Neurosurgeon Recounts Near Death Experience
October 14th, 2011Via: Epoch Times:
Eben Alexander was your typical neurosurgeon. A firm believer of scientific reductionism, he thought that all thoughts originate from the brain. But this changed in 2008 when he encountered a case of near-death experience (NDE).
As much as it was the complete opposite of his previous views, he couldn’t dismiss or avoid the case—it was none other than his own experience, and he had to face it and search for an explanation.
Having contracted acute bacterial meningitis, which damages the neocortex—the part of the brain that is thought to involve complex cognitive functions like conscious thought—Alexander went into a coma and spent six days on a ventilator. The chance of survival was very slim, and less so was the possibility of recovering fully.
The normal glucose levels in a human’s cerebrospinal fluid are between 60 and 80 mg/dl (milligram per one-tenth of a liter), and the meningitis infection is considered severe when the level drops to 20 mg/dl. But the glucose level of Alexander’s cerebrospinal fluid was at 1 mg/dl, making it impossible for his brain to function.
However, during the time when he was in coma, Alexander encountered vivid experiences involving multiple senses, such as vision, hearing, and smell. He said that he couldn’t describe how amazing it was.
“What happened deep in coma was absolutely stunning,” Alexander said during an interview.
“The whole situation seems to be much more real than our earthly life, and the sensory modalities were very strange because they were, you know, when I was remembering all this and trying to write it down, a lot of the kind of auditory and visual things that we would normally think of as things that we see or hear, were all kind of blended together.”
For example, he “saw” a beautiful melody appearing as colors in front of him, and he remembered gold and silver arcs of lights as transparent arcs of energy that he perceived as sounds.
“To compare it with sitting here and talking on the phone or working on my computer, it was much, much more real, very rich, and as if I were truly being alive for the first time,” Alexander said. “It was really amazing.”
“My brain right now—I think it recovered pretty well—could not do anything close to what my brain was doing deep in coma,” Alexander said in this year’s International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) conference.
“How does a dying brain end up getting far, far more powerful and able to handle these tremendous loads of information instantaneously and put it altogether?”
“For me the problem was how to explain the hyper-reality. How do I explain such a rich experience, such an interactive experience, one with so much very vivid, and auditory and visual components when the parts of my human brain that normally handle all that were infected with meningitis and were not working. And especially how was it that the mind would experience consciousness, and handling very complex tasks?” Alexander said during the interview.
…
“The standard neuroscientific explanation […] absolutely does not address the real powerful elements of the experience,” he said.
“My conclusion is that the experience was very real and had to happen outside of my brain, and it had to happen outside of this physical universe. […] There is an element of our consciousness that is not dependent on the brain and that is what was set free, for me, and went on that journey.”
…
“The main role in my view for quantum mechanics is that it provides the ‘smoking gun,’ that shows us there’s something special about consciousness in making reality,” he said.
“It suggests that we’re missing a big point about our consciousness and exactly how it interacts with reality. […] I don’t think that by chasing quantum mechanical phenomena to a certain degree that we will come up with the answer about mind and consciousness, although I think it will be very helpful at elucidating the mind-brain interface.”
“I see science and spirituality going forward, together—science and spirituality as being one, and complementing each other beautifully. Both the religious side and the science side will have to let go of some of the more simplistic dogmatic assumptions and statements, but then science and spirituality and this deeper knowledge of the profound nature of our individual consciousness can move forward. The world will be an enormously better place when we do that,” he concluded.
