Eben Alexander: There are millions of other butterflies.
Looping and spiraling in these vast formations,
and down below in this verdant, fertile meadow,
there were thousands of beings dancing lots
of joy and merriment.
I remember children playing,
dogs jumping,
incredible festivities,
and it was all being fueled because up above were
these swooping orbs of
angelic choirs that were emanating chants and anthems,
hymns that would just thunder through my awareness.
Rod Bland: My guest today is
Dr.
Eben Alexander, A neurosurgeon and author of
the brilliant book, Proof of Heaven which details
a near death experience that he had in 2008.
Eben, welcome and thank you so much for coming on the show.
Eben Alexander: Well, Rod, thanks so much for having me.
It's great to be with you.
Rod Bland: Alright, so I think to get started, I'd like to
ask what your understanding of human consciousness was
prior to your NDE and how your medical training informed
that perspective and then if you could take us through
the events that led up to and including your NDE.
Eben Alexander: Okay.
I had a very kind of conventional upbringing
in terms of my scientific understanding.
My father was very influential in my life.
He was a globally renowned neurosurgeon.
He also was very spiritual.
He had a strong belief in God and power of prayer,
but, like so many of us who grew up in the 60s and 70s,
I always knew science was the pathway to truth, and as
much as I might have wanted to believe what I heard
in that Methodist church growing up in North Carolina
Science was going to guide my way to any
kind of understanding of the nature of reality.
And the conventional training I had at both Duke and then
when I worked at Harvard medical school teaching
neurosurgery for 15 years,
was basically the notion of materialism or physicalism.
And that's basically the metaphysical position
that all of that exists is the physical world.
And therefore, if we can fully understand
everything that governs the interactions of the particles
that make up that world.
Then we can understand all of causality and
all of the nature of our unfolding reality.
In fact, that materialist science that I worshipped
before my coma, and I do not use that term lightly
would scoff at you for claiming to have free will.
Because that science claimed that it was all
just chemical reactions, electron fluxes, and the
substance of the brain.
It gave us an illusion of free will, an illusion
of conscious awareness.
But that ultimately it was all predetermined by the laws of
physics, chemistry, biology.
And that was the hard core position.
But that's really where you went if you believed that
conventional scientific...
Training,
which basically said our existence is birth to
death and nothing more.
When our physical brain and body die, that's the
end of conscious awareness.
My journey back in 2008 showed me that just
the opposite is true.
We are conscious in spite of our brain.
And that's really where I think all of this gets
a lot more exciting.
And the proof to me was very solid.
In the form of the severe case of Bacterial
Meningoencephalitis.
You couldn't have come up with a better laboratory prep
to try and mimic human death
than what I went through.
This kind of severe meningitis is a perfect model for human
death because it selectively destroys the neocortex
and then the brainstem.
The pieces of the brain that are most responsible,
according to modern neuroscience, for our detailed
human conscious awareness.
And yet...
The medical details of my case made it crystal
clear that brain was in no shape to harbor any kind
of dream or hallucination.
And that's something that I discuss in the book Proof
of Heaven, but that point is greatly amplified by the
medical case report written by three doctors not
involved in my care that came out in the Journal of
Nervous and Mental Diseases
in September of 2018.
Dr.
Surbhi Khanna, Lauren Moore, and Bruce Grayson
were fascinated by my recovery, and that's why
they wrote this case report.
And in fact, when they were challenged by the peer review
editors of that journal, how do you explain this?
This is unprecedented in the medical literature.
Have somebody this ill from, a week in deep coma from
gram negative bacterial meningoencephalitis with all
the lab parameters, Glasgow Coma Scales, 6 or 7, and
anything below 9 is deep coma.
And all the lab values, that's what haunted me,
was when I was reviewing my own medical records.
and remembering everything that I went through,
that brain was in no position to construct
any such elaborate hallucination or dream.
That's why the scientific community takes my story
so incredibly seriously.
And that's why some people who try to take me down with
ad hominem attacks cling desperately to their hope that
this, their claim that this was a medically induced coma.
They are denying the facts of the case that are
absolutely a beautiful gift to humanity.
And that is, no, this extraordinary experience
happened but wasn't caused by my brain at all.
The fact of the matter was I was so close to death and
so far gone from this world that I could experience
this extraordinary spiritual journey that I had.
And that's really, to me, the magic of it all.
And I can dive briefly into what all that involved,
and then we can talk about some of the details and
why it's important to the scientific community and
all that kind of thing.
Rod Bland: Yeah, I think it's especially for people
that haven't read your book or anything, I think it'd
be good to understand, what actually led to the meningitis
and then, what happened once you were in the hospital and
things started to go south.
Eben Alexander: We never ever determined
a cause why I had an E.
coli bacterial meningoencephalitis.
That was never discovered.
It turns out important to point out in my journey, I
had a very atypical feature for near death experiences.
And that is a pretty complete amnesia for the
life of Eben Alexander.
I had no memories of the personal events
of my life, none of my religious teachings,
none of my scientific knowledge of cosmology,
physics, neuroscience, quantum physics, etc.
None of that made it in.
I had a really an empty slate.
And in looking back on it, I've come to realize
that every near death experience is tailored for
the individual who has it.
That's ultimately the reason these things occur.
But there are NDEs that are so remarkable that
it's of great interest to to this world at large.
In fact, I think all NDEs can be very instructive to this
world at large because they paint a beautiful picture.
That we're all in this together and that the
binding force of love is absolutely there connecting
us with each other and with the universe at large.
So my beliefs before coma were really strongly that of that
materialist scientist that brain creates consciousness,
and then of course fearing that when the brain and body
die awareness comes to an end.
The opposite is what I experienced, and it all
started in what I call the earthworm's eye view.
A very primitive course, unresponsive realm, it was
like being in dirty jello.
