr. Eben Alexander:*Yes. It really struck out of the blue. I’d been
quite healthy up until that time. In fact, I was in reasonably good
shape because my older son had been putting me through a big workout,
anticipating a climb of a 20,000 foot volcano in South America.

*Alex Tsakiris:*Wow.

*Dr. Eben Alexander:*Luckily I was in pretty good shape. At 4:30 in the
morning, November 10, 2008, I got out of bed. I was getting ready to go
up to work. I was working in Charlottesville at the time and I had
severe sudden back pain, much worse than I had ever experienced.
Literally within 10 or 15 minutes, it got me to a point where I could
not even take a step. I was really in tremendous agony.

My wife, Holly, was rubbing my back. Then my younger son, Bond, came in
and saw I was in a lot of distress and he started rubbing my temples. I
realized when he did that that I had a severe headache. It was like he
took a railroad spike and put it through my head. But I was already
really going down very quickly. I didn’t know it at the time.

I found out much later that I had acute bacterial meningitis and it was
a very unusual bacteria. One that the incidence of spontaneous E. coli
meningitis in adults in the U.S. is about 1 in 10 million per year. So
it’s really rare. We never found out where it came from. But at any
rate, it was in about 2 to 2-1/2 hours it drove me deep down and in
fact, my last words really were to my wife, “Don’t call 911. Trust me,
I’m a doctor.”

Luckily she overruled that and she did that because she saw me having a
grand mal seizure on the bed. Of course I don’t remember that and I
really don’t remember anything that happened for the next week because I
was gone. I was very sick during that time as I heard later. In fact, I
was so sick that I was on a ventilator the whole week.

They did several lumbar punctures trying to guide therapy. I was on
triple antibiotics very early on, due to a very good medical team. They
did a lumbar puncture about the second or third day into this and my
cerebral spinal fluid glucose, which is normally around 60 to 80 and in
a bad case of meningitis might drop down to about 20, well my glucose
went down to 1. So I was really sick.

*Alex Tsakiris:*So at this point, nothing should be going on in your
brain and yet something was happening in your conscious awareness.

*Dr. Eben Alexander:*Yeah, I’d say that’s correct. To me, and I’ve spent
a lot of time in the last three years trying to explain this and that
explanation initially, all I was doing was trying to explain it
neuroscientifically. Meningitis is very helpful because it’s probably
better than anything else at really diffusely wiping out the neocortex.
But one can always argue that there’s some idling function at a deep
level that might still survive.

In fact, one of the hypotheses that I entertained about all this was
because the experience that I’ll describe to you seemed very hyper-real
and extremely crisp and vivid, much more real and interactive than
sitting here and talking with you right now. I mean, it was
extraordinary. That is something that is often described in near-death
experiences and of course one of my early hypotheses was well, maybe
there’s some differential effect against inhibitory neuronal networks
that allowed over-expression of excitatory neural networks and gave this
illusion of kind of a hyper-real situation.

I can tell you from having lived through it that it was so powerful and
so beyond that kind of explanation that I wasn’t very hopeful that that
would work out in the end. But I figured I needed to give it a chance
and look at the microanatomy in the cortex and the different connections
with the thalamus and basal ganglia and see if I could come up with some
way that one might have an illusion of hyper-reality.

I can tell you because of the kind of content of the experience and the
powerful, overwhelming nature of it and the fact that it was so complex,
I think much of what I remembered from that experience, I don’t think my
brain and mind could possibly manage that even now.

I mean, the kind of mental function that occurs when you’re in that
hyper-real state, the way that information comes in from spiritual
beings and kind of the interaction with them is so intense and
extraordinary, it’s really inexplicable in earthly terms. But it would
basically outrun any of those kind of theories. That was something I was
looking for. In fact, I never found an anatomic distribution that would
support that over-activity of excitatory pathways.

*Alex Tsakiris:*Great. Thanks for doing that. I think we’ve jumped a
little bit ahead of the story. For those who don’t know, tell us a
little bit about your NDE.

*Dr. Eben Alexander:*Okay. Well, you were asking what it is like when
one has their cortex shut down like that, and in fact, for one thing I
was surprised that I remembered anything because as a neurosurgeon
having had many patients who were in comas for various reasons and had a
lot of them recover, my understanding was that in general you don’t
really remember anything.

