Coma leads to life-changing experience

Just more than a year ago, Lynchburg neurosurgeon Eben Alexander fell into coma and, he believes, out of the realm of experience his brain could have produced.

Alexander is currently writing a book about the experience and shared his story for the first time Thursday to a group of about 130 who gathered to hear him speak as a fundraiser for the Lynchburg not-for-profit organization Kid’s Haven, which offers support for children who have lost loved ones.

In 2008, Alexander came down suddenly with E. coli-induced meningitis — common in infants, Alexander said, but almost unheard of in adults. While the bacteria literally attacked his brain over the span of a week and doctors fought back with powerful antibiotics, Alexander neither saw nor heard anything around him.

Instead, the sights, sounds and thoughts he experienced would change him forever.

At its most profound, Alexander’s experience was of entering a “core,” a realm he cannot describe in sights, sounds or images, merely understandings.

“In the core with God and the Angel… there was humor, irony and pathos,” Alexander said. “It was almost as if you could see where these very human characteristics really originate.”

More than anything else, Alexander said ,he felt suffused with the knowledge of that love exists throughout the metaverse, and that it is the single important currency in the realm to which he had traveled.

Alexander’s experience with the core was far from the only thing he remembers from his time in the coma.

During the talk, Alexander attempted to string together a narrative of his time, though he admitted that he has had to do some guesswork when it comes to some of the sequencing.

He said he believes he first experienced a muted world of browns and grays, where the images he saw were grotesque, but where he was neither helped nor bothered, a time that seemed almost endless.

Then there was a melody that dissolved this world and ushered in, instead, a beautiful gateway.

In this world, Alexander rode on the wing of a butterfly, just one in a giant flying kaleidoscope of butterflies, surrounded by flowers and light, suffused by heavenly song.

On the butterfly with Alexander was a beautiful woman, who he believes is his guardian angel, who he said journeyed with him from the beautiful portal, to the place of understanding that was beyond human images, beyond the world.

After he left the “core,” Alexander remembered wanting to return to that place, but was comforted by images of circles of people with their heads bowed, a few of whom he recognized. At the time, Alexander said, he did not remember the word prayer, but he felt the prayers, the prayers of people who were praying for him in real life.

As the antibiotics did there work, Alexander began to come back. He glimpsed his son, with his own eyes, and knew the boy had meaning to him, and Alexander to he, though he did not yet have the brain function to place him.

He experienced what he calls a nightmare, which he separates from the rest of his experience because it was infused with language, personal memories and plot-twists, highly different from the rest of what he saw.

In his time since his dramatic recovery with the help of the antibiotics, he has been trying to piece together what he saw.

Before, Alexander said he had become skeptical that God hears prayers. Now, Alexander said, he believes emphatically that prayers are heard and have meaning, if not necessarily in his case to save him, at least to offer him comfort.

He says he hopes to share his experience with more people and that may be a purpose for him and his continued life.

Alexander received a standing ovation from the audience assembled.

“I think he gave me a lot of consolation as far as the hereafter,” John Alford of Lynchburg said, adding that he has had many questions about it. “I don’t think I question quite as much now, as when I walked in here.”