Proof

I don't ordinarily offer book reviews/recommendations as a blog topic, but I've just finished reading "Proof of Heaven, A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife," by Eben Alexander, M.D. and I found it to be a fascinating read.

In it Alexander recounts his amazing experiences during a week-long coma brought on by a rare for adults (less than one in 10 million annually contract it) E.coli bacterial meningitis. The mortality rate is more than 90 percent and those who do survive are usually in a persistent vegetative state. Yet he not only miraculously survives, but regains all of his faculties.

He begins the prologue with an Albert Einstein quote, "A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be." It's an apt way for him to start to describe how, as a scientist and physician, he had his mind changed in a profound way about the possibility of an afterlife. Spoiler alert: he now strongly believes that physical death is not the end of our human consciousness. Well, given the title, that's probably not much of a surprise.

He also speaks of the existence of the connection of the two realms. From the book:

"To experience thinking outside the brain is to enter a world of instantaneous connections that make ordinary thinking (i.e., those aspects limited by the physical brain and the speed of light) seem like some hopelessly sleepy and plodding event. Our truest, deepest self is completely free. It is not crippled or compromised by past actions or concerned with identity or status. It comprehends that it has no need to fear the earthly world, and therefore, it has no need to build itself up through fame or wealth or conquest."

I believe in the heart, the soul, of every human is a desire to understand what lies beyond, to know bits and pieces about that which has been deemed unknowable. People of faith, men and women of science, believers, skeptics and those who are firmly undecided about the meaning of life or the existence of a realm which comes after, we all are curious about exactly what happens when we die.

I certainly have my own thoughts on the matter. Alexander does too. Like any other book on this topic, there are detractors. But I would suggest his "proof" is not as easily dismissed as some would claim.