Seemed to go on for a very long time,
even though I'm sure I didn't have a memory of
moment to moment, eternity would seem like a reasonable
length of time that I experienced all that, but
I was rescued, luckily,
by this slowly spinning white light.
They came towards me and it opened up like a rip
in the fabric of that ugly earthworm eye view, as I
call that initial stage.
And it led me up through this light portal into
this brilliant, ultra real gateway valley.
And that's the part that's so hard to explain to people.
It was much more real than this world.
Much more detailed, much more memorable,
much more meaningful.
Much more transformational.
This was an extraordinarily rich environment in
which I found myself.
It makes this world look very murky and
dreamlike by comparison.
Now that Gateway Valley, it had a lot
of earth like features.
I was a speck of awareness on a butterfly wing.
There are millions of other butterflies.
Looping and spiraling in these vast formations,
and down below in this verdant, fertile meadow,
there were thousands of beings dancing lots
of joy and merriment.
I remember children playing,
dogs jumping, incredible festivities, and it was
all being fueled because
up above were these swooping orbs of angelic choirs that
were emanating chants and anthems, hymns that would just
thunder through my awareness.
And the best thing about the whole scene I'm describing
to you is I wasn't alone.
There was a beautiful woman sitting beside me
on this butterfly wing and she looked at me
with a look of pure love.
Sparkling blue eyes, high cheekbones, high
forehead, broad smile.
She was dressed in the same kind of simple garb of all
the beings dancing down below, but it was very colorful.
Really, colors beyond the rainbow.
And when I say this world is ultra real, do understand
this is the realm where
people would have life reviews, where your life
would flash before your eyes and you would relive the
events, not just remembering.
And also those events in a life review are commonly
described as being from the perspective of others around
us who were impacted by our actions and even our thoughts.
In other words, your life review is a beautiful
example of how we're all in this together.
And if you hurt another, you're hurting yourself.
If you hand out a lot of pain and suffering...
In the life review, you have to be on the receiving end of
that to see what it felt like.
And the life review is there to serve as a course
correction, because another major part of the scientific
evidence for the reality of this broader concept
of mind we're talking about is the scientific
evidence for reincarnation.
And the University of Virginia, which is about
12 miles from where I'm sitting right now, For
the last six decades,
they've studied more than 2, 700 cases of
past life memories in children indicative of
reincarnation, of which 1, 700 of the cases were solved.
That is, they found the person who was
described by the child.
So this much bigger vision of consciousness is one that
is here in the scientific community and certainly
in my very neighborhood.
Now, I was discovering this for my own on this
extraordinary journey.
And this beautiful message that came to me from
this lovely spiritual guide, the guardian angel
on the butterfly wing.
was you are deeply loved and cherished forever.
You have nothing to fear.
You are richly cared for.
And I cannot tell you how reassuring and validating
that was in that moment.
And it was around that time that I witnessed
the soft summer breeze that blew through.
And that breeze essentially changed everything because
given my complete amnesia and complete lack of knowledge
or of any kind of history of connection with human thought
that summer breeze was my first awareness of that
infinitely loving God force.
And I came back from this incredible journey realizing
that it doesn't matter if you want to call that deity
God or Allah, Brahman, Vishnu, Jehovah, Yahweh,
whatever the words are.
The truth of the matter is more than 90% of near
death experiencers from all different faith traditions
and, many who were previously agnostic or atheistic.
More than 90 percent of near death experiencers through
thousands of years come back
believing in an infinitely powerful, loving force at
the core of the universe.
So the reality of that presence defies the fact that
we can't necessarily nail it down with a proper label.
That's why it's so important to have your
own practice of centering prayer, going within,
meditation, what have you,
to develop your own personal relationship
with that loving force.
Now for me on this journey, it turns out that those
angelic choirs provided yet another portal to a
higher and higher level.
And what I remember is that all of four
dimensional space time, the kind of lowest material
realm, collapsed down.
And then this entire spiritual region, this gateway valley
as I called it, that same realm where you can experience
birth, death, everything in between, You have left time.
You are no longer just remembering events
that occurred in a lifetime, in Earth time.
You're reliving those events.
That's the power of that realm.
But given my amnesia, I was not to have an Eben
Alexander life review.
I had life reviews presented to me in two very powerful
fashions in the next stages of this journey.
Because with these angelic choirs providing yet another
portal, All of that deep time, as I call it or meta time.
That's the causal relationship that occurs in that spiritual
realm, which is of complete order of magnitude beyond what
we experience here, because you can have all the events
of your life simultaneously presented in that deep time.
Very important concept, because this explains a lot
about How reincarnation and all that can still honor
that our loved ones will absolutely be
there when we pass over.
To help welcome us into that realm.
And people are often concerned when they hear all this
evidence for reincarnation.
Oh no, what if they've reincarnated
before I get there?
No.
I can tell you from my experience that
just doesn't happen.
That's the importance of understanding this different
temporal layer in that in that mystical, spiritual realm.
But what that led me up into is what I call the core.
And I remember seeing all of, even that spiritual
realm collapsing down until
what I saw was this complex over sphere that
was there for teaching, and to me that over sphere
was basically the universe throughout all of eternity,
but it showed me the much bigger aspects of
the universe that I was trying to understand.
And in that core realm, all dualities.
Come into oneness, masculine, feminine, light,
dark, good, evil, etc.
All the different dualities of this world
come together into oneness in that beautiful realm.
And I also came to see that the very source of
our conscious awareness.
is that deity, that God force of pure love.
And it's important to understand that even though
you may see apparent conflict and, apparent darkness
and evil and all that kind of on the way into this,
as you get closer and closer to that spiritual core of
what I call the core you're getting to a level where
it's pure oneness and love.
In other words the apparent darkness and evil isn't
even part of the original sourcing equation.
