Science Has Proven the Afterlife! With Dr Eben Alexander

Dr Eben Alexander 0:00

We can all explore consciousness and start revealing that our mind is much more than just something generated by a three and a half pound gelatinous mass floating in a warm, dark bath between our ears. I would like to point to an article by Bruce Grayson. He's a very renowned researcher in these fields in NDE, where he discussed 700 life reviews, and basically a third said their entire life was involved. That there was nothing omitted, and you might wonder how can that happen during a 10-minute cardiac arrest? That your entire life is involved in review, and it turns out that that realm is completely timeless. The spiritual realm is eternal.

Jannecke Øinæs 0:39

You fell into a coma. Could it take us through the key moments of what happened?

Dr Eben Alexander 0:43

Completely amnesic. I had no language, no knowledge of Earth, humanity, this universe, etc. These light portals would then take me up the first time into that rich, ultra-real gateway valley. Many Earth-like features, but like a world of perfection. And then the spiritual realm, with its eternal timing, you know where you can witness birth, death, everything in between simultaneously. All of that collapsed down as I ascended through another light portal up into what I call the core, and the core was an infinite inky blackness, but it was filled to overflowing with this divine love of that God force.

Jannecke Øinæs 1:20

Did you see anything about our future?

Dr Eben Alexander 1:22

Well, I did, and

Jannecke Øinæs 1:31

Doctor Eben Alexander, welcome back to the Wisdom F rom North Show.

Dr Eben Alexander 1:36

Well, Jannecke, it's so great to be back with you again. It's been a while, and I look forward to catching up.

Jannecke Øinæs 1:42

It has been a while, and you have been on my show a couple of times. And the first one was actually in I think it was February 2013 after you had just come out with your first book, Proof of Heaven, about your near-death experience. And there were a lot of people who noticed that, especially in Norway, and I think in the whole world. Then you were on the cover of Time magazine, and this story, you know, about a neurosurgeon. You were a neurosurgeon for 20-five years, and you were teaching at Harvard, and all of a sudden you have this very unique and extraordinary near-death experience. And then after this, you have continuously been sharing this beautiful message from this experience, and you've been writing books, Map of Heaven, Living in a Mindful Universe. You're also one of our masterclass teachers in my own Wisdom F rom North membership with your partner Karen Newell, and teaching about binaural beats and how we can connect to the divine without having an NDE, so we might speak about that as well, and then we're going to meet in person in San Diego this fall at the San Diego Transcendence Retreat, and I can't wait for that because I think it's more important than ever that we meet together as a community, we're living in strange times, and I know Darrell Anka is going to be there. Scott Taylor, Barbara Lamp. I think it's going to be amazing.

Dr Eben Alexander 3:09

Great meeting, very exciting. I'm looking forward to that.

Jannecke Øinæs 3:13

Me too. And for everyone who is curious to come and join us, I'll drop a link below. Now, Evan, this is a very interesting day to record this for me, and I felt like being authentic and personal because this morning my husband's mother passed away, and she was an older woman. She was sick, and it happened very peacefully. And still, me knowing everything I do, I still found myself asking, "Where is she going now? And I thought I would start by asking you that question: "Where is she going? Where do we go when we die?

Dr Eben Alexander 3:53

Well, I would say, most simply put, we go return to a spiritual home. It's something you know. We use all these words to describe near-death experiences, and yet ultimately, the biggest and most important words are love and about our connections with the loved ones who have left their physical bodies. So they they're very much alive in that spiritual world, and that's something we can discover through meditation, through centering prayer. There are many ways we can all explore consciousness and start revealing that our mind is much more than just something generated by a three and a half pound gelatinous mass floating in a warm, dark bath between our ears. But we're really sharing the mind of the universe, and that's something we share with our fellow beings. And those that presence is is there, whether or not the physical body has departed the physical plane yet? So our soul relationships do not end with the death of a physical body, and this is where we can start exploring on our own and just kind of open our minds to that. Start and also important to to stress that be careful of your. Beliefs, because your beliefs can either be falsely confining or kind of falsely limiting, and most of our societal beliefs do not accept some of the deepest truths that are quite apparent to those who have had near-death experiences and study these, have had after-death communications, etc. They've realized the world is a far grander, more interconnected world than they thought before when they identified mainly with just their physical body. So this is really just about getting deeper into the question of consciousness, the brain-mind connection, the fact that this thing we call consciousness or mind seems to be interconnected across space and time, and then of course when you really dig deep and study near-death experiences, especially in terms of life reviews, that's a very important concept. Now, of course, in my NDE, you know, I had a amnesia, very severe amnesia, that prevented me from having an Eben Alexander life review. But that doesn't mean I couldn't see life reviews and reincarnation in very powerful ways, generic ways that basically convinced me of their reality. And it's only since coming back from the coma that I've been able to also assemble some of the scientific data supportive of this, and in this discussion, most specifically, I would like to point to an article by Bruce Grayson. He's a very renowned researcher in these fields in NDE. He's skeptical. He grew up in a biochemist family, and you know, thought all this was woo-woo nonsense until he started having his own patients have extraordinary experiences. Anyway, he wrote a paper in fall of 2021 in the Journal of Near Death Studies where he discussed in detail 700 life reviews. I mean, 698, but whose quibblings are roughly 700 life reviews, and made several important statements. One is 37 percent of them, basically a third, said their entire life was involved, that there was nothing omitted. And you might wonder how can that happen during a 10-minute cardiac arrest? That your entire life is involved in review, and it turns out that that realm is completely timeless. The spiritual realm is eternal. That's where our eternal souls basically dwell. But so 30 for a third of these people to have their entire life involved without exception is not a surprise. But even more surprising is that about half of them, 40-7% said that it was a reliving of events as if they were still ongoing, not just some vague memory or dream, but a reliving of these events. And three quarters of them stress that the life review was from the perspective of multiple souls involved. So, in other words, if you've handed out pain and suffering to others in the life review, you become the other to receive it, to see what that felt like. So, in in other words, and when you hand out love and compassion and kindness, also that is involved in the life review. But the important message here is that ultimately we're here to show love, kindness, compassion, mercy. Essentially, that kind of reflection of the life review involving those around us affected by our thoughts and actions-that is the golden rule: treat others as you would like to be treated, written into the very fabric of the universe.

