Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife, by Eben Alexander, M.D. is certainly right at the top of my list of most profound NDE’s I have ever read about.

As a practitioner of one of the most highly educated professions, Dr Alexander had no real belief in any sort of life beyond death. He was wholly immersed in the science of his field. He was an occasional church goer, but had no active participation in organized religion. He describes himself as a C & E’er Christian, attending services at Christmas and Easter!

He suddenly contracted a deadly disease, “spontaneous E. coli bacterial meningitis.” This disease aggressively began eating his brain, most notably, the cortex, the part of the brain which most makes us human, the part we think with, and analyze, and form ideas with. The bacteria was eating his brain from the outside in. And it is the outermost layers of the brain which are the most “human”. This disease is so rare that the medical personnel treating him could find no precedent cases. They finally considered his case as a “N = 1”. In other words, completely unique, nothing for them to base treatment on, etc. Every other case of this disease ever recorded always had some precipitating condition, such as brain surgery or some immune deficiency. For a completely healthy, active person, in mid-life, this disease was completely unprecedented. And the disease is so aggressive that there is over a 90% fatality rate. And even if they could save his body, the chances of him ever regaining any semblance of human functioning were pretty much a complete zero.

While in a seven-day coma from this disease Eben Alexander had one of the most unique and profound near-death experiences ever recorded. The first lesson he learned from this, after recovery, was that human consciousness, our awareness of who we are and what we are, is completely separate from brain function.

But while I was in coma my brain hadn’t been working improperly. It hadn’t been working at all. The part of my brain that years of medical school had taught me was responsible for creating the world I lived and moved in and for taking the raw data that came in through my senses and fashioning it into a meaningful universe: that part of my brain was down, and out. And yet despite all of this, I had been alive, and aware, truly aware, in a universe characterized above all by love, consciousness, and reality. There was, for me, simply no arguing this fact. I knew it so completely that I ached. What I’d experienced was more real than the house I sat in, more real than the logs burning in the fireplace. Yet there was no room for that reality in the medically trained scientific worldview that I’d spent years acquiring. (p 129f)

During his NDE Eben experienced three levels of the Spirit realm, or “heaven”, in his words. He first experienced what he came to call the “Earthworm’s-Eye View”, then moved into the “Gateway”, and then “. . . into the black but holy darkness of the Core. . .” (p 70). He would go back and forth between these places. It was in the Core, in the presence of God, that he learned the most profound spiritual truths.

The Earthworm’s-Eye View was a somewhat unpleasant place, not necessarily frightening, just a subhuman consciousness. He initially had no awareness of himself as human, or even animal. “I wasn’t human while I was in this place. I wasn’t even animal. I was something before, and below, all that. I was simply a lone point of awareness in a timeless red-brown sea.” (p 30f) But, the longer he stayed there, the less comfortable he felt.

As my awareness sharpened more and more, I edged ever closer to panic. Whoever or whatever I was, I did not belong here. I needed to get out.”

But where would I go?

Even as I asked that question, something new emerged from the darkness above: something that wasn’t cold, or dead, or dark, but the exact opposite of all those things. If I tried for the rest of my life, I would never be able to do justice to this entity that now approached me . . . to come anywhere close to describing how beautiful it was.

But I’m going to try. (p 32)

Initially light appeared, splintering the darkness around him. “Then I heard a new sound: a living sound, like the richest, most complex, most beautiful piece of music you’ve ever heard.” (p 38) Then he found himself flying. As he flew through an opening in the light, he found himself “. . . in a completely new world. The strangest, most beautiful world I’d ever seen.” (p 38) It was a green, lush countryside of trees, fields, flowers, streams and waterfalls. People were there, children, singing and dancing.

I don’t know how long, exactly, I flew along. (Time in this place was different from the simple linear time we experience on earth and is as hopelessly difficult to describe as every other aspect of it.) But at some point, I realized that I wasn’t alone up there. (p 39f)

He found himself accompanied by a beautiful girl, riding on the wing of a butterfly. This Being conveyed messages to him.

Without using any words, she spoke to me. The message went through me like a wind, and I instantly understood that it was true. I knew so in the same way that I knew that the world around us was real–was not some fantasy, passing and insubstantial.

The message had three parts, and if I had to translate them into earthly language, I’d say they ran something like this:

 

“You are loved and cherished, dearly, forever.”

“You have nothing to fear.”

“There is nothing you can do wrong.”

 

The message flooded me with a vast and crazy sensation of relief. It was like being handed the rules to a game I’d been playing all my life without ever fully understanding it.

