Heaven Help Us

Depiction of heaven at the State Hall of the Austrian National Library in Vienna, finished in 1730

Daniel Gran/Wikimedia Commons.

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.

"I've spent decades as a neurosurgeon at some of the most prestigious medical institutions in our country," Alexander writes, reminding us that he's no sap. "I sympathized deeply with those who wanted to believe that there was a God somewhere out there who loved us unconditionally. In fact, I envied such people the security that those beliefs no doubt provided. But as a scientist, I simply knew better than to believe them myself." He was just like you and me, you see, at least until he fell into a coma?and flew into the sky, and entered the mind of an earthworm, was forced to reconsider all his Harvard science skepticism about the loving Lord above.

Is it even worth rebutting this interpretation? Even before it was published, Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeons Journey Into the Afterlife has reached the Top 10 of the Amazon best-seller list, so we may as well prepare ourselves for the out-of-mind publicity that's sure to follow. For starters, Alexander says it took him "months to come to terms with what happened," as if he'd had to reconstruct the ultra-real experience after his recovery. One might timidly suggest that the story is confabulated?that is to say, his wounded brain filled in the gaps in time with a holy flight of fancy. (Perhaps his experience of "flying" came from memories of skydiving while a student at University of North Carolina?) It also seems at least half-plausible that Alexander's dreamy chit-chat with Jehovah happened in his head, as he was emerging from his coma, and during a time in which the author says he suffered from what's called "ICU psychosis." In the book?which I've had the great displeasure of perusing?he describes waking up to "a strange and exhausting paranoid universe" in which "Internet messages" showed up wherever he looked, and a "grinding, monotonous, anti-melodious chanting" filled his head. "Some of the dreams I had during this period were stunningly and frighteningly vivid," he says.

It was only later on that he worked out the fine points of his astral projection, in part by using a commercial meditation aid called "Hemi-Sync"?a $12 music CD that purports to mimic psychedelics and expand the mind with alternating beats. "Hemi-Sync potentially offered a means of inactivating the filtering function of the physical brain by globally synchronizing my neocortical electrical activity, just as my meningitis might have done, to liberate my out-of-body consciousness," he explains, as only a Harvard neurosurgeon can. Scientists who are a bit more skeptical have described these claims as silly.

Alexander claims to have been waffling on the matter of his faith before the meningitis. But the book reveals that he's always been a devout or at least a searching Christian. Long before he found himself in the "God-soaked and love-filled darkness" of his coma, Alexander took his family to church and made his children pray every night before they went to bed. His story of enlightenment is suffused with the most conventional evangelism: He was lost and now is found; he has "good news" to share with all. According to the memoir, Alexander was abandoned as a baby, spent Christmas as an orphan, and later on became a depressive alcoholic. Then he goes to a meeting in Jerusalem and finds the spot where Jesus ate his final meal, and while he's there (through some celestial stroke of luck), he contracts the deadly bug that will restore his faith and change his life and put him in a coma for a very biblical duration of seven days and seven nights.

Now, by grace of God, he's scheduled to appear on Nightline, Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and Fox & Friends. His book is almost guaranteed to be a huge success, a work of neuro-prophecy that hauls in massive neuro-profits. There's no doubt that Alexander's publisher is looking back with greedy eyes at another publishing sensation from three years ago, by the neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor. That one, called My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey, was also based on the rather dubious idea that we might draw a deeper understanding of the universe from debilitating brain damage. Bolte Taylor's rise to fame and neuro-guru-status began not with meningitis but with a cerebral hemorrhage, one that taught her how to find nirvana by allowing her "life-force power" to "flow like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria."

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=4faea081573a23bb487137b8aa8258df

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