Eban Alexander’s quick trip to heaven started with a headache.
It was November 2008 and a rare bacterial meningitis was fast on its way to shutting down the University of Virginia neurosurgeon’s neocortex — the part of the brain that deals with sensory perception and conscious thought.
“For seven days, I lay in a deep coma,” he said.
Yet at the same time, Alexander “journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe, a dimension I’d never dreamed existed.”
There he found “big, puffy, pink-white” clouds against a “deep, black-blue sky” and “flocks of transparent, shimmering beings ... quite simply different from anything I have known on this planet.”
It turns out Alexander was not alone.
His traveling partner in the afterlife was a young woman with high cheekbones, deep blue eyes and “golden brown tresses” who, amid “millions” of butterflies, spoke to him “without using any words.”
“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever,” she told the doctor, a father of two with movie star looks. “You have nothing to fear. There is nothing you can do wrong.”
NEW BOOK
Alexander recounts his story, and seeks to explain it, in Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, to be published in the US on Oct. 23.
His New York publisher failed to respond to interview requests, but an excerpt from Proof of Heaven in Newsweek magazine has stirred the enduring debate about life after death.
Inevitably, skeptics wonder if Alexander, who teaches at Harvard Medical School, is going out on a paranormal limb.
“It sounds like he had nothing more than an intense lucid dream,” wrote one reader on Newsweek’s Web site.
“A personal anecdote is not evidence or proof, as moving as it may be,” another added.
The sarcastic New York blog Gawker challenged its readers to spot the difference, if any, between Alexander’s portrayal of paradise with published accounts of LSD trips.
SUPPORTERS
However, others stood firmly by Alexander, who has previously spoken of his near-death experience on science television programs and in a lengthy interview last year with Skeptico.com, a science and spirituality blog.
“If there is evidence and proof of an afterlife, this is probably as good as it gets,” Catholic Online, a Web-based Roman Catholic news service, wrote approvingly.
By one estimate, 3 percent of Americans — more than 9 million — have undergone a near-death experience. Some have written up their stories on the Web site of the Near Death Experience Research Foundation.
“There are tens of thousands of near-death experiences every year and many of them are very similar to Alexander’s,” said Paul Perry, co-author of several best-selling books on the topic.
“These experiences might be a glimpse into our next miraculous and exciting adventure,” he told reporters in an e-mail. “Unfortunately, there is little meaningful research taking place in this field right now.”
Dean Mobbs, a psychologist at Columbia University in New York who studies neurobiology and fear in humans, did not dismiss Alexander’s experience — but he questioned how it came about.
“I think there’s no paranormal component to it,” said Mobbs, co-author of a paper in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences identifying near-death experiences as “the manifestation of normal brain functions gone awry.”
“I believe our brains can concoct vivid experiences particularly in situations of confusion and trauma,” he said in an interview. “The brain is trying to reinterpret the world and what’s going on.”
DOUBTERS
Mobbs cited research in which, for instance, Swiss neuroscientist Olaf Blanke has artificially induced an out-of-body experience by stimulating the point in the brain where the right temporal and parietal lobes meet.
He also recalled how the body can unleash “a massive dose of opioids” in the face of extreme danger. Opioids generate feelings of euphoria like those described by near-death survivors.
Mobbs also noted that many people who claim to have undergone a near-death experience were never, in fact, near death — while the majority of those who have died briefly before resuscitation do not recall going anywhere.
In his Newsweek excerpt, Alexander framed his experience in religious terms.
One of the few places he has had no trouble getting his story across is the church, where “the colors of the stained-glass windows recalled the luminous beauty of the landscapes I’d seen in the world above,” he wrote.
Far from the violence ravaging Haiti, a market on the border with the Dominican Republic has maintained a welcome degree of normal everyday life. At the Dajabon border gate, a wave of Haitians press forward, eager to shop at the twice-weekly market about 200km from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. They are drawn by the market’s offerings — food, clothing, toys and even used appliances — items not always readily available in Haiti. However, with gang violence bad and growing ever worse in Haiti, the Dominican government has reinforced the usual military presence at the border and placed soldiers on alert. While the market continues to
An image of a dancer balancing on the words “China Before Communism” looms over Parisian commuters catching the morning metro, signaling the annual return of Shen Yun, a controversial spectacle of traditional Chinese dance mixed with vehement criticism of Beijing and conservative rhetoric. The Shen Yun Performing Arts company has slipped the beliefs of a spiritual movement called Falun Gong in between its technicolored visuals and leaping dancers since 2006, with advertising for the show so ubiquitous that it has become an Internet meme. Founded in 1992, Falun Gong claims nearly 100 million followers and has been subject to “persistent persecution” in
ONLINE VITRIOL: While Mo Yan faces a lawsuit, bottled water company Nongfu Spring and Tsinghua University are being attacked amid a rise in nationalist fervor At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common, but in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valor in cyberspace. Last month, a patriotic blogger called Wu Wanzheng filed a lawsuit against China’s only Nobel prize-winning author, Mo Yan (莫言), accusing him of discrediting the Communist army and glorifying Japanese soldiers in his fictional works set during the Japanese invasion of China. Wu, who posts online under the pseudonym “Truth-Telling Mao Xinghuo,” is seeking
‘SURPRISES’: The militants claim to have successfully tested a missile capable of reaching Mach 8 and vowed to strike ships heading toward the Cape of Good Hope Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia’s state media reported on Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The report by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited an unidentified official, but provided no evidence for the claim. It comes as Moscow maintains an aggressively counter-Western foreign policy amid its grinding war on Ukraine. However, the Houthis have for weeks hinted about “surprises” they plan for the battles at sea to counter the