Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon, had been living a “predictably normal” life by his accounts when one day he woke up with his brain on fire, writhing in pain as his meningitis devoured—quite literally—his brain.

He was rushed to the hospital, where he fell into a week-long coma. His disease had a 53 percent mortality rate (pdf), and cases like his nearly always result in lasting neurological impairment. At the beginning of the week, doctors told his family he had a 10 percent chance of survival. By the end of the week, that projection fell to two percent, and if he recovered they foresaw that he would spend the remainder of his life in a vegetative state.

Yet Alexander made a full recovery in two months—something unheard of.

Alexander woke from that coma a changed man, and spent the following 14 years working with other scientists to unravel the mystery of what he experienced. Years after the coma, a trio of doctors including Bruce Greyson, professor emeritus of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia and leading near-death experience researcher, independently reviewed Alexander’s records (pdf).

Alexander, and others, are convinced his miraculous healing is the consequence of his near-death experience.

“I was a 54-year-old neurosurgeon, a scientist, and I thought I had some idea of how brain-mind consciousness works,” said Alexander in an interview with NTD Television for the show “Mysteries of Life.” “I’ve had a tremendous, 180-degree shift in my belief system, beyond the simplistic and false materialist scientific belief I harbored before my near-death experience.”

Early morning on Nov. 10, 2008, Alexander woke up with horrific back pain. In an attempt to alleviate it, he struggled down the hallway to take a nice, hot bath, which only made things worse. He somehow made it back to his bed in a cold sweat, and collapsed into it in pain. Later that morning, his youngest son, 10 at the time, found him in bed and tried rubbing his father’s temples to help what looked like a terrible headache.

“It felt like he’d driven a white-hot railroad spike through my head,” Alexander said. “Anyone in medicine who hears this, sudden onset severe back pain, headache, would instantly think meningitis. But the doctor was already out. My brain was already being overrun by an extremely aggressive, gram-negative bacterial infection that by all right should have killed me.”

“Yet what it did was give me this beautiful journey,” he said.

The field of near-death experience research has found many commonalities in the experiences, with rapid healing from life-threatening conditions being a rare, but not unique, feature.

Another unusual aspect of Alexander’s experience was that when it started, he did not remember who he was.

“I was amnesic. I had no memory whatsoever of Earth, this universe, Eben Alexander’s life, none of it, it was all gone,” he said. “It all started with what I call the ‘earthworm-eye view.'”

He found himself inside a “primitive” and “underground” sort of environment, with something like roots or blood vessels all around him. Quite frankly, it was irritating, and terrible, he remembered, and it seemed to go on for a long time.

“Luckily, I was rescued from that, by this slowly spinning white light that came associated with a perfect musical melody,” Alexander said.

Soon, he felt a “most astonishing transformation” as he was taken from a murky underground environment into a brilliant and beautiful “ultra-real” place of nature that Alexander termed the “gateway valley.”

“There were a lot of earth-like features. There were sparkling waterfalls, crystal blue pools, lots of meadows and forests around—incredible beauty. And there were thousands of beings dancing; joy and merriment, festivities. I remember children playing, dogs jumping, incredible fun, because up above were these swooping orbs of angelic choirs that were emanating chants and anthems and hymns that were just thundering through my awareness.”

Alexander describes his perception of that experience was like he had “become awareness.” In one instance, he was atop a butterfly wing, and beside him, on that wing, was a beautiful young woman.

Alexander had never met this woman before, and would not have known it even if he did, as in that experience he had no memory of his life.

“Sparkling blue eyes, high cheekbones, high forehead, soft brown hair framing her lovely face,” he said. He trusted her, and with no words, through “an emotional kind of mind meld,” she delivered to him what he says was the central message he was meant to receive in this experience.

“She told me, ‘you have nothing to fear,'” he said. “‘You’re deeply loved and cherished forever. You are cared for.’ I cannot tell you how important that message was at that time.”

After Alexander returned to consciousness, he would realize how much he needed that message.

At 11 days old, he was abandoned by his birth mother, and the knowledge of that had left a “smoking crater of whether or not I was worthy of love” in his life. His adopted father, Dr. Eben Alexander Jr., was a good father, he adds. The renowned neurosurgeon had a rich spiritual life as well and set a good example. But Alexander himself had gotten lost, spiritually.

It was about eight years before the meningitis-induced coma that Alexander had become “very agnostic.” His son had been working on a school project and needed some biographical information, leading Alexander to search for this family.

“I got a different answer than I expected,” Alexander said. He had always heard that his birth mother wasn’t looking to connect, so there was no information for him. But this time, he received information that his birth parents had gotten married, and raised a family.

