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April 21, 2016 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:12:07
Edition 250 - Dr Eben Alexander

The US neurosurgeon who fell into a near-death coma, amazingly recovered and returned with amessage for the world...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is edition 250 of The Unexplained.
Well, I can't believe I've just said those words.
It seems like only yesterday that I was sitting here recording edition one, and back then, I don't think I had much of a clue how to do all of this.
I was just feeling my way, and I still am.
I've learned about recording techniques.
I've learned about the things you like and don't.
I've learned who's controversial and who's not.
And I suppose I've learned who I like over the years.
So many changes in your life and my life over this decade, of course.
If you've followed me from the beginning, and thank you if you have, you'll know that I've lost my parents over those years.
That was hard to bear, and I've been through some rotten experiences one way or another.
Some kicks in the teeth professionally, and some of the sunlit uplands as well.
But it's all part of the tapestry, isn't it, really, that we weave as we walk along this path that is our life.
And, you know, I'm still here.
I'm still standing and I'm still doing it, and I'm still learning it.
The best broadcasters I've known over my lifetime are the ones who say you never stop learning.
So thank you for being part of that process, whether you were there on edition one, ten years ago, very nearly, or whether you've only recently joined and have started listening to the archive at theunexplained.tv.
Thank you to Adam at Creative Hotspot for all of his years of dedication and support.
Adam, you know I couldn't have done any of it without you.
Thank you to Martin, the man who composed a theme tune for me and then revised it.
And, you know, his music has been part of this from the very beginning.
So Martin, wherever you are, whether you're hearing these shows now or not, thank you from the bottom of my heart for what you did for me.
And you didn't know me.
And thank you.
Shout outs are an important part of this show, so we're going to do some of those on this edition.
And then we talked with Dr. Eben Alexander, a man who says, and wrote a book about, seeing the other side of life.
In other words, getting a handle on what happens when we die.
Proof of heaven.
That's what it was all about.
And he is a man who's had a lot of media coverage over the years.
And I've wanted to get him on this show.
You've suggested him for a long time.
So Dr. Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon, coming very soon here on The Unexplained.
The New York Times said about him, he found himself in hospital with bacterial meningitis, deadly infection that got into his brain, put him in a coma.
During that week, his life slipped away.
He says he was living intensely in his mind.
He was reborn into a primitive, mucky jello-like substance and then guided by a beautiful girl with high cheekbones and deep blue eyes on the wings of a butterfly to an immense void that is both pitch black and brimming with light at the same time, coming from an orb that interprets for an all-loving God.
58 he was then, and he survived and wrote a book about it all.
We'll be talking with him about that very soon here on The Unexplained.
Shout outs.
Let's get to as many as we can.
Darren says, listen to your talk radio show.
And that's the newest thing I do at 10 p.m. on Sunday nights on the radio here in the UK.
It featured Dr. Stanton Friedman, the UFO expert, the father of modern ufology, and Darren loved the show.
That's good.
Jim in Canada, still living all the great work, he says.
I'd like to suggest Brad Steiger.
We're onto that one, Jim, originally from Bristol.
Paul in Vancouver says Ray Hernandez, fascinating to say the least.
Thank you for having him on.
Not everybody felt that way about him.
I've had a few emails that felt the other way, but many emails of support.
And all I can say is to the people who didn't like him, did they listen to part two with all of the evidence that he says he's uncovered about ET contact?
Stephen Kells in Australia suggesting Patrick Kelly about free energy.
I'm on to it.
Thank you.
Jack in Newcastle saw what you probably could call a shadow figure when he was 10 years of age that actually danced ballet back then and also had a cat 20 years ago that appeared to back away from something frightening that he couldn't see.
So it sounds like Jack in Newcastle, you've had a bit of a life of this.
Chris in Northance listens to this show in the car on the way to bed sometimes, but always listens.
That's good.
You know, a lot of people listening in bed and a lot of people listening while commuting, I find.
Melissa in Taos, New Mexico, thank you for all of the good things that you say at your 8,000-foot elevation in Taos.
You asked me for advice on what mainstream and non-mainstream media, mainly non-stream media, I should recommend.
I don't think I can recommend anything, Melissa, because you've got to find it really for yourself.
What works for you is right.
And I think you've just got to listen around and see who you do like.
I'm part of the non-mainstream, but also for part of my working week, just because I've got to eat, part of the mainstream.
But if you tune around and look through the guides of podcasts and shows on radio stations, I think you will probably find somehow these things tend to be brought to you.
Jim Rogan, nice to hear from you, suggesting Dr. Louis Turi, who's going to be on the radio show.
Mary Jo in Nova Scotia, thank you for your suggestions about my tinnitus.
Tim Askew in the UK, thank you.
Martin in Chesterless Street, County Durham.
I also mentioned you, Martin, on the radio show last week.
Dave Bennett, David Bennett in Nashville, Tennessee, thank you for your email.
Hannah Summers in the UK listens while driving on the busy M25 motorway, a great big highway here in the UK.
Ryan Padgett says some very nice things about me and the show.
Says that I sometimes interrupt too much.
And all I can say, Ryan, is that, you know, you've got to try and judge this delicate balance.
And I've said it before here, I'm not always going to get it right.
But I do appreciate everything that you said.
Tracy Hollywood says, really enjoyed the show on the radio.
You were going to talk about your men in black experience, but I missed it on the radio.
Please can you tell me?
All right.
Very briefly.
12 years ago, doing The Unexplained on the Radio in London before we went and became a podcast online.
Left the radio station and I saw a black Jaguar, Jaguar, car opposite on a completely quiet London street.
Nobody else around.
Two men In black suits, white shirts, dark ties.
On the dashboard of the car, they had a camera, and the camera, as I walked, panned and followed me all the way along the street.
And all of these years on, I'm convinced there was more to that than I ever knew.
Brea in Sierra Vista, Arizona, thank you so much, and says, I rank you the same as Art Bell.
Brea, that's so kind of you.
I am not worthy, but that is a nice thing to say.
Thank you.
And finally, very importantly, Phil Sims, thank you for your email.
Getting married in July to beautiful Terry, soon to be Mrs. Sims.
Please, can you give us a shout out?
It is my greatest pleasure to do that.
I wish you a wonderful married life together, and I hope that day itself is fantastic for you.
It'd be nice to see a photograph when it happens.
And I wish you my very, very best for everything that is to come for both you, Phil, and Terry.
And thanks for emailing.
Happy to do that.
All right, let's get to the United States now to Dr. Eben Alexander.
Dr. Alexander, thank you very much for coming on the show.
Well, it's my pleasure to be here.
And do you like to be Dr. Alexander or Eben?
