welcome my name is natasha sherman and i am your host and my guest today is the renowned academic neurosurgeon dr aben alexander so after decades as a physician and teacher at harvard medical school and elsewhere dr alexander thought he knew how the brain and the mind and consciousness worked and a transcendental near death experience or n d s they are referred to during a week long coma from a an brain infection changed all of that completely his books proof of heaven and neurosurgeons journey into the afterlife and the map of heaven how science religion and ordinary people are proving the afterlife have collectively spent more than two years atop the new york times and international bestseller lists welcome dr alexander well thank you for having a talk show it's great to be here i'm so thrilled i know you've been on oprah and dr oz and the fact that you would make this time for us is really pretty incredible i'm just happy to steer by story and do it all the time i mean it's pretty natural thing you know force the world gives me back stories and that's how real that i get out of all this yeah so let's tell a bit about your story to start with well i think it's important point out my background i grew up in north carolina my father was an academic neurosurgeon but he was very religious my father even is the scientific you know chairman of a neurosurgical training program that never his knowledge of science and and the brain and all that never challenge his view of god as being absolutely real i grew up in the sixty's and seventy's and like so many from that era always have known that science is the pathway to truth what my koan journey should be very clearly back in two thousand and eight is that the materialist science that i worship before coma that's kind of our conventional version of scientific understanding which basically says the only stuff that exists in this world is the physical and that things like consciousness soul spirit are epiphenomena of their illusions of the physical brain and that's what i believe of fully going into my coma experience and yet that's why it was such a gift in fact the vast experience that i report in the book proof of heaven could never have happened if all of my beliefs from before about brain creating consciousness and the physical is the only thing existing were true and this is where our science is now expanding greatly human part of the brain it's a perfect model for human death because it devastates the human part of the brain and yet it also is almost always fatal that's why i'm often asked to speak to medical groups surgical groups etc about my experience because they realize that it completely violates all of our conventional scientific preconception and erroneous thinking about the brain mining business now the essence of mind journey  it all began deep in what i call the earth for my view now or to point out that my entire near death experience was somewhat atypical compared to other experiences because i was amnesic for the life of evan alexander i remembered nothing of my life before in fact i had no words no language had absolutely no knowing of the beings that had accompanied me in the first fifty four years of life and when i first came back from coma i explained  defaulting to my old conventional neuroscientific view which said that if you wrecked the cortex which my disease had done very effectively then that wipes out all memories so my initial assumption was i guess it makes sense given ottis that i would have no memories it's important to point out though that when i although when i first woke up from my co monday seven i c u bad i didn't even recognize my mother my sister is my son's standing at the bedside i had no idea who these beings were so very important to point out that my brain really was wracked from the experience just as my doctors predicted and just as they would have told you to this day my doctors have no explanation for how i possibly could have recovered and also how in the world could i have had any experience they kept telling me you can't experience to anything because they have the evidence when i first came back from m scans from my lab that by a gram negative bacteria meant it does was so severe that it would have eliminated all but the most rudimentary forms of conscious awareness and that's why i have an extraordinary all to real experience which is actually what i goal was completely mind bending it it violated and defied all of our preexistent notion of brain creates consciousness that the neocortex is responsible for detail conscious awareness now the pieces that i didn't recall all my words and language and every memory of human existence was gone from my awareness i could still kind of wonder who what where and there was never a flicker of response to any of that but i was rescued from that kind of deep  dark murky rel by slowly spending white light that came towards me and opened up like a rip in the fabric of that ugly earth where my view is and open up into this brilliant ultra real realm the gateway valley that i describe and in  great detail in the book group heaven now this gateway valley was only the first of many layers of what people might be tempted to haul heaven from my experience and but it was one that is very common it's where  really night with our higher souls that's where we go through our life reviews that's where we plan our next incarnations and so in that i'm going to interrupt you here for just a second so before this you had never really that's kind of what our conventional science says and i bought into that fully so i never paid any attention to reincarnation