Reminded me of Jill Bolte Taylor’s experience:
http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html
“I see science and spirituality going forward, together—science and spirituality as being one, and complementing each other beautifully. Both the religious side and the science side will have to let go of some of the more simplistic dogmatic assumptions and statements, but then science and spirituality and this deeper knowledge of the profound nature of our individual consciousness can move forward. The world will be an enormously better place when we do that,”
Amen to that but it’s going to be a long haul if all these doctors & scientists need to experience strokes first.
visual sound, hyper-reality, NDE…
the brain’s own natural DMT immediately comes to mind first and foremost.
http://www.erowid.org/library/books/dmt_spirit_molecule.shtml
Zuma, I thought the same thing; it explains the cause. But his real concern was this:
“For me the problem was how to explain the hyper-reality. How do I explain such a rich experience, such an interactive experience, one with so much very vivid, and auditory and visual components when the parts of my human brain that normally handle all that were infected with meningitis and were not working. And especially how was it that the mind would experience consciousness, and handling very complex tasks?”
I, for one, thought Strassman’s conjectures in that book were bunk.
There are some cases where someone with brain damage suddenly gained the ability to draw or do music.
Does anyone here have synesthesia, in many cases where numbers and letters are strongly associated with colors when you recognize them? It supposedly is a simple mendelian trait
This sounds like a man who needs to experience the wonderful world of psychedelics. Zuma, you are probably very close. DMT can have that effect. LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, and to a lesser extent MDMA, can also.
Any psychedelics can alter your perception of reality, intertwining different sensations with others (tasting or seeing sound, hearing colors, seeing or feeling energy, etc).
A friend once told me about taking some LSD. During the trip, he traveled back in time, communicated with proto-homosapiens, and came back with an understanding of where we came from.
To the rest of us, he was asleep on the couch. 🙂
Someone else, after taking 5-MEO-DMT (another very strong hallucinogen), felt his essence separate from his body, and became one with the universe. He observed distant stars, planets, and galaxies, and was “everywhere, but nowhere, in a timeless state”. He remembered wondering what it was like to have a body. Hours later (to him), he drifted back to his human form, and was once again with us.
To us, he was comfortably laid back on a beanbag, and didn’t move for about 15 minutes. 5-MEO-DMT is a very intense, but very short lived experience. Typically, the first 15 minutes is a very intense hallucination, where the subject can barely (if at all) interact with the real world. Pretty much, if they are laying on the floor, that’s where they’ll stay. The next 15 minutes, they come back to reality, and at the end of the whole 30 minute period, they are right back to their normal self.
So, what did the doctor see? Well, his brain was in a measured altered state, observed by medical professionals. He was tripping balls. At least it was a good trip. Some don’t go so well. At least when you’re playing with psychedelics, you know it has a finite span (you’ll be back to normal in 15 minutes to 8 hours depending on the dose and drug), and if you know anything about doing them, you have a “babysitter” with you. That is, a non-tripping friend, who can talk you down from any bad hallucinations.
In a coma, with little to no chance of survival? I guess the hallucination is much better than some of the alternatives.
The two best sites I know of with excellent information on virtually every recreational drug (for those who don’t have experience, and/or do or don’t plan on ever trying) are Erowid (mentioned above) and Lycaeum.
http://www.erowid.org/
http://www.lycaeum.org/
And no, I won’t babysit you. I’m too old to spend an evening watching kids trip, and making sure they don’t freak out. 🙂
@JWsmythe
i think the common thread here between incapacitated for 15 min, and the 6 days on a ventilator, is the disabling/damage (erk) to the physical “reality” of the body and/or brain. i think alot of what enlightenment means is remaining functional, or in this case conscious and mobile, while being aware and living in this memetic/spiritual world, where the idea of a body is all it is, an idea, and the physical reality comes farther down the road, w/ manifestation. while these people have a singular experience, either on drugs or a disease induced coma, the idea of doing the same w/out, and continuing to function in taht state going to the grocery, or the bank, or doing household chores, this is the purpose of spiritual disipline, to create familiarity w/ that higher awareness and using it to increase the quality of life and/or educate others to do the same here and now. im thinking its not “just” dmt or glitching of some regulatory center. premature, and at least similar to enlightenment, maybe.
nice to see people w/ credibility jump the fence, helped me loads convincing people about 911 stuff, but thats a different discussion, similar thread tho. as credible as someone w/ potentially severe brain damage can be lol.
