I’m Dr. Eben Alexander. I’ve been in academic neurosurgery for more than 20 years. And I had a very profound near-death experience with bacterial meningitis, back in November 2008. And that has helped me to come to a much greater understanding of our existence.
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Everything had been going very normally in my life until 4:30 in the morning of November 10, 2008. And I woke up with severe back pain. And it was much worse than anything I’ve ever had before. And it got much worse quickly. And from then on, I was already going down so much I didn’t know that I was going into coma.
And my wife called 911. And the EMTs came and packed me up. I was having grand mal seizures that were difficult to break. And then into the emergency room.
And my first awareness deep in coma was a monotonous, kind of, pounding, murky existence that, in my book, I refer to as the earthworms eye view. And given that I had no recollection of a life before this, I seem to be there for a very long time.
And then, I was rescued by this spinning white light. This beautiful melody so different from that murky, horrific existence that I had been in for eons. And it opened up as a rip into a whole new beautiful world of rich, complex, lovely valley with blossoming flowers and greenery everywhere.
I had no body awareness whatsoever. I was a speck of knowing, a speck of awareness on a butterfly wing. Millions of the butterflies that were swooping and swirling and just absolutely rich and vibrant. Very responsive, interactive world with a beautiful girl beside me on the butterfly wing. And that realm, I call the gateway. And that was en route to going out of this universe, into this immense infinite black void that was very comforting, full of love, of knowing of the divine, of this beautiful loving, creative source behind it. Far more awesome than I ever, ever could have imagined.
And this brilliant orb of light. And it was my consciousness, which was there as consciousness of all eternity and all of higher dimensional multiverse with that orb of light and that divine creative source. And it was there that I was told– not in words, but the concepts that there were many things I would be taught and then, I’d be going back. And then, I would find myself back in that earthworm eye view.
And I learned that by remembering the melody– that beautiful melody– that white light would come spinning again and open up and take me back up in that gateway with the beautiful girl, and the butterflies, and the blossoming flowers. And then outside of this universe into that immense void. And more of those lessons with the divine. And I made that cycle several times. And that was mysterious, at first. And it was only months after I came out of coma that I was able to understand more about what that all meant.
The good news about all of this is that you don’t have to almost die to get there. What I’ve found is through meditation, through centering prayer, I can get back into that realm. And I think mystics have known this for millennia– that within our own consciousness, each and every one of us has the ability to go deep into that realm. And to know the power and awe of that creative loving source that’s at the origin of everything.
One thing I do remember as I was coming back from deep in this coma experience was arcs and arcs of people around me going off into the darkness. Kneeling, many of them with hoods and candles. And there was all this murmuring coming up. And it was creating this energy– this beautiful energy that was bubbling me up.
And when you read my story, you’ll find that this followed realizing that I could no longer get into that beautiful idyllic realm. The melody no longer worked. I was very comforted by this assemblage of people around me. And what I came to realize as I was writing this all up within the next few weeks when I left the hospital is that those people were praying for me.
To the families, know that those prayers get in because they make a tremendous difference to those who are making the transition. And I would not say that I can claim that those prayers brought me back because, I think, my coming back had to do with a much higher plan that I don’t understand even now. But I can tell you that the prayers did get through to me. And they were very comforting at a crucial time. And for that, I am very grateful.
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