i always thought memories are stored in the brain and yet modern neuroscience has not the remotest clue that that  is true nobody has any evidence certainly not a location in the brain where memories might be stored and it turns out you know that i basically needed to go through a far grander education that's what a lot of the seven years since my com been is trying to learn more about the deep mystery of consciousness what's called the hard problem of consciousness which is the deepest mystery known to all of human thought but anyway getting back to my general journey this this gateway valley was beautiful it was idyllic it was kind of a perfect ideal world i often liken it to plato's world of forms but one that is there for our personal soul journey because no human being has ever experienced anything other than their personal soul journey and how that interacts with the souls around them and is part of the one mind the one consciousness that is of all that so in that gateway valley of there were butterflies lots of waterfalls and sparkling form or fashion and of course there was a beautiful girl beside me on the butterfly wing and this is something that is a crucial piece of the story told and prove i have it because in fact four months after my coma is what i actually got the evidence together that proved to me the reality of journey and i don't want to have to put out a splinter alert here knowing all the details of that but it has to do with the fact that that beautiful girl who  my guide my guardian angel on this journey and and then when i started reading the near death literature and in the months after my coma i came to realize she should be someone who was very important to be on by a journey in my life and yet i knew her so well and the messages she gave to me so crucial and and way to reveal to me about her very soul of the message is being you are deeply loved and cherished you have nothing to fear you will be take in kero and i cannot tell you how profoundly liberating and refreshing those messages were at that point of my journey but it was a deep mystery to me when i came back because i had no idea who this woman was and to me that was a parallel mystery to the fact that if i had scripted my near death experience first and foremost i would have encountered my father he was such a tremendous influence for me as i said he passed over four years before my coma and yet he was nowhere to be found in the journey and in the never met her before my life and to me that was a big struggle and that's what i point out in this for a group happen but that's all revelation came to me four months after the coma back inside my coma journey this beautiful idyllic valley was just the beginning of collapse of all to pull layers ascending into higher and higher levels always sound vibration frequency music serving the portal from my soul to ascend those levels of that's why them the melody the ushered me up from the earth for my view up into that brilliant idea like valley of the gateway valley was music musical notes and they were very important to recovering portal later because i would spontaneously ascend to higher and higher spiritual realms all the way out to the they goes far beyond any kind of words or description at all that deity and of course when i came back i called that all because all was the sound i heard in that realm and that a core read that infinite one that love and this is such a crucial part of the message i bring back to this world is the infinite healing power of unconditional love to heal all whether it's healing an individual soul group healing all of humanity all of life on earth all consciousness throughout the universe however big you scale it unconditional love has infinite power to heal this is an ancient lesson but one that our world has obviously not really taken to heart it's time we move beyond that false sense of separation and part of that false sense of separation has to do with our interpretations of these deep spiritual journey i would say that all of our religious systems originate in near death experiences or similar spiritually transformative experiences and the encounters coalesce towards one major kind of knowing of the reality of that deity of that being but i came back realizing full well that god loves christians jews muslims hindus buddhists skeptics atheists that god loves all and this is part of the confusion of our modern era and in in the book of haven't i go into this in a little more detail about talking about our current era and the destiny of humanity over thousands of years and why all i see all of this is perfectly appropriate for where we are to be now and it's part of understanding that world inside civic thinking world the journey that we're all in realizing that consciousness itself completely defies any kind of simplistic physicalist explanation and that's why science says such tremendous difficulty materialist science i should point out that says brain free consciousness has had such difficulty because they've made absolutely zero progress of all along the lines of trying to understand how physical so wow well done putting all that into a short it's just mind boggling especially coming from your perspective as a scientist and then also you know the fact that the brain wasn't functioning in the way it would need to be functioning if consciousness if the brain was the seat of consciousness so i do have a question in one of the your talks or in the book itself you mentioned that you know the word god in a sense the way we envision god is much too limited it's kind of a tiny little explanation for this mystery