The Sean McDowell Show - A Neurosurgeon's Journey through the Afterlife w/ Eben Alexander

Episode Date: April 11, 2025

Dr. Alexander's recovery is a medical miracle. He is the New York Times bestselling author of “Proof of Heaven.” His near-death experience shifted his views from being a materialist scientist to embracing the soul, afterlife, and reality of the divine. In this interview, he shares his journey. Stay tuned to the end because he and Sean discover a unique way forward amidst their differences about reincarnation and the identity of Jesus.READ: Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife Paperback by Eben Alexander (https://a.co/d/56Zqyx5)*Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf)*USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for $100 off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM)*See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK)FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: @sean_mcdowell Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/Website: https://seanmcdowell.org

Please watch this whole interview to the end. Why? Now I had a chance to interview Dr. Evan Alexander, author of Proof of Heaven, mega best-selling author, neurosurgeon who taught for years at Harvard Medical School. In this book he tells a story of being a materialist, having a near-death experience, and then that shifts his whole worldview to start believing in the afterlife, heaven and the soul, et cetera. Now in this interview, you'll notice a few issues arise that he and I differ over reincarnation, the historical Jesus, rather than hijacking the conversation and debating those issues, kind of going down a secondary

trail, I decided to keep the conversation moving forward, but I think we came to a really cool place at the end to continue the conversation. So let us know what you think and enjoy this interview with a brilliant neurosurgeon who had a near-death experience that quite literally changed his life. Dr. Alexander, thanks for coming on and talking about your book, Proof of Heaven. Well, Sean, thanks so much. It's great to be with you today, and we'll talk about that. And also, I'll be sharing some of what's in our other books, especially the book Living in a Mindful Universe,

where a lot of the science and spirituality really comes together. Fascinating. Let's do that. Well, let's start in with your story and your backdrop. So maybe tell us why you wanted to be a neurosurgeon and kind of your journey to get there. Well it's important to point out that I was adopted. My birth mother was unwed 16 years old and I was adopted into a wonderful loving family.

My adoptive father was a globally renowned neurosurgeon so I greatly respected him and was interested in his career, but there was certainly a time like in college where I decided that pursuing medicine would not be so advisable because he was so well known and I thought I'd always kind of compare my own career with his. So I was interested in astrophysics early on. But then I worked in the OR one summer, fell in love

with helping patients, and then I did a neurosurgery rotation in med school, and that's when I realized, oh my gosh, this is the best thing since sliced bread. I mean, it was an amazing field. I was so grateful to go into neurosurgery, but it was mainly through the lead of my adoptive father. And also, he was in many ways a very important spiritual teacher. I still have at my bedside the little pocket Bible of Psalms and New Testament that he had with him during World War II in the Pacific Theater. He was overseas for more than two years. And he came back from that severe conflict relatively

unaffected. And I think a lot of that was due to his belief in God. Now, he was very scientific, knew all about Big Bang cosmology, neuroscience, physics, and yet he also knew that that in no way conflicted with his notion of a loving personal God and the power of prayer. So, I had that as my role model growing up. And yet, during much of my career, as you said,

I went to Duke Med School, Duke Residency, then worked at Harvard Medical School teaching neurosurgery for more than 15 years, I thought I had some idea of how brain, mind, and consciousness all work. And yet, there were these extreme anomalies that you'd encounter in patient care, stories nurses told me, et cetera, where I really couldn't explain it with my kind of materialist worldview. Because as much as I wanted to believe all that my father had believed and tried to teach me about spirituality, you know, this long career in neurosurgery had me really struggling with how does conscious awareness survive the death of the brain and body. And that's why I think my near-death experience

that occurred in 2008 when I was 54 years old, where I went into it with this kind of strong materialist belief that brain creates consciousness and all that exists is a physical world and what my disease showed me because this kind of bacterial meningitis that I had that put me in coma for a week is a perfect model for human death. In fact, there's a medical case report on my medical records that goes beyond the case I made in Proof of Heaven to say, and this was written

by three doctors not involved in my care, but fascinated by my recovery. And in their case report in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease in September 2018, they make it crystal clear that my brain was in no shape to harbor any kind of dream or hallucination, much less the most extraordinary, detailed, memorable, transformative set of experiences I've ever had in my life.

How did that happen? And especially at a time when my brain was very demonstrably offline. And not only that, in the case report, the peer review scientific editors challenged the authors. They said, how do you explain his recovery? It's really unprecedented in the medical literature to be that sick from this kind of E. coli meningitis and then to end up having a full recovery. And the doctors who wrote the case report said it's

because he had a near death experience. That's what allowed for this absolutely astonishing recovery. They knew of other cases, as did the peer-review editors of the journal, of people who had profound NDEs and then had a recovery that's inexplicable by modern kind of medical knowledge, like Anita Morjani, who had an advanced lymphoma, had an NDE back in 2006, and she ended up

coming back to this world perfectly healthy. Her cancer disappeared. Our Dr. Mary Steele, orthopedic surgeon who had an over 30-minute warm water drowning in 1999 kayaking in Chile, and she ended up having a full recovery, even though she was brought to the surface dead and resuscitated, had a very long recovery. So, in other words, these scientists,

the medical scientists knew of cases where these extraordinary deep spiritual experiences end up resulting in a tremendous amount of healing. And that I think is really the crux of this discussion is that we're spiritual beings in a spiritual universe and our spiritual form has tremendous influence on our evolving reality. And that reality is one that involves our physical body,

our mental, emotional state, et cetera, but especially, I would say, our spiritual state. And that is one that acknowledges this oneness of consciousness, and that we actually have as the source of our conscious awareness that God force at the core of the universe That has been so promising to in the ears for thousands of years So in other words, that's who I was before and I was headed into this extraordinarily

Deep dive to prove to me beyond any doubt that consciousness is not created by the brain We are truly spiritual beings in the spiritual universe is not created by the brain. We are truly spiritual beings in the spiritual universe. And you know the 16 years since my coma have been spent working with scientists around the world to help elucidate this profound truth of our reality which is essentially pointing out the reality of God, of a loving personal God that actually responds to prayer. That's so helpful to have your training and your family background. If I can kind of push into one area is you mentioned being adopted and this is a piece of your story that really kind of frames your mindset.

So maybe tell us when you discovered that you were adopted, but the story you tell in your book about trying to reach out to your adopted family unsuccessfully and then successfully, how that affected you personally all before the near-death experience. Right. Well, it's important to point out, you know, that I was adopted in a wonderful loving family, but I will take you back to the beginning. I was hospitalized with failure to thrive. You know, as a young infant, I was not feeding well.

That was at age 11 days. And so I was put in, taken by social services to the hospital. And my birth mother, who was unwed and 16 years old, thought that, you know, she could somehow claim me back, but she didn't realize, you know, in 1953, social services was not necessarily going to let that happen. But she was also not willing to sign the papers to let me go.

She did not do that until I was four months old. And so what basically happened is that set of circumstances led to me living my first four months of life in a baby dorm and not having, you know, a mother and all that kind of contact. I'm not looking for sympathy because I was adopted into a wonderful loving family that honored all my hopes and dreams. And I remember in discussions with my father, the neurosurgeon about all this, he told me there's no way you can remember anything that happened to you when you were only days and weeks old. And I would agree with him, okay, I guess you know what you're talking about.