Dr Eben Alexander 8:31

So, some very deep and profound lessons about our responsibility. All of this is is a gift because it opens up to the ongoing connection with our loved ones, and realizing this is all going somewhere, you know. This all of this work we do is for soul growth and coming to understanding and a deeper knowledge about our relationship with the universe is actually leading somewhere to deeper understanding and participation in this universe. So, to me, it's all a fascinating set of topics. It's extremely reassuring that the scientific community is now well into this. And in case your viewers don't know it, there's a website bigelowinstitute.org where more than where there are 29 papers written by scientists proving the reality of the afterlife and even of reincarnation. So go to bigelowinstitute.org, start reading those 20-nine essays. You'll realize quickly that from a scientific perspective, the afterlife has already been established as a proven reality. So, you know, and and the reincarnation literature is extremely strong. A lot of it out of University of Virginia. They've studied more than 2,500 cases of past life memories in children over the last 65 years, and more than 1,700 of those cases are solved. But they also point out very importantly in this discussion that you must harvest those memories from these children before age six. Seven because they're natural processes. Something I call programmed forgetting. I don't know if there's a more official term for it all, but programmed forgetting is there so that we have skin in the game for this life. But by age six or seven, those memories of past lives and between lives have pretty much been covered over. So most of us don't remember them, and this is all very important because it's showing us as bigger entities than just something that inhabits, you know, a body from birth to death and nothing more. But we're all much more than that. This kind of soul nature is something we can come to know through meditation and centering prayer, which is why I'm such a giant proponent of of meditation for people to get in deeper touch with their kind of higher soul.

Jannecke Øinæs 10:47

Thank you for sharing that about the new research. That's super interesting and so important. And I think it's so aligned with the times we find ourselves in that everything is coming up to the surface, and we might be receiving help, and the veil is getting thinner. It just seems like so much is happening right now, and gosh, I get so many questions now. I would like to ask you to share some key moments from your near-death experience for those who haven't heard it. But before that, you talked about beliefs, and I'm curious whether our beliefs are affecting or influencing the near-death experiences that people are having or our afterlife experience? Because I know in your case you didn't have deep spiritual beliefs before, and you still had a profound near-death experience.

Dr Eben Alexander 11:31

Well, our prior beliefs certainly can influence how we tell the tale of the journey, but a very important misconception that needs clarification is that these journeys are fully fueled by whatever your prior belief system was? That is not true at all. For example, my prior belief system: I grew up in a Methodist church in North Carolina, then a lot of time spent in an Episcopal church as an adult. I was married in an Episcopal church the first time. All those kinds of things, but to me, I wanted to believe all that. But especially as a scientist, I was having trouble coming up with a way to prove to myself when I lost patients when they died. You know, and I dealt with a lot of malignant brain tumors and bad subarachnoid hemorrhage from aneurysm, so a lot of people just coming in with a very bad prognosis anyway. But luckily, we did a lot of good for those patients. But the reality is, this this is kind of an awakening. I think it makes a lot of sense to a lot of people because they've sensed this kind of ongoing connection with loved ones, even after bodily death and things like that, and so I'd say that the fact that the science is coming down very strongly in support of the reality of the afterlife. When you read those bigelowinstitute.org essays, you'll see exactly what I mean. These are very rigorous scientists, and they're coming at it from many different directions, and yet the conclusion is inescapable that these these stories are revealing a realm that's very real and that has always been here, and it's part of our existence. In fact, many people I think who read Proof of Heaven were attracted to it and really kind of, you know, got it, groked it, because they they had had their own experiences, and this just reminded them there was something about my language, what I was going through and describing, that kind of brought back memories of their own soul journey and helped them to realize, oh yes, I've been there before. Then these stories start to sound less and less foreign and a lot more familiar as people start to admit that this is bringing up memories of something very deep in their own memories, and that programmed forgetting is very active. But ultimately, this is about the scientific community going through a paradigm shift where we realize that materialism or physicalism, which is the kind of science I was trained under and brought up under, that that is false. And in fact, the biggest admission to date from the scientific community that we've left behind those dark days of this blind faith in materialism. A lot of it is is the very fact that they gave out the Nobel Prize for quantum entanglement in the year 2022. That was given to an American, John Clauser, to a Frenchman Alan Espet, and then of course, the Austrian Anton Zeilinger, and the three of them were the kind of strongest researchers who proved the reality of spooky action at a distance. You know, something that Einstein abhorred. He thought quantum physics was incomplete. He postulated something called hidden variables, but it was. Luckily, thanks to an Irish physicist, John Bell, in 1964, who realized that the complaints of of Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen in the EPR paper of 1935 that quantum mechanics had to be incomplete because spooky action at a distance just didn't make sense to him. He was trying to define something called local realism. Einstein was, and local realism. Local is the idea that all physics involves particles touching in a three-dimensional space or four-dimensional spacetime, that they must contact each other, and then the the notion of realism is that there's an objective physical world that exists out there independent of your observation, and some aspect of local realism must be false for entanglement to be true. And all the experiments that were done over many decades proved that Einstein was wrong, and entanglement, spooky action at a distance, was actually what was going on. And when the Nobel Prize finally awarded for quantum entanglement, that's an admission. We're no longer stuck with a science that's limited in four-dimensional space-time and limited by the concepts of local realism.