It may well have been just “tripping” but it also may have been something much more which as yet can’t be place in a suitable conceptual framework.To simply place it in the drugs department and neurological fireworks is to do a great disservice to other possibilites.
NDE experiences cover a vast array psi anomalies which include factual reports of actions feelings, thoughts from others and physical / spatial descriptions taking place outside and during the NDE accounts which are then corroborated in detail. This suggests that many NDE experiences go far beyond the mechanics of neurology.
This man’s experience has deeply affected him and changed his perception in a way is obviously very difficult for him to convey yet it seems to have deepened and broaden his horizons from mere scientific belief to a more open-minded and dare I say balanced world-view that is conducive to those very things he describes. To imagine we can understand what he experienced and gliby account for it doesn’t do justice to what he shares.
Talking of conceptual frameworks for consciousness and physics and how they may interact, I recently read Dr.Thomas Campbell’s “My Big Toe” Trilogy which I can thoroughly reccommend in this context.
Apply Occam’s Razor. Which is more believable?
A patient in the hospital with a measured chemical imbalance in his brain …
1) … suffered hallucinations, which are expected under the circumstances.
2) … had an out of body experienced, where he reached a spiritual realm that has only be theorized of for aeons.
If you choose #2, I have a business proposition for you. I have an invisible bridge to Atlantis, which cannot be measured in any sort of physical way, and cannot be marked on a map. I’ll give you a percentage of the ownership for only $20,000. Cash.
@kristofer
quite right, and precisely so.
that’s always been the question for me about DMT.
what’s beyond it? ‘who’ are there? and why are ‘they’ helpful sometimes? and why are ‘they’ not sometimes? -or rather, what’s beyond the body? something.
being ignorant about the brain, i need to learn more; the pineal gland -is it in or attached to the neocortex -and what is that exactly? etc. working with what’s at hand, the human brain, is all well and good and primary even, but frames the inquiry right from the gitgo.
strassman’s book for me was far too much a clinical report, with few conclusions, much less conjectures. just more questions. the clinical context precluded much.
something about being close to death seems to open us to beyond us, but NDE’s and death itself, like birth itself or the ‘birth trauma’, or sex or dreaming -all seem to circumnavigate something larger and of it’s own context. inexpressible in any conventional form. tao. conventions are, after all, just that, conventions.
the ineffable presences, whether castaneda’s ‘allies’ or mckenna’s ‘self-transforming machine elves’ would best be corroborated in the group situation. this is where one interesting facet leaves off and hasn’t yet to my knowledge connected to another; the group mass experiences that can be recounted in detail by each participant. fascinating as those accounts are, they never mention the Others, and the accounts that do never seem to be in the group experience context. damned curious.
i have smoked DMT but that is not like doing ayahuasca et al and so in this context my own experience (all 15 minutes of it) is marginalized. no entities directly contacted me. my questions remain…
pride, pride, pride…
imho, both mckenna and castaneda are diffident about them, almost wary but respectful. & i, ass that i am, say they suck. it would seem however that ‘something’ or some ones enables ‘us’ to continue to experience when we cannot…
i just don’t want no inorganic being doing my thinking for me, alive or dead.
but then what else is there a god for?
god knows. (dominus probiscum)
the topic apparently broaches the limits of language and science at it’s extremes, to me. which certainly challenges us in our pride… but then isn’t ego death where all this begins?
http://zuma.vip.warped.com/#tibts
As I said before, if you really want to address those points from a scientific but open-minded approach then I suggest you have a look at Thomas Campbell. No business propositions or allusions to Atlantis will be necessary…Only the rejection of beliefs and an open but skeptical mind. The proof will be in the pudding.
No, I’m not a groupie, but this man comes the closest to offering a unified theory that has to be tested by one’s own experience. But as he says, don’t confuse the model of reality with reality itself…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxECb7zcQhQ
http://www.my-big-toe.com/