“We will show you many things here,” the girl said–again, without actually using these words but by driving their conceptual essence directly into me. “But eventually, you will go back.”

To this, I had only one question.

Back where? (p 40f)

This is one aspect of Alexander’s NDE which is quite different from most other NDE’s reported. “Many people have traveled to the realms I did, but, strangely enough, most remembered their earthly identities while away from the earthly forms.” (p 76f) Also, most NDE’ers report undergoing a life review of some sort.

I experienced none of these events, and taken all together they demonstrated the single most unusual aspect of my NDE. I was completely free of my bodily identity for all of it, so that any classic NDE occurrence that might have involved my remembering who I was on earth was rigorously missing. (p 77)

Eben Alexander believes it is this aspect of his particular NDE which allowed him to go so deeply into the spiritual realms. “Throughout my entire time in those worlds, I was a soul with nothing to lose. No places to miss, no people to mourn. I had come from nowhere and had no history, so I fully accepted my circumstances–even the initial murk and mess of the Realm of the Earthworm’s-Eye View–with equanimity. And because I so completely forgot my mortal identity, I was granted full access to the true cosmic being I really am (and we all are). . . . At the risk of oversimplifying, I was allowed to die harder, and travel deeper, than almost all NDE subjects before me.” (p 78)

When Eben returned to his earthly life, he immediately began wanting to re-educate his peers. But he encountered the same paternalistic attitudes which he himself had previously practiced upon patients trying to explain their experiences while in coma or medically dead states. This book is one of his efforts to educate the general population on the reality of the Spirit realm. And there is so much more in the book than I can include here. Just discovering the identity of the girl on the butterfly wing is worth the read!!!

I will conclude this lengthy review with Eben’s experience of going to church approximately a month and a half after his experience.

My memory of my time out of the body was still naked and raw, and everywhere I turned in this place that had failed to move me much before, I saw art and heard music that brought it all right back. The pulsing bass note of a hymn echoed the rough misery of the Realm of the Earthworm’s-Eye View. The stained glass windows with their clouds and angels brought to mind the celestial beauty of the Gateway. A painting of Jesus breaking bread with his disciples evoked the communion of the Core. I shuddered as I recalled the bliss of infinite unconditional love I had known there.

At last, I understood what religion was really all about. Or at least was supposed to be about. I didn’t just believe in God; I knew God. As I hobbled to the altar to take Communion, tears streamed down my cheeks. (p 147f)

Hummingbirds Don’t Fly In The Rain, by Kimberly Klein.

Every parents’ worst fear is losing their children. This book details Kimberly Klein’s loss of her only child, thirteen-year-old Talia. Ms Klein does a terrific job of sharing the emotions of the first hours and days of hearing that the love of her life has gone. Sharing from notes taken while events unfolded, she shows us what it is like to go through various stages of loss. Incomprehension, un-acceptance, anger, disbelief, panic, frantic action, numbness, depression are not talked about so much as demonstrated. Kimberly Klein allows us into her life at her most vulnerable time. She lets us experience the intense emotions of being in the middle of events she could not control, events she moment-by-moment began to realize were going to culminate in the most tragic way possible.

But the author does not leave us, the reader, there. She takes us through her own journey of discovering her daughter’s death in a plane crash and the terrible mess of family relationships in a dysfunctional family as they seek to work out legalities.

She also shares with us what it was like to have shared her few years with the truly remarkable, incredible person Talia was. Talia impacted every person she came in contact with during her years on earth. (And she continues to do so!) Klein goes into quite some detail as she shares with us the person Talia was while on earth. She shares with us her own experience of being a single mother devoting her entire existence to properly raising her daughter. She lets us in on her own life, her marriage to Michael, Talia’s father (who also died in the plane crash), his upbringing, etc. The reader gets a real sense of what her life was like with Talia.

Within hours of Talia’s death, her mother began to sense Talia’s presence. One of the first instances was feeling Talia’s hand on her wrist, sensing Talia instruct her to obtain the bracelet off the wrist of Talia’s body. This happened quite a long while before the bodies had been recovered from the wreckage of the plane up on a Panamanian mountainside. Thus the book details a completely bittersweet story. It is a story of utter loss; but it is also a story of hope, of wonder, of glory and reassurance.

One of the first messages Talia sent her mother was that she was okay. “I did not die. I am okay! I am still with you. I will always be with you. You did such a magnificent job of being my mother; you were perfect!” She then began a long process of communications which revealed Talia’s task, sharing with us on earth how we should live. But I get ahead of myself!

