Divine Encounters Episode 029 | Near-Death Experience Story
Dr. Eben Alexander spent more than 15 years teaching neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School and was, by his own description, a conventional materialist who could not see how awareness could survive the death of the brain. Then, he says, he fell into a coma, and what he remembers from that time upended everything he thought he knew. In this Divine Encounters episode he tells Alex Ferrari about Gateway Valley, the Core, a message of love, and the voice of a ten-year-old boy that he says pulled him back.
Key Takeaways
- Eben says he was a neurosurgeon and Harvard Medical School professor who believed science, in its older materialist form, was the pathway to truth.
- He says he was amnesic during his experience, with no language and no memory of his own life, which he sees as essential to why it unfolded as it did.
- He describes a journey from a murky, primitive realm into Gateway Valley, where a young woman on a butterfly wing told him, “You are deeply loved and cherished forever.”
- He says the Core was infinite blackness filled to overflowing with love, where he was told he would be going back.
- He says six faces he saw at the end were people in the ICU room during his last 24 hours of coma. The sixth was his ten-year-old son.
- He says his late adoptive father did not appear during the journey, and explains in his books how he later found him in meditation.
- Eben says life reviews show the golden rule at work: “if we hurt others, we are hurting ourselves.”
| Guest | Dr. Eben Alexander |
| Episode | Divine Encounters 029 |
| Profession | Neurosurgeon; more than 15 years teaching at Harvard Medical School |
| Upbringing | Methodist church; a neurosurgeon father who believed in the power of prayer |
| What Eben says happened | A coma that, in Earth time, lasted seven days |
| Where he says he went | A murky earthbound realm, Gateway Valley, and the Core |
| Who he met | A young woman on a butterfly wing, angelic choirs, and beings holding candles |
| The message | You are deeply loved and cherished forever. You have nothing to fear. |
A Neurosurgeon Who Struggled With Faith
Alex opens with his standard question, and Eben begins by saying his life was good. He followed his father into neurosurgery. He spent more than 15 years teaching at Harvard Medical School as an associate professor, and he also taught neurosurgery at the University of Virginia and the University of Massachusetts. He had a wife and two sons. The day before his coma, he says, he had no clue what was coming.
He describes himself as a conventional, reductive materialist neuroscientist. He had grown up in a Methodist church, and his father, although scientific and the head of a neurosurgical training program, was also very spiritual and believed in the power of prayer. But like many people who came of age in the 60s and 70s, Eben says, he was certain that science was the pathway to truth. He now thinks he made a mistake. He had settled on an old, disproven, Newtonian, deterministic version of materialist science, and he says there is a much richer, quantum-informed way to understand consciousness. He has spent the 13 years since his coma working on it with scientists around the world.
He also struggled with faith. After a long career, he says, he was confused about how conscious awareness could survive the death of the brain and body. He simply could not see how. A deeper layer was his adoption. He describes an eight year dark night of the soul before the coma, tied to the fact that he is adopted, and says that backstory is relevant to understanding his experience and its aftermath. Decades earlier he had accepted that his birth mother was not looking for him, and he stopped writing letters to the children’s home. See our glossary entry on the dark night of the soul for how others describe such seasons.
The Anomaly: A Journey Without Memory
Eben points to one feature he calls atypical for near-death experiences. He was amnesic. He says he had no memory whatsoever of Eben Alexander’s life. No words, no language, none of his religious preconceptions and none of his scientific knowledge. “Everything was wiped clean.” It took him months to understand why.
His conclusion is that these experiences are “tailored for the individual to help answer their deep and profound soul questions.” Mine took the form it did, he says, and it needed that amnesia. He describes it as an empty slate.
The Earthworm’s View, and a Spinning Light
The journey, in this amnesic state, began in what he calls an earthworm’s eye view. It was a very primitive, coarse, unresponsive realm that seemed to go on for ages. He says he was rescued from it by a slowly spinning white light that came packaged with a perfect musical melody. It ushered him up through what he describes as a wormhole into a brilliant, ultra real gateway.
