34.
A Final Dilemma
I must be willing to give up what I am in order to become what I will be.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879–1955)
Einstein was one of my early scientific idols and the above quote of his had always been one of my favorites. But I now understood what those words actually meant. Crazy as I knew it sounded every time I told my story to one of my scientific colleagues—as I could see in their glazed or perturbed expressions—I knew I was telling them something that had genuine scientific validity. And that it opened the door to a whole new world—a whole new universe—of scientific comprehension. Observation that honored consciousness itself as the single greatest entity in all of existence.
But one common event in NDEs had not happened with me. Or, more accurately, there was a small group of experiences I had not undergone, and all of these clustered around one fact:
While out, I had not remembered my earthly identity.
Though no two NDEs are exactly alike, I’d discovered early on in my reading that there is a very consistent list of typical features that many contain. One of these is a meeting with one or more deceased people that the NDE subject had known in life. I had met no one I’d known in life. But that part didn’t bother me so much, as I’d already discovered that my forgetting of my earthly identity had allowed me to move further “in” than many NDE subjects do. There was certainly nothing to complain about in that. What did bother me was that there was one person I would have deeply loved to have met. My dad had died four years before I entered coma. Given that he knew how I felt I had failed to measure up to his standards during those lost years of mine, why had he not been there to tell me it was okay? For comfort was, indeed, what the NDE subject’s friends or family who greeted them were most often intent on conveying. I longed for that comfort. And yet I hadn’t received it.
It wasn’t that I hadn’t received any words of comfort at all, of course. I had, from the Girl on the Butterfly Wing. But wonderful and angelic as this girl was, she was no one I knew. Having seen her every time I entered that idyllic valley on the wing of a butterfly, I remembered her face perfectly—so much so that I knew I had never met her in my life, at least my life on earth. And in NDEs it was often the meeting with a known earthly friend or relation that sealed the deal for the people who had undergone these experiences.
Try as I did to brush it off, this fact introduced an element of doubt into my thoughts on what it all meant. It wasn’t that I doubted what had happened to me. That was impossible, and I’d have just as soon doubted my marriage to Holley or my love for my kids. But the fact that I had traveled to the beyond without meeting my father, and met my beautiful companion on the butterfly wing, whom I didn’t know, still troubled me. Given the intensely emotional nature of my relationship to my family, my feelings of lack of worth because I had been given away, why hadn’t that all-important message—that I was loved, that I would never be thrown away—been delivered by someone I knew? Someone like . . . my dad?
For in fact, “thrown away” was, on a deep level, how I had indeed felt all through my life—in spite of all the best efforts of my family to heal that feeling through their love. My Dad had often told me not to be overly concerned about whatever had happened to me before he and Mom had picked me up at the children’s home. “You wouldn’t remember anything that happened to you that early anyhow,” he’d said. And in that he’d been wrong. My NDE had convinced me that there is a secret part of ourselves that is recording every last aspect of our earthly lives, and that this recording process commences at the very, very beginning. So on a precognitive, preverbal level, I’d known all through my life that I’d been given away, and on a deep level I was still struggling to forgive that fact.
As long as this question remained open, there would remain a dismissive voice. One that told me, insistently and even deviously, that for all the perfection and wonder of my NDE, something had been missing, had been “off” about it.
In essence, a part of me still doubted the authenticity of my astonishingly real deep-coma experience, and thus of the true existence of that entire realm. To that part of me, it continued to “not make sense” from a scientific standpoint. And that small but insistent voice of doubt began to threaten the whole new worldview I was slowly building.
35.
The Photograph
Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.
—CICERO (106–43 BCE)
Four months after my departure from the hospital, my birth family sister Kathy finally got around to sending me a photo of my birth sister Betsy. I was up in our bedroom, where my odyssey all began, when I opened the oversized envelope and pulled out a framed glossy color photo of the sister I had never known. She was standing, I would later find out, near the docking pier of the Balboa Island Ferry near her home in Southern California, a beautiful West Coast sunset in the background. She had long brown hair and deep blue eyes, and her smile, radiating love and kindness, seemed to go right through me, making my heart both swell and ache at the same time.
Kathy had affixed a poem over the photo. It was written by David M. Romano in 1993, and was called “When Tomorrow Starts Without Me.”
When tomorrow starts without me,
And I’m not there to see,
If the sun should rise and find your eyes
All filled with tears for me;
I wish so much you wouldn’t cry
The way you did today,
While thinking of the many things,
We didn’t get to say.
I know how much you love me,
As much as I love you,
And each time you think of me,
I know you’ll miss me too;
But when tomorrow starts without me,
Please try to understand,
That an angel came and called my name,
And took me by the hand,
And said my place was ready,
In heaven far above
And that I’d have to leave behind
All those I dearly love.
