Posted on 06/15/2026 8:59:10 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
I was interviewing the third person who told me they had died, when I noticed they were all saying the same thing. Their accounts of the other side differed in nearly every detail. One had been guided through an unearthly realm by a young woman on a butterfly’s wing. Another had communicated with a man who had died years before. The third was met by angels in an operating room. What they had in common was more discreet: while recounting their experiences, there was a shared gentleness in their eyes and a poised confidence about the nature of death and the meaning of life.
They all carried a sense of mission that, decades later, had not faded.
I’ve been making a documentary, “Final Hours,” about people who have come back from clinical death, known as near-death experiences (NDEs). By the third interview, I wasn’t so interested in what they saw, but rather, what they brought back.
Dr. Eben Alexander III was given up for adoption when he was eleven days old. His adoptive father was one of the most respected neurosurgeons of his generation, and Alexander followed him into the same field, eventually teaching neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School for fifteen years. He was a confident materialist. “The brain produces the mind. Period.”
However, in November 2008, he was admitted to the emergency room, seizing from a rare bacterial meningitis—an infection in his brain. By the end of the week, his doctors put his survival chance at two percent, with zero percent chance of recovery. They were recommending the family take him off the ventilator.
Yet he miraculously recovered.
I sat with him on a brisk February morning at his home in Virginia, listening as he recounted the experience. He is in his seventies now and speaks fluidly between medical neuroscience and spirituality in the same sentence.
What he remembers from the seven days his brain was offline is the spine of the documentary, and I will leave most of it there. Yet, he came out of the coma with an account that he—as a working neurosurgeon—could not reconcile. His entire neocortex was offline; there was no instrument left to produce a dream.
Upon return, he realized that the materialist worldview he was teaching at Harvard was a smaller story than the one he had stumbled into.
“Be careful of your beliefs,” he told me.
The neurosurgeon who used to teach that consciousness ends at the skull now teaches the opposite. He shares with people that human life is not purely materialistic—that life is unlimited, even after death.
Just days before my trip to Virginia, on a humid afternoon in central Florida, I sat in a sports gym across from a young man whose heart had stopped on the operating table during what was supposed to be a basic elbow surgery.
Bubba Herrick was nineteen, a right-handed pitcher, on a fast track to the major leagues. The day before his surgery, a nurse asked whether he had any allergies that might complicate the procedure. He had never been under, so he said no, and walked out with a pit in his stomach he couldn’t explain.
The next morning, he had a reaction to the anesthesia and died on the operating table.
What he describes from the other side begins with a life review. He saw every single moment of his life play out. Including obvious moments: the first time he picked up a baseball, an A on a test. Yet, he also saw things he had not expected. He saw every time he could have said “I love you” and didn’t, and every time he could have said “I’m sorry” and didn’t.
“I died full of regret,” he told me.
However, over on the other side, he was approached by a figure who told him he could receive a second chance, with one condition. “The next time you die, you have to be ready for it.”
Herrick is in his early twenties now. He carries himself with a bovine gentleness that usually only comes with age—or by peeking at the great beyond. The first thing he did, once he could put what had happened to him into words, was call everyone on his phone he felt he had wronged.
“I made sure to right all the wrongs that I felt I needed to,” he told me.
My journey to interview the third person was itself a test. I drove to Houston in a storm that turned the freeway into a long grey corridor of brake lights and standing water. By the time the crew and I reached the set, the rain had thinned, and Tricia Barker arrived ready.
In 1995, at twenty-one, the then-English major student at the University of Texas (UT) was hit head-on in Austin by a driver who jumped a yellow light.
Her back broke in three places. The first surgeon on call refused to come in because she had no health insurance. The surgeon who eventually agreed had been on duty for forty hours and had to take a nap first. The consent form offered to the student noted a seventeen percent chance of death. With no other choice, she signed the documents.
On the operating table, she counted down from 100, waiting for the anesthesia to hit, when suddenly her consciousness left her body. She watched the surgery from above the table and noticed the surgeons were not alone in the room. Angels worked around them and through them. Later, she rose higher, past the hospital, into a starscape where she met what she calls a divine intelligence. There was a voice. It instructed her plainly.
“You’re going back, and you’re going to teach.”
Before the accident, Barker was an agnostic college student from a broken home, a few years out from a suicide attempt.
After the accident, she returned to UT, completed her degree, and became a teacher.
Thirty years later, she is still teaching.
What she brought back, she said, was a job description, a mission, and a value system. “I was a product of this culture. I thought money and success and a house and a car, you know, all these things were all that mattered. Then I had seen what really matters is how you treat people.”
“You can’t take dogma with you into that realm. You can’t take hatred into that realm. You can’t even take being right. All you can take—the only energy that is light enough to go with you—is love.”
“Absolutely not,” they unanimously said.
Their lack of fear was striking to me. Their calmness was a reflection of a deeper kind, a realization that death is far from the end.
Each of these three had reorganized their adult life around something they brought back. For Alexander, teaching that we are spiritual beings in a spiritual universe. For Herrick, learning to live so that the next death, whenever it comes, finds him with nothing left unsaid. For Barker, guiding her students in a classroom.
I visited Dr. Jeffrey Long’s home in Kentucky. He is a practicing radiation oncologist and researcher who runs the largest publicly accessible database of near-death experiences in the world. He has been doing this for more than thirty years. I asked him whether what I had been observing on my three trips was present in his data.
He answered it the way a researcher would, with numbers. In 2024, he published the largest study of NDE aftereffects on record, comparing 834 near-death experiencers against a control group of people who had brushes with death without an NDE. The differences, he told me, were far from subtle. The experiencer group reported, overwhelmingly and consistently, increased compassion, a heightened sense of meaning, and decreased fear of death.
