By Jongho Lee –
Dr. Eben Alexander awoke with horrific back pain, collapsed, writhing in pain and a cold sweat on Nov. 10, 2008.
“I was rescued by this slowly spinning white light that came towards me,” said Eben, a former Harvard neurosurgeon. “The white light was accompanied by a perfect musical melody.”
His near death experience challenges the scientific materialism he once believed. A professor from Harvard, he now encourages scientists to acknowledge truth beyond the microscope and the telescope.
Born to an unwed 16-year-old, Eben Alexander was adopted into a wonderful loving home.
His adopted father was a globally renowned neurosurgeon and a Christian who believed in prayer in his work as a healer.
Growing up under the influence of his father, Eben became a neurosurgeon and taught neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School for 15 years.
“With all my formal training in conventional science, I was doubting some of these spiritual realities that (my father) knew from having lived them,” Eben said.
When Eben was 54 years old, he woke up around 4:30 a.m. with severe back pain.
He tried taking a hot bath to relieve the pain, but when it did not help, he struggled back to his bed and collapsed.
Soon after, his youngest son, Bond, who was 10 years old at the time, entered the room and realized that his father was in serious condition.
“He started rubbing my temple to make me feel better,” Eben said. “I felt like he’d driven a white hot spike through my head.”
Eben was suffering from severe E. coli bacterial meningoencephalitis, an infection affecting the brain and the membranes surrounding it.
When Eben arrived at the emergency room, he was having seizures and could only make groaning sounds.
Emergency room doctor Laura Potter explained that his chance of survival was only about 10%.
Eben remained in a coma for seven days.
During that time, he later recalled, he had no memories of his life or even knowledge of the world around him.
However, he described seeing a slowly spinning white light coming out of the darkness. He recalled that the white light opened like a passage to another world.
He described arriving in a place filled with green fields, waterfalls, countless butterflies and dancing beings.
While riding on a butterfly wing, he recalled meeting a beautiful young woman who communicated with him without speaking. Later it was revealed this was his sister.
“You are deeply loved and cherished forever,” she told him. “You have nothing to fear.”
After seven days in a coma, Eben finally opened his eyes.
As he recovered, Eben tried to explain his spiritual experience to his doctors.
However, they explained that his experience could have been a hallucination caused by his severe brain infection.
Because Eben wanted to understand what had happened to him, he began writing down his memories and reviewing his medical records.
He found that his brain had been severely affected by the infection.
“This didn’t make sense,” Eben said. “This was not a brain that could have a casual, you know, spiritual journey or dream or hallucination.”
Through his experience, he came to believe that all people are connected by a divine force and exist to practice love, kindness and compassion.
“Although we can certainly come to identify our connection with that beautiful God force and how it shows us we’re all in this together and we’re truly here to manifest love, kindness and compassion,” Eben said.
Some Christians have noted that his communication regarding the afterlife doesn’t seem to line up 100% with the Bible. It could be classified as “universalism,” the idea that everybody makes it into Heaven.
