Alex Ferrari 0:00
Tell me what your life was like before you died.

Dr. Eben Alexander 0:08
It happened back in 2008 when I was 54 years old. So tremendous amount of growth and understanding those 18 years, and I've used meditation to get to a deeper hold on it. But the essence of my exit point was those were faces of people physically present the last 24 to 48 hours of coma, meaning that the vast majority of the spiritual experience had to happen between days one and four or one in five, and we explain all the timings of that based on those faces and who they were and how they appeared to me. At any rate, it was the last of those faces that really got my attention, and that final face was a 10-year-old boy. And I didn't see him with my eyes and hear him with my ears. I promise, I was far too gone from this world, and that is all well documented in those in that case report and my medical records. It was my son Bond. Now I didn't recognize him at the time because of my amnesia. All through this journey, because of my amnesia and that kind of presumed anonymity and no sense of responsibility to other souls, I thought that this whole thing can continue or it can cease. It doesn't matter. But now, all of a sudden, in witnessing him, and and what I witnessed was him being at the bedside of my ICU bed. I'm on the ventilator. It's day seven of coma. The doctors have just held a conference for the family where they said I've gone from 10% to 2% chance of survival, no chance of recovery, and that's where Bond knew he'd not been told the the real news here, and this was much worse than he had been told. So he came running down the hallway, pulled open my eyelids, one eye looking over there, one eye over there, need the pupil working. Anybody in medicine knows that's a horrible picture of brainstem damage because this meningitis was really trying to take me out, and he was pleading with me, "Dad, you're going to be okay. Dad, you're going to be okay. As if somehow that would make it so. And that's what I sensed was his pleading nature. I didn't understand the words, but there was another soul out there that needed me, and that's what drew me back to this world. And I started fighting the ventilator. They pulled out the breathing tube. That's when I said thank you. But I was still in for about a 36-hour paranoid delusional ICU psychosis that was just beginning. So the interesting thing is those kind of psychotic nightmare dreams. I knew they were delusional as they were happening, and all of the rich spiritual stuff that seemed way too real to be real; those memories are as sharp today as if the whole thing happened yesterday. Whereas the memories of that 36-hour post coma ICU psychosis-they vanished within a few weeks. So I'm glad I wrote everything down. It was very important to have those memories recorded. Within two months, I was back to normal, and all memories had returned even more complete than they had been before. As I studied my medical records and realized it was so shocking, because how did I have this robust, profound, ultra-real experience when all those parts of my brain that neuroscience says are necessary to make that happen were inactivated by the meningitis? And not only that, but in the backstory to that case report, you find that the peer review scientific editors challenged the the authors of that case report and said, "How do you explain this unprecedented, apparently miraculous recovery? They said, "It's because he had a near death experience. And in terms of my buying into it and believing in the reality of it, and that was amnesia. I had no memories of Evan Alexander's life, no knowledge of Earth, humans, this universe. It was an empty slate, and only in the months and years after my coma did I realize why that was so important to actually convince me that the whole thing really happened. It just didn't happen in the material realm. So, in that setting and that backdrop, very quickly. We'll go through the elements. It started in Earthworm's eye view, primitive course, unresponsive starting point, like being in dirty jello, kind of very murky. Luckily, that didn't last forever.

