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Heaven Is Real: A Doctor’s Experience With the Afterlife
Newsweek/Daily Beast ^ | Oct 8 2012 | Eban Alexander

Posted on 10/08/2012 3:01:21 PM PDT by WilliamIII

As a neurosurgeon, I did not believe in the phenomenon of near-death experiences. I grew up in a scientific world, the son of a neurosurgeon. I followed my father’s path and became an academic neurosurgeon, teaching at Harvard Medical School and other universities. I understand what happens to the brain when people are near death, and I had always believed there were good scientific explanations for the heavenly out-of-body journeys described by those who narrowly escaped death.

... 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.

(Excerpt) Read more at thedailybeast.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial
KEYWORDS: ebenalexander; heaven; neardeathexperience; neurosurgeon
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To: cva66snipe

Good stories for George Noory at Coast to Coast AM. I don’t buy NDE stories.


121 posted on 10/09/2012 8:43:37 AM PDT by AmericanSamurai
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To: WilliamIII

How beautiful our Blessed Mother is: It gets stranger still. For most of my journey, someone else was with me. A woman. She was young, and I remember what she looked like in complete detail. She had high cheekbones and deep-blue eyes. Golden brown tresses framed her lovely face. When first I saw her, we were riding along together on an intricately patterned surface, which after a moment I recognized as the wing of a butterfly. In fact, millions of butterflies were all around us—vast fluttering waves of them, dipping down into the woods and coming back up around us again. It was a river of life and color, moving through the air. The woman’s outfit was simple, like a peasant’s, but its colors—powder blue, indigo, and pastel orange-peach—had the same overwhelming, super-vivid aliveness that everything else had. She looked at me with a look that, if you saw it for five seconds, would make your whole life up to that point worth living, no matter what had happened in it so far. It was not a romantic look. It was not a look of friendship. It was a look that was somehow beyond all these, beyond all the different compartments of love we have down here on earth. It was something higher, holding all those other kinds of love within itself while at the same time being much bigger than all of them.


122 posted on 10/09/2012 10:17:05 AM PDT by mgist
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To: Salvation

Look up <”Dr. Maurice Rawlings,Sr”


123 posted on 10/09/2012 10:32:39 AM PDT by rxtn41
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To: WilliamIII; a fool in paradise; Slings and Arrows

Stories like this make you wanna die.
Honey, will you drive me to the bridge?


124 posted on 10/09/2012 10:33:07 AM PDT by Revolting cat! (Bad things are wrong!)
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To: Revolting cat!
Gonna drive your Cadillac off a bridge?
125 posted on 10/09/2012 10:54:46 AM PDT by Slings and Arrows (You can't have IngSoc without an Emmanuel Goldstein.)
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To: AmericanSamurai
Good stories for George Noory at Coast to Coast AM. I don’t buy NDE stories

Then you would have to toss out the writings of Paul and John in The Bible as well as well. It doesn't matter what state the persons body is when GOD has a message or revelation for them. What matters is the message, listening, and praying, for understanding of the message in which The Holy Spirit will lead one to the truth and meaning.

Do you also reject that still GOD speaks too and works through any individual man? Is it or is it not Jesus Christ who conquered death, hell, and the grave? It is He who has authority over it right? Who then are we to limit or say that he can't do this or that in someone elses life? It may be for the individual persons sake, for someone elses sake the person will witness too, or to The Glory of GOD for the sake of His Gospel.

Which part of us does The Lord minister too? Which part is eternal? Which part of us lives though we die? Who has the power and authority over life in our physical form as to even our next heartbeat? Who can give us life or take it away? Yet GOD who has that power can not speak to one who is clinically dead? I find that very hard to believe that he can't. Most persons who survive this come out of it much stronger in faith. BTW the doctor had a chance to either accept or reject what was told him.

What does The Bible show us about what GOD can do with the dead?

Matthew 27:51-53 The earth shook, rocks split apart, tombs opened, and the bodies of many godly men and women who had died were raised from the dead. After Jesus’ resurrection, they left the cemetery, went into the holy city of Jerusalem, and appeared to many people.

Looks like the dead can indeed be brought to life as a witness. I do sometimes wonder what they said.