Even when the patients seem to be interacting I knew that usually if
they’d been sick, for instance with meningitis, that they really
wouldn’t remember much of it. Occasionally there were exceptions to
that. You’d have patients who would remember very remarkable things from
deep inside, but before I had always kind of explained that away with
the standard answers. “Oh, that’s what the brain does when it’s very sick.”

What I do remember from deep inside coma, for one thing my first
awareness was I had no memory whatsoever of my life. I had no language,
no words. All of my experience in life, knowledge of humans, Earth, the
universe, all of that was gone. The only thing I had was this very kind
of crude existence. And I call it in my book the “earthworm’s eye-view,”
because it really was just a crude, kind of underground.

I have a vivid memory of dark roots above me and there was a kind of
monotonous pounding, a dull sound in the background pounding away
eternally. It was just murky and gross. Every now and then a face, an
animal or something would boil up out of the muck and there might be
some chant or roar or something. Then they’d disappear again.

It sounds very foreboding to talk about it right now, but in fact, since
I knew no other existence I don’t remember being particularly alarmed
when I was in that setting. I think that that was the best consciousness
that my brain could muster when it was soaking in pus. It turns out that
that seemed to last for a very long time. Given that it was my first
awareness of anything, it actually seemed to be years or eternity. I
don’t know. It seemed like a very, very long time.

Then there was a spinning melody, this bright melody that just started
spinning in front of me. Beautiful, beautiful melody compared to that
dull pounding sound that I’d heard for eons. It spun and as it spun
around, it cleared everything away. This was the part that was so
shocking and so hard to explain. It was as if the blinders came off and
the reality there was much more crisp, real, and interactive and fresh
than any reality I’ve ever known in this earthly existence. That part is
very shocking and hard to explain when you go through it, and yet what
I’ve found since then is that a lot of people who have had NDEs discuss
the same kind of hyper-reality. But it’s very shocking to see it.

For me, I was a speck on a butterfly wing. I had no body awareness at
all. In fact, I had no body awareness through this entire kind of deep
coma experience. I was a speck on a beautiful butterfly wing; millions
of other butterflies around us. We were flying through blooming flowers,
blossoms on trees, and they were all coming out as we flew through them.

Beside me on the butterfly wing was a beautiful girl. I remember her
face to this day. Absolutely beautiful girl, blue eyes, and she was
dressed in–what I was trying to write all this up in the months after I
came back—I described as a kind of peasant garb. I can remember the
colors very well. Kind of a peach/orange and a powder blue, just really
beautiful.

She never said a word to me and she was looking at me and her thoughts
would just come into my awareness. Her thoughts were things like, “You
are loved. You are cherished forever. There’s nothing you can do wrong.
You have nothing to worry about. You will be taken care of.” It was so
soothing and so beautiful, and of course as I said, my language wasn’t
really working then. So those particular words were words I had to put
on it when I came back out. But a lot of this flowed perfectly when I
came back out.

In fact, I didn’t read anything about near-death experiences or about
physics or cosmology because of the advice my older son, Eben IV, who
was majoring in neuroscience at the University of Delaware advised me.
Three days after I left the hospital, when he came home for Thanksgiving
back in 2008, he said, “Well, if you want to write this up as a useful
report, don’t read anything. Just write everything down you can remember.”

I spent the next two months typing everything I could remember in the
computer. It came out to about 100 pages of memories from this deep
experience within the coma. I think from that beautiful valley scene on
the butterfly wing, waterfalls, pools of water, indescribable colors,
and above there were these arks of silver and gold light and beautiful
hymns coming down from them. Indescribably gorgeous hymns. I later came
to call them “angels,” those arks of light in the sky. I think that word
is probably fairly accurate.

On this butterfly wing, the first time I was there, I remember having
this sensation. It was as if there was a warm summer breeze that just
blew by. Then everything changed and the scene stayed the same but I
became aware. Again in looking back on it, that was my awareness of a
Divine presence of incredibly indescribable, kind of a superpower of
divinity. Then we went out of this universe.

I remember just seeing everything receding and initially I felt as if my
awareness was in an infinite black void. It was very comforting but I
could feel the extent of the infinity and that it was, as you would
expect, impossible to put into words. I was there with that Divine
presence that was not anything that I could visibly see and describe,
and with a brilliant orb of light. There was a distinct sensation from
me, a memory, that they were not one and the same. I don’t know what
that means.

In my awareness, when I say I was aware, this goes far, far beyond the
consciousness of any one—this is not Eben Alexander’s consciousness
aware of being in that space. I was far beyond that point, way beyond
any kind of human consciousness, and really just one consciousness. When
I got there they said that I would be going back, but I didn’t know what
that meant.

