Internet Radio Show
How Do We Explain the Origins of Consciousness
- Eben Alexander M.D.
- Download
- Click "" below to listen
Welcome to Healing From Within I am your host Sheryl Glick Reiki Energy Teacher Medium and author of my newest book A New Life Awaits Spirit Guided Insights to Support Global Awakening sharing a plan for creating through your thoughts and actions new approaches for living out the duality of soul and physical life in its most advantageous possibilities supporting life here and beyond. Sheryl is delighted to welcome Dr. Eben Alexander author of his newest book Living In A Mindful Universe and a former guest of the Healing From Within as we continue to focus on his journey to tap into our greater mind and the power of our heart to enhance healing relationships creativity and all understand Universal aspects of life.
For those listeners who would like to listen to the show Dr. Alexander and I shared previously go to my website www.sherylglick.com and listen as we discuss his near death experience shared in his first book Proof of Heaven. Go to the radio page July 2013. It doesn’t seem that long ago that we were discussing your visit to the afterlife during a near death experience.
As listeners of Healing From Within are well aware Sheryl and her guests share intimate experiences and the realization that we are very much more than we appear to be and are only using a small part of our brain mind power to create the world of opportunities that exist within our soul or energetic presence. It is in understanding the duality of life and the opposite choices always available to us, that we learn balance harmony and ways to achieve a purposeful healthy life experience. But we often have to let go of beliefs and stories of past events in order to see life with new perspective.
In today’s episode of Healing From Within Dr. Eben Alexander an academic neurosurgeon dealing with patients rendered comatose by trauma, brain tumors, ruptured aneurysms, infections or strokes thought he had a good idea of how the brain generates consciousness but now after a near death experience himself is able to offer a more comprehensive worldview where consciousness is the glue that defines reality itself and shatters conventional boundaries that traditionally separated science from spirituality. In other words, we need to learn how to be mindful and live in a mindful universe and the time is definitely NOW as challenging world events pandemic war environmental issues disease are giving us the experiences to awaken to our full soul potential to evol.
When Dr. Alexander is asked to think back to his childhood and remember a person place or event that may have left an impression of some importance on his heart or mind and led him to the lifestyle work or interests he is exploring now as an adult the first person who comes to his mind is his father. His father was a doctor and used to take him with him to see patients and Eben was able to see how much he was helping people and wanted to do the same. Sheryl tells Eben that she believes healers are born not made and select the family they need to fulfill their soul mission or life plan. Dr. Alexander was adopted and into the family and experience that would be most advantageous for his soul development.
We fast to Dr. Alexander’s NDE and talk about the realms he visited during that life altering experience. Dr. Alexander tells us he saw a beautiful young woman who he never knew in his life and later after he recovered he received a picture from his birth family of his sister who had passed and it was the beautiful person he had seen in spirit. He said if he had seen his father it could have been because he knew him in life and it wouldn’t be as defining and compelling as having met his birth sister who he never knew until meeting her in the Afterlife.
How common are Near Death Experiences and how was yours the same or different than other people’s NDE’s? Dr. Alexander tells us he recorded his remembrances after coming out of the coma and the memories of the deep coma experience have remained stable and clear even to this day which he understands many people who have near death experiences describe. He came to realize my ordeal could be termed a near-death experience NDE and began to learn more about such experiences. One of the first resources encountered was Life After Life Dr. Raymond Moody’s world changing 1975 book that first popularized the term “near-death experience.” The loving comfort encountered by most of the hundred or so patients Dr. Moody documented resonated deeply with Dr. Alexanders experience. They were all confounded by the limitations of earthly language to describe such nonearthly journeys. Another characteristic of NDE experiences is that they remained consistent and stable over long periods of time unlike memories of most events dreams and hallucinations
The other main quality of NDE descriptions concerns the sense of ultrareality. Way to real to be real such a heightened sense of reality.
Perhaps Dr. Alexander was able to prove to himself that the experience was real and not a result of the dying brain because of the
kindness and knowingness of his friend Dr. Charles Joseph who expressed to you, “There is plenty of room in our understanding of the brain, and mind and consciousness to allow for this remarkable recovery to indicate something of extreme importance. As you well know, we encounter copious evidence in clinical neurology that we have a far way to go before we can start claiming any kind of complete understanding. I am inclined to accept your personal mystery as another lovely piece of the puzzle, one that greatly raises the ante in approaching any understanding of the nature of our existence.” My friend was open to the grand possibilities of eternal life implied by my memories from deep in a coma where I should not have been able to experience anything due to the damage to my brain besieged and swollen with infection.
