Beiruting News

The one-time Harvard and Duke affiliate's new book, 'Proof of Heaven,' draws on accounts from his miraculous medical recovery. His brain went completely inactive as he battled bacterial meningitis.
Eben Alexander said he saw heaven during a seven-day coma brought on by bacterial meningitis and E. coli bacteria eating his brain. The experience happened, he said, as his brain had supposedly gone completely inactive. During the experience, he traveled on the wing of a butterfly with a biological sister he had never met, the adopted doctor said.It was in the early-morning hours of Nov. 10, 2008 that Alexander woke up with an intense pain in his back and head coupled with bouts of lost consciousness.
Doctors at the very hospital where he worked found that he had come down with bacterial meningitis and that E. coli bacteria were literally eating his brain.
His chances of survival close to nil, Alexander fell into a seven-day coma. His brain went completely inactive.But this, he says, was just the moment he witnessed heaven."I had no body awareness at all. I was just a speck of awareness in kind of a dark, murky environment, in roots or vessels or something. And I seemed to be there for a very long time-I would say years," Alexander said in a recent interview."I was rescued by this beautiful, spinning, white light that had a melody, an incredibly beautiful melody with it that opened up into a bright valley," he said, "an extremely verdant valley with blossoming flowers and a just incredible, rich, ultra-real world of indescribable complexity."Alexander eventually traveled on the wing of a butterfly with a young woman whom he later discovered was a biological sister he had never met, because he was adopted.In his heavenly state, Alexander said, he felt a divine presence and even received a special message.
"There is no scientific explanation for the fact that while my body lay in coma, my mind-my conscious, inner self-was alive and well," he wrote.Still, not everyone buys it.
"This is nothing more than the classic argument from ignorance," wrote physicist Victor Stenger, the author of the best-selling book "God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist.""The flaw in the argument should be obvious. Just because someone - or even all of science - currently cannot provide a natural explanation for something, it does not follow that a natural explanation does not exist or will never be found," he wrote.