14 DAY TRIAL // Dr. Eben Alexander believes he found God after escaping death. While in a coma, the man experienced what he can only define as the afterlife.
He describes his experience in an interview with ABC News. Alexander was in a coma for a week, four years ago, after a coli meningitis infection affected parts of his brain, yet he survived.
He had little chance of survival and even less of regaining complete use of his mental functions. His entire cortex area was affected, a region of the brain which is responsible for thought, memory and understanding.
Alexander, a Harvard educated neurosurgeon, dubs his survival a miracle, and the experience brought him a deep rooted belief in a higher power.
He believes that he went to heaven, briefly, during his near-death experience. Alexander described the feeling as a lack of connection with one's body, and one's mind, in what memories and an awareness of time are concerned.
"My first memories from when I was deep inside: I had no language, all my earthly memories were gone," he said.
"I had no body awareness at all. I was just a speck of awareness in kind of a dark, murky environment, in roots or vessels or something. And I seemed to be there for a very long time -- I would say years,” he recalls.
Along him was a sort of guardian angel, a young woman flying on a butterfly wing, as if in a Peter Pen movie. She guided him throughout the entire journey, opening his eyes to the incredible beauty of another world, as if she were a “translator to bring in that message from the divine and the incredible."
"I was rescued by this beautiful, spinning, white light that had a melody, an incredibly beautiful melody with it that opened up into a bright valley, [...] an extremely verdant valley with blossoming flowers and a just incredible, rich, ultra-real world of indescribable complexity," he describes.
He had witnessed God as a presence, “as a vast presence of love.” As the man woke up from the coma, he felt “a presence of love,” a lack of fear and a feeling of communion with everything around him.
"She looked at me, and this was with no words, but the concepts came straight into mind: You are love; you are cherished; there's nothing you have to fear; there's nothing you can do wrong," he said.
He was shown a picture of his biological family, in which he saw a sister he had never met before. The picture had been sitting on his nightstand all along.