But I finally came to realize he was wrong. That adoption, that four months abandonment wound of being in a baby dorm, basically left me with a deep kind of subconscious doubt as to whether or not I was worthy of love. And I think it influenced my relationships. You know, I felt like I had a lot of great social skills, but I recognized that that smoking crater from that four-month abandonment wound had done some damage. And it demanded from me a deeper and richer answer to the question of whether or not, you know, I was worthy of existence

in this universe, given that my own mother left me behind when I was 11 days old. So that was kind of the backdrop for it. And I would say that I did reach out to the children's home in North Carolina several times in my late teens, early 20s, trying to reconnect with my birth mother. I did not feel that my birth father was still involved. The only scant information I had from the children's home was that they had gone their separate ways. And so I thought that was what I was dealing with. So I wrote letters, you know, is my birth mother looking for me?

I always got the same answer back. No, she's not. Forget about it. Go on with your life. I even heard of cases where birth dates were changed in adoption situations to make it even tougher for a child to reconnect with their birth family. So, you know, I just lived with it, and I decided that's fine.

You know, I'm living a great life here. I'm very fortunate. I don't have to close that particular gap in my knowledge and come to that deeper understanding of my origin. I'll just let it go. And it turns out that all changed as I tell the story in the book Proof of Heaven in the year 2000 when my older son, Evan the fourth,

who had been given a school project in family genealogy, said, Dad, we have to reach out to your birth family. We need more information. I thought, oh, great. I'll write another letter to Children's Home. I was expecting the very same answer as before. And I wrote that letter, and about two weeks later, I was driving through a blizzard going up to Maine to go skiing.

My older son, Evan, was in the back seat. And I remembered, oh, yeah, the social worker said to give her a call today. It was a Friday afternoon. She might have an answer. So driving through this blizzard, I called her up and she said, well, I do have some information. Are you sitting down? Well, I was sitting down, but I was driving through a blizzard and she said, your birth parents got married. I cannot tell you what a shocker that was. And that's when I decided I'd better pull

over and she said, yeah, there's more to the story. They had three children, but your youngest sister died two years ago. That would have been 1998. And so the social worker interpreted all this as they're grieving that sister's loss, so it's not a good time to come back in their lives. And that was a complete misinterpretation of facts. You got to remember that back in 2000, the laws were still very strict to prevent the children's home from helping any adoptee from connecting with their birth family Hmm, so what I perceived was rejection from my birth mother And if you read the adoption literature, you'll realize that if an adult adoptee gets another rejection

From the birth mother or birth family it can really send them into a tailspin And that's exactly what happened to me. In fact, you know, I'd had this long history of taking my two sons to church, saying prayers to them at night. And what I noticed was months later, I had just given up on those practices. I no longer said prayers to them. I no longer took them to church.

You know, I went on Christmas and Easter. That was about it. And I'd lost my faith in a loving person of God, and that was kind of a casualty of my learning that my birth family had rejected me again, even though they didn't. I found out later because in 2007, walking on a beach in South Carolina after family vacation,

two of my adoptive sisters said, don't you think it's time you reached out to your birth family again? My first thought was no, because I remembered how that kicked me off the edge of to go back to the time when I was in the military, and I was like, I'm going to go back to the time when I was in the military, and I was like, I'm going to go back to the time when I was in the military. And I was like, I'm going to go back to the time when I was in the military. And I was like, I'm going to go back to the time when I was in the military.

And I was like, I'm going to go back to the time when I was in the military. And I was like, I'm going to go back to the time when I was in the military. And I was like, I'm going to go back to the time when I was in the military. And few weeks later, I got a positive response through the Children's Home. Now it was anonymous, but it was from a birth sister saying, yes, we'd love to connect. And she gave me a few enticing clues about the family. I tell a lot of that story in proof of heaven.

So it's all there for anybody who's interested. But the interesting thing is so a year before my coma in October of 2007, we finally made arrangements and I was able to go down to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where my parents lived, where I had gone to undergraduate school. And I finally met. For the first time in 54 years, I hugged my birth mother.

And minutes later, hugged my father. And over that weekend, met the other brother and sister who was still living and then over weeks and months after that reunions with aunts uncles other extended family all a very kind of glorious reunion and yet it was in this backdrop of this ongoing sadness over the the big elephant in the room the missing daughter who was not there and they were there they were not that comfortable about sharing a lot about her. I could tell they were still in a lot of pain about it. But that's where the near-death experience, of course, comes in

as an absolutely astonishing kind of revelation of reality because of how it helped me to resolve this apparent mystery and come into a deeper understanding of my origins and, you know, of my relationship with the universe that in DE and the 16 years since then of making sense of it has completely transformed my life in a very positive fact We'll unpack some of that, but it's really important for people to see that you have this scientific materialist worldview Trained at Duke some of the, if not one of the most respectable

universities in the world to be a neuroscientist, neurosurgeon, working at Harvard, but this deep sense of loss and yearning for meaning and your place in the universe, this NDE change everything. Now, one last question before we get to your story. I want you to kind of imagine that I'm one of your patients before you had this. And maybe you do neurosurgery on me and I come out of it and I say, Dr. Alexander, I had this real vivid life changing near death experience. What would you have thought and what would you have said to me? Well, I think I would have invited more information. I mean, I was never one to shut down my patients, but in my own mind, you know,

my general assumption before my coma was that near-death experiences were tricks of the dying brain. They were hallucinations that happen, you know, with a very ill brain. And that's why I think my particular case with all the very specific and very global demonstration of damage to the human part of my brain the neocortex and the brain stem left it really impossible for that brain to have any dream or hallucination. That's why I think my case means so much to the scientific community. People often think oh what do your People often think, oh, what do your scientific colleagues make of your crazy story? And the truth is, I've been very supported by science and scientists through this whole 16 years, because a lot of scientists realize that materialism, physicalism, the notion that only the physical world exists and therefore you must explain consciousness as emerging

from the physical workings of the substance of the brain is incorrect that there's far too much going on in that mental space to simply say that it's part of the brain's work. This is kind of a line of thinking that was gaining prominence even in the 1970s when Wilder Penfield, a very renowned neurosurgeon in Canada wrote a book called The Mystery of the Mind. And he made it clear that in spite of a whole career

of stimulating the brain and awake patients and really getting to the heart of the brain and phenomenal experience, he knew that consciousness and the mind was much more than could be explained by the brain. So in his book in 1975, he made it clear that much more was necessary, that this physical world is not enough

to explain all of mental phenomena. And yet that book sadly fell on deaf ears back then, but there's a lot more information now from quantum physics, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, parapsychology, and all the evidence for non-local consciousness like telepathy and remote viewing. And this is all the material we go into in our book, Living in a Mindful Universe, to bring all the science

and spirituality together. Because it's an astonishing revolution that's been about 5,000 years in the making. And it's especially promising that science, in many ways, will now be taking up the reins of proving the reality of the one mind and of our interconnectedness through the mental layer of the universe that supports our beliefs in God and an afterlife and even things like reincarnation which are very Empirically supported by the data and yet our theoretical models have been woefully inadequate

Especially materialism and it basically has to deny consciousness even exists. That's the only way materialism is compatible with modern scientific study of consciousness. But that's where bigger models for understanding quantum physics and the measurement paradox, things like that, like idealism or panentheism, which I think is the best answer. That's where we go in living in mindful universe. But this is all leading to a transformation of humanity that's been thousands of years in the making. Now you've said a few things here that my audience, mostly conservative Christians, are gonna go, wait a minute, panentheism, reincarnation, timeout.

