The Outworker
Stories of healing, personal development, and inner work. Founded on the idea that the relationship with oneself is the most important to develop, but the easiest to neglect, The Outworker shares conversations aimed at helping you develop that relationship.
The Outworker
#052 - Dr. Eben Alexander - A Neurosurgeon’s Near-Death Experience & The Truth About Consciousness
Dr. Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon, shares how his near-death experience completely shattered his scientific understanding of consciousness. We explore the mind-body connection, the reality of the afterlife, and why love and interconnectedness are at the core of existence. His journey challenged materialist science and revealed a deeper, more expansive view of reality—one that affirms we are spiritual beings living a human experience.
Timestamps:
00:00 Knowing When To Tell Your Story
13:52 Going Into A Coma For 7 Days
19:19 Entering A Higher Realm
34:03 Lacking Faith Up Until This Experience
39:08 Were You Chosen?
46:44 Power Of Prayer
51:54 Returning To A Physical Body & This World
57:55 Creating A Symbiotic Relationship Between Science & Spirituality
1:01:12 Stories Heal Like Medicine
1:04:45 Spiritual Beings Living The Human Experience
1:05:20 Connect With Dr. Eben Alexander
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What’s up outworkers. Dr. Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon, shares how his near-death experience completely shattered his scientific understanding of consciousness. We explore the mind-body connection, the reality of the afterlife, and why love and interconnectedness are at the core of existence. His journey challenged materialist science and revealed a deeper, more expansive view of reality—one that affirms we are spiritual beings living a human experience.
Tim Doyle (00:08.442)
You say what you've experienced is a tricky story to tell because it is so foreign to ordinary understanding. And to be honest with you, I think this is one of the harder interviews I've had to prepare for because of that very point. And I'm a big believer that we all have a story that the world can benefit from hearing. But before we share that story, we have to internally process that experience for ourselves so we can fully understand.
you know, what we've gone through.
How did you go about navigating that entire process and how did you know you were at the point where you were ready to share your entire story with the
Eben Alexander MD (00:53.304)
Well, in many ways, it was a tremendous gift because the whole experience, my whole NDE happened in a setting of amnesia where I really didn't have memories of my life, Earth, this universe, our language, every bit of that was gone. And that's unusual. That's very rare, especially to the degree I had it. And it only made sense to me months later as I started to put all the pieces together. So.
The answer to your question is that there was a struggle. There was a back and forth struggle that in some ways is still going on. But that struggle had to do with kind of my scientific side. That's how I was raised. And, you know, my whole upbringing was deeply scientific. My kind of genetic origins were in a very scientific background, although I was adopted. So that's a huge part of the story. But both my
nurturing side of my nature side were strongly scientific. So ultimately, making sense of my experience had to be consistent with my kind scientific knowledge. And in many ways, of course, I've had to modify my scientific model of the world because in many ways it was a kind of conventional materialist or physicalist worldview that I harbored.
I trained at Duke and worked at Harvard Medical School teaching neurosurgery for 15 years. Thought I had some understanding of brain mind and consciousness, but that training was so heavily based in kind of the materialist, physicalist viewpoint that was so prominent in the 20th and early 21st century. And yet that was completely violated by my experience. And that experience not only included what I went through, but
very importantly, reviews by other doctors of my medical records. Because, you know, initially with that amnesia, when I came back to this world, my neurosurgical knowledge was temporarily gone. You know, all I knew was where I'd just been. And when I tried to tell my doctors about this extraordinary spiritual experience, they would just pat me on the back and say, well, your brain was soaking in pus. We have no idea how you were even coming back to us.
Eben Alexander MD (03:11.086)
But you can forget about it because a dying brain plays all kinds of tricks. And given that my big, you know, 54 year history of acquiring scientific knowledge, including neurosurgery, had been temporarily deleted, I just said, OK, you know, that's that's it. They're telling me it's a hallucination. And so that was my default assumption, even though to me, as I told my older son, Evan, the fourth, who is majoring in neuroscience in college at the time.
when he came home two days after I got out of the hospital, I said it was way too real to be real. That's the way I interpreted it because there was so much detail. The memories were so strong, the emotional power of it. I mean, there was this rich thing that had happened to me. And but I defaulted to my doctor's statement. You know, the dying brain plays all kinds of tricks. Now, that's until I started going back to the hospital for follow up appointments, talking with my doctors, going through my medical records.
reviewing neurologic exams, Glasgow Coma Scale, things like that, some of the details of those exams, CT and MRI scans that showed that no part of my brain was spared from this extremely aggressive and should have killed me bacterial meningoencephalitis. And that's where I started hitting this huge conflict because everything that I'd been taught about the brain and consciousness basically tells you, modern neuroscience tells you,
that any detail of modern conscious awareness, everything we see, hear, feel, our body awareness in space, our notion of our surround and other people around us, interpretation of their input into us, sensory input into us, memories of past events, predictions of future events, every bit of that giant thing we call consciousness supposedly happens thanks to
the detailed neurocalculator of the neocortex, the outer six layers of the brain. But meningitis is a perfect model for human death by attacking that system. And so how was it that with this meningitis eroding and destroying my brain, in fact, one of the remarkable lab values in my story is my cerebrospinal fluid glucose. And you or me, that would be 80 or so.
Eben Alexander MD (05:30.822)
and somebody in deep coma from a horrific bacterial meningitis might drop as low as 20. Well, my CSF glucose was one. In other words, and the consultants on the case had never heard of that serious a case of meningitis. And in addition to all the neurologic features of decline, know, the bacteria had long ago run out of glucose and was destroying my brain.
And that's what makes it such a perfect model for human death. So I shouldn't have been able to have any dream or hallucination. And that argument is greatly bolstered, not just by the medical facts I present in the book, Proof of Heaven, but in the medical case report about my medical records published by three doctors not involved in my care, but fascinated by my recovery.
And that came out in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, September 2018. Dr. Sir B. Connell, Lauren Moore, and Bruce Grayson wrote the report. And they make it clear that brain was way too ill to be supporting a hallucination or dream or confabulation or anything like that. And yet, how did this happen? So many people often say, well, it's not important that he was a neurosurgeon. You know, it does actually make a difference because I know what I went through.
