An End To Upside Down Thinking EXCLUSIVE BONUS

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1 An End To Upside Down Thinking EXCLUSIVE BONUS Eben Alexander, MD is a former Harvard neurosurgeon who had a transformative near-death experience while in a deep coma. He has authored Living in a Mindful Universe and #1 New York Times bestseller Proof of Heaven. See below for the transcript of Mark Gober s interview with Dr. Alexander, which at a later date will be available in audio as part of Mark s forthcoming podcast. Mark Gober: 00:12:25 Maybe we can start with your background and your educational background and the experiences that led you to think about consciousness in a different way. Eben Alexander: 00:12:37 Well, basically I had spent the first 54 years of my life owning a very conventional neuroscientific world view, and our conventional science is strongly based in what's known as physicalism, which of course is the idea that only the physical world exists and that nothing else is necessary for explaining all the events of our lives. I spent I guess it was more than 25 years in academic neurosurgery, that was my training. 15 of those years were spent basically working my way to being an associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, and I really thought I had some idea of how brain, mind, and consciousness work, even though I knew that at deep levels people were very confused and there was certainly no consensus about how the brain might create consciousness. I assumed we just needed to do more work. Eben Alexander: 00:13:32 Occasionally I would hear stories from my patients who had had very profound experiences, and I would always pat them on the back and say, "Yes, that was amazing." I wouldn't necessarily take away their amazement about it, but I figured that every bit of that was hallucinatory actions in the brain and that that's all one needed, so you didn't really need to explain anything. Another consequence of that mindset, of course, was I believed that our existence is birth to death and nothing more. Eben Alexander: 00:14:07 I also believed that the brain creates consciousness just out of physical matter, and of course a major assumption about that that many people don't think about but is built into the core of that materialist neuroscientific association of brain producing mind is if consciousness is just the illusion or the epiphenomenon of the chemical reactions and electron fluxes in

2 the brain, then where in the world would you inject any kind of notion of free will? I tacitly assumed that the materialist model was correct, that we didn't have free will, although I found that a very discomforting thought. Eben Alexander: 00:14:47 I had spent much of my earlier life, I grew up in a Methodist church in North Carolina, wanted to believe in an afterlife and in God and in power of prayer, but then as I describe in my book, Proof of Heaven, I had basically a dark night of the soul that began in February of I won't go into too much detail on that now, but suffice it to say it has to do with the fact that I was adopted and that I got a perceived rejection from my birth mother in an attempt to reunite, and that was in Eben Alexander: 00:15:18 That actually killed off my last belief in a loving personal God or power of prayer. I know that in the coming years I quit taking my sons to church or saying prayers with them at night, and that dark night of the soul lasted for the eight years until my coma. That was November of 2008, and it began very suddenly about 4:30 in the morning waking up with horrific back pain. Soon thereafter realizing I had a headache that was beyond description, and then I went in to having grand mal seizures and deep into coma, lying on my bed at home. Eben Alexander: 00:15:53 My family, of course, was very alarmed at the seizures. They called 911. The EMTs came to our house, put in IVs, tried to break the seizures, couldn't do it. Now, of course, I remember none of this because I was gone from this world from the onset of those seizures for the next seven days. I was taken off to the Lynchburg General Hospital emergency room, and that's where my ER doctor was smart enough to realize I might very well have a severe case of meningitis, did a lumbar puncture, and out came thick white pus under pressure. I was put on a ventilator on a medical ICU, and on three very powerful intravenous antibiotics. Eben Alexander: 00:16:35 The second day they got a big shocker, a report back from microbiology that it was E. coli. Oddly enough E. coli and meningitis almost always occurs in newborns. It's extremely rare in anyone over the age of three months, and I was 54 years old. This was a big mystery for my doctors and my family. The problem is that those antibiotics did not seem to be saving the day, and I kept slipping down during that seven days. My neurologic exams and my CT and MRI scans and my lab values showed an extremely severe meningoencephalitis that was affecting all eight lobes in my brain.