He says the realm he arrived in was something he later called Gateway Valley. Eben remembers it as ultra real, a kind of reality that felt more real than ordinary life. He says that when he later read the accounts of other near-death experiencers, he learned that most of them describe the same thing: “too real to be real.”
He had never read near-death literature before his coma. His older son, who was majoring in neuroscience at the time, gave him very good advice: write down everything you can remember before you read anyone else’s account. Eben did. He ended up with a pristine document of about 20,000 words.
Gateway Valley and the Girl on the Butterfly Wing
Gateway Valley, he says, had many earthlike features. “I was a speck of awareness on a butterfly wing.” Below him was a lush meadow surrounded by forests, with plant life, buds, blossoms and flowers, all richly dynamic and alive, with no sign of death or decay. He remembers thousands of beings in the meadow, with joy and dancing and festivities.
Above them, he says, were whooping orbs of angelic choirs, chanting anthems and hymns that thundered through his awareness. They were what fueled the celebrations below.
He was not alone. A beautiful young woman was on the butterfly wing with him. Eben says he did not know who she was at the time. Four months after waking from the coma, as he describes at the end of his first book, he discovered her identity. Her message came telepathically, in a rich, emotional way. “You are deeply loved and cherished forever. You have nothing to fear. You are cared for.” That, Eben says, was the ultimate message he was meant to bring back.
What He Says the Medical Record Showed
Eben points to what he says the record shows. He says his brain was documented to have such destruction that it could not have produced any dream or hallucination. He says a case report on his medical records came out 10 years after his coma, written by three physicians who were not involved in his care, and appeared in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease in September 2018. In his telling, they make it very clear that his brain was too damaged by his illness to produce any kind of phenomenal experience, much less the most robust, meaningful and ultra real experience of his life.
Those are his statements, and Next Level Soul reports them as such. We are sharing his account of what he experienced, and we do not make medical claims.
Higher Levels, Deep Time and the Core
Gateway Valley, Eben says, was a stepping stone. He remembers four dimensional space-time collapsing, and then the whole spiritual realm, which has a different kind of causal ordering that he calls deep time. Earth time, he explains, is only a shared consensus flow. In the spiritual realm there is a more fundamental measure of progression: the growth of the soul and the evolution of consciousness.
In the next phase, that too collapsed. Through another wormhole created by the music of the angelic choirs, he ascended into the Core. He describes it as infinite, inky blackness, “filled to overflowing with the divine healing love” of the Creator, God, source. He says this is what mystics, prophets and near-death experiencers have encountered for thousands of years across belief systems. It shows there is more to the universe than the physical world.
That ocean of love is, he says, something every experiencer comes back with. They return “realizing there’s nothing to fear about death.” It is a return to source and a beautiful oneness. In the Core, he says, he was told repeatedly, we will teach you many things, but you will be going back. “You’re not here to stay.” For more on the science-adjacent language Eben uses, see our glossary entry on quantum consciousness.
Candles, Prayer and the Way Back
Near the end, Eben says, he tried to remember the musical notes of the melody that had carried him from the murky realm into Gateway Valley. He could not conjure the light portal. That is when he saw thousands of beings moving off into the distance with heads bowed, some holding candles, with a murmuring energy coming from them.
The surprise was that he was now back in the murkiest, earliest realm, the earthworm’s view, and yet he still felt an incredible sense of love and connection, a spiritual home, from all those beings. When he wrote it up weeks later, he said it was the power of prayer. He believes that is what he was sensing, and that it was helping guide him back to this world.
Six Faces and a Boy in the Hallway
The last thing he saw, Eben says, were six faces. They matter, he explains, because they were what he calls veridical time anchors. They were family and friends who were in his ICU room during the final 24 hours of the coma. They showed him that a journey that felt like months or years had happened in seven Earth days.