I want them to know that you and I would probably have some differences about how we should couch that out. We don't need to debate that here. Mainly what I want to unpack is your experience and we're going to come to that next and how this challenge your assumption that there's no soul, no God, no life after death. That's the calm ground I want to focus on. And by the way, that Penfield Experience book that was so fascinating is he would distinguish between when a neuroscientist was pushing something his brain and making it happen and when he as an agent or a mind Would make something happen, which means there's different kinds of causation

Which points towards something beyond the material namely a soul So this research has been done for a while, but near-death experiences, I think, is a whole nother level of evidence for the supernatural. Now, take us to this moment. Let's jump in there. This is what a lot of people clicked on this video want to hear is in your lower 50s, all of a sudden you have this radical, undescribable, just traumatic experience. Tell us what happened and then we'll come to the part afterwards he came out of it how you processed it Okay. Well it All began in the wee hours of the morning on November 10th of 2008 when I woke up with horrific back pain Kind of made my way down the hallway to a hot bath. I thought that would relieve the the pain and discomfort. Almost couldn't get out of the tub. Baby steps back to the bed, collapsed, writhing in pain in a cold

sweat. Soon thereafter my youngest son, Bond, who was 10 years old at the time, came in the room, saw that dad wasn't off at work and not only that he looked horrible, he came up and started rubbing my temples when he did I felt like he'd driven a white-hot spike through my head horrific pain headache back pain etc and soon thereafter I lapsed into unconsciousness grand mal seizures right there at home and my family was very alarmed by this now I remember nothing of the next week from earth earthly realm I was gone from this world From the time the EMTs came and took me away. There's a kind of a misconception out there

But by an irresponsible journalist that says I was in a medically induced coma that was absolutely not the case The coma was glued to the severe case of meningitis. It's very important for the scientific interpretation of what's going on here. But anyway, it was due to severe damage to my entire neocortex and brainstem even from day one. And interesting thing is for me, you know, another important point to make is an atypical feature of my near-death experience was amnesia. I had no memories of humanity, Earth, this universe, Ebene Alexander's life, I had no language. Everything was gone.

Now, my initial interpretation of this when I came back to this world in the weeks and months afterwards, making sense of it, was, oh, yes, well, I was learning more and more about the amount of damage to my neocortex. So I tended to default to my previous conventional thinking that memories are stored in the brain. They're not. And this is something we go into in detail in our book Living in a Mindful Universe.

But the interesting thing is that I was completely amnesic, which I originally attributed to the amount of neocortical damage I had. But of course, then after I woke up, all the memories came back. And over about two months, the memory return was so strong that often the memories were more complete than they had been before the coma. You know, that is kind of an astonishing realization.

And again, we talk about that in our book, Living in a Mindful Universe, but memories are not stored in the brain. And neurosurgeons have suspected this for a very long time because there's never been a case in the millions of brain resections we've done in the last century where any long-term swathe of memories was removed with a brain resection. It just doesn't ever happen. So we can leave that one behind.

But the interesting thing was I was amnesic. I went into this with a completely empty slate And that is something I've never heard happen in anybody else's NDE to this degree Some people worry that that'll happen to them. I can say statistically it's extremely unlikely So don't worry in my case It was important because that extreme amnesia took me to a level where it was very Difficult to talk myself out of it with my old materialist mindset.

That's why I needed a much deeper dive than normal. You know, if I had scripted this whole thing, my adoptive father, who had passed over four years before my coma, he would have been my spiritual guide, but he wasn't. He wasn't present. And in fact, there was much more going on that we'll get into here shortly. So it started my first awareness in what is what I call the earthworm eye view a very primitive course kind of Unresponsive realm like being in dirty jello. I had no body awareness during any part of this But in that earthworm eye view, there was a tactile sense. I could feel roots or blood vessels around me

It was kind of foreboding and people would often ask me when I gave talks about all this early on, was that hell or purgatory? And I would say, well, I don't know, but it was the only consciousness I knew at the time. So I just learned to accept it. And luckily that didn't last forever. That kind of earth were my view. I was rescued by this slowly spinning white light

that came towards me. And it was packaged with a perfect musical melody. And that bright light had these fine silvery and golden tendrils around it. And it turned into this, basically a wormhole or a portal from this kind of lowest Earth where my view realm up into this brilliant ultra real gateway Valley.

And that is the realm where, you know, where we would reunite with souls of departed loved ones where we would go through life reviews You know your life flashing before your eyes is a very profound feature of Indies It tells us a lot about the nature of near-death experiences and a lot about consciousness But in this Gateway Valley, I was a speck of awareness on a butterfly wing There were millions of other butterflies that were looping and spiraling in vast formations colors beyond the rainbow below us in this lovely meadow it was a perfect meadow really lots thousands of beings dancing lots of joy and merriment festivities going on there were children playing dogs jumping I mean incredibly

beautiful all being fueled because up above were these swooping orbs of angelic choirs, these pure spiritual beings arcing against this blue-black velvety sky, emanating chants and anthems, hymns that would thunder through my awareness with incredible majesty and awe of the beauty of this connection of this infinitely loving God force and I remember my first awareness in that music state of that God awareness was this soft-summer breeze that I later called the breath of God or the divine wind and that breeze Blew through the scene and even though all the elements as I would describe them stay the same

It was kind of an opening of emotional curtains that led me into, oh my God, this is so beautiful and real because of this infinitely loving source, this God source at the core of it all. And I remember on this butterfly wing, in this beautiful kind of awakening to the reality of a much grander universe that we're all part of, I was a young woman, I was a young woman, I was a young woman, I was a young woman, I was a young woman, I was a young woman, I was a young woman, I was a young woman, I was a young woman, I was a young woman, I was a young woman, I was a young woman,

I was a young woman, I was a young woman, I was a young woman, I was a young woman, I was a young woman, I was a young woman, I was a young woman, I was a young woman, I was a young woman, I was a young woman, I was a young woman, I was a young woman, I was a young woman, I was a young woman, But she looked at me with this look of pure love. And her message to me that came straight into my mind, and this is something I wrote the words down later, because when it first happened, this was far beyond any language.