3 Eben Alexander: 00:17:15 I think that's the important gift of all this, and this is why I'm often asked to speak to medical and surgical and scientific groups about this is because of that diagnosis, because it's really a perfect model for human death. Meningoencephalitis is a devastating illness where infection overruns and destroys much of the human part of the brain. Every bit of what modern neuroscience says is responsible in the brain for our modern human detailed, conscious awareness depends on that most advanced calculator, the neocortex. Eben Alexander: 00:17:54 That's why it's such a beautiful model for human death is if you can destroy the neocortex, you should have destroyed every bit of an ability of a human being to have any kind of conscious experience. My doctors had good evidence mainly from my neurologic exams of just how extensive that devastation was. My Glasgow coma scale which normally is 15 in a healthy person but only three in a corpse or in somebody in deep coma, mine was basically between six and seven that whole week, and anything under nine is deep coma. Eben Alexander: 00:18:28 My doctors knew that I was in a very deep coma that was due to the meningitis. There was some confusion out there due to one lay press article that completely misunderstood my illness and said that I was in a medically induced coma. They misquoted my ER physician to say that, and it's terribly misleading because I went into coma at home on my bed without any sedative medications necessary. I was deep in coma when the EMTs first got there. Even though I was on variable doses of sedating medications during that week, I was still on very strong sedation at the end of the week, on day seven, when I actually came out of coma. Eben Alexander: 00:19:10 This was not a medication-induced coma at all. It was due to the extensive and devastating nature of my well-documented meningoencephalitis. That's why it is such a gift, because you couldn't have a purer model of destruction of the human part of the brain. That part of the brain is absolutely essential for any dream, hallucination, drug effect, any kind of conscious experience should have part of the neocortex still functioning to support it, and yet my doctors had excellent evidence during those seven days of coma that I was way too ill for any part of my brain to participate. Eben Alexander: 00:19:52 Now, it turns out that the coma has some unique features, my near-death experience that occurred in that seven day coma, and the most striking of those unusual features was my amnesia. The fact that deep in coma during this entire spiritual experience I had absolutely no memories whatsoever of Eben

4 Alexander's life. I had no words or language, no knowledge at all of Earth or this universe. I really had an empty slate, and that is unusual for an NDE. Of course, initially when I came back to this world and was trying to explain it all, I thought, "Well, with the well-documented damage to my neocortex that would explain somewhat why my memories were gone, why I had no memory of anything." Eben Alexander: 00:20:45 That empty slate allowed for an extraordinary journey, and it began in the earthworm's-eye view, a very primitive, coarse, unresponsive realm. It was like being in dirty jello. I remember roots or blood vessels all around me. Now, I had no body awareness during any part of this spiritual journey. I was just a speck of naked awareness, of knowing. At the beginning, that awareness was in that earthworm-eye view, but then I was rescued by this slowly spinning white light. Eben Alexander: 00:22:29 I was rescued by this slowly spinning white light, and it came to me as a perfect white light that had fine golden and silvery tendrils off of it, and I recognized that it had a beautiful melody associated with it. That melody was very crucial because I could use my remembrance of the notes of that melody to return to that portal, which I did several times during the experience. Initially that spinning white light with the musical melody served as a portal up into this rich, ultra real, gateway valley and that I describe in great detail in Proof of Heaven. It was a valley with many Earth-like features. Eben Alexander: 00:23:26 I remember I was a speck of awareness on a butterfly wing, and there were millions of other butterflies with colors beyond the rainbow all looping and spiraling in these vast formations, and down below us were thousands of beings that I saw as people dressed in very simple garb. I described their clothing as simple peasant clothing but with rich colors and lots of joy and merriment. There was tremendous festivity going on in this valley below us. It was in a realm that was absolutely rich with life and fertile growth, all of the plants, blossoms, buds, flowers, every bit of it was dynamic and rich and alive and creative. Eben Alexander: 00:24:16 There was no hint of any kind of death or decay anywhere. This was really very much an ideal world in this valley. I've often used a comparison in my talks saying that it basically should be looked at kind of like Plato's world of forms, of his world of ideals, but it's one that's actually there for the individual soul. That's why the descriptions of these journeys can vary because they do depend somewhat on where a soul is in their journey, what they know already and what they need to know, the lessons they're to learn. That's why people's individual

5 descriptions of near-death experiences and other spiritually transformative experiences always have a personal flavor to them. Eben Alexander: 00:25:04 Interesting thing to note is the content is not limited by someone's prior beliefs, and that is extraordinarily important to understand, even though the way people recount these stories, how they identify and how their religious beliefs might influence how they describe certain aspects of the experience. The amazing thing when you hear hundreds or thousands of these, which I have heard since my own coma experience, you start to realize they occur in a very common realm, and it's independent of one's prior belief systems, cultural upbringing. The raw matter of those experiences is something that's very extraordinary that often changes people tremendously. Eben Alexander: 00:25:50 My religious beliefs going in, as I said I grew up with a fairly conventional Methodist church upbringing, and then I rejected that over the eight years before my coma, and yet I saw evidence in my journey that was very clear that we come back again and again, that reincarnation was an essential feature to understand any of this, and especially the loving power of that divine entity, of that deity that I first witnessed in that gateway valley and my first awareness of that God force was a soft, summer breeze. Eben Alexander: 00:26:29 In my writings I later called it a divine wind or breath of God, but it was really an awareness that that comforting force of love, of God was everywhere through every bit of that world. In fact, I could see how that force extended all the way into the lower material realms, even though at that time I had no idea what those lower material realms were. Of course, they're our physical universe and other lower spiritual realms, but that warm breeze was my first awakening to that, that happened while I was on that butterfly wing. Eben Alexander: 00:27:02 Now, also witnessing all this beauty from the wings of a butterfly, all the blossoming plants and flowers, the joyous festivities, all the dancing going on below from these souls or beings that I've already described, I was witnessing that a companion, a beautiful girl on the butterfly wing with me. Those who've read Proof of Heaven will realize she ended up playing a tremendous role in terms of my understanding the reality of the experience many months after I came back from coma. When I was deep in this experience, she was just extremely comforting. She had sparkling blue eyes, soft, brown hair, high cheekbones, high forehead, a broad smile, and she looked at me with this look of pure love. I can't describe it any other way.