This is all part of that one mind and we're sharing
the dreams of that one mind in all of this process.
Now, it turns out that in that core realm, I
was taught many things.
The two visions I did have that showed me both life
reviews and reincarnation, even though I couldn't
have an Eben Alexander life Review because of my amnesia.
One I call the flying fish version.
That's as it sounds.
The flying fish down in the water.
That's our bodies in the material realm.
Dumbed down, not knowing all that our higher souls know
about the bigger picture.
But then when we die, we come back up.
Reunite with higher soul, with souls of departed loved ones.
Go through life reviews.
Plan next incarnations for further growth.
learning and teaching, and then dive back in.
The second vision was on a separate passage through the
Core Realm, and that was what I call the Indra's Net vision.
That was far grander, showing me life reviews
and reincarnation and a profound kind of
Indra's Net, this higher dimensional network of web,
where basically everything we did had influences that would
It would influence out into the universe and you could see
how we were all interconnected in this Indra's net vision.
And it was that binding force of love that was so important.
Now it turns out, again, I would tumble back down into
that earthworm eye view.
I cycled through these realms several times.
I learned that by remembering the musical notes, the melody,
that's how I could conjure up all these light portals.
And always many lessons I've spent 15 years since
my coma, unpacking those lessons in meditation.
I use sacred acoustics, which is a very powerful form
of differential frequency brainwave entrainment.
And I use that form of meditation basically daily.
And a lot of that effort is not just to recover
memories from my NDE,
but to develop ongoing relationships with the
guides and the force and that incredible love force
at the core of that realm.
Every bit of that is what I've been doing for the
15 years since with this program of meditation.
It turns out, as I said, I would cycle
through those levels.
Every time I entered into the core realm, I was told,
you're not here to stay.
You'll be going back.
I'd even come to believe that going back, just going back
to that earth worm eye view.
And for me, that was no problem, because I'd
learned that by remembering
the musical notes and the melody in my mind, I could
conjure up that light portal.
And that would always take me up to the next level.
But there came a point where, as they promised me,
you're not here to stay, I could no longer conjure
up the light portal up into that gateway valley.
To say I was sad at that point would be an understatement.
But I also knew that I could trust in the universe, that
I would be taken care of.
And it was at that point that I saw thousands of beings
going off around me, off into the distance, many with heads
bowed like that holding arms up, some holding candles.
And this murmuring energy was coming back from them.
The surprising thing was I now tumbled back down to this
murky kind of earthworm's eye view, that primitive level
where everything started.
And previously the incredible...
Joy and bliss to see I had experienced in the spiritual
realms, in the gateway valley and the core realm was not
really present in that lowest level in the earthworm's
eye view, but now it was.
Because of this murmuring energy of these people around
me thousands of them, and when I labeled all that, when I
came back to this world and was writing it all up, I said
that those were prayers, and that was the power of prayer
leading me back to this world.
And the final stage of my near death experience were the
six faces I saw at the very end of it all.
They were very important.
Five of them were physically present in the ICU room the
last 24 hours I was in coma.
Now, there were many other family and friends who had
been there earlier in the week who I had no memory of.
And what this helped me to realize is the vast majority
of my coma journey had to happen between days one
and four or one in five of the seven day coma.
And I explained that timing in the book Proof of Heaven
and then elaborate more on that in the book Living
in a Mindful Universe.
But it was really the last of those faces that I would
say is the most important.
That was the one that actually compelled me to
come back to this world.
It was of a ten year old boy.
Now, I didn't recognize him at this time, but
it was my son, Bond.
Great name.
It turns out that that he was 10 years old.
They'd given him the sugar coated version of
the story, Dad's sick.
Then he saw Dad on a ventilator, unresponsive,
worried about that.
And they hadn't told him the worst news, but
it was day 7 of coma.
And the doctors held a family conference where they said
I'd gone from a 10 percent chance of survival down to 2%.
But with no chance of recovery.
And they were recommending stopping the antibiotics and
taking me off the ventilator.
Just letting nature take its course.
But turns out Bond overheard all that and
now realized it was much worse than he'd been told.
So he came running down the hallway and I was lying
there on my ventilator.
Eyes taped shut, he pulled open my eyelids.
One eye looking over there, one eye over there,
neither pupil working.
Any of your audience in medicine will know that's
a horrible picture.
And I promise you, I did not hear him with my ears, I
didn't see him with my eyes.
But somehow, his pleading with me, Daddy, you're
going to be okay, Daddy, you're going to be okay.
Even though I didn't understand the words, but it
was that emotional engagement of our connection, that
pleading, that somehow I had to be back there for him.
Whatever that meant.
And it's the toughest thing I've ever done
in my entire existence.
Crawling out of there.
I often use the analogy,
it was like crawling out of a gravel pit where every
time you reach up, everything collapses in around you.
I had to do it.
I had to get back for him.
In some way, I was able to come back to this world and,
the next thing I knew, I'm fighting the ventilator and
they pulled the tube out.
I said, thank you.
Now, my brain was still very addled by this
serious infection.
And even though I was coming around, it was
still deeply involved.
And in fact, over the next 36 hours, after they took out the
breathing tube, I was in and out of a paranoid, delusional,
psychotic nightmare
that I described briefly in the book, Proof of Heaven.
But it was wild.
And the interesting thing about it was that those
memories as much as they seemed a little more real
than a normal nightmare, I knew they were delusional
while it was happening.
And also those memories faded within about two weeks.
Whereas the deep coma memories,
the spiritual journey that I describe in the
book, that incredible richness, that, those
memories are as sharp now
as if the whole thing happened yesterday.
Gigantic difference, and there have been papers,
scientific papers, written about the resilience and
stability of NDE memories that corroborates this.
These are not, hallucinations or dreams.