I think maybe if you start with Dr. Alexander, just to make that clear to people, and then go right to Ebon for every reference thereafter.
All right.
Well, Dr. Alexander, lovely to have you on The Unexplained.
What kind of a doctor are you?
A neurosurgeon.
Okay.
So the field that you have been investigating beyond your neurosurgery is highly appropriate because it's a lot to do with the mind.
It is.
It's all about the relationship of brain and mind, which I would say is the deepest mystery to all of human thought.
Now, the experiences that you've documented, and of course you've had to suffer the slings and arrows of some people saying this man is clearly deluded, and some people have absolutely been amazed, as I have been, by what you've had to say.
But this experience dates back only to 2008, doesn't it?
That's correct.
It was November 2008 that I was driven into coma.
It was all very sudden and severe.
It took about three hours to get me from symptom onset of back pain and headache, deep into coma.
And I remained there for seven days.
Should have died from it by all rights, according to our Western medical thinking.
And yet I didn't.
I came back.
My brain was wrecked, just as my doctors had predicted.
But in fact, over the next eight weeks or so, I had a complete recovery, which absolutely defies our Western medical understanding.
But when you get into the world of near-death experiences, you do find a lot of examples of kind of miraculous healing.
Well, I interviewed very recently a man in the UK called Anthony Wright.
And I've mentioned him on this show a few times since I did the interview.
He lives in Berkshire, not very far from London.
This man was quite a high-level salesperson and had a series of collapses.
I'm compressing this story a great deal.
But anyway, had a monumental and catastrophic brain tumor and managed through an experience, he went through an experience somewhat similar, I think, to the one that you may tell and managed to defy the medics and now is 95% functioning after something that I think would probably have killed most people.
He was in a coma for a month at one point.
Well, I think that in many ways, what I've come to realize as a physician is that in the pursuit of health, you know, whether you're talking about physical, mental, emotional, what have you, health, you got to remember that at the core of it all, you must have the spiritual health.
And that's why illness and injury and disease and the hurdles and hardships in life seem to be such challenges.
And yet in so many ways, they are gifts.
And there's no question that my meningitis was a tremendous gift.
I think a lot of people will be surprised that somebody of the age that you were when you got this, were you 58?
54 when all this came about.
That you could get meningitis for a start off, because a lot of us tend to confuse the different kinds of meningitis and tend to think it's a thing that young people get, but that you can be flawed and hospitalized and comatose within such a very short period.
Yeah, it absolutely is shocking and humbling how rapidly something like that can destroy your life.
And doctors who hear that story, especially that my descent into coma from symptom onset was only over about three and a half hours.
I mean, that's a very bad prognostic sign right there if you have bacterial meningitis.
And so to then spend a week in coma from that severe a case, it's really just unheard of to then have a complete recovery.
And of course, the deeper mystery is that I had any experience at all in there.
One would think, you know, with my prior medical thinking of the importance of the neocortex, the outer surface of the brain in terms of detailed human conscious awareness, you know, before mycoma, I was very much a conventional neuroscientist and believed the brain creates consciousness.
And mycoma showed me very clearly that is absolutely not the way it works.
Consciousness is fundamental.
The brain is much more of a prison or a shackles.
And the more we can understand that, the better our understanding of the overall nature of reality and certainly any kind of understanding of things like what happens when the brain and body die.
And that's why I find the most fascinating thing here is not just that I am driven on this journey because of my experience, but that in fact I find that there are tremendous parallels all across the scientific community about the awakening that is coming to them.
And it really is about this is not some battle between science and religion, for example.
It's really much more a discussion about materialism or physicalism.
You know, is the physical universe the only thing that exists?
Or is there much more to this universe, you know, that consciousness that we're all part of?
And that is the big discussion that science is involved in right now.
And had you ever thought about any of that before you had the experience that you had?
Well, I would say like pretty much anyone involved in neuroscience, neurology, neurosurgery, I was fascinated with consciousness and fascinated with kind of the brain And how it works.
And I was under that illusion, you know, that the brain creates consciousness.
Again, it's an assumption that is built into a lot of our conventional science that the physical world is all that exists.
And that's where the real problem comes in, because brain and mind are so effective at conveying that illusion, you know, that what we're experiencing is the outside world.
But, you know, truth be told, you know, first principles are that, no, what we're experiencing is the inside of our consciousness.
We're experiencing a representational model that is constructed within consciousness that represents something that we say is the outside world.
Okay, I want to get into this in a little while.
You sound very, very definite about this.
And of course, that's why you wrote a book.
When you actually found yourself mowed down in this way within just a few short hours, because you were in this field, were you given special information?
Did they tell you how bad this was or did you know it?
Well, you know, in the midst of it, I knew nothing.
But, you know, in the midst of it, my entire memories of the life of Eben Alexander, every bit, all words, all language, all personal memories, all knowledge, you know, gained about physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, everything was gone, deleted completely.
So I was completely amnesic within my coma experience for the life of Eben Alexander.
And of course, that's a little atypical.
When you read other near-death experiences, by and large, souls go into them with some kind of memory of their earthly connections from the recent incarnation.
And by the sounds of what you just said, you barely knew who you were.
I did.
It's not even barely.
There was absolutely zero left of an attachment to the memories of Evan Alexander's life.
None of that existed at all.
And again, I stress words, language, any kind of knowing of life in this universe, of planet Earth, or being human, every bit of that was gone.
And so I started with a completely empty slate within the coma experience itself.
And were you, they say that people do hear.
The sense of hearing is still there, whatever happens to you.
Were you taking in anything from the outside world around you in the emergency room?
Presumably you were in intensive care.
Absolutely nothing.
There was zero that got into.
Now, the only exception to that statement, as I report in the book, Proof of Heaven, is at the very end of this extraordinary odyssey of an experience that seemed to last for months or years deep within coma, although it all had to happen within seven Earth days.
At the very far end of it all, I had an awareness of six faces that kind of bubbled up out of the muck.
And those were actually five of those faces were people who were physically there in the ICU room.
You know, one of them was one of my physicians, who was also a very close friend and neighbor, and then also my former wife, and several other people who were physically there.
But the important thing is they were the ones who were there the last 24 hours or so of coma.
I have no kind of similar memories of other family and friends who were there during the middle part of the week of coma.
So what were you going through in the depths of it?
You say that the people you can describe were the ones who were there at the very end, so you may have had some kind of conscious awareness of them.
But in the midst of this, when you were in six days of nothingness, what were you going through?
Oh, that was absolutely the beauty of the experience.
And it was very extraordinary.
And I would preface this by saying that none of it was possible at all, according to my prior beliefs about the brain creating consciousness and especially about the role of the neocortex.