And then I know the medical facts of my case as it has been confirmed by other doctors investigating it. And there was no way that the old model of brain creates consciousness fit with my experience, given the medical details of the case. So that's why in so many ways, my case is very important to the scientific community. And that's why you find that there are some, there is one specific personal attack out there, an article that was written,
trying to discredit me and take down my believability. And they make a very strong point in that article that it was a medically induced coma. That is a lie. It was not medically induced. was, I went deep into coma at home in bed having seizures long before I had any medical intervention at all. And when I came out of coma seven days later, I was still on very strong sedative medications.
Eben Alexander MD (07:45.942)
So forget about it. It was not medically induced at all. It was caused by destruction of the neocortex and brainstem. For example, my oculocardiac reflex, which is a very deep kind of linkage between the hypothalamus and the lower brainstem, that was gone. And that shows horrific damage. mean, it's a tiebreaker when you've got a very low Glasgow Coma Scale to lose your oculocardiac reflex. But that was the case in my situation.
So this was not a little, ho, another case of bacterial meningitis. This was an absolutely slam dunk killer case that should have killed me. And, you know, in fact, my doctors estimated early in the week, had 10 % chance of survival by the end of the week, 2%. And there was no real chance of recovery back to a normal quality of life. And that's why the doctors were recommending stopping antibiotics. That was day seven of coma.
And it soon thereafter I started to wake up. But when I was waking up, all I remembered was this incredible journey. I had no memories of my life. That amnesia was still very much in power. So I didn't even recognize my mother, my sisters, my sons at the bedside. All I knew was that incredible journey. At any rate, I went through a 36 hour period of kind of a paranoid delusional ICU psychosis. I know what that looks like. And I knew that was a delusion. I knew it wasn't real.
And yet the memories from deep in coma when my brain was most inactivated were the strongest and most powerful and detailed and transformational details of the entire experience. So that's why my case is so important to scientists. People often ask, are your skeptical scientific colleagues think about all this? Well, in fact, they support me tremendously. As we reported in our third book, Living in a Mindful Universe,
I was first of all invited to my own M &M conference, Morbidity Mortality Conference, and that's for patients who are horribly affected or die from their illness. And so it's very rare for such a patient to attend their own conference, but I did because they wanted to know how in the world did this happen? And the doctors in my community, as I had worked at that same hospital where I was treated for this meningitis,
Eben Alexander MD (10:03.178)
Also, the County Medical Society invited me several months later to give a presentation at the country club. And I was there and gave this talk to 120 doctors and their spouses. So that scientific community who knew about this case were terrifically interested in what in the world happened. You know, this is not some little made up fantasy in my mind, but something that took our whole medical community by storm.
I've found tremendous scientific support in the last 16 years since my experience. And in fact, they've been some of my biggest supporters. You can go to medical and scientific.net or Galileo commission.org and you'll find groups that I work with as an advisor. And it's all about this new model that leaves the old kind of materialist and physicalist model.
in the rear view mirror as hopelessly inadequate of bleak and paltry fiction. So this is really about a scientific revolution that to me is very promising for humanity at large, especially because it counters the ridiculous nonsense of the false sense of separation that's so inherent in materialist thinking. You know, that we're all individual bodies and that we're separate from each other as opposed to acknowledging the oneness of mind, the connectedness.
of our mental space, which is revealed strongly in NDEs. And it's a whole new worldview that is much more promoting of love, compassion, kindness, mercy, acceptance. When you acknowledge how the science supports the reality, not just of near death experiences, but shared death, which is just like them, but happen in perfectly healthy people, after death communications, past life memories and children's suggestive reincarnation.
All these big scientific databases that contribute to this question are now allowed to kind of express and let's follow the data where it leads. I mean, our practice in the 20th century was as materialist scientists to debunk and deny all this stuff. So it can't be, it doesn't fit the materialist model. NDEs are hallucinations, you know, they have nothing to do with reality. I'll tell you what, when you keep ignoring real data,
Eben Alexander MD (12:20.62)
you lead yourself away from the truth. As Carl Sagan said, science should never suppress data because it doesn't know which data is right or wrong. You should take all data. so Sagan would not like the materialist atheist approach of the modern era, which is simply to try and sweep it all under the rug. So it's really about a huge revolution in human thinking.
Tim Doyle (12:45.83)
I think that's why your story is so impactful because it's so incredible on its own, but given the added detail of you being a medical professional for decades just adds so much more weight to that story. Taking things to the start though, so people have a better understanding of exactly what did happen and how you got into this coma. Can you just walk me through?
what exactly happened on November 10th, 2008.
Eben Alexander MD (13:17.87)
Okay, well, I'll say at that time I was 54 years old. I'd been following this kind of conventional materialist worldview. Thought I understood it all, at least to some degree, although nobody in that mindset.
truly understood how consciousness was related to the brain. But anyway, in that setting, I woke with severe back pain, soon realized I had a horrific headache. And before long, I was having grand mal seizures passed out on my bed at home when my family called the EMTs to come get me. So what the family saw was my body hauled off to the ER. They couldn't really stop the seizures until arrival in the ER when they were finally able to do that through medications.
But I was gone from this world. don't remember anything for the next seven days. And that's what my family saw. I was put on a ventilator on three powerful intravenous antibiotics, went from a 10 % chance of survival down to 2 % over that week with no chance of recovery by the end of the seven days in coma. That's what they saw. Now, very different was what I was actually going through.
what I was experiencing. First of all, as I said, amnesia. had no memory of this universe, earth. I had no language, no knowledge of Evan Alexander's life. And of course, when I first came back in the weeks and months after my coma, I explained all that by thinking, well, I guess memories are stored in the brain. So a damage to the neocortex got rid of them. Well, I did not yet know that over two months post coma, all my memories were returned. In fact, many of them were more complete.
than they had been before coma, which came through conversations with close family and friends, et cetera. But memories are not stored in the brain. It's something neurosurgeons had suspected for a long time because there's never been a brain resection that was associated with a loss of a swathe of long-term memories. So we're always very suspicious of this idea that memories have stored the brain. There's much more about that, especially in our third book, Living in a Mindful Universe. But anyway, that was my default assumption early on.