Hummingbirds Don’t Fly In The Rain merely begins to open up the vast body of communication from Talia to us. The conversations continue in two books (thus far) titled The Universe Speaks, volumes one and two. Hummingbirds. . . ends with the very earliest of these communications, mostly reassuring Kimberly Klein of Talia’s continuing existence, the gloriousness of this existence, and the sense that she, Talia, has a job to do, now from the Spirit realm. That job is to share truth with those still in body on earth.

She is still Talia over there! Her spunky personality comes through in the communications. She jokes while instilling profound truth! “But I cannot lie from over here.” There is definite seriousness in what she is about.

This book is an incredible story. Everyone should read it!! And those who are thus inclined will want to continue to follow Talia’s communications in The Universe Speaks. But begin by reading Hummingbirds Don’t Fly In The Rain. Even by itself it is an incredibly bittersweet story of loss and hope.

I have begun working my way through a book by Allan Kardec. I will certainly not be done reading it any time soon; in fact, I may never finish the entire book! This is because of the sort of book it is. First, a bit about the author, and then I will share just a little of what I have read so far.

Allan Kardec was a French educator, living from 1804 to 1869. He is best remembered as the systematizer of “spiritism”. In his 50’s already, he became interested in a phenomenon gaining widespread appeal in high society, namely contacting spirits of departed souls. He and others experimented with various methods of communicating with these spirits, and receiving information from them. What began as merely frivolous entertainment gradually evolved into an awareness that these spirits were attempting to convey information.

The Spirits Book was Kardec’s first publication of the results of this experimentation. The body of the book consists of 1019 questions which were put to the spirits, and their answers. While it is not at all difficult to read, it is written in the 19th century, translated in the 1870’s into English. Thus it contains the typical wordiness of 19th century writing. But with that caveat lector, the book contains much fascinating stuff, especially given its date.

In the introduction (which is as far as I’ve gotten so far!) Kardec summarizes the information received from the spirit dimension. And it is amazing to me how much it agrees with information of the spirit dimension received from other, more contemporary, sources.

I have been reading about near-death experiences, for example, for over thirty years, fascinated by the information these experiencers bring back from the spiritual dimension. More recently I have been receiving information about the spiritual dimension from other sources. And every one of these sources is almost completely in agreement. There is a consistency which cannot be ignored. There has to be something about all these messages which tell us at least a bit about heaven, the spiritual dimension.

And I find that much of this information is in line with biblical writings as well. The Bible does not give us a great deal of information about heaven, mostly hints and small glimpses. The theology gleaned from the Bible does differ at some key points from the information received more experientially. I don’t know all the answers to these discrepancies. I trust God in this. My position is that I don’t need to know all the answers, that I only need to trust and obey. I follow, obedient to where he may lead, trusting in his love and infinite care for me. He will not lead me astray.

I cannot share the entire summary of key points of the doctrine transmitted by the spirits to Allan Kardec and his associates. They cover over six pages! But here are just a few, to possibly whet your appetite.

“The spirit-world is the normal, primitive, eternal world, pre-existent to, and surviving, everything else.

“The corporeal world is only secondary; it might cease to exist, or never have existed, without changing the essentiality of the spiritual world.

“The soul is an incarnated spirit, whose body is only its envelope.

“On quitting the body, the soul re-enters the world of spirits from which it came, and from which it will enter upon a new material existence after a longer or shorter lapse of time, during which its state is that of an errant or wandering spirit.

“The incarnated spirit is under the influence of matter; the man who surmounts this influence, through the elevation and purification of his soul, raises himself nearer to the superior spirits, among whom he will one day be classed. He who allows himself to be ruled by bad passions and places all his delight in the satisfaction of his gross animal appetites brings himself nearer to the impure spirits, by giving preponderance to his animal nature.

“Spirits who are not incarnated, who are errant, do not occupy any fixed and circumscribed region; they are everywhere, in space, and around us, seeing us, and mixing with us incessantly; they constitute an invisible population, constantly moving and busy about us, on every side.

During a recent visit to Sao Paulo, Brasil, I visited with my daughter-in-law about Spiritism. She and her mother go to meetings on occasion. I wished my visit had allowed me the opportunity to accompany her to one of these meetings. I gathered that the meetings consist primarily of discussion of Kardec’s ideas, and other practitioners of Spiritism, such as Chico Xavier. They apparently pray and support each other in the various troubles life tends to bring. It sounded not unlike the small group experience of most contemporary church-goers. What I would’ve liked to learn more about was whether there was much practicing of contact with spirits today, or whether they primarily focused on past writings of such experiences. Future agenda!!!