They said there were many things that they would show me, and they
continued to do that. In fact, the whole higher-dimensional multiverse
was that this incredibly complex corrugated ball and all these lessons
coming into me about it. Part of the lessons involved becoming all of
what I was being shown. It was indescribable.

But then I would find myself—and time out there I can say is totally
different from what we call time. There was access from out there to any
part of our space/time and that made it difficult to understand a lot of
these memories because we always try to sequence things and put them in
linear form and description. That just really doesn’t work.

But suffice it to say that I would find myself back at the earthworm
eye-view. What I learned was that if I could recall the notes of that
melody, the spinning melody, that would start the melody spinning again
and that would take me back into that beautiful, crisp, clear hyper-real
valley on the butterfly wing. My guardian angel was always there and she
was always very comforting.

Then we would go out into what I came to call “the coral,” which was
outside of the entire physical universe. Again, they would show lessons
and often those lessons would involve becoming a tremendous part of what
they were demonstrating.

So much of it is just indescribable and so much of it there are reasons
why we cannot bring a lot of that back. And there are reasons, in fact,
it’s why I’ve come to see that we’re conscious in spite of our brain. To
me that makes a lot more sense.

I go into detail about all that in my book, but it turns out that I
would oscillate from this beautiful, idyllic place in the core, coming
back down into earthworm eye-view, and it seems it was three or four
times. Like I said, sequencing was so strange because when I was in the
earthworm eye-view, everything seemed to be one kind of soup of just
mixed foam. It was very hard to put sequence on it but it was very clear
to me that several times I would use the memory of those notes and spin
that melody and go back in. They would always say, “You are not here to
stay.”

*Alex Tsakiris:*Dr. Alexander, a couple of questions. First, what is the
title of your book?

*Dr. Eben Alexander:*Okay. Well, I’m going through several possible
agents right now. I don’t have a publisher and I have a feeling that
agents and publishers will have their own ideas. What I can tell you is
that the tentative working title right now, and this could easily
change, is Life Beyond Death: A Neurosurgeon’s Life-Changing Near-Death
Odyssey.

*Alex Tsakiris:*Let me hone in on a couple of things. It’s an amazing
experience, an amazing account. Tell us a little bit about coming back
into this world. I want to hone in on a couple of things that we need to
nail down if we’re going to really try and understand this account from
our world.

One thing I want to nail down is the time perspective. How do we know
that these memories were formed during the time when you’re in a coma?
You’ve already laid out a couple of points about that in that normally
we wouldn’t even expect you to have a lot of clear, coherent memories
three days after coming out of this coma. But you said that’s when you
started writing down this account. You also said you tried not to
contaminate your memories with talking to other people. So those are
good parts of your story.

What are some other aspects of it that you can tell us that make you
confident that these memories were formed while you were in this
severely compromised mental state?

*Dr. Eben Alexander:*I can tell you that when I first started waking up,
it was very shocking because as I said, I didn’t have memories of my
life before and my family, loved ones, sisters, my wife and sons, they
were there. So initially I have a very distinct memory as I was
emerging, which was on the seventh day of coma. I was still on the
ventilator and still had the endotracheal tube in.

My awareness was of several faces. I remember one was my wife and one
was a good friend of ours who is also my infectious disease doctor and a
neighbor, Dr. Scott Wade. Then one was also my 10-year-old son. These
faces were there. I did not recognize them. They would say words. I
didn’t understand the words, but I had a very powerful visual memory.
They would kind of boil up out of the muck and then they’d go away.

I’m fairly sure that was Sunday morning because much, much later, after
I’d written everything down and I did start asking people about things
that had happened, it seemed that that’s when people were doing that.
Now in fact, they’d been doing it all week but I think I was unaware of
it during the week. That’s mainly based on the people that I do remember
seeing who only those who were there that Sunday morning were.

My language started coming back very quickly and so did my visual
cortex, because I think—again, it’s so hard to put a time label on
this. But in talking with people who were there, I think that probably
over an hour or two or three I started getting language back quickly. My
auditory cortex started coming online. My ability to understand speech,
so what’s called Wernicke’s area in the dominant temporal lobe was
starting to come back up to speed and I can understand things. I could
then start making speech.

