Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey Into the Afterlife Read Online Free PDF

Sullivan called him on the phone an hour later, he realized that he needed to make the drive down— immediately .
    As Eben drove toward Virginia, an icy pelting rain started up. Phyllis had left Boston at six o’clock, and as Eben headed toward the I-495 bridge over the Potomac River into Virginia,she was passing through the clouds overhead. She landed at Richmond, rented a car, and got onto Route 60 herself.
    When he was just a few miles outside Lynchburg, Eben called Holley.
    “How’s Bond?” he asked.
    “Asleep,” Holley said.
    “I’m going to go straight to the hospital then,” Eben said.
    “You sure you don’t want to come home first?”
    “No,” Eben said. “I just want to see Dad.”
    Eben pulled up at the Medical Intensive Care Unit at 11:15 P.M . The walkway into the hospital was starting to ice over, and when he came into the bright lights of the reception area he saw only a night reception nurse. She led him to my ICU bed.
    By that point, everyone who had been there earlier had finally gone home. The only sounds in the large, dimly lit room were the quiet beeps and hisses of the machines keeping my body going.
    Eben froze in the doorway when he saw me. In his twenty years, he’d never seen me with more than a cold. Now, in spite of all the machines doing their best to make it seem otherwise, he was looking at what he knew was, essentially, a corpse. My physical body was there in front of him, but the dad he knew was gone.
    Or perhaps a better word to use is: elsewhere.

5.
Underworld
    D arkness, but a visible darkness—like being submerged in mud yet also being able to see through it. Or maybe dirty Jell-O describes it better. Transparent, but in a bleary, blurry, claustrophobic, suffocating kind of way.
    Consciousness, but consciousness without memory or identity—like a dream where you know what’s going on around you, but have no real idea of who, or what, you are.
    Sound, too: a deep, rhythmic pounding, distant yet strong, so that each pulse of it goes right through you. Like a heartbeat? A little, but darker, more mechanical—like the sound of metal against metal, as if a giant, subterranean blacksmith is pounding an anvil somewhere off in the distance: pounding it so hard that the sound vibrates through the earth, or the mud, or wherever it is that you are.
    I didn’t have a body—not one that I was aware of anyway. I was simply . . . there , in this place of pulsing, pounding darkness. At the time, I might have called it “primordial.” But at the time it was going on, I didn’t know this word. In fact, I didn’t know any words at all. The words used here registered much later, when, back in the world, I was writing down my recollections. Language, emotion, logic: these were all gone, as if I had regressed back to some state of being from the very beginnings of life, as far back, perhaps, as the primitive bacteria that, unbeknownst to me, had taken over my brain and shut it down.
    How long did I reside in this world? I have no idea. Whenyou go to a place where there’s no sense of time as we experience it in the ordinary world, accurately describing the way it feels is next to impossible. When it was happening, when I was there, I felt like I (whatever “I” was) had always been there and would always continue to be.
    Nor, initially at least, did I mind this. Why would I, after all, since this state of being was the only one I’d ever known? Having no memory of anything better, I was not particularly bothered by where I was. I do recall conceptualizing that I might or might not survive, but my indifference as to whether I did or not only gave me a greater feeling of invulnerability. I was clueless as to the rules that governed this world I was in, but I was in no hurry to learn them. After all, why bother?
    I can’t say exactly when it happened, but at a certain point I became aware of some objects around me. They were a little like roots, and a little like blood vessels in a