Eben Alexander may refer to:
Our spirit is not dependent on the brain or body. It is eternal, and no one has one sentence worth of hard evidence that it isn’t.
Those implications are tremendous beyond description. My experience showed me that the death of the body and the brain are not the end of consciousness, that human experience continues beyond the grave. More important, it continues under the gaze of a God who loves and cares about each one of us and about where the universe itself and all the beings within it are ultimately going.
As a neurosurgeon, I did not believe in the phenomenon of near-death experiences.
Love is, without a doubt, the basis of everything.
We can only see what our brain’s filter allows through.
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.
I finally chalked it up to the fact that the brain is truly an extraordinary device: more extraordinary than we can even guess.
I'm not the first person to have discovered evidence that consciousness exists beyond the body. Brief, wonderful glimpses of this realm are as old as human history.
Laughter and irony are at heart reminders that we are not prisoners in this world, but voyagers through it.
There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind - my conscious, inner self - was alive and well.
I grew up in a scientific world, the son of a neurosurgeon.
Physical life is characterized by defensiveness, whereas spiritual life is just the opposite.
I had a foretaste of another, larger kind of knowledge: one I believe human beings will be able to access in ever larger numbers in the future. But conveying that knowledge now is rather like a chimpanzee, becoming human for a single day to experience all of the wonders of human knowledge, and then returning to one's chimp friends and trying to tell them what it was like knowing several different Romance languages, the calculus, and the immense scale of the universe.
To experience thinking outside the brain is to enter a world of instantaneous connections that make ordinary thinking (i. e those aspects limited by the physical brain and the speed of light_ seem like some hopelessly sleepy and plodding event. Our truest, deepest self is completely free. It is not crippled or compromised by past actions or concerned with identity or status. It comprehends that it has no need to fear the earthly world, and therefore, it has no need to build itself up through fame or wealth or conquest.
A story-a true story-can heal as much as medicine can.
We-each of us-are intricately, irremovably connected to the larger universe. It is our true home, and thinking that this physical world is all that matters is like shutting oneself up in a small closet and imagining that there is nothing else out beyond it.