And that's why the medical community takes my story so seriously.
That's why I've been invited to speak to more than 25 medical and surgical groups around the world over the last few years about this experience because they realize the profound nature of it.
And this is the thing that shocked me initially.
Now, important to point out, when I did come back to this world, as I said, all my memories were still gone.
When I first woke up in that ICU room, I had almost no language or words at all, and certainly no memories of my life before.
For example, my mother, my sisters, my sons standing around the bedside.
I had no idea who these beings were.
That's very important to stress.
My recovery was astonishing because it came very rapidly.
Words and language were coming back just in the first few hours.
Childhood memories came back within a few weeks.
And all of my knowledge of brain, mind, consciousness, all the 20 years spent as an academic neurosurgeon, 15 years at Harvard Medical School, every bit of that knowledge came back to me over about eight weeks.
And that's the part that completely defies our kind of medical understanding.
There's no way to explain it.
Because normally the road to any kind of recovery after something like that is precarious and it's time consuming.
It is all of that.
And it's also incomplete, which is one of the biggest shocks is by eight weeks out, my memories were back.
And in fact, shocking to me is over the next few years, I would have various conversations with people and came to realize that some of the memories that had come back were more complete than they had been before the coma.
And that part is very hard to explain, especially if you buy into the conventional neuroscientific notion that memories are stored in the brain.
Now, it's important to point out that no one who studies the brain has any idea where memories might be stored.
In fact, they don't seem to be stored in the brain at all.
And that was one of the reasons why when I first came back to this world, you know, I was still going with my old thinking of brain creates consciousness.
And so to me, that complete amnesia made some kind of sense because I thought, well, I guess my memories are stored in the neocortex.
And since I had such temporary devastation of my neocortex, that explains why I didn't remember anything.
I now know that the issue is much deeper than that, and that my amnesia was there for a much more powerful purpose of showing me some lessons that I could not have gotten if my memories had been intact.
So, in other words, you had to, it's almost as if your computer had two hard drives, you had to turn off the main hard drive with all your experiences for a while in order to download more stuff.
Well, except for the fact that this kind of conscious experience deep within COVA was far more powerful, vivid, vibrant, and alive than I've ever experienced in normal waking consciousness when I'm in my kind of brain and in my kind of normal physiology.
Well, I think, Edmund, my duty here is really to effectively shut up and allow you to talk about that, because that is the most fascinating part of this.
And I would rather than fire questions at you that you just talk about that to me.
Okay, well, I think the, you know, getting back to that original case, what were those memories that came back to me?
Because as I said, when I first woke up from coma, I had no memories of my life before.
But what I did know at that time was this very rich journey that I had just been on.
And that journey started in what I call the earthworm's eye view.
It was a very primitive, coarse, unresponsive realm of like being in dirty jello.
And even though I had no words or language, no memories of my life, it was really an empty slate, I could still kind of wonder who, what, where.
You know, it was very mysterious and I had great curiosity.
But there was never a flicker of response to any of that kind of curiosity at all.
But the good news is I was not stuck in that earthworm eye view, that very primitive, coarse subterranean realm forever, even though it seemed to go on for eons.
And what happened was there came a slowly spinning, pure, clear white light with fine silver and gold tendrils off of it.
And it came towards me, slowly spinning, and it came with a perfect musical melody.
And the notes of that melody proved very important in later stages because I would oscillate up through the highest levels of spiritual realms.
And then I would tumble back down to that earthworm eye view without any obvious explanation.
By remembering the musical notes of the melody, that would enable me each time to conjure up that beautiful, clear white light.
And it would come to me slowly spinning.
And then it would approach me and it would open like a portal, like a rip in the fabric of that ugly earthworm eye view realm, as I called that initial realm.
And it led up into this ultra-real gateway valley that was absolutely beautiful, idyllic, very heavenly in some sense, had lots of earth-like features to it, but they were very perfect.
Everything in that realm was of perfection, of creation, of birth and growth and evolution and development.
There was no sign at all of any kind of death or decay in that beautiful gateway valley.
Now, as I said, it had many kind of earth-like features, but in essence, they were in their ideal, perfect, and most alive form.
And the ultra-reality is something that's very hard to put into words, but I think the best way to explain it is to point out that you are entirely into that pure, infinite, unconditional, unconditionally loving consciousness and conscious awareness that is our true existence.
And the veiling function of the brain is no longer there.
When we witness things as consciousness allowed into this reality through our physical brain serving as a reducing valve or filter, we get only this tiny little limited view of that much greater consciousness.
Now, for those who have used psychedelic drugs, what they've experienced is some dismantling of that veiling function of the neocortex.
So they get to witness a bit of what it's like to get into more pure, complete consciousness.
But I would then say that the psychedelic experience is still quite limited.
So the near-death experience, which is a complete move into that realm of infinite universal consciousness, is shocking.
And of course, I didn't realize because I'd never read the near-death experience literature before as a neurosurgeon.
I always thought it was just fantasies, tricks of the dying brain, pay it no mind.
Well, it turns out that I read a lot of that literature after I came out of my coma and after I wrote my original 20,000 words about the experience, which I did before I read about near-death experiences because I wanted the recording of my memories to be completely independent of anyone else's experience.
And that was on the advice of my older son, Evan IV, who was majoring in neuroscience at the time.
And he told me to write it all down before I read anything else.
But when I did finally write all that down and then go reading thousands of near-death accounts, I was shocked to find that more than half of them stressed the ultra-reality of that experience, which I think is simply because you've gotten beyond the veiling function of the brain.
Eben, when you were in the midst of all of that, did you feel that you were navigating your own way through it or something beyond you was guiding you through it?
Well, I felt in many ways that I was being shown.
I was being guided through this.
I did not feel that I had much in the way of any kind of free will about things, although I will stress that I had a very open mind.
I was willing to be led around, to be shown these things I was to be shown.
And so in fact, that's why that Gateway Valley was so beautiful in so many ways.
And as I said earlier, it had a lot of earth-like features, lots of blossoming flowers, buds on trees, lots of plant growth, thousands of beings between lives, souls dancing below, joy and merriment, sparkling waterfalls into crystal blue pools.
And then, of course, the beyond the earthly elements of it, what was driving all the festivities of those souls dancing below were these angelic choirs above.
They were swooping orbs of golden light, leaving sparkling trails against a blue-black velvety sky.
Just this absolutely rich, thunderous hymns, chants, anthems coming down from above.
And you're convinced you were having a real, in that situation, in that position that you were in, you were convinced you were having a real experience.
It was much more real than anything I've ever experienced in my earthly incarnation.
And you're happy that that's not just an artifact of the ailing brain?
