Eben Alexander, (a Lynchburg, Virginia (USA) neurosurgeon), reported an amazing experience undergone while comatose due to a serious E. coli meningitis from 10 to 16 November 2008. During this experience he was present in a depressing and constricting universe he termed the Realm of the Earthworm’s-Eye View, and also repeatedly visited a wondrous light- and love-filled, heavenly realms he termed the Core, and the Gateway where he flew on a butterfly wing and met a deceased sister he had never known. The book describing his experience is called Proof of Heaven. It is wildly popular and acclaimed by many people, especially those seeking the "comfort" offered by the idea of an afterlife, and those who believe in the literal reality of visionary perceptions of near-death experiences. [Note. The page numbers cited are from “Proof of Heaven” unless otherwise indicated]
But is this experience truly a NDE, or is it simply a hallucination of a seriously ill person, subsequently recalled and expressed in popular language?
According to Robert Wade, his neurologist, Eben Alexander had a chance of surviving his severe episode of meningitis caused by E. coli was less than 3% (page 184). But 3% is not 0%, meaning that some people do survive. Moreover, some people also survive without any apparent neurological damage. This statistic simply means that Eben Alexander was a very lucky man. He survived without any evident neurological damage. Furthermore, this was man who was subsequently able to articulate and tell of his experience-something which most of his patients were unable to do. This was clearly revealed in one of the passages of this book. He told of the reactions of his physicians to his survival, and the mental experiences undergone while apparently comatose.
And this passage immediately raises a very relevant question; “In what way did his experience differ from that of his patients?” After all, Eben Alexander claimed to have undergone a very real experience of a transcendental afterlife during a period his brain no longer functioned. Believers in his story tell us that his hallucinations were so coherent, that they were not hallucinations but real experiences. Furthermore, that his hallucinations had such a pervading sense of intense reality that they must have been literally true. Unfortunately, hallucinations can be coherent, and they can feel intensely real. So these criteria mean nothing, and are no proof of reality.
So let us look as some aspects of this experience. The first aspect is the sociocultural environment in which Eben Alexander lived and functioned.
Eben Alexander’s wife and sisters were all regular attenders at the local Epicopal church, and he lived in a community actively engaged in the church and the beliefs it propagates (pages 34, 57, 93, 97, 147-148). They believed in the power of prayer. And subsequently after recovery from his illness, a "reborn", and newly religious Eben Alexander also believed in the healing power of intercessional prayer (see Chapter 32).
But intercessional prayer such as this is known to have no effect whatsoever. This is no new knowledge, but has been known since the publication of the first investigation of intercessional prayer published during 1872 by the eminent scientist Francis Galton (Galton 1872). This study was subsequently confirmed by a rigorous medical study of the efficacy of intercessional prayer in people recovering from heart surgery. Surprisingly, this landmark study published by Herbert Benson and his group revealed that those who knew they were being prayed for had a higher chance of complications! (Benson 2006). Subsequent reviews confirm the lack of any effect of intercessional prayer (Roberts 2009). So it surprises me that a man with the credentials of Eben Alexander actually believed prayer was any help at all. I can only imagine he thought this classic example of “confirmation bias” of the power of intercessional prayer was good psychological therapy for his family. After all, if he had died, no-one would have mentioned the “healing power of prayer” at all, or at best considered his demise as part of the “inscrutable plan of God … ”
Then we come to the visual aspects of his experience. At one point he was in a wondrous transcendental world, flying on a butterfly wing with a beautiful young woman. He described this world.
This is a rather puerile description of a heavenly environment that could only arise in the mind of a person steeped in a simplistic popular Christian culture. In this transcendental world, he also experienced heightened awareness and time dilation, two common aspects of transcendental experiences.
And another example.
Eben Alexander never tells us what amazing lessons he learned via this telepathic communication, except that the afterlife is very loving. So we are left without this undoubtedly valuable knowledge. Nonetheless, there is one aspect aspect to his experience revealing it not to be so much an NDE, but a fantastical hallucination with very little in common with an NDE.
Eben Alexander’s statements about his memory function during his experience is one of the most interesting, and at the same time most disturbing statement for those believers in the literal immaterial reality of his experience. In fact, his statements about his memory function reveal his experience to be hallucinations occurring during a gradual emergence from coma. His statements about his memory function are very revealing.