So I was having a very rapid return of cortical function, but I was
still kind of in and out of reality. In fact, in my book I go into great
detail describing what I call the “nightmare,” which was kind of a
paranoid, crazy thing where I was halfway in and out of reality. My
younger son, Bond, he can describe it to you. It was kind of a very
frightening thing because I would seem to be with it and then I’d be
saying things that were just out of my mind.

Of course, initially as I explained to some of my physicians, what I
remembered was this incredibly powerful hyper-real spiritual experience.
They would say, “Oh, yes, well you were very, very sick. We thought you
were going to die. I can’t even believe that you’re back.” They were
predicting that I would have two to three months in the hospital and
then need chronic care for the rest of my life. So they were obviously
quite shocked that I came back like I did. It was just so strange.

Initially I thought, “Gosh, it was almost too real to be real.” That
hyper-reality that people describe, I just wish we could bottle that up
and give it to people so they could see what it’s like because it is not
something that is going to be explained by these little simplistic kind
of talking about CO2 and oxygen levels. That just won’t work. I promise
you that won’t work.

*Alex Tsakiris:*That’s an interesting point because as you mentioned
briefly, you know it won’t work because you actually went and tried to
see if there was a model that you were aware of from your training that
could fit your experience, right?

So you became a near-death experiencer who became a near-death
experience researcher from a neurophysiological standpoint. I think
that’s one of the things that really draws people to your story. Tell us
a little bit more about your quest to understand this from the
perspective of your background as a neurosurgeon.

*Dr. Eben Alexander:*Okay, well I can tell you that I mentioned a few
minutes ago that initially I was getting the message from my physicians
that I was extremely sick and it doesn’t surprise them that I had very,
very unusual memories. There was one other thing that really got my
attention that I’ll mention, and that is I told you about the faces I
saw kind of floating in the muck, which I think—again, it’s hard to
put a time on it. I know that some of them appeared that Sunday morning
and maybe the Saturday afternoon. Some could have been earlier.

There was one that I think was earlier, although she seems like all the
rest. Her name is Susan Reintjes and she’s a friend of my wife’s. They
worked together 25 years earlier teaching in Raleigh. Susan’s had a lot
of experience helping coma patients. She wrote a book called, Third Eye
Open. It’s about her going into a state or trance and then going to them
in whatever fashion. That’s not something I claim to understand. But not
through the physical material realm.

In fact, she had done that with a lot of patients and she discussed that
in her book. Holly called her up, I think it was Thursday at night that
Susan heard all this and said, “Yes, I’ll try and help.” I remember her
being there very clearly. I mean, just like all the rest. She was there
and she never was physically there. She did this from Chapel Hill where
she lives.

Of course, in the first few days as I was coming around and I told my
wife about the six faces that I remembered, that does not include my
guardian angel who I still didn’t know at that time, but those six
faces. And Susan Reintjes was there. Holly said, “She did come to you
channeling. She came to you in the psychic realm.” I can tell you when
Holly told me that I said, “Of course. Don’t need any explanation for that.”

Of course, as I healed—it probably took three or four weeks for a lot
of my neuroscience and neurosurgical training to come back—all along
that time I was still writing all this down and not reading anything. I
was very tempted but my son had told me, “You want this to be
worthwhile, don’t read anything else. Just write it all down.” I just
was shocked; I was buffeted because my neuroscience mind said, “No, that
couldn’t happen.” The more I heard about how sick I was, my cortex shut
down, “No, that’s impossible, your cortex was down.”

Of course, for a while I was going after the hypotheses that involved
formation of these very complex, intricate memories either right before
my coma or right coming out of it. That really did not explain it at
all. Part of the problem, when you get right down to it, is that whole
issue of remembering the melody because that was a very clear part of
it. I remember the elation when I figured that I could just remember
that melody and that spun the melody in front of me.

Then all of a sudden, boom! Everything opened up and I went back out
into that valley, so crisp and beautiful, and my angel was with me, as I
came to call her, my companion on the butterfly wing. And then out into
the core, outside of the universe. Very difficult to explain in that
fluctuation.

I guess one could always argue, “Well, your brain was probably just
barely able to ignite real consciousness and then it would flip back
into a very diseased state,” which doesn’t make any sense to me.
Especially because that hyper-real state is so indescribable and so
crisp. It’s totally unlike any drug experience. A lot of people have
come up to me and said, “Oh that sounds like a DMT experience, “or” That
sounds like ketamine.” Not at all. That is not even in the right ballpark.

