Why Dr Eben Alexander’s Near Death Experience Made Medical History

‘There's a mistaken notion out there by a very irresponsible journalist who tried to pretend that my coma was medication induced. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was a meningitis induced coma. And that's why the scientific community takes my case so seriously.’ Eben Alexander, Neurosurgeon & Author

American Neurosurgeon Dr Eben Alexander put the mysterious near-death experience (NDE) concept firmly on the scientific map in 2012 following the publication of Proof of Heaven. His international best seller documents Eben’s 2008 life-changing NDE and miracle recovery from a seven-day catastrophic coma caused by a rare and severe form of E. coli bacterial meningitis. In September 2018, Eben’s NDE made medical history when his case report, which clarifies that his brain was in no shape to harbor any dream or hallucination, was published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases. If anything, the amount of destruction in Eben’s brain should have disabled any kind of phenomenal experience.

​Eben has also written The Map of Heaven (2014) and Living in a Mindful Universe (2017), and all three books share a common thread of a non-materialist view of consciousness.

​This article includes a selection of compelling transcript excerpts from Jock Brocas’s Deadly Departed episode: Separated Minds, Violent World | The Truth About Our Nature. The focal point of their discussion centers on the profound insights derived from Dr. Eben Alexander's near-death experience, which fundamentally reshaped his understanding of consciousness and existence.

Key discussion themes include:

1. Near-death experience and consciousness

2. Scientific evidence for afterlife

3. Materialism versus spirituality

4. Reincarnation and past lives

5. Meditation, mindfulness, and brain function

6. The brain-mind relationship

7. Ontological shock and worldview transformation

An Unprecedented Near Death Experience Case

Born to a 16 year old unwed mother in the 1950s, Eben Alexander was taken away from her by Social Services when he was 11 days old. Stuck in a baby dorm for the four months of his life because his mother refused to sign the papers to give him up, created some deep subconscious questions as to whether he was even worthy of love. Fortunately, Eben was adopted into a loving family that honored his hopes and dreams. His father was a globally renowned neurosurgeon and combat surgeon in the Second World War in the Pacific Theater. He had a strong belief in God and the power of prayer and used it in his neurosurgical work for healing patients. While Eben always wanted to believe what his father believed, he was of the view that science was the pathway to truth:

Eben Alexander: Like many who grew up in the 60s and 70s, like I did, I always knew that science is the pathway to truth. And of course, the mistake I made is similar to a mistake many people make, and that is thinking that Newtonian determinism is a pathway to truth, but it is not. Quantum physics is a pathway to truth, and that's still very mysterious. But that's because of the linkage it has with the brain-mind question because everything about neurons involves quantum computing.

Neurons deal with ions and synaptic vesicles and molecules and things that are way down there in the quantum scale and so quantum field effects are alive and well in the brain and in the mind, brain interpretation, etcetera. So at any rate, spending my life wanting to believe what he believed, but then having great trouble understanding how conscious awareness could survive the death of the brain and body. And that's why I needed an especially deep dive. And that's what I went through in November of 2008.

I woke up with severe back pain, severe headache, and soon lapsed into coma, grand mal seizures. My family was very alarmed. There's a mistaken notion out there by a very irresponsible journalist who tried to pretend that my coma was medication induced. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was a meningitis induced coma. And that's why the scientific community takes my case so seriously.

In fact, some of my biggest support in the last 18 years has come from scientists. And a lot of that depends on a medical case report in my medical records read by three doctors not involved in my care, but fascinated by my recovery. That case report appeared in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases in September 2018 and makes very clear, my brain was in no shape to harbor any dream or hallucination. That was the same fact that had haunted me early on – the amount of destruction in my brain should have disabled any kind of phenomenal experience.

But also, even more importantly, to people who don't have medical knowledge or don't know much about my case, is that the peer review editors of the scientific journal challenged the three authors of the case report said, well, this is unprecedented in the medical literature for somebody, this illness from E. Coli meningoencephalitis, to have a full recovery. How do you explain it? And they and the three authors who wrote the case report said, it's because he had a near death experience.

