24. ”That little ego voice in your head is nothing more than an annoying roommate” – Eben Alexander

The near-death experience of Dr Eben Alexander is astonishing in its depth, and it is especially interesting since Dr Alexander was part of the mainstream scientific community. He was in a week-long coma, and his brain was all but destroyed. He shouldn’t have been able to experience anything. Yet he visited realms that he describes as far more real than this physical plane. Against all odds he recovered to tell about it. His story has been the key for many other scientists to open the door to a non-physical reality. ”The reason the scientific community has taken my experience so seriously has to do with the documentation of the damage to my neocortex. It should have, by all principles of modern neuroscience, eliminated all but the most rudimentary forms of consciousness. But what I experienced was an extraordinary expansion of consciousness”, says Dr Eben Alexander in this episode. ”And my recovery has no explanation in modern Western science.” Alexander tells about a timeless existence, first in what he describes as the realm of the earthworm's eye view. Later a light which served as a portal ushered him into an ”ultra-real gateway valley”. ”I was merely a speck of awareness on a butterfly wing. There were millions of other butterflies. The valley was fertile and lush, no sign of death or decay, there was a crystal clear pool, sparkling waterfalls. It was a real paradise. I had no memory of Eben Alexander’s life. I had no language. I just had this phenomenal experience, which is sharp and clear in my memory even to this day, twelve years later.” In the gateway valley Eben Alexander was accompanied by a soul who conveyed a profound message: ”You are deeply loved and cherished forever, you have nothing to fear, you will be taken care of.” ”I cannot tell you how comforting and validating that message was. It basically welcomed me home.” When he reached what he describes as the core realm, language fails almost completely. ”I often use analogies. It was like standing on the edge of a black hole, on the event horizon, where time has stopped and the universe has crystalized.” Couldn’t it have been a vivid dream? No, says Dr Eben Alexander: ”This existence is dreamlike compared to that. That is far crisper, far more alive, far more real. And modern neuroscience will tell you that if we are to have a dream or hallucination, the details of that experience must be assembled in some part of the neocortex. My neocortex was off, that’s documented.” For all of this to make sense, says Dr Alexander, you must realize that a huge part of how it all works is reincarnation. ”The scientific support for reincarnation is overwhelming. At the University of Virginia, over 2.500 children’s memories of past lives have been discerned objectively. It completely violates conventional materialistic neuroscience, but that’s because conventional materialistic neuroscience is completely wrong.” ”The scientific community is shifting very rapidly. Interviewers used to try to set me up with a materialist scientist that represented ’the other side’, but it got harder and harder to find anybody that had anything meaningful to say from that camp.” Dr Alexander’s website features his books Proof of Heaven, The Map of Heaven and Living in a Mindful Universe (with Karen Newell). He is an adviser to the Galileo Commisson, which advocates ”exploring and expanding the frontiers of science, medicine and spirituality”.