Sheryl says I think Eben found after his near-death experience he had a need to be connected to people of faith who supported his spiritual experience such as his friend Alan who he had worked with and climbed mountains with. He had written a book The Scalpel and the Soul: Encounters with Surgery, the Supernatural and the Healing Power of Hope. Given his prestigious academic appointments, it seemed he had gained the courage that so many lacked to open the doors wide to the reality of our spiritual nature.
Sheryl remembers being at a lecture with Dr. Raymond Moody author of Life After Life and hearing him say that scientifically he could not definitively conclude that life or consciousness survived physical life though his book was all about that reality. At the end of the lecture Sheryl went up and was a bit harsh when she said to him, “ I am a medium and am trying to prove like you the soul nature of our life and am disappointed you didn’t definitively state your belief that Consciousness survives death.. Dr. Moody was very kind to me and told me his wife’s name was Sheryl also and a few years later I read a new book by him where he quite powerfully stated the truth of our knowingness. I invited him as one of the first guests on my show Healing From Within when I started ten years ago and he was kind enough to join me as have so many of the gifted and distinguished seekers of truth have.
You know Eben as a medium who meditates and gets accurate information that helps clients validate what’s happening in their lives and offers ways to remember their soul life, I often think how happy I am that I didn’t have to have a near death experience to awaken to the reality of dimensions and layers of life beyond this world. But maybe 26 years ago when I was sick with the flu and had what I thought was a dream feeling my grandfather standing near me and telling me I had to write something for my dad and then the very next day found out my dad had passed led me to question how my deceased grandfather gone for 35 years or so was there to give me a message. That began my journey to understand if consciousness survived physical death and my development as an energy healer, medium, hospice volunteer. Who knows, maybe that was like a NDE even though I wasn’t as close to death as you or others.
Sheryl says… True healing is a combination of mind body spirit not merely the physical symptoms of the mind. Our soul has journeyed through time and space and multi- dimensional realities of life gathering experiences both good and bad and needs to refine our soul energy healing karma from past lives and relationships to a higher level of love and cooperation. We have many guides both in Spirit and in the physical world who offer assistance and insight if we become open to the many possibilities of soul life and wisdom beyond an ego- based mind set of physical reality.
What is consciousness, nonlocal consciousness and what is the brain’s role in consciousness?
Dr. Alexander wrote,” In essence we tried to explain my memories during coma based on the common assumption that the brain is required for any type of conscious awareness. Over almost three decades of my life spent working daily with neurosurgical patients, I had come to believe I had some understanding of the relationship of the relationship between brain and mind –the nature of consciousness. Modern neuroscience has come to believe that all of our human qualities of language reason thought auditory and visual perceptions emotional forces etc. ---essentially all the qualities of mental experience that become part of human awareness ---are directly derived from the most powerful calculator in the human brain: the neocortex.
But having accepted this how could it be that when my brain was not functional my consciousness and awareness of Self was interacting with other forces and remembering it all….
Dr. Alexander writes We know lots about the mechanics of the brain right down to the molecular level, but when it comes to consciousness,\ we simply haven’t got a clue. How might the physical matter of the brain give rise to the conscious mind.
Sheryl says years ago she interviewed Dr. Maurie Pressman author of Living In the SuperMind who was aware of the power of our spiritual soul energy to influence our physical body and reality. The brain he suggested in simple terms was the physical organ to connect to physical life and reality and the mind was an energy connected to dimensions of eternal levels of live and creation. So while your physical brain was not functioning during that severe attack of meningitis your super mind was what allowed you to have that vivid afterlife experience and bring it back with you after you recovered. While that is a simple definition perhaps of the mind and brain it does express our connection to energetic soul life and God or the Divine. A conventionally-trained psychiatrist, Dr. Pressman has combined that work with studies in the high reaches of the mind. His practice focuses on spiritual psychotherapy and the exploration of the human soul.
