Proof of Heaven A Neurosurgeon s Journey into the Afterlife

[Page 4] This book is dedicated to all of my loving family, with boundless gratitude. [Page 5] C ONTENTS Prologue 1. The Pain 2. The Hospital 3. Out of Nowhere 4. Eben IV 5. Underworld 6. An Anchor to Life 7. The Spinning Melody and the Gateway 8. Israel 9. The Core 10. What Counts 11. An End to the Downward Spiral 12. The Core 13. Wednesday 14. A Special Kind of NDE 15. The Gift of Forgetting 16. The Well 17. N of 1 18. To Forget, and to Remember 19. Nowhere to Hide 20. The Closing 21. The Rainbow 22. Six Faces 23. Final Night, First Morning 24. The Return 25. Not There Yet [Page 6] 26. Spreading the News 27. Homecoming 28. The Ultra-Real 29. A Common Experience 30. Back from the Dead 31. Three Camps 32. A Visit to Church 33. The Enigma of Consciousness 34. A Final Dilemma 35. The Photograph Eternea Acknowledgments Appendix A: Statement by Scott Wade, M.D. Appendix B: Neuroscientific Hypotheses I Considered to Explain My Experience Reading List Index [Page 7] P ROLOGUE A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be. —A LBERT E INSTEIN (1879–1955) W hen I was a kid, I would often dream of flying. Most of the time I’d be standing out in my yard at night, looking up at the stars, when out of the blue I’d start floating upward. The first few inches happened automatically. But soon I’d notice that the higher I got, the more my progress depended on me—on what I did. If I got too excited, too swept away by the experience, I would plummet back to the ground . .