“Standing at the coastline witnessing the beautiful purple mountains
standing upright against the swift blue – grey clouds adorning the pinkish –
orange sky. What an ideal heavenly sight! But does paradise really exist?
A neurosurgeon, Eben Alexander, a victim of a rare bacterial meningitis,
says that he has been to paradise. Eben Alexander III is an American
neurosurgeon and the author of the best seller “ Proof of Heaven: A
Neurosurgeon’s Journey into Afterlife” in which he describes his 2008 near
death experience and asserts that science can and will determine that heaven
really does exist.
In November 2008, the diagnosed bacterial disease was shutting
down the University of Virginia’s neurosurgeon’s neocortex – the part of the
brain that deals with sensory perception and conscious thought. He laid in coma
for 7- days during which he journeyed to another, larger dimension of the
universe, a dimension he had never dreamt existed.
There he found “big, puffy, pink-white” clouds against a “deep,
black-blue sky” and “flocks of transparent, shimmering beings… quite simply
different from anything I have known on this planet.”
But was this a reality or just a lucid dream, a collection of images
supplied by our sub conscience mind. But Eben Alexande isn’t the only one who
encountered such an experience. There are several people on this planet who
were saved from the mouth of death and have witnessed near death experiences.
Most of them report a sense of peace and painlessness, and a vision of
bright light. Other report feelings or visions associated with their cultural
beliefs. There experiences are shared on the official website http://www.nderf.org
So what is exactly happening? There is considerable controversy on this.
Researchers at the university of Michigan have conducted research on the near
death experiences of patients suffering from a cardiac arrest. They have found
that there is a surge of electrical activity in the brain at the time of
cardiac arrest. This unusual activity was recorded for the first time by the
scientists in rats which were undergoing a stimulated cardiac arrest.
Led by author Jimo Borjigin, associate professor at the University of
Michigan Medical School the study shows that shortly after clinical death, in
which the heart stops beating and blood stops flowing to the brain, rats
display brain activity patterns characteristic of conscious perception.
These visions and perceptions have been called “realer than real,”
according to previous research, but it remains unclear whether the brain is
capable of such activity after cardiac arrest.
The possibility that arises is that if these experiences are
manifestations of brain activities, then it should be possible for researchers
to detect such neural signals.
Researchers analyzed the recordings of brain activity called
electroencephalograms (EEGs) from nine anesthetized rats undergoing
experimentally induced cardiac arrest.
Within the first 30 seconds after cardiac arrest, all of the rats
displayed a widespread, transient surge of highly synchronized brain activity
that had features associated with a highly aroused brain. Nearly identical
patterns in the dying brains of rats undergoing asphyxiation were also
observed. These data confirmed the earlier possibility.
In fact, at near-death, many known electrical signatures of
consciousness exceeded levels found in the waking state, suggesting that the
brain is capable of well-organized electrical activity during the early stage
of clinical death.
Not only in the case of cardiac arrest, the generation of these neural
signals can occur in the near death from other reasons too.
From the religious point of view heaven is center for afterlife, but
scientifically it is the manifestation of neural activity.
THE MAIN QUESTION IS: WHICH STORY DO WE CHOOSE TO BELIEVE?
