‘Proof of Heaven’
RECOMMENDED reading for Holy Week, is “Proof of Heaven” authored by Dr. Eben Alexander, an academic neurosurgeon for the last 25 years, 15 years of which were at the Brigham & Women’s and the Children’s Hospitals at Harvard Medical School in Boston. A must sequel also for NDE (near-death experience) followers after “Life After Life” (Dr. Raymond Moody).
Dr. Alexander contracted a rare disease – E. coli bacterial meningitis, and was in a coma for seven days. Reminds me of Doy Laurel’s encounter (and debate) with God in his two-week coma. Alexander’s team of doctors considered shutting down treatment at that point. I discovered the book on the third wake of a chain – four in total -- of deaths in the family in roughly a year passing on my maternal side. I decided to gift the clan this book.
Pole-vaulting across the chapters of “Proof of Heaven,” to share Alexander’s own words: “Something had appeared in the darkness. It radiated fine filaments of white-gold light, and as it did so the darkness around me began to splinter and break apart. Then I heard a new sound: like the richest, most complex, most beautiful piece of music you’ve ever heard. Growing in volume as a pure white light descended. The light got closer and closer, spinning around and generating those filaments of pure white light that I saw. Then at the very center of the light, something else appeared. I began to move up. There was a whooshing sound. In a flash I went through the opening and found myself in completely a new world. I felt I was being born. Not reborm, or born again. Just…born. Below me there was a countryside. It was green, lush, and earthlike. I was flying, passing over trees and fields, streams, waterfalls, and here, and there, people. There were children, too, laughing and playing. The people sang and dance. I don’t know how long exactly I flew along. (Time in this place was different from the simple linear time we experience). Someone was next to me: a beautiful girl.” Alexander describes her and later in the book reveals who she was. “Without using words, she spoke to me. The message went through me like wind, and I instantly understood that it as true.
Meanwhile I was in a place of clouds. Big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the blue sky. Higher than the clouds – Immeasurably higher – flocks of transparent orbs shimmering beings arced across the sky. Birds? Angels? They were more advanced. Higher. A sound, huge and booming like a glorious chant came down from above. Seeing and hearing were not separate. I could hear the visual beauty of the silvery bodies, and I could see the surging joyful perfection of what they sang.
Where is this place? Who am I? Why am I here? The answer came instantly in an explosion of light, color, love, and beauty that blew through me like a crashing wave. I was able to instantly & effortlessly understand concepts that would have taken me years to fully grasp in my earthly life.
Paradoxically, God is “human” as well more human than you and I are. He understands and sympathizes with our human situation more profoundly and personally than we can even imagine because He knows what we have forgotten, and understands the terrible burden it is to live with amnesia of the Divine for even a moment.”