But the best words I could use to describe the message to me was, you are deeply loved and cherished forever. You have nothing to fear. You're richly cared for. You can do no wrong. Now, I wish I'd explained that last one better in the book, Proof of Heaven, because I thought I conveyed to people

that in this environment, in this ambience of this beautiful gateway valley, that God force is such a beautiful presence of pure love that anything we've done that comes up in that life review that showed greed or selfishness or handed out pain or suffering to another being looks Especially bad. That's why the life review gently nudges us towards this oneness with the divine and this love for ourselves and for our fellow beings and so in that kind of

situation though where where I was I I wasn't witnessing an Eban Alexander life review because of the amnesia. But what I did witness is as I went to the next levels, because this was only kind of a gateway as we've said, and I remember seeing all four dimensional space time in the earthly realm collapsing down. And then all of that rich kind of overlay of spiritual realm where it's basically a realm of eternity. That's why when you hear people sharing life reviews, birth, death, everything in between simultaneously is presented to you and it's one of the reasons why these stories are so

ineffable. They're so difficult to explain because our modes of knowing are far grander and more enhanced than we're used to in these bodies in this kind of physical presence and So in that setting all of this collapsing down Into this complex over sphere as I entered a realm that I call the core The core was an infinite inky blackness But filled to overflowing with the divine love of that God force and although the core may

Sound a little frightening to some people. It was a spiritual home. It's like you get there and it's like, ah Now I remember and it's when our kind of higher soul memories come back to us We recognize a much deeper sense of our kind of meaning and purpose and reason for being in this universe I mean that core realm was an absolute resolution of all dualities. You know in this world we live in you have many dualities. You have masculine, feminine, dark, light, good, evil, all these different specter of possibilities. In that realm, in the core, all of that resolved into this pure oneness of divine love. And that was very important for several reasons

One is I recognized that that God force that I was witnessing that loving intelligence Personal was the very source of my conscious awareness. So in other words seeing That we're all connected through that God force and through that kind of sensation. And that it was all about love. When you get to that deepest level, or level that dazzling darkness, you're at a point where you recognize

that there is not some battle between good and evil going on there. Any apparent conflict between good and evil that we see in this realm is only due to some of the Situations that arise way out here near the periphery a long way from that core realm That allow us to have a dynamic that is interaction with our fellow beings and that's how all of consciousness evolves That's what all of this is about and when I said a minute ago that part of that guardian angel message was you can do no wrong. The important thing to get is that as long as we are most facile and easy pathway forward as souls is to share love,

compassion, kindness, mercy, acceptance with all of our fellow beings. I mean, you could easily see how the teachings of Jesus Christ that I had studied, you know, in my earlier years, pretend that you can claim to know whether that force is God or Allah or Brahman or Vishnu, Jehovah, Yahweh, Great Spirit, all the many names we give to it. So in other words, taking the focus off the ideology and off of our tendency to name things and claim them, a recognition that for example near-death experiences show us that all religious systems allow for this infinitely loving, merciful, and powerful

God force to come to the fore that unites us all. And so this is all kind of a recognition that I'm getting in this core realm, this incredible sense of oneness with that divine and connection with all other beings in this universe and a shared sense of meaning and purpose growing towards love, kindness and compassion. And that's what I was seeing so strongly. That's a story that of course is reverberated through millions of other near-death experience accounts across all cultures. And I think important to point out for your audience that if you study near death experiences in detail, what you will find over thousands of years

across all continents is that more than 90 percent of people who have an NDE. And this can easily include many who were previously atheist or agnostic. More than 90 percent of them come back not only believing in but knowing the reality of a loving God and The power of that connection with this loving intelligent force at the core of the universe And why we would all be doubting the people who have been there I don't know but the bottom line is modern science is certainly catching up to this and we're recognizing that modern science is certainly catching up to this and we're recognizing that this idea of primacy of consciousness and interconnection of consciousness throughout the universe the fact that the physical world emerges from the

world of consciousness not the other way around it gives us a tremendous kind of notion of the power of our free will in this universe at large now getting back to my story though to try and finish it up I'm sure you'll have questions and And I think that's a tremendous kind of notion of the power of our free will in this universe at large. Now getting back to my story though to try and finish it up, I'm sure you'll have questions and want to go in certain directions. So I would tumble back down from that lofty sanctum sanctorum of the core realm right back to the earth were my view.

And by remembering the musical notes of the melody, I could conjure up that light portal that would take me back up into the Gateway Valley. Always welcomed by that beautiful girl on the butterfly wing, by the same scenery and some different lessons that evolved there. But several, and then I would ascend to the core through those angelic choirs again.

And there were two visions I had in that core realm that were especially important in terms of reincarnation and this bigger notion of kind of soul and spirit and interconnected consciousness. One I call the flying fish vision, which basically is flying fish down in the water, was like us in our material bodies, temporarily dumbed down to the knowledge of our higher soul

about our greater existence. But then when we come up out of the water is these flying fish that's when we leave the physical body at the time of bodily death, reunite with souls of our departed loved ones, go through life reviews for any residual learning and teaching lessons, plan next incarnations, dive back in. And so it's all about love. It's all about becoming one with the divine. It just so happens that you can't do all that in one lifetime. People can make a lot more progress in the modern era with this kind of information.

But in general, I think, and we can talk about that more if you want to, but you know, I had no claim to understanding or believing in any kind of reincarnation before my coma But much of what I saw in the coma told me that our souls have to come back again and again as we Progress towards this oneness with the divine in the state of grace of growth and transformation of all of consciousness Now in my I'm sorry to be drifting a bit but getting back to closure on my NDE, what happened is I would go through these multiple levels multiple times. And then finally, as I was always told going into the core, you're not here to stay.

We'll teach you many things. You'll be going back. I even come to believe that going back was going back to the earth from my view. But there came a time when I could no longer conjure up the musical notes that led up in the Gateway Valley and the Corps. And at that point, I saw thousands of beings going off around me in the distance, heads bowed, some holding candles, this murmuring energy coming from them. And what I call that in my writings later is that was the power of prayer. And

prayer was leading me back to this world. And then the final thing in my near-death experience was the appearance of six faces that bubble up out of the muck, say a few words. I didn't understand the words because my amnesia was still very strong. And then they disappear. And I can remember those faces as vividly now in my mind as if the whole thing happened yesterday morning. Yet it all happened 16 years ago. Those faces were important because they were faces of people who were physically present in the ICU room or who there was one person who channeled to me

from 120 miles away. And of course, before my coma as a materialist neurosurgeon, I would told you channeling is nonsense. Well, when she appeared front and center with these other people in my journey, and then when I was waking up in the first few days coming out of coma, I said, but you were here, you were here. But where was Susan?

And they said, well, Susan didn't come here physically. She had been someone I met in freshman English in 1972 at UNC. She became good friends with my former spouse after that when they taught together. And we knew that Susan had done some work channeling to people who were in very ill and coma, et cetera. And my family had contacted Susan early in my week of coma. And she intervened by channeling to me. And she helped me to come back to this world. And that was a very strong memory I had of the experience was her presence.