So in other words, that should alert people that the scientific review board said yes, let's publish because we now have an explanation. But that explanation was an incredible spiritual journey and it's because they knew of similar cases of NDEs that resulted in miraculous healing. So once you get that scientific connection, you start paying attention to those kind of cases.

It Was Much More Real Than This World

At any rate, for me it is important to point out that an unusual feature of my near death experience was amnesia. I had absolutely no knowledge of Earth humans. Eben Alexander's life, our language, this universe, every bit of it was gone. It was an empty slate that only in the months and years afterwards, I came to realize was very crucial for me to absolutely get the reality of the journey.

Now, in this amnesic state, the way my journey began was in what I call the Earth, where my view, a very primitive coarse, unresponsive realm, was like being in dirty jello. But luckily, I wasn't there forever. There came a slowly spinning white light. It opened up like a rip in the fabric of that ugly Earth form I viewed and led me up into this brilliant, ultra real Gateway Valley. And this is where… you realize words do not do justice to these kinds of journeys. It's often said these are ineffable beyond our language, and part of the reason is that in that kind of ultra real realm, you are outside of the flow of Earth time.

I mean, you're able to witness birth, death, everything in between past life events, even potentialities for future life events. All of that simultaneously presented, is… a shocking kind of summary and integration, and assimilation of any information you might have gleaned about your life living it forward by Earth time. But such a powerful demonstration of the much grander scale of our existence, to have that life review in this beautiful Gateway Valley…

As I said, it was much more real than this world. That's one thing that's very difficult to explain to people. But that timeless, eternal nature helps to explain some of that, and it had many Earth-like features. I often liken that realm to – it's like Plato's world of ideals, but for the individual soul. So it's a world of templates, it's a world of… possibilities and potentials. And what is it that we're going to bring into realization in our lives. And that's where this kind of bigger view is very helpful.

It Was Surprisingly Familiar… Like This is Home

Now, in this Gateway Valley, I was a speck of awareness on a butterfly wing. I never had any kind of body awareness at all. And we were looping and spiraling with thousands, millions of other butterflies in these vast formations, rivers of pure color… It's something that goes far beyond my ability to describe with words. But it was absolutely beautiful and filled with light and love beyond any description. And I remember there were thousands of beings in this field down below us, and surrounding that was this forest with sparkling waterfalls and the crystal blue pools.

Down in this meadow were thousands of beings dancing, lots of joy and merriment. There were children playing, dogs jumping, and incredible festivities, all of it being fueled, because up above were these swooping orbs of pure angelic beings who were emanating chants, anthems, hymns that would just thunder through my awareness. This incredible sense of… majesty and awe. And yet, surprisingly, it was familiar. Like, this is home… the memories started coming back. Been here before. And I think that's one of the reasons why Proof of Heaven struck such a chord with people. There's something about the language I used that resonated with some deep memory that they weren't even really consciously aware of. But I think it helped to awaken them to similarities in our journeys.

Jock Brocas: I find it absolutely fascinating, Eben, that… being a neurosurgeon and trained as you are in science to measure things, you're having this experience that totally reshapes your whole worldview and these experiences that you had, which is a lived experience. How did you deal with that resistance when you came back? I have a passion for ontology and ontological shock, and my research has uncovered this arc of what I never expected. And so you have come back and your whole worldview has changed from this. When you were having that experience… before you came back, did you have any feeling that everything was about to change? You said you couldn't remember, you had no consciousness of who you were in this earth plane. But was there anything in that review that kind of changed that whole worldview, even when you had that experience?

Dark Night of the Soul

Eben Alexander: Well, you know, it's interesting, but that amnesia was a very powerful and important ingredient. And in many ways, that amnesia short circuited any kind of attempts by me to have an overview – Oh, what's going on? Oh, am I dying? Or something like that. Because I was so far gone from this universe, all of that seemed to be the only natural part of beingness and existence. So there was no kind of questioning as I went along. But in the process of waking up from the coma, there was some tremendous kind of shock because of veridical perceptions and things like that, as well as discovering the identity of this beautiful guardian angel. So it was really, most of… shock and the… wrestling match of back and forth of my old worldview, and a new worldview really occurred in the months and years after the coma. I mean, the coma absolutely reset my… oh my God…

A quote we use from René Descartes (1596–1650) is… Anyone who claims to be a true seeker at some time in their life, they must give up on everything they've ever believed to be true. In other words, you have to doubt everything to truly be a seeker in understanding the nature of this reality that we're trying to understand. And that to me, was absolutely real. I had to go back to square one. And it involved a lot of serious kind of, up and down and doubt. And there's an important role, I would say, what I call a dark night of the soul, and I did that.