6 Eben Alexander: 00:27:54 Tremendously comforting, and telepathic messages coming into my awareness. Now, they were not in words at that time, but later when I came back to this world and my language started to return, I could start attaching words to some of the pure conceptual and emotional flow of what I witnessed during that journey, and the words that I put onto those telepathic communications coming from that guardian angel on the butterfly wing were, I believe, an essential core of the message that I was meant to bring back to this world. That message is that you are deeply loved and cherished forever. You will be taken care of. You have nothing to fear. Eben Alexander: 00:28:53 I cannot tell you how comforting those words were. Now, there was a third part of that message. People who have read Proof of Heaven will realize, and that was that you can do no wrong. I wish I had expounded on that a little bit where it appears in Proof of Heaven, because people come away misunderstanding that. From an everyday human point of view there's plenty we can do wrong, but we're here to learn, and learn from basically our mistakes and errors. What I did witness even there on that butterfly wing and being told you can do no wrong, I knew what that really meant was that manifesting love, compassion, kindness, forgiveness, mercy to all fellow beings is the most direct way towards ascendance that oneness with the divine, but that God loves us so much as to give us free will. Eben Alexander: 00:29:52 That free will allows for us to learn by trying other pathways. I don't necessarily have to manifest love, compassion, forgiveness, kindness at every turn. If I want to take a more arduous pathway towards the truth, I can be greedy or selfish, or I can hand out pain and suffering to others. Now, I realized that the life review is a very stunning and strong and powerful ingredient of these journeys that's been described for thousands of years. Eben Alexander: 00:30:23 I mean the life review is not a new age concept at all. You can go back to the writings of Plato 2,400 years ago and he writes about the Armenian soldier Er and his death in battle and how he was dead on the battlefield several days, and when he was put on the funeral pyre he woke up, and boy did he have a story to tell, which was basically that when you die you go through a review of your life, all the meaningful lessons still meant to come out of it of unresolved issues, et cetera, you have to live those memories from the point of view of those around you affected by your decisions and your choices. Eben Alexander: 00:31:04 The important thing to note about a life review is you don't experience it from your point of view so much as from the point

7 of view of those around you. It's a beautiful demonstration of how the boundaries of self in many ways are false, and that we're all sharing in this dreaming of the one mind, and we're all taking all these different roles, but I'd like to look at it as we are all facets on the diamond, on that perfect gem of our existence. We're not so much separate from each other, we're just different facets on that same diamond, of that same one mind, all participating in this beautiful drama. Eben Alexander: 00:31:41 The thing people need to remember is that life review is something you will be encountering. The more near-death experiences you go through, you realize this is something that has been part of near-death experiences no matter what the culture, no matter what the millennium that they came up, no matter your prior religious beliefs that this life review is a very common feature. It's kind of a course correction mechanism. It teaches us not to do things to other people that we would not like done to ourselves. It's basically the golden rule written into the very fabric of the universe, witnessed by millions of souls who have been to the other side. Eben Alexander: 00:32:23 I think that was an important part of that message from the beautiful girl on the butterfly wing: you can do no wrong, but essentially from most humans' point of view you can do wrong. You can choose to do things to others that you would not like done to yourself, but you're going to end up facing the consequences of that. In fact, I believe a painful life review for someone who's handed out pain and suffering to others is where our concept of hell comes from, because I also saw from my journey that eternal damnation for a soul made no sense at all in this universe, that we come back again and again was obvious to me. That it's always about that ascendance towards oneness with the divine over progressive lifetimes. Eben Alexander: 00:33:06 Now, turns out in my journey that gateway valley with all those earth-like features, all the festivities were being fueled because up above were these angelic choirs that were swooping against this blue-black velvety sky, these golden orbs of light leaving sparkling golden trails were emanating chants and anthems and hymns that would thunder through me and just enlivened this incredible sense of festivity in that gateway valley. Just like that spinning musical melody had offered a portal up out of the earthworm's-eye view into this brilliant ultra real valley, and it was far more real than anything I've ever experienced in this material world, likewise those angelic choirs and the music that they were emanating down that was thundering through me with great awe and majesty and power, that music provided yet another portal up into higher and higher levels.

