Dr Eben Alexander
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Neurosurgeon Dr Eben Alexander was convinced out-of-body experiences were hallucinations — until he went into a coma himself and had what he now believes was a glimpse of heaven.Â
In this second extract from his book The Map Of Heaven, Dr Alexander, who has taught at Harvard Medical School, reveals many others have also seen what he described.
A near-death experience will change your life in more ways than one. It means you have survived a serious illness or a major accident, for one thing, and that alone is one of the most significant events imaginable.
But the aftermath, as you adjust to your radical new perspective, can be even more significant. For me, it was as if my old world was dead and I had been reborn into a new one.Â
Coping with that is hard: how do you replace your old vision of the universe with a new one, without unravelling into chaos?Â
How do you take that step from one world to another one, without slipping and falling between the two?
Scroll down for videoÂ
One man had a vision of his father sailing a canoe towards a huddle of loved-ones on a pier as he took his final breathsÂ
So many people are going through similar versions of what I went through, and the stories I have heard from other near-death experience witnesses give me courage every day. They are a constant corroboration of everything that was revealed to me — how we are loved and cherished much more than we can imagine, how we have nothing to fear and nothing to reproach ourselves for.
If you have never seen yourself as a spiritual person, and perhaps did not even believe in God, this new dimension to your understanding has an even greater impact.
A man named Pascale wrote to tell me about his father, who had a PhD in astrophysics and was ‘100 per cent scientifically minded’ — in other words, a complete atheist.
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Pascale’s dad (we’ll call him Pierre) was a heavy drinker. He’d suffered a succession of emotional blows, and he used hard drink to numb the pain — so much that his organs started one by one to pack up. Kidneys, liver and then lungs gave way, and Pierre succumbed to double pneumonia.
He was not expected to live, but to give his body the best chance of repairing itself, the doctors placed him in an induced coma.Â
After three months in intensive care, he started to come round — and all this hard-headed scientific man wanted to talk about with his son were his experiences of heaven.
He had seen the after-life, just as I did. And he brought back the same message: there were angel-like beings who loved us more than we could imagine, and they would help us, if only we would let them.
Pierre faced a major challenge. He could never drink again. One glass would be enough to tip him back into alcohol abuse, and the end would be inevitable.
Somehow, he found the strength to beat his demons. For the next four years, Pierre didn’t touch a drop. But after his initial burst of spiritual fervour in the hospital, he stopped talking about heaven.
Pascale sensed that his dad, an intensely shy man, was embarrassed by the massive contradiction between the atheism he had always preached, and the heaven he had experienced during his coma. He found it easier to say nothing.
But he developed a quirky habit, which seemed to help him in his abstinence — in all the places where he might be tempted to relapse and have a drink, Pierre left Post-It notes. Every one was the same, with four cryptic letters written on it: GaHf.
Pierre would not say what the notes meant. All he would admit was that they helped him.
After four years, his heart gave out, and Pierre died. His son was deeply comforted by words his father had said in the hospital: ‘I’m not afraid of dying any more. I know it’ll be fine.’
After the funeral, as he collected up the Post-It notes, Pascale had a sudden insight. He knew what the letters GaHf meant, what his father was reminding himself . . . ‘Guardian angels. Have faith.’
Not every experience of heaven, and the change it brings, is so dramatic. After I first shared my story with others in public, I received a charming letter from a lady named Jane-Ann, who told me that she underwent surgery for a brain abcess in 1952, when she was eight years old, and that for two weeks after the operation she was in a coma.
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