But the other important thing about the ones who were there in those visions was that they showed me that the vast majority of the coma journey had to happen between days one and four or one and five of the seven day coma. We go into all that timing in the books. That's where all the facts are that make that alignment. But it's very important because the scientific community would default to thinking, oh, this whole kind of crazy vision you had happened when your brain was coming back online. But I know it didn't because most of this vision happened at a time when my brain was in no shape to have any dream or hallucination. That's why that case report is so important. Medical knowledge of my case is

very important. But when I, the last of the six faces I saw, this is the end of the NDE story, was a 10-year-old boy. And I didn't recognize him at the time. Turns out that was Sunday morning, day seven of coma. That was my son, Bond. They had protected him from the worst news during that whole week. But at this point, he overheard a conversation

where the doctor said I'd gone from a 10% chance of survival early in the week down to 2% chance of survival, but now with no chance of recovery. And Bon knew this was much worse than he'd been told. He came running down the hallway, pulled open my eyelids. My eyes were taped shut. I was on a ventilator. One eye looking over there, one eye over there, neither pupil working, anybody in medicine knows that's a horrible picture of brain stem damage. And I promise you, I didn't hear him with my ears or seeing with my eyes, but he was pleading with me,

Daddy, you're gonna be okay, Daddy, you're gonna be okay, as if somehow that would make it so. And my awareness was very far gone from this world, deep in these spiritual realms. But that vision of him and this pleading, I thought through this whole adventure, you know, I thought through this whole adventure because of the amnesia, he can either continue or cease. It doesn't matter.

But now everything mattered because there was another soul out there that needed me. And like so many other Indie ears, in spite of the beauty and glory of that realm, I ended up coming back to this world out of a sense of responsibility to that other soul And so as I'm waking up on the ventilator, you know fighting the tube They took it out. I said, thank you and only then did my kind of knowledge and memory start coming back But when I first woke up in the ICU bed I didn't even recognize my mother my my sons, my sisters at the bedside because of the extreme damage of this meningitis.

And for the next 36 hours after the extubation, I was in and out of a paranoid delusional psychotic nightmare. And I know what that looks like, and I knew when it was happening it was a delusion. It was very different from the deep coma spiritual experience, and I'm glad I wrote it all down early on because the memories from the psychotic nightmare disappeared within weeks. The memories from the deep coma experience when my brain was offline, those memories are rock solid.

And I've had them stable as a rock for 16 years now. And there are scientific papers in the indie literature showing that phenomenon so anyway, that's and I've spent the 16 years since then working with other scientists and In a deep field of study involving a lot of meditation and centering prayer To get to deeper answers about all this But it it's lucky like as I said, the scientific community has been very supportive There are hundreds of scientists around the world that study consciousness and realize that materialism, you know, the brain creates consciousness idea is wrong and that we need much more to explain this human experience.

Now, I resonate with that last statement firmly that materialism is wrong and there's much more to life than that and you emphasize that in your book. There's kind of two questions here. One is the experience that we have. And then second, how we process that near death experience. Now you've mentioned a bunch of things I would love to push and probe into that maybe I haven't read your other book.

Maybe I'll read that. Maybe you'll come back and maybe we can kind of discuss, debate, dialogue, some of things like reincarn reincarnations our religions capturing the God of love Channeling as a as a Christian those are certain things. I'd say hang on a minute and process differently That's a separate conversation if we can maybe shelf that for now But you describe your book you said your experience is perhaps one of the most convincing Such cases in modern history. Now what's interesting to me about near-death experiences,

what I've always said is part of the most powerful evidence is when somebody comes back and has information they could not have had while they were in that state, like information at a distance, stuff that took place in the operating room, it's not that you share information you couldn't have had. It seems like what's so compelling is that you have this vivid life change in experience

while you are functionally brain dead. Does that capture what you think makes your story so compelling? That captures the essence of it. And in terms of your question, there's a particular subcategory of this kind of veridical knowing that you're referring to in NDE cases, of people knowing things that they couldn't know, you know,

through normal channels, that they had to have a different mode of acquisition, and they're called peak enderian experiences. That's named after when the first Spanish explorers from Europe went up in Panama up on the mountaintop expecting to see this big continent going off to the west and they saw another ocean out there. And they were so shocked by this. So peak and Darien is kind of the code words

for an astonishing revelation. For me, that astonishing revelation is what I try and capture in the book at the very end, four months after my coma, when I would wrestle and struggle with this whole thing. And especially, of course, that my adoptive father had not been there. That was a deep mystery and almost a complete game changer

and game killer for me in trying to understand this, was who was this woman? The more I read about NDE literature, I'd never paid attention to NDE cases before, but you bet now I was paying a lot of attention. And luckily my older son, Evan the fourth, who was majoring in neuroscience in college at the time, is the one who told me,

write everything down you can remember before you read anybody else's NDE. Best advice I've ever gotten. So I wrote down about 20,000 words and then I had a raw database that was untainted by anyone else's NDE. But anyway, the upshot of all this is that I had no idea who this woman was. And the more I read that NDE literature, the more I realized she had to be somebody important to me in my life. And yet I didn't recognize her.

And yet we'd had this beautiful mind meld. I can picture her in my mind perfectly. And I had no idea who she was. And that's why it's so important in the book how at the very end I talk about how I finally received a photograph in the mail sent to me from my living birth sister of the other birth sister who had passed back in 1998. And that is the real, I mean, this is a bit of a spoiler alert

for anybody who hasn't read Proof of Heaven. There's still a tremendous amount to that book. Sure. But to me, that brought me to my knees when I recognized who that guardian angel was. And in the picture, it, as I said, it brought me to my knees. It was an incredible revelation that proved to me the reality of the journey. It seemed way too real to be real because it actually happened. But it happened at the same time.

It was a great experience. It was a great experience. And I think that's the most important thing. I think that's the most important thing. And I think that's the most important thing. And I think that's the most important thing. And I think that's the most important thing. And I think that's the most important thing.

And I think that's the most important thing. And I think that's the most important thing. And I think that's the most important thing. It was an incredible revelation that proved to me the reality of the journey. It seemed way too real to be real because it actually happened. But it happened at a time when my brain was in no shape whatsoever to manufacture that kind of dream or hallucination and the ultra reality of it and kind of this tenacity of the memories and the structure of the memories that is so complete and doesn't change over time. That is what is so amazing. And to me, it was an incredible peak in Darien kind of recognition of this beautiful guardian angel and who she was. And that's what really kind of put me on the pathway of deciding,

well, I had to come to a much deeper scientific resolution of my journey and explain it. And that's where I'm very happy to report in Living in a Mindful Universe and in the work since then, we are making great progress in proving the reality, not only the afterlife. But I said earlier, there's a lot of scientific evidence that children remember past lives. And when you study them, you actually find out that, for example, at UVA, University of Virginia, more than 1,700 such cases have been solved over the last 65 years.

That is, they actually found the person who lived before. Very detailed names, events, memories, modes of death, et cetera. So it's an astonishing literature. It's something most of us are unaware of. Part of that problem with that is that, as Jim Tucker and Ian Stevenson, who did a lot of that reincarnation work at UVA,

will tell you, you must harvest these memories before age six or seven. Because after that, natural processes cover them over. So that most of us, as teenagers and adults, don't have ready access to memories of past lives and between lives but they're there in children and you can study them scientifically and it brings a tremendous amount of information to this discussion of the nature of consciousness and the brain mind

connection. You were given advice that I thought was really interesting that when you came out of this near-death experience to Not read the literature until you really processed and wrote down your experience first So I think that was wise now. You've read the literature so much. There's also a lot of hellish near-death experiences I've done a full video on this so you're right You said I understood that I was part of the divine and that nothing, absolutely nothing could ever take that away. The false suspicion that we can somehow be separated from God is the root of every form of anxiety of the universe. And the cure for it, which I received partially within the gateway and completely within the core, was knowledge that nothing can tear us from God ever.