The sixth face was a ten-year-old boy. It turned out to be his son, Bond. Eben did not recognize him, because his amnesia was still complete. Bond had been outside the room where doctors held a family meeting on day seven. The doctors, Eben says, estimated a 10 percent chance of survival early in the week, 2 percent by the end, and no chance of recovery. They recommended stopping the antibiotics. Bond overheard.
He ran down the hallway and pulled open his father’s eyelids. One eye looked one way and one another. Neither pupil was working. Eben says he knows anyone in medicine would call that a terrible picture. He did not see Bond with his eyes or hear him with his ears. But he felt his pleading: “Daddy, you’re going to be okay.” He did not understand the words. The emotional engagement, he says, is what got through, and it is what impelled him to come back, even though he had no idea what he was coming back to.
The Father Who Did Not Appear
Years later, Eben says, he keeps up a relationship with that world through deep meditation. Every few weeks or months he does what he calls a deep dive in consecutive meditations, both to remember events of the journey and to build relationships. He shares much of this in his book Living in a Mindful Universe.
One piece involves his adoptive father, who had died four years before the coma. If he had scripted the experience, Eben says, his father would have been front and center, and he was not. About two and a half years after the coma, Eben found him in deep meditation, in a way that shocked him and then made perfect sense. His father’s sense of humor came through. He told Eben he could not be apparent during the experience, because if he had been the guardian angel, Eben might have been tempted to dismiss it all as, you only see who you want to see on the way out.
That, he says, is why the woman on the butterfly wing was someone he did not know. Eben describes a one in 10 million diagnosis of E. coli meningitis in an adult and a one in a billion recovery, and says the stranger on the butterfly wing, who he later learned was connected to his birth family, was important to him in a bigger sense. Read about meditation in our glossary if you want to explore a similar practice.
The Golden Rule and a Life Review
Eben says the golden rule sits at the heart of nearly every major religious system and of some atheist systems of ethics. And you see it demonstrated, he says, in the life review. “If we hurt others, we are hurting ourselves,” and that is what people discover.
He believes this is a lesson the world needs now, with so much polarization, friction and a false sense of separation. That false sense, he says, is built into the predominant materialist model. A quantum-informed understanding of consciousness allows for the oneness we share, “that we’re in this together.”
Placing His Account Beside Others
Eben’s account includes themes common across near-death reports: a transition through a realm of light and music, meeting beings who offer love and reassurance, a sense of coming home and a return with a message. What is distinctive is the amnesia he describes, and the way he links it with his scientific background. As he sees it, the experience needed none of his memories to be what it was.
If you are new to the topic, our complete guide to near-death experiences is a good place to start, and our glossary has a short entry on consciousness.
Questions to Sit With
- Eben says certainty in one way of seeing the world kept him from asking a bigger question. Where might certainty be holding you back?
- He says what got through to him was not words but emotion, a child pleading. Who has reached you that way?
- If the golden rule is how a life review feels, what is one place this week where you can act on it?
Write down everything you want to remember from a meaningful moment this month, before you read anyone else’s version of it. Then see what is still true a week later.
Spiritual Takeaways
- Eben says he is deeply loved and cherished forever, and so are you.
- He says consciousness is richer than an old materialist view allows.
- He says prayer from others helped guide him back.
- He says that when we hurt others we are hurting ourselves.
- He says there is nothing to fear about death, because it is a return to source.
Please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Eben Alexander.
Guest Links: Connect With Dr. Eben Alexander
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Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Dr. Eben Alexander?
Dr. Eben Alexander is a neurosurgeon who spent more than 15 years teaching at Harvard Medical School and also taught at the University of Virginia and the University of Massachusetts. He says he fell into a coma and had the near-death experience he describes in this Divine Encounters episode.
What does Eben Alexander say he experienced?
He says he moved from a murky, primitive realm, up through a wormhole of light and music, into Gateway Valley. He says he was then taken into the Core, an infinite blackness filled with love.
