Leading neurosurgeon Dr Eben Alexander was sceptical when anyone said they had experienced the afterlife. But then he had a similar experience after going into a coma. In our final extract from his book, The Map Of Heaven, Dr Alexander — who has worked at Harvard Medical School — explains that there is one thing that endures after we die: love.
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.
In his vision of the afterlife, Dr Eben Alexander was a speck perched on the wing of a butterfly
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.
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.
We simply haven’t discovered the scientific answers to spiritual questions yet
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.
The sight of a monarch butterfly in his garden gave Don a calmness and the ability to pack up his home
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.’
I believe that instinct plays a great part in helping us to recognise messages from the afterlife
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.
This is not abstract love. There is no such thing
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.
- Adapted from The Map Of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon Explores The Mysteries Of The Afterlife And The Truth About What Lies Beyond by Dr Eben Alexander with Ptolemy Tompkins (Piatkus).