Dr. Eben Alexander 3:52
I was rescued by a slowly spinning white light associated with a perfect musical melody. Music ended up being a terribly important theme in my journey because it's basically how I could navigate these spiritual realms, these memories of musical cadence and rhythm and and melody and things like that. Now, in that first ascent through this spinning melody of light, of musical light, I ended up in the Gateway Valley. It's a realm of extreme richness and ultra reality. This is where we'd reunite with souls of departed loved ones, go through life reviews, plan next incarnations, dive back in. It had many Earth-like features, but in many ways, it was like Plato's world of ideals, but for the individual soul. So that's how come life reviews are so relevant there, because we would relive the events of our lives when possible, make amends, try and do it better in in our life review, so that we don't have to repeat all the issues facing us in this life and the next life. You find that a lot of the hardships and difficulties are there to serve as engines of growth, and it's best to work our way through them in this lifetime. And then have a whole new set of progressive, you know, improvement on our understanding of our relationship with the universe in the next lifetime, and not have to come back and repeat. I mean, there's some people, for example, a hardcore narcissist sociopath who might make no progress at all in this life and have to repeat everything in the next life, and they'd have to do it from kind of a different perspective, since the cards that were dealt in this lifetime didn't seem to work to help them move in that direction. Anyway, so in this Gateway Valley, I had no body awareness. I was a speck of awareness on a butterfly wing. There were 1000s of beings down below dancing. I in the writings weeks later, I call them souls between lives, and I remember in all that festivity and joyous celebration. There were children playing, dogs jumping, incredible festivities, all being driven because up above were these swooping orbs, angelic choirs emanating chants and anthems, hymns that would thunder through my awareness. And the best part about it all was I wasn't alone on that butterfly wing. People who've heard my story before, or have read Proof of Heaven, or heard any of these 1000s of podcasts out there that I've given on this topic will realize that you know I was in for this incredible journey, and that led to the next stage. And the next stage was actually witnessing of a collapse of four-dimensional space time, and also a collapse of that rich spiritual realm. And note very importantly that spiritual realm is not locked into into Earth time. Like and and there, I would I would point out that Earth time is not part of our underlying reality, but Earth time is part of how the universe enables us to kind of experience things in a way that we can make sense of now between lives in a NDE and a life review, and this has also been shown to happen in the hospice palliative care literature. So it's not just the NDE literature, but in palliative care terminal care, you find a lot of examples of people reuniting with souls of departed loved ones and beginning elements of a life review, even as they're there in that hospice setting. So, very important thing to to recognize. At any rate, I saw all of that collapsing down, and the angelic choirs that had been emanating these chants and anthems and hymns that were just thundering through my awareness and reminding me of the beautiful kind of spiritual home nature of this journey. Well, all of that led to another collapse, and witnessing all that spiritual realm of eternal souls collapsing down, I entered what I call the core. The core was an infinite inky blackness filled to overflowing with that divine love of that God force. In fact, in the core realm is where I recognize that my very conscious awareness, as I believe it is for us all, is directly sourced in that God force, so we're never separate from it.

Dr. Eben Alexander 7:44
We may fool ourselves into thinking that in this world, but as especially as we leave the body at the time of bodily death, that's where we come into direct contact with that infinite loving force at the core of the universe, and we realize that any judgment that is sensed in these life reviews doesn't come from that higher force, but that higher God force is simply this beautiful golden light of love, unconditional love, and against that light, any kind of our misdoings on our behalf, being greedy or selfish, handing out pain or suffering to other people, it looks especially bad in that light, and that's where that sense of quote judgment comes from. It's not coming from a higher being. It's really more from our higher soul and soul group in witnessing the way we behaved in this lifetime, and especially when you when you learn that scientific studies of life reviews reveal that about three quarters of life reviews stress that the review is from the perspective of many of the participants. That's why we often say the golden rule: treat others as you would like to be treated. Is written into the very fabric of the universe because of the structure of those life reviews and how, if you've hurt others, you feel that pain that you dished out by becoming them in the life review. At any rate, in this core realm where I had a complete resolution of all dualities. You know, in our world, we have masculine, feminine, dark light, good, evil, etc. All these different specter of possibilities that are compressed into pure oneness and unconditional love in that spiritual realm, and that's what all of us go through between lives. And then, of course, there's the the process of program forgetting. So the last things I saw in my journey, one was being surrounded by 1000s of beings going off in the distance, and this occurred back down in that earthworm, my view realm, that where it all started in the first place. And this was when I finally came to realize, as I was told every time I entered the core, "You're not here to stay. You'll be going back. We'll teach you many things. And but now I tried to conjure up the musical notes of the melody that had allowed that light portal to lead me up into the Gateway Valley and the core, and it no longer worked. To say I was sad would be an understatement, but because I also knew I could trust that I would be taken care of, I've been reassured many a time in this near-death experience by both my guardian angel. And by that infinitely loving God force at the core of the universe, that I would be taken care of. So I knew I could trust in that, and that's what ended up leading me back towards this world. When our lease is up and kind of leave the physical body and brain once and for all, we're liberated to that much higher level, and that's something we can all start to anticipate and predict and and and mimic and duplicate through meditative experience. This is why regular daily meditation, to me, is absolutely critical in kind of living this life and learning more about who we are, where this is all headed, and helping the world the most.