Dr Eben Alexander 16:08

We now have to kind of entertain much bigger notions of mind, of connection, of information passage in the universe, and that's the revolution that's happening now. But that revolution has right at the tip of the spear near-death experiences and the challenge they present to us in terms of this neat and tidy explanation of physicalism or you know materialism that the brain is creating consciousness out of physical matter and then when you encounter things like telepathy like Guillem Playfair wrote his book *Twin Telepathy* where he estimated 35 percent of identical twins have powerful telepathic experiences, and then other works like that. A good friend, Larry Dossi, he wrote a book called *One Mind* and that book, along with our book *Living in Mind for Universe* is an incredibly strong set of arguments for the fact that we're all sharing one mind, but that we have free will, and that this is shared not just with humans, but all of animal life, all of life that we know of is kind of living within this kind of consciousness, unified consciousness of that God mind, of that cosmic mind, and this is what near-death experiences have come in direct contact with for 1000s of years. So humans have been able to bring back these tales of connection through that the near-death experience and related experiences. And my point is that you can come to know this for yourself through meditation. You don't have to have an NDE, and I know this because Karen and I have run many workshops around the world using sacred acoustics as a form of binaural beat brainwave entrainment, but I use it an hour or two every day. Been doing that for the last 1213, years, and have found it to be an incredibly important gift in terms of connecting with higher soul and with that cosmic mind, and with further refining my kind of understanding of this kind of one mind hypothesis about the nature of the universe, and kind of supporting a philosophical position of evolutionary panentheism.

Jannecke Øinæs 18:13

Yeah, I can really understand that having experienced what you have, you would probably be longing to have that connection again, and thus I understand that you're doing these meditations, and I think we can all have an experience of bliss, of divine connection, and sometimes there's something about divine timing as well. I think it's divinely orchestrated, and when I look at your story. It seems like everything was so divinely orchestrated, with the story of your adoption, and then how your NDE unfolded. And I hopefully I think it's that's the case with all our lives that it is really a common thread and someone who is taking care of us all the way, and there is so much intelligence behind it. So I would love for you to share some key moments from your NDE, and also maybe pointing out what we started talking about-that you actually didn't, you weren't sure that there were an afterlife, and still you had this amazing experience.

Dr Eben Alexander 19:19

Right. So I, you know, before my coma, I was very kind of confused as a neurosurgeon scientifically understanding brain and mind in such a way, and and the problem is, you know, when you're sucker punched by materialism and you keep driving, that somehow there's got to be a way that those electrical fields and those ion channels and those synaptic vesicles, all the work going on in you know 100 billion neurons in the brain is somehow contributing to consciousness. And what I came to realize is, yes, it's participating, but it's not ultimately the source. That's the important thing. In fact, in our book, Living in a Mindful Universe, we discuss how nerves are. Have had to kind of come to a recognition that memories are not stored in the brain, and that becomes clear when you realize that with more than a century and a half, or almost century and a quarter at least, of brain operations resecting brain, there's never been a case of resecting any part of the brain that led to a loss of long-term memories, and this includes a number of patients, some childhood epilepsy patients, where half the brain is removed, and so a hemispherectomy, and yet never was any loss of long-term memory found, and that's because memory is not stored in the brain. Now, when you then review the scientific literature on reincarnation and find that at UVA they've solved more than 1,700 cases of past life memories in children by finding the person who lived before. You then start to admit, well, of course, memories are not fundamentally stored in the brain because there is no explanation for how those memories would be transferred from one person to another person who lives later on, and only 1/5 of those cases out of UVA are familial. That is from the same family. So 80% of them were from completely different families, different communities, etc. So, but we we have a much bigger kind of set of human experiences to try and explain, and that's why we have to leave materialism behind as hopelessly lost and inadequate.

Jannecke Øinæs 21:26

But at that time, you didn't know about this, so let's move back to 2008 You fell into a coma. Could you take us through the key moments of what happened?