Eben Alexander MD (15:20.168)
But then when the memories came back, that was no longer a valid argument at all. Anyway, so deep in this amnesic state, it all started in what I call the earthworms I view, a primitive course, kind of unresponsive realm, like being in dirty jello. I had no body awareness, but I was sensing things around me. I was aware. And that awareness, although it sounds foreboding in the words I used to describe it, this kind of subterranean earthworm I view, it was the only thing I knew. I had no memory of anything else. So
I simply accepted it. This is existence. Luckily, it didn't last forever. There came a slowly spinning white light that was surrounded by fine silvery and golden tendrils. And as it spun towards me very slowly out of these murky depths, I realized it had a perfect musical melody. And the musical notes of the melody were very important because they helped me later on when I would ascend through all these spiritual levels and spontaneously tumble back down.
that earth were my view by remembering the musical notes of the melody, I could always conjure up that light portal that led up into the brilliant ultra real gateway valley. And this is where things get to a point where you've entered a territory that's no longer like our earth time and our earthly experience. This is, for example, where we would have life reviews. You know, your life flashing before your eyes. But important thing to get, those are not just vague memories.
They are a reliving of events and also from the perspective of everyone involved. That's very important because that means that the golden rule, treat others as you would like to be treated, is written into the very fabric of the universe. Now given my amnesia, I didn't have an Eban Alexander life review, but as this whole story unfolds, I was able to see not only life reviews, but reincarnation. But I'll get to that in a second. So what happens is up at this light portal into this
brilliant ultra real gateway valley. If you can imagine being able to witness birth, death and everything in between in your life simultaneously, that kind of gives you an idea of the exotic nature of that spiritual realm. It's completely elevated out of our normal little kind of ant like view of reality as we plod along with earth time and these material bodies. But with that giant helicopter view, birth, death, everything in between, including
Eben Alexander MD (17:38.872)
potentially some past life experiences and also future life potentials, you realize you're in a very different territory. And that kind of kind of connection, that kind of perspective is also something that is very difficult for us to explain, although it's a tremendous tool, because by having that much bigger perspective, things make much more sense. We start to realize why we had certain challenges and hardships and how, in fact, they added to our soul growth.
So one of my biggest lessons from this journey was embrace your challenges and hardships in life, illness, injury, these kinds of things can be gifts. It's how we approach them, how we recover strength in a sense of meaning and purpose and heart with the universe. That's what's of value there. So at any rate,
In my situation, this Gateway Valley was a beautiful scene. I was a speck of awareness on a butterfly wing, were millions of other butterflies looping and spiraling in vast formations, colors beyond the rainbow. Below us, this incredibly rich and verdant meadow, very fertile, rich, verdant, no sign of any death or decay anywhere. So in many ways, this kind of Gateway Valley that I'm talking about, which is a very common
intersection space for the spiritual and the earthly realm where life reviews would happen and things like that. It was kind of indescribably gorgeous and I mean just to think back on it and when I meditate and go back to it it's an incredibly rich experience to recover all that. But in the midst of all this there were thousands of beings down below me in the meadow they were dancing and joy like this festival going on.
children playing, dogs jumping, I mean just beautiful festivities all being fueled because up above were these swooping orbs of angelic choirs that were swooping through these vast formations above, emanating chants and anthems, hymns that would thunder through my awareness, this incredible beauty and majesty and all just unbelievable kind of emotional beauty and growth and kind of wisdom of the universe presented
Eben Alexander MD (19:56.302)
And I was witnessing every bit of this. They were around this beautiful meadow with all the festivities. There was this rich forest, sparkling waterfalls and crystal blue pools. The entire scene was lit by clouds of pure billowing color. mean, it's just indescribable, the majesty of it all. At some point in that early exposure in this gateway valley, there was a sense.
of what I later called the divine wind or God's the breath of God coming through. And that was my first awareness in this amnesic state of the infinitely healing God force of love, the love of the creator for the creation, essentially, that was just permeating this entire scene. And it changed the entire emotional tenor of it. And that's what started drawing me up and away. And that's when I realized that the entire four dimensional
of space time, the very limited earth time, which you could vaguely perceive from the spiritual realm, collapsed down. And then all of this rich spiritual realm with its kind of meta time or deep time, a completely different kind of chronologically ordering of cause and effect and awareness of all that, all of that collapsed down into this complex over sphere as I was ascending through yet another light portal. This light portal, again, provided by the music of those angelic choirs.
And that's what led me up into what I call the core. The core was as far as I went, but I had to get there several times in this overall journey. And in the core, always informed. And the way I translated that information on entering the core, when I wrote it all up weeks later, you are not here to stay. You will teach you many things. You'll be going.
And there were many lessons there. That's all the kind of material I've talked about in these hundreds of podcasts, etc. In the book and presentations and additional books like Living in a Mindful Universe, where we go into a lot of detail about all this. But at any rate, in the core realm, the most amazing thing, in addition to this complex over sphere that was the universe throughout eternity as a teaching tool, was this very powerful sense.
Eben Alexander MD (22:13.612)
that my conscious awareness itself was directly sourced in that God force of pure love, the co-creative force that I mentioned before. And I came back from my journey realizing it doesn't matter if you want to try and label that God, Allah, Brahman, Vishnu, Jehovah, Yahweh, Great Spirit, all the many names that humans have tried to capture that and define it, you cannot. It is far too kind of originating of all of our existence.
for us to have that kind of outside description of it. And it's far grander than our imagination. And that's why, to me, it's important to realize that in so many ways, religions try to tend towards an agreement about that force in terms of it being a force of love, kindness, compassion, and mercy and acceptance. And that's what I was witnessing full bore in this core realm.
And I'll mention one of the main visions I had there, although it wasn't in the first passage through the core because I'd tumbled back down to the earth from my view by remembering the musical notes of the melody, I could conjure up that light portal and get back up into the Gateway Valley. And then always reassured by this beautiful guardian angel who accompanied me on the butterfly way. And that guardian angel was very important in the later story.