8 Eben Alexander: 00:34:01 I remember seeing all of space-time collapsing down in the material realm. All of what I call deep time which is a whole different ordering of causality in that spiritual, in that gateway valley, deep time also collapsing down as well as that whole spiritual realm, until the entire higher-dimensional multiverse throughout all of eternity and infinity was there in front of me like this very complex oversphere that was part of the lessons that I was to be taught in that part of the journey, which I called, and when I came back to this world I labeled that the core. Eben Alexander: 00:34:36 The core was basically the sanctum sanctorum of the divine. It was a place that was so immense and indescribable that all of the entire universe, higher dimensional space through all of eternity could be envisioned there as this little complex oversphere used as part of the lessons. In that realm I was especially aware of an oscillating oneness with the infinite loving power of that divine creative source, that God force. Eben Alexander: 00:35:05 To me that was a gigantic revelation that completely overturned even my earlier religious views out of that Methodist church, because in fact I realized that that oneness with the divine, that that divine force was identical with that spark of conscious awareness that each and every one of us have, so we're never separate from it at all, and we can develop that relationship through deep meditation and centering prayer, and other forms of going within, any way that we use to turn off that little egotistical voice in the head which is little more than a parlor trick. Eben Alexander: 00:35:48 That's a huge part of how I have pursued my understanding of these realms is through a daily practice of meditation. I try and meditate an hour or two a day, and that's what I've done for the last eight years or so in returning to these realms. In my NDE, that core realm is the part that is most absolutely indescribable to people, and yet so many who have had similar spiritually transformative experiences know exactly what I'm talking about. People can get there through meditation too. That's, I think, the important step. Eben Alexander: 00:36:24 In that core realm, I was basically, again, no linguistic communication here at all, but pure conceptual flow. When I wrote it all down as words in the weeks after coming back from coma, in that core realm I was told I was not there to stay, that I would be going back, but that there were many things that they would teach me. The teaching force seemed to be that infinitely overflowing abundance of pure, creative love at the core of all existence, which I would label as the God force, which I called

9 Om, because in my memories of that part of the journey I remember this very deep and resonant om sound that to me was the best label for that. Eben Alexander: 00:37:10 When I came back to this world, talking about God, to me God was a puny little human word that couldn't remotely do justice to the power, majesty, awe, and overwhelming unconditional love of that creative force. In fact, to me no words can possibly, possibly describe, because our words and our language always limit things, and that force, and that awareness, and that becoming and that identity was far beyond anything that I could ever put into human words. Eben Alexander: 00:37:44 That why I used that word om, even though when I came back to this world especially as I started giving talks to various groups, and people heard about these talks, and word would get around about them, and I kept hearing from leaders of some of the deep mystical traditions like kabbalists, Jewish mystics; Sufis, Islamic mystics, Christian mystics, Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Shintoists, I mean all these various deep meditative traditions, people would reach out to me and say how similar my journey was to their journey. In many ways I came to see that all of our knowing of this converges to that sense of oneness and pure love and that we're all sharing that one mind, going deep into any of these mystical traditions. Eben Alexander: 00:38:33 I realized that it's the orthodoxies that emerge over the top of many of our religious belief systems that are so confusing and confounding, and lead us away from the deeper truth that that force of pure love, that creative, divine force is right there at the core of our very conscious awareness. To me that was a tremendous lesson. I remember that core realm, I often use the analogy it was like being on the edge of a black hole. Best analogy I can use, where you're oscillating between pure oneness with the infinite, divine, eternal creative force, and then the very first layers of separation as one emerges into these various spiritual levels that all have a progressive separating out until you get down to this dense lowest level of the material realm itself, where we're as far from that core as you can be, and yet it's right there with us all the time, because it's at the very core of consciousness, of our very mind. Eben Alexander: 00:39:37 I would oscillate through these various levels through my NDE. Even from that sanctum sanctorum in the core realm, I would suddenly find myself way back down in that earthworm's-eye view. The good news is that I quickly learned that by remembering the musical notes of the melody I could conjure up that spinning light that had the fine golden and silvery