I have just finished reading two books from this most prolific author. I had not heard of her before, but while reading these books, carrying them around with me in public, I encountered several people who immediately recognized what i was reading. “Oh, I have read most of her books!”, was a comment I heard more than once. I felt left out!!! Where have I been?!! But I guess this is yet one more instance of things coming our way when the time is right, when we are ready to receive them. I operate on that principle, in fact, when I post on The Urban Monk. I trust that you, the reader, are receiving these offerings at the time which is right for you. Not that you will thus necessarily agree with what I say, but more along the lines that you are being thoughtfully prodded by Spirit at a time when you can receive it.

The two books I read by Sylvia Browne are, The Two Marys, and The Mystical Life of Jesus. These two books outline the lives of Jesus, his mother Mary, and his wife, Mary Magdalene. Sylvia Browne is a psychic, a gift she has had since childhood. She receives a lot of information from her spirit guide, Francine. But these two books also contain a lot of research into the lives of these pivotal people.

Sylvia calls herself a “gnostic Christian”. She founded a church called “Novus Spiritus”. She is completely and unapologetically a Christian. But her beliefs do not rely only on biblical revelation as do the beliefs of most Christians. Being “gnostic”, that is, “knowing” or knowledge based, she also takes from revelation received through other, more esoteric sources (such as her own spirit guide). This of course leads her to sound quite different from orthodox Church teaching! She says she has been severely criticized and persecuted throughout her life and ministry. But her faith in God, and relationship with him and his son, remains strong despite the opposition.

Sylvia is very critical of “Pauline Christianity”, which comes mostly from Paul’s writings in the Bible and is what primarily comprises orthodox Church theology. She draws heavily on the four gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings. But she also relies on other writings, many of which have come to light only in the past century or so, having been destroyed by the Church when they made decisions on what would comprise Church theology and what would not.

I myself find it very interesting that so many of these early writings have been recently re-discovered. What does that fact alone tell us? What is God saying to us in our day by allowing these earlier banned documents to be revealed?

I would not be as critical as Sylvia Browne of the early Church’s decisions about what was in and what was out as far as early writings circulating among believers. I view the Church leaders in the perspective that they were operating to the best of their ability with what they were given. I do view their decisions as human ones, made with human reasoning, but I do not necessarily, out-of-hand, consider them nefarious.

Moving to the content of Sylvia Browne’s books, they tell a much more complete story of the lives of these three characters so central to the Christian faith. We get details of what Jesus was up to before beginning his public ministry in Palestine. We get filled in on story elements missing in the biblical accounts. And it is most fascinating to consider!! Especially for someone like me who has been part of Church all my life and studied extensively the Church’s book, the Bible.

Well before encountering these books I had come to accept the fact of Jesus being a married man. And, dear reader, I find nothing in the Biblical writings which would preclude this!! It is only Church tradition which has led us to believe that Jesus was single. (And what does that tell us!!!)

These books tell us much about Jesus’ travels as a young man, going to numerous places to learn from scholars of his day, taking with him various companions. Browne also paints a picture of Jesus coming from a fairly well-to-do family, not the poor downtrodden picture we often get from Church tradition. His uncle, Joseph of Arimathaea, was a wealthy business man, with ships, tin-mines in the British Isles, etc. Jesus’ father Joseph, as a carpenter, had an extensive, successful business with numerous employees working for him. Jesus was able to use family resources to become a student and itinerant teacher.

The part of Sylvia Browne’s stories about which I have the biggest questions center around the resurrection and time following. She has received information from beyond that Jesus did not die on the cross when he was crucified. After surviving this horrific experience, he spent a short time in Palestine, appearing to his disciples, giving them final messages (all recorded in the Bible), and then travelled once again, re-visiting some of his earlier places, and eventually settling in the south of France, in the Languedoc region. I had long known that Mary Magdalene had lived out her life there, but to consider Jesus and Mary living out their lives there together, was a new one for me! I take that information with a grain of salt, putting it on the back burner, so to speak, for future consideration.

Francine has told Sylvia that a lot of this information will come to light in the coming years, probably soon! We will see, I guess, whether this pans out. Once again, I take information coming from sources like this with some hesitation. Not all mystical, psychic revelations are 100% accurate. There is variance in the information which comes out of all these stories. Taken together they present a fascinating picture. But I take no one account as truth over all others. And I encourage my friends and readers to do the same. Learn as much as you can from this, adding it to the fabric of the larger picture. New information (like Sylvia Browne’s is for me) does not need to negate what I have learned from other sources, from other peoples’ stories of truth.