These are profound memories that rival real,
lived events in terms of their kind of tenacity
and their staying power.
People would often come up to me after I gave a talk
and share something with me and they'd say, I never told
anybody this before, but,
and then they'd share an after death communication or a
deathbed vision, a near death experience, what have you.
Might have happened 50 years ago.
But they remember it perfectly because these
things transform your lives.
They're incredibly rich dives into the nature of
reality that's much grander than what we normally assume
to be our human condition.
And they're much more indicators of kind of
the spiritual nature of the universe and our
spiritual nature as beings.
And by spiritual, I simply mean interconnected through
that mental layer and also with a shared meaning and
purpose, because that's ultimately what emerges
from near death experiences and from a broad review
of this literature.
At any rate, over two months,
all my memories returned.
That was shocking.
In fact, in our book, Living in a Mindful Universe,
Karen and I talk about how memories are not
even stored in the brain.
It's something that neurosurgeons have
suspected for a long time that was false.
And yet it's such a nail in the coffin of materialist
neuroscience that it's not often discussed.
And yet, if you go back to
Wilder Penfield, the renowned Canadian neurosurgeon who
wrote a book in 1975, Mystery of the Mind, he makes it
very clear that consciousness
is not something that you can simply explain as
a result of brain work.
And in fact, through his career, he went through,
as a neuroscientist, as a neurosurgeon, working on awake
patients with electrodes.
I did a lot of those operations myself.
But Penfield...
Basically concluded that memories were not to be stored
anywhere in the neocortex.
Now, of course, there was enough materialism
still around in 75, that he thought you got to put
it somewhere, so I guess it's in the brainstem.
But when you hear all these reincarnation stories in the
modern literature, you realize those memories are not being
stored in any brain at all.
80 percent of the reincarnation cases
are not related.
So there's no way to even postulate, a DNA
connection or heredity when 80 percent of them are
not from the same family.
But in other words,
we need a much bigger model to explain consciousness and
memory than the simplistic and outmoded model that
the physical brain somehow is storing those memories.
And so I've spent the 15 years since my coma working with
scientists around the world.
And this includes if people wanna go check out the
groups that I work with.
Go to scientific and medical.net or go to
galileo commission.org.
Those are both scientific groups that I've worked
with for a while.
And they are coming up with models of reality that go far
beyond the simplistic and.
Basically, paltry fiction of materialism that pretends
that only the physical world exists and that we
don't even have free will.
There's obviously much more that we can learn about the
human condition from all this, but it really implies
that we're all eternal souls and we're all working
together on this kind of evolution of consciousness.
That's basically where my NDE has taken me
and I'd like to...
Address any questions or comments and get deeper
into it all with you.
Rod Bland: So when you came back, or I guess when you
re regained consciousness was it like when you were
on the other side, so you didn't know who you
were as Eben Alexander, but you had this memory
of where you'd just been?
Eben Alexander: All I remembered when I came
back to this world, when I was waking up on that ICU
bed was where I had been.
That was the only experience of my, in my memory, period.
That was it.
But I very quickly was regaining language, literally
within hours of waking up and starting to recognize those
loved ones at the bedside.
Initially I was very confused about them and very confused
about a lot of things.
But I quickly, within hours, a day or two, started recovering
plenty of memories of those relationships to start putting
it all back in context.
But, this new Eben Alexander was one who had been through
something quite astonishing and completely unexpected
based on my prior worldview.
I was also very busy trying to tell my doctors about
this, what had happened to me, and they would just pat
me on the back and say your brain was soaking in pus.
We don't have any idea how you're even coming back to us.
You can forget about it because a dying brain
plays all kinds of tricks.
Okay, I believe my doctors, I should forget about it,
but I wanted to write it all down because it was such
a fascinating experience.
And in fact, by the time I got out of the hospital a
few weeks later, it was two days before Thanksgiving,
Now, I remember my older son, Evan IV, who was majoring in
neuroscience in college at the time, and he had been there
during part of my coma, so he knew just how ill I was.
In fact, he thought they lost me but he had gone back
to school after I started waking up took some exams,
and then he came home, and he drove overnight
to surprise me.
He'd heard that I was staying up all night
because I couldn't sleep
because I was so energized by the spiritual experience.
And he drove overnight.
He came home the day before Thanksgiving,
gave me a big hug.
And he told me much later that it was like when he gave
me that hug, like there was a light shining within me
that I was far more present than I'd ever been before.
And I remember telling him, it was all way
too real to be real.
That's the way I, that ultra reality.
That's how I put it into words because I always
believe in my doctors.
Trick of the dying brain,
but I had not yet begun to review my medical records.
That was weeks and months into the future, and as I did
that, I started realizing no
this brain was not there creating some wild
hallucination or dream because this brain was
far too damaged.
It could not have done that and that of course,
as I said, is why the scientific community takes
my story so seriously,
but the the reality that was coming to me is all the
memories started coming back.
And in fact, the memories of my distant past life or
distant early life in this body were more complete than
they had been before the coma.
I figured that out with conversations with family
and friends about certain things that occurred
way back in early life.
And realized that those details were clearer in
my memory after the coma than they had been before.
So it was a beautiful example of how our brain
serves as an interface.
It's a filter to that primordial consciousness.
And it accesses memories and it accesses this kind of
lifeline of our existence.
But ultimately the brain is not the creator of
that conscious awareness.
The universe is conscious, essentially.
That's what this is teaching us in a very deep fashion.
The very same consciousness that came up with the Big Bang
and so many other, aspects of our emerging reality.
That is the consciousness we share, that God force is one.
At the deepest levels of our journeys, we find that is
the source of our conscious awareness and that we
all have the same source.
So it's all shared.
That's why this notion of the life of you as being
the golden rule written into the fabric of the
universe is so important.
