Proof of Heaven

person straining at language and ideas to get this enormity across to the
reader, I’d understand the aim of the storyteller and what they’d hoped to
convey in all of its boundaryless majesty, but simply couldn’t.
Yes, yes, yes! I’d say to myself as I read. I understand.
These books, this material, had all, of course, been there before my
experience. But I’d never looked at it. Not just in terms of reading, but in
another way as well. Quite simply, I’d never held myself open to the idea
that there might be anything genuine to the idea that something of us
survives the death of the body. I was the quintessential good-natured,
albeit skeptical, doctor. And as such, I can tell you that most skeptics
aren’t really skeptics at all. To be truly skeptical, one must actually
examine something, and take it seriously. And I, like many doctors, had
never taken the time to explore NDEs. I had simply “known” they were
impossible.
I also went through the medical records of my time in coma—a time
that was meticulously recorded, practically from the very start.
Reviewing my scans just as I would have for a patient of my own, it
became clear to me at last just how fantastically sick I had been.
Bacterial meningitis is unique among diseases in the manner in which
it attacks the outer surface of the brain while leaving its deeper structures
intact. The bacteria efficiently wreck the human part of our brain first,
and finally prove fatal by attacking the deeper “housekeeping” structures
common to other animals, deep beneath the human part. The other
conditions that can damage the neocortex and cause unconsciousness—
head trauma, stroke, brain hemorrhages or brain tumors—are not nearly
as efficient at completely damaging the entire surface of the neocortex.
These tend to involve only part of the neocortex, leaving other parts
unscathed and able to function. Not only that, but instead of taking the
neocortex alone out, they tend to also damage the deeper and more
primitive parts of the brain as well. Given all of this, bacterial meningitis
is arguably the best disease one could find if one were seeking to mimic
human death without actually bringing it about. (Though of course, it
usually does. The sad truth is that virtually everyone as sick as I was from
bacterial meningitis never returns to tell the tale.) (See Appendix A.)