What is Gateway Valley?
Eben describes it as a lush, ultra real, earthlike place with meadows, forests, flowers and thousands of beings celebrating, with angelic choirs above. He says he was a speck of awareness on a butterfly wing.
Who was the woman on the butterfly wing?
Eben says she was a beautiful young woman who spoke to him telepathically. He says he did not know who she was at the time and discovered her identity four months after waking from the coma.
What message did Eben receive?
He says he was told that he is deeply loved and cherished forever, that he has nothing to fear and that he is cared for.
What does Eben mean by the Core?
He describes it as infinite, inky blackness filled with the love of the Creator, source. He says it is what mystics, prophets and other experiencers have encountered across belief systems.
Why was Eben amnesic during his experience?
He says he had no memory of his own life, language or beliefs. He concludes that near-death experiences are tailored for the individual to answer their soul questions, and that the amnesia was necessary.
Who were the six faces Eben saw?
He says they were family and friends in his ICU room during the final 24 hours of his coma. He calls them veridical time anchors. The sixth was his ten-year-old son.
What got Eben to come back?
He says his son pleaded with him, saying, “Daddy, you’re going to be okay.” He did not understand the words but says the emotional engagement is what impelled him back.
Why didn’t Eben see his adoptive father?
He says his father told him later, in meditation, that he could not appear because Eben might have dismissed the experience as seeing who he wanted to see.
Is a near-death experience proof of an afterlife?
Next Level Soul shares near-death experiences as lived experiences told in the guest’s own words. Researchers continue to study and debate what they mean. Nothing here is medical advice or a medical claim.
Keep Exploring
- The complete guide to near-death experiences
- What consciousness means, in plain language
- A short explanation of quantum consciousness
- Dr. Eben Alexander on what happens between lives
- Dr. Yvonne Kason on being transported from Earth after a plane crash
- Dr. Rod Chelberg, a doctor who says he learned our divine blueprint
- Oxford doctor Margot McKinnon on meeting her deceased mother
- Anita Moorjani on love and healing in her experience
- Browse more free masterclasses and the Divine Encounters podcast.
Follow Along with the Transcript
Alex Ferrari 0:00
Tell me what your life was like before you died.
Dr. Eben Alexander 0:08
Well, you know, I was living a very good life. I mean, I was a neurosurgeon. I'd followed in my father's footsteps in pursuing that field. I spent more than 15 years teaching at Harvard Medical School as an associate professor. I also taught at University of Virginia and University of Massachusetts, all in neurosurgery. So I was, I was leading a very good life, you know, I had a wife and two wonderful sons, and the day before I went to coma, I had no clue what was about to unfold in my life. But, you know, I really have no complaints. I was, you know, a conventional kind of reductive materialist neuroscientist, as much as I wanted to believe much of what I'd heard, growing up in a Methodist Church, and my father, although he was scientific, he was the head of a neurosurgical training program. He was also very spiritual and believed in the power of prayer, and he used that regularly in his work. But, you know, like so many of the who grew up in the 60s and 70s, I was certain that science is the pathway to truth, and I made the mistake of thinking that an old, disproven, Newtonian, deterministic version of materialist science was a pathway to truth, and that is false. There is a much richer quantum, informed version of understanding consciousness, and I've spent the last 13 years since my coma, working with other scientists around the world, pursuing that. So it's it's an extraordinary gift, but yeah, the day before my coma, I had no inkling what was about to to come across my bow. I think the best way to put it is I struggled a lot with my faith. You know, the the long career in neurosurgery left me really confused about how conscious awareness could survive the death of the brain and body. I really just couldn't see how that could happen. And of course, as I explained in my book Proof of Heaven, which is the first book I wrote about all of this, you know, I was sent into a dark night of the soul for eight years before my coma. That has to do with the fact that I'm adopted. That's a huge part of the backstory, and is very relevant to major discussions of my nd and its aftermath and understanding. But turns out, as I describe in Proof of Heaven, in February of 2000 when I was, you know, I had, long ago, decades earlier, accepted my birth mother was not looking for me, so I quit writing letters to the children's home. The most important thing to