10 tendrils off of it, and it opened like a portal and allowed me back up into that rich gateway valley. I always encountered that same beautiful girl on the butterfly wing, the same reassuring messages and seeing all the souls dancing below, the incredible waterfalls and pools and vegetation, and everything in that meadow that just goes far beyond human words to describe. Eben Alexander: 00:40:23 Then of course those angelic choirs would provide that portal to higher and higher levels, back to the core for more lessons, and that oscillation happened several times. I don't know how many, but then there came a time when just as they had told me my first pass through the core that I was not there to stay, that I realized that remembering the musical notes of the melody no longer worked to conjure up that portal into the gateway valley. To say that I was sad at that point in the journey would be a vast understatement. Eben Alexander: 00:40:56 I also realized by that point that I could trust, and I think that's one of the most important things for people to understand is that our journeys through that realm bind us together through love, and the more we realize that we are a direct extension of that loving and infinitely powerful healing force of divine love, the God force at the core of the universe, we have nothing to fear. We will be taken care of. It certainly helps to know that going in, and that's one of the reasons that I think Proof of Heaven and especially our most recent book which is Living in a Mindful Universe, which touts all of the incredible benefits of meditation and gives people some incredibly powerful tools to use differential sound frequency in the form of sacred acoustics tones, which are created by my partner and coauthor Karen Newell, to help get into deep meditative states. Eben Alexander: 00:41:55 It turns out that in that final part of the journey, I realized I could no longer use the musical notes to conjure up that spinning melody and enter those ultra-real realms, and it was at that point that I saw thousands of beings around me, many of them with heads bowed, and this murmuring energy coming up from them. Even though when I was back down in those very murky regions, I felt that same loving energy, that incredible healing power of unconditional love coming up with these voices, these murmurings of these thousands of being. Eben Alexander: 00:42:28 What I recall about that when I came back from my coma in the next few weeks trying to write it all up was that they were saying prayers. That prayer energy was a huge part of what led me back to this world. It's an important lesson for anyone who's there at the bedside of a loved one who's in coma or who has

11 died is remember that those prayers get through, and that they're very comforting, and they help the soul on their journey. Eben Alexander: 00:42:58 It turns out also right after seeing all of those thousands of beings going off in the distance and that prayer energy power, I also saw six faces that came up out of the muck. These faces were very important, because they were people that even though I did not recognize them at the time, because I still had no words or language, no memories of Eben Alexander's life, so I don't recognize anybody until a few hours later when I actually woke up from my coma, and it turns out that five of those people were people who had physically been present the last 24 hours of my coma in the ICU room. Eben Alexander: 00:43:39 Notably many other family and friends who had been there earlier in the week were not apparent to me at all. These memories of these faces were useful as a time anchor, because what they basically did was showed me in later weeks when I was trying to put all this together that most of this coma experience had to happen between days one and five of my seven-day coma, and that's very important, because that's during a time when my doctors had all the evidence that my Glasgow coma scale was between basically probably five to six and seven, very low. As I said, anything below nine is deep coma. Eben Alexander: 00:44:23 My brain especially with the neocortex so disrupted with this meningitis should have been incapable of forming anything, and yet those six faces were very important to me, because they showed the timing that most of the journey had happened in those first five days. It turns out one of those faces was of someone who was not even physically present in the ICU. Even though I described her in great detail to my family and friends when I came out of coma, and they said, "Well, yes, Susan," who was our family friend, "was never really here." My family had actually sought Susan's help, Susan Reintjes had done some work with coma patients and others through what she called channeling. Eben Alexander: 00:45:07 She would go into a meditative trance, and she would help them to heal. Now, it didn't always work, and in my case she said she'd never encountered anybody as deep as I was. Many of her coma patients had gone on to die. When I heard that six months after my coma, I realized just how sick I had been, that it was the very worst case Susan had ever encountered in a set of cases that involved many fatalities. She was very concerned in her channeling efforts to me on nights four and five of my coma from 120 miles away that I might never come back to this

12 world. She was the one face that was not physically there, but of course I remembered her just as well as if she had been physically present, just as I explained to all of my family and friends when I came out of the coma. Eben Alexander: 00:45:54 It was really the last face of those six that I saw that helped me come back to this world, because at that time I still had no idea what was going on. I realized I was going back somewhere, but didn't know what that somewhere was, and that was the Sunday morning of my coma when my youngest son, Bond, who was 10 years old. They protected him from the worst of it during the week, but he overheard the physician conference that last Sunday morning, day seven of coma when they recommended stopping the antibiotics, because I'd really not made any significant progress. They were very worried that my neurologic exam was so dismal that there was no chance for any kind of meaningful recovery. That's why they recommended stopping antibiotics. Eben Alexander: 00:46:40 My son Bond, 10 years old at the time heard that news, went running down the hallway into my ICU bed and pulled open my eyelids. I was still on the ventilator at the time, and he was pleading with me: "Daddy, you're going to be okay. Daddy, you're going to be okay." As if somehow that would make it so. I promise you, I didn't see him with my eyes or hear him with my ears. I was way too far gone from this world, but his message got in to be mixed in with those six faces that I saw at the very end of the coma. Couldn't understand the words he was saying, but there was something about his presence and that connection between us that all of a sudden I knew that every bit of this mattered, and I had to come back to this world. Eben Alexander: 00:47:22 To this point in my journey I had thought this can all continue or it can cease, none of that matters, but now all of a sudden everything mattered because I realized I had a connection and a responsibility to another soul. Even though I didn't remember anything about the father-son relationship with him, I knew that this was so important that somehow I had to get back and help him. It was really my connection with Bond that I sensed on that day seven of coma, that Sunday morning that brought me back to this world. Eben Alexander: 00:47:53 When I first came back, I had no words or language. I didn't even recognize my mother, sisters, sons at the bedside. I had no idea who these beings were. Words and language came back very quickly, literally over hours, a day or so most of it had returned. My childhood memories came back over a week or so, all of my memories including all my semantic knowledge, all my