If you hurt others, you're hurting yourself, and
the more the deep lesson of NDE's of this oneness
and this binding force of love can come to fruition,
the more harmonious and prosperous this world
will be for all of our fellow sentient beings.
Rod Bland: Now, I think I remember the lady on
the butterfly on the butterfly wing, there's a
special certificates there.
Could you tell us more about that?
Eben Alexander: I'll tell you a little bit.
I don't want to have to give out a spoiler alert for
people who haven't read the
Rod Bland: that's a good point.
Eben Alexander: it's a...
It's a fantastic,
that's one of the reasons people absolutely love that
book, plus it, the book Proof of Heaven, and it's also a
reason that so many people contacted me because it, it
reawakened in them memories of their own journeys.
Of things that had happened to them that they had suppressed,
between lives, what have you.
But yes, that is an important point.
It has a lot to do with kind of the overall
challenge of my life.
And that has to do with the fact that I was adopted.
I tell a lot of that story in the book, Proof of Heaven.
I was put up for adoption by my 16 year old unwed
mother at age 11 days.
I was basically taken by social services because
of failure to thrive.
I went on a hunger strike, which babies that
are not wanted by their mothers often will do.
And so social services had taken me on and my birth
mother could no longer claim me after that Christmas
break when they had taken me.
But she wasn't willing to sign the papers to give me up.
So I basically got stuck in purgatory in this baby dorm
in Greensboro, North Carolina for four months until my
birth mother was willing to sign the papers to let me go.
And then I couldn't have been luckier.
I couldn't have been adopted into a better family.
a loving family that honored all my hopes and dreams.
I had three sisters in that family.
The older one was adopted.
The younger two were the biological children
of my adopted parents.
But the important thing is I went through most
of my life not knowing about anything of the
details of that connection.
And there was a deep kind of subconscious worry.
And I was not conscious of this, but it was operative
at a subconscious level.
that maybe I wasn't even worthy of love.
And I think that affected a lot of my relationships
with people and whether or not I could trust the world.
And in
so many ways, this whole journey of working towards
my NDE and then beyond was part of the sole journey of
answering that question of whether or not I was worthy
of love in this universe.
And what I will tell you in terms of answering
your question is that I finally met my birth family
a year before my coma.
That also that story's all told in proof of Heaven.
And that was a beautiful reunion.
I felt a huge part of my past had now been locked
into place and I now understood so much more.
It started me on a pathway of understanding the answer
to that question, whether or not I was loved, but I
needed the n D E to fully answer that question, and
that's why I dove in deep
and in fact that beautiful guardian angel had to be
somewhat important in my life.
And it turns out that she was,
and that had to do with that birth family and a
sister that I never knew.
I won't go into any more detail than that.
But suffice it to say, it was a mind bender that
shocked me to my knees when I did figure it all out.
And it also proved to me the reality of my journey
in a very strong fashion.
I already knew all of this seemed way too real to
be real, but then to fit it all into my life in a
meaningful and powerful way was extraordinary.
And that was the gift.
Rod Bland: People often use that description is
it's more real than real.
And I've had a single out of body experience.
And when I try to explain to people and they go, okay
well, you sure you weren't dreaming and said well,
I, you know, when you're dreaming, but you really know
when you're dreaming after you've had a different kind
of experience like an NDE or an OBE because there's
this essence of reality to it that just doesn't exist
in our present reality and it's really hard to explain.
It's just one of those things you have to experience
and then you get it, but otherwise it's really just a
concept that's quite foreign.
Eben Alexander: I think you're exactly right, and that's
why a lot of people were attracted to Proof of Heaven.
There were thousands of people who wrote to me after that
book came out sharing, how that had awakened in them a
sense of a similar journey and a bigger existence.
As you say it's hard to put your finger on it.
It's certainly way beyond the linguistic description
of these journeys.
But it has more to do with kind of their overwhelming
power of of reliving these events and getting this
much richer, deeper sense of connection with the universe.
It's a very beautiful lesson in actually existing to go
through these kinds of things.
And then come back to this world and have that as a
touch point as a, a mile post that you contacted.
Bathing in that ocean of consciousness is something
that always can serve me well in terms of these journeys.
And I know when I present this to other NDEers, for
example that's especially when that heart resonance
of understanding comes out and you realize
that the communication goes far beyond just our
language and our words.
There's something much deeper about our connections,
especially in sharing these kind of profound spiritual
journeys that leads us into some common ground.
Rod Bland: Yeah, there's our senses are quite limited,
like our five senses, they're not limited but...
There's so much more to your experience of consciousness
than that was what I remember.
It was like there was this sort of ongoing essence
of joyful cheerfulness.
So that's hard to explain, but it was like everything was
really vibrant and everyone who was there was really
happy and great to see you.
And
Eben Alexander: This is something that my partner
Karen Newell has pointed out to me very well.
She's become a student of Christopher Kerr, K E R R.
He's a hospice doctor in Buffalo, New York.
So all he writes about is hospice, terminal care,
patients who are dying.
But it turns out that you find the exact same
themes are coming to them.
You have reuniting with souls of departed loved ones.
You have them resolving some of the big
issues in their life.
If there were things that they had done in their life where
they had a lot of guilt or shame and they had hurt others
they end up able to make amends and to do that
in real time with the spiritual ingredients
of these encounters.
So the dying experience from the hospice world is
identical to what happens in near death experiences and
shared death experiences.
Shared death are just like near death but they happen
to perfectly healthy people.
Often people who might be loved ones, say a
thousand miles away from a mother who is dying,
but when the mother dies and leaves, and her soul
leaves her body, it goes through and grabs the
soul of the loved one,
who might be a thousand miles away, takes that along even
to the point of witnessing a full blown life review
with the mother's soul, but then the bystander soul
comes back to this world.
And those shared death experiences have many
of the same ingredients of near death.