point out is there's one anomaly in my case that's atypical for ndS, and that is that I was amnesic. I had no memory whatsoever for Eben Alexander's life. I had no words, no language, none of those religious preconceptions of Eben Alexander, none of the scientific knowledge of Eben Alexander. Everything was wiped clean. It was an empty slate, and it took me months to really understand why that would be. I mean, I came to realize, of course, nde's are always tailored for the individual to help answer their deep and profound soul questions, and that's why, I think mine took the role that it did, but it involved that necessity of the amnesia. But the journey itself in this amnesic state began in the earthworms eye view, very primitive course, unresponsive realm that seemed to go on for ages, but I was rescued from that by a slowly spinning white light that came packaged with a perfect musical melody and that ushered up like a wormhole into this brilliant, ultra real gateway Valley. Now the gateway Valley had many earth like features. I was a speck of awareness on a butterfly wing. There was this lush, incredible kind of meadow, surrounded by forests down below us, lush plant life, buds, blossoms, flowers, all of this very richly dynamic, alive, no sign of any death or decay. I remember 1000s of beings down in this meadow, lots of joy and merriment and dancing and festivities, all being fueled because up above were these whooping orbs of angelic choirs that were emanating these chants, anthems, hymns that would just thunder through my awareness. Another crucial feature of that stage of the journey was that I wasn't alone. There was a beautiful young woman on the butterfly wing with me. And those who've read Proof of Heaven realized at the very end of the book, four months after awakening from coma, I actually discovered the identity of that beautiful woman, but at the time I didn't know who she was, but her message to me and it was delivered telepathically in this rich kind of emotional identity of communication. You are deeply loved and cherished forever. You have nothing to fear. You are cared for. And I think that was kind of the ultimate message I was to bring back to this world, that and everything else about, you know, being able to have this, when my brain was documented to have such destruction that I couldn't that brain. Could not have made any kind of dream or hallucination. And that's all confirmed in a case report on my medical records that came out 10 years after my coma by three physicians not involved in my care. That case report, it's in the Journal of Nervous and Mental disease, September 2018, but they make it very, very clear that my brain was was far too damaged from the all the data, neurologic data of my illness to have come up with anything in terms of phenomenal experience, much less the most robust, meaningful, detailed, ultra real experience I've ever been through in my life. Now, it turns out that was a stepping stone, as we say, Gateway valley to higher and higher levels. And I remember seeing all of four dimensional space time collapsing down, then all of that spiritual realm, including a different cause, causal ordering that I call deep time, very important to understand Earth. Time is only kind of a shared consensus time flow, but that ultimately, in the spiritual realm, there's a more kind of fundamental marker of progression of soul growth and evolution of consciousness that occurs in deep time. But in the next phase of my journey, all of that collapsed down too and through another wormhole that was engendered by the music of the angelic choirs, I ascended into the core realm. The Core was infinite inky blackness, but filled to overflowing with the divine healing love of that creator god source. I mean, that's what nder's, prophets and mystics have encountered for 1000s of years across all belief systems in these journeys of it shows there's more to the universe than just the physical world, and that's exactly what I bathed in. I mean, that beautiful ocean of love is something that any nder's comes back and realizing there's nothing to fear about death. It's really kind of that returning to source and that beautiful oneness. But I was always told in the core, we'll teach you many things, but you'll be going back. You're not here to stay. And there came a time when that was true, and I tried to remember the musical notes, the melody, to conjure up that light portal that took me from the earth where my view up into the gateway Valley, and it wouldn't happen. And that was towards the very end of the journey, that's when I saw 1000s of beings going off into the distance, heads bowed, some holding candles, this murmuring energy coming from them. And the surprise of that was I was now back in this murkiest early realm the earth were my view, and yet I still felt the incredible sense of love and connection and spiritual home of all those beings around me in my