Proof of Heaven
A reader partial to the historical classification of books (though one who is not too fussy-minded) might feel tempted to add Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander to the thousand-year accumulation of vision literature. Though recorded by members of the literate clergy, these visions were related by laymen who professed, without any obvious ulterior motive, to have died and returned to life with an eye-witness description of heaven and hell. But it is what sets Proof of Heaven apart from this tradition that makes it initially so interesting and ultimately so problematic. The visions recorded by Pope Gregory the Great in 590, for example, were experienced in an age in which people were educated to believe in visions, an age of fasting, flagellation and fever, in which sanitation was poor and antibiotics were yet to be discovered. And, not surprisingly, the visions bear all the hallmarks of an intense religiosity and credulity.[1] Eben Alexander, on the other hand, a neurosurgeon, scientist, and former atheist, presents himself to his readers as the most unlikely candidate imaginable for such an experience and would have us believe that this lends enormous credence to his claims.
What happened to him can be summarized in a single paragraph. In 2008, Eben Alexander contracted bacterial meningitis and fell into a coma that lasted for seven days. During that time, he says, he left his body and entered a spiritual dimension that consisted of three levels: an earthen, subterranean cavern whose walls were a bubbling, protean mass from which ugly faces appeared and disappeared; above that, a glittering iridescent dreamscape, viewed from a vantage point that he starts by describing as a bolus of innumerable butterflies and later simply as an enormous butterfly wing, on which he stood in the company of an angelic female presence; and, finally, a black hole at the center of which was an infinite intelligence that appeared to him as an orb of glittering darkness and to which, throughout his account, he refers to as The Om. According to Alexander, two important features of his experience suffice to demonstrate that it was neither a dream nor a hallucination. The first is completely subjective and therefore completely unfalsifiable: the vividity of the spiritual world which, he emphasizes repeatedly, was "more real than real" and in contrast to which his conscious experience is but a confused and fragmentary dream. The second (something which in theory could but has not yet been proven) is that during his vision his neocortex was not functioning and the experience must therefore be imputed to spiritual, or supraneural, consciousness. No one, least of all Eben Alexander, should be surprised that his book has elicited criticism, incredulity, and even scorn. There have also been accusations of factual inaccuracy and even deliberate falsehood.[2] Dr. Laura Potter, for example, one of the doctors who treated Alexander, has refuted his claim that his last words before slipping into coma were, "God, help me!" and supports this refutation with the rather robust counterargument that he was by that point intubated and incapable of speech. She also denies that his coma was the result of his meningitis, with the loss of higher brain activity, and states that it was medically induced and the patient conscious throughout—an assertion which, if true, would utterly destroy Alexander's credibility but which directly contradicts the written testimony of another doctor who treated him, Dr. Scott Wade, found in the appendix of the book. Others, while accepting the medical circumstances, have questioned the psychological chronology. Fellow neuroscientist Sam Harris makes the rather uncontroversial point that, "even in cases where the brain is alleged to have shut down, its activity must return if the subject is to survive and describe the experience" and then observes that there is simply no way to establish that Alexander's vision occurred while his neocortex was not functioning. Oliver Sacks, agreeing with Harris, suggests that Alexander's vision probably occurred as he was surfacing from the coma and his cortex was returning to full function. The vision, according to this explanation, only seemed to last seven days but was in fact condensed into the indeterminate period of time before Alexander reopened his eyes but after his brain activity had resumed. His error, they suggest, consists in fitting to the duration of his coma an experience that in fact occurred in its immediate aftermath. William Hazlitt noted, judiciously, that "an author may be wrong in his main argument and yet deliver fifty truths in arriving at a false conclusion." Having read Proof of Heaven, and the criticism of it I have outlined above, I find myself equally and rather inconveniently sympathetic to both Alexander and his critics. There is no question that the explanation provided by Harris and Sacks is infinitely more probable than that provided by Alexander. And to their general skepticism, several specific