13 knowledge of cosmology, physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, brain-mind neurosurgery, every bit of it came back by about two months out. Eben Alexander: 00:48:28 In fact, the shocking thing is over the next few years based on very detailed conversations with family and friends about distant events in my early life, I came to realize that the return of the memories was more complete than the memories had been before coma. That to me was an extraordinary example of how memories are not stored in the brain at all, which is one of the biggest nails in the coffin of materialist neuroscience, and it's something we discuss in detail in our book Living in a Mindful Universe, because it's so important to get that the brain is not the producer of consciousness, nor is it the repository for memories. It only serves as an access mechanism, but it's not where they are stored, because all the postulates of physicalism are false, and this is where the whole scientific world view is starting to shift very dramatically. Mark Gober: 00:49:28 That was a wonderful explanation. Thank you for that. Eben Alexander: 00:49:32 Thank you. Mark Gober: 00:49:33 That was great. A few questions to follow up. One is what have been some of the criticisms from the mainstream neuroscientific community claiming that what you experienced was a hallucination associated with a dying brain? What have the criticisms been and what- Eben Alexander: 00:49:53 I think that comes from people who really are not aware of the medical details of my case. Now, some of those medical details are listed in Proof of Heaven, and I've also written some articles that have appeared in the medical literature, and specifically in Missouri Medicine. I wrote two articles that have since been put into a book of peer reviewed medical information on neardeath experiences called The Science of Near-Death Experiences by John C Hagan III, he's the main editor. In those chapters I describe the medical situation much more clearly. If you're ignorant of those details, of course, you could think Alexander looks good now, so he can't have been that sick, so he just had a hallucination. Well, it's not so simple, and that's where my doctors themselves were absolutely shocked by my full recovery over two months. It completely defies anything in Western medicine, anything we've seen. I've certainly encountered no other cases like mine of such a severe, grim, negative bacterial meningitis where someone went on to have a more than complete recovery, and yet that's what happened.

14 Eben Alexander: 00:51:05 Now, it turns out the good news is doctor Bruce Greyson has also recently with two other independent physicians done a medical record review of my medical records. They talked with the two neurologists, and of course there's information from Scott Wade. Doctor Wade was my infectious disease doctor who made a statement at the end of Proof of Heaven, it's appendix A in that book, about just how ill I was. Doctor Greyson in his review and in discussion with my neurologists, the two doctors who took care of me from a neurological standpoint during that illness who were really quite shocked that I would have a full recovery. They thought I was basically going to die of this illness, or at least spend the rest of my life in a nursing home. Eben Alexander: 00:51:52 To have that kind of recovery is really extraordinary, and yet when you start getting into the world of near-death experiences you find that it's not uncommon to find really remarkable and even miraculous cases of healing that come with a near-death experience. To me that should be no surprise. It's because any healing whether you're talking about physical, mental, or emotional health must fundamentally be spiritual in its origin. By the word spiritual, I don't mean religious, although people can certainly use religion to get deeply into the spiritual mode of humanity. Eben Alexander: 00:52:32 I really just mean by spirituality for me is really two notions. One is that we're all connected through this kind of one mind, that we are all part of that one mind, so there's this incredible sense of connection with the origins of all will and active agents in this universe, and not only that, that we're bound together like that, but also that there's a sense of purpose and meaning to our lives. I think that's an essential part of the notion of spirituality, that we're here for a reason, that all of this is headed some direction, and that in fact we play a role in the direction in which it all heads. Eben Alexander: 00:53:13 I think that that spiritual nature of healing, of health and of becoming more whole is absolutely essential to any and all of us in our journeys. I also came to realize that things like illness, injury, hardships, challenges in life that these are in fact gifts. These are planned stepping stones that we lay before we even come into these incarnations because that is part of the challenge that we've accepted to live through in learning and teaching the lessons of this life with our soul group. Eben Alexander: 00:53:48 I would say it's a whole different way of looking at illness and injury, but it's one that provides a tremendous power for healing especially when you look at what is already known to be