And yet, as I said,
they usually happen in people who are perfectly healthy.
So they completely defy those materialist
pseudo explanations of, decreased oxygen tension or
increased carbon dioxide if somebody's body is dying.
But no, you don't need those ingredients for these
incredible spiritual journeys.
And anybody who wants to learn more about shared
death experiences should read
Raymond Moody's book, Glimpses of Eternity.
I think it came out in 2011, but that's all about
shared death, completely.
And then also follow the work of William Peters.
If you Google Shared Crossing Project,
he's in Santa Barbara.
California,
and which enables people to learn techniques that might
enhance their ability to share the dying experience with a
loved one who is terminal.
And he's, William Peters was just a guest with us
and he's claiming some very good success with this.
He's recently written a book.
It's called At Heaven's Door.
I highly recommend it.
And that will help people get up to speed with shared
death experiences, which are an extraordinary kind
of extension of near death into explaining our spiritual
nature the spiritual nature of the universe at large.
Highly recommend people get into learning more about
shared death experiences.
Rod Bland: That's very interesting.
That sounds a bit like the, I think it's the Gateway
Experience Program at the Monroe Institute, where they
are learning how to escort, other people who have, who
are passing or have passed to the sort of next part
Eben Alexander: Exactly.
In fact, that was my original introduction to
binaural beat brainwave entrainment was working
at the Monroe Institute.
So I'm very familiar with that.
Took that lifelines course where we were
actually there to
help souls who were stuck, who had died and yet
weren't certain they died and what have you, but
the many different ways that souls can get stuck.
And we were there helping them.
That's in fact the environment
where I met Karen Newell.
Because she also was there training learning how to teach
people to use these sounds
to get into deep hypnotic or deep states
of conscious awareness.
And in fact, I was the one who, once I listened to
what she and her business partner, Kevin Cossey,
he was a sound engineer.
They were putting together their own binaural beats.
They'd not shared them with anyone else.
Once I heard those back in early 2012, I said, you
guys really need to get these out to the world.
Now I'm one of their biggest customers and biggest fans.
I listen to Sacred Acoustics an hour to a day, and
I've been doing that for more than 11 years now.
But people can go to sacredacoustics.
com to learn a lot more.
I highly recommend it as a meditative tool and
just cuts the chase from a neuroscientific perspective.
The reason I think sacred acoustics is so powerful
is because it uses binaural beat brainwave entrainment
to engage a circuit way down the lower brainstem in this
ancient circuit by oscillating left and right back and
forth quickly with these binaural beat sound waves.
I believe that is what allows our conscious awareness to be
set free from the illusion of here, now, and sense of self.
So I highly recommend it.
People can learn a lot more at sacredacoustics.
com.
To learn about these meditative tools and
the different ways that you can use them.
Her site is very good for instructing people
about the details of these various programs
and how they've been used.
And it's important to note that Dr.
Anna Usim, Y U S I M, wrote a peer reviewed scientific study
of sacred acoustics binaural beat brainwave entrainment
that was published in the
Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases in, I think
it was in February of 2020 and basically they found
that in their busy Manhattan psychiatric practice,
that simply listening to binaural beats, sacred
acoustics gave a 26 percent reduction in anxiety
symptoms over two weeks.
And that's compared to only a 7 percent reduction in anxiety
symptoms in people who had standard of psychotalk therapy
but did not have the tones.
So by listening to Sacred Acoustics tones,
you had a dramatic improvement in alleviation
of anxiety symptoms.
This is very early in the pandemic.
So Karen, with all her generosity, It was important
to get these tones out to the world to relieve
anxiety, especially as the economic collapse added
on top of the pandemic.
And so she made the whole mind bundle, which was
the source material for that scientific paper.
showing such a reduction in anxiety.
She made that whole mind bundle available for a
discounted price of 19.
But she also included a free option because she
knew there'd be a lot of people because of the
pandemic who didn't have the financial wherewithal,
but would need something like this powerful tool.
And I believe that free option is still available.
Due to Karen and Sacred Acoustics generosity, people
can download and use that very same set of acoustic
files that were so effective in alleviating anxiety
in that scientific study.
Rod Bland: So there was something that you
mentioned was EndersNet.
It sounded like you said EndersNet.
Did I get that right?
Eben Alexander: Indra's
Rod Bland: Oh, EndresNet.
Okay.
Eben Alexander: It's from some ancient Eastern
teachings the notion of this interconnected web.
And that was just the vision that came to me after coming
out of coma and trying to describe and go through
the various elements of my journey that extraordinary
vision of the net
that I had in the core realm showed my interconnection
with all that was happening and showed that my actions
and thoughts and learning and teaching were also associated
with the transformation of consciousness itself.
Which I believe is the reason the whole universe exists,
is for this one mind to grow.
It's we're sharing the dream of the one mind in this
process of learning and teaching, and unpacking what
is possible for sentient beings to accomplish in
recognizing their connection with the universe at large.
And that's really what I see a lot of this as being this
kind of expanded sense of mission, of understanding that
we're all in this together, this process of discovery.
And it's really all about a deeper version
of know thyself.
That inscription over the temple of Apollo at Delphi
in Greece, Know thyself.
And I think that's ultimately what we're all
being challenged with.
And the interesting thing is you find that your mind is
not just related to this three and a half pound gelatinous
mass sitting in a warm, dark bath between your ears,
but your mind is sharing the mind of the universe.
And this becomes obvious, especially in our book,
Living in a Mindful Universe, we point out All the
different consilience lines of evidence that lead to this
notion of primacy of mind.
From the hard problem of consciousness in neuroscience,
to the binding problem, the apparent unity of
consciousness, which is very difficult to explain
in the individual if you're postulating that it's
all different neuronal populations contributing
in network fashion to this bigger version.
