Brief Review of “Proof of Heaven,” by Eben Alexander

Synopsis

The author, a neurosurgeon with a thoroughly materialistic view of life and consciousness, suffers a case of meningitis of a very rare type. Within hours he has fallen into a deep coma where he remains, desperately ill, for the next seven days. Just when the doctors have begun to give up hope, he awakens.

From early on in his recovery, as he is suffering from ICU psychosis, his only clear memories are of an experience of another world, a “near death experience” (NDE). (“Despite that initial moment of seemingly full lucidity when my eyes first opened, I soon once again had no memory of my human life before coma. My only memory was of where I had just been: the rough, ugly Realm of the Earthworm’s-Eye View, the idyllic Gateway, and the awesome heavenly Core” [Kindle location 1527]).

As his recovery progresses and his mind returns to normal, Alexander recognizes that he has in fact experienced the real world, the world beyond our own four-dimensional one. The main reasons for his certainty that the world is real and not imagined are:

• His higher (neocortical) brain was completely non-functional during the entire period of the coma.
• The experience was extremely vivid and realistic, unlike any dream or hallucination.
• He received transcendent knowledge that remained with him, though not easily verbalizable, after he recovered.
• His entire outlook on the world and life was transformed. It was obvious to him, afterward, that the universe is the domain of a loving, personal God and that we are here for a purpose.
• He sees his experience as fitting within a long line of similar ones attested to throughout history.

The narrative of the experience is fairly short (only about 15% of the body of the book). The author describes it in terms of a journey through different locations, while warning us that neither space nor time meant anything like they do in our world. At one end of the journey was a non-descript, netherworld-like, primordial existence, while at the other end was the realm of God (often referred to as Om). Between them was an earth-like world which the author soared over on the wings of a butterfly, guided by a Beatrice-like girl who could answer his questions and explain the truths of this non-physical world.

Alexander emphasizes the difficulty of putting the experience and new knowledge into words, but several main points are clear.

• The world (including our physical one and the wider spiritual one) is filled with purpose and love, the creation of a personal God who has very human qualities
• Every person is precious and loved.
• Our lives have meaning. Our decisions and activities matter in the ultimate scheme of things. Paradoxically, however, “There is nothing you can do wrong.”
• There are countless higher dimensions and universes, but all are connected in some way. All are based on love. Each includes small amounts of evil, the unavoidable price of giving creatures free will. Ultimately, though, love will triumph over evil.
• Rather than being physical beings, animals who have somehow developed consciousness, we are really “spiritual beings currently inhabiting our evolutionarily developed mortal brains and bodies.” Fundamentally we are spirit or mind, but a kind of mind that operates at lightning speed (or beyond time). The brain functions as a “filter” to mediate between the limited physical world (including our bodies) and our true, transcendent mind.
• Creatures from the higher world look after us and in some way respond to our needs. Our prayers are important and are heard.

But was it real?

I see no reason to dismiss the account out of hand, whether as a fabrication or hallucination. Assuming that the publishers have done basic fact checking (that the author is who he claims to be, that he experienced such an illness, etc.), Dr. Alexander is a competent, rational, educated person with no obvious reason to make up the story. He is also an expert on many aspects of brain function. Still, as with any first-person narrative, it would make sense to investigate further, checking with other witnesses and any documents including medical records. One important factual question would be when Dr. Alexander first spoke to another person about his NDE.

I am open to the possibility that the experience reflects reality (a world “above”), and even hope that it does. I do have some concerns, which I mention not to discredit it, but to point out areas which should make us cautious about leaping to the conclusion that it is in fact a “Proof of Heaven.”

First and most important is the question of when the experience occurred. The author simply assumes throughout the book that it happened during the coma, but what evidence is there for that? Assuming that it did happen during the coma, how could he know that since he was not aware of the external world and able to correlate the timing of the NDE with outside events? It seems that from a this-worldly point of view, he would not have been able to remember or reconstruct the experience until he had recovered from the coma; by then, how could he know that it occurred while he was comatose rather than in an in-between state?

Consider this possibility: the patient is indeed deeply comatose, with no higher brain functions. At some point, the brain recovers enough to regain consciousness, but is still in a dysfunctional state whether from drugs, ICU psychosis, sensory deprivation, or whatever. Alexander himself points out that after a brief period of lucidity, he was “crazy.” The NDE could have occurred during the early awakening or later, stormy period, and have been retrojected into the past. The author mentions something like this as the “reboot “ hypothesis, only to discount it with, “But this seems most unlikely given the intricacies and interactivity of my elaborate recollections.” I agree that it seems hard to imagine a sick, rebooting brain creating such detail and meaning from scratch, but I’m not sure it is less plausible than the alternative that the experience was real.

The second question is whether Dr. Alexander’s brain was truly incapable of creating the NDE. He emphasizes repeatedly that his neocortex was non-functional. It was “out of the picture,” “inoperative,” “down,” essentially “absent,” “damaged,” “off,” and even “devoured” by the bacteria. Perhaps so, but I would like to hear more evidence. Alexander is a neurosurgeon, so should have a very good idea of how clinical states correlate with brain activity, but he does not go into detail. Given the depth of the coma and the consideration of whether he was beyond recovery, were not brain-function studies done? Was the cortex metabolizing glucose, being perfused by blood, electrically active at all? These are basic questions and could be simply answered if the tests were performed.

It seems intuitive that the brain cannot produce such a conscious experience unless the neocortex is functioning at least somewhat normally, but how well is this established? I am not at all familiar with the NDE literature, so the answer may already be known, but it would be good to have it spelled out. Since the book is meant for a popular audience, the absence of such detail is quite understandable, but that doesn’t mean it can be ignored.

Another question is how Alexander’s NDE compares with reports by users of hallucinogens. Are there enough dissimilarities to let us be reasonably sure that drugs or the “DMT dump” or “endogenous glutamate blockade” hypotheses were not responsible? The author believes those could not have caused his experience because his cortex was zapped, but if that issue is put aside, could those mind-bending factors have accounted for the nature of his NDE?

Finally, a tiny red flag popped into my head when Alexander presented a particular, patented method of meditation as a way to achieve something like his NDE: “I believe Hemi-Sync has enabled me to return to a realm similar to that which I visited deep in coma, but without having to be deathly ill” (Kindle location 2039). This is probably nothing but a sincere endorsement, but it did cause me to wonder.

Conclusion

In the end, I can only say that I am not competent to judge the evidence. What I would like to see, and what I hope does appear, is reviews by a few neurologists, neurosurgeons, and other neuroscientists who can confirm or question the author’s assertions and conclusions. It should be a very interesting discussion!