Doctors at Lynchburg General Hospital in Virginia, a hospital where I myself worked as a neurosurgeon, determined that I had somehow contracted a very rare bacterial meningitis that mostly attacks newborns. Our current understanding of the mind “now lies broken at our feet”—for, as the doctor writes, “What happened to me destroyed it, and I intend to spend the rest of my life investigating the true nature of consciousness and making the fact that we are more, much more, than our physical brains as clear as I can, both to my fellow scientists and to people at large.” 
 
 Well, I intend to spend the rest of the morning sparing him the effort. Unlike many atheists, I don’t doubt the subjective phenomena themselves—that is, I don’t believe that everyone who claims to have seen an angel, or left his body in a trance, or become one with the universe, is lying or mentally ill. In the fall of 2008, however, after seven days in a coma during which the human part of my brain, the neocortex, was inactivated, I experienced something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death. Alexander is also releasing a book at the end of the month, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, which seems destined to become an instant bestseller. On the iPad Read Newsweek’s 2007 story on how science is bringing more heart-attack victims back to life 
 
 I’m not the first person to have discovered evidence that consciousness exists beyond the body. I trust that doing so has given you cause to worry that the good doctor is just another casualty of American-style Christianity—for though he claims to have been a nonbeliever before his adventures in coma, he presents the following self-portrait: 
 
 Although I considered myself a faithful Christian, I was so more in name than in actual belief. I didn’t begrudge those who wanted to believe that Jesus was more than simply a good man who had suffered at the hands of the world. But in essence, it will show the universe as evolving, multi-dimensional, and known down to its every last atom by a God who cares for us even more deeply and fiercely than any parent ever loved their child. In fact, I envied such people the security that those beliefs no doubt provided. I knew so in the same way that I knew that the world around us was real—was not some fantasy, passing and insubstantial. Everything—absolutely everything—in Alexander’s account rests on repeated assertions that his visions of heaven occurred while his cerebral cortex was “shut down,” “inactivated,” “completely shut down,” “totally offline,” and “stunned to complete inactivity.” The evidence he provides for this claim is not only inadequate—it suggests that he doesn’t know anything about the relevant brain science. In his Newsweek article, Alexander asserts that the cessation of cortical activity was “clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations.” To his editors, this presumably sounded like neuroscience. As Dr. Alexander says, it’s unlikely we’ll know the answer in our lifetimes, but that doesn’t mean we won’t keep asking. Even if his entire cortex had truly shut down (again, an incredible claim), how can he know that his visions didn’t occur in the minutes and hours during which its functions returned? As you correctly point out, coma does not equate to “inactivation of the cerebral cortex” or “higher-order brain functions totally offline” or “neurons of [my] cortex stunned into complete inactivity”. I understand what happens to the brain when people are near death, and I had always believed there were good scientific explanations for the heavenly out-of-body journeys described by those who narrowly escaped death. Today many believe that the living spiritual truths of religion have lost their power, and that science, not faith, is the road to truth. (Photo illustration by Newsweek; Source: Buena Vista Images-Getty Images) 
 
 There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility. In this case, however, it would be parsimonious to reject the whole idea of consciousness in the absence of brain activity. The old castle simply took too much work to build in the first place, and if it falls, an entirely new one will have to be constructed in its place. Everything was distinct, yet everything was also a part of everything else, like the rich and intermingled designs on a Persian carpet ... or a butterfly’s wing. I later came to call them “angels,” those arcs of light in the sky. The message went through me like a wind, and I instantly understood that it was true. It was as if I were being born into a larger world, and the universe itself was like a giant cosmic womb, and the orb (which I sensed was somehow connected with, or even identical to, the woman on the butterfly wing) was guiding me through it. “We will show you many things here,” the woman said, again, without actually using these words but by driving their conceptual essence directly into me. But then I would find myself—and time out there I can say is totally different from what we call time. There was access from out there to any part of our space/time and that made it difficult to understand a lot of these memories because we always try to sequence things and put them in linear form and description. I know that many of my peers hold—as I myself did—to the theory that the brain, and in particular the cortex, generates consciousness and that we live in a universe devoid of any kind of emotion, much less the unconditional love that I now know God and the universe have toward us. Brief, wonderful glimpses of this realm are as old as human history. But what happened to me was, far from being delusional, as real or more real than any event in my life. The message had three parts, and if I had to translate them into earthly language, I’d say they ran something like this: 
 
 “You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.” 
 
 “You have nothing to fear.” 
 
 “There is nothing you can do wrong.” 
 
 The message flooded me with a vast and crazy sensation of relief. But as far as I know, no one before me has ever traveled to this dimension (a) while their cortex was completely shut down, and (b) while their body was under minute medical observation, as mine was for the full seven days of my coma. As a neurosurgeon, I did not believe in the phenomenon of near-death experiences. The woman’s outfit was simple, like a peasant’s, but its colors—powder blue, indigo, and pastel orange-peach—had the same overwhelming, super-vivid aliveness that everything else had. And such ecstasies do tell us something about how good a human mind can feel. Let me suggest that, whether or not heaven exists, Alexander sounds precisely how a scientist should not sound when he doesn’t know what he is talking about.
– Dr. Eben Alexander held a scientific worldview until, he says, he went to heaven. As a nominal Christian—and a neurosurgeon with Harvard credentials—Alexander admits he had envied "those who wanted to believe that there was a God somewhere out there who loved us unconditionally," he writes at the Daily Beast. Then he contracted meningitis and slipped into a 7-day coma that shut down "the human part of my brain, the neocortex." Incredibly, Alexander visited a realm of clouds, higher beings, and a God-like wind that told him he was "loved and cherished, dearly, forever." Now Alexander is encountering different beings—colleagues who give him "looks of polite disbelief" when he tells his story. In church, however, he "saw everything with fresh eyes," feeling again the universal love of his journey in the stained-glass windows, bass notes of the organ, and a painting of Jesus. And he is calling on scientists to paint "a new picture of reality" as an "evolving, multi-dimensional" universe with an all-knowing God. Click for the full article and its fiery comments section—or read this criticism of Alexander's science by Sam Harris.