Why is consciousness so unified?
It's because it's unified from the get go.
We're sharing that one mind.
The brain is a filter that allows it in.
And then you have in this argument of consilience all
the evidence for non local consciousness, like telepathy.
Read Guy Lyon Playfair's book on twin telepathy.
You realize 35 percent of identical twins
have very powerful telepathic experiences.
Of course, they're easy to demonstrate in twins, but
they also occur in many other connections we have
with people where telepathy is real, remote viewing
is real, distance healing, and then you run into all
this kind of category of non local consciousness
in the form of near death.
Shared death experiences,
deathbed dreams and visions like in the hospice work,
and then of course after death communications would
probably happen in more than 50 percent of our
modern western population.
In fact, it's the population at large that's going to
be driving this revolution.
The scientific community is catching up, slowly
but surely, but ultimately it's people having these
experiences once they realize they don't violate science
and scientific principles.
But, in fact, are supported by the modern science
of quantum informed scientific investigation
of consciousness.
And really that's where this whole thing explodes.
And, for example, if anyone still thinks that this
is, talk of the afterlife and reincarnation is not
scientific, I would send you to BigelowInstitute.
org.
Because that's where you'll find 28 essays that were
written in the year 2021.
The challenge was from Robert Bigelow, an aerospace
engineer in Las Vegas, who said he'd lost his wife, his
son had committed suicide.
He wanted to know more about, are they really
still here in some form?
And so he put a question out to the scientific community.
What's the best scientific evidence for continuation
of consciousness after permanent bodily death?
And you had to demonstrate at least five years research
experience in the afterlife question to submit an essay.
But in that context, they got 204 essays.
They were going to give out 3 monetary prizes,
instead they gave out 28.
And you can read all 28 of those winning essays
at BigelowInstitute.
org And from my perspective, you read even that
first place essay by Jeffrey Mishlove and you realize...
We're far beyond questioning whether or not these
these things are real.
We're now into, okay, how do we work this into our larger
worldview of understanding?
But, the old heyday of
materialist pseudo skeptics, saying this is
nonsense, science disagrees with this, are gone.
Because quantum physics actually demands...
This kind of free will openness of
sentience that we share
and doesn't allow for that complete determinism that
I thought before my coma based on my materialist
scientific studies.
And once people start reading these essays,
and if you're looking especially for the deep and
profound scientific essays in that BigelowInstitute.
org group, I would steer you to
Bernardo Kastrup, and I would steer you to
Pim van Lommel, who won second place,
and I would steer you to julie Beichel,
Now, many of the other essays are excellent,
but these three in particular are the strongest kind
of scientific footing, I think, for defining
this afterlife question.
Rod Bland: I was going to ask the question, at what
point do you think that the NDE experience or other
spiritually transforming experience are going to
inform the current view of reality that science has, but
it almost sounds like that's really already been answered.
Perhaps it's more that mainstream disseminators of
information like media, etc.
really haven't caught up yet.
I think that's probably more
what the issue is.
Eben Alexander: It turns out, there's this incredible
and unbelievable prejudice among science writers.
They are hardcore materialists, even though
many in the scientific community are leaving
that behind because they realize with quantum physics
and especially with the
2022 Nobel Prize in physics going for entanglement, which
is right there at the heart of the mystery of quantum physics
that defies the normal notions of space time as
being the theater in which this all happens from a
scientific perspective.
But the astonishing thing is how they do not seem
capable of understanding this revolution.
The revolution is gigantic.
Read the Bigelow Institute essays and you'll get it.
This is all in process.
It's happening.
And yet, for example, there was a paper of a
month or two ago that was talking about this burst
of electrical activity that happens in a brain, right
around the time of death.
And everybody made this giant deal of these, I think it
was two cases reported and this was on top of an earlier
study where in mice that were being euthanized they saw this
burst of electrical activity.
Bruce Grayson and Pim Van Lommel put out a
public response to that misinterpretation by
science journalists.
That continue to trumpet materialism as an explanation
for NDEs, because in fact, When you review, for example,
Pim Van Lommel's own study of hundreds of patients
who had cardiac arrest and had near death experiences,
you'll find the EEG goes flatline in 15 to 20 seconds.
Period.
End of story.
So nobody expects any kind of EEG activity to be
associated with NDEs based on the NDE literature itself.
And Pim Van Lommel and Bruce Grayson made that absolutely
crystal clear to some science writers who still don't get it
and continue to pretend that brain activity causes this.
The exact point from the deep literature on NDE's is
that you don't have brain activity in these people.
You have flat EEGs in the cases where it's measured.
So walk away from that silly nonsense and let's get rid
of this stupid materialist assumption that the brain
is creating consciousness.
Another place where this is very relevant is a
whole series of scientific papers that have come
out in the last 11 years.
Looking at people under the influence of
psychedelic substances like psilocybin, magic mushrooms,
DMT, dimethyltryptamine, active principle in ayahuasca,
LSD, one of the most potent serotonin 2A psychedelic
substances known.
And in all the scientific papers using functional
MRI, magnetoencephalography,
ways of really looking at detailed neuronal activity
in the brain, what you find is people under the influence
of things like psilocybin.
The default mode network, which is the network that's
normally thought to be the kind of ego network of what
happens when you're sitting there doing nothing but
just existing and aware of your existence, that
network completely dissolves under psilocybin and same
thing with LSD and DMT.
And so what we find is the brain activity is not going
to explain those incredible, phenomenal experiences under
those psychedelic substances.
So why would we demand that the brain somehow explain
these other activities that occur when people die and
when their soul is in the process of leaving their body?
The bottom line is these are not created by the brain.
You've got to give up on materialism or physicalism
because it's inadequate.
To answer these questions we need bigger models
like idealism, which is where we go in our book,
Living in a Mindful Universe, the primacy of the
mental over the physical.