During his amazing experience, or NDE, (or whatever type of experience it may have been), Eben Alexander repeatedly states he had absolutely no memories of his life prior to the beginning of his experience (see pages 24, 30, 31, 78, 79, 117). However, during an NDE, many NDE-ers undergo life-review, and all NDE-ers remember their personal sense of identity and everything about their lives prior to their NDE’s. Yet here we have an experience where the person undergoing it claims to lose his sense of identity, and has absolutely no memory of his life prior to his soul, (mind / non-local consciousness / universal consciousness / whatever you want to call it), awakening in the transcendental world he entered during his experience. But all believers in the literal reality of the NDE claim all memories are retained within the soul. Chris Carter is one of the most outspoken proselytizers of this belief, and states as much in one of his books:
So if the soul is the repository of memory as claimed by Chris Carter, as well as Pim van Lommel, Jeffery Long, and many others, how is it possible to forget all prior memories when disembodied? After all, when disembodied the soul is freed of the limitations of the physical body, the conscious soul still has access to all memories as is revealed by all other persons reporting their NDEs. Furthermore, Eben Alexander is amazed that he was able to clearly remember all details of what he underwent during his experience.
How is this possible? His memories of his experience returned as he wrote them down in the 20,000 words he mentioned writing during a 6 week convalescence. These may well be accurate memories of his experience. I cannot say otherwise. Believers in dualism and the literal reality of the experiential content of the NDE claim that the soul is unaffected by anything affecting the physical body. During his experience of disembodiment in this transcendental world, the apparently disembodied mind / soul of Eben Alexander could remember experiences undergone during the earlier parts of his experience (see pages 68, 69, 103). For example, at one point he was sent away from the "Core", back to the Realm of the Earthworm’s-Eye View:
This passage clearly reveals that his apparently disembodied mind / soul was able to form new memories, and recall these memories. Accordingly, the memory function of his apparently disembodied mind / soul functioned normally. Moreover, the soul is unaffected by the functioning of the body. So why was he then unable to recall memories of his life prior to his illness? After all, these memories are supposedly also stored within his soul / separable mind / consciousness. So he should have been able to access memories of his life prior to his illness. There is only one explanation possible according to believers in the literal experiential reality of NDEs. His mind / soul was not dissociated from his body. It was captive inside a hallucinating body with sufficient memory function to form new memories of hallucinations, but unable to remember its past life! This is further emphasized by the statement of Eben Alexander that these experiences occurred during a period his brain no longer functioned, at a time his brain was “soaking in pus” (page 125).
The fact that the mind of Eben Alexander was locked firmly inside his skull, means that those parts of his brain required for laying down long-term memory functioned well enough to form long-term memories of his experience. True, this also implies these parts of his brain may well have functioned sufficiently to remember his prior life. But he still had amnesia of his prior life. However, while amnesia of a past life, (called "retrograde amnesia"), is incapable of explanation by a soul unaffected by disease, such retrograde amnesia is well explained by a malfunctioning brain capable of forming new memories, but incapable of remembering the old.
Summarizing, Eben Alexander’s retrograde amnesia cannot be explained by disembodiment and memory in his soul, because a disembodied soul has no retrograde memory loss. Instead, his memory loss of his prior life during his experience is fully explained by saying his experience was a structured hallucination.
Eben Alexander claims his experiences occurred during his coma, stating in an interview on a populist website Skeptiko (Click here to read interview).
In fact the only so-called "proof" of this assertion is given in the passage of this discussion, where we read:
This unbelievably uncritical statement by Alex Tsakaris, (a believer in everything and anything even suggestively paranormal), is not a veridical experience. It was no more than observations made during the return of consciousness, as was clearly indicated and stated in his book
This description of the removal of the breathing tube is one that would induce side-splitting convulsions of hysterical laughter with incontinence in any physician acquainted with the management of desperately ill patients in an intensive care unit. It is truly silly drama! Such a passage can only be a product of someone ignorant of all procedures in an intensive care unit. A neurologist caught removing an endotracheal tube [breathing tube] in such a cavalier manner from a deathly ill patient on an intensive care unit would immediately be thrown out of the hospital, and struck from the medical register for malpractice. So I imagine the intensive care physicians, together with the neurologist, determined that Eben Alexander was conscious, carefully built off the ventilator support, and removed the tube after following the usual procedures.
Nonetheless, aside from amusingly ignorant passages such as this, the passages prior to and after clearly reveal that the only veridical aspects of his experience were during his return to consciousness (see Chapters 22, 23, and 24). Eben Alexander provides no evidece to indicate he may have been conscious, or apparently comatose. So the level of evidence in his statement is equivalent to saying, "Trust me, I’m a doctor. And I'm not only just a doctor, but a neurosurgeon who knows all about these things."
The 16-point Greyson NDE-Scale is a generally accepted method of scoring whether an experience could be considered an NDE. So even though the Eben Alexander experience is one where considerable objections can be raised as to its origins, it may still be classified as an NDE with this scale. Here is the scoring system from the IANDS website (Greyson NDE scale). I have reproduced the scale below, with the attributes reported by Eben Alexander underlined in red, bold, underlined letters.
