Book: Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander, MD

A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife.

How provocative is that? Proof of Heaven??? This was an interesting book. Dr. Alexander inexplicably gets a bacterial meningitis, nearly dies, should have died, is in a coma for a week and then "wakes up." While in the coma, he experienced his proof of heaven and describes it vividly in this book or at least as much as he can, given words we all know and understand. He also knows unequivocally that what he experienced was God and heaven. He constantly does admit to a frustration in not being able to accurately portray a reality that did not abide by our known earthly rules of time, space and sensory input and acceptance.

So....

NDE or Near Death Experiences are not uncommon but Dr. Alexander may be the first highly educated and very knowledgeable scientist (whose specialty training was all about the brain and how it works, who practiced medicine as a neurosurgeon for years and who heard patients' talk about their NDEs), he may be the first of his ilk to write about it with such conviction and with so much certainly that what he experienced was, in fact, proof.

He was not a particularly religious man before his coma so was not predisposed to an easy acceptance of what he saw, heard, experienced. He offers as many possible explanations as he can to explain on a purely medical / physiological basis what had happened to him and refutes all possibilities. He knows there are skeptics, just as he was before, just as he never really fully believed what people said about near-death experiences and he accepts that.

Dr. Wade (Eben's doctor in the Lynchberg General Hospital) after several days of coma: "We've lightened Eben's sedation considerably, and by this point his neurologic examination should be showing more neurological activity that it is. His lower brain is partially functioning, but it's his higher-level functions that we need, and they're all still completely absent."

But then one day his eyes open and he begins the journey back. Months later he writes:

"Medically speaking, that I had recovered completely was a flat-out impossibility, a medical miracle. But the real story lay in where I had been, and I had a duty not just as a scientist and a profound respecter of the scientific method, but also as a healer to tell that story."

I have read no reviews of this book yet but will. I am deeply curious how others reacted to Dr. Eben's story...the believers and the skeptics.

It is easy to read, compelling, not too long....sometimes fascinating, but still.....proof? If you read it, you will decide for yourself.

"It wasn't any single, discrete butterfly that appeared, but all of them together, as if they were a river of life and color, moving through the air. We flew in lazy looped formations past blossoming flowers and buds on trees that opened as we flew near...She looked at me with a look that, if you saw it for  few moments, would make your whole life up to that point worth living...no matter what had happened in it so far. It was not a romantic look. It was not a look of friendship. It was a look that was somehow beyond all these..beyond all the different types of love we had down here on earth. It was something higher, holding all those other kinds of love within itself while at the same time being more genuine and pure than all of them....Without using any words, she spoke to me. The message went through me like a wind, and I instantly understood that it was true. I knew so in the same way that I knew that the world around us was real--was not some fantasy, passing and insubstantial."