Share This

Google App Engine

Powered by Google App Engine

AddToAny.com/share_save

Share

share gadget

http://fcgadgets.appspot.com/spec/sharefb.xml

Facebook Badge

Loke San | Create Your Badge

PLUGINS FACEBOOK

FACEBOOK SOCIAL PLUGINS

My Blog List

ADDED TWITTER

Total Pageviews

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Proof of Heaven: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife - Newsweek and The Daily Beast

Proof of Heaven: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife - Newsweek and The Daily Beast
Posted by at

2 comments:

  1. RAYLOKEOctober 9, 2012 at 9:25 AM

    In the fall of 2008, however, after seven days in a coma during which the human part of my brain, the neocortex, was inactivated, I experienced something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death.
    Alexander discusses his experience on the Science channel's 'Through the Wormhole.'
    I know how pronouncements like mine sound to skeptics, so I will tell my story with the logic and language of the scientist I am.
    Very early one morning four years ago, I awoke with an extremely intense headache. Within hours, my entire cortex—the part of the brain that controls thought and emotion and that in essence makes us human—had shut down. Doctors at Lynchburg General Hospital in Virginia, a hospital where I myself worked as a neurosurgeon, determined that I had somehow contracted a very rare bacterial meningitis that mostly attacks newborns. E. coli bacteria had penetrated my cerebrospinal fluid and were eating my brain.
    When I entered the emergency room that morning, my chances of survival in anything beyond a vegetative state were already low. They soon sank to near nonexistent. For seven days I lay in a deep coma, my body unresponsive, my higher-order brain functions totally offline.
    Then, on the morning of my seventh day in the hospital, as my doctors weighed whether to discontinue treatment, my eyes popped open.
    ...cont.

    ReplyDelete
  2. RAYLOKEOctober 9, 2012 at 9:31 AM

    2/- There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind—my conscious, inner self—was alive and well. While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility.
    But that dimension—in rough outline, the same one described by countless subjects of near-death experiences and other mystical states—is there. It exists, and what I saw and learned there has placed me quite literally in a new world: a world where we are much more than our brains and bodies, and where death is not the end of consciousness but rather a chapter in a vast, and incalculably positive, journey.
    I’m not the first person to have discovered evidence that consciousness exists beyond the body. Brief, wonderful glimpses of this realm are as old as human history. But as far as I know, no one before me has ever traveled to this dimension (a) while their cortex was completely shut down, and (b) while their body was under minute medical observation, as mine was for the full seven days of my coma.
    All the chief arguments against near-death experiences suggest that these experiences are the results of minimal, transient, or partial malfunctioning of the cortex. My near-death experience, however, took place not while my cortex was malfunctioning, but while it was simply off. This is clear from the severity and duration of my meningitis, and from the global cortical involvement documented by CT scans and neurological examinations. According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)