Dr Eben Alexander 21:36

Right. I think the most important thing important to remind people: I was amnesic, and don't worry, it probably won't happen to you. I've never encountered anybody else's NDE with this strong a degree of amnesia. Initially, I explained it because in the first weeks after I came out of coma, I was kind of defaulting to well, maybe meningitis kind of deleted all those memories. But I was surprised that all the memories were now coming back. That was a big surprise to me, but that was the reasoning that allowed me to think. Well, maybe it was because of the meningitis that was amnesic. But in fact, I think there was a much bigger reason, and it had to do with if I'd had a more conventional NDE that involved a lot more of Evan Alexander's memories, and especially the guardian angel, who was always somebody important to you in life? If I had scripted this, my guardian angel would have been my adoptive father, the globally renowned neurosurgeon who passed over four years before my coma. But it wasn't, and that's where the important kind of differences in the story come to light. So completely amnesic, I had no language, no knowledge of Earth, humanity, this universe, etc. But in that setting, it started in what I call the earthworm's eye view-a very primitive, coarse, unresponsive realm. But luckily, I was rescued by a slowly spinning white light that came associated with a perfect musical melody. The music was important because by remembering the musical notes, the cadence of the melody later on, that's what enabled me to reconjure up these light portals between levels because I would spontaneously tumble back down to this primitive state of the earthworms I view, but these light portals would then take me up the first time into that rich ultra-real gateway valley, many earth-like features, but like a world of perfection. It's kind of like Plato's world of ideals, but for the individual soul, and that gateway valley is where we would reunite with souls of departed loved ones, go through life reviews, plan next incarnations, sort out the hardships and challenges we'd like to face up to, and then we dive back in. But at any rate, in that gateway valley, I was a speck of awareness on a butterfly wing. I never had any other body awareness at all, but I was aware of what was going on around me, and there were millions of other butterflies looping and spiraling in vast formations, a river of of color and beauty beyond description. And below us was this meadow, a perfectly green, fertile meadow surrounded by a rich, lush forest, sparkling waterfalls into crystal blue pools, and in this lovely setting, being on this butterfly wing, I saw 1000s of beings down in the meadow dancing, lots of joy and merriment, children playing, dogs jumping, festivities all being fueled because up above were these swooping orbs of angelic choirs, and they were emanating chants, anthems, hymns that would just thunder through my awareness. This incredible awe and majesty, and yet buried deep in all of that was a sense of oh, I remember now. This is home. It starts to become familiar. Your soul remembers. It's been there before many a time, and so in that beautiful setting, the next ingredient is so important. For one thing, there was this summer breeze that blew through, and I described it in my early writings as the breath of God or divine wind, and in in that summer breeze was my first awareness of that God. Force of infinitely loving power, majesty, awe, and yet simple love and connection-that God force. So, and that's what is so rewarding to all near-death experiences. It's why they come back. They don't fear death. They realize it's not an end. It's not the annihilation of of their consciousness. And so, in that setting, I remember on this butterfly wing, I wasn't alone. There was somebody witnessing it all with me-a beautiful young woman, sparkling blue eyes, high forehead, high cheekbones, broad smile. She never said a word to me. She never had to, but she looked at me with this look of pure love, and with that look came this mental mind melt as as our minds joined in her message to me.

Dr Eben Alexander 25:44

Came as pure conceptual flow, but weeks later I wrote it all down in words, and those words to best describe that message. You are deeply loved and cherished forever. You have nothing to fear. You're richly cared for, and I cannot tell you how reassuring and affirming those messages were coming from this beautiful young woman. So, at any rate, but that was just a gateway, as I said, because the angelic choirs provided more music, and that music caused everything that I was witnessing here. I could vaguely sense four-dimensional space-time in the material world is some tiny subsection of the spiritual realm, but all of that collapsed down, and then the spiritual realm, with its eternal timing, you know, where you can witness birth, death, everything in between simultaneously, all of that collapsed down as I ascended through another light portal up into what I call the core, and the core was an infinite inky blackness, but it was filled to overflowing with this divine love of that God force, the love of the Creator for the creation. But given that we're given the gift of free will from that God force, and that we're co-creative of our emergent reality with that God force, this is where you know we start to realize that we're much more than just a physical body, and that we have much more influence than we could have just in a birth to death existence in that body. But this is where we also take responsibility for our choices and realize that we play an important role in the evolution of the universe at large. And that was becoming clear to me as this whole kind of journey unfolded in that core realm. I was shown many things every time I entered there. I was told, "You're not here to stay. You'll be going back. The biggest and most important finding in the core was that that God force was the very source of my conscious awareness. So we're never separate as sentient beings. We're never separate from that God force at all, and that's why simply going within through centering prayer, through meditation, the different ways of kind of shutting out the little ego voice-you know, the little voice in our head-that is not who we are. I love how Michael Singer, in his book *The Untethered Soul* calls the voice in your head your annoying roommate. Yep, that's your ego mind, and it chatter, chatter, chatters, and it can interfere with meditations and prayers and all that. But you can leave it behind, and this is where sacredacoustics.com is so useful as a source of binaural beat brainwave entrainment, which I've found to be incredibly important in this journey. But at any rate, I would cycle through these levels multiple times. There was one vision I had towards the very end in the core of what I call the living tapestry. I used to call it the Indra's Net vision, but I then found that that was not really sufficient because the Indra's Net was based on a Hindu cosmology and how each node of the network, each sentient being, that their thoughts and actions have repercussions throughout the network. That's that was the important feature that I saw in my vision of this beautiful living tapestry. But more importantly, it was going somewhere. So our notions of reincarnation, for example, from Buddhism, it's more about getting off the wheel of suffering. But in this discussion of near-death experiences and their contribution to this knowledge of this kind of living tapestry of our ongoing eternal soul connections, it was clear that there was a golden center. That all of this is part of the evolution of humankind towards a much higher kind of oneness with the divine, and that that's really what this whole process of humanity and human evolution is going through, and it's not just about humans. As I said earlier, it's a much bigger thing than that in terms of sentience throughout the cosmos participating in this grand evolution of our thinking and understanding of the nature of our fundamental relationship with the universe at large.