Well, you know, when I first came back, of course, I believed what my doctors told me.
They said the dying brain can do all kinds of tricks.
They assured me that, in fact, my neocortex had been so damaged, and they knew this from my neurologic exams.
They knew it from the way that gram-negative bacterial meningitis behaves in other patients.
They knew it from my CT and MRI scans.
They knew that my neocortex was devastated throughout.
There was nothing left there.
Now, of course, initially, what that really meant was this had to be some vast and crazy hallucination.
And yet they kept telling me, you can't have even had a hallucination or a dream state or a drug effect that would have given you such a bizarre hallucination because any of that would necessitate that some part of your neocortex had to be active.
And in fact, they knew from medical details of my case that there was no part of my neocortex that could serve that purpose.
And that's where it became such a deep mystery.
So early on, I was trying to explain it all as some vast hallucination that had to do with the fact that I had preferentially destroyed my neocortex.
So I was looking for other mechanisms where you might generate a hallucination within the physical brain when you've gotten rid of the most powerful calculator, the neocortex, the human part of the brain.
So you were in a situation that most of us would have been in, even if we weren't qualified as you were.
You came back from this and you thought to yourself, well, it must have been some kind of hallucination.
Then the doctors said to you, according to the amount of activity going on in your brain, not even that was possible.
Right.
And so they told me to forget about it.
And, you know, so, but then- Why didn't you simply get on with the experience of life?
And there was just no way to put it out of my mind.
You know, part of the package was that I had a one in a 10 million diagnosis.
You know, spontaneous E. coli meningitis in an adult is extremely rare.
Virtually every case of spontaneous E. coli meningitis occurs in newborns.
It's extremely rare beyond the age of three months.
So that was a tremendous rarity in its own right.
And then to have a recovery that was kind of on the level of one in a billion, I mean, there's really, I've encountered no other cases like mine with somebody that sick from a gram-negative bacterial meningitis having a full recovery.
I mean, most of those patients, by and large, just die.
They die within the second or third day.
So to still be there seven days later to where the doctors have said, well, he's now gone down to a 2% chance of survival with no chance of recovery, recommending stopping the antibiotics.
I mean, that's just really an unheard of situation in medicine.
So I was faced with these extreme rarities of the diagnosis and then the recovery that completely defies explanation.
So there was no way to just kind of ignore it.
I had to pay attention to it.
But initially, and especially before all of my knowledge of brain, mind consciousness came back over those first two months, I thought, well, it had to be some kind of hallucination in spite of what my doctors say and the extreme strength and ultra-reality of it must be because of the damage to the neocortex, even though that seemed to violate everything that modern neuroscience says about the role of the neocortex in generating consciousness.
But, I mean, the experience happened.
So, you know, I've got to come to some explanation of it.
And were you told anything when you were in that experience and in that place that validated everything that you just said?
Oh, you mean in terms of the revelations?
In terms of whatever you were given while you were there, yes.
And I'm sorry we seem to be talking over each other a little bit.
I think it's due to some latency with the digital connection.
So please, if anybody's about to complain that I'm interrupting you, it's just because there's a very small delay and there's so much material to get through.
Well, I mean, the lessons I learned from the journey are, you know, we could speak for days about all of that.
There's a tremendous amount.
I had to completely rework my worldview about the nature of reality from the ground up.
Everything changed.
And it was all due to what I learned in that journey.
And of course, to the seven years of struggling to come to an understanding of that and work it into a worldview.
And the interesting thing, of course, is what I've come to realize is my personal struggle as a neuroscientist trying to understand this experience is identical and mirrors perfectly the struggle of the entire world now, of our Western and Eastern civilizations, in trying to come to a view of reality and come to some answers about the mind-body discussion that's been going on without resolution for 2,400 years.
That's what we're really talking about.
And I came to see that my personal journey is absolutely what the modern world in the 21st century is struggling with in terms of resolving this issue of mind and body and what is consciousness and the very nature of it.
And that's from a position of realizing that the only thing any human being has ever witnessed is the inside of their own consciousness.
This is a crucial part of the awakening that we're all coming to.
And it just, it necessitates a much broader field of view in terms of the understanding and realize that we're questioning the very fundamental assumptions of our worldview about the nature of reality.
Now, when you were in that unconscious state in the coma, being guided by various beings and whatever you came across there, were you given choices?
Because people who've had near-death experiences, NDEs, often don't they, and it's in the literature, claim that they are given a choice when they're on, quotes, the other side.
Well, that is a beautiful question.
I would say for most of my experience, I was simply along for the ride.
What I did Find out was that I could control some of that through the use of sound.
And like I said earlier, the beautiful melody I heard that came with that initial clear white light that served as the portal up out of that ugly, kind of unresponsive earthworm eye view realm up into the brilliant beauty of that ultra-real gateway valley and then on beyond that through the portals that were presented through the music of the angelic choirs above that led me all the way up into the core realm,
into that pure infinite oneness that was filled to overflowing with the infinite healing power of the unconditional love of that deity, of that God that initially for me was far beyond anything that you could describe and then label with something as trivial as the word God.
Although I came to realize is that that deity, I don't care if you want to label that deity as God or Allah, Vishnu, Brahman, Jehovah, Yahweh.
I mean, it doesn't matter.
The words get in the way.
The actual reality of that infinitely loving deity far surpasses any kind of human ability to put it into words or describe it.
And yet that's what so many other journeyers by the millions have been reporting for thousands of years is that very the reality of that essence, of that purity at the core of all of our consciousness.
So Eben, did anybody say to you while you were there, you have a task to fulfill and you have to return to life?
Because a lot of people report that they have a choice.
They have a choice as to whether they die or whether they continue.
Well, you know, it's interesting.
The times that I would ascend all the way to that oneness, to that core realm, right at the boundary of that realm, I was always reminded, not in words, but in pure conceptual flow, you're not here to stay.
You'll be going back.
I even came to think that going back meant I was going back to the Earth where my view realm, because I saw that I oscillated through that realm several times.
And again, that's when I would invoke the musical notes of the melody to get back up into the Gateway Valley.
But in reality, I felt like I was not manifesting my free will through much of that journey.
I was being shown many things.
But at the end of the day, what happened was they were right.
I was not there to stay.
As I describe in Proof of Heaven, there came a time when using those musical notes of the melody that had worked so well before to conjure up that portal up into the rich, ultra-real gateway valley, it no longer worked.
Just as they had promised me, you're not here to stay.
And there came a time when recalling the musical notes of the melody did not conjure up that portal.
That's when I sensed that I had been walled off from that realm.