“I never thought my birth parents had gotten married. That was a tremendous shock. And that they had three children,” Alexander said. He was told that their youngest daughter had just died two years prior, and it would be a bad time for Alexander to come back into their lives.

“That message to me is what sent me into the dark night of the soul in the year 2000,” Alexander said. He stopped going to church. He stopped saying prayers with his sons every night.

And yet, it all “reversed completely,” he said, “when I had this profound near-death experience, because in that gateway valley with a beautiful girl in the butterfly wing, my first awareness of the divine was like the soft summer breeze blowing through. I called it a divine wind or the breath of God. And that was my first knowing, in that kind of amnesic state, of the power of that infinitely loving, divine, and non-judgmental kind of God force.”

Later, Alexander would discover the identity of the beautiful young woman to be his birth sister, who had passed away a decade ago. He had never met her, nor even seen a photograph of her before the coma. When he saw a picture of her years later, it would only cement in his mind that everything he experienced in that coma was real.

Alexander has published recounts of his near-death experience in the books “Proof of Heaven” and “Map of Heaven.”

After meeting the girl on the butterfly wing, the journey proceeded. The angelic choirs above “provided yet another musical portal to higher and higher levels.”

He divides the journey into three spiritual realms: first the earthworm-eye view underground, and then the gateway valley, and then what he called “the core.”

“The core was a complete oneness,” he said. Here he recognized “that my conscious awareness was derived directly from God’s source of pure love, that all of us have that connection with that form of pure love at the core of the universe. It’s what so many near-death experiencers have witnessed and benefited from. it’s that feeling of connection and love that really allows them to come back with no fear of death, realizing that it’s a liberation.”

Alexander said he cycled through these spiritual realms several times, and he was able to do so by remembering the melody the angelic choirs had created, which then conjured up the light portals that led from realm to realm.

“Obviously in those realms, you’re no longer limited to sounds that one can hear with ears, you’re not limited to things you can see with the eyes. It’s much more of a pure, direct experience that allows us to come into this kind of knowledge of things,” he said.

But every time he entered the “core” realm, he felt he was told, “You’re not here to stay, you’ll be going back.”

“The experience would seem to go on for months, or years, even though it had to happen within seven earth days of the coma,” he said.

It just so happens that these experiences occurred in roughly the first four days of his coma, Alexander would later discover. In the past 14 years, he’s sought out scientists around the world to further studies about consciousness.

“How could all that happen when my brain was so demonstrably inactivated? That was the big mystery I had to solve.”

The most vivid visions and “most robust, profound experience” actually happened “when my brain was at its worst,” Alexander said.

Alexander said what brought him back was the face of his son. He didn’t recognize him in the experience, but he saw the face of a 10-year-old boy pleading for his father to return, and Alexander felt fear for the first time in his near-death experience. It brought him back to life, where he woke up in the ICU room fighting the ventilator, which Alexander couldn’t remember doing.

The next 36 hours, his brain had more activity than the earlier coma state, resulting in “paranoid, psychotic nightmares” that disappeared a few weeks later, whereas the comatose journey through spiritual realms are still as fresh as if they had just occurred.

“It shows you something very different and important about near-death memories and why they are so transformative,” Alexander said.

The spiritual transformed him not just mentally or emotionally, but also physically.

Also gone from Alexander’s memory is what he started doing after he woke from the coma. His family tells him he would sit on the bed and look everyone deeply in the eyes, and tell them “all is well, don’t worry.” He came back feeling a sense of responsibility and connection to the “infinitely loving God force,” with a message of “love, kindness, compassion.”

And he knew he would heal.

“It’s not just mind over matter, but spirit over matter,” he said. “I came to recognize a far greater role for the individual soul and their journey in their own healing.”

Two months later, at a medical follow-up visit with his neurologist, Alexander was found to have made a “complete and remarkable recovery” with no residual neurological issues.

His medical records and near-death experience had shown him that consciousness happens not because of the brain, but in spite of it.

Far greater perception, awareness, and consciousness have been reported by near-death experiencers when the brain “gets out of the way,” Alexander said. The common scofflaw remarks that the experiences must be due to misfiring brain activity certainly do not take the actual medical records into account, he added, because one would find that these experiences tend to take place when there is the least brain activity.

“We’re conscious in spite of our brain, and that’s what near-death experiences have been trying to tell us for thousands of years across all culture, is that when you die, you’re liberated from the shackles of the prison of your brain and body, your conscious awareness expands tremendously,” he said.

“It’s a much grander understanding of the human potential, the notion of free will, understanding our impact on the world, is something that comes from this revolutionary, 180-degree flip from the outdated science of materialism, which just so happens to be the conventional, modern kind of scientific view of the world.”

With reporting by NTD News.