But her message to me is I it came it's a pure conceptual flow. She never said a word to me She never had to it was a telepathic emotional mind melt From her and when I wrote those words down later I said her message to me was you are deeply loved and cherished forever You have nothing to fear you were richly cared for and I cannot tell you how comforting and reassuring that message was in that in that moment and every time I pass back through there
very affirming and kind of invigorating and she was the guardian angel. At any rate, I would go through these levels multiple times. This one vision that I wanted to mention about the core realm was a very powerful vision showing me not only life reviews, life flash before your eyes, even though I could not have an Eben Alexander life review, but also showing me reincarnation because it showed these interwoven fibers, these threads.
Eben Alexander MD (24:33.676)
that I interpreted as our lives. And it was almost as if the inhale is incarnation in a body. The exhale was time between lives with the life review. But with these progressive incarnations in physical form, we grow. It's not like the Buddhist concept of get off the wheel of suffering. That's what reincarnation is about. But more about grace, more about progress and transformation, evolution of consciousness itself towards this golden center.
that was very clear in my Endresnet vision. So reincarnation, life reviews, every bit of that was presented to me in a very powerful fashion, even though I couldn't have an Evan Alexander life review. And in fact, I came to realize in the months and years after my coma that if it had been scripted more like a traditional view, my adoptive father, very important in my life, a globally renowned neurosurgeon who was also very spiritual, he had passed over four years before my coma.
If I had scripted this, he would have been there front and center, and yet he was nowhere to be found. And I describe in the book, Living in a Mindful Universe, how I finally encountered his soul about two and a half years post coma in a deep meditation using sacred acoustics, a form of binaural beat brainwave entrainment that I've used daily for an hour or two for the last decade plus, a lot of it to return to my NDE, but a lot of it for other soul work and kind of healing work.
So meditation is what I recommend to anyone and everyone to kind of get to this same level of understanding. You don't have to have an NDE yourself. Just be aware of that literature and then spend some time in meditation and centering prayer and you'll start realizing the big wisdom of this expanded view of mind that I'm talking about. At any rate, back to my story.
Multiple passages through many, many lessons, but then there came a time, as they told me the first time I entered the core, you're not here to stay, where I could no longer conjure up the musical notes, the melody leading to the light portal up into the Gateway Valley. To say I was sad would be an understatement, but I also knew by that point I could trust in the universe that I would be cared for. I had nothing to worry about. that's when I witnessed thousands of beings going all around me into the distance in the murky.
Eben Alexander MD (26:50.176)
kind of realm of that earth were my view and they had head spouts i'm holding candles this murmuring energy was coming from them and the most amazing thing to me was even though i was back in that murky first stage of this journey that earth were my view with this murmuring energy there was a tremendous amount of elation and love and optimism and kind of a sense of being in my spiritual home again but it was coming from all these beings around me and what i call that when i came back to this world was that was the power of
prayer and kind of drawing me back towards this world. And the final thing I saw in my NDE, there were six faces that bubbled out of the muck. those faces were mainly of people, close family and friends who were there the last 24 to 48 hours of coma. So very importantly, they told me that the vast majority of the coma journey had to happen before that.
you know somewhere in the seven-day coma probably between days one and four one and five and that medical case report i mentioned a while ago showed that during that entire period i was in deep coma from something that would not have allowed any kind of dream or hallucination so anyway those faces were very important to one of them was actually an old friend of mine all the way back to 1972 to college freshman english class susan wrenches she'd written a book called third eye open
I lost track of her after 1972, but reunited with her when she worked with my former spouse teaching at a high school in Raleigh. But my family knew that she had done this work channeling to help people in coma. So they contacted Susan and on nights four and five of my coma, she channeled to me from from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 120 miles away. And to me, when I came out of coma and I was saying, well, you were there, you were there, you were there. But where was Susan?
And they said, well, she was never physically here, but she channeled to you. Of course, before my coma as a conventional neurosurgeon, I would have told you channeling is nonsense, but she'd been there as forcefully and really as anyone else, having a lot to do with my return to this world. So it made perfect sense that in the spiritual realm, there's no limitation of time or distance. So there she was. But it was the last face that was the most important. It was a 10-year-old boy.
Eben Alexander MD (29:13.78)
I didn't recognize him at the time and I promise you I didn't see him with my eyes or hear him with my ears. It turned out it was my son Bond and they'd been keeping the worst news from Bond this whole week. But that Sunday morning he overheard the conference with the doctors where they said it was time to let me go. He knew this was much worse than he'd been told. came running down the hallway into major bay 10, pulled open my eyelids that had been taped shut as I was lying there on my ventilator all week.
And he started pleading with me, Daddy, you're to be okay. Daddy, you're to be okay. As if somehow that would make it so. And I ended up, you know, way out there in this kind of spiritual realm of sensing his presence and that pleading with me. And up until this time, because of the amnesia and no sense of responsibility to other souls, I thought this can all continue. It can cease. doesn't matter. But now everything mattered because there was another soul out there who
desperately needed me even though I couldn't understand the words he was saying but it was a plea that invoked me to be there to help him and That was terrifying probably the only real terrifying moment of the whole Adventure because now there was something I kind of had to do and yet I didn't understand this world at all But what happened next was I guess higher soul navigation I was coming back to this world and as I woke up in the ICU bed fighting the ventilator
They pulled out the breathing tube. said, thank you. and my younger sister tells kind of a funny story. She arrived there about 30 minutes or so after I came out of coma. And she said, I was sitting there like a little Buddha on the bed. And I was looking at everyone around them, family, friends, doctor, nurses, what have you. And I would look at them in the eyes and I'd just say, don't worry. All is well. And then I'd move to the next one. Don't worry. All is well.
And after a whole week where all the doctors were saying how deadly this illness was and my likelihood of death for me to be sitting there reassuring everybody right when I got back this world was a real shocker. But I was not really back yet. I was still aimed for about 36 hours of a paranoid, delusional, psychotic nightmare. I describe that a little bit in the book Proof of Heaven. But the interesting thing was I knew as it was happening that that was a delusion.
