On first reading this narrative I was struck by both its grandiosity and its obvious elements of wish fulfillment, but I took for granted the lofty medical credentials Alexander stresses. However, as a lethal exposé by Luke Dittrich in Esquire recently revealed, Alexander’s successful career has been stained by an extraordinary chain of unpleasant departures from prestigious institutions, by malpractice suits (five in one ten-year stretch—all settled out of court), and by loss of surgical privileges—he’s been without official credentials since 2007. (The Virginia Board of Medicine once ordered him to take continuing education classes in ethics and professionalism.) None of this, needless to say, is alluded to in Proof of Heaven.
Dittrich also raises questions about Alexander’s veracity. Most damning are the tempered remarks he quotes from Dr. Laura Potter, who was on duty in the ER the night Alexander was brought in. Alexander tells us that his coma was caused by a case of E. coli bacterial meningitis, neglecting to mention that the coma was actually induced by Dr. Potter, in order to keep him alive until he was in a condition to be treated. Through the seven days of coma, whenever they tried to wake him, he was, Potter reports, in an agitated state—“just thrashing, trying to scream, and grabbing at his tube.” At those moments, she says, he was delirious but conscious. (A central point in Alexander’s argument is that throughout this entire week, his brain was incapable of creating a hallucinatory conscious experience.) When Alexander showed Dr. Potter the passages in his manuscript referring to her, she told him that they didn’t reflect her recollection. He then said to her, as she reported to Dittrich, that it was a matter of “artistic license,” and added that parts of his book were “dramatized, so it may not be exactly how it went, but it’s supposed to be interesting for readers.”
Certainly, readers have found it so. Last year alone, almost 950,000 copies of Proof of Heaven were sold. A movie is coming, a follow-up book is on the way, and according to Dittrich, “Anyone can pay sixty dollars to access his webinar guided-meditation series, ‘Discover Your Own Proof of Heaven.’” What’s more, you can pay to join the doctor on a “healing journey” through Greece. As for Dittrich’s revelations, Alexander told him, “I just think that you’re doing a grave disservice to your readers to lead them down a pathway of thinking that any of that is, is relevant.” All that should matter is the message he returned with from heaven.
(In an official, if unspecific, response to Dittrich, Dr. Alexander proclaims that the Esquire article “is a textbook example of how unsupported assertions and cherry-picked information can be assembled at the expense of the truth.”)
It’s up to us to decide for ourselves whether Alexander is dishonest, delusional, a fantasist—or even telling the truth, at least as he sees it. Dittrich takes the long view: “Dr. Eben Alexander looks less like a messenger from heaven and more like a true son of America, a country where men have always found ways to escape the rubble of their old lives through audacious acts of reinvention.”
* * *
TODD BURPO AND EBEN ALEXANDER couldn’t be more different, but the message they, and all the others, deliver is the same one, a message mankind has always been happy to receive: You can go on living after you die—in the short run, by returning from death or near-death; in the long run, up in heaven. In fact, once you get to heaven it’s so wonderful there you don’t want to return. In account after account the narrator begs to be allowed to stay on, but someone on high—Jesus, God, Saint Patrick, an angel—insists that he go back to earth. (“Mark! You must go back!” “Go back? No! No! I can’t go back!” … “You must return; I have given you [a] task, you have not finished.” “No, no, please God, no! Let me stay.”) They all obey, however, and so we get Heaven Is for Real; Proof of Heaven; To Heaven and Back; Nine Days in Heaven; 90 Minutes in Heaven; A Glimpse of Heaven; My Time in Heaven; When Will the Heaven Begin?; Waking Up in Heaven; AfterLife: What You Really Want to Know About Heaven, the Hereafter, and Near-Death Experiences; A Vision from Heaven; My Journey to Heaven; Flight to Heaven; Appointments with Heaven; Hello from Heaven!; The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven; Revealing Heaven; plus others whose titles don’t include the H word—I Saw the Light, Saved by the Light, Embraced by the Light.
