LIFE AFTER DEATH? DOCTOR SAYS HE'S BEEN THERE

NEAR DEATH EXPERIENCE OF A
NEUROSURGEON TOLD IN NEWSWEEK

www.wset.com - Is there life after death?  One neurosurgeon with ties to Lynchburg is trying to answer that.  He tells his story in the pages of Newsweek that's on stands right now. 
Dr. Eben Alexander said four years ago, he was in a coma. Doctors at Lynchburg General, where he worked, determined he had a very rare bacterial meningitis. He explained that there is no scientific explanation for the fact that while his body lay in a coma, his mind was alive and well - seeing what he believes is heaven. He says: 
“As a neurosurgeon, I did not believe in the phenomenon of near-death experiences. ... 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. 
In the fall of 2008, however, after seven days in a coma during which the human part of my brain, the neocortex, was inactivated, I experienced something so profound that it gave me a scientific reason to believe in consciousness after death.” 

“Then, on the morning of my seventh day in the hospital, as my doctors weighed whether to discontinue treatment, my eyes popped open. ‘You have nothing to fear.’ ‘There is nothing you can do wrong.’ The message flooded me with a vast and crazy sensation of relief. ‘You have nothing to fear.’ ‘There is nothing you can do wrong.’ The message flooded me with a vast and crazy sensation of relief. 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. 
While the neurons of my cortex were stunned to complete inactivity by the bacteria that had attacked them, my brain-free consciousness journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe: a dimension I’d never dreamed existed and which the old, pre-coma me would have been more than happy to explain was a simple impossibility. But that dimension - in rough outline, the same one described by countless subjects of near-death experiences and other mystical states - is there,” explains Dr Alexander.

For seven days, Dr. Alexander lay in a deep coma. “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. But as far as I know, no one before me has ever traveled to this dimension (a) while their cerebral cortex was completely shut down, and (b) while their body was under minute medical observation, as mine was for the full seven days of my coma,” says Dr. Alexander. While in coma, at the same time, he “journeyed to another, larger dimension of the universe, a dimension I'd never dreamed existed.” Dr. Alexander has no doubt about the existence of that dimension, as he explains “what I saw and learned there has placed me quite literally in a new world: a world where we are much more than our brains and bodies, and where death is not the end of consciousness but rather a chapter in a vast, and incalculably positive, journey.” The sages explain that apart from the physical body, there are subtle elements assembled together surrounding the individual soul, the small particle of spirit.

WHAT DO THE VEDIC TEACHINGS TELL US? 

Maya is divided into twenty four categories: the five great elements ... the five tan-matras, the ten knowledge-acquiring and working senses, and mind, heart, intelligence and false-ego. Altogether these are the twenty four categories of matter. The conscious individual spirit soul is the twenty fifth category in the body, and the Supreme Personality of Godhead, the Supersoul, in the twenty-sixth. ... The sthula-sarira (gross body) consists of the five gross elements (panca-maha-bhuta), five sense objects (panca-tan-matra) and the ten senses. The linga-sarira (subtle body) consists of the mind, heart, intelligence and false-ego. The individual spirit false thinks of this material body in terms of “I” and “mine”. In this way he does not understand how his own welfare is best served. The soul, a tiny fragment of spirit, exists in a dimension beyond time, space, and the other features of the material world. Even though it is a tiny particle, the soul is all-pervading within the material body. As a tiny drop of sandal-paste cools the entire body, so the soul, situated in one place within the material body, is aware of the pleasure and pains of the body as a whole.

Śrīla Saccidananda Bhaktivinoda Thākura :
Jaiva-dharma (The Universal Religion)
Chapter 16: “Eternal Religion and
Sambandha, Abhidheya and Prayojana”
http://philosophy.ru/library/asiatica/indica/authors/bhaktivinoda/jd/03.html

Published by dasavatara das - "Vedic Views on World News"
http://www.vedicviews-worldnews.blogspot.com.ar/