Jannecke Øinæs 29:42

Hey guys! I wanted to introduce you to Wisdom F rom North M embership. The membership is something I'm deeply passionate about because it's great to be inspired by episodes on YouTube, but in the membership, you have the potential for a deep transformation in your life. Our mission. Is to support you and empower you in your spiritual awakening, so that you can finally live your life purpose and radically fall in love with yourself. And in the membership, you'll get to meet some of my favorite guests from the show who are teaching masterclasses you won't find anywhere else. And in our monthly Q and A, you can ask your burning questions directly to the teacher. We also have a library of meditations and practices ad free that can really enhance your spiritual practices. You can find us on wisdomfromnorth.com/membership. If you love the Wisdom F rom North show, I think you will adore Wisdom F rom North M embership, and I hope to see you there. Now let's get back to the episode. Wow! Oh my gosh! It's so rich, so much to unpack there, and we can go in all sorts of directions. I'll go into the last thing you said-that sentient beings all over the universe are part of this great shift. Can you share more about what you know about this? Because I think a lot of us are feeling this great shift and that we're not alone.

Dr Eben Alexander 31:12

Well, certainly, what what I saw and I described very briefly in Proof of Heaven. We were trying to keep that book simple and not so controversial, but I describe seeing civilizations as far advanced beyond us as we are beyond earthworks, and that was my experience. So I was witnessing incredible civilizations growing and contributing to this process. In many ways, I would say the visions I was having came together as a definable category, when a few months after my coma, I read Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's book *Phenomenon of Man* and that really helped me to understand. He was a French Jesuit priest writing in the mid 20th century. You know, big discussions back then about Darwinian evolution and what he recognized. Now, first, as a as a Jesuit priest. He obviously had some spiritual knowledge. He was also a paleontologist, so he was a scientist working with billion-year timescales. So he was a perfect person to have this recognition that consciousness throughout the universe was actually evolving. Now, sadly, when he wrote all this in the mid 20th century, a lot of the rest of the scientific community was far too immature and ignorant to even begin to see where he was going. But I think a lot of modern scientists are certainly appreciating much more his notions of this kind of cosmic consciousness and how all of consciousness throughout the cosmos is in the process of evolution, not just this kind of relatively minor Darwinian evolution in biological systems on Earth, but there was certainly a sense, and and I know in conversations that I've had since my coma, for example, with Edgar Mitchell, the Apollo 14 astronaut. I stayed with him several times in Florida, when I was giving talks down there, but he had a lot to offer about kind of an open mind about orbs, about UAPs, and that the ETs are actually here to help us. I mean, that was the general understanding of the conversation: is that we have some assistance, but we got to be careful. Humanity is very close to tipping this planet right off the deep end with our addiction to fossil fuels. You know, climate change. I mean, this stuff is incredibly deadly and threatening to you know 1000s of species around the planet, and it's up to us to take a deeper responsibility for our planet, and do more sustainable energy, and quit burning so much carbon fuel. And you know, if we don't, if we don't face the absolute obvious truth of the damage that human-caused addiction to fossil fuels is creating, we're going to pay a horrific price. I mean, as it is, the experts estimate that if we stop burning all carbon-based fuels today, the whole system would keep worsening a bit for about a century until it would finally stabilize. So we're already way into the deep end, and that doesn't mean it's too late to do something smart. It's never too late to do something smart, but we got to quit admiring stupid and admiring people who deny the obvious evidence, and we've got to start working with political leaders and world leaders who can help us get you know back to Paris Accords, back to something that's relatively sane, even though we've probably already blown through those doorways, for good. But it's time for us to become more responsible, and that's what I think. This scientific revolution, pointing to the oneness of mind, the binding force of love as a connector. This is all about our coming into a greater wisdom about who we are and what our responsibility is in terms of guiding this plan. In the right direction, and taking care of all those billions of unborn animals and babies, and all of it humans, you know, that are going to be cursed because of the absolute stupidity of a group calling themselves Homo sapiens in the early 21st century. If we're not wise enough to start addressing these very serious problems with our planet,

Jannecke Øinæs 35:26

and I think part of why we're seeing so many channelers and NDE experiencers coming out with their truth and experiences is that we're waking up all of us to the fact that there is more to reality much more, and then we start taking more responsibility. I think this all is all connected, and I'm curious. I think I've heard you say that you got answer to all questions when you were on the other side. Now you might have forgotten something, or maybe you weren't allowed to bring them forward. But did you see anything about our future?