Dr. Alexander tells us about Carl Sagan an American Astronomer who said Science is not only compatible with spirituality: it is a profound source of spirituality Dr. Alexander goes on to tell us that Dr. Raymond Moody had studied ancient Greek philosophy and the writings of Plato and learned about the case of Er an Armenian soldier killed in battle who was placed on a funeral pyre. Just before its ignition he returned to life and told the soldiers that when one dies they proceed through a review of the most crucial aspects of their life as a lesson of sorts-the “Life Review” and that the most important quality by which they are judged concerns the love they have managed to manifest while here on earth. We learn the brain does not create consciousness and the mind (spirit or universal energy or source) and mental experience are the fundamental essence of all existence: the mind has the complete power over matter and our free will has tremendous capacity to change the world.
About Mindfulness and Living in a Mindful Universe shares the importance of “spiritual health?”
Sheryl says that in her new book A New Life Awaits Spirit Guided Insights to Support Global Awakening we come to realize that as we merge our duality or awareness of spiritual and physical life we become healthier and happier beings. Sheryl wrote, I was not aware that in the deep, hidden recesses of my subconscious mind, the truth lay dormant waiting to be proven to me: “There was no death, only a return to life beyond here.” However, if dying is a concern of yours, I hope that what you read in the following pages of this book will allow you to remember that part of yourself, that soul essence, which may have gone unexamined for some time or may have been damaged or tarnished by the well-meaning people around you who may also have forgotten their true divine essence. It is my hope that you may retrieve a ‘knowingness’ of your soul essence that experiences peace, love, compassion, and a fluid movement through time and space eternally, allowing you to enjoy both a physical life today and “existence” beyond this physical life tomorrow. What you may well discover if you keep an open mind is how to live vibrantly in the two realms of life: the physical and the spiritual.”
Sheryl says there is duality or choices so that we can find balance and harmony through our choices Suffering comes when we are unable to accept the nature of a physical world and life. Everything in a physical world is transitory and must have a beginning and ending. People are afraid of change death and what they cannot control which is everything except the choices they make when they confront difficulty. We must experience all the emotions and feel them not numb ourselves to life. Once we know these emotions, we can begin to move from that feeling of discontent unhappiness or pain to a higher emotion of feeling at peace with oneself or feel gratitude or love as often as we allow ourselves to. All experiences are this dance from pain or suffering to a higher feeling or emotion and in every event every human wish to be in those higher feelings. It takes effort consistency and patience to achieve this level of dealing with all challenges good or bad.
We thank Dr. Eben Alexander author of his newest book Living in a Mindful Universe for dedicating himself to sharing information about near-death experiences and other spiritually transformative experiences and what they teach us about consciousness and the nature of reality. Like myself, and the hundreds of authors who have shared their spiritual awakening, we hope for research on the unifying elements of science and spirituality and for everyone to be inspired by the power within their soul life to refine love and compassion and spread of filter it out into the world.
In summarizing today’s episode of Healing From Within we have shared multiple stories of scientists philosophers healers and visionaries as we move beyond the limitations of our physical world belief systems to discover the truth of BEING and existing as eternal sources of divine energy and creation to understand the brain, Near death experiences, and the mind or universal source of creative energy that is within and around us and which connects to all life eternally.
Dr. Alexander writes that Materialist science as a foundation for comprehending our reality is at a dead end. We are long overdue to rise above this façade, and this demands the robust incorporation of consciousness into our working model of the universe. A convergence of understanding about our approach to science our universe and ourselves is the only way forward. For those with the most open minds, this is where science finds itself now, in the 21st century, as it finally comes closer to understanding the depths of the mind body debate.
Eben and I would simply have you awaken to the full awareness of your spiritual or soul life force and your physical reality so you many know we are all so very much more than this physical life. By working to conquer the fear of death you may come to realize that the Afterlife and all we love in this life is contained within the mind and soul of our life force and journey’s past death to realms of infinite beauty and love.
Eben and I were methodical proponents of the scientific community which demands proof of the unseen aspects of life and perhaps, even skeptics before having experiences that opened our awareness to new perspectives of life and energy. We have been fortunate enough to have had these experiences and wish to share an awe inspiring reality with those who will allow themselves to know the world and universe beyond beliefs or opinions and truly experience and feel the truth.