And I discuss how sad that was as an event, but I also discuss in the book, Proof of Heaven, that I knew at that time that I could trust, that I would be taken care of.
And it was at that point that I saw those six faces I mentioned earlier.
And they were the ones that helped provide time anchors to show me the reality of the deep spiritual part of the journey at times when my doctors would later tell me my brain could not have possibly been able to manifest that because of the damage to my neocortex.
So this is an awful lot for an ordinary person.
It's an awful lot for me.
And I research some of these things to take in.
What you seem to be saying is that consciousness, which we all think is within our brain somewhere, perhaps, is something that's almost like in this modern day on the internet, like the cloud.
It's above us.
It's a storage area that's outside us.
It is.
Well, the big reality is that every bit of our conscious experience and even things like memory are occurring in that non-physical realm.
And yet vast consciousness from that spiritual realm is what projects and results in the emergence of all the physical reality that we witness in this world.
Now, you would ask a minute ago about the choice to come back.
I do want to make one final point about that.
That has to do with the fact that of those faces that I saw, the sixth one was a face of a 10-year-old boy.
You know, it was my son, Bond.
And that was that Sunday morning, seventh day of coma, when they had carefully protected 10-year-old Bond from the worst news during the week.
But that Sunday morning, the doctors held a family conference to recommend to my family to let me go to stop the antibiotics.
Bond overheard that conversation, came running down the hallway into my room, pulled open my eyelids.
I was lying there on the ventilator as I had been all week, deep in coma.
He pulled open my eyelids and he was pleading with me, Daddy, you're going to be okay.
Daddy, you're going to be okay.
Now, I have a memory of that very event.
And yet it's important to stress that when it happened, I had no idea who that being was.
But I did sense an extremely powerful connection to him.
And through much of this journey, I had thought, well, it can continue or cease to continue.
It does not matter.
And that allowed me to be fearless because I did not attach any kind of outcome, you know, of survival or of returning to the physical world or anything.
I didn't attach any of that to it.
Okay, your sons, of course, you know, the bond between me and my father was, and still is, even though he's not here anymore, very, very close.
Could it not be that you were just simply using something that perhaps is latent within all of us?
Look, I saw, and this is a trivial example, I'll tell it fast.
I saw a documentary about a man who, by summoning up powers that he didn't even know he had, strength he didn't know he possessed, was able to overturn a small car with his own hands.
Now, by that function and extrapolating from that, maybe you were just simply able, once your son intervened in all of this, even if you didn't consciously register it, you called upon some reserve within yourself to pull yourself back from whatever you were in.
I would say in the very big sense of the word, yes.
In the sense of reuniting with higher self and with souls and soul group and a multi-incarnation journey of evolution of souls, from that point of view, you're right.
You're seeing it exactly.
To view this as, oh, you know, psychology 101, you wanted to have some reason to come back.
So you conjured up this vision of your son being there.
No, that's not it at all.
It has to do with a much grander interpretation of our soul journeys and what this was all about.
But that is why my son presented there.
And of course, as I said, I had no idea who he was, but I sensed this extremely powerful connection and knew that I had to come back for him.
Now, I didn't know what coming back really meant because I had no idea what I was coming back to.
But that was a huge part of it was at the end of the day, I did have a free will choice to return to this world out of love for my connection to this other soul, even though I had no memory of why that soul would be important to me.
And you talked, I think, about an eight week period of recovery, which amazed the medics because of the speed and, you know, the.
I mean, it really defines.
The totality of it, absolutely.
So you talked about that eight-week process.
At what stage did you start to understand the material that you've now been, that you're now trying to pass on to everybody else?
In other words, at what point did you realize this wasn't just some illness that I'm recovering from?
This was a profound experience.
Well, I think, you know, as I tell that story in Proof of Heaven, that really kind of paints the picture to answer your question directly.
And it has to do with that revelation I had four months after my coma, because I was at that point deeply into reading thousands and thousands of near-death experiences, reading much more about consciousness.
I was becoming much more aware of the scale of what's called the hard problem of consciousness, which is probably the deepest enigma known to all of human thought, has to do with trying to relate brain and mind, given that no neuroscientist on earth has the foggiest notion how physical brain could give rise to consciousness.
So it's an extreme challenge to modern neuroscience.
And I was just beginning to glimpse the power of that conundrum when I had that revelation that I discuss at the end of the book, Proof of Heaven.
Of course, there would be a bit of a spoiler alert if we really got into that, but it had to do with the fact that I was adopted.
My birth mother was a sophomore in high school.
My birth father, a senior in high school.
There was no way for them to keep me, so they had to give me up for adoption.
And that led me through a lot of the challenges in my life was that perceived rejection by my birth mother.
And that figures into it tremendously.
But to make a kind of a long and beautiful story, which is told in Proof of Heaven much shorter, I will simply say in answering your question, that the revelation of who that beautiful girl on the butterfly wing was, which came to me in the form of a picture of my birth sister that was finally sent to me four months after my coma,
and the realization that she was indeed the beautiful angel on the butterfly wing that had proven to be so mysterious, because I remembered her perfectly.
I described her in great detail to family members and friends after I came out of coma.
So can I just clarify this, Eben, because I don't want to lose that point.
Did you not know your birth sister before this?
No, I had never met her.
I'd only learned of her existence back in February of 2000.
And again, this is all in the book Proof of Heaven for those who want to get the full story.
But I had learned of her existence by reaching back out to my birth family in February 2000 and then getting a perceived rejection at that time where I found out that my birth parents had actually gotten married.
That was a tremendous shock to me that I'd never entertained this possibility.
And not only that, but they had three children, but that my youngest sister had died two years earlier in 1998.
And so it was not a good time to come back in their lives because they were still grieving her loss.
And so, you know, I'd never known her at all.
And you'd never, very, very crucially, you'd never seen her before you saw her during the coma.
No, that is part of the deep mystery, and that is why this was so shocking.
Now, the thing that people need to understand is the way she appeared to me in this experience was in her beautiful light body form, which is, you know, we often encounter souls of departed loved ones, but we don't see them as they were at death or right before death or at the time of death.
We usually see them in their kind of perfect ideal form, which would be in late teens, early 20s, in perfect health.
Any infirmities they may have had when they died are no longer there.
And that's how I saw her was in her early 20s, very beautiful.
And I remember her, the image is burned so crisply into my memory.
I mean, I don't have to do any kind of work to recall it.
It's right there front and center.
And yet that was a deep mystery because as I started reading the near-death literature, I started realizing that that kind of guardian angel is always someone of great importance to you in life.
And yet I could remember her face so perfectly and her appearance and her thoughts had come straight into my awareness.
So I knew her at some kind of deep level.
And yet I knew I'd never met that woman in my life.