Those things do not explain the kind of clarity, the rich interactivity,
the layer upon layer of understanding and of lessons taught by deceased
loved ones and spiritual beings. Of course, they’re all deceased loved
ones. I’ve kind of wondered where it is that these people are coming
from. They say, “The brain was very sick but it was very selective and
made sure it only remembered deceased loved ones.” They’re just not
hearing something.

*Alex Tsakiris:*You know, I think that brings up a very interesting
point and one that we’ve covered a lot on this show. To be fair—well,
not only to be fair but to really understand the entire phenomena and
understand how it fits in our culture, in our society, which I think is
important because here you are, someone like yourself with your obvious
intellectual capabilities but also medical understanding and you have
this experience and you have to come back and try and make it make sense
with all your training.

I think all the rest of us are right there with you trying to make sense
of these completely counter-intuitive experiences and then trying to jam
them back in our head and in our experience. In that sense, I do have a
lot of empathy and appreciation for the NDE researchers, both the
skeptical ones and the non-skeptical ones. So let me talk a little bit
about that NDE research and get your perspective on it. Of course there
are a few of these brave researchers out there who have stuck their neck
out—really only a very few—and have tried to tackle this.

It seems to me that they’re really barely making a dent in the medical
model that we have. The medical model that we have sees us as these
biological robots and death as kind of the ultimate Boogeyman. Can we
really believe that we’re really going to change such an entrenched system?

*Dr. Eben Alexander:*I think so. I think that is very much a
possibility. There’s this whole issue of mind and brain and duality
versus non-dualism and the physical material reductivist models. I go
into this in great detail in my book but I think you have to go back
about 3,000 years to really get to the beginning of the discussion and
to start to see why certain things have transpired.

I think most importantly was the part of this discussion that happened
between Rene Descartes and Spinoza back in the 17th Century. They
started us into our current era. Our current era is one of
mind/consciousness/our soul has been put in the realm of the church
more-or-less. There was kind of a truce of sorts that I guess Descartes
came up with back then to say there’s mind and then there’s body and
just let the natural scientists, those with an interest like Francis
Bacon and Galileo and Newton, let’s not burn them all at the stake. Let
some of them survive.

So I think it was a good thing to have that truce so that science
survived. I mean, I’m a scientist and I love science and the scientific
method. I’ve just come to realize that the universe is much grander than
we appreciate. So I have to simply broaden my definitions.

I think science is still very important to get us there. Getting back to
that mind/brain issue, what happened over time is science kind of grew
up and got to be more and more powerful at giving us many things.
Science has been a real wonder. But I think that it’s been somewhat at a
price and that price came from splitting out mind and body back then and
that dualistic approach because as science gained more and more of an
upper hand, people were losing track of the kind of mind part of it, the
consciousness part.

*Alex Tsakiris:*Let’s talk about that a little bit right now because
part of that does seem to be contradictory to your experience and the
experiences we’ve heard from other folks who have had these
transformative spiritual experiences in that if there is this broader
knowing—and much broader—broader doesn’t even begin to describe it
but that we hear over and over again.

We hear it from your account; we hear it from many near-death experience
accounts. We also hear it from all sorts of transformative spiritual
accounts, kundulini accounts, spontaneous spiritual awakenings. There’s
this sense of knowing, much, much greater knowing that then must be
crammed back into our body and it doesn’t fit, you know? So your account
says that and others do, as well.

Can we really then hope to get out of the consciousness loop that we’re
in now? Is it just going to be a matter of a philosophical shift like we
had back in the 1700’s? Or is there something fundamental to the way
that we’re constructed that’s going to keep us limited in how much we
can really tap into and understand that knowing that you experienced?

*Dr. Eben Alexander:*In my view, what I think is going to happen is that
science in the much broader sense of the word and spirituality which
will be mainly an acknowledgement of the profound nature of our
consciousness will grow closer and closer together. We will all move
forward into a far more enlightened world. One thing that we will have
to let go of is this kind of addiction to simplistic, primitive
reductive materialism because there’s really no way that I can see a
reductive materialist model coming remotely in the right ballpark to
explain what we really know about consciousness now.

Coming from a neurosurgeon who, before my coma, thought I was quite
certain how the brain and the mind interacted and it was clear to me
that there were many things I could do or see done on my patients and it
would eliminate consciousness. It was very clear in that realm that the
brain gives you consciousness and everything else and when the brain
dies there goes consciousness, soul, mind—it’s all gone. And it was clear.

Now, having been through my coma, I can tell you that’s exactly wrong
and that in fact the mind and consciousness are independent of the
brain. It’s very hard to explain that, certainly if you’re limiting
yourself to that reductive materialist view.