There's a significant percentage of people with NDEs who report, Whoa, hell is real. I can be separated from God. I've got to shift my worldview and belief system, or that's my eternal fate. How do you process, if I'm not mistaken, somewhere between 10, 20% of NDEs could be described as hellish. How does that fit into your experience and study?

Well, I would say the figure is probably more like about 5 to 10 percent. So maybe a little lower than you're saying, but they're also under reported. I mean, people are much less likely to spare a hellish NDE. To me, the fascinating thing is how readily people in our very ego-besotted culture and materialist-besotted culture are so ready to let go of this world and move on into those beautiful spiritual realms during the NDE. But usually they end up making a choice to come back to this world to help another soul or other souls that are involved. But I would say that to me, for one thing, I don't think you'll find

that those negative NDE's conclude that God has abandoned them because often in that setting of kind of finding this hellish circumstance They also find a way out and it teaches them that there is a God so even the hellish NDEs can have very positive transformational appearances of much of what I've studied about all this would suggest that the hellish NDE's are more associated with life reviews where you spent a little too much time handing out pain and suffering to others. You know if you're greedy or selfish or hand out pain and suffering, in the life review you get on the receiving end of that. My information on life reviews comes not from

my own experience, but from Bruce Grayson, who's a skeptical psychiatrist MD, who's written about NDEs for the last 45 years. And he wrote a beautiful paper in the Journal of Near Death Studies in the fall of 2021, where he discussed almost 700 life reviews in his database of NDE's. Interestingly, he found that a third of those 700 cases said the life review was complete. Every event of their life was included. Now, if this happens during like a 10-minute cardiac arrest, people in our world say, well, how can that be that your whole life flashes before your eyes in 10 minutes? And the reason is that realm is timeless. It is not slave to the unfolding of earth time like we have here. So that's a very important point. Even more important is he found that about two-thirds

of these people said that the events of their NDE were more real than any lived event they'd ever been through. And that's been supported in scientific studies of NDE cases the apparent resilience and stability of these memories is really astonishing but even more important is it about three quarters of these NDE's in his report are of these life reviews involve that it's a You re-experience the events but from the perspective of everyone involved So in other words, it's like the golden rule treat others as you would like to be treated is Written into the fabric of the universe through these life reviews and in the ease

and so if people have handed out all that pain and suffering a Hellish in DE for me is one where they have to be on the receiving end of all that. You know, and try and make amends, try and kind of struggle upstream with showing good and love and kindness and compassion in your life review when the way you live the events forward during your life was more of one of somebody who didn't care about others and was very selfish, greedy, egotistical. So from my perspective, a lot of the hellish NDE's are incomplete.

They involve a dive into this territory like a life review, but maybe not a complete resolution. And they come back to this world recognizing what they had dished out to the world was not very comfortable to receive. So I think the hellish NDE can be instructive again. They're they're they're You know much less common than the more positive ones But I think that they also very importantly often lead to very powerful positive transformational effects I

Think that's undoubtable that it leads to transformational effects in those kind of NDEs as well. What's interesting is you talk about a lot in your book that there's this element of choice that we have, that in matter there's no free will, but we have choice. And in some ways, yes, the hellish NDEs have a remarkable influence on somebody's life. I mean, how could they not when they're so vivid and harrowing? But there's a sense of choice that's built in, which means somebody could choose to reject God,

somebody could choose to be separated from them, which I think indicates something about the afterlife, that there is a chance to lean into God, but there's also a chance to reject this and to not choose to do so, and experience something that's pointed out in the hellish NDE. to lean into God, but there's also a chance to reject this and to not choose to do so and experience something that's pointed out in the hellish NDE. If I may, let me ask you one more question at the end. I know we're bumping up at time. You gave me an hour here, and I thought at the very end you give an afterword, which I thought was interesting.

So you write this book and it's kind of a 10-year century 2013 reflection or maybe it's more years than that. And at the end you talk about kind of the Gospel of Thomas and you cite this reference from the Gospel of Thomas and it says this, it says, I am the light that is over all things. I am all. For me all came forth and to me all return. Split a piece of wood I am there lift up the stone and you will find me there." Now let me just push back a little bit and let you answer this how you would like to. As you talked about you

wanted to describe your experience first and then study NDE's and I think there's wisdom in that. I think if somebody were to study the historical Jesus and say I want to find the words that Jesus spoke, they wouldn't go to the Gospel of Thomas which is written in the middle to the second century and doesn't preserve a historical core by almost anyone's assessment of what Jesus really taught. So I think somebody could say wait wait a minute Dr. Alexander, you're beginning with this experience and you're finding kind of a certain biblical Jesus-centered truth that fits it, rather than saying, okay what did Jesus teach

you about this and then how do I make sense of my experience in light of it? How would you respond to that kind of question? I'm really curious. Well I think for me I've tended to default heavily to near-death experiences as a teacher of kind of these spiritual and religious truths. There's a beautiful book by a friend of mine, Christopher Koppas, he's in the NDE community in the Netherlands, he wrote a book called The Essence of Religions. In that book, he compares the three Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, as well as Hinduism and Buddhism with NDE's and uses NDE's as the gold standard.

And to me, that's kind of my default position because I've met many NDEers. I realize that NDEers, you don't have to rely on any kind of ancient scripture You can simply go with modern human experience in the current era and you end up getting a tremendous Education in the reality of kind of our grander spiritual selves and the grander spiritual nature of the universe you certainly encounter a Field of study and information and knowledge that greatly supports the unification of consciousness and that this kind of

God-mind, this beautiful infinitely loving God-force at the core of the universe is right there as a source of our conscious awareness. And to me all of that has a very kind of unifying and straightforward interpretation. I certainly do not claim to be a religious scholar at all. And I have to default to what other people say about that. I must say though that I, having grown up in a Methodist church and then Episcopal church as an adult. My familiarity with the Bible was there. You know, not that I'd ever read the whole thing,

but I certainly have been exposed to many, many of the teachings in the Bible. But I also found that, for example, reading the work of Elaine Pagels, she's done, she is a religious scholar and has written extensively on several books, not only in the Bible, but also the apocryphal texts. And to me, some of her observations, for example, about the book of Revelations, about the book of Thomas,

in direct comparison with the book of John, to me Elaine Pagels was very instructive at opening my mind to kind of a grander interpretation. And also, as I said earlier, you know, my Christian upbringing certainly did not teach me anything about reincarnation. So when I encountered all these very strong signals supporting reincarnation in my NDE, I had to do more homework. And that's when I found out that in fact the scientific database at the University of

Virginia is, you know, you study that work of Ian Stevenson, Jim Tucker, and realize there's got to be something to this notion of reincarnation. Now, you could argue from their data that it takes, you know, a particularly violent or unexpected death to allow a child, to allow someone to come back into this world with memories of a past life because violent or sudden death is there in about 70% of those reincarnation cases.

