PROOF OF HEAVEN
Dr
Eben Alexander claims in his book Proof of Heaven that, while in a coma
in 2008, he 'floated over fluffy clouds', on his way to the final
frontier. Photograph: Ron Edmonds/AP
Heaven has an edge over every other construct of the human
imagination because, built into the design, alongside the fabulous
promise that we can, after all, live forever, is a catch. We can never
try it out and report back. There are no return tickets. And, before
Richard Dawkins
points it out, yes, of course, that means that even if every single one
of us is ultimately disappointed when we catapult into oblivion, we
have no way of warning those who come after us.
That, at least, is
the theory. But when we are told that sneak previews are impossible, we
instinctively try to find a way round the restriction. So on the cover
of this week's Newsweek, neurosurgeon
Dr Eben Alexander, who has taught at Harvard Medical School, boldly announces to the world that he has cheated death, visited Shakespeare's "
undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns", and come back to tell us all in his imaginatively titled book, Proof of Heaven.
In 2008, Alexander was struck down by
meningitis
and spent seven days in a coma. Science says that, during this ordeal,
everything should have gone blank since his neocortex wasn't
functioning. But this celestial Columbus claims that, while apparently
flat out, he was actually on "a hyper-vivid and completely coherent
odyssey" to the final frontier. He floated over fluffy clouds, met
"transparent … shimmering beings" and was guided through this timeless
world by a beguiling female. It was all, he writes reassuringly, "an
immense void, completely dark, infinite in size, yet also infinitely
comforting".
At least he didn't mention a bright white light, but
in every other way his account contains just about heavenly cliche known
to humankind. Proof of Heaven may have a certain cachet because its
author is, by profession, "a man of science", and therefore, by the
crude logic of our secular, sceptical 21st-century society, better
placed than most to see through the ultimate claim of religion, but this
book sounds like pretty run-of-the-mill near-death experience
literature.And there's plenty of it around. The
International Association for Near-Death Studies,
founded in 1981, claims to speak for a constituency of 15 million in
the US alone. In hugely popular books such as psychologist
Raymond Moody's Life After Life,
thousands of travellers report back on an extra-terrestrial world of
painlessness, mysticism, peculiar light and beautiful but intangible
guides to a divine pleasure dome.
What is most remarkable about
these accounts is how similar they are to each other and to a whole
literature that stretches back through the centuries. Once, the very
same topography was part of the beatific vision, fashioned by Christian
theologians such as Saint Augustine as a heavenly landscape to frame the
face of God.
The similarities prompt one of two responses. Either
it must be true because so many people say it is. Or they are borrowing
from each other one of the biggest collective delusions we have ever
known. Or, perhaps, there is a third, more plausible explanation.
At
its most simple, all of these pictures of after-life touch on the most
basic of human needs, something that predates written language,
philosophy and even religion itself. From the time the first Neanderthal
sat next to the lump of dead protein that had been his or her mate and
realised that something had to be done about the smell of rotting flesh,
we have wanted there to be something more, something beyond death. When
that body was put into a ditch, or pushed over a ledge into a ravine,
the one left behind looked into the void and ached.
The myths,
traditions and literature, the shamans and soothsayers, the priests and
popes, the poets, writers and dramatists, have subsequently all tried to
picture an after-life to take the sting out of that yearning. And, lest
I be accused of having a closed mind (which I don't), of the
uncertainty. Alexander, then, is just the latest in a long line.
There
has, though, always been a tension in such fevered – or coma-induced –
imaginings. For what most religions have taught is that heaven,
paradise, nirvana, jannah, or whatever they have called it, is
ineffable, beyond words, beyond imagination.
Photograph: Ron Edmonds/AP
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