From Brain to Mind to Soul: An Interview with Eben Alexander M.D.

The near-death-experience is probably one of the most documented and studied phenomenon in what we would call the field of the paranormal or parapsychology.

Taken altogether, the evidence points unmistakably to the survival of consciousness beyond physical death. At the same time, the overwhelming evidence for the existence of these realms is ignored by mainstream science, government, and media. From my point of view, the silence is becoming deafening.

Dr. Eben Alexander’s book, Proof of Heaven, about his own near-death experience, is one of the latest accounts of a near-death-experience. What makes this account special is that Dr. Alexander is a neurologist with twenty-five years of experience. His entire career has been focused on the brain and its functioning. Before his experience, his basic assumption was that the brain gave rise to consciousness. Following his experience, he had no doubt that consciousness is primary.

I’ve not read the book yet. It’s next on my list. I have listened to several interviews, however, and the Coast2Coast interview with George Noory is the best I have heard. Dr. Alexander is quite articulate and he talks about the boundaries between brain, mind, and soul in very clear language and thought.

The interview can found below or here on youtube. It is the first two parts of a four-part program and it starts about ten minutes into the first segment.

Here is the Introduction to the show posted on Coast2Coast.

In the first half, neurosurgeon for the last 25 years, Eben Alexander, M.D., discussed his transcendental Near-Death Experience (NDE), in which he was driven to the brink of death and spent a week deep in coma in 2008 from a severe case of bacterial meningitis. In contrast to many other NDEs, his memory of his life on Earth was wiped out during his experience. He first went into a long period of being in a dark, murky place with the sense of roots or vessels around him, and a monotonous pounding sound. “It was from that that I was actually rescued by a floating, very fine white light,” that had a beautiful melody, he said. From there, the spinning light opened into a lovely, verdant valley with butterflies and flowers, and a beautiful girl, whom he later learned was like his guardian angel. This area turned out to be a gateway, where he first recognized “the divine creative power beneath it all.”

He felt a sense of love, and then traveled out to the universe, into “an infinite cold black void that was filled with that love, and also had this brilliant orb of light…There was this awareness of three of us, that divine infinitely knowing and loving creative source whom many would call God, this brilliant orb of light, and then my consciousness which was far beyond the consciousness of any individual,” he detailed. During the experience, Alexander was told that he would be shown many things, but he was only there temporarily, and would eventually be returning to Earth. After his recovery, one of his conclusions based on his NDE, was that neuroscience is very far from understanding how memory works, “and I now believe that a lot of memory is actually associated with processes that are outside of the physical brain and physical universe.”