Any of the scientists in the crowd who want to get in on this, what I
would recommend is there’s one book I consider the bible of this. It’s a
wonderful book but it is really for those who have a strong scientific
interest in it. It’s called Irreducible Mind, Edward Kelly, Emily
Williams Kelly, Bruce Greyson, Adam Crabtree, Alan Galt, Michael Grassa,
the whole group from Esalen and also based in the Division of Perceptual
Studies at the University of Virginia, have done an incredibly good job.
Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century is the subtitle and that’s
exactly what it is.

I felt their book was quite illustrative and of course it caused a huge
splash when it came out in 1987, but again a lot of the reductive
materialists like myself were not really going to put in the work to go
through all of that. We just thought, “We can’t understand it so it
can’t be true.”

*Alex Tsakiris:*I think you’re being a little bit too generous there
because some of the folks do do the work. Do tap into the research and
still come out the other end holding onto that materialistic model that
we’re stuck with here because there’s a lot invested in it. With that,
what I wanted to do was I sent you a couple of audio clips that I
thought you might like to respond to because it fits in with what you
were just talking about–people who have walked in your shoes and are
still there in that model.

The first clip I’d like to play for you is a former guest on this show,
Dr. Steven Novella, who is a clinical neurologist at Yale University.
He’s a well-known and outspoken skeptic of near-death experiences but a
nice guy who’s willing to engage the topic. What I thought I’d do is
play this little clip and see any response you might have to it, okay?

*Dr. Eben Alexander:*All right.

*Dr. Steven Novella:*The three basic kinds of explanations are one is
spiritual; that it represents the fact that the mind can exist separate
from the brain. The second one is a psychological experience of some
sort. And then the third is that it’s organic; it’s neurophysiological.
The evidence and some of the best explanatory models that people are
putting forward are blending the second two, the psychological and the
organic, the neuroscientific. I think what we’re seeing is that there’s
a core experience that’s primarily organic. It’s just the kinds of
things that can happen to the brain under various kinds of stress.

*Alex Tsakiris:*Now, I’ve got to add that if you really listen to the
whole interview with Steve and the follow-up that we had, what he’s
talking about is really a bunch of fluff. [Laughs] There really isn’t
any research that shows any neurophysiological cause for near-death
experience. I really held his feet to the fire and he was unable to
produce anything of any real substance about that research.

But maybe you can talk because it speaks so much to the position that
you were in just a few years ago, about that position and that kind of
entrenched “It has to be in the brain” kind of thing and how you think
that relates to near-death experience.

*Dr. Eben Alexander:*I would say for one thing I think that a healthy
skeptical approach to all this is a good thing because it helps us get
to the truth. It helps us know the answer. What we have to be careful
of, of course, is not getting in the trap of having our prejudices rule
the day. A lot of these experiments and studies, how you interpret them
will depend a lot on what your prejudices are going in.

I found early on in my experience, I had to do as Descartes recommended
when he was talking about getting to the truth, and that was to really
ignore or to reject everything I had ever accepted as real. That was the
only way to start getting to where I could figure any of this out. I

know that a lot of the reductive scientific crowd out there—I have a
favorite quote from Stephen Hawking. He says, “There’s a fundamental
difference between religion, which is based on authority or imposed
dogma and faith, as opposed to science which is based on observation and
reason.” What I would say is I think his statement is true as a general
statement but that science, and certainly those who believe in science
and scientists, are as prone to addiction to imposed dogma and faith as
our religious zealot. So one has to be very careful to really step back
and want to know the truth. That’s what I think we all would like to know.

*Alex Tsakiris:*In this case, if we really do step back one of the
things that’s troubling to me, and you touched on it a minute ago, is
how overwhelming the evidence seems to be. At this point, we can
confidently say that near-death experiences didn’t just start happening
in the last 20 years since we had advanced resuscitation techniques.

We can confidently say that 4% to 5% of everyone who has a cardiac
arrest is having this. There’s obviously hundreds of millions of people
over time who have had these accounts and we have thousands and
thousands of well-documented, consistent accounts across cultures,
across times. These are the measures that we would normally use to say,
“This is a real phenomenon.”

And then when the skeptics, and really the mainstream scientists have
pounded against it for 20 years with really what amounts to a bunch of
very silly explanations but ones that have been carefully looked at and
dismissed—was it CO2 , a fear of death, other psychological factors?
Is it all the different things like REM intrusion? All these things.