15 the power of mind over matter in healing through placebo effect. I mean placebo effect is getting stronger and stronger all the time, and it is a beautiful example of mind over matter. In fact, placebo effect when you start to acknowledge how powerful it is and how widespread, you start to realize the materialist model of reality, the materialist model of medicine, molecular medicine isn't the way it really works at all, that there's a much deeper truth about our beliefs. Eben Alexander: 00:54:34 That's where, I think, that getting back into this notion of spiritual healing and wholeness, of being here to learn lessons that have to do with the challenges and conflicts and illness and injury of our lives is a very important way of expanding our view of self and of our power to influence the course of our lives. Mark Gober: 00:54:58 How has the experience changed your day-to-day living and your day-to-day outlook? You've kind of alluded to it, but could you explain the transformation before to now? Eben Alexander: 00:55:10 Well, I would say that for the first four months or so after my coma I was really very confused by it all. I kept defaulting to my prior world view and thinking somehow I had to explain it all as a vast hallucination, and yet I knew the medical evidence was so strong that my neocortex had been so heavily damaged that I couldn't see how any hallucination could occur. Yet, that had to be my default because I wasn't really willing to let go of my most fundamental world view of physicalism that early on. It was really that recognition of the beautiful girl on the butterfly wing, and realizing that she had been my birth sister who I had never known. Eben Alexander: 00:55:59 I didn't realize that till I received a photograph of her four months after my coma, and that's when I just hit the wall. It shocked me no end, and I realized that I really had to go all the way back down to square one and restart from the ground up any understanding of the nature of reality. I knew that our productive model of consciousness in neuroscience was on extremely shaky ground, because in fact no one on Earth had the remotest clue how the brain could create consciousness, and yet there's this blind faith. That is a faith-based religion, a blind faith that if we keep working away at it somehow we'll discover the mechanisms, and yet it's just completely wrong. That realization changed my life. Eben Alexander: 00:56:47 When I realized that we live in a mental universe, that we're all connected directly with that divine creative source, and that we have tremendous power in our beliefs to influence our emerging reality, everything shifted, and I started to realize

16 healing, becoming more whole in any sense, as we've already said: physical, mental, emotional healing at its deepest level is always going to be rooted in those notions of spirituality, meaning and purpose and of connectedness with others. Realizing that the golden rule, as I said earlier, is written into the fabric of this universe, and that we will reap what we sow, so it's best to treat others as we would like to be treated. The best way to do that is to manifest that love, compassion, forgiveness, acceptance and mercy for all fellow beings. Eben Alexander: 00:57:43 Realizing this is part of human evolution and that this understanding is more critical now than it's ever been, because what we've witnessed in the twentieth century was this divorce between science and technology and the highest human sensibilities about our human nature. That's how come the sins of science in the 20th and early 21st century like the creation of high explosives, poisonous gasses, machine guns, nuclear weapons, et cetera, is because we've really lost our pathway by not realizing the power that we have through our mental influence on self and others to really manifest that love and compassion and togetherness. Eben Alexander: 00:58:32 We are in real danger if we miss that lesson of having life reviews that will be extremely painful to go through that have to do with mistreating of others. This is not just about humans, it's about all life, and not just all life on Earth. I believe it's part of a much bigger tapestry of life throughout this universe, and we are to join that. To do that we can no longer be a war faring, warmongering, violent, conflicted civilization, which basically is what humanity in the year 2018 still is, remarkably enough. I believe that's why this awakening, and Karen and I see this awakening, as we describe in Living in a Mindful Universe, is absolutely inevitable, and also is already well underway. This is not some blue-sky thinking. This is absolutely the direction in which everything is headed when you look at all the big pieces of evidence about the nature of consciousness, the nature of reality, trying to resolve the deep mystery of the measurement paradox in quantum physics. Every bit of this has to do with maturing and growing to a much higher level of knowing who we are, why we're here, and where this is all headed. Mark Gober: 00:59:59 Since writing Proof of Heaven how have you seen the evolution around you? How far have we come since then and how much further do we need to go to reach the evolution that you're describing as a society? Eben Alexander: 01:00:12 Well, I would say one thing that to me was a very pleasant surprise as I first really got into this journey after my 2008 coma

17 experience, I anticipated I was going to have a lot of pushback from the scientific community, but that's only because I didn't realize how big and powerful the scientific community is that already gets where this is going. Encountering people like the Division of Perceptual Studies at UVA, Ed Kelly, Bruce Greyson, Jim Tucker, I mean they just do incredible work. In their book Irreducible Mind which I first encountered when I gave a talk at the Division of Perceptual Studies on my coma experience, which actually occurred two years to the hour after I woke up from coma, that was in November of Eben Alexander: 01:01:05 When I read Irreducible Mind, I realized, oh my god, that all of the scientific work has been done by these incredible scientists over the last century. An incredible eye-opening experience that was, but of course I then started reading the works of Henry Stapp, of Larry Dossey. There are so many scientists out there who get this, and they're loosely connected and communicating. To me it was tremendously refreshing to realize where this is headed. Of course, I knew enough about quantum physics to knew that you had to go there for the answers because I also realized that every bit of what we experience in our mind is the inside of our own consciousness. It is a construct. Eben Alexander: 01:01:54 As much as we are fooled into believing that everything that we witness out there in that world around us exists out there independently of us, as we explain in Living in a Mindful Universe, don't let that supreme illusion take you too far. Never forget that you've only witnessed the inside of your own consciousness. As we come to realize that the measurement paradox in quantum physics is basically screaming at us that consciousness is fundamental and we live in a mental universe, and that all of the apparent physical universe is only an extrapolation out of the mental, this is where we start to gain tremendous power in our abilities to influence our emerging reality. Mark Gober: 01:02:39 To what extent had you heard about these ideas during your educational upbringing and your time at Harvard? Had you even heard of these concepts at all in the mainstream academic community? Eben Alexander: 01:02:51 Well, I must confess if you had asked me before my coma about the hard problem of consciousness I would not really have had much of a clue about what you're talking about. I would have thought, "Oh, well, they're just referring to the fact that consciousness seems to be confusing." In fact, there is a very elaborate set of philosophical arguments around the hard

