NDE: Mind Unbound with Eben Alexander
In this episode of See See by Ceci, we’re joined by Eben Alexander, an academic neurosurgeon for over twenty-five years, who shares one of the world’s most documented near-death experiences: his own. For decades he operated on the living brain at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Children’s Hospital, and Harvard Medical School in Boston. Born into a lineage of neurosurgeons and physicians (his father, himself, and now his eldest son), he was, like most in his field, a materialist: he believed the brain was both the beginning and the end of consciousness. In the autumn of 2008, that belief was undone completely.
An aggressive bacterial meningitis (E. coli meningoencephalitis) drove him into a week-long coma, his odds of survival falling to two percent with no chance of recovery. Yet with the neocortex, the seat, neuroscience insists, of all awareness, essentially offline, he experienced not nothingness but a journey of extraordinary vividness and detail. After seven days he woke, and over the following two months made a complete and inexplicable recovery: a case so unprecedented that three physicians outside his care documented it in the peer-reviewed Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. In this intimate conversation, he walks us through that journey and the framework he has spent seventeen years building to make sense of it: the brain not as the producer of consciousness but as its filter; consciousness as primary and fundamental to the universe; memory not stored in the brain at all; and a love so vast it holds everyone and everything. Guardian angels, past lives, quantum entanglement, prayer: he asks how such things might be reconciled with science.
With reflections from Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Reverend Barbara Holmes, parapsychology researcher Dean Radin, and Jesuit theologian Felix Körner, woven together with excerpts from Dr. Alexander’s Proof of Heaven.
*He is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University School of Medicine, trained and taught as an academic neurosurgeon for more than twenty-five years, including fifteen on the faculty of Harvard Medical School, with appointments at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston Children’s Hospital, Duke, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Virginia. A specialist in cerebrovascular neurosurgery, he authored more than 150 chapters and papers in peer-reviewed journals and presented at over 230 conferences worldwide.
Brief Excerpts from Proof of Heaven read by the author and used in this episode with permission and as courtesy of Dr. Eben Alexander.
Sacred Acoustic Tones used in this episode with permission and as a courtesy of Karen Newell.
LINKS AND INFORMATION:
Webpage: https://ebenalexander.com
X: @LifeBeyondD
Instagram: @ebenalex3md
Facebook: Eben Alexander III MD
LINK to SACRED ACOUSTICS free download.
https://www.sacredacoustics.com/pages/free-download
LINKS:
- DOI (publisher): https://doi.org/10.1097/NMD.0000000000000874
- Free full-text PDF (University of Virginia, Division of Perceptual Studies): https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp-content/uploads/sites/360/2018/09/Greyson_-Alexander-JNMD-2018.pdf
Paper documenting his case: Khanna S, Moore LE, Greyson B. “Full Neurological Recovery From Escherichia coli Meningitis Associated With Near-Death Experience.” The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 2018 Sep; 206(9): 744–747.
*The paper is a retrospective medical-record review authored by three independent researchers at the University of Virginia (led by NDE researcher Bruce Greyson). Dr. Alexander is the patient/subject, and the case is presented in anonymized form (a 54-year-old man with E. coli meningitis, a 6-day coma, and a full recovery, who scored 29 of 32 on the Greyson Near-Death Experience Scale).
BOOKS:
- Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife (2012)
- The Map of Heaven: How Science, Religion, and Ordinary People Are Proving the Afterlife (2014)
- Living in a Mindful Universe: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Heart of Consciousness (2017) — co-authored with Karen Newell
- Seeking Heaven: Sound Journeys into the Beyond (2013) — an audio program co-created with Karen Newell