Clearly this would normally be something where we’d be putting a lot of
attention into it. Or that it would then become the presumed explanation
for it. But none of that’s happening. They have managed to hold back the
dyke, you know? So what do you make of that?

*Dr. Eben Alexander:*Okay, I think in trying to get back to your
original question with the previous guest, to me one thing that has
emerged from my experience and from very rigorous analysis of that
experience over several years, talking it over with others that I
respect in neuroscience, and really trying to come up with an answer, is
that consciousness outside of the brain is a fact. It’s an established fact.

And of course, that was a hard place for me to get, coming from being a
card-toting reductive materialist over decades. It was very difficult to
get to knowing that consciousness, that there’s a soul of us that is not
dependent on the brain. As much as I know all the reductive materialist
arguments against that, I think part of the problem is it’s like the guy
looking for his keys under the streetlight. Reductive materialists are
under the streetlight because that’s where they can see things.

But in fact, if you’re keys are lost out in the darkness, the techniques
there are no good. It is only by letting go of that reductive
materialism and opening up to what is a far more profound understanding
of consciousness. This is where I think for me as a scientist, I look at
quantum mechanics and I go into this in great detail in my book, is a
huge part of the smoking gun. It shows us that there’s something going
on there about consciousness that our primitive models don’t get. It’s
far more profound than I ever realized before.

That’s where I’m coming from because my experience showed me very
clearly that incredibly powerful consciousness far beyond what I’m
trapped in here in the earthly realm begins to emerge as you get rid of
that filtering mechanism of the brain. It is really astonishing. And
that is what we need to explain. Thousands or millions of near-death
experiencers have talked about this.

Not only that but as you mentioned a few minutes ago, people don’t even
have to go to a near-death situation. There are plenty of mystical
experiences that have occurred over millennia that are part of the same
mechanism. That’s why all this talk about oxygen, tension, CO2 and all
that you can pretty much throw out the window. You really need to be
working towards explaining all of those phenomena. Part of the problem
is they’re hard to explain but that is a clue.

Willy Lomans was asked, “Why do you rob banks?” He said, “Because that’s
where the money is.” Well, same kind of thing. They are hard issues and
the whole understanding of what consciousness really involves. I came a
lot closer to that in my coma experience and coming out of it and in
doing all the very intense homework for the three years since then to
try and understand it. It’s a difficult question because it’s close to
the real truth that we’re going after. If it were easy it would be
widely available. It would already have been written up by somebody who
wanted to publish or perish. That’s not how it works. It’s not that easy.

*Alex Tsakiris:*Dr. Alexander, in the little bit of time we have left
what’s it been like being so public about your experience?

*Dr. Eben Alexander:*Well, many people have come up to me and said,
“Wow, this takes a lot of courage to do this.” You know, it probably
would have taken courage to talk like this right after I came out of it.
I learned to put the lid on it but then as I did more and more work and
talked with more people and started realizing, “Oh my gosh, this is all
real.” Then I can tell you, it takes no courage at all. It simply is so
powerful to know this.

One thing I’m trying to do in my book is to show why it’s so logical,
why this is a very rational way for things to work, especially when you
really delve into the profound mystery of conscious existence. Again,
I’d recommend Irreducible Mind to any people with a scientific bent who
really want to get into it.

Go in there because the whole issue is far, far deeper than we would
like to think. It’s absolutely wonderful to realize this. I think it’s
going to change this world in wonderful ways. But a big part of it, of
course, is to try and broaden the boundaries of science and of what we
accept and will use to get towards truth. I’m very hopeful that science
and spirituality will come together hand-in-hand and go forward to help
with getting these answers and help people to understand the true nature
of our existence. A side effect will be that humanity and the grace and
harmony that we will see around this world will expand tremendously as
we move forward in that fashion.

*Alex Tsakiris:*Great. It’s certainly an amazing account and you do a
great job of bringing forth this information. We wish you the best of
luck with that and we’ll certainly look forward to your book, coming out
when? Probably next year maybe?

*Dr. Eben Alexander:*I certainly hope so. I’m hoping to finish it now. I
do have a web page which is lifebeyonddeath.net for any people who have
an interest. I tell you, I’m so busy on the book. You can send me email
or sign up for the newsletter or whatever, but I won’t be responding for
a few months. If people are interested, they’re welcome to get in touch
and sign up for the newsletter, which won’t come out until I’m done on
the book. Then we’ll move from there.