So you might argue that it's just that kind of a traumatic premature ending to a life that leads to the kind of angst that allows them to remember that past life when they come back into a next life. So it doesn't mean that all of us reincarnate. It just means that it's something that's there as something where there's a lot of empirical evidence that it's real. But also note that program forgetting.

That is there for some purpose. And I think at the current stage of human evolution and understanding the program forgetting is there that is that at age six or seven We forget past lives in between lives is to give us skin in the game for this life So we have buy-in to this life and we live this life seriously And I think that's still a very important concept because ultimately it's all still about growth of the soul So when I talk about reincarnation based on NDE cases, it's not like a Buddhist interpretation where reincarnation is the wheel of suffering and you're trying to get off of it. In fact, and this is something that

we explain especially in the second book, Map of Heaven, and also a bit in that third, 10th anniversary edition of Proof of Heaven, is that, you know, this deeper understanding allows us to consolidate quantum physics, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, all these observations start to make much more sense when you take this kind of bigger theater of operations that includes all the evidence for non-local consciousness like telepathy. I mean telepathy is actually very common in identical twins. Something like 35% of identical twins have powerful telepathic experiences. And yet if people who do not have identical twins in their family might not be familiar with that, that telepathy is so common. And yet Guilion Playfair wrote a beautiful book called Twin Telepathy where he makes that case.

And telepathy is just the beginning of this non-local consciousness argument. But anyway, I'm kind of getting away from your question. Sure. So. Hey, that was really helpful in clarifying. You've given me an hour of your time and I want to commit to that. So, few comments at the end might be helpful. I think it was helpful to explain that kind of the source of authority or these near-death experiences.

I would look very differently as a Christian source of authority to the words of Jesus and the Gospels and then try to make sense of these near-death experiences in light of them. So in some ways we're just speaking past each other. My audience with the citation of Elaine Pagels would go, time out! I'm a historical Jesus scholar and would take serious issue with some of the citation of Elaine Pagels would go, time out, I'm a historical Jesus scholar, and would take serious issue with some of the elevation of, say, Gnostic gospels that sometimes takes place over the canonical gospels. But again, I think that's a conversation for another time.

I did do a show, maybe this is one you and I can probe on, with a friend of mine, Steve Miller, who's a philosopher. One of the leading near-death experiences in the world, and the assumption was that Buddhists would see Buddha, Muslims would maybe see Muhammad's certain qualifications because of beliefs about seeing Muhammad, Hindus might see Krishna. And in his initial research on this with a few hundred cases, he actually found that that wasn't the case and that Jesus was profoundly overrepresented in these kinds of near-death experiences which I think could possibly challenge or at least raise questions as some of

the universalist interpretations that sometimes take place. I would point out though that I, to me, it's no surprise whatsoever that Jesus is so prominent in those stories Especially coming from people of other faiths no surprise at all Because when I look back on this and I look at how far I've come in 16 years How the scientific community has grown in the deeper understanding of all this? Yeah in these last few decades To me Christ was the first to come to this world with this notion of the kingdom of God lies within you He acknowledged of where science is getting now with all the heavy equipment of quantum physics

Etc to this notion of primacy of mind that consciousness is fundamental and Christ knew that and And that's what he projected and talked about you know the way to heaven is through emulating what he was doing he knew it was the binding force of love that's what in the East tell us today so it's absolutely zero surprise to me that Christ is so commonly associated with in the East because I think Christ was the important primary initial human contact with these ideas of idealism of that God force being within all of this emerging reality and the sense that we're all interconnected through that

mental layer of the universe of that God intelligence so zero surprise I'm perfectly accepting that Christ is featured very prominently, because to me Christ absolutely saw the deep profound truths that we're only now beginning to realize as a culture through combination of all of our best knowledge from science, quantum physics, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, you know, all the non-local consciousness, etc. Blending it all together, Christ knew the answer 2,000 years ago. So the fact that that extremely profound kind of profit and source of wisdom for all of humanity would be right there at the center of people's experiences

makes perfect sense. I think it's super interesting that we both agree that there's no surprise for Jesus to appear primarily in these near-death experiences. Then the question becomes, how do we make sense of this? And that's actually where we shift to kind of the historical question of what did Jesus really teach? And I think this is where we differ a little bit. And again, you said you're not a historical Jesus scholar. Maybe we have this conversation another time.

But I would just push back a little bit the idea of the Kingdom of God is within you. What did Jesus mean by this? And what did he mean by the means to heaven? So I would argue that Jesus uniquely claimed to be God in what he did and what he said. The God of the Old Testament in a way that no other human being can or would become. And that the problem of the world is sin, that Jesus uniquely died for sin. And then over and over again claimed to be the only way to get to the Father. I've been reading with my son who's 12 years old, it was actually yesterday.

We read the Gospel of John every morning together, and I stopped with my son and you know in John 14, he's like, I'm the way, the truth, and the life. No one gets the Father but by me. Jesus was the unique God man who died for our sins to enable us to get to the Father, not a prototype of others who came after him. So I think that interpretation, we would agree that Jesus appears predominantly in near-death experiences, but who was Jesus? How do we know what Jesus claimed? That's where we have to go back to the text itself and arguably not second century documents like the Gospel of

Thomas, but the earliest sources themselves, the biographies of Jesus written within the first century. So that's, I think that's where some of the nuances and maybe differences would come out. Does that make sense to you? Is that at least a fair distinction to you? I think it makes sense and I would also put out this one kind of biblical statement. I don't even know where it is in the Bible. Maybe you can tell me. These things in greater ye shall do. Christ talking with other people about

possibilities. So in other words, he's saying all that you see me doing. Oh You have that this power too and even greater so in other words, I don't think Christ was telling us that you know, he's this very You know this son of God who is you know, he's not running around bragging about that. It's something that other people Acknowledge, but what he was saying is live as I do and you will find this heavenly kingdom. In other words, emulate Christ. Don't just claim to believe in him. Do as he would do. As best as you can, live with that love, that unconditional love, kindness, compassion, mercy, when necessary, forgiveness. To me, that was the real message Christ was delivering. He was showing us something

about our nature that was extraordinary. And even to this day, his ideas and revelations and his teachings are extraordinarily powerful and connected with deep truth that I would say is part of this whole in the e literature But I would caution people not to just say that believing in Christ is the ticket that you think it is, you know Believing in Christ is fine. But emulating Christ doing what he modeled is really what I think Christ was trying to teach us. I Think we're getting back to the heart of what is the gospel and what is the message of Jesus itself So when he says these things are greater, too You will do greater things. Of course He's speaking with his disciples that they won't do him on his own power

But through the power of who Jesus is so other people do miracles you see the disciples I mean look in the book of Acts, you see like Paul and Peter raising people from the dead, but Jesus did miracles distinctly because of his power. He didn't have to pray to God for that power. What the Apostles do is they actually do it through the power of Jesus that he gave to them. So I guess I don't interpret it as a kind of like bragging that Jesus was doing. Jesus is the most powerful being who's ever lived, but there's this profound sense of humbling where he's willing to give up his power and die on the cross. But what he did say in John is he said believe in God,

also believe in me. Repent of your sins and then you shall have eternal life. You know, John 3.16, obviously one of the most famous verses that everybody knows. That verse makes it clear that we just, you know, through believing in Jesus, we have eternal life itself. So I think there's something qualitatively different about the person of Jesus that we find in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, calling us not to just enter into a kind of God consciousness, but repent, turn from our sins, and that it's only by His name that we can have forgiveness and have eternal life. Hence, in the afterlife, there is a heavenly state.