But if these books all take us to heaven and back, they’re by no means all alike. Some are just risible. Mary Stephens Landoll had A Vision from Heaven while in bed with a bad chest cold. In her vision, she was dressed in “a white satin (huge puffed up shoulders) file gown with chip diamond sparkles all over it.…” As for Jesus, he “certainly looked Jewish.… His neck was real muscular and wide like a calf—strong as an animal. He was not a wimp. He was healthy.” Kat Kerr, in Revealing Heaven, not only sees John, her late husband, playing golf with Jesus but also watches a heavenly movie with John Wayne.
Most of these narratives, however, despite details that may strike one as bizarre or just plain silly, are clearly sincere, and a number of them are cogent and convincing. That is, the reader—or at least this reader—is convinced that they represent a reality the author experienced and remembered. The range of backgrounds is very wide, the life stories and lifestyles dramatically divergent, and the tone of most of them generally unruffled and confident. And though accounts of heaven tend to pall after one has read thirty or so of them, the real-life stories of the narrators are frequently absorbing and often moving.
Don Piper, whose 90 Minutes in Heaven is one of the most widely read of these books, “died” in a car crash; had a typical near-death experience of heaven; was in the hospital for 105 days; lay in bed at home for thirteen months; and “endured thirty-four surgeries.” What he most wants to convey is that he survived because so many people prayed for him: “You prayed; I’m here.”
Crystal McVea—sexually abused at the age of three; a violent stepfather; bulimia and abortion in high school; suicide attempts—nevertheless survived and flourished. We feel she’s telling the truth in her memoir Waking Up in Heaven when she writes that, after her NDE, she “really missed God. I longed to be with Him again.… I mean, it wasn’t like I had met the president or a celebrity or something. This was the Creator of the universe! The Lord God of Israel!”
Betty J. Eadie, author of the much-loved Embraced by the Light, speaks of
the unconditional love of God, beyond any earthly love, radiating from him to all his children.… But above all, I saw Christ, the Creator and Savior of the earth, my friend, and the closest friend any of us can have. I seemed to melt with joy as I was held in his arms and comforted—home at last. I would give all in my power, all that I ever was, to be filled with that love again—to be embraced in the arms of his eternal light.
Uniquely, she reports on “the Lord’s sense of humor, which was so delightful and quick as any here—far more so. Nobody could outdo his humor.”
Particularly moving is the account of Jeff Olsen in I Knew Their Hearts. He was driving, nodded off, and when his car plunged off the road, his wife and baby son were killed and seven-year-old Spencer was trapped but saved. Olsen’s account of his almost four months in the hospital, eighteen major surgeries, one leg lost, right arm almost gone, skin grafts—and of his guilt and remorse—is direct, modest, and sensible. He doesn’t go to heaven, but on the first night, in terrible pain, he floats through the hospital and wanders down the halls, coming upon his own broken body. Because of Spencer he rejects the idea of suicide: “Having a child is like having your heart leave your body and walk around in the world.… I just didn’t know how to be there for him with my own heart still broken in so many ways.” In a dream God says to him, “Choose joy,” and eventually he repairs himself emotionally, becomes a successful advertising director, remarries, adopts two sons, lives a life. His book inspires, not through the God part but through his strength and fortitude as a man.
* * *
BECAUSE ASPECTS OF THE MORE ARTLESS NDE NARRATIVES are so available to ridicule, it’s hard to remember that even some of the seemingly absurd byways of the literature can be genuin
e reflections of serious concerns. Gary Kurz, a fundamentalist Christian who is a strict Biblicist—that is, he believes that every word of the Bible must be taken literally—has devoted three books to the place of pets in the afterlife: Cold Noses at the Pearly Gates, Wagging Tails in Heaven, and Furry Friends Forevermore. They repeat themselves, but they’re good-natured, even funny, and from a Biblicist point of view, they have a certain logic to them.