It’s just a wonderful gift and I think people will see that it actually
makes more sense than anything else has so far. That’s why I think it’s
of inestimable value to get this out to the world.

*Alex Tsakiris:*Thanks so much for joining us today.

*Dr. Eben Alexander:*Thank you very much. I appreciate it, Alex.

………………..

*15 THINGS WE KNOW ABOUT DISTRESSING NDES*
By Nancy Bush
Dancing Past The Dark
February 19, 2012

http://nhne-pulse.org/15-things-we-know-about-distressing-ndes/

Original Link

With all the points of view about near-death experiences, it can be
difficult to sift out facts from opinions. Here, for the sake of
convenience, is a brief listing of what the research has shown about NDEs.

1. Reports of experiences like NDEs, both splendid and harrowing, have
come from around the world, going back to antiquity.

2. Although the great majority of NDE accounts describe pleasant, even
glorious, experiences, a study of research reports indicates that as
many as one in five may be disturbing.

3. Both pleasant and distressing NDEs are likely to include: an
out-of-body experience; movement, often with a sense of speed, to areas
with special qualities of light or dark; a landscape; encountering one
or more presences; intense emotion; sometimes transcendence; sometimes a
specific message. Some experiences include more of these elements than
others. Distressing NDE reports typically lack three elements that may
appear in a pleasant NDE: a life review, positive emotional tone, and
loss of the fear of death.

4. The primary effect of any NDE is usually a powerful and enduring
awareness that there is more to reality than the physical world.

5. NDEs do not play favorites: they appear across demographic bases
including age, race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual preference,
education, occupation, socioeconomic status, religious background and
beliefs, level of religious activity, expectations of afterlife. Despite
limited demographic data about distressing NDEs, they appear to have the
same universality.

6. At least three types of distressing NDE have been identified: 1) one
with features common in pleasant NDEs, but interpreted negatively; 2)
the Void; 3) features or landscape interpreted as hell. A suggested
fourth type separates out an otherwise pleasant NDE with a guilt
reaction to the life review (a type I generally include with #1).

7. NDEs are not always static but may switch from unpleasant to pleasant
or, less commonly, pleasant to distressing.

8. A fear of social stigma has made many people reluctant to report
distressing NDEs.

9. A distressing NDE may produce long-lasting trauma, especially for the
unknown percentage of individuals who have great difficulty explaining
and integrating the experience.

10. The strong emotional response reported to have been present during
an NDE indicates that interpretation begins within the experience. A
distressing NDE is upsetting during the experience, not only when
thought about afterward.

11. The description of any NDE is dependent upon the pre-existing mental
categories and vocabulary of the person doing the describing. For
instance, encountered entities are not reported as wearing name tags but
are described according to whatever identities are present in the
person’s cognitive storehouse; people do not describe presences or other
elements in terms that are unfamiliar to them. Any report identifying a
presence as a particular individual is a perception that may or may not
be factually true. Nevertheless, the identification is bound up with the
content and ascribed meaning of the experience, though it cannot be
confirmed as literal fact.

14. Pleasant NDEs tend to convey powerful messages that are common to
all human experience, across religious and philosophical systems: a
mandate to love, to have compassion, to keep learning, and to be of
service to others. Distressing NDEs have less focused messages but
follow the ancient shamanic pattern of suffering/death/ resurrection,
read as an invitation to profound self-examination, disarrangement of
core beliefs, and rebuilding into a new way of understanding. (The new
way commonly moves toward some aspect of the elements described by
positive NDEs: love, compassion, learning, service.)

15. Because NDEs do not conform to the precise doctrines of any specific
cultural, philosophical, or religious subset, they present a difficulty
for groups tightly tied to particular teachings (which may be religious
or secular). For example, unwavering materialists dismiss NDEs as
impossible and therefore unbelievable, whereas strongly doctrinal
religious groups may believe them to be satanic. Again, description is
dependent upon individual interpretation.

If you have questions about any of these–or anything else–please feel
free to ask. I’d love to have some guidance from readers of the blog
about particular interests!

………………..

*RELATED LINKS:*

.Dancing Past The Dark – Distressing Near-Death Experiences

.Pulse on Near-Death Experiences

.NDE Stories
.NHNE NDE

it’s a good question. I think people have NDE’s because they are NOT IN THEIR BODY, i.e. they cannot stay present with their current destiny, so their soul pulls them out to get a different perspective – similar to death, with its life review. Then dropped back into the body.
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