“Ultimately,” Long told me near the end of our conversation, “the message they bring back, again and again across cultures, is the same. I would say it is the most profoundly important message that is even conceivable for all of humanity.”
“Our lives have purpose.”
“We’re meant to treat each other with as much compassion and caring and generosity as we can ... and to use the opportunity of life as an opportunity for spiritual development.”
Drink your Ovaltine.
LOL GMTA
A provoking article.
Interesting.
With the exception of Christ nobody has ever came back from death!
I love hearing about these NDEs, especially when they talk about Heaven & the things they learned on “the other side.” My only son passed away on June 19, 2023. I know he’s in Heaven because, as awesome as he was, he was a genuinely kind & loving person, things of which I’m most proud. Thanks for sharing this article.
“Buy My Book”!
Reminds me of that popular Jesse Collin Young song, done with acoustic strings:
“Come on people, smile on your Brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another
Right now!”
I’m sorry for your loss.
I speculate that your Son,
in his present Spiritual state
still knows of your love.
Did you forget about Lazarus?
And all those who arose from the grave in Jerusalem at the moment Jesus died on the cross.
What about Lazerus
Colin
An anthem
I still play it some
I remember it first listen when it hit summer 67
Getting ice cream with my mom In New Orleans couple hours from home near commander’s palace and the old cemetery Lafayette #1 across the street where I peered inside the crypt at bones in metal coffin seven year old girl died in 1835 yellow fever
Clearly etched for me
Btw his ridge top album is good
Psychedelia haight guy goes to the country
A lot did as we know
I was ten
Dad was bidding a construction job
The family business then construction
Snag
Eben Alexander did not have an NDE as much as he had an ego rescue.
I have known him for many years, even prior to his writing his books. Last month I met with him again, and must say that his soul has grown considerably through his difficult experiences since his experience, but he is still not benefiting from his supposed NDE as he blocks the connection. .
I was with Eban and his birth and adopted families when he first shared his story publicly. I met with him personally immediately after this and warned him of the difficult path he was headed down. He discarded my warnings and chose the path of difficult experiences.
His wife stated, after their divorce, that his ego after his NDE was even bigger than his ego as a neurosurgeon. He developed an extreme spiritual ego. This is a common problem with people who have had profound spiritual experiences.
Eben was facing the Virginia Medical Licensing Disciplinary Board for altering medical records to cover his operating on the wrong vertebrae during spinal surgery. He previously had many malpractice claims and knew that his mistake potentially ended his ability to obtain malpractice insurance. Don’t take my word for it. The Licensing Board’s Disciplinary Reports are available online through their public records.
His profound experience caused the disciplinary hearing to be postponed and decreased the punishment subsequently imposed upon him.
That being said, I am extremely grateful to Eben as he has allowed me and others to learn by observing his difficult life experiences rather than replicating them.
Having been an NDE experiencer myself, I’ve had the opportunity to meet and discuss their personal experiences. Yes, they change people in many ways.
My NDE was different in that I never fully returned to my physical body. I’ve been straddling the fence between Heaven and earth for almost forty years. This gave me the ability to read souls and experience the memories of other people, including those who have had NDE’s. I’ve helped several of the experiences understand their own journey.
When I step into the stored memory of the NDE of another person, I experience what they did during their journey. Usually, they experience the feeling of the experience again as I stimulate their stored memory. Thus I can tell the type of NDE they experienced and how far they crossed over. The conferences like IANDS where NDE folks get together and share is wonderful due to so many people with connections to Divine through their experiences.
Many of the proclaimed NDE’s are very real. However, many of these experiencers have lost the Divine connection they made during their experience by creating another ego, a spiritual one, around their experience. Thankfully, not all have done this. Humility is a prerequisite to experiencing Heaven.
Is Heaven real? Absolutely. I’ve been there many times and it is my home, not being here on earth in this physical body. I have missed it every day for many years and cannot wait to fully return. Coming here makes me feel as though my heart has been ripped out. I miss the profound Love and Bliss of Heaven.
Most, but not quite all that a person experiences in an NDE can be experienced while still here on earth through meditation and prayer.
“With the exception of Christ nobody has ever came back from death!”
You don’t understand what Jesus was speaking about when He spoke of dying daily.
““Our lives have purpose.”
Surrendering to the Will of God, wherever it takes you is the ultimate purpose.
If you want to hear God laugh, tell Him your plans.
A spiritual ego is where a person forms an ego identity by playing God.
Seek ye first the Kingdom of God. You only find that by dying daily of self. You become aware and experience God only when this happens.
The NDE framework, taken on its own terms, almost universally produces moralism–be kinder, love more, fear death less. What it almost never produces is the recognition that you need a Savior, because the experiential environment of the NDE (warmth, acceptance, light) doesn’t confront you with the holiness of God against which your actual condition becomes visible.
The NDE may crack open the materialist ceiling. But it doesn’t hand you a map of what’s above it.
The NDEr who returns with a warm glow and a mission to be loving has had a genuine experience. But they may have encountered grace without encountering the full weight of what grace is actually solving–and that partial picture can inoculate people against the real thing.
Because the message of Christianity isn’t about feeling good or being accepted. It isn’t even primarily about being better. It is about the undoing of oneself–the death of the self that came back.
One dies. And is resurrected.
Every other framework is additive–add virtue, add compassion, add discipline, with the self remaining the project manager throughout. The gospel is subtractive at the root. The self doesn’t get improved. It gets crucified. What rises is something categorically different–not a better version of the old man, but a new creation.
That’s the message NDEs almost never deliver. And its absence is worth noticing.
Well said.
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