Kurz is anti-evolution. (“I am not a mammal. I am not an animal. I am a man.”) He dismisses the idea of departed pets coming back to visit, and he’s adamant that animals will not be included in the final Rapture. He’s also fierce on the subject of the heaven narrative: “As a Christian and Biblicist, I reject erroneous claims about Heaven, the ‘I visited there myself’ claim in particular. The Bible teaches clearly, that short of the rapture [which would mean the return of Jesus to earth], the only way to get to Heaven is to die.” In fact, when Kurz comes upon certain descriptions of heaven: “Pleeeeeeease! When I hear something like that I repeat what I have said so many times before. ‘Pass the bread, the baloney has already been around.’”
On the other hand, Kurz wonders whether “animals aren’t just another order of angels or perhaps directed by angels to serve and protect humankind.” And indeed reports bear out that animals can come to our rescue in much the way guardian angels do. USA Today, for instance, published an account of Gary, from Columbus, Ohio, who trained his cat, Tommy, to use the telephone. Sure enough, when Gary fell out of his wheelchair and his osteoporosis and mini-strokes kept him from getting up, Tommy dialed 911 for help. “The cat was lying by a telephone on the living room floor when the officer went in. Tommy saved Gary’s life!” There’s a considerable library of books that provide scores—hundreds—of comparable stories about angels, including a particularly engaging one about a bank employee who helps a man retrieve his lost Filofax and whose name turns out to be … Dawn Angel!
Anecdotes like these are the bread and butter of the tabloids, and they have their entertainment value. Their absurdities, however, reflect the naive but potent hunger for the kind of reassurance that the more substantial NDE narratives also provide. Yes, these scenarios of visits to heaven may seem preposterous to the skeptical reader (like myself). And yes, the comforting messages brought back from heaven have often been delivered before—but through prophecy, revelation, the Word. The recent spate of NDE books offers something more concrete: contemporary first-person reportage. If their authors are not liars, something happened to these people. But what? Can what they report, however unlikely it sounds, be reconciled with science, so that we can respect the phenomenon while rejecting its literal manifestations?
II
THE INCREASING FOCUS OF SCIENCE TODAY on the study of the brain has spilled over into considerations of what exactly may be happening to people who experience out-of-body and near-death experiences. In Erasing Death, a stimulating book published in 2013, Dr. Sam Parnia recapitulates recent arguments that there may well be a continuation of consciousness after what we conventionally think of as death. He’s one of a number of physicians and scientists who have been reconsidering the mainstream definition of death, concluding that it isn’t the single event of cardiac arrest but is a process. In other words, the heart stops but the brain doesn’t, so that visions, hallucinations, dreams—or NDEs—may take place after we’re officially labeled dead. In other words, these are in fact ADEs: actual death experiences.
Much of Dr. Parnia’s discussion rests on the extraordinary progress made over the last twenty years in the art of resuscitation—and, as he emphasizes, of post-resuscitation. (He’s been a leader in this field.) The central procedure involved is the use of hypothermia—cooling the body to slow the heart. In a provocative sidelight, he invokes the Titanic. Rewatching James Cameron’s movie after a number of years, he concluded that if the people on the rescue ship Carpathia, which arrived on the scene less than two hours after the disaster, had been aware of the benefits of hypothermia, many of the 1,514 drowned victims found bobbing in the sea might have been brought back to life:
Today we would not have necessarily declared those people dead—at least not in the irreversible and irretrievable sense. Although I agree they were dead, they were nonetheless salvageable. Their bodies would have been largely preserved by the icy cold waters, and two hours is not much time at all. In short, they were potentially completely viable.
Erasing Death takes us through the histories of a number of patients not only “dead” for several minutes or hours but who have existed in years-long comas or other states of unconsciousness before suddenly reviving and even resuming a more or less normal life. (I have direct knowledge of one such case.) These people were not clinically dead, because their hearts were beating, but they were presumed to be brain-dead … until they weren’t. So what is happening to brains in this “dead” or unconscious condition? In what way can they and do they function? Do they retain some level of awareness? Are they dreaming? Are they having near-death experiences? We don’t know.
