Proof of Heaven Isn’t… Still…
Proof of Heaven is the sort of book I almost never read, but I’m glad I made an exception. I don’t really follow the whole Near Death Experience, is-there-or-isn’t-there-an-afterlife debate. I’ve come to believe there is more to life than life, but I don’t think about it much. Life itself seems a pretty urgent business and I want to pay attention to it before it’s gone. If there’s nothing afterwards, I’ll never know. If there is, I’ve got an excellent lawyer.
But a friend gave me the book for Christmas. I started it, and found it weirdly compelling. As you’ve probably heard, it’s Dr. Eben Alexander’s memoir of how he, a neurosurgeon, went into a coma and saw the next world. According to Alexander, who should know, he was so brain dead at the time it happened that it’s virtually impossible for this to have been any kind of a dream or hallucination. And as the experience went on for days, there was a lot of detail, including some stuff that struck me as convincing. Nothing he sees on the Other Side is particularly startling. It’s all in line with the instincts of the best sort of faith. We’re loved; we’re forgiven. Oh, and there are angels. I’ve never been so sure about angels, but apparently there they are. Dogs too. I’d be very disappointed if there were no dogs.
Now as one of my novel characters once remarked: There’s a reasonable explanation for everything and that’s the one some people choose to believe. One of the things I liked best about the book is that Alexander is honest enough to allow us into some of the darker places in his psychology. If you want to construct a psychological explanation for his Near Death Event you can. And he even gives several “scientific” explanations of greater or lesser plausibility — the best being that the whole experience was basically the dream he had when his brain was rebooting.
All the same, I found the book oddly believable. It’s not pious or treacly like so many books about faith experiences are. And even though the doc gets pretty New Age and woo-woo by the time he’s finished, it wasn’t alienating if you kept an open mind. It stuck with me for several days after I finished it.
So while no one can offer you a guarantee, I would say this book constitutes a piece of circumstantial evidence for the defense of heaven. Which makes for an interesting read, even if you decide to dismiss it.
Thanks Andrew! It’s always good to hear your perspective. I enjoyed the book, although a little too new age-ish for me in the end, but that’s just my lifelong Episcopalian training. I did find one of his online interviews to be more enlightening than the book. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOSb3G53HsA
“I’d be very disappointed if there were no dogs.”
That is Hell. If my dogs aren’t there to greet me, it isn’t Heaven.
Amen! to that
I believe Dr. Alexander’s survival, with little or no evident brain damage, is near to miraculous. (I mean, maybe the medical people who back his story about how sick he was are lying, but it isn’t likely.) I certainly trust that, by explaining what is and isn’t known in his field about consciousness, Dr. Alexander can expose flaws in the argument that an NDE is nothing more than chemical reactions in a dying or “rebooting” brain. But, after watching a few interviews of Dr. Alexander, what I don’t trust is that he had an NDE. I think he came home from the hospital knowing he was no longer sharp enough to practice in his field and suddenly saw how he wouldn’t need to be. So who’s NDE would I trust ? I trust Ben Breedlove was telling the truth about what he experienced, and that he is now with God.
Did anyone here ever experience lucid dreaming? It’s dreaming while being aware that you’re dreaming and often being able to partially or completely control the dream. You are as aware as when you are awake — you know your body now lies in bed in the bedroom, you remeber that before going to bed you watched an episode of Law and Order, — you remeber what the episode was about, — and then washed the dishes and prepared the green shirt to wear for work tomorrow. You remember tomorrow is the last day to pay your electricity bill, and that you have a meeting at noon. In short, you’re just as realistically aware of yourself as when you are awake. But while knowing you are lying in your bed sleepin you don’t actually feel you’re lying in your bed. You’re somewhere else, seeing other things and doing other things. You can even be in your bedroom, but floating around, might even be looking at your body lying in bed, or be able to pass through solid objects. The sensation is very different from a regular dream since you’re as aware as when you are awake, so it seems very realistic. When you wake up the experience often doesn’t fade away like a regular dream, you remeber it like you remember your waking expereiences. So it all seems very real.
The question is how you interpret this experience. If you were practicing lucid dreaming you will normally interpret it as a dream you have while being aware of dreaming. If it happened spontaneously you are very likely to interpret it as an out-of-the-body-experience (OBE). I can’t tell you which interpretation is the correct one, but I once tried to experiment with it to find out if it’s an authentic OBE. I opened a book without looking at it and placed it on a high shelf where I couldn’t reach to look without a ladder. The next time I’d wake up floating in the room I was to float to the high shelf and look at the page numbers and the first words where the book was open. If after waking up I could tell the correct page numbers and first words, it would be a very siginificant support for the OBE interpretation. If I couldn’t it still woudn’t refute it completely, but would cast a very significant doubt on it. Next time I woke up floating in the room I remembered my experiment and floated over to the top library shelf to look at the page numbers and words. When I “returned to my body” and woke up in it I took the book down and compared it to the numbers and words I remembered from my “OBE”. They were not the same numbers and words, I’m sad to say.
If you like to try it yourself there are various techniques to practice lucid dreaming or OBE (the techniques are similar, the interpretation is different). They usually invlove deep relaxation which I’m not very good at, so I found a neat little trick that works for me. Don’t know if it’ll work for you, but you can try. I made a habit of asking myself a couple of times a day if I’m dreaming right now. I’d look at my surrounding, examine my hands and touch, even pinch, my cheeks before answering ‘No’. After some time of practicing, this habit started invading my dreams. Surprisingly if I ask myself if I’m dreaming right now when I am dreaming the answer would usually be ‘Yes’. If you ask yourself if you’re dreaming it makes you aware and you start noticing unrealistic details which make you realize you are dreaming. Now that you know you are dreaming and are not in the physical reality you can try to do all sorts of things, like flying, passing through solid objects, changing the scenary, making things, people or beings appear and disappear, or becoming aware of your body lying in bed, “leaving it” and looking at the open book on the top library shelf.
Oddly enough here’s another doctor who had a NDE when she drowned kayaking. These two books came out right around the same time. http://drmaryneal.com/about-dr-mary-neal.html – Her’s is entitled To Heaven and Back.
I have the same lawyer you do.
Problem is he always advises me that I must plead guilty. I’ve been told by his other clients though that even though the judge metes out the most excessive of penalties (far beyond any human rights code) he will always offer to take the retribution on his own shoulders. Most unusual.
I also believe most law society’s frown on this sort of conduct by such an advocate.