Eben Alexander MD (31:36.566)
It wasn't real at all. And of course, my family helped me to come to that realization. But, you know, it was very different from the extraordinary experience deep in coma. Those memories from deep in coma when my brain was so inactivated, according to the medical records, those memories are sharp and clear as if the whole thing happened yesterday. And yet the memories of the psychotic nightmare disappeared within a few weeks. So I'm glad I was writing things down, trying to record it.
you know and make sense of all this stuff because then I had this 20 000 word summary that was there you know my older son majoring in neuroscience in college at the time had recommended write it all down before you read anyone else's nde and i'm glad he he said that because that gave me a basis that was untainted by anyone else's nde and that's that's where that that whole big story came from and then of course the 16 years since then
trying to make sense of it. And that's what really makes up, especially that third book, Living in a Mindful Universe. It was co-written with my wife, Karen Newell. She was not my wife at the time. I ended up having a divorce from my former spouse as happens in about 85 % of NDEs because there's such a major shift in kind of spiritual awareness that sometimes a couple doesn't last through that. at any rate, my...
Karen has been very important to me in my spiritual journey and a mentor, et cetera. She's also the co-founder of Sacred Acoustics, the form of binaural beat brainwave entrainment that I've found to be so valuable in this effort.
Tim Doyle (33:15.954)
What I also find really interesting about your story, because obviously a very enlightening and spiritual experience that you went through, but before any of this happened, so 20 years in neurosurgery before this and always being in a scientific environment and you had a decline in your faith and your spirituality. And in the early two thousands for eight years, you considered yourself agnostic. How do you think the fact that
you weren't spiritually healthy, so to speak, made this entire experience even more profound.
Eben Alexander MD (33:50.606)
Well, I think it was an important part of it. To me, what I've come to recognize in a very powerful sense is one of the greatest qualities in assessing this kind of situation is a true open-minded skepticism. know, doubting, as René Descartes said, this quote is somewhere in proof of heaven. But if you consider yourself a true seeker, at some point in your life, you must reject everything you've ever believed to be true.
and start over at square one. And that's what I had to do. I had to say, well, wait a minute, something is badly off with my kind of interpretation through conventional science about how all this works. And so I really had to go back to square one. So I think open-minded skepticism is very valuable. Now it turns out in our media, in the press, you'll find people who call themselves skeptics, but in so many cases, they're simply militant atheists.
you know, agents, they don't care about the facts. They don't care about rational argument, but they care about is promoting their own worldview. And so those are the kinds who would sweep all this evidence under the rug. And as Carl Sagan told us, you know, science should never suppress evidence because we don't know which evidence is right or wrong. So Sagan would certainly not agree with those militant atheists who just deny and debunk all this. And in fact, I will tell you that today,
There is a resource available for anyone and everyone who wants to follow this question of the afterlife from a scientific perspective. If you go to bigelowinstitute.org, you will find a series of 29 essays written four years ago. The challenge to the scientific community was what's the best scientific evidence for continuation of conscious awareness after permanent bodily death. That's the question.
and Robert Bigelow put on a contest a few million dollars of prize money and that was the origin of these essays. They're extremely good. They come from many different angles. If you go to bigelowinstitute.org you'll see exactly what I'm talking about and you'll realize that the afterlife questions has already been settled beyond any reasonable doubt. It's real. The afterlife is absolutely real, scientifically proven. These essays make that crystal clear.
Eben Alexander MD (36:09.678)
So henceforth, anytime you run into a materialist atheist scientist who comes on a podcast and says, oh, NDEs are nonsense, know, science has debunked them completely. What you know is you're listening to somebody who is willfully ignorant, who doesn't care to take the time to read that voluminous and very convincing rational argument for the reality of not only the afterlife, but reincarnation is strongly.
supported in that literature and in that scientific argument. So we've really come a tremendous way towards proving the reality of this. And to me, it's something that can help our society become much better, because ultimately the message of NDEs and the truth behind them is that we're sharing one mind. We're really here to show unconditional love, compassion, kindness, and mercy to our fellow beings.
That is one of the deepest lessons of the NDE literature that we are really part of one mind who hurt another is to hurt yourself and the life review. You your life flashing before your eyes, which happens in 25 to 50 percent of NDE's depending on the series. Life reviews are the golden rule. Treat others as you would like to be treated, written into the fabric of the universe and in our very conflicted and polarized and warring world. This deep and profound lesson.
right at the core of our existence. So that comes right out of near-death experiences and of memories of children of past lives and this incredible richness of scientifically and rigorously studying all this data to make a better model of what humanity and existence on earth today is really all about. It's incredibly valuable, especially to get rid of the false sense of separation that's so inherent in materialism.
because that is what is killing our world today. The egos, the narcissism, authoritarian dictatorial leaders, nuclear weapons that are at their whim. I mean, we need this lesson to survive as a planet.
Tim Doyle (38:21.672)
To that degree, does it feel like you were chosen by a higher being to experience this?
Eben Alexander MD (38:28.02)
I think all these kind of experiences, whether it's near death, shared death, which are just like near death, but happen in perfectly healthy people, after death communications, these reincarnation stories, every bit of that contributes to this knowledge. mean, my story is one part of it. It's a catalyst because of the evidence I have that it was not just a hallucination or dream. And yet all of them contribute tremendously.
So it would be very short-sighted to say that I was chosen in any way. think the universe at large has been trying to show us some deep truths about our existence for thousands of years. And humans have tried to put this together. Religious systems have tried to focus on things like oneness and love, but religious ideologies by people who wanted to control other people would fall away from the ideal path of the prophets.
and get into controlling others, things like that. So religions were kind of led astray in some ways. Now I'm not putting down religion because I think religion, prayer, the rituals, the togetherness of it, praying in groups, things like that is a very powerful, active way to demonstrate this oneness and this binding force of love. And yet it's interesting to me that as a scientist and religions have had 5,000 plus years,
to teach us this golden rule in very profound fashion. And yet it turns out what I think is finally gonna help humanity turn the page on all this in our understanding is the scientific study of near-death experiences and other kind of exotic forms of consciousness that defy the typical models because that's where we start putting together this much bigger picture that in many ways is much more optimistic.
But it necessitates we acknowledge our oneness that we're sharing one mind. That is the essential message of our book, Living in a Mindful Universe. And it talks about how we do it through both science and spirituality. They strengthen each other. They don't conflict. And when I use the word spirituality, all it means in a very simple definition is that we acknowledge that there appears to be a shared mind, that God mind is a source of our very conscious awareness.