What adds to the confusion is that the vocabulary in which such things are discussed is (and no doubt has to be) vague: Parnia, among others, refers to consciousness, the self, the mind, the psyche, the soul, as if these things were almost interchangeable.
In his consideration of NDEs, Parnia sets forth a series of explanations that various reputable scientists have proposed in recent years: temporal lobe epilepsy; the effect on the dying brain of certain drugs; a change in the levels of carbon dioxide in those who are dying; a surge of electrical activity in the brain in the minutes preceding death; a lack of oxygen in the brain during the death process that may “cause uncontrolled activity in the brain areas responsible for vision,” thus triggering the illusion of experiencing a light and/or a tunnel—this is known as the “dying brain” hypothesis; and more. He summarizes these theories with apparent disinterestedness, but in his tempered dismissal of them I sense a certain satisfaction. What he’s hoping for, I infer, is a larger answer, or at least the answer to a larger question: Is it possible that what we call the mind may be “a separate, undiscovered scientific entity” that isn’t the result of the brain’s usual processes? This is a revolutionary proposition, and one that he seems to be straining to see confirmed.
What emerges, finally, from Parnia’s book is that it’s not simply the science that concerns him. His core issue is finding “a spiritual or metaphysical perspective on the survival of our consciousness beyond death.” He concludes:
Today, the tantalizing question for science is, If the human consciousness or soul does indeed continue to exist well past the traditional marker that defines death, does it really ever die as an entity? Our new studies will continue to explore this and other significant ethical questions. For now, though, we can be certain that we humans no longer need to fear death.
A comforting conclusion, but several readings of Parnia’s text have left me baffled about the evidence he’s marshaled and the logic he’s employed to reach it.
* * *
MIDWAY THROUGH HIS BOOK, Dr. Parnia refers in passing to a 2006 study by Dr. Kevin Nelson on the possible relationship between NDEs and sleep patterns. Nelson isn’t mentioned elsewhere, even in the bibliography, which is hard to understand because two years before Erasing Death was published, Nelson published a carefully thought-out and persuasive book called The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain. In it, he suggests what seems to me a possible, even plausible, explanation of what may actually be happening to people who are experiencing NDEs. Nelson was inspired by something a woman reported decades earlier to Raymond Moody, author of the groundbreaking book Life After Life—a woman who after suffering cardiac arrest found herself fully conscious of the world around her but paralyzed and unable to signal to the doctors that she was alive. What natural physiological process, Nelson asked himself, could have caused her precipitous, total, yet temporary paralysis?
It came to him that there was a clear connection here to
what we experience every night when sleeping—“when our eyes move rapidly beneath our lids, as if watching events before us. It is called the rapid eye movement stage of sleep, familiar to everyone who studies the brain. We call it the REM state of consciousness.” REM activity would explain the light beckoning to eternity that is one of the most salient features of most NDEs:
With death approaching, what if we were overtaken by REM paralysis, our visual system stimulated to produce light, and the dreaming apparatus in our brains triggered—all while we were consciously awake and in a state of medical crisis? REM consciousness and wakefulness blending into each other as death approached could explain many of the major features of near-death experiences.
The research that Nelson and his colleagues have been doing on this theory as well as on what he terms a variety of related spiritual events—“out-of-body experiences, feelings of rapture or nirvana, mystical ‘oneness,’ and visions of saints or the dead”—has, not surprisingly, stimulated controversy:
On one hand, the link I have made between REM and the near-death experience upsets those who see such experiences as a revelation of the afterlife or proof of an underlying web of consciousness or the existence of God. For these people, my work puts near-death experiences uncomfortably close to dreams—in other words, experiences that aren’t real. On the other hand, my work also irks some die-hard atheists, because it inextricably links spirituality with what it means to be human and makes it an integral part of all of us, whether our reasoning brain likes it or not.
Near-Death Experiences . . . and Others Page 2