Dr Eben Alexander 36:00

Well, I did, and it's a very optimistic future. Part of this has to do with my knowing that mind over matter is a very real principle, and that you must be careful of your beliefs. And in fact, if you're very careful with your beliefs, they can end up leading you towards deep truth. And but in other words, don't falsely limit yourself based on the ignorance and the bleak fiction that's presented to us by materialist science, because there's far more to this evolving scientific model of connection through mind and the binding force of love that brings us into healing, and I would say that a lot of that has become quite clear in meditations. You know that I think the ETs are here to help us. And you know when people are saying, "Well, we're still waiting for absolute confirmation, I would say, you know, to me the evidence we have out there, all these UAP videos from fighter jets off San Diego, et cetera. I mean, you know, this is not being made up by a bunch of party boys in the back room. This is, you know, these are hardcore military types, and you don't just kind of fool around with this stuff. This is real, and and these are not technologies that currently the U.S. China, Russia, or any other modern country can claim to be even remotely capable of generating. So they're, I think, they're here and they're here to help us. In fact, in my conversations with Edgar Mitchell, it was clear he believed that he'd already seen evidence of, say, orbs and UAPs interfering with military satellites and nuclear weapons tests and things like that, so I think you know they're here to help us if they're here at all. And but it's really up to us to take responsibility, not just wait you know for some Superman UAP extraterrestrial far more advanced than us to come rescue us. It's really up to us to take responsibility and not just be stupid kids running this planet off the road and into the ditch. It's time for us to wake up and mature and become proper stewards for this planet.

Jannecke Øinæs 38:14

Going back to your NDE, when people in the 3d world in this reality, loses someone, and people are going on to the other side. Does it help to pray for them?

Dr Eben Alexander 38:29

Absolutely, prayer is a beautiful way to connect. Going into mind, and of course, a mantra helps. Very important is to try and take the little ego voice and put it into timeout. You know, your little ego mind, the one that you used to, that little chatterbox, is not necessarily your ally in this kind of thing. But prayer is a beautiful way to connect. I know, for example, when my own mother passed from this world, my adoptive mother, she was 99 years old. This was back in April of 2019, but she spent the last four days and nights of her life pretty much in deep coma, unresponsive with a pulmonary infection right before she died. But then two nights before she passed, she actually woke up, said, "Oh, my mother's here! My mother's here! Call my children! You know, and it was 2:30 in the morning, so the nurse did not call us, but I heard all about all that the next day, and I knew I better get home because she was getting ready to go, and that's exactly what happened. But that last night, I was you know in prayer, lying on a mattress beside her bed, and had the most amazing dreams of connection with her and with a lot of her early friends, and with my dad's earlier friends, and you know, it was just an incredible experience. And that, to me, was a beautiful opening to the reality of connecting with her soul, even after bodily death. She she died at 830 the next morning. So she didn't pass during the night when I was having these very vivid dreams. But it was like I was seeing this kind of get ready party going on, almost like there was all this sense of anticipation that E. A. Junior, my dad, would be appearing any moment. Although he did not appear, but of course she didn't pass while I was in that dream state. Anyway, it's prayer. It's a beautiful way to connect. In fact, in our book, Living in a Mindful Universe, I talk about how I use meditation, which for me is always a form of centering prayer, and that's how I first connected with my my adoptive father's soul. He had passed over four years before my coma. If I had scripted my NDE, he would have been there front and center, yet he was nowhere to be found. And in fact, when two and a half years after my coma, in deep meditation using binaural beats similar to sacred acoustics, I encountered my father's soul. He was he had passed over at age 90-one, but here he was in his early 20s or late teens, and he was with his college roommate, who was also very very young, and they were having a very animated conversation. And he turned and looked at me with his wings and a little smile, just like he'd give me when I was a kid when we had some inside joke. And he turned and looked and gave me that little wink, and then turned back to his conversation with Agnew, and the whole thing was incredible because in that moment I got this thought plume of all this information that answered the question that I'd started that meditation with. You know, am I on the right path? And that full story of is disclosed in our book, Living in a Mindful Universe, which, from my perspective, is the true proof of heaven. The book Proof of Heaven was more of a question mark. It said yes, these things happen, but wow, they are not explicable within the materialist scientific community. But that doesn't mean they're not real because they happen to millions and millions of people. So living in a mindful universe is where we finally take it to the next level and unite the science and spirituality. And I also point out for your viewers there is a free online workbook that goes with Living in a Mindful Universe, and that free workbook is at ebenalexander.com, and it's the 33-day journey into the heart of consciousness. So when you get to ebenalexander.com, that little banner 33-day journey will wiggle in your face. Click there, leave a first name and email address, and you're off and running for 33 days. Each day, you'll get a major topic from the book and our kind of explanation of why it's important and how.

Dr Eben Alexander 42:26

And then you'll see all the comments from more than 14,000 people who have taken that course to date, and they've helped each other. They've left their own experiences. So it's a very rich community forming up around this 33-day journey, and it's absolutely free. It also includes four sacred acoustics audio files that you can keep and use for meditation that come with that 33-day journey. So it's a very powerful way for people to get into this knowledge and understanding, start their own personal journey with their own meditation, and build up the scientific understanding of the brain mind connection and nature of reality and mind over matter, and then run with the ball. You can you can do it through that 33 day journey.

Jannecke Øinæs 43:11

How physical is the other side? I understand you felt like a spark of consciousness. You weren't even. You didn't have your familiar body. But how would you describe the realness of that reality compared to this reality?