Eben Alexander MD (40:45.142)
is something we all have access to. And we get much better access to that when we're free of the constraints of our ego. Our ego kind of misleads us in a lot of ways. The ego is always participating in addictions and things like that. And this is why prayer and meditation are so important. And acknowledgement, I love how Michael Singer in his book, The Untethered Soul, he calls that voice in your head, your annoying roommate. That's a very good way to put it. And that is not your consciousness. The miracle of your consciousness
is your awareness of those thoughts. But that is a neutral observer, kind of higher form of self. That's the part that expands to witness life reviews and things like that in an NDE. It's not constricted. So that kind of higher soul is really something we don't kind of possess as ours, but it's our connection with the primordial mind, with that God mind. And this is why I strongly encourage people, you don't have to have an NDE to get
to the level of my understanding of this. Just spend some time in meditation or centering prayer going within, exploring consciousness. And you'll soon discover, especially when you're effective at turning off the little ego voice in your head with meditation, that there's a tremendous connection you have with that primordial mind and the sense of love. And the same thing that Indie ears have been discovering for thousands of years. And the good news is that discovery does not lead us to a point
where you see good and evil at battle at the very cores of origin in the universe. But you see as you get to that primary source of creative potential that it's pure love. That God force is pure love. And that's why NDEs don't show a blend of good and evil, but they actually lead us towards that love and light of that God force. And that's what we can bring back to this world.
And for those who need an effective tool to help turn off that little monkey mind voice in your head, I highly recommend sacredacoustics.com. Go there. You'll see what I mean. Binaural beat, brainwave entrainment is something I was attracted to beginning about two years post coma. I'd read 150 books since my coma, quantum physics, spiritual traditions, East and West, trying to understand it, but then came to realize you can read everything you want, go to all the talks and discussions. Ultimately, you must explore your own consciousness.
Eben Alexander MD (43:05.814)
And that's when I encountered binaural beat brainwave entrainment. I encountered an article in Scientific American in the early 1970s by Gerald Oster, where he talked about binaural beats in the brain. That kind of educated me about the relevant anatomy and what's going on here. know, any sound you've ever heard chant, anthem, hymn, what have you, that's engendered a transcendental state of conscious awareness has been processed up in the acoustic cortex of the temporal lobes.
Those are circuits that have been derived in last two to three million years in human and primate evolution. Very different are the differential frequencies of something like sacred acoustics. Slight differences in the frequency of sounds hitting the two ears intersects in lower brain stem, superior olivary nucleus. It participates tremendously in modulating 40 times a second the kind of activity of the thalamocortical loops. I don't want to turn this into a big neuroscience lecture, but the bottom line is
by addressing and modulating this very powerful circuit that arose more than 300 million years ago before mammals walk the earth. was originally a localization circuit for auditory threats. You know, if you heard a sound and still to this day, that circuit works. If you snap fingers behind my head, that circuit is calculating arrival time of sound going a thousand feet per second arrives in my ears at slightly different times. And that circuit
is what tells me where that sound is. It can modulate the reticular activating system, which is an ignition system for a now signal coming up. And modern neuroscience has these kind of vague ideas of how consciousness works. But that much makes sense that this powerful modulator left right oscillation in the lower brain stem is what enables you to escape the illusion of here now and sense of self. And in the mid and late 20th century, binaural beats
were found to enhance people's ability to have out of body experiences and to do remote viewing. Remote viewing is a form of kind of blanking your mind and receiving first impressions from the universe. And it was used by intelligence communities around the world in the late 20th century. You know, for military secrets, intelligence secrets, things like that. And it's been proven beyond any reasonable doubt, even though Wikipedia proudly tells you that remote viewing is pseudoscience. That's because
Eben Alexander MD (45:30.732)
Wikipedia is a pseudo encyclopedia. I don't know why anybody pays attention to a cyclopedia where people can edit it. Anybody can come in and edit. And it turns out there's a militant Gestapo in Wikipedia that completely crushes any information about consciousness and these spiritual developments in consciousness. But anyway, beyond that, mean, this is an incredible scientific revolution with tremendous potential for all of us.
Tim Doyle (45:58.704)
Your story brings real life to the power of prayer. And I'm not talking about your own experience within that higher, setting that you're in, but more so the power of prayer here in this world. What was the impact of your family saying prayers for you, on your way back when you were returning to your physical body?
Eben Alexander MD (46:18.316)
Well, I'm quite convinced that one of the main factors that allowed me to come back to this world after such a devastating illness was the fact that when I, and this is all told in proof of heaven, but when my older son who was majoring in neuroscience in college, got to my bedside and my youngest sister, Phyllis, they, that first night I was in coma. They were so impacted by all this. And when they first got there, the nurse had stepped out. So they saw me alone in a room on a ventilator.
And that's when they asked the nurses if somebody from the family could be there most of the time to hold my hand. And that was the arrangement they made. And thank God the nurses and doctors were okay with that. I'm sure there were times when they had everybody out for a few minutes. But the reality is there was somebody there for my family holding my hand 24 and seven. And, you know, I have no memory of that.
But I'm convinced based on the entire experience that that was a huge part of my coming back to this world. And there were prayers. I mean, there were a lot of prayers. My family had kind of grown up with that kind of instinct that prayers worked. mean, my father, the world renowned neurosurgeon who had been a combat surgeon in the second world war. In fact, I still have his little pocket Bible that he had for more than two years, New Guinea, Philippines, Japan.
as he was over there during that horrific conflict. And I think his faith in God got him through it relatively unscathed. He came back to this world. He became the chairman of a leading neurosurgical training program in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. And so we grew up going to church and all of that, you I wanted to believe in. And yet in my long career as a neurosurgeon, including 15 years teaching at Harvard Medical School,
just was having more and more trouble understanding how conscious awareness could survive the death of the brain and body. And that's why I needed such a profound experience. to me, it's become crystal clear. Prayer is a beautiful way of connecting and kind of bringing, you know, kind of the ideal world of our dreams into fruition. And when it comes to healing others, healing self.
Eben Alexander MD (48:36.448)
I think prayer has tremendous value. My good friend and colleague, Dr. Larry Dossie, has written extensively as a physician about prayer and its effectiveness. His book, Healing Words, I especially recommend. And Larry Dossie is a world leader in this notion of the one mind. And he came up through different directions. He was actually a twin. And he knew that he had, he and his twin married identical twins.
