"On the one
side you have folks like Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins who suggest that science
has conclusively disproved the existence of God. And then on the other side you have folks like
Stephen Meyer who say no no when you look at the science what you see is God's signature in
the cell and DNA you see sort of clues that God has left behind as to the organization
of nature in a particular way that speaks of an intelligence beyond mere evolution for example."
How does someone go from being a total skeptic to a believer?
"Really has changed me in every way by realizing that our souls are eternal, I think part of it is
that we are here to learn lessons, the only way we can really kind of survive and thrive with these
kind of challenges is to face them together." This is Dr. Eben Alexander. Today he deeply believes in
an afterlife and that our conscious Minds live on after our bodies pass away, but he didn't always
believe this. For most of his life up until he was 54 years old he didn't believe in any kind
of God or a soul. He was a neurosurgeon who spent 15 years as an associate professor at Harvard
Medical School. After operating on countless patients he came to believe that the brain is
really just a kind of machine and that when the brain dies everything about who you are disappears
along with it. This is a world view often called materialism and it's a mechanical vision of the
universe and our place within it. For Dr. Eben Alexander this left no room for a soul or for
any kind of consciousness that survives after we die. But all this changed after a terrifying
brain infection put him into a coma. In his book "Proof of Heaven: a neurosurgeon's journey into
the Afterlife" he describes how bacteria attacked his brain, completely shutting down some of the
most important functions we think of as making us human. The real mystery is that our current
scientific understanding of the brain tells us that Eben shouldn't have been able to perceive
anything at all, and yet somehow he had the most real and vivid experience of his life,
a near-death experience that revealed to him that death isn't the end, that there are higher states
of being, as well as vast and incredible worlds beyond this one. This is the story
of a man who crossed over into a world so real that it makes the one we're living in now seem
like a dream by comparison. A journey into a life completely changed by an experience of the Divine.
On November 10, 2008 Dr. Eben Alexander went to bed with an unusual pain in his back. That night,
every time he moved his body even a little he felt a jolt of pain shooting through his
spine. When he finally got up to take a bath in the early hours of the morning he suddenly lost
all consciousness. Paramedics came to take him to the hospital and he fell into a coma. Eben
was infected with a rare kind of bacterial meningitis. In cases like his, the meninges
becomes swollen. It's the membrane that protects some of the most delicate parts of our body: the
spinal cord and the brain. And it was here that the bacteria attacked his brain's outer layer:
the cortex. When this happens it impairs our most critical human functions: memory,
language, and emotion, all of it gets shut down. Out of all the people who come to the emergency
room in the condition that Eben was in, 90% don't survive, and even for those that do,
many spend the rest of their lives in a vegetative state and they never fully regain consciousness.
Eben's prospects were bleak. As doctors and nurses worked to keep him alive inexplicably
he found himself somewhere else. In a strange world of darkness, a place without time and
without any memory of his life before his coma. He thought to himself "what is this place,
how long have I been here?" Somehow it felt like he'd always been there and always would be.
There was a sound of deep rhythmic pounding in the distance like a heartbeat. As he looked more
closely he saw what looked like roots and blood vessels on the walls that surrounded him. It made
him feel like an earthworm buried deep in the ground and so he called this place "the realm
of the earthworm's eye view." Suddenly he saw something new coming out of the darkness just
above him, a pure white light with thin strands of whitish gold was spinning and moving towards him.
It made the sweetest most harmonious music growing louder the closer it came. In the middle of that
light he saw an opening, he felt himself being drawn into that opening, and in a flash he was in
a completely different world. He flew high above a countryside, green and Lush with indescribably
brilliant colors. He glided over forests and fields, rivers and waterfalls. He watched his
people and children ran and laughed below him. They sang and danced in circles filled with joy
with the same living warmth as the flowers that blossomed all around them. Eben called this place
"the Gateway Valley" and then he realized that he wasn't alone, there was another presence here:
a beautiful girl with blue eyes flying beside him. She smiled at him not with a look of romance
or friendship but with a sense of love that was somehow beyond all these things, beyond all the
kinds of love we experience here on Earth. And then millions of butterflies flew around them
soaring down into the fields and coming back up again like a living river of color fluttering
through the air. And then she spoke to him but not through words, it was a direct communication that
burst through him like a wind. Eben understood that she would be his guide in this place. He
writes that it's impossible to fully capture her message with words but if I had to translate
the meaning it would be something like this: you are loved and cherished dearly forever,
you have nothing to fear, there is nothing you can do wrong. She communicated all this instantly and
he felt an incredible wave of relief and peace flow through him. Eben says that the message
about doing no wrong is often misunderstood; it doesn't mean that it's okay to harm other people,
it's the Insight that whatever you've done in your past, whatever regrets you have or
mistakes you've made, you can find redemption, you can find forgiveness and healing and chart
a positive path forward wherever you are now. And then she said "we will show you many things here
but eventually you will go back." She guided him to a place of beautiful white clouds. Shimmering
spheres floated across the sky. Eben understood that these spheres were also Divine beings,
as they passed by they sang indescribably beautiful music that swelled with pure joy and
then he felt a new presence changing everything around him, shifting it into a higher vibration.