126 posted on 10/09/2012 2:35:19 PM PDT by cva66snipe (Two Choices left for U.S. One Nation Under GOD or One Nation Under Judgment? Which one say ye?)
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To: WilliamIII; a fool in paradise; Slings and Arrows

Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens. But to be subjected to heavenly choirs for eternity 24/7, it would be like listening to the horrible art rock of the 1970s, ya know Pink Floyd, Genesis, EL&P, etc, torture, no thank you.

I guess we’ll never know. Lazarus, as I recall, wouldn’t go on talk shows and declined all book advances.


127 posted on 10/09/2012 6:12:01 PM PDT by Revolting cat! (Bad things are wrong!)
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To: CatherineofAragon

My gran is very, very old. I mean very. She said one day that she saw two men in white robes at the end of her bed and they said, “It’s not time, yet.”

I mean she is very old and lives at home.

As for me. I have seen the shimmering beings when a person (who was a satanist online) said that they were going to “take care of me.”

Everyone can go ahead an scoff. But there’s a lot we don’t know.


128 posted on 10/09/2012 8:25:08 PM PDT by Winstons Julia (Hello OWS? We don't need a revolution like China's; China needs a revolution like OURS.)
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To: Misterioso
I can even imagine it not existing.

How sad for you.

129 posted on 10/09/2012 8:35:17 PM PDT by prairiebreeze (Don't be afraid to see what you see. -- Ronald Reagan)
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To: TalBlack

My Grandmother passed away in an assisted living home. Their was no indication that she would be passing away anytime soon...However, the night she died...the night attendant stated she was talking to people that were not their...particularly her beloved husband who died decades before...


130 posted on 10/10/2012 6:36:37 AM PDT by PigRigger (Donate to http://www.AdoptAPlatoon.org - The Troops have our front covered, let's guard their backs!)
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To: Winstons Julia

No scoffing from me. Believing in the God of the Bible necessitates a belief in the supernatural world described therein. Sometimes, circumstances give us a glimpse of that world.


131 posted on 10/10/2012 8:57:56 AM PDT by CatherineofAragon (Don't be afraid to see what you see. (Ronald Reagan))
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To: I want the USA back; Lazamataz; Nea Wood; WilliamIII

I don’t automatically believe nor automatically disbelieve what is called “private revelation.”

St. Hildegard of Bingen had them on for over 70 years, and they weren’t “near-death” experiences either: they were intense visions that came to her, on and off, through all 5 senses, from age 3 until her death at age 81.

Even she did not consider them automatically worthy of belief, and for a long time didn’t know if they were a delusion or a gift.

I admire her sane and balanced point of view. God is capable of giving us visions; on the other hand, the brain itself is inconceivably complex, and capable of engendering convincingly fantastic other worlds.

But I want to ask the doctrinaire atheists this question: why and how would unaided materialistic evolution -— you know, that mechanistic process totally defined by survival and reproductive fitness -— have given us such powerful, apparently otherworldly, perceptions, capacities, and drives?

I ask you.


132 posted on 10/10/2012 10:00:36 AM PDT by Mrs. Don-o (Jesus, my Lord, my God, my All.)
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To: Salvation

Bookmarking to read your links later :-)


133 posted on 10/10/2012 12:51:11 PM PDT by VRWCer ( They will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. - ML King)
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To: Winstons Julia

Thank you for sharing you grandma’s experience. My grandma had a very similar thing happen to her. Grandma was also very elderly and in the hospital with pneumonia. She told us that two women dressed in white robes were coming and standing at the foot of her bed every night, she knew they were angels. Grandma passed away shortly thereafter.


134 posted on 10/10/2012 6:27:13 PM PDT by ragmop
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To: I want the USA back

Just what I was thinking. Where does this guy get off claiming he was in the afterlife when wasn’t dead? After-life..What does that word imply? Oh yes.. dead. Yep, I read it again...Nowhere in this article does it claim he was dead. 32 years ago I took LSD and had visions of heaven and God, but as far as I remember I wasn’t dead at the time as well.


135 posted on 10/14/2012 9:21:32 AM PDT by GrandJediMasterYoda (Someday our schools we will teach the difference between "lose" and "loose")
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