Dazzling glimpse
For those who dare to think that maybe, just maybe, we can have a clue as to what happens to our consciousness when our bodies die, here comes an interesting new book by Eben Alexander, called Proof of Heaven. To be released on Oct. 23., an excerpt from it was the cover story for the Oct. 15 issue of Newsweek.
Alexander is a Virginia neurosurgeon who considers himself a man of science, a solid skeptic/agnostic who figured Jesus was a great guy, but, you know, come on. And then, he was hit with medical calamity in ’08. A victim of a rare meningitis that was eating his brain, he fell into a coma, and the resulting CAT-scans all indicated that the cortex of his brain had simply shut down. “According to current medical understanding, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma.” But unconscious he was, apparently, not.
He reports that he journeyed to a realm that sounds somewhat familiar. “I was in a place of clouds. Big, puffy, pink-white ones that showed up sharply against the deep blue-black sky. Higher than the clouds were flocks of transparent, shimmering beings arced across the sky, leaving long streamer-like lines behind them.”
Sure these folks didn’t have harps?
“A sound, huge and booming, like a glorious chant, came down from above, and I wondered if the winged beings were producing it. Thinking about it later, it occurred to me that the joy of these creatures, as they soared along, was such that they had to make this noise, that if the joy didn’t come out of them this way then they would simply not otherwise be able to contain it.”
I have to admit, I’m very attracted to any place where the locals are so filled with joy that they have to vocalize it somehow in order to insure they don’t overdose on the ecstasy of it all. And no harps? Cool.
Later, Alexander meets a real nice gal. “She looked at me with a look that, if you saw it for five seconds, would make your whole life up to that point worth living. It was not a romantic look. It was not a look of friendship. It was a look that somehow was beyond all these … ”
OK, OK, sounds just positively jiffy, but, come on, dude, we all have really good dreams once in a while, and have you ever heard of Terence McKenna, by any chance?
“I know full well how extraordinary, how frankly unbelievable, all this sounds. But what happened to me was, far from being delusional, as real as any event in my life. What happened to me demands explanation.”
This isn’t the first Dazzling Glimpse, of course, but what makes Alexander’s Glimpse more interesting than usual is that he’s a scientist, doctor, and skeptic, pre-disposed to ride out his coma in dull, peaceful, blackness. Does this make his mindbender somehow … more meaningful?