Without words Eben began asking questions to this Divine being: "Where is this place? Who am I?
Why am I here? With each question he asked answers came back to him instantly, crashing through him
like a tidal wave of pure Insight. Eben saw that there isn't just one universe but many of them,
more than we can ever imagine, but what lies at the core of all of them is love. Each of these
universes has darkness in it too but only because of the necessity of free will, because the choice
to do good also requires that there be a choice not to do good. All of this is essential because
without free will there can be no growth, no forward movement and as painful as the darkness
seems to be in our world, within the broader picture it's love that overwhelmingly dominates,
and it's only through love that humanity can be saved. Eben writes that" I saw the abundance of
Life throughout the countless universes, some of them are so far advanced beyond humanity.
I saw many higher dimensions but they're not separate from us all of these worlds are part
of the same Divine Essence. These insights were life-changing but there's a very important missing
piece to this story. In order to understand how it fits in with what comes next we have
to look at a key detail in Dr Eben Alexander's past: the fact that he was adopted as a child.
Eben's biological mother was only 16 years old when she gave birth to him. His biological father
was still in high school, and for two teenagers growing up in the 1950s they had no way to support
a child. Neither of them wanted to give Eben for adoption but they didn't see any other choice.
Eben would be adopted into a loving home. His adoptive father was also a neurosurgeon and it
was from him that Eben learned of the value of discipline and hard work. It was his father who
inspired him to become a doctor himself. Eben describes his childhood as being wonderful in
so many ways but deep inside there was a part of him that felt like an orphan, like he was less
than completely wanted. It wasn't until August of 2007 when Eben was 53 years old that he was
able to reunite with his biological parents. It was here that he learned that their choice to
give him up was the hardest thing they'd ever had to do. His mother says that "I picked you up one
last time I called you by your birth name and said I love you you so much so much you'll never know,
and I'll love you forever until the day I die. I kissed you one last time I laid you gently in
your crib wrapped you in your blue blanket took one last look into your eyes and said goodbye
Richard Michael, those were my last words to you at least for a half century or so.
There was another surprise. Eben learned that he had a biological sister named Betsy who he
never knew about. She died 10 years earlier and so they never had a chance to meet. He learned
that Betsy had a kind heart and worked at a women's crisis center where she helped
victims of abuse. And she loved animals and often took care of stray cats and dogs that
she found in the neighborhood. Eben's biological family promised to send Eben a picture of Betsy
one day but it wasn't until after he woke up from his coma that Eben would see that photo.
All of these memories faded into the background while Eben was in his near-death experience. He
looked down and saw the same trees and the same sparkling streams below him. Eben's guide was
still flying next to him and her message was the same: "we will show you many things but you will
have to go back." Eben realized that he was being led on a kind of tour of this higher
plane of existence. He traveled back and forth countless times to many different planes. The
further he went the more that was revealed to him in the same wordless and instantaneous way. Eben
writes that "I came to understand that love is without a doubt the basis of everything."
And it's not just an abstract idea it's the real day-to-day love that we all have access to. It's
what we feel when we're in the warmth of family and friends, when we feel a real and genuine
connection with something outside of ourselves. It is in its purest form completely unselfish
and unconditional. "This I believe is the single most important truth of our universe, that we're
all part of the Divine and nothing can never take that away." There's a deep part of us that already
knows this but all too often we get disconnected from this understanding. Why? The answer may come
down to the very thing that Dr Eben Alexander spent his entire life studying: the human brain.
What came first the brain or the conscious mind? most scientists believe in the materialist
worldview which assumes that the brain is the source of all consciousness and that we're nothing
more than biological machines. They believe that it's the physical structure of the brain that
gives us self-awareness, memory and the experience of everything that happens in our lives. If that's
true it means that seeing a beautiful sunset, falling in love or experiencing heartbreak are
all just pieces of data stored within the physical hardware of the brain. But there's a problem:
if the physical brain is what creates consciousness then how do we account for the fact
that people have had incredibly vivid near-death experiences at precisely the point where their
brains shouldn't have been working at all. To understand this we have to look at a completely
different view of the brain and consider that maybe the materialist view has it backwards. What
if the brain isn't the source of consciousness at all? What if the brain is actually a filter that
receives thoughts from our higher consciousness and then collapses it into the limited physical
experience we have here on Earth? This filter model of the brain is actually a very old idea
which we looked at in this video, but briefly, it proposes that the brain is what blocks us from
understanding our true nature, especially the left side of the brain which is focused on language,
logic, and the sense we have of being a narrowly defined ego-self. The author and philosopher
Aldous Huxley describes this in his book "The Doors of Perception," "the function of the brain
is to protect us from being overwhelmed, it shuts out most of what we should otherwise perceive or
remember at any moment leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to
be practically useful and which makes biological survival possible, the Mind At Large has to be
funneled through the brain and what comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of
Consciousness which helps us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet."