So they had lots of twin experiences and he started recognizing that telepathy was a huge part of twinhood. If you read Guilion Playfair's book on twin telepathy, you'll come to realize 35 % of identical twins have very powerful telepathic experiences. So anyway, Larry Dossier was kind of ahead of the game and kind of acknowledging the one mind and our interconnectedness through telepathy with identical twins. But he broadened that tremendously in his book, The One Mind. Anyway.
All of it, think the more it's important to stress our beliefs make a huge difference. And, my attitude used to be kind of the doubting Thomas skeptical scientist. But what I've come to realize is if you don't believe any of this is possible, you put up huge hurdles to your ability to prove that any of this is possible. If you believe it's possible, all of a sudden everything starts happening to confirm it's possible. And it's not just that you're fooling yourself.
What you're doing is revealing pathways forward from the spiritual realm into the world of the physical where things become manifest. And you're showing the reality of our ability as sentient beings to manifest our will and bring it into fruition here in this world. I mean, the kind of materialist camp that I was part of before my coma would scoff at you claiming to have free will. They would say, it's all just chemical reactions, electron fluxes in the brain.
There is no such thing as free will. It's all just the laws of physics, chemistry, biology, and the substance of the brain. But they are dead wrong. To think this is all just some accident of molecules readjusting through physics, chemistry, biology, and that's how we get all of human history is very, very misguided. mean, there's much more influence we have on our emerging reality that comes from that will and that world of the ideal.
Eben Alexander MD (51:00.354)
And that's why it's so important to believe in our ability to manifest the world of our dreams, because that's what ends up happening.
Tim Doyle (51:09.116)
The only pain and heartache to a large degree that you felt throughout this entire experience, you say, is when you were returning to your body and you say, my real self was squeezing its way back into the all too tight and limiting suit of physical existence with its spatio temporal bounds, its linear thought and its limitation to verbal communication. So this spiritual awakening was more of a shock to your system rather than the E. coli meningitis to a large degree.
Eben Alexander MD (51:30.146)
Right.
Tim Doyle (51:39.814)
At the very start when you return to your body and as time continued to go on, what does the reacclimation process for you look like and what does it continue to look
Eben Alexander MD (51:50.51)
Well, you know, as I mentioned before, it was this incredible kind of wrestling match. It was a struggle. mean, for one thing, I know when we made it, when Karen and I made the choice to write the book, Living in a Mindful Universe, we decided a huge part of it should be not just an explanation of these scientific and spiritual kind of alignments, but to give people tools to personally explore on their own in consciousness. And that's why we have a lot of information in there about sacred acoustics, binaural.
beat brainwaves, cetera, because we knew telling people about this can only take you so far. And our linguistic system is extremely limited. And I think that's an important thing to understand. So we knew we couldn't just tell people these things. mean, there's a lot that's provided in the information you can report by writing and talking.
But ultimately, the major kind of shifts in understanding occur with personal experience and exploration. And that's why it was so important to stress for people that they need to go within, they need to explore consciousness. Now, of course, the reality is this world is where we get the actual soul growth done. You know, it's not, it doesn't accomplish there. Although the life review can help to kind of polish the rough edges to make more efficient and enhance
our next dive into the next incarnation. But, you know, very important to get this kind of bigger picture of higher soul. And the only way to really understand it is to commune with it. And we do that by going within, by putting that little ego voice into timeout, because that is not your ally in this whole mission. The ego fights this like crazy because the ego wants to be in control. But this is
you know going within and having these kind of higher ideals and believing in the possibility of your coming to know them and achieve them, in your own life. I think it's very very important. but and also it gives us a beautiful kind of expansion of our worldview and You can start achieving that life review, you know, your life flashing before your eyes in deep meditative states, you know revisiting events of the of the day and of the week and of the year, etc
Eben Alexander MD (54:10.222)
hauntings from past experience where we might have behaved better, shown more of a higher soul of love and compassion kindness, and we did. By going into meditation on a regular basis, we're able to make all those amends as we go, which makes it a far more efficient process when we come to the end of this life and go through that life review as we proceed to the next incarnation and realize that we don't have so much baggage.
So it's very important to be aware of this. In fact, that's one of the greatest reasons for getting this message now and not when you're on your deathbed. I mean, I can't imagine anything worse than being a hardcore staunch, militant atheist materialist. And then on your deathbed, when your loved ones appear to you and they're really there and it's not a hallucination and they're saying, well, now you will finally get it. You realize how much of your life you wasted.
You know, as this materialist falsely believing in separation and trying to get the most toys before you die, as opposed to realizing that the true value of a soul journey is measured by how much good and love you're able to hand out to your fellow beings in living this life. Let's realize all that now and act out those lives now as a more idealized form of higher soul. And it makes it far, far easier when we get to our deathbed.
And this is not just from the NDT literature, but there's a beautiful book from the hospice and palliative care community, which just deals with people who are going to die that says the very same thing. It's by Christopher Kerr. K.E.R.R. He wrote this book. It's called Death is But a Dream. It came out about five or six years ago. I highly recommend it. We presented with Dr. Kerr before. Incredibly good prospective scientific work.
to show the reality of these journeys and people making amends. That's the giant part of terminal care and palliative care and end of life is people addressing the things they've done wrong in their life, trying to make amends with others, other souls, both alive and dead. Every bit of it, and this is all work, of course, that we also discuss in Living in a Mindful Universe is Christopher Kerr's brilliant work in the hospice community. But.
Eben Alexander MD (56:29.234)
all of it is leading us towards a much more kind of enhanced and yet very evidentiary and fully supported view of our existence as spiritual beings in a spiritual universe. And this is where I think that atheist materialist thinking can be so deadly for you. And yet, as you come to acknowledge that bleak and paltry fiction it's been trying to sell you, you realize that you can become a far grander version of yourself through this.
kind of higher soul connection, practice of prayer and meditation, and then bringing those lessons of love and light and healing and wholeness back to this world and our dealings with all of our fellow beings.