18 problem of consciousness that I would say coalesced with David Chalmers' book The Conscious Mind in The notions and the problems with the materialist model of consciousness and trying to explain it all as brain based had been emerging over several decades. Chalmers just brought it all together. Eben Alexander: 01:03:37 I think since that time it's been very well-defined that there are tremendous gaps, explanatory gaps if you're trying to connect the dots between the physical workings of the brain and consciousness. Of course, things get far, far worse when you realize that the evidence for things like telepathy, precognition, presentiment, past life memories in children indicative of reincarnation, near-death experiences, shared-death experiences which happen in physiologically normal people but are identical in quality to the extraordinary nature of near-death experiences, that all of these phenomenon, what I would group as under the rubric of non-local consciousness, are real. They have scientific basis to them. They've been studied. People in psychology and parapsychology have looked at many of these extraordinary cases. Eben Alexander: 01:04:32 The scientific evidence is out there in huge manner that all this is very real. The very fact that at University of Virginia they have more than 2,700 cases of past-life memories in children studied over the last five to six decades where the best explanation seems to be of actual reincarnation. 35% of those 2,700 cases actually have a birthmark, a physical birthmark on the current child that corresponds to a mortal wound in the previous lifetime. I mean this is really an extraordinary body of evidence that you can't just wish away as a materialist. Eben Alexander: 01:05:16 All thanks to Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker, Division of Perceptual Studies at UVA has done a world of good, and yet they have to keep a very low profile, because materialist science has a lot of very screaming heads out there that go berserk when you mention this kind of stuff, and yet anybody who wants to understand the truth of human existence needs to be open to every bit of this information in trying to put together the bigger picture. The seduction of that supreme illusion, as I said earlier, and as we explain in great detail in Living in a Mindful Universe, the seductive power is very strong, and yet we should never lose sight of the fact that we're witnessing the inside of our own consciousness, and we need to figure out how much we can correlate that with what we're seeing out there in the world and our influence over our abilities to change that world.

19 Mark Gober: 01:06:16 What do you think it will take for the mainstream materialist scientific community to open up to at least the scientific evidence for the phenomena that you just described? Eben Alexander: 01:06:27 Well, I think that really the scientific work that we're talking about here, like the work from Division of Perceptual Studies, the work, say, from the noetic sciences group, ions.org, out in California, many independent parapsychology investigators around the world. We're all assembling this data of... From my point of view, what I can tell you is I find it harder and harder to actually get to any kind of materialist to have a discussion or debate, say, on the internet, during an interview, or at presentations just because as they start looking at the information, the data, they realize you cannot just reject it, and they end up coming over to this side, leaving the materialism behind as hopelessly befuddled and lost. Eben Alexander: 01:07:22 What I've seen personally, even though you could argue that because of my daily focus on this... I tend to hang out with people with similar beliefs, but I also get put up with people who have doubts, who are true open-minded skeptics, not the closed-minded skeptics who make up some of my critics who basically already had made up their mind. They don't care about the data. They don't care about rational argument. Those people, who knows when they'll come around, but they're not really what matter. What matter is the major scientific community and a lot of scientists are waking up to this. Eben Alexander: 01:07:58 I get a tremendous number of communications from engineers, from physicists, from physicians, from nurses, from all manner of scientifically trained people very grateful to me for writing as I do and sharing these books and ideas and these presentations, because they realize that the materialist model is horribly broken. Over the issue of consciousness, it's actually mute. If someone tells you the brain creates consciousness, if you ask them, "Tell me more." You don't get a word. It's because there really is no train of logic or rational understanding or world view that takes you from the physical work of the brain to the production of consciousness and mental states. Eben Alexander: 01:08:45 That's where we really need to go back to square one, which I believe the scientific community is really on the tipping point of doing just because of all the overwhelming evidence and some very well-presented arguments in some of the books that we're discussing here, to help take the world to the next level. Mark Gober: 01:09:04 I completely agree with you. I'm sensitive to time. I really appreciate your time. Are there any closing messages or pieces