Proof of Heaven

me feel a little like the boy in the fairy tale who travels to the other world
and then returns, only to find that it was all a dream—until he looks in his
pocket and finds a scintillating handful of magical earth from the realms
beyond.
As much as I’d tried to deny it, for weeks now a fight had been going
on inside me. A fight between the part of my mind that had been out there
beyond the body, and the doctor—the healer who had pledged himself to
science. I looked into the face of my sister, my angel, and I knew—knew
completely—that the two people I had been in the last few months, since
coming back, were indeed one. I needed to completely embrace my role
as a doctor, as a scientist and healer, and as the subject of a very unlikely,
very real, very important journey into the Divine itself. It was important
not because of me, but because of the fantastically, deal-breakingly
convincing details behind it. My NDE had healed my fragmented soul. It
had let me know that I had always been loved, and it also showed me that
absolutely everyone else in the universe is loved, too. And it had done so
while placing my physical body into a state that, by medical science’s
current terms, should have made it impossible for me to have experienced
anything.
I know there will be people who will seek to invalidate my experience
anyhow, and many who will discount it out of court, because of a refusal
to believe that what I underwent could possibly be “scientific”—could
possibly by anything more than a crazy, feverish dream.
But I know better. And both for the sake of those here on earth and
those I met beyond this realm, I see it as my duty—both as a scientist and
hence a seeker of truth, and as a doctor devoted to helping people—to
make it known to as many people as I can that what I underwent is true,
and real, and of stunning importance. Not just to me, but to all of us.
Not only was my journey about love, but it was also about who we are
and how connected we all are—the very meaning of all existence. I
learned who I was up there, and when I came back, I realized that the last
broken strands of who I am down here were sewn up.
You are loved. Those words are what I needed to hear as an orphan, as
a child who’d been given away. But it’s also what every one of us in this