Again, these books are fascinating to read. I highly encourage everyone to read them! Learn from them, take the parts which you can accept, and allow the rest to slough off like water off a duck’s back. “. . . read it (the Bible, and I would add, her books) with new eyes of love and right living and spiritual search. . . . If you stop searching for truth, then you become complacent and you really don’t realize what his life was about.” (p 121, The Mystical Life of Jesus). I hope you enjoy these writings as much as I did, and that you let me know your reactions!

A few weeks ago I watched a video drama of the life of Chico Xavier. He was a Brazilian mystic who could sense very concretely the spirit world. Of course, with gifts like these, he grew up as a very different child, being viewed as odd at best, of-the-devil at worst.

In adulthood, he was able to hear messages from the spirit world, and write them down. He became widely popular, as people sought him out to seek messages from departed loved ones. He did thousands of “readings” during his long life (he died in 2002, age 92). In 2012 a Brazilian TV show named him the greatest Brazilian of all time, based on a viewer survey.

Xavier was heavily influenced by the works of Allan Kardec, a French educator, who became famous for systematizing Spiritism. Xavier never claimed to compose any of his writings, which numbered in the hundreds of books, saying he was only a channel, writing what the spirits dictated.

One of his most famous writings, Nosso Lar (Our Home), was made into a movie in 2010. In English it is called Astral City. It is the messages from Dr Andre Luis which comprise this story, a phenomenal account of the heavenly realm we enter upon dying. This profound movie is certainly worth searching out and watching. It will affect your views of dying and the afterlife.

Back to the dramatized video of Chico Xavier’s life, one of the most powerful scenes occurs when he receives messages from a murder victim which exonerate the shooter. Communicating through the writing of Xavier, the spirit/soul of the victim tells his parents, and the shooter’s parents, that his death was the result of an accident and was not a murder at all. This evidence was entered into a court, and the perpetrator was absolved of his crime. The two mothers, who had been good friends before the accident, and then became estranged, were reunited in their friendship. It was a ground-breaking case, receiving much publicity, especially in Brasil.

Chico Xavier’s life was a difficult one, from beginning to end. From his childhood, right through his adulthood, he was surrounded by people who either wanted to take advantage of his gift, or who wanted readings. His health suffered. Since he claimed to not be the author of anything, he refused to take money for any of his readings, books or writings. He was only the writer and messenger, penning what others, in the spirit world, were saying. So, even with growing popularity, he remained relatively poor all his life. And he struggled with health issues, especially his eyesight.

But what he gave the world has continued. Many of his writings have been translated into English and other languages. I have read just a couple of these writings. The quality of the translations is not consistently good. Some of the writings are quite readable, others abysmal.

When I visited Brasil recently, I found out that there is quite a large following of Xavier and Kardec’s works. There are groups of people who meet in homes or small meeting places to discuss their works, to pray for each other, and to continue some of the traditions. These “spiritists” do not claim to be a religion as such, but merely people who have accepted the validity of these writings. It was not clear to me how much mediumship continues today. It sounds like most of what happens in these meetings is based on what has already been written down.

I have seen a few instances of evidence that the organized Church feels threatened by this spiritist movement (which to my mind lends credibility to the truth of the movement!). In fact, the video of Chico Xavier’s life shows some of this resistance by the Church. In Brasil, of course, “the Church” is mostly the Roman Catholic Church. But I have seen some criticism of spiritism from evangelical churches as well. It would appear that the organization which claims to be the closest follower of God’s truth does not really want to hear what God has to say to us today! They want to persist with the comfortable platitudes which have been handed down through the centuries. No new revelations can be allowed. The Church would have us believe that God is not the same today as he was a few thousand years ago. He spoke then through prophets and teachers, but today speaks only through what was written down way back. Any revelation which comes to gifted ones in today’s world gets labelled as devilish, evil, and must be stamped out. Xavier himself always claimed to be operating within the confines of Christianity, and began his “ministry” with the blessing of a beloved priest who had known him as he grew up.

So, through most of his life, he struggled with this dichotomy. People loved him, and sought him out to hear wisdom from beyond. But the Church largely persecuted him, labelling him as being of the devil (where have we heard that before?!!!).

My own personal view is that I have no trouble accepting Chico Xavier for what he was and claimed to be. As with any mystic gifts, there is never a guarantee of 100% accuracy. Thus there is a bit of inconsistency from one mystic to another. Xavier’s words do not always completely agree with revelations from other sources.  But overall, we can receive wonderful messages and glimpses of the life-beyond through the words of Chico Xavier.