Dr Eben Alexander 43:32

It's much more real than this world. In fact, I was giving you stats a few minutes ago from Bruce Grayson's paper on life reviews, and the stat I did not give you was the highest statistic, and that was 84 percent of his life review cases were more real than lived experience. That's why these things are so memorable. And part of that more real than real experience is that it's occurring in a realm where you're no longer slave to Earth time. So, in other words, in a life review, when you can see multiple aspects of your life all at the same time, you can see the interrelationships and the cause, the causality that links them much more clearly than when we're kind of you know with this anti view of the world of you know stumbling through our existence in these physical bodies in the material world, like molasses, very different in that in that setting of the the life review, and which you can also do in in meditation and centering prayer, you can get to that much richer vision of life that's not bound by earth time, and that's part of the reason that it seems way too real to be real. That's those are the words I used to describe it to my son Evan the Fourth, who was majoring in neuroscience in college at the time. When he got home two days after I got out of the hospital, back in 2008 I said it was way too real to be real, and he told me later he gave me a big hug. Then he felt like there was a light shining within me, like I was far. Far more present than I'd ever been before, and I was just following the lead of my doctors. I had tried to tell them in the first few days about my spiritual experience, and they just pat me on the back and said, "Well, your brain was soaking in pus. In fact, we have no idea how you're coming back to us now, but you can forget about it because the dying brain plays all kinds of tricks. Okay, I was trying to forget about it, but wow, what an incredible set of tricks! And then, especially as I started going back to the hospital, talking with my doctors, and there were two neurologists and two neurosurgeons who looked in on me, so I had their their input for my neuro status and had a very good picture of that. And plus, there's a medical case report on my medical records for anybody who wants to review it, and that's in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases as September 2018. Case report is by Dr. Serby Kana, Lauren Moore, and Bruce Grayson. But in the case report, they make it very clear to anybody with medical knowledge that there's no way that brain could harbor a dream or hallucination. That's why my case is so important to the medical community, and it's why very irresponsible, very irresponsible writer who's trying to discredit me and take away my credibility tried to pretend that it was a medically induced coma, because he knew that that was a lot less important to the medical community than a meningitis induced coma, so he simply lied about it. But the reality is, as this case report makes clear, it was a medically induced coma. And then, for those who still are very confused about all this, there's a backstory to that case report, and that is that when the three doctors who were not involved my care but fascinated by my recovery submitted the case report. They were challenged by the peer review editors. How do you explain this unprecedented case? How how do you have this recovery with E. coli meningitis, deep coma for a week after going into coma in three hours, within three hours of symptom onset? How do you explain this recovery? And they said it's because he had a near death experience. So the scientific peer review editors say, "Okay, now we've got an explanation, and they went with that, and that shows a lot of courage and wisdom on their part that they weren't saying, "Ah, that's woo-woo nonsense, but they acknowledge, "Wow, this is an extraordinary case, and it demands an extraordinary explanation, and the extraordinary explanation for this miraculous survival is that I had a rich spiritual journey.

Dr Eben Alexander 47:23

It simply tells us all: if we awaken to the reality of our spiritual nature and our connection with the universe at large in a much grander sense, then we can come to live the purpose we came to live as the souls that we came here to be. So, no more restrictions. Let's start living that, and that involves true open-minded, you know, investigation of all the empirical data, and that's what's happening now, and that's why BigelowInstitute.org is such an important repository because a lot of the scientists that have participated in this work, proving the reality of the afterlife from a scientific perspective, have assembled essays at BigelowInstitute.org that will help anybody and everybody realize the afterlife is not in doubt. It's absolutely scientifically established beyond any reasonable doubt. Period. Any scientist who tries to claim otherwise is simply confessing that they're either too lazy or haven't had time or what have you, but they haven't read any of the bigelowinstitute.org essays.

Jannecke Øinæs 48:28

I've heard you say that there is an importance to our choices, and at the same time, I've heard you say that we're loved, we're taken care of, there's nothing to fear. We're not doing anything wrong. Like these are my words that I understand that all of me is accepted and not judged. Is it a paradox here that these our lives is very important, our choices is important, but when we go on over to the other side, we're not judged for anything. Everything is just bliss and love, and okay.

Dr Eben Alexander 49:03

Well, but that's an important point. Is when you get over the other side, especially in the deep dives, very deep in des, you find it's all love, light, joy, and bliss. There is no battle between good and evil going on at the very source of the universe. It's pure love. The apparent darkness and evil emerge as we get way out here near the periphery of the material realm, and those edges, like the the the earthworm's eye view that I experienced on my first entry into the spiritual realm, you know, it seemed dark, kind of foreboding when I talk about it, and yet it's just part of who we are, and it's not our enemy, and you realize that at its very core, at the very deepest we can go, that that loving God force has our back, that we can trust in that force to take care of us. But it is important to honor, love, compassion, kindness, mercy, acceptance. If we start doing other things, being. Greedy, selfish, hurting others, handing out pain and suffering-all we're doing is setting ourselves up for a horrible life review because we're going to have to be on the receiving end of all that in the life review, and it's not leading to our soul growth. It's kind of circling the drain. So it's important to remember: it's not like you know, in in the book Proof of heaven. The last thing she said, you know, beyond you can do no wrong, or beyond the statements of you're deeply loved and cherished forever, was the business you can do no wrong. But do no wrong was misinterpreted by many people who thought, oh, you can do anything, and they thought that was fine. No, it is not. You you find out the hard way. Do that stuff and find out in your life review what that felt like. And if you can't fix it in the life review, if you abuse people too much, you know, in your physical lifetime, then you come back being one of those victims to help teach you the lesson. So better to get this all fixed in the life review as opposed to pushing it to that next level-that

Jannecke Øinæs 51:02

makes sense. Oh, it's been so wonderful having you here, Eben. I'm curious. After all of this, after been working with this for many years now and having that experience, what would you say is your deepest spiritual insight?