corroborating details could be added. Despite claiming that prior to his coma he was a hardboiled atheist and scientist with a materialistic worldview, for instance, Alexander reveals much that could have primed him for his vision: Specifically, his long exposure to religious and parapsychological influences in the form of two family friends; one, the minister of an Episcopal church of which he was a member; [3] the other, an "intuitive" and author of a book on channeling (The Third Eye) of which his wife is an enthusiastic and accommodating reader. And yet, in the midst of all this, and during a vision whose butterfly wings and attractive female angels make Alexander an easy mark for skeptical derision, it must be admitted that he presents an intriguing theory; and one that, even if it does not explain reality, has at least the virtue of explaining itself. One problem encountered when pondering the possibility that consciousness might exist independently of the body is the difficulty of explaining the purpose of the brain and its staggering neuronal complexity. Relieved of the task of generating consciousness, the human brain (according to the most recent measurements there are 200 billion neurons and 125 trillion synapses in the cerebral cortex alone) becomes an absurd superfluity, a useless and uselessly complex excrescence. To this question Alexander is able to postulate an answer: The brain itself does not produce consciousness; per contra, it is “a kind of reducing valve or filter, shifting the larger, nonphysical consciousness that we posses in the nonphysical worlds down into a more limited capacity for the duration of our mortal lives.” A second problem follows from the suggestion, made by Alexander, that human love and consciousness (and not, say, the atom or dark energy) is the primary element of our universe. Anthropocentric models of cosmology entail the necessity of either explaining or ignoring the supermassive vastitude of space and our planet’s relatively tiny size. If human consciousness is central to the universe, why is it supported by such an infinitesimally minute point of such a wastefully gargantuan substrate? Alexander’s answer is that space is an illusion projected onto the universe by the human brain. In higher states of consciousness, all of space is revealed to occupy a single point—much as a two-dimensional being would see from a three-dimensional perspective that his two-dimensional universe, with its parallactic shifts and vanishing points, occupied a single plane. Lastly, though somewhat supplementarily, one might mention the Borgesian charm of his lessons in cosmogony from the Om, during which ideas were imparted to his mind by that divine intelligence, not through the linear accumulation of logical precepts and conclusions, but instantaneously, in the form of “conceptual edifices, staggering structures of living thought, as intricate as cities.” In my view there are two central flaws in Eben's account: The first and most obvious is the profoundly unconvincing assertion that a dimension next to whose complexity our own world pales in comparison consists of no more than a hole in the ground, a garish landscape of glittering trees, and a black sphere at the center of a void. The second is that, presupposing the truth of his claim that the physical and spiritual realms are necessarily separate to allow for the spiritual growth of human souls on Earth, his book constitutes an unlawful breach of the divine order—for just as the importance of faith to Christianity would be immediately subjugated if God deigned to provide scientifically verifiable evidence of His existence, so proof of consciousness in the absence of neocortical function would conflate the physical and spiritual realms and subvert the conditions which it has pleased the Om to impose on humankind in the interests of our spiritual progress... And yet it will be seen how, with tongue firmly in cheek, one could develop the argument that the former actually safeguards against the latter and that the manifest implausibility of his claim is therefore actually proof of its ultimate veracity. ______________________________________________________
[1] In The History of Hell by Alice K. Turner, we read of a merchant in Constantinople who died and was sent to hell—only to discover that his damnation was the result of a clerical error by an infernal bookkeeper and be politely restored to life; of demons swarming like bees at a river of fire; of piteous lamentations and course laughter from a pit of black flames; and, of course, of the Vision of Tundal, featuring a centipede-like Lucifer and a hell located in the stomach of an animal filled with tears and fog and other animals. [2] It's best to gloss over the accusations of past malpractice since, even if true, they have no conclusive bearing on the veracity of Alexander's claims. [3] Pedantic readers may recall with confusion that Alexander cried, "God, help me!" as he was slipping into a coma and thus before the vision that disabused him of his atheism. |
|