But as I turned to walk away,
A tear fell from my eye
For all my life, I’d always thought,
I didn’t want to die.
I had so much to live for,
So much left yet to do,
It seemed almost impossible,
That I was leaving you.
I thought of all the yesterdays,
The good ones and the bad,
The thought of all the love we shared,
And all the fun we had.
If I could relive yesterday
Just even for a while,
I’d say good-bye and kiss you
And maybe see you smile.
But then I fully realized
That this could never be,
For emptiness and memories,
Would take the place of me.
And when I thought of worldly things
I might miss come tomorrow,
I thought of you, and when I did
My heart was filled with sorrow.
But when I walked through heaven’s gates
I felt so much at home
When God looked down and smiled at me,
From His great golden throne,
He said, “This is eternity,
And all I’ve promised you.
Today your life on earth is past
But here it starts anew.
I promise no tomorrow,
But today will always last,
And since each day’s the same way,
There’s no longing for the past.
You have been so faithful,
So trusting and so true.
Though there were times
You did some things
You knew you shouldn’t do.
But you have been forgiven
And now at last you’re free.
So won’t you come and take my hand
So when tomorrow starts without me,
Don’t think we’re far apart,
For every time you think of me,
I’m right here, in your heart.
My eyes were misting as I put the picture carefully up on the dresser and continued to stare at it. She looked so strangely, hauntingly familiar. But of course, she would look that way. We were blood relations and had shared more DNA than any other people on the planet with the exception of my other two biological siblings. Whether we’d ever met or not, Betsy and I were deeply connected.
The next morning, I was in our bedroom reading more of the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross book On Life After Death when I came to a story about a twelve-year-old girl who underwent an NDE and at first didn’t tell her parents about it. Finally, however, she could no longer keep it to herself and confided in her father. She told him about traveling to an incredible landscape full of love and beauty, and how she met and was comforted by her brother.
“The only problem,” the girl told her father, “is that I don’t have a brother.”
Tears filled her father’s eyes. He told the girl about the brother she did indeed have, but who had died just three months before she was born.
I stopped reading. For a moment I went into a strange, dazed space, not really thinking or not thinking, just . . . absorbing something. Some thought that was right on the edge of my consciousness but hadn’t quite broken through.
Then my eyes traveled over to the bureau, and the photo that Kathy had sent me. The photo of the sister I had never known. Whom I knew only through the stories that my birth family had related of what a hugely kind, wonderfully caring person she had been. A person, they had often said, who was so kind she was practically an angel.
Without the powder blue and indigo dress, without the heavenly light of the Gateway around her as she sat on the beautiful butterfly wing, she wasn’t easy to recognize at first. But that was only natural. I had seen her heavenly self—the one that lived above and beyond this earthly realm, with all its tragedies and cares.
But now there was no mistaking her, no mistaking the loving smile, the confident and infinitely comforting look, the sparkling blue eyes.
It was she.
For an instant, the worlds met. My world here on earth, where I was a doctor and father and a husband. And that world out there—a world so vast that as you journeyed in it you could lose your very sense of your earthly self and become a pure part of the cosmos, the God-soaked and love-filled darkness.
In that one moment, in the bedroom of our house, on a rainy Tuesday morning, the higher and the lower worlds met. Seeing that photo made me feel a little like the boy in the fairy tale who travels to the other world and then returns, only to find that it was all a dream—until he looks in his pocket and finds a scintillating handful of magical earth from the realms beyond.
As much as I’d tried to deny it, for weeks now a fight had been going on inside me. A fight between the part of my mind that had been out there beyond the body, and the doctor—the healer who had pledged himself to science. I looked into the face of my sister, my angel, and I knew—knew completely—that the two people I had been in the last few months, since coming back, were indeed one. I needed to completely embrace my role as a doctor, as a scientist and healer, and as the subject of a very unlikely, very real, very important journey into the Divine itself. It was important not because of me, but because of the fantastically, deal-breakingly convincing details behind it. My NDE had healed my fragmented soul. It had let me know that I had always been loved, and it also showed me that absolutely everyone else in the universe is loved, too. And it had done so while placing my physical body into a state that, by medical science’s current terms, should have made it impossible for me to have experienced anything.
I know there will be people who will seek to invalidate my experience anyhow, and many who will discount it out of court, because of a refusal to believe that what I underwent could possibly be “scientific”—could possibly by anything more than a crazy, feverish dream.
