How is heaven possible

The resulting NDE would actually be a dream. But that hypothesis still cannot account for people who report seeing, during their out-of-body experiences, what they could not have. Perhaps the most famous corroborated case, cited by Beauregard, is that of a migrant worker named Maria, whose story was documented by her critical care social worker, Kimberly Clark.

The day after she had been resuscitated after cardiac arrest, Maria told Clark how she had been able to look down from the ceiling and left the OR.

She described it in detail. In a similar vein, many traditional Christians are more than a little wary of the reported experiences of the heaven travellers. For them the idea—so intolerable to materialist skeptics—that consciousness, or the soul, can and does exist outside the body is an article of faith.

But some of the new afterlife, however seemingly Christian in outline, is often troubling, especially in its utter lack of judgment. The division over the possibility of continuing human consciousness is not entirely between the religious and the secular.

And the extraordinary popularity of heaven tourism—books have continued to pour down the publishing pike this year, including I Believe in Heaven by Cecil Murphy, one of the pioneers in the genre—is not entirely driven by evangelical enthusiasm.

In that regard, the storm stirred up by Proof of Heaven only obscures the wider significance of the afterlife books. There are elements, from key plot points to tiny details, that link their stories, starting with two obvious points. The idea that major scientists no longer dismiss the idea of continuing consciousness colours all accounts, as does the fact that, whether truth or fantasy, the experiences are necessarily culturally specific.

All overwhelming and bewildering mental states have to be sorted, defined and made comprehensible in the light of the familiar—what else do our brains have to work with? Many of the writers share a common gaping wound, centred on lost children, a wound usually healed by simultaneously finding the child and realizing there is no blame or judgment to suffer, no forgiveness to offer or seek.

Her tearful father then told her about the son who had died three months before her birth. Eben Alexander, who—unlike most NDE cases—lost all sense of personal identity during his experience, was troubled because that loss meant no relative offered him assurances of love and acceptance.

Afterwards though, Alexander—an adopted child who had felt abandoned his whole life—saw a picture of his deceased natural sister, whom he had never met in life. She was the girl on the butterfly. They are all, even the children, witnesses who experienced what they did—and came back, reluctantly—for a reason.

Those similarities in form pale beside the deep thematic link between the new bestsellers: the previously undiscovered country is a place of unconditional love. Several of the writers pause, sometimes for pages, to stress the adjective as much as the noun.

He boils those down to one word—love—but the key phrase may be the third sentence of his longer version:. That an individual like any of the authors, someone of broadly Christian background coping with emotional pain, should undergo such a heaven-centred experience when in the throes of physical trauma, is broadly predictable and easy to dismiss as wish-fulfillment.

The fact it has happened to a group of such similar individuals does not in itself prove the truth or the falsity of the experiences; what that does, though, is illuminate a culture that increasingly rejects the very notion of judgment while equating salvation with personal healing.

Largely ignored by the non-religious world and looked at askance by many Christian commentators, 90 Minutes sold like hotcakes. And while it set the template for what was to come, what stands out about it today is its modesty. Religious believers interpret these similar yet varying accounts like blind men exploring an elephant—they each feel something different the tail is a snake and the legs are tree trunks, for example ; yet all touch the same underlying reality.

Heaven, in a theological view, has some kind of entrance. Of course, the purported way to see Heaven without having to take the final run at the platform wall is the NDE. This past October, neurosurgeon Dr. His account of Heaven was based on a series of visions he had while in a coma, suffering the ravages of a particularly vicious case of bacterial meningitis.

Alexander claims there is no scientific explanation for his experiences, but I just gave one. They occurred while his brain function was either on the way down or on the way back up, or both, not while there was little to no brain activity. And Alexander makes no reference to functional data that might have been acquired by fMRI, PET, or EEG—nor does he seem to realize that only this sort of evidence could support his case. If self-deception were an Olympic sport, this is how our most gifted athletes would appear when they were in peak condition.

And these takedowns have company. This is religious belief; nothing else. These criticisms of Alexander point out that what he saw was a classic NDE—the white light, the tunnel, the feelings of connectedness, etc. One might argue that the scientific description of NDE symptoms is merely the physical account of what happens as you cross over. This argument rests on the fact that you are indeed dying. In , a study was published in the Lancet that looked at the medical records of people who experienced NDE-like symptoms as a result of some injury or illness.

Why would the brain react to death or even imagined death in such a way? Well, death is a scary thing. Imagine an alpine climber whose pick fails to catch the next icy outcropping as he or she plummets towards a craggy mountainside.

If one truly believes the next experience he or she will have is an intimate acquainting with a boulder, similar NDE-like sensations may arise i. You do not have to be, in reality, dying to have a near-death experience. What does this make of Heaven? Explaining the near death experience in a purely physical way is not to say that people cannot have a transformative vision or intense mental journey. The experience is real and tells us quite a bit about the brain while raising even more fascinating questions about consciousness.

But emotional and experiential gravitas says nothing of Heaven, or the afterlife in general. Near death experiences occurring in cardiac arrest, coupled with evidence from research mediums, further suggest the survival of consciousness, following bodily death, and the existence of other levels of reality that are non-physical.

Scientists, the manifesto went on to say, "should not be afraid to investigate spirituality and spiritual experiences since they represent a central aspect of human existence. In other words, my friends, even the venerable scientific method seems ready to explore the ephemeral, ineffable nature of God-consciousness.

Or at least our experiences of it, limited as we are in our ability to describe them. And what of life after death? Well, it sure looks like there's a lot more experiential evidence out there than most of us ever realized.

And the neat part is, people's descriptions match up with what some of what the world's saints, mystics and sages have described. For example, Ignatius of Loyola once had a mystical experience "with so great an enlightenment It was if he were a new man with a new intellect. Thoughts entered me directly.

But it wasn't thought like we experience on earth Upon drawing close to what he calls "the Core" where God is , Alexander finds an "immense void, completely dark, infinite in size, yet also infinitely comforting. Pitch black as it was, it was also brimming over with light. Oh night more loving than the rising sun. Oh night that joined the lover to the beloved one transforming each of them into the other.

My favorite quotation from Alexander's odyssey evokes Julian of Norwich 's understanding of God as a mother : "My situation was, strangely enough, something akin to that of a fetus in a womb In this case, the 'mother' was God, the Creator, the Source who is responsible for making the universe and all in it.

This Being was so close that there seemed to be no distance at all between God and myself. Yet at the same time, I could sense the infinite vastness of the Creator, could see how completely miniscule I was by comparison. So, yes, I gave my friend Proof of Heaven to read. While I doubt that anyone can "prove" God or heaven to anyone else, we may be able to help our loved ones open up to experiencing the too-good-to-be-true possibility that God does exist and loves us eternally.

Since my friend is a big fan of both John of the Cross and Zen meditation, I sort of think God's got this one covered. Joseph, Sr. Christine Schenk served urban families for 18 years as a nurse midwife before co-founding FutureChurch, where she served for 23 years. She holds master's degrees in nursing and theology.

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