THE ONE.

I couldn’t put this book down.

I watched an interview about it and I was hooked.

Here’s a clip of the interview.

I got it that night and finished it in 2 days.

It was THAT good.

Seriously, BEST book I’ve read all year.

Here is a summary of what it is about:

Dr. Alexander’s own brain was attacked by a rare illness. 

The part of the brain that controls thought and emotion—and in essence makes us human—shut down completely. 

For seven days he lay in a coma. 

Then, as his doctors considered stopping treatment, Alexander’s eyes popped open. 

He had come back.

Alexander’s recovery is a medical miracle. But the real miracle of his story lies elsewhere. 

While his body lay in coma, Alexander journeyed beyond this world and encountered an angelic being who guided him into the deepest realms of super-physical existence. 

There he met, and spoke with, the Divine source of the universe itself.

Alexander’s story is not a fantasy. Before he underwent his journey, he could not reconcile his knowledge of neuroscience with any belief in heaven, God, or the soul. Today Alexander is a doctor who believes that true health can be achieved only when we realize that God and the soul are real and that death is not the end of personal existence but only a transition.

This story would be remarkable no matter who it happened to. That it happened to Dr. Alexander makes it revolutionary. No scientist or person of faith will be able to ignore it. Reading it will change your life.

Here are some quotes that really resonated with me:

I know there will be people who will seek to invalidate my experience anyhow, and many who will discount it out of court, because of a refusal to believe that what I underwent could possibly be “scientific”—could possibly by anything more than a crazy, feverish dream.    

But I know better. 

And both for the sake of those here on earth and those I met beyond this realm, I see it as my duty

—both as a scientist and hence a seeker of truth, and as a doctor devoted to helping people—

to make it known to as many people as I can that what I underwent is true, and real, and of stunning importance. Not just to me, but to all of us.    

If you don’t have a working brain, you can’t be conscious.

  This is because the brain is the machine that produces consciousness in the first place. When the machine breaks down, consciousness stops.

My experience showed me that the death of the body and the brain are not the end of consciousness, that human experience continues beyond the grave.

Mine was in some ways a perfect storm of near-death experiences. As a practicing neurosurgeon with decades of research and hands-on work in the operating room behind me, I was in a better-than-average position to judge not only the reality but also the implications of what happened to me.

The place I went was real. Real in a way that makes the life we’re living here and now completely dreamlike by comparison.

Once I realized the truth behind my journey, I knew I had to tell it. Doing so properly has become the chief task of my life.

Now that I have been privileged to understand that our life does not end with the death of the body or the brain, I see it as my duty, my calling, to tell people about what I saw beyond the body and beyond this earth.

For the next seven days, I would be present to Holley (his wife) and the rest of my family in body alone.

 I remember nothing of this world during that week and have had to glean from others those parts of this story that occurred during the time I was unconscious. 

My mind, my spirit—whatever you may choose to call the central, human part of me—was gone.

Many victims of bacterial meningitis die in the first several days of their illness. Of those who arrive in an emergency room with a rapid downward spiral in neurologic function, as I did, only 10 percent are lucky enough to survive. However, their luck is limited, as many of them will spend the rest of their lives in a vegetative state.

Below me there was countryside. It was green, lush, and earthlike. It was earth . . . but at the same time it wasn’t.

But as you look around, something pulls at you, and you realize that a part of yourself—a part way, deep down—does remember the place after all, and is rejoicing at being back there again.

Imagine being a kid and going to a movie on a summer day.

Maybe the movie was good, and you were entertained as you sat through it.

But then the show ended, and you filed out of the theater and back into the deep, vibrant, welcoming warmth of the summer afternoon.

 And as the air and the sunlight hit you, you wondered why on earth you’d wasted this gorgeous day sitting in a dark theater.

  Multiply that feeling a thousand times, and you still won’t be anywhere close to what it felt like where I was.

Om (his name for God) told me that there is not one universe but many—in fact, more than I could conceive—but that love lay at the center of them all. Evil was present in all the other universes as well, but only in the tiniest trace amounts.

Evil was necessary because without it free will was impossible, and without free will there could be no growth—no forward movement, no chance for us to become what God longed for us to be. Horrible and all-powerful as evil sometimes seemed to be in a world like ours, in the larger picture love was overwhelmingly dominant, and it would ultimately be triumphant.

The only pain and heartache I felt was when I had to return to earth, where I’d begun.

Just as our brains work hard every moment of our waking lives to filter out the barrage of sensory information coming at us from our physical surroundings, selecting the material we actually need in order to survive, so it is that forgetting our trans-earthly identities also allows us to be “here and now” far more effectively.

I saw the earth as a pale blue dot in the immense blackness of physical space. I could see that earth was a place where good and evil mixed, and that this constituted one of its unique features. Even on earth there is much more good than evil, but earth is a place where evil is allowed to gain influence in a way that would be entirely impossible at higher levels of existence. That evil could occasionally have the upper hand was known and allowed by the Creator as a necessary consequence of giving the gift of free will to beings like us.

This other, vastly grander universe isn’t “far away” at all. In fact, it’s right here—right here where I am, typing this sentence, and right there where you are, reading it. It’s not far away physically, but simply exists on a different frequency. It’s right here, right now, but we’re unaware of it because we are for the most part closed to those frequencies on which it manifests.

We—each of us—are intricately, irremovably connected to the larger universe. It is our true home, and thinking that this physical world is all that matters is like shutting oneself up in a small closet and imagining that there is nothing else out beyond it.

Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.    —CICERO (106–43 BCE)

A story that as time passes I feel certain happened for a reason. Not because I’m anyone special. It’s just that with me, two events occurred in unison and concurrence, and together they break the back of the last efforts of reductive science to tell the world that the material realm is all that exists, and that consciousness, or spirit—yours and mine—is not the great and central mystery of the universe.