writings. When I wrote it up weeks later, I said, that was the power of prayer. That was that was what I was sensing from all those beings, and it was helping to guide me back to this world. There were six faces I saw at the very end, and they're important because they were veridical time anchors. There were people, family and friends, who were in the ICU room the last 24 hours of coma, and for all the elaborate reasons I go into detail in the book to explain it, but they showed me that the vast majority of the coma journey, which seemed to go on for months or years, I mean, an extraordinary journey, even though it happened in seven Earth days in my time in coma, finally coming back to this world, was the sixth face that I saw was a 10 year old boy, and it turns out it was my son bond. I did not recognize him. My amnesia was still absolutely preponderant in this in this journey, but his pleading with me he'd been outside the room where the doctors held the family meeting on day seven of coma, where I had not been making any progress, 10 they estimated 10% chance of survival early in week, 2% at the end of the week, no chance of recovery, and that's why they recommended stopping the antibiotics. Bond overheard that conversation. Came running down the hallway, realizing now is much worse than what he'd been told, and he pulled open my eyelids. One eye looking over there, one down there. Neither pupil working. Anybody in medicine knows that's a horrible picture, I promise you, I did not see him with my eyes. Hear him with my ears, but his pleading with me, Daddy, you're going to be okay. Daddy, you're going to be okay. I didn't understand the words, but the emotional engagement and the pleading is what got through, and that is what impelled me to come back to this world, even though I had no idea what I was coming back to. And every few weeks or months or so, I'll have a really deep dive in kind of consecutive meditations that will help me connect with that, not only to remember, like some of the events of the NDE, but to develop this relationship, and I share a lot of that, specifically in the book Living in a mindful universe, especially around my adoptive father. Because if I had scripted this whole thing, he had passed over four years before my coma, and if I had scripted it, he would have been there, front and center, and yet he was not. But I did find him in a very beautiful way, in deep meditation about two, two and a half years or so after my coma, and I explained that whole encounter in living in a mindful universe, but it was an extraordinary experience that just shocked me no end, and yet it then made perfect sense. In essence. Sense of humor came through in a beautiful way. And he was telling me that he could not be apparent to me during my nde because then if he'd been the guardian angel, I would have been more tempted to in spite of a one in 10 million diagnosis of E coli meningitis in an adult, in spite of a one in a billion recovery, if he had been there, I might have been more tempted to dismiss it all as you only see who you want to see on the way out, and that's why I actually had to have someone that I didn't know who is very important to me in my life in a bigger sense. You know, going back to that birth family having left the world two years before I even knew of her existence and and all of that was an important part of it, but I've used meditation to develop those kind of relationships. Now, you're exactly right, though, the ultra reality that to me, was so shocking about the gateway Valley and the and the core is something for one thing, I found most nder's describe that same kind of ultra reality, too real to be real, kind of sense. And I had no idea of that because I'd never read nde literature before my coma. And my older son, who was majoring in neuroscience at the time, was smart enough to advise me to write down everything I could remember about my coma before I read anyone else's nde account. And that was very good advice. And then I had a pristine, kind of 20,000 word document explaining what, you know, I remembered and what I'd been through. And the golden rule, I would say, is essential to basically all major religious systems and certainly some ethical, you know, atheist systems of morals and ethics. Golden Rule is right there at the heart of it, and yet you see it perfectly demonstrated in life reviews. Because if we hurt others, We are hurting ourselves, and that's what we discover in that life review. And that's a lesson that this world really needs to learn now, with all of our polarization and friction and false sense of separation, that's inherent in the predominant materialist model. You know that's what gives us that false sense of separation, where it's a quantum, informed version of reality, and understanding consciousness fully allows for this oneness that we share, that we're in this together.
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