And when you did connect with her, Eben, when you did connect with her, what did you say?
What was the experience like?
Well, the experience was really the most, the purest blessing of pure love and acceptance, comfort, reassurance, and trust of the whole near-death experience.
I mean, she was the main delivery mechanism for that message.
You are deeply loved and cherished forever.
You have nothing to fear.
You will be taken care of.
I mean, she gave that message to me by thought every time I passed through that realm.
And the clarity of her apparition to me was just so stunning.
In fact, for me, the bittersweet element of our reunion was the fact that she was gone and she was not something that I got to know much about because it was a very painful thing for them to revisit.
I understand.
So the revelation for you was the knowledge of her existence and connecting with the birth family who were still grieving about her, but you came to contact with her essence.
Okay, now I understand.
Right.
But see, the important thing is that my sister, when I met my birth family a year before coma, my sister Kathy, still alive, promised to one day send me a picture of Betsy.
And she did send that picture.
It arrived four months after my coma.
And this, of course, is the spoiler alert for proof of heaven, because that's really how the book kind of comes together is around that, is that revelation.
And to me, it was that mystery of that beautiful guardian angel who I had never remembered meeting in my lifetime was matched by the mystery of why wasn't my father there?
Because if I had scripted this whole near-death experience, first and foremost, my father would have been there, the neurosurgeon who was very religious, who deeply believed in God, but was very scientific.
He had died four months before my coma.
And I mean, four years before my coma.
And this is the soul I would have wanted as my guardian angel to escort me to the other side.
And yet he was nowhere to be found in my NDE.
And those were two parallel mysteries to me, the presence of this woman who I didn't know and the absence of my father, who I really wanted to see in that journey.
Which indicates, doesn't it, Eben, that somebody else picked your guardian angel.
That it almost adds a bit of credibility to your story, because if you'd had a choice, it would have been your father that you met, and you didn't.
You met somebody else.
That's a whole lot more than a bit of credibility.
It's a mind-blowing, life-changing, world-shifting revelation to come to realize that.
The fact that that beautiful guardian angel was, in fact, my birth sister.
So after all of this, and you come to this realization that you've been through something truly profound, what did you do about it?
When did you start wanting to...
Well, I think it was at that point, you know, when I saw her picture, it stunned me.
I mean, I couldn't even stand up for about 30 minutes.
My heart was just pounding.
It was so, I mean, in one moment, because I would say that my near-death experience, although in many ways it changed my life, it only really set the stage for a much deeper understanding.
And that moment, four months after my coma, when I saw her picture and started putting it all together, that's when everything really shifted.
But in many ways, it was just the beginning of the shift, because that's what started me on this journey of trying to come to an understanding of it.
And as I said minutes ago, my journey is absolutely a perfect reflection of what the entire world is going through now.
I have no doubt about the revolution that is coming to this world.
It is the end of that pure materialist thinking or physicalist thinking that the only thing that exists is the physical world.
That is coming to an end through the hard problem of consciousness, through the enigma of the measurement problem in quantum mechanics.
There are many aspects of science and understanding of science and consciousness that prove that pure materialism is dead.
And yet it's still alive and well in the bully pulpit of The Guardian and The New York Times and Scientific American and all of our publications that get out there to the intelligent world.
And yet that pure materialism is absolutely doomed.
It's coming down all around the question of consciousness and a deeper understanding of the mind-body relationship.
And that is what is so absolutely world-shocking about, you know, not only my story, but the awakening that's coming to reality and to all of the scientific community around this issue of consciousness.
Eben, you know, a lot of people will say, and I think maybe they're right, that really we can't know ourselves that well.
The best way to know ourselves is through the reflections of other people upon who and what we are.
They see us as we are, and we have an idealized version of what we are.
What I'm trying to get around to is that after this experience and after the eight-week recovery period and miraculously overcoming that form of meningitis, what have people told you about how you are?
Are you a different person?
You must be.
Well, I'm very different.
In fact, if you ask my sons, my former wife, Holly, many of our friends and family, they will tell you that I've changed completely.
And to me, that's quite clear, too.
And I would say it's a change that is still very much in process.
I mean, trying to come to a deeper understanding of all this is very much a lifelong journey.
And of course, those who have listened to a lot of my talks and followed what I have to say will realize that it's more than just one lifetime journey because we are much more than just a little birth to death incarnation in one little physical body.
Each and every one of us is far grander than that.
This is why so much of my ongoing journey of investigation involves a daily practice of meditation.
I try to meditate an hour to a day.
I use and develop tools with a group called Sacred Acoustics to try and help get into very deep transcendental conscious states.
I've used the sacred acoustics kind of tones to get back into my NDE to re-encounter those beings, develop a much more complete kind of relationship and knowing of the lessons there for me from not only my birth sister who is available to me in these deep transcendental states, but also my father.
Beginning about two and a half years after my coma, I was able to encounter his soul in these deep transcendental journeys.
And this is why I encourage people to go within, to meditate.
If you don't have a way to quiet that kind of obnoxious voice in the head, go to sacredacoustics.com and download some of their tools, free tools for getting into deep conscious exploration.
Okay, understood.
Your father and your birth sister.
Very important point, I think.
So sorry for interrupting briefly there.
What does this say about Reincarnation and the theory of reincarnation, they're still available to you to connect with when you're in a meditative state.
So that obviously means that they have not been reincarnated, does it?
Well, I think the important thing to point out, and this is a point that I make in Proof of Heaven, is that time flow in this realm is not as it appears to be.
You know, as Einstein said, past, present, and future are cleverly wrought illusions.
And what I often tell people is that there's a whole higher realm of causality in that spiritual realm where the journey of souls and the ascendance of soul groups and all of our evolution of consciousness in which we are all partaking makes sense in that higher realm.
But you realize that time flow in this realm is very much artificial.
It's part of setting up the stage on which this drama can unfold.
But in other words, by definition, none of them would be reincarnating before, you know, they welcome me out of this life into that afterlife.
But that doesn't in any way limit what is available to unfold in this realm.
Now, another way of making this point is to talk about the life review.
When people have a near-death experience, they often talk about your life flashing before your eyes, the life review.
Well, the life review is a very profound and ultra-real experience of going through the key pieces of your life where you still need to make any kind of adjustment or soul lesson.
For example, if you were handing out pain and suffering to others, you need to feel that pain and suffering as the victim.
And that's what the life review is, is it shows you that the boundaries of self are very, in many ways, artificial.
And also, the apparent flow of time and causality in this world is not the ultimate determinant of how events unfold.
There's something that I call deep time, which is a much more profound sense of ordering of ascendance of souls that is apparent in that realm.