and the experience of this  consciousness and so when i take it into kind of my experience of religion a lot of religions are or a lot of religion for me is fear based and what you're saying is or there's a lot of punishment and there's a lot of watch out kind of thing and what you're saying is that the message you've got is you are loved you are safe you will always be loved there is nothing that is going to take that away from you so then how do we reconcile that with what we're taught on this earthly plane well i would say it's very important point out that a so many who have near death experiences come back with this incredible sense of the loving comfort embrace that is there from that creative source of this whole universe the very core of our consciousness is that deity and it is what is creating all of this emerging world been through and have to come back and try to explain now what i would point out though is i think the original message of the prophets whether you're talking about of budo where you're talking about christ or mohamed or or what have you those messages from my point of view are always very pure and have to do with the oneness that we all share the wrong part of one consciousness that in fact if you you don't need some massive influx of intellectual enlightenment to get this all you have to really know is the golden rule you know given that we are all want that explains why we should do under others as we would have done unto ourself and that's really kind of a fundamental way of looking at all of the great religious systems but then they get hijacked and they get hijacked by others who are trying to control human beings by taking the messages of the prophets and then trying to pit us against each other try to make us force us to choose sides and they will my religion is correct yours is wrong and therefore i'm you know we are at battle that is the way it really works the deepest message as i see it from all of the prophets and the great systems of religious thing converts in their mystical roots and that was something that was made very clear to me as i started giving talks about all this which began two and a half years before proof of heaven came out and i would make these amateurish d v d s of these talks and sent around to people and they got distributed pretty widely and then i started hearing back from people i would hear the core part of my journey as it was portrayed in the book heaven and in my talks was right in line with their most ancient teachings and traditions and i began to realise then in fact all of our great mystical and spiritual traditions converge to one kind of truth but it's only through this tower of babel through our linguistic brain that is very tightly tied to ego and a sense of self that you know the linguistic brain does what it ra to cart pointed out it does best to define is to limit it starts setting up falls down trees and limitations and we think that that is necessary for our kind of limited human bandwidth to understand that but it actually gets in the way tremendously so that religious dogma is often quite separatist in its preachings you know i had to interject something here i heard this expression once you know it first there with god and then the devil came and created religion and it kind of points to that one of the things you said in one of the books was that you think that inherently in each of us there is some memory of heaven and you know i was trying to look at that and and for me it really resonates because i think you know i work with a lot of people and there's this this is kind of a yearning that everybody has it's a yearning to connect it's a yearning for a deeper connection and we see it evidenced you know in times of disaster where people just automatically come together and connect and and it turns out to be like a pivotal moment in their lives the most meaningful moment and this has there's evidence of it everywhere we look for the signs you know and and i think that's one of the accesses to kind of starting to get that we are all the same and we are all in this together and it is all part of one so to speak but i want to ask you on a day to day basis you know it's like and i think it was a need to more johnny maybe it was you who said that kind of coming back after this near death experience you know you've expanded and you had this tremendous experience and kind of universal experience and then it's like stuffing the genie back in the lamp you know your child every day of her go yeah it's kind of cramped and so do you find that and how because now you're back in a human body with all your human reactions how do you find on a day to day basis that you continue to process this and what is different now that's a beautiful question i would say that any one of us can come to cultivate this and nurture this no way of the oneness of all consciousness in our connectedness to all fellow beings through meditation i mean i'm really shocked that anybody would choose not to meditate meditation brings so many benefits for help for guidance  for being one with the world being comfortable with everything that is going on in your life i mean meditation brings from mrs power to or else everything else but i'm not a take daily i try to do it an hour or two or more if i can and the reality is deep meditate and we can come to know the very same things this is why i've helped develop the tools that i've developed with sacred acoustics because this provides a form of very powerful differential sense of the one mind that we are all truly in this together that it makes eminent sense to make our decisions out of