The Map of Heaven: How Science, Religion, and Ordinary People Are Proving the Afterlife - Hardcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Eben Alexander, MD, has been an academic neurosurgeon for the last twenty-five years, including fifteen years at the Brigham & Women’s and the Children’s Hospitals and Harvard Medical School in Boston. He is the author of Proof of Heaven and The Map of Heaven. Visit him at EbenAlexander.com.

Ptolemy Tompkins is a former editor at Guideposts Magazine and the author of seven books. His writing has been featured in Beliefnet, Harper’s, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Best Spiritual Writing, and The Best American Spiritual Writing.

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The Map of Heaven

Introduction

I am the child of earth and starry heaven, but my real race is of heaven.

—FRAGMENT FROM AN ANCIENT GREEK TEXT GIVING INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE NEWLY DEAD SOUL ON HOW TO NAVIGATE THE AFTERLIFE

Imagine a young couple at their wedding. The ceremony is over, and everyone is crowding around on the church steps for a photo. But the couple, at this particular moment, doesn’t notice them. They’re too concerned with each other. They are looking deep into each other’s eyes—the windows of the soul, as Shakespeare called them.

Deep. A funny word to describe an action that we know can’t really be deep at all. Sight is a strictly physical affair. Photons of light strike the retinal wall at the rear of the eye, a mere inch or so behind the pupil, and the information they deliver is then translated into electrochemical impulses that travel along the optic nerve to the visual processing center in the rear of the brain. It’s an entirely mechanical process.

But of course, everyone knows just what you mean when you say you’re looking deep into someone’s eyes. You’re seeing that person’s soul—that part of the human being that the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus was talking about some 2,500 years ago when he wrote: “You would not find the limits of the soul even if you travelled forever, so deep and vast is it.” Illusion or not, it is a powerful thing to glimpse that depth when it presents itself.

We see this depth manifested most powerfully on two occasions: when we fall in love, and when we see someone die. Most people have experienced the first, while fewer, in our society where death is so shunted out of sight, have experienced the second. But medical people and hospice workers who see death regularly will know immediately what I’m talking about. Suddenly where there was depth there is now only surface. The living gaze—even if the person in question was very old and that gaze was vague and flickering—goes flat.

We see this when an animal dies, too. The direct avenue into what the twentieth-century scholar of religions Titus Burckhardt called “the inward realm of the soul” goes dead, and the body becomes, in essence, like an unplugged appliance.

So imagine that bride and groom looking into each other’s eyes, and seeing that bottomless depth. The shutter snaps. The image is captured. A perfect shot of a perfect pair of young newlyweds.

Now jump ahead half a dozen decades. Imagine that this couple had kids, and that those kids had kids of their own. The man in the picture has died, and the woman now lives alone in an assisted living facility. Her kids visit her, she has friends at the facility, but sometimes, like right now, she feels alone.

It’s a rainy afternoon, and the woman, sitting by her window, has picked up that photo from where it sits in a frame on a side table. In the gray light filtering in, she looks at it. The photo, like the woman herself, has taken a long journey to get there. It started out in a photo album that was passed on to one of their children, then went into a frame and came with her when she moved to the facility. Though it’s fragile, a little yellowed and bent at the edges, it has survived. She sees the young woman she was, looking into the eyes of her new husband, and remembers how at that moment he was more real to her than anything else in the world.

Where is he now? Does he still exist?

On good days, the woman knows he does. Surely the man she loved so much for all those many years could not have simply vanished when his body died. She knows—vaguely—what religion has to say on the matter. Her husband is off in heaven: a heaven that, through years of more or less steady church attendance, she has professed belief in. Though deep down she has never been all that sure.

So on other days—days like today—she doubts. For she also knows what science has to say on this matter. Yes, she loved her husband. But love is an emotion, an electrochemical reaction that goes on deep inside the brain, releasing hormones into the body, dictating our moods, telling us whether to be happy or sad, joyous or desolate.

In short, love is unreal.

What is real? Well, that’s obvious. The molecules of steel and chrome and aluminum and plastic in the chair she sits in; the carbon atoms that make up the paper of the photo she holds in her hand; the glass and wood of the frame that protects it. And of course the diamond on her engagement ring and the gold of which both it and her wedding ring are made: those are real, too.

But the perfect, whole, and everlasting bond of love between two immortal souls that these rings are meant to signify? Well, that’s all just pretty-sounding fluff. Solid, tangible matter: that’s what’s real. Science says so.



The inside is your true nature.

—AL-GHAZALI, ELEVENTH-CENTURY ISLAMIC MYSTIC

The root of the word reality is the Latin word res—“thing.” The things in our lives like car tires, skillets, soccer balls, and backyard swing sets are real to us because they possess a day-in, day-out consistency. We can touch them, weigh them in our hands, put them down, and come back later and find them unchanged, right where we left them.

We, of course, are made of matter as well. Our bodies are made of elements like hydrogen, the earliest and simplest element, and more complex ones like nitrogen, carbon, iron, and magnesium. All of these were cooked up—created—at inconceivable pressure and heat, in the hearts of ancient, now long-dead stars. Carbon nuclei have six protons and six neutrons. Of the eight positions in its outer shell where its electrons orbit, four are occupied by electrons, and four are vacant, so that electrons from other atoms or elements can link up with the carbon atom by binding their own electrons to those empty positions. This particular symmetry allows carbon atoms to link together with other carbon atoms, as well as other kinds of atoms and molecules, with fantastic efficiency. Both organic chemistry and biochemistry—massive subjects that dwarf chemistry’s other subsets—are exclusively devoted to studying chemical interactions involving carbon. The entire chemical structure of life on earth is based on carbon and its unique attributes. It is the lingua franca of the organic chemical world. Thanks to this same symmetry, carbon atoms, when submitted to tremendous pressure, lock together with a new tenacity, transforming from the black, earthy stuff we associate it with into that most powerful natural symbol of durability, the diamond.

But though the atoms of carbon and the handful of other elements that make up most of our bodies are all essentially immortal, our bodies themselves are transient in the extreme. New cells are born and old ones die. At every moment our bodies are taking matter from, and giving it back to, the physical world around us. Before long—the blink of an eye on a cosmic scale—our bodies will go back into the cycle entirely. They will rejoin the flux of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, calcium, and other primary substances that build up and disintegrate, again and again, here on earth.

This insight is nothing new, of course. The word human itself comes from the same root as humus, earth. So too does humble, which makes sense because the best way of staying...