​After Frans Hals, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Family Matters

Jock Brocas: I want to talk about that because I had a car crash; I had a near death experience. I experienced some things, nothing like you, but one of the things that I found difficult to kind of acquiesce, going back into this world…. there is an ontology that changes. You go into this ontological shock. But even to this day, I always had a sense of wanting to feel that experience, that interconnectedness, that reality again, and you can't do it. So you mentioned the dark night of the soul. Did you have that experience where you come back and there was a darkness, there was a depression, because you really wanted to have that again?

Eben Alexander: No, it's a little different from that… It turns out, you know, as an adoptee, back in my teens and early twenties, I'd write letters to the children's home in North Carolina asking if my birth mother was looking for me. That was a very simple attempt to reconnect with my origin, and North Carolina had very strict laws to prevent reunions. In fact, I heard cases where they actually changed birth dates to make it tougher for an adoptee to reunite with their birth parents. But at any rate, I gave up on all that way back in the 1970s, because I was okay with it. And they told me, forget about it, she's not looking for you.

So for 20, 30 years, I forgot about it. And I was okay with every bit of that. But then in the year 2000, my older son Eben IV, was doing a school project… and… he knew he needed more genealogical information from the birth family, so he asked me to inquire again. So I wrote a letter. And the social worker said, call me back in a few weeks. I'll let you know if I find anything.

And it turns out, two weeks later, in February 2000, I'm driving up to go skiing in Maine with Eben. We're driving through a blizzard and my son is sitting in the back seat. And all of a sudden I remembered, oh, yeah, the social worker said call her up, maybe she'd have an answer. And so I called her up.

She said, well, yes, I did find something out… your birth parents got married. Now, I cannot tell you what a wham, what a complete shock that was to my system. I never had thought they'd gotten married. And the social worker said, and they had three children. So I had a whole family, a birth family out there completely intact, that I knew nothing about…

And social worker said, but your youngest sister died two years ago. That would have been 1998. And because they're still grieving her loss, it's not a good time to come back into their lives. Now, she made up that last part because the laws were very strict. She was not allowed to connect us together. But she didn't know anything about the thinking because her communications had actually come just from some letters from one sister in the birth family, but not from any of the parents. And so the social worker… couldn't really go very far with it, but she made up that little lie.

Massive Wake-up Call

That did a lot of damage to me because I quit taking my sons to church. I quit saying prayers to them at night. I basically entered a dark night of the soul where I gave up on any lasting hope for a loving personal God. And that dark night of the soul lasted me right up until my coma in 2008. But fortunately, a year before my coma in 2007, two of my adoptive sisters walking on a beach in South Carolina, said, don't you think it's time you reached out to your birth family again? Because they recognized that I made some progress in the past but I'd hit that stone wall back in 2000 with that perceived rejection. They were right.

I wrote another letter. This time, I got a positive answer. And I met my birth mother October 5, 2007. Minutes later, I met my birth father, hugged them for the first time at 54 years. And then that weekend, I met my birth brother and sister, and then in coming months, went to beach family reunions where I met some uncles, cousins, et cetera. So all a big story. But anybody who's read Proof of Heaven realizes how important that adoption reconnection was for me to have that near death experience because of the identity of that beautiful guardian angel, which only became clear to me when that birth sister Kathy finally sent me a picture of our lost birth sister, Betsy, that arrived four months after my coma. So I looked at it, and it's as if she's looking, saying, do you finally get it? And yes, Betsy, I do finally get it. So what a wake up call that was.

Jock Brocas: So when you come out of your coma, did any of this connect with you in this life review that you had? Because that ontology that would have changed everything.