1. Did time seem to speed up or slow down? 0 = No 1 = Time seemed to go faster or slower than usual 2 = Everything seemed to be happening at once; or time stopped or lost all meaning [page 103]
2. Were your thoughts speeded up? 0 = No 1 = Faster than usual 2 = Incredibly fast
3. Did scenes from your past come back to you? 0 = No [pages 24, 30, 31, 78, 79, 117] 1 = I remembered many past events 2 = My past flashed before me, out of my control
4. Did you suddenly seem to understand everything? 0 = No 1 = Everything about myself or others 2 = Everything about the universe
5. Did you have a feeling of peace or pleasantness? 0 = No 1 = Relief or calmness 2 = Incredible peace or pleasantness [pages 40-41]
6. Did you have a feeling of joy? 0 = No 1 = Happiness 2 = Incredible joy [pages 40-41]
7. Did you feel a sense of harmony or unity with the universe? 0 = No 1 = I felt no longer in conflict with nature 2 = I felt united or one with the world
8. Did you see, or feel surrounded by, a brilliant light? 0 = No 1 = An unusually bright light 2 = A light clearly of mystical or other-worldly origin [page 38 and others]
9. Were your senses more vivid than usual? 0 = No 1 = More vivid than usual [pages 95, 130] 2 = Incredibly more vivid
10. Did you seem to be aware of things going on elsewhere, as if by extrasensory perception (ESP)? 0 = No 1 = Yes, but the facts have not been checked out 2 = Yes, and the facts have been checked out
11. Did scenes from the future come to you? 0 = No 1 = Scenes from my personal future 2 = Scenes from the world’s future
12. Did you feel separated from your body? 0 = No 1 = I lost awareness of my body [page 29] 2 = I clearly left my body and existed outside it
13. Did you seem to enter some other, unearthly world? 0 = No 1 = Some unfamiliar and strange place 2 = A clearly mystical or unearthly realm [throughout book]
14. Did you seem to encounter a mystical being or presence, or hear an unidentifiable voice? 0 = No 1 = I heard a voice I could not identify 2 = I encountered a definite being, or a voice clearly of mystical or unearthly origin [page 103]
15. Did you see deceased or religious spirits? 0 = No 1 = I sensed their presence 2 = I actually saw them [his deceased sister - see Chapter 35, pages 165-171 ]
16. Did you come to a border or point of no return? 0 = No 1 = I came to a definite conscious decision to "return" to life 2 = I came to a barrier that I was not permitted to cross; or was "sent back" against my will.
The total score on the Greyson NDE Scale = 16. This qualifies the experience as a quite profound NDE - at least according to this scale. Furthermore, his NDE mainly consisted of Affective and Transcendental elements, which is something mainly occurring in people expecting to undergo a life threatening event (analysis by Bruce Greyson 1985). Was this the result of expectations derived from his experiences prior to coma? As a neurosurgeon, he almost certainly understood the dangerous nature of his illness prior to losing consciousness. This would explain why the elements of this NDE correspond more with an expectative than a reactive NDE. Yet while his NDE was undoubtely profound according to this scale, this scale omits one important factor. It omits the fact that all persons reporting an NDE do retain, and can access memories from their prior existence. As is discussed above, this property of the apparently disembodied conscious mind of Eben Alexander is singularly lacking. This is why it becomes doubtful whether his experience is not better explained as a complex hallucination.
All the above facts can be summarized in a list clearly revealing that the experience of Eben Alexander, no matter how wondrous, or how miraculous, was not truly an NDE.
All that can be said about this experience is that it is a description of a profound, structured, culturally determined hallucination occurring during, and after recovering from a serious illness. It is not an NDE, as is proven by a lack of any memory of his life before his illness during the period he was supposedly disembodied. Furthermore, the spiritual interpretation of this undoubtedly profound experience is permeated with uncritical and populist foolishness. What is certain about this experience is that Eben Alexander survived a life-threatening illness during which he apparently underwent life-changing mental experiences without any veridical moments to confirm when they occurred. Subsequently, he and his co-author, Ptolemy Tompkins, wrote this experience up in a readable popular work confirming the beliefs of those believing in the literal reality of an afterlife as revealed by NDE’s.
Accordingly, the lack of true evidence presented in “Proof of Heaven” reveals no proof of heaven, but is rather an expression of a belief system, as was so eloquently described by Ivor Tuckett long ago in 1932:
The final conclusion is that this experience is an account of hallucinations undergone during, and recovering from a life-threatening illness. To regard it as anything more, is to elevate the interpretation of this experience to a paean of praise of the “unscientific method”, a celebration of uncritical thinking, and a hagiography without import or meaning.