Heaven Help Us: Another ‘Harvard brain scientist’ finds faith and tells the world.
Proof of Heaven: Heaven Is Real Author Eben Alexander Is a Neuro-Evangelist.
Newsweek is dead. The 80-year-old magazine will cease publication at the end of the year, a teary-eyed Tina Brown said last Thursday. Before we sink too deeply into grief, let’s all remember what lies beyond these earthly, stapled pages. Newsweek may have passed away, its paper turned to dust, but the Newsweek spirit carries on, not as matter or material, but in a state of pure electron flux, a ghostly form that rides the WiFi waves around us. Its words will rise off the printing press and be transformed into an energy that’s everywhere at once, but also nowhere. The magazine will become an online angel—a Web-based publication that penetrates our minds with truth and light. In death, it will be reborn and find everlasting life. …
Sorry, I’m getting all mixed up. I’ve been having a little trouble focusing since I read Newsweek’s cover story from Oct. 15—the one with a picture of a hand reaching up into the clouds and a headline promising that “Heaven Is Real.” It’s a personal account of meeting God, excerpted from a memoir published this week, called Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey Into the Afterlife. A neurosurgeon? More than that! The author, Eben Alexander III, makes a point of saying that he’s a skeptic and a scientist, a skeptical scientist who happens to have spent some time (did he mention?) at a little school in Boston called Harvard University. This science-minded Harvard skeptic never thought he’d find the truth of Jesus Christ. But the facts are just the facts: Alexander has been graced with the divine, and he’ll share that grace with us. He’s become a neuro-prophet.
This experiment in out-of-body consciousness began in fall of 2008, when a case of bacterial meningitis put Alexander in a coma and “shut down” his “entire cortex.” What he means by that is never clear—you might think this state would be synonymous with death, which is sort of what Alexander claims, even though he’s now alive and writing books. But it’s a waste of time to quibble over details, since according to the author, the fact of his brain’s inactivation is the only thing that could possibly explain what happened next. While Alexander was in the coma, and his brain was “totally off-line” he drifted from this world of Harvard neuroscience into a land of pink and puffy clouds, and chanting flocks of angels, and a glowing orb that speaks telepathically, and a blue-eyed lady-friend, and lots and lots of butterflies. You would not believe how many butterflies there are in Heaven.