In other words our brains have to filter out huge parts of our reality so that it can focus on the
things it needs to survive. If it didn't do that our lives would be even harder to navigate than it
already is. The idea that the brain is a filter also shouldn't be surprising because we already
know that all the time the brain is filtering all kinds of sensory input. For example when
our eyes transmit light to the brain it filters out infrared and ultraviolet light. What we end
up seeing is just a visible part of a huge and infinite light spectrum. And when the brain's
filter breaks down like it does during near-death experiences people report seeing all kinds of
extraordinary things like seeing vibrant and brilliant colors they've never seen before meeting
loved ones who've passed on and traveling to other worlds. It's here that we begin to realize
that there's a mind outside of the brain, a higher Consciousness that perceives all the
mysterious ways in which everything's connected. It's exactly at this place where Dr Eben Alexander
found himself in the world of his near-death experience, but then suddenly everything changed.
He watched as the sky began to shift and all around him were the same Divine beings, but
now they were whispering, murmuring. He couldn't tell what they were saying but he later realized
that they were praying for him. He felt himself being pulled downward until he arrived back at the
beginning once again at the place he called the "realm of the earthworm's eye view." This is where
he started his journey, but this time he saw human faces in the walls, they were speaking to him. He
recognized these faces as people he knew. Their names were Sylvia, Holly, Peggy, Scott, and Susan.
Hospital staff later confirmed that these very same people had stood and prayed in
Eben's hospital room. Somehow against all odds on the seventh day of his coma Eben woke up.
It was a medical miracle and from that day, he began the hard work of transitioning back to his
regular life, and he would completely recover. On November 25th 2008 he left the hospital and
came home to a house filled with love and gratitude. It's an experience that healed
his soul but there's still one more mystery in all this. Four months after waking up from his coma,
Eben finally got the photo of his sister Betsy who died 10 years earlier. It was the first time
he looked at a picture of the sister he'd never known, and there was no mistaking it,
he was absolutely stunned to recognize Betsy as the blue-eyed girl he met in his near-death
experience. She was his guide that flew beside him during his time in the coma. Somehow they
shared a bond in the afterlife even though they'd never met each other in their earthly lives and
an instant his waking world in the Divine world came together. How do we make sense of all this?
Eben went over all of his medical records which were carefully recorded from the very beginning.
His own CT scans showed that his brain cavity was swollen with pus. Medical notes from his
doctors confirmed that none of them expected him to survive and even if he did he'd never be able
to function on his own. Everything he learned as a neurosurgeon told him that it should have been
impossible for him to have the kind of experience he did. Looking back he's sure of one thing:
the place he visited was absolutely real, more real than anything we encounter here on Earth. His
story finds support in the millions of people all around the world who've had near-death experiences
of their own. The author Anita Moorjani describes her experience with an analogy:
"Imagine being in a huge dark warehouse, imagine you live there with only one flashlight to see
by. Everything you know about this enormous space is what you've seen by this narrow beam
of light. That's what physical life is like because we're only aware of the things we
focus our senses on at any given time. But then imagine someone turns all the lights
on there for the first time in a sudden burst of Brilliance you can see the whole warehouse
and it's unlike anything you ever imagined, you finally understand that you're part of a
huge unfolding tapestry that goes far beyond Sight and Sound. When the light switch turns
off again and you're left with your flashlight, nothing can take away that wonder and beauty
or the fabulous aliveness of everything you experienced in that blindingly lucid moment.
The things that happened to near-death experiencers like Anita moorjani and Dr Evan
Alexander are absolutely astonishing, but even Eben admits that he's not more special than anyone
else. What he does have is a unique perspective that allows him to bridge the worlds of science
and rationality with the world of the Divine and so now as we face a critical time in our history,
what we need most of all is to regain more of our higher consciousness, the sense that we're
all part of the same Divinity that there's a true spiritual self that each of us is
destined to find again. It's a message so simple that even children can understand: you are loved
and cherished dearly forever, you have nothing to fear, and there is nothing you can do wrong.
I would absolutely love it if you left a comment with an angel Emoji and please
share any near-death experiences you may have in the comments. And if you liked this video
please show your support by pressing the like button. As always thanks so much for
watching all the way to the end, take care of yourselves and I'll see you in the next one