But I know better. And both for the sake of those here on earth and those I met beyond this realm, I see it as my duty—both as a scientist and hence a seeker of truth, and as a doctor devoted to helping people—to make it known to as many people as I can that what I underwent is true, and real, and of stunning importance. Not just to me, but to all of us.
Not only was my journey about love, but it was also about who we are and how connected we all are—the very meaning of all existence. I learned who I was up there, and when I came back, I realized that the last broken strands of who I am down here were sewn up.
You are loved. Those words are what I needed to hear as an orphan, as a child who’d been given away. But it’s also what every one of us in this materialistic age needs to hear as well, because in terms of who we really are, where we really came from, and where we’re really going, we all feel (wrongly) like orphans. Without recovering that memory of our larger connectedness, and of the unconditional love of our Creator, we will always feel lost here on earth.
So here I am. I’m still a scientist, I’m still a doctor, and as such I have two essential duties: to honor truth and to help heal. That means telling my story. A story that as time passes I feel certain happened for a reason. Not because I’m anyone special. It’s just that with me, two events occurred in unison and concurrence, and together they break the back of the last efforts of reductive science to tell the world that the material realm is all that exists, and that consciousness, or spirit—yours and mine—is not the great and central mystery of the universe.
I’m living proof.
Eternea
My near-death experience inspired me to help make the world a better place for all, and Eternea is the vehicle to enable that fundamental change. Eternea is a nonprofit publicly supported charity I cofounded with my friend and colleague, John R. Audette. Eternea represents a passionate effort to serve the greater good by helping to create the best possible future for earth and its inhabitants.
Eternea’s mission is to advance research, education, and applied programs concerning spiritually transformative experiences, as well as the physics of consciousness and the interactive relationship between consciousness and physical reality (e.g., matter and energy). It is an organized effort to apply in practical ways not only the insights gained from near-death experiences, but also to serve as a repository for all manner of spiritually transformative experiences.
Please visit www.Eternea.org to further your own spiritual awakening or to share your own personal story about a spiritually transformative experience you may have had (or if you are grieving from the loss of a loved one, or if you are facing a terminal illness or a loved one is). Eternea will also provide a valuable resource for scientists, academicians, researchers, theologians, and members of the clergy who are interested in this field of study.
Eben Alexander, M.D.
Lynchburg, Virginia
July 10, 2012
Acknowledgments
I wish to especially acknowledge my dear family for suffering through the hardest part of this experience, while I was in coma. To Holley, my wife of thirty-one years, and our wonderful sons, Eben IV and Bond, who all played central roles in bringing me back, and in helping me comprehend my experience. Additional dear family and friends to thank include my beloved parents Betty and Eben Alexander, Jr., and my sisters Jean, Betsy, and Phyllis, who all participated in a pact (with Holley, Bond, and Eben IV) to hold my hand 24/7 while I was in coma, assuring that I always felt the touch of their love. Betsy and Phyllis did yeoman’s work in spending nights with me during my full-blown ICU psychosis (when I couldn’t sleep at all, ever) and in those first very tenuous days and nights after I went to the Neuroscience Step-down Unit. Peggy Daly (Holley’s sister) and Sylvia White (Holley’s friend of thirty years) were also part of the constant vigil in my room on the ICU. I never could have returned without their indivi
dual loving efforts to bring me back to this world. To Dayton and Jack Slye, who did without their mother, Phyllis, while she was with me. Holley, Eben IV, Mom, and Phyllis also helped in editing and critiquing my story.
My heaven-sent birth family, and especially my departed sister, also named Betsy, whom I never met in this world.
My blessed and capable doctors at Lynchburg General Hospital (LGH), especially Drs. Scott Wade, Robert Brennan, Laura Potter, Michael Milam, Charlie Joseph, Sarah and Tim Hellewell, and many more.
The extraordinary nurses and staff at LGH: Rhae Newbill, Lisa Flowers, Dana Andrews, Martha Vesterlund, Deanna Tomlin, Valerie Walters, Janice Sonowski, Molly Mannis, Diane Newman, Joanne Robinson, Janet Phillips, Christina Costello, Larry Bowen, Robin Price, Amanda Decoursey, Brooke Reynolds, and Erica Stalkner. I was comatose and had to get names from my family, so forgive me if you were there and I have omitted your name.
Critical to my return were Michael Sullivan and Susan Reintjes.
John Audette, Raymond Moody, Bill Guggenheim, and Ken Ring, pioneers in the near-death community, whose influence on me has been immeasurable (not to mention Bill’s excellent editorial assistance).
Other thought leaders of the “Virginia Consciousness” movement, including Drs. Bruce Greyson, Ed Kelly, Emily Williams Kelly, Jim Tucker, Ross Dunseath, and Bob Van de Castle.
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