Some of the stuff you point out in your book is so powerful and compelling. I wanted you to share the story that we hear this from NDE researchers, people who've experienced NDE and researches, that there's love, that there's an afterlife, that there's a God who wants us to be in relationship with

Him. Jesus claimed to be that God in a way that other religious figures didn't. Mohammed certainly didn't, Buddha certainly didn't, Krishna didn't, and then Jesus did miracles to back it up, but talks about the possibility of being separated from Him if we don't believe in him for forgiveness of our sins, hence eternal life. So I think that's, we're getting to the heart of who Jesus is and what his message was. Maybe I should just put in one important point and this has to do with many NDEers I've met who have had similar experiences with this incredible

connection with his loving, personal God at the core of their experience. And some of them are not quote Christian. They might be Hindu, they could be atheist or what have you. But they come away with the same knowing of love and compassion and kindness and mercy as the ingredients of living the life they came here to live. So my only point to you in this discussion of Christianity and believing in Christ would be for people to just acknowledge that even someone of a different faith can have a very profound experience that comes in

connection with a loving God. And to me those people are having an authentic experience with heaven, with that heavenly God that Christ talked about Even if they don't encounter Christ, but I would say to me Acknowledgement of what the fact you made earlier that Christ is often there and in the ease Even for people who were not formerly Christian makes perfect sense I mean to me that says a tremendous amount about how important Christ is in kind of the consciousness of sentience of the universe. But the the thing is I have run into people who tried to say that if you

don't believe in Jesus then you do not have access to that infinitely loving God and I would say that there are many NDE people I've met who are counter examples to that. Had a beautiful loving experience. They don't claim to be Christian in their upbringing. So here's a clarification that may help and I think that was really helpful the way you described that. I don't think any thoughtful Christian would say that if you don't believe in Jesus, you can't have an experience of the divine of God in an NDE. We see people of all sorts of backgrounds coming back and having those kind of experiences, but it doesn't follow from that, that because somebody brought a certain worldview to that

and had an experience, then therefore all roads lead to that God. So Christians wouldn't say to have a positive NDE experience, you need to believe in Jesus. You're, well, you're an example of somebody who didn't believe in God and obviously had a powerful experience that changed your worldview profoundly. Right. The question therefore is everybody can have those experiences, but how do we get eternal life? How are we saved? How do we get to that God? That's the follow-up

question and that's where these different religions vary so profoundly on who God is, why we're separated from God, how we get to God, and that's where for me I keep pointing back to the person of Jesus who claims to be God, does miracles we can publicly investigate and analyze. That's the distinction that I would make. So does that make sense? Anybody can have this kind of indie experience, but doesn't follow that therefore everybody of every faith has eternal life, that raises the question, how do we get eternal life? Let's look at what these different religious leaders said and let's look at what these different leaders said and see if it's actually true. That would be the follow-up question. Right. Okay. Well, maybe we can, you know, as I said, I'm not a religious scholar, so I don't want to try and pretend otherwise here

in this discussion. But to me, the NDE community leaves a very clear pathway forward that allows for an infinitely loving, personal God and power of prayer and meditation to get each and every one of us to a deeper understanding of that God force that lies within us all and offers us the opportunity for eternity of soul and interconnection of our kind of meaning and purpose

with our fellow beings in this world. So there's plenty of room for people with these kinds of beliefs to make the world a far better place by promoting the reality of that God at the core of it all that in many ways is just loving, merciful, and very powerful, and yet kind of accessible to all of us. And I think that's one of the best lessons of Indies. And for anybody who needs a tool to get them in the deep state of conscious awareness of

centering prayer and meditation. Sacred acoustics is what I use and I've meditated every day an hour to a day for the last 13 years, find it incredibly powerful and I won't go into the details of all that but for anyone who needs to go within and kind of get away from the ego mind, the little voice in our head, the kind of monkey mind, is deep meditation and sacredacoustics.com is an excellent tool to help them get there. So I hope we can talk again. You bring up a lot of interesting points.

And also, especially if you read Living in a Mindful Universe, it was co-written with my partner Karen Newell, who is the co-founder of Sacred Acoustics. I'd love to talk with you about that and what your thoughts are on that book, because I think that book goes a lot further towards bringing this all together. And people who want to learn a lot more about me can go to ebenelexander.com and also sacredacoustics.com to learn more about the meditation. You said the title is living in a mindful universe Correct. I will check it out. Give me some time and maybe follow up and we can probe into some of those things I'd love to send you a book that my dad and I wrote together

It's a really short quick book called more than a carpenter making kind of a historical case for Jesus my dad had a powerful experience I for Jesus. My dad had a powerful experience. I basically, I just really quickly, it wasn't near death experience, but really troubled background with abuse. I won't describe a father who told him he wasn't wanted, a father who's in town drunk and was challenged by some Christians who just had a peace and contentment in their life. And he asked them why, and they said the person of Jesus. So this is like in the 50s. He's 85 years old right now. Set out to prove that Christianity was false. He thought it was a joke.

Really surprised by the evidence that Jesus rose from the grave, that the scriptures are reliable, that Jesus uniquely claimed to be God. And wrote this book, and now worldwide worldwide it's over 30 million in print. So I don't think it's sold close to proof of heaven which is unbelievable how many it sold but it's done really well. I'd love to send you that maybe maybe we come back on and you can ask some questions and see what you think about that book and I can ask you some about mine we could have a follow-up conversation. Hey I really appreciate you coming on. Your book have a follow-up conversation. Hey, I really appreciate you coming on.

Your book is a page-turner. I was reading it last night to my wife and just going, oh my goodness, this is so interesting. So many times doctors, maybe I shouldn't say this, the strength of being a doctor is you can analyze and dissect details. You have so much passion and story. Like you can make the pages come alive and

Even some of the differences we talked about between the two of us of course. I would really recommend that people read it It's really fascinating well done, and I apologize for keeping you 20 minutes after I feel like the end We kind of just got to the conversation that I would love to have, but really appreciate it. Check out Proof of Heaven. If you'll stand afterwards, maybe I could get just an address to ship you that book. We'll have the follow-up conversation. For the rest of you watching, make sure you hit subscribe. We have other shows on NDEs and the historical Jesus coming up.

And if you thought about studying apologetics, some of the questions that came up today about reincarnation and channeling and the identity of Jesus, all these topics we cover in depth, we'd love to have you in our program. Information is below. We'll see you next time.