Dr Eben Alexander 51:17

I think it's it's deep, and yet some people would say that's it. It's all about love. Love is the center of my of my prayers and meditation. It's what I give out to anyone and everyone of trying to heal people. I also do higher soul to higher soul dealings with people that I'm having trouble with in my life, feeling that we can work it out at that higher soul level, but all of this is leading us towards a much deeper understanding of our power of mind over matter, and how the more we align with forces of love, kindness, compassion, mercy, and when necessary, forgiveness-forgiveness of self and forgiveness of others-and that forgiveness does not have to be public. By the way, the the true power of forgiveness lies in liberating the heart of those who are holding a grudge or holding, you know, a feeling of vindictiveness or or anger or resentment or what have you. That enslaves the person who has chosen to, you know, hang on to it. So this is all to liberate that person. Is to forgive, forgive yourself, and forgive the other for their transgressions. And you never have to do that publicly. They never have to even hear about it. But the important thing is in your heart to set yourself free from holding them responsible and trying to exact some punishment for their soul, instead of realizing they're going to face that in their own life review, and all you need to do is let go and let God, let you know, let let that beautiful love, compassion, and kindness enter your heart and soul, and just serve as a filter that lets that out to the universe at large as a source, as a conduit, and that's I think the best we can do. And learn more about our relationship with the universe at large. But this is all about growing as souls, and that's what I think we're finally entering an era where humans can do in large measure because of these scientific advances in understanding the nature of the spiritual realm and our relationships to it.

Jannecke Øinæs 53:32

And one of the questions I ask everyone is, "What is self-love to you? And if you could also expand on perhaps whether you were different, Eben, before the NDE and after the NDE, whether your self-love actually changed after that experience?

Dr Eben Alexander 53:51

My self-love changed completely because one of the problems with my adoption abandonment wound was if my own birth mother wouldn't keep me. Why did I deserve to have love from anyone else? And that wasn't at a conscious level. It was a very deep subconscious program that was running, but it was a doubt, you know, that I was worthy of that love. And and finally, my NDE, and especially encountering that lovely girl in the butterfly wing, and of course, four months after my coma, I found out who she was and how important that was in my birth family history. And the fact that I'd only met my birth family a year before my coma became an absolutely critical element for me to fully understand my journey. But a lot of it was hinged on that beautiful girl in the butterfly wing, who had passed from this physical world two years before even found out about her, and that's all very important because that was an awakening of me to this kind of oneness and binding force of love that I share with the universe at large, and a sense of of my life actually having purpose and meaning that's important to the world.

Jannecke Øinæs 54:57

And my final question, and the biggest one of all. What is the deepest meaning of life from your perspective?

Dr Eben Alexander 55:04

It is to know thyself, and when you realize thyself is the mind of the universe and includes all that's in the universe, that task becomes a little more interesting. And also, never forget that in knowing thyself and these soul connections, you find that ultimately the binding force is one of pure unconditional love, and that is what leads to wholeness and healing for self, for soul groups, and for humanity and the world at large.

Jannecke Øinæs 55:35

Beautiful. This has been such a rich conversation. I feel that we spoke about so much in an hour. Tell us a little bit about the talk you're going to have in San Diego, and for those who may not be able to go there, how they can reach you. So tell us about your work.

Dr Eben Alexander 55:54

Okay, the San Diego talk. This is a 19th and 20th of September in San Diego at a beautiful location. I am very excited about it. But a lot of what I've been sharing today is what I'll be expanding on there, because I'll be talking much more about this living tapestry and this notion of interconnected souls and how the scientific community is proving this is the real structure of human existence above and beyond the simplistic, bleak, and paltry fiction that materialism or physicalism has offered us in the path of birth to death and nothing more. So that's what I'll be sharing and expanding on at my talk in San Diego, and I'm very excited about seeing you there. It'll be a lot of fun, and everybody else, it looks like a fantastic conference. Now, for people who won't be able to make it, go to ebenalexander.com. That website has my books. You can find out much more about the books, reviews of the books, which from scientific experts are very important, and also lots of links to podcasts and interviews, etc. Go to sacredacoustics.com to learn a lot more about binaural beat brainwave entrainment and how powerful that could be, and opening your mind to etc. There's many resources there. Plus, it's a great website for learning about meditation.

Jannecke Øinæs 57:15

Thank you so much for coming back to the show, Eben. It was wonderful connecting with you.

Dr Eben Alexander 57:20

Well, my pleasure, Jannecke. Thanks so much for having me on, and I'll see you in San Diego.