the law if we realize that loving ourselves first and foremost is a crucial step forward because in fact i would say when i came back to my home a journey i realized that one of the biggest problems in our world is we don't even love ourselves enough and we think the challenges that we're supposed to love our neighbor and love our enemy well how can we  do that if we're not loving ourselves and two but by doing that we're actually recovering a memory and then our eternal spiritual beings that are intimately connected to the divine source of all of this universe to that god that deity and that's why i i love meditation i often tell people you don't have to die or almost die today everything i know of these realms you can get to it of a lifelong practice of deep meditation and and that one this is a crucial concept and we can come to realize that our minds especially are connected for all of conscious awareness is connected as one and this goes far beyond just being human being you know i know and i think if i heard someone saying you know i think it was the need to more johnny who had the same thing the first lesson is you have to love yourself and truthfully i think most people lol of themselves at some level and so you know on the one hand some people are going to resonate with meditating because they're ready to hear it but are there any tools on a day to day basis that people can use to remind themselves because we have so forgotten that well again going within is beautiful you've got to realize first and foremost the little voice in my head is not my aunt's it's a love the way but in the book the untethered soul where he refers to that voice in our head as an annoying roommate that is a very good way to look at that little voice of our ego and the false the finer of boundaries of self our conscious awareness that is the observer part with nose that is our conscious that is the part that we can develop fully and come to realize it is not bound by these false notions of self and that's why i think this kind of lesson has so much practical value for each and every one of us so your conversation a few minutes ago you know in dealing with those around us and all the hardships and challenges we face remember that in fact so much of that apparent conflict with other people is through the  fixation of certain aspects of their person that do not necessarily click with our persona because it's a problem within ourselves and that is one of the interesting twists in psychology to come to realize that often what we don't like about other people is a part of ourselves that is active is reflected in them and that's why meditation is a beautiful way to step outside of ourself step outside of that little egotistical voice and it's false batteries and how it's trying to defend the ego take that much grander view the much grander view always allows us to see a win win situation for all involved and that is a beautiful gift to get and that can come just from meditation and you know i'm with and and realizing that connectedness and one and i think it just occurred to me that one of the things is when you when you suggest to people you know look at the mirror  love you i think where they're relating to it from is the ego and so i you know i'm lacking here i'm letting there perhaps maybe they can just say i love the essence of who you are i love your spirit i love your soul because your soul is pure and i think most people on some level can relate to that but you talk about how it's really important now especially at this juncture in in time that we start to pay attention to that message so in the last minute maybe you could say something about that well i think it is this awakening is happening for a reason i try to point out in the map of heaven of from my point of view all of this really makes perfect sense when you look back over thousands years of human thought go back to the time of aristotle and plato watch how all of our thinking both east and west has he merged over the centuries look at the rise of the natural sciences the last four hundred years and how it has fostered this kind of belief in the myth of materialism is if the material is the only thing that exists all of us are participating in the evolution of consciousness each one of us is a microcosm of this great awakening that is coming to humanity we're all doing our own part and we do it for our quote selves but in essence what this really means is we are all evolving with all of humanity to realize the oneness that we all share with all life and all consciousness throughout this universe and it brings tremendous benefits we must awake for we've got a painted ourselves into a corner in terms of climate change and other disasters modern warfare thoughtless homicide and suicide a lot of the consequences of the successes of science and technology of the twentieth century is obviously also an ugly underbelly and this is because of the mismatch between our spiritual growth and awareness and our kind of intellectual technological scientific growth that was basically allowed to go unbridled in the twentieth and early twenty first century because we had separated from the fact that we are truly spiritual beings living in a spiritual universe and that is a crucial fact to recover unfortunately we are at the end of our time but i think that's a great place to end and really you know it's our job to take on our personal level lucian but it's part of we are part of everybody else doing the same thing and you started out by do on to others as you would have them do unto you dr alexander thanks so much for being here today and i encourage