And in fact, if you really listen to all the words we're
saying in this talk about NDE's and that loving God
force and how all of this is really around the one
mind and how we're connected through that mental layer.
You'll realize that it's not just simple idealism,
but we're really pushing for what might be called in
a philosophical discussion, evolutionary panentheism.
That's a better philosophical description
of where we're headed.
But ultimately it's all just saying that
the physical universe is emergent from the
realm of the mental.
And that we have much more power over that
than we might think.
And for me as a healer, as a doctor, where that then
leads is into placebo effect, which is an acknowledgement
of our six or seven decades that our thoughts,
beliefs, and attitudes can influence our healing.
And then you get into spontaneous remission.
And then finally you get into the category of miraculous
healing in the setting of near death experiences
that begin to show us this power of understanding our
spiritual nature and its ability to influence
our emerging reality has tremendous power to
bring us into wholeness.
That is healing.
So any kind of physical, mental, emotional healing,
ultimately, will be spiritual healing, fundamentally.
And that spiritual doesn't need any kind of religious
ingredient at all.
Even though religions can help people get into deep
spiritual states, but sometimes religious ideologies
work against spirituality.
Because ultimately, spirituality is teaching us
we're all in this together.
We're bound through the forces of love.
The best way to free ourselves and others is with kindness,
mercy, acceptance, love, when necessary, forgiveness.
But get rid of this sick and toxic false sense of
separation that comes out of materialism and let's move on
with the scientific revolution that proves the oneness of our
consciousness and how we're all truly in this together.
Rod Bland: I love your passion, Dr.
Alexander, and you've given us a whole bunch of other
like further reading materials as well, which I'll try to
capture all these and put them in the description.
So how about you just tell us everything you've got
going on as I know you've mentioned a few of your books
and just tell us everything you've got going if people
want to find out more about your work and what you do
and get involved that way.
Eben Alexander: People can certainly go to
Eben, E B E N, alexander.
com to learn more
and I would especially recommend on there, there's
a page that has a lot of the media, a lot of the
interviews and podcasts.
There's a page with FAQ that addresses some
of the main questions,
especially that you encounter out in the
lay press about my case.
And then also I would recommend the
recommended reading list.
More than a hundred references.
Many of them have hot links to the scientific
papers involved.
And they're categorized.
And I try to update that on something of a frequent basis.
But I think evanalexander.
com is an excellent starting point.
The books, Proof of Heaven,
Map of Heaven.
And especially important
is Living in a Mindful Universe.
That's the real proof of heaven.
That's the one that unites science and spirituality.
That was co written with my partner, Karen Newell,
who's also the co founder of Sacred Acoustics.
And we talk in there not only about the scientific
revolution, but a lot of personal recommendations about
meditation and about doing this journey yourself, so a
lot of personal guidance is in Living in a Mindful Universe.
Also highly recommended, sacredacoustics.
com.
That's Karen's website.
She has on their page, I want to dot dot, and all the many
things you might want to do with meditation are there.
And she has specific pathways of the different sacred
acoustics audio files that might be useful, but you
don't have to pay a penny.
You can just either download that free 20 minute OM file,
or you could download that whole mind bundle.
Like I said earlier, it's a very discounted price now
at 19, but she still has for those who are financially
challenged as the pandemic leaves us behind, she still
has that free option available for that whole mind bundle.
So people can jump in full speed ahead.
The other website I'd recommend is
inner sanctum center.
com.
That's I N E R.
SanctumCenter.
com
and that has a number of different possibilities that
Karen and I have come up with that's really through Karen's
wisdom to have that website there and especially I would
recommend the interviews we did during the pandemic
about a year and a half's worth of interviews every
two weeks that we did
with thought leaders around the world
in consciousness studies, many of the scientific endorsers
of our book we interviewed, other experiencers we
interviewed, and there's also a monthly session, Zoom
session that we hold with a lot of people who like to
follow us that's available through innersanctumcenter.
com.
We have a tremendous time on that monthly broadcast.
I love it with people who are deeply into this line
of work and they join us every month for that.
And there's also a mental health practitioner
course available at intersanctumcenter.
com.
That's a course that Karen and I taught with Dr.
Anna Usom.
A very valuable practical course on bringing this into
a mental health practice.
So there are all these different options.
And then of course the other ones that I mentioned
the scientificandmedical.
net and
the galileocommission.
org, especially important scientific resources.
Rod Bland: Okay, terrific.
I'm going to have a lot of additional reading to do over
the next little while I think.
Is there any final message that you'd like to leave
people with before we wrap up our conversation today?
Eben Alexander: I think the most important thing to
say is no soul left behind.
This revolution will impact each and every one of us.
Each and every one of us has a certain responsibility
to ourselves and others to enlighten ourselves about
this, to come into deeper knowing of why we're here
and what this is all about.
And it ultimately is very comforting.
When you face up to things like death or
loss of a loved one
to realize that we're eternal souls,
which is essentially what this deeper scientific
message is trying to tell us I think can be very comforting
very reassuring and very affirming of what people
seem to sense at a deeper level about our connection.
No soul left behind.
And it's all about that binding force of love.
Rod Bland: Eben, your enthusiasm is contagious.
I really applaud that.
I know you're like getting on in years, but you
don't seem to be slowing down one little bit.
So that's really something to admire.
Eben Alexander: I love doing this and Rod, thank you for
getting this out to the world.
I'm so glad you're doing that.
And we know we have some following there in
Australia and hopefully they can band together and
start helping each other and helping other people.
And this is all about helping our fellow beings.
So let's get together and do it.
Rod Bland: all right I appreciate you being
my guest today, Eben.
I'll see you soon.
Eben Alexander: All right, Rod, thanks so much.
Good talking with you.
Look forward to next time.