Eben Alexander: Okay, well, here's the important thing about that. Because of the amnesia, and I think that was one of the reasons the amnesia was there, I did not have an Eben Alexander life review, but what I did have… and I really haven't finished my NDE story… So in that beautiful Gateway Valley, I wasn't alone on that butterfly wing. There was a beautiful young woman, sparkling blue eyes, high forehead, high cheekbones, broad smile. She never said a word, never had to, but her thoughts, her mind melded completely with mine. And her message to me, which I put into words many weeks later after I woke up and was recording all this… which was a pure, conceptual, emotional flow, was, you are deeply loved and cherished forever. You have nothing to fear. You're richly cared for. And I cannot tell you how reassuring that was in the moment, that beautiful message from that guardian angel.

But I ascended up from that level from the Gateway Valley, and in fact, once again, it was a musical portal. Music, vibration, frequency was a giant theme for me in my journey and also a giant theme in my meditation using sacred acoustics ever since my journey. But in the core realm, what I witnessed was… four dimensional space time, which I could vaguely sense from that Gateway Valley, all of that collapsed down. Then all of the Gateway Valley, with its kind of eternity, of time and different causal ordering, all of that collapsed down as my awareness ascended up into what I call the core. An infinite inky blackness, but filled to overflowing with the divine love of that God force at the creative force of the universe.

The Core Realm was Devoid of Duality

I also recognized in the core realm that my very conscious awareness was directly sourced in that God force. So none of us are ever separate from that God force of purity and oneness and that's what is so important to near death experiencers. That's why more than 90% of near death experiencers come back not just believing, but knowing in some form of intelligence and love and co-creative energy at the heart of the universe. And to me, coming back from my journey, having grown up in a Christian environment, it was important to stress that it didn't matter whether you wanted to label this divinity God or Allah, Brahman, Vishnu, Jehovah, Yahweh, Great Spirit, Dao, all the many words people use to try and claim that, as opposed to recognizing that religions are actually steering us to that central concept of kindness, love, compassion, mercy, acceptance, forgiveness, and having that be the core of our basis for decisions, thinking and action in this world. And so that was a beautiful kind of demonstration of that.

And there was a vision I had… in this Gateway Valley… especially on one of the final passages there. And I used to call this the Indra's Net vision (core Buddhist concepts of Śūnyatā (emptiness), dependent origination, and the perfect interpenetration of all phenomena), but that was a bit of a mistaken term. I was borrowing a term from Hindu cosmology that wasn't a perfect description of my situation. The current description I use is more of a living tapestry.

What it was, was a vision I saw in the core. So the core is a realm that otherwise is completely devoid of any of the dualities of our world. So masculine, feminine, dark, light, good, evil, all those things are completely resolved into oneness in the core realm. But in the core, I was witness to this living tapestry vision, all these interwoven threads. And what I saw was, they were our lives, and it requires more than a physical lifetime to get to that oneness with the divine. So reincarnation had to be part of the package. It was written, the very fabric of all this, as well as the vision of life reviews. I saw this course correction that was very important at the end of every lifetime where you reunited with your soul group, went over the lessons learned life review and then planned next incarnations and then dove back in.

And of course, all the scientific data on reincarnation, I didn't know about before my coma. But since then, I've learned about the work at… University of Virginia, where they've studied more than 2,500 cases past life memories in children over 65 years. And of those, more than 1700 they've solved. That is, they actually found the person who lived before.

Jock Brocas: I find that fascinating because I started researching that years ago and as you know, being a medium for over two decades, I was really skeptical of these past lives. And I was thinking… there's bound to be natural explanations for it. But when you dive into the data and you see there is actual empirical evidence, it is absolutely fascinating and scary at the same time. It's comforting. But then, other people would say, I don't want to be incarnate again. I don't want to have that experience.

Eben Alexander: I think we have very much free will around that issue.

​Watch the Podcast

​Separated Minds, Violent World | The Truth About Our Nature

Premiered June 15, 2026 – Runtime: 1 hr 29

Resources

Eben Alexander: Unveiling the Mystery of Consciousness – https://ebenalexander.com/