Proof of Heaven

century) all particles. And particles are made up of… Well, quite frankly, physicists don’t really know. But one thing we do know about particles is that each one is connected to every other one in the universe. They are all, at the deepest level, interconnected.

Before my experience out beyond, I was generally aware of all these modern scientific ideas, but they were distant and remote. In the world I lived and moved in—the world of cars and houses and operating tables and patients who did well or not depending partially on whether I operated on them successfully—these facts of subatomic physics were rarefied and removed. They might be true, but they didn’t concern my daily reality.

But when I left my physical body behind, I experienced these facts directly. In fact, I feel confident in saying that, while I didn’t even know the term at the time, while in the Gateway and in the Core, I was actually “doing science.” Science that relied on the truest and most sophisticated tool for scientific research that we possess:

Consciousness itself.

The further I dug, the more convinced I became that my discovery wasn’t just interesting or dramatic. It was scientific. Depending on whom you talk to, consciousness is either the greatest mystery facing scientific enquiry, or a total nonproblem. What’s surprising is just how many more scientists think it’s the latter. For many—maybe most—scientists, consciousness isn’t really worth worrying about because it is just a by- product of physical processes. Many scientists go further, saying that not only is consciousness a secondary phenomenon, but that in addition, it’s not even real.

Many leaders in the neuroscience of consciousness and the philosophy of mind, however, would beg to differ. Over the last few decades, they have come to recognize the “hard problem of consciousness.” Although the idea had been coalescing for decades, it was David Chalmers who defined it in his brilliant 1996 book, The Conscious Mind. The hard problem concerns the very existence of conscious experience and can be distilled into these questions:

How does consciousness arise out of the functioning of the human brain?

How is it related to the behavior that it accompanies?

How does the perceived world relate to the real world?

The hard problem is so hard to resolve that some thinkers have said the answer lies outside of “science” altogether. But that it lies outside the bounds of current science in no way belittles the phenomenon of consciousness—in fact, it is a clue as to its unfathomably profound role in the universe.

The ascendance of the scientific method based solely in the physical realm over the past four hundred years presents a major problem: we have lost touch with the deep mystery at the center of existence—our consciousness. It was (under different names and expressed through different world-views) something known well and held close by pre-modern religions, but it was lost to our secular Western culture as we became increasingly enamored with the power of modern science and technology.

For all of the successes of Western civilization, the world has paid a dear price in terms of the most crucial component of existence—our human spirit. The shadow side of high technology—modern warfare and thoughtless homicide and suicide, urban blight, ecological mayhem, cataclysmic climate change, polarization of economic resources—is bad enough. Much worse, our focus on exponential progress in science and technology has left many of us relatively bereft in the realm of meaning and joy, and of knowing how our lives fit into the grand scheme of existence for all eternity.

Questions concerning the soul and afterlife, reincarnation, God, and Heaven proved difficult to answer through conventional scientific means, which implied that they might not exist. Likewise, extended consciousness phenomena, such as remote viewing, extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, clairvoyance, telepathy, and precognition, have seemed stubbornly resistant to comprehend through “standard” scientific investigations. Before my coma, I doubted their veracity, mainly because I had never experienced them at a deep level, and because they could not be readily explained by my simplistic scientific view of the world.

Like many other scientific skeptics, I refused to even review the data relevant to the questions concerning these phenomena. I prejudged the data, and those providing it, because my limited perspective failed to provide the foggiest notion of how such things might actually happen. Those who assert that there is no evidence for phenomena indicative of extended consciousness, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, are willfully ignorant. They believe they know the truth without needing to look at the facts.

For those still stuck in the trap of scientific skepticism, I recommend the book Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century, published in 2007. The evidence for out-of-body consciousness is well presented in this rigorous scientific analysis. Irreducible Mind is a landmark opus from a highly reputable group, the Division of Perceptual Studies, based at the University of Virginia. The authors provide an exhaustive review of the relevant data, and the conclusion is inescapable: these phenomena are real, and we must try to understand their nature if we want to comprehend the reality of our existence.

We have been seduced into thinking that the scientific world view is fast approaching a Theory of Everything (or TOE), which would not seem to leave much room for our soul, or spirit, or for Heaven, and God. My journey deep into coma, outside of this lowly physical realm and into the loftiest dwelling place of the almighty Creator, revealed the indescribably immense chasm between our human knowledge and the awe-inspiring realm of God.

Each one of us is more familiar with consciousness than we are with anything else, and yet we understand far more about the rest of the universe than we do about the mechanism of consciousness. It is so close to home that it is almost forever beyond our grasp. There is nothing about the physics of the material world (quarks, electrons, photons, atoms, etc.), and specifically the intricate structure of the brain, that gives the slightest clue as to the mechanism of consciousness.

In fact, the greatest clue to the reality of the spiritual realm is this profound mystery of our conscious existence. This is a far more mysterious revelation than physicists or neuroscientists have shown themselves capable of dealing with, and their failure to do so has left the intimate relationship between consciousness and quantum mechanics—and thus physical reality—obscured.

To truly study the universe on a deep level, we must acknowledge the fundamental role of consciousness in painting reality. Experiments in quantum mechanics shocked those brilliant fathers of the field, many of whom (Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrodinger, Sir James Jeans, to name a few) turned to the mystical worldview seeking answers. They realized it was impossible to separate the experimenter from the experiment, and to explain reality without consciousness. What I discovered out beyond is the indescribable immensity and complexity of the universe, and that consciousness is the basis of all that exists. I was so totally connected to it that there was often no real differentiation between “me” and the world I was moving through. If I had to summarize all this, I would say first, that the universe is much larger than it appears to be if we only look at its immediately visible parts. (This isn’t much of a revolutionary insight actually, as conventional science acknowledges that 96 percent of the universe is made up of “dark matter and energy.” What are these dark entities?[1] No one yet knows. But what made my experience unusual was the jolting immediacy with which I experienced the basic role of consciousness, or spirit. It wasn’t theory when I learned this up there, but a fact, overwhelming and immediate as a blast of arctic air in the face.) Second: 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. And third: the crucial power of belief in facilitating “mind-over-matter.” I was often bemused as a medical student over the confounding power of the placebo effect— that medical studies had to overcome the 30 percent or so benefit that was attributed to a patient’s believing that he was receiving medicine that would help him, even if it was simply an inert substance. Instead of seeing the underlying power of belief, and how it influenced our health, the medical profession saw the glass as “half- empty”—that the placebo effect was an obstacle to the demonstration of a treatment.

At the heart of the enigma of quantum mechanics lies the falsehood of our notion of locality in space and time. The rest of the universe—that is, the vast majority of it—isn’t actually distant from us in space. Yes, physical space seems real, but it is limited as well. The entire length and height of the physical universe is as nothing to the spiritual realm from which it has risen—the realm of consciousness (which some might refer to as “the life force”).

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