And we can get to that notion of deep time in deep meditative states.
You don't have to die or almost die to get this.
But it's a way of seeing our soul journeys in evolution in a far richer way that is not limited by the simplistic linguistic linear lineup of events of causality as they are presented to us in Earth time.
Now, Eben, you said that you went through, I think you said just now, the life review, but you told me at the beginning of this that in the coma state, you had no sense of yourself.
You couldn't remember what you'd done.
You didn't know who you were.
So how could you have a life review of a life you couldn't connect with?
Important to point out that I saw far grander aspects of this, not just Earth and humanity, but the much greater aspects of sentient beings in billions of civilizations throughout this universe that were participating in this process of incarnations in this material realm as a learning process, learning teaching process.
I did not have a Eben Alexander life review for very obvious reasons in retrospect.
I couldn't because this amnesia was such a crucial part of the lessons I was going to get.
And so, no, I did not have a life review, but I saw fully how that whole life review and how it really works in that much higher setting was very clear to me.
That is something I've spent a long time trying to make sense of given my overall worldview.
But from my near-death experience, it was very obvious how that applied.
But it took me a long time to figure out why the amnesia was so important for my journey.
And to have a life review, I could not have had the amnesia.
Without the amnesia, I would have witnessed my father being there as opposed to this beautiful guardian angel.
And with my father being there, I would have been more tempted to default to my old way of thinking, which would be, oh, well, you saw your father because that's who you wanted to see.
Psychobabble 101.
You can just dismiss it.
You know, it was not a profound, hyper-real experience in the spiritual realm at all.
It was simply wishful thinking and that kind of thing.
So the amnesia was crucial.
No life review was crucial.
And yet I witnessed perfectly how life reviews are used and how the false boundaries of self have to dissolve for the life review to do what it does, which is to help to guide our ascendance and our pathway and guidance into a next incarnation.
Do people who commit suicide go through this?
They go through it in a very profound and powerful way.
And that is why suicide gives you kind of a special setting of life review where, for one thing, they come to realize the very profound love that was present for them.
Love from others, love of the divine, infinitely powerful and loving creator.
All of that love was there.
Not only that, in their life review, they have to go through the pain and suffering that was caused to those loved ones by their act of suicide.
Interesting parenthetical comment about that.
Dr. Raymond Moody, I've presented with a lot.
He's become a very close friend.
And he's told me that one of the very few things that he can say with pretty much 100% assurance as a statement is that if people attempt suicide and have some of the elements of a life review, like encountering the souls of departed loved ones or having their own life review where they sense the pain and suffering that their suicide engendered in their loved ones, and then they come back to this world, they never attempt suicide again.
So in other words, any little peek into the life review, the near-death experience, the profound loving power of that God is a corrective so that they never attempt suicide again.
And those who study suicide will tell you that's therefore quite uncommon.
So in the cases where they don't have any NDE experience, attempting suicide again is quite common.
And so I think this gives us a huge clue to what happens in the cases of suicide.
So what we're saying here is, Evan, that people cannot circumvent the problems that they have here because they will have to account where they go.
There's no escape.
But you come back.
You don't, you know, in other words, suicide simply means that you didn't address the problems you came to this world in this lifetime to address.
They were not properly addressed.
You do not Graduate and then in the reincarnation, you'll be coming back and working on those same issues again.
Well, that makes an awful lot of sense.
Well, that's just the way I see it all working.
I'm scared of dying.
By the sounds of you, you're not.
Well, I can tell you that what really happens is that we are freed up from the shackles of the physical brain.
We are conscious in spite of our brain.
The brain is much more like a prison, and it's not the creator of consciousness at all.
It's a reducing valve or filter that allows it in.
So what near-death experiences are really trying to tell you, and what I'm trying to explain, is that when we die, our awareness actually becomes much greater.
Reconnecting with souls of departed loved ones, reconnecting with that infinitely healing power of that God, of that deity that is far beyond all naming and description, is a beautiful experience.
This is why so many people who touch on that in an NDE tell you, you know, it's really much more beautiful than this realm.
What my journey showed me very clearly is that we come back over and over again.
Now, as a neuro-reductive materialist scientist, neuroscientist, I'd never paid attention to the scientific literature on past life memories in children indicative of reincarnation, but it's a very strong literature.
The group at University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies, Jim Tucker currently and previously Ian Stevenson, have written some incredible books.
They have more than 2,500 cases of past life memories in children where the best explanation is actual reincarnation.
It's a huge body of scientific evidence that I don't believe we can simply just ignore and say, well, it's some mass conspiracy, mass hallucination.
No, this is something much more profound.
This is about understanding the nature of our reality and existence.
A lot of it is really a much deeper questioning of those boundaries of self and the very nature of consciousness.
That is what this is all really about.
And why do you think that of all the people in the world, you were deputed to bring this message to us?
Well, let's set this right.
There are millions and millions of souls on this planet who have been to the other side and have come back.
They're all telling their stories.
Proof of heaven only serves, in my view, only serves a useful purpose to help open the door, to take the lid off, to allow these millions and millions of stories to come out.
It's not like I was chosen.
All of us are chosen.
We're all here as part of this grand adventure in the evolution of consciousness and coming to a higher understanding.
I play a certain role, you know, as a neurosurgeon.
I can tell you from where I've been in those realms, MD, Harvard Medical School, none of it means squat.
And yet in our world, it had to happen at some point that this kind of thing, you know, a scientist going to the other side.
Now, there are many other scientists who have been out there.
They have contacted me, chemists, engineers, physicists.
Many, many scientists have contacted me, very grateful about the message in Proof of Heaven.
And this is really all about a reconciliation of science and spirituality.
That's what we're talking about.
And the pure materialism is a dead end.
In fact, it's the biggest smoke and mirrors trick of the 20th century successes of science and technology is this ongoing belief in an assumption, totally unproven, that the physical brain creates consciousness out of physical matter and that the physical is the only thing that exists.
In fact, our real evidence is that consciousness absolutely exists.
We all know that.
The physical world, as physicists and cosmologists studying string theory and quantum gravity will tell you, there is no material to the material world.
That is the illusion that is set up through consciousness.
It's a complete reversal of everything I thought I knew before.
There are scientific books that get into this.
For those who are interested in the science, I recommend the book Irreducible Mind, Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century, and also Beyond Physicalism, Toward Reconciliation of Science and Spirituality.
These are the two most profound scientific works on this whole question of consciousness that I know of, and they very profoundly indicate the truths that I point out in Proof of Heaven and the Map of Heaven, and I'm working on in a third book now with my life partner, Karen Newell, to try and help get this understanding out to this world.
