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Eben Alexander, M.D. experienced “brain death” for a week. He has written a book about what he experienced while all the functions of his “higher brain” were off-line. These are quotes from his book “Proof of Heaven.”
Quotes from “Proof of Heaven” by Eben Alexander M.D. in black.
Bluesky’s comments in blue.
Seeing and hearing were not separate in this place … I could hear the visual beauty … I could see the surging, joyful perfection of what they sang. It seemed that you could not look at or listen to anything in this world without becoming a part of it – without joining with it in some mysterious way.”
This Being was so close that there seemed to be no distance at all between God and myself.
This is so DA. His voice has a multidimensional effect on the listeners: we see, hear, feel, and grasp the emotion, as much as we are “held” by it.
♥
Christian poet Henry Vaughan: “There is, some say, in God a deep but dazzling darkness.”
The questions, and the answers … didn’t come in the form of language as we know it, …[this Being] possessed the qualities we possess, only in infinitely greater measure. It knew me deeply and overflowed with … warmth, compassion, pathos … even irony and humor.
I love the way he describes God here, complete with pathos, irony and humor. This I see in DA’s song choices. He never shies away from the difficult aspects of life. He sees life as a complete experience, he sees people as complete individuals. Thus his “simplicity” encompasses all of life; and rejoices: “… a deep but dazzling darkness.” To me, many of these concepts are beautifully expressed in the song “Angel” and the way DA sings it.
Love is, without a doubt, the basis of everything. … This is the reality of realities, the incomprehensibly glorious truth of truths that lives and breathes at the core of everything that exists or that ever will exist, and no remotely accurate understanding of who and what we are can be achieved by anyone who does not know it, and embody it in all of their actions.
It is my belief that we … need to recover more of that larger knowledge while living here on earth..
DA unabashedly, loves.
Small particles of evil were scattered throughout the universe, but the sum total of all that evil was as a grain of sand on a vast beach compared to the goodness, abundance, hope, and unconditional love in which the universe was literally awash. The very fabric of the alternate dimension is love and acceptance.
Our truest, deepest self is completely free. It is not crippled or compromised by past actions or concerned with identity or status. It comprehends that it has no need to fear the earthly world, and therefore, it has no need to build itself up through fame or wealth or conquest.
Although still finding his way (and that is as it should be) I can think of few people who carry a mantle of personal freedom as unselfconsciously and as graciously as DA does.
How do we get closer to this genuine spiritual self? By manifesting love and compassion. Why? Because love and compassion are far more than the abstractions many of us believe them to be. They are real. They are concrete. And they make up the very fabric of the spiritual realm.
One of the biggest mistakes people make when they think about God is to imagine God as impersonal.
[God] knows what we have forgotten, and understands the terrible burden it is to live with amnesia of the Divine for even a moment.
“Amnesia of the Divine” What a wonderful way to describe such a desolate feeling; hunger for a sustenance we do not always know we need or even that we lack. But when DA sings, sometimes, somehow, we remember.
Later, Eben would say that when he first saw me that day, he was immediately taken with how “present” I was. “You were so clear, so focused,” he said. “It was as if there was a kind of light shining within you.”
DA shines, pure and simple. I believe it is because of his constant search for the companionship of the divine: not as an act of separation from humanity, no, he is the faithful pilgrim, who seeks the divine within humanity.
♥
Here is the “nakedness”, the total leap into the unknown, the complete vulnerability – because of his deep inner knowledge that the unknown is the known. The “expanse” is the one thing closest to our hearts: our true home. So he has no fear there – no unfamiliarity, only a bright oneness, a freedom… a naked, shining heart. Clothed in light and love. Safe. His. Mine. Ours.
I will forever be grateful for his willingness to allow the wings of his heart and voice to unfold.
Take flight, DA.
Bluesky is a staff writer for The Voice.
The Voice David Archuleta 