Tim Doyle (57:11.536)
It's easy for people to say and think that there's a stark separation between science and spirituality, but how do you think we can create a symbiotic relationship between the two that so that one grows another?
Eben Alexander MD (57:25.442)
Well, I will tell you that's exactly what we do in living in a mindful universe, but there are also groups that I'm a member of scientific groups around this world. And there's some that go public with their statements and manifestos and evidence. The two I recommend highly scientific and medical.net Galileo commission.org those two websites on the advisory group for both groups.
And they will take you light years towards this deeper understanding. It involves quantum physics, involves neuroscience, it involves philosophy of mind, parapsychology, all the evidence for non-local consciousness. I mean, there's a complex arguments and databases. And yet when you look at them critically and rigorously, you start finding out, as you will from reading bigelowinstitute.org essays, that it all leads towards one
conclusion. And that's a very spiritually advanced conclusion of our connectedness through mind, through that basically mind of the universe, that God force that has been described so well by Indie ears and prophets going back thousands of years. And we find that all of that starts to come together in a more sensible kind of discussion and agreement on where all this is headed. Now for the very heavily scientifically minded and I'm not
kidding about this because these books are very deep and dense, but they are rewarding from a scientific perspective. And I'm speaking of the trilogy by Ed Kelly. He's from the University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies. You can get to their data at uvadops.org, where they list a lot of their papers and books, et cetera. Bruce Grayson does all their NDE work. Jim Tucker's done all their work in past life memories and children showing reincarnation.
Ed Kelly kind of brings it all together as the kind of parapsychology and electrical engineering expert in his books beginning with Irreducible Mind in 2008, I believe it was. And that book is an 800 page tome proving the reality of consciousness that's not simply derivative from the brain. And in 2015, his book Beyond Physicalism, an incredible opus, not quite as long as Irreducible Mind.
Eben Alexander MD (59:48.45)
but still makes a very good doorstop when you're done reading it. And then finally, the third book that Ed Kelly put in this trilogy, Consciousness Unbound came out in 2021. Incredibly rich book that really kind of brings all this together from a scientific perspective. And Kelly is a great writer. He's a good friend of ours. He also happens to live in our little community here outside Charlottesville.
a good friend, he and his wife, his wife has done Emily Williams Kelly has also done tremendous work in the field. But if you want a deep scientific dive, go for Ed Kelly's trilogy and you'll see exactly where I'm coming from on this.
Tim Doyle (01:00:30.41)
from your writing that stood out to me the most above everything? A story, a true story can heal as much as medicine can. What do you think your story aims to heal within all people in this world?
Eben Alexander MD (01:00:43.904)
I think what it seeks to heal the angst of our modern existence with this false sense of separation. This, you know, in many ways, my adoption abandonment wound was very important in my own personal story, but expanded that challenge of my abandonment wound is what all of us feel as spiritual beings coming from the spiritual realm into this world and the material bodies. We're all separated.
from that rich spirituality, especially in some forms of our modern culture. Now some communities are fully accepting of reincarnation and spiritual things. Fine, they're coasting ahead, but much in our Western world resists all that and tries to toe the line with this hardcore materialist philosophy. And that's very damaging. It's very intoxicating. And so this is really a true story to try and help.
Other people I know that many people who wrote me after proof of having him out thousands Said that there was some of the language and telling of my story there that for them reawakened memories that they weren't even aware of things that have been forgotten one thing that's very obvious in this in the literature on Past life memories and children and at UVA they've solved 1700 cases over the last six decades. That is they actually found the person who lived before
But incredibly important to point out that those memories start being covered over by age six or seven. So most of us as teenagers and adults, we don't have ready access to memories of past lives and between lives. But a lot of young children do. And what Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker discovered is if you investigate those early claims from children who are having nightmares and you know.
behaviors and phobias that are linked to issues of their past life. But those memories are covered over at age six or seven. So you have to harvest them earlier to make sense of them. And when we talk about these kind of true stories being of important value, mean, to me, that is a huge part of it because it awakens in people memories of their own soul journey.
Eben Alexander MD (01:03:01.228)
Now, there's something about the current stage of human development, I think, that necessitates this situation where we need this program forgetting to give us buy in, skin in the game in this lifetime to learn these lessons. And yet, you know, that ego mind that's so, you know, in force in that situation is not our allies. I've said it's right at the heart of addictions and other issues. And the ego is right there with some of those militant atheists trying to deny all this data.
So open up to our broader, more spiritual side and suppress that ego mind in meditation. And that's where you start gaining this much kind of grander insight. these kind of stories can make a tremendous difference in people's lives. People can identify with stories. So it's not just hard scientific facts, but in living in a mindful universe, we have a lot of story to help support the reality of what we're trying to say.
And people can identify with those. And that's why they're so effective at conveying this kind of knowledge.
Tim Doyle (01:04:03.614)
Dr. Alexander, it's been great talking with you. I've had some guests on earlier use the phrase, I'm a spiritual being living the human experience. And that phrase really stood out to me and something that I've never heard before, but I had three guests who different walks of life and different work use that phrase. And a lot of the time I just like really couldn't understand or grasp exactly what that meant. but your work and your, and your writing.
really brought a lot of insights to what that truly means. So I just want to thank
Eben Alexander MD (01:04:37.228)
Well, I'm so glad it's helped you and anyone else who wants to learn more can go to ebonyalexander.com. There's a very lengthy reading list that people can use for resources, also links to audios, podcasts, et cetera, an FAQ page. It's very important.
and also sacredacoustics.com and also innersanctumcenter.com is a very important resource. Karen and I did over 50 interviews with fault leaders around the world in these topics during the pandemic. And all those interviews are available for free at innersanctumcenter.com as well as a mental health practitioner course. That one has a charge to it. That was done with Dr. Anna Usum, but every bit of that is at innersanctumcenter.com. And I'm so grateful that it helped you in your journey and thanks for what you're doing.
to get this out to the world at large, to help as many people as possible, because we can bring this world to a much better, happier, more prosperous and harmonious level by acknowledging this tremendous scientific revolution in the nature of consciousness that really brings us all together.
Tim Doyle (01:05:44.446)
Awesome. Great talking with you today.
Eben Alexander MD (01:05:46.168)
Well, Tim, you too. Thanks for having me on.