It really is all about a revolution in our scientific understanding of the nature of consciousness.
Are you still practicing?
Well, neurosurgery is not something you can do part-time.
I was blessed to return to my work.
When I went to Coma, I was serving as the neurosurgical research director for the Focused Ultrasound Surgery Foundation, a technology that I think is very promising, focused ultrasound surgery, which is still going to revolutionize medicine.
And I was able to return to work full-time doing that within three months.
That was a blessing that goes beyond any possible explanation.
And then I also went back to seeing patients with some of my former partners in Lynchburg.
But I was giving talks on my experience beginning about two and a half years before Proof of Heaven came out.
And those talks, plus putting the book together and getting it out there, proved to be too time consuming.
And so I finally had to let go of any kind of seeing of neurosurgical patients in June 2012.
But I am following my life's mission.
I am doing what I am supposed to be doing.
It's all unfolding in ways that still are fascinating and amazing to me.
You know, you have your critics, Urban.
I was reading one article in one newspaper, which I think was from this country, the UK.
Various holes in your argument they have picked.
One of them is that apparently you, in the midst of the experience you went through during the illness, apparently you say that you cried out, God help me.
But according to this critic who wrote this piece in a newspaper, you wouldn't have been able to do that because you had a tube down your throat at the time.
You know, there are critics out there, aren't there?
Well, the fact of the matter is the person who wrote that article did not bother To interview any of the relevant witnesses because the one who wrote that article, the main article that people refer to, had no interest in the truth at all.
He had an idea of something to present as his story that had no truth to it, and yet he felt he could get away with it.
So he was not interested in the truth.
He did not interview the people who heard me cry out, God help me.
Now, I don't remember saying, God, help me at all.
But, you know, I don't remember anything that happened during my coma.
So I had to get all that from witnesses.
Now, the witnesses to that statement were my wife and my very good friend and former neighbor and rector in our Episcopal Church, Michael Sullivan.
They witnessed that.
And of course, they could easily confirm to anybody who asked.
And of course, I did say that.
It turns out there was an editorial error at the end of it where, no, with a tube in, I could not have said that.
But my saying, you know, God help me was before I was intubated.
So that was an editorial error in the ordering of that part of the story.
But it does not take away the truth of the fact that, yes, I did cry out, God help me.
That rainbow was absolutely real.
The person did not add, the, quote, journalist, unquote, did not ask the people who witnessed the rainbow, my younger sister and my mother who saw the rainbow the morning that I recovered from coma.
And yes, it was a meteorologically, it was a very rare phenomenon.
But I mean, we're talking here about miracles.
So that's exactly what happened.
I think that the bigger bottom line here is to understand that this is all a very honest attempt to understand my journey, my experience, what happened to me, and to share that with the world.
And that I understand.
To me, at the end of this, you sound like, to me, a man who has got so much that he wants to get out there.
It almost sounds to me that every nanosecond counts to you.
You want to fill it with information.
And you really do sound like a man who's got fire under his feet.
Well, I must say I am lit up.
And part of it is that I know that I'm on a pathway towards a much deeper truth that resonates with so many souls out there.
And this is not about science versus religion.
It is far transcending that very simplistic kind of kindergarten level view of what we're talking about.
It's about much deeper issues, much deeper questions, and much deeper answers about the nature of reality.
And that's what we're really all talking about.
It's frustrating to me that some people try and short-circuit this into a trivia little, you know, hatchet job takedown, ad hominem attack, and that kind of thing.
But the big reality here is we're talking about fundamentally crucial questions.
I'm sharing my honest attempts to come to grips with this.
It has everything to do with a much deeper scientific understanding of the nature of reality.
But it's very difficult, isn't it?
And I'm anticipating my email inbox right now.
I'm sure that when you go to do talks, you are preaching, I say preaching, but you're speaking to a lot of people who are absolutely on your side and buy into all of it.
But you know that there are an awful lot of people who will just not accept anything that you say on any level and will say that what you're pronouncing is simply a reflection of somebody who's been through a bad illness.
Well, I think the best way to put it is when all else fails, look at the miracle here.
Look at the fact that, you know, how sick I was.
The medical details are out there for anyone who's interested.
I mean, and no doctor is going to tell you, oh yeah, well, occasionally somebody can come back from that illness and make a full recovery because that's really not the reality.
I can't argue with that on any level.
That's, you know, absolutely so.
It's very haunting because it has driven me to come to some answers and not just, you know, give up and dismiss all this as, well, I guess the dying brain can do all kinds of tricks.
But it really challenges us to come to a much deeper understanding of the nature of reality.
And that's what I'm trying to share with this world.
It's just my personal journey.
And it's important because it's not just my little problem.
You know, these experiences are out there by the tens of millions.
And so it's really kind of a scientific effort to help those people who have had these experiences because to simply say, oh, it was a vast hallucination, you can forget about it, doesn't work.
It changes people's lives.
And in the long run, these experiences are going to change this whole world because they are a fundamental part of reality, fundamental part of who we are as human beings.
You know, a huge fraction of your listening audience has had these experiences personally.
So they need a deeper explanation of it other than just saying, oh, it's got to be a hallucination because we don't understand it.
Right.
You're coming to London, I understand, in June.
Yes, I'm very excited.
I can't wait.
We're setting up hope and we're still doing the final details on this, but at an alternative series at St. James Church, Piccadilly, June 17th, Karen Dewell and I will be presenting a sound meditation.
I hesitate to call it a workshop because these are so much fun and such incredible experiences for people who attend.
So I'm hoping to meet a lot of fellow souls, journey or seekers in London when we're there on June 17th and look forward to meeting people in person because for me, that's where this really gets to be fun is in sharing personal journeys and stories.
Well, I'd like to be one of those people, Eben, and thank you very much indeed.
You've given me food for thought very, very much so.
Please look after yourself and thank you for speaking with me.
Well, thanks so much for having me on and I look forward to meeting people there in England June 17th.
Well, food for thought indeed at the end of this 250th anniversary edition of The Unexplained.
Dr. Eben Alexander may be one of our best guests over these 10 years.
Perhaps you'll tell me by going to the website theunexplained.tv, designed by Adam at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
If you want to leave a donation while you're there, that would be great too, to Allow all of this work to develop and continue and send me an email thought about future guests or what you just thought about this guest or anything really.
When you do email, please tell me who you are, where you are, and just a little bit about how you use these shows.
Always nice for me to have that colour to know who exactly I'm speaking with.
More great guests coming soon here on The Unexplained on Edition 251 and all the editions that will follow that.
So until next we meet here on The Unexplained, my name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London and please stay safe.
Please stay calm and please, like you always have done, stay in touch.
Thanks very much.
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