What if someone you know said they
went to heaven and came
back?
They tell you they were wrapped in
light, love, and met
God. Would you call it a
hallucination?
A dream?
Maybe wishful thinking.
When a neurosurgeon said he
saw the afterlife while in a coma,
he got a lot of pushback.
Skeptics said his celestial
journey was no miracle.
It was a chemical trick of the
brain. And these skeptics pointed
to a specific molecule.
DMT.
It is known to induce profound,
sometimes frightening psychedelic
experiences, and our own
bodies can make it.
So, today on the show,
reporter Haleema Shah looks at
DMT and death.
I'm your host, Arielle Duhaime-Ross,
and this is Altered States.
This summer, I spoke to a
man who saw, embraced,
and no longer fears death.
Death is an adventure.
This is Dr. Eben Alexander.
I met him near his home in
Charlottesville, Virginia.
He walks into the room with a long
stride and a head of graying
hair.
He says he witnessed the afterlife
and came back.
I'm seventy one years old and
I live my life as an
eternal soul who has a
purpose to bring love and kindness
and compassion and mercy
to this world.
At 71, Eben tells his
story as someone who was lost,
then found.
He was adopted and raised by a
family that attended a Methodist
church. He grew up to be a promising
student, then a skydiver,
then a Harvard-trained neurosurgeon,
who still longed for his birth
family.
As an adult, Eben's belief
in the observable, measurable,
and material deepened.
He stopped praying, he
says.
But in 2008, when he was in his
50s, something happened that
made Eben more than a man of
science.
I'm known for having had a
near death experience during a week
long case of severe bacterial
meningitis, a case that
should have killed me.
He was hospitalized for over a
week and spent most of it in
a coma.
And yet, during that week in coma
I had a profound spiritual
experience.
An experience that he would come to
understand as a near-death
experience, or NDE.
They're often characterized by a
tunnel, bright light, and encounters
with spiritual beings.
NDEs happen when someone is
near death or is pronounced
dead, but survives.
Imagine someone who experiences
cardiac arrest.
When their heart stops beating and
their body lies still, a bystander
might step in and administer CPR.
The heart restarts, but the
person remains unconscious.
Nearly 20% of cardiac
arrest survivors say that during
that time they experience a
mystical, lucid journey.
What I went through in my NDE, the
ultra reality of it, was far
beyond anything I've ever
experienced in my life.
Eben decided to write about it and
told the world how he, a
scientist, found proof
of heaven.
That was also the title of his New
York Times bestselling book,
and it took the media by storm.
2020 continues.
Is there proof of heaven?
He was on Primetime News.
Well, I'd been to heaven.
I mean, absolutely the
most remarkable
experience and and for me
the amazing thing was that I had
this rich experience while my
brain was completely
shut down, soaking in pus.
His trip started off ethereal.
I was rescued by this beautiful,
spinning white light that had
a a melody, indescribably
beautiful melody with it, that
opened up into a bright
valley.
And I had no body awareness, but
I was moving up through it because
I was a speck on a butterfly
wing.
There was someone on the butterfly
wing with him.
A girl.
I'll never forget the way she was
sitting, the way she was dressed,
the way she looked at me.
And she looked at me with this very
loving smile.
Eben says she was a biological
sister he'd never met.
She guided him through this realm
and she gave him a message.
You are deeply loved
and cherished forever.
You have nothing to fear.
He heard something.
I heard that sound of Om,
that eternal resonance of
all of infinity and eternity.
During his voyage through the
heavens, Eben was just a
soul in its happy place.
But on his hospital bed,
he was surrounded by family praying
for his return.
He couldn't hear them, but
one face and voice got through.
It was his 10-year-old son.
He's telling me, Daddy, you're gonna
be okay. Daddy you're gonna be okay.
Daddy, you're gonna be okay.
As if it he said it enough, it would
work. I didn't even remember what a
father and son were.
I didn't recognize him, but there
was something about the connection
between us. When I saw him pleading
with me, I knew I had to come back.
When Eben returned to what he calls
the earthly realm, something else
happened.
He made a full recovery from
his coma.
But he'd changed.
He was suddenly a spiritual man
embraced by an all-encompassing
deity.
He was talking about Om.
And I guess the reason I used Om
as the identifier for that
God force was to me the
word God when I came back from my
NDE was a puny human
word with a lot of baggage.
And I recognized that,
you know, it was not about this
debate about God, Allah, Brahman,
Vishnu, Jehovah, Yahweh, Great
Spirit, but actually an
acknowledgement of the commonality.
Eben has a prophetic answer to
a question that's probably as old as
humanity.
What happens when we die?
People have answered these questions
by turning to religion, science, and
clairvoyance.
I have distinct childhood memories
of a psychic medium with a peroxide
blonde bob.
She had heavily lined eyes
that didn't blink much, and her name
was Sylvia Brown.
She shared the stage with Montel
Williams and Larry King.
You communicate with dead people.
Yes.
You do psychic readings.
Yes.
You work with the police on murders
and message.
What do you believe happens when you
die?
You go through the tunnel and you go
to the other side and it's a
beautiful place with actual
buildings and art
museums and
This was the 2000s.
My grandmother was on one of her
visits to the US from Pakistan,
and I remember she once suggested
that my mom ask Sylvia
about my late father.
The idea had crossed my roughly
nine-year-old mind too.
And then I quietly wondered,
can Sylvia talk to dead Muslims?
But to believe the unbelievable,
people need the right messenger.
Sylvia spoke the language of daytime
TV and the paranormal.
Eben is fluent in languages
that carry far more weight in
America: Christianity
and science.
The quote I often give to explain
exactly the transformation I
had as a scientist.
It's a quote from Werner Heisenberg,
who won the Nobel Prize,
and he said that the first gulp
from the glass of natural sciences
will lead you towards atheism, but
at the bottom of the glass God is
waiting for you.
That quote is contested.
Heisenberg's children don't think
their dad said that, but the idea
rang true with Eben anyway.
His NDE led him to make
the case for an eternal spirit,
or consciousness, or mind.
He argues that consciousness
is not a byproduct of the physical
brain. It can exist without
our bodies.
Our souls do not cease to exist
when the body dies.
In fact, our souls and our awareness
expands, it becomes much grander.
And to me, that
is something we can call heaven.
Belief in an afterlife and an
everlasting soul is a heresy
for many scientists, especially
the materialists, who believe
matter is the source of all that
is real, and our material
brains create consciousness.
But Eben doesn't buy that anymore.
The brain and mind are obviously m
tightly interconnected, but
the mistake we've made in science
in physicalist or materialist
science is thinking that only
the physical world exists
and the stuff we can measure in the
physical world is the only thing
relevant to science, and that is a
tremendous error.
Skeptics rolled their eyes at his
so-called proof of heaven.
They questioned how much he knew
about death since he was only nearly
dead. They challenged his
credibility.
In 2013, an Esquire
reporter found a series of
malpractice cases against Eben.
He settled five over an 11
year period.
To Eben's skeptics, this
was a disgraced doctor seeking
to reinvent himself.
Scientists don't understand NDEs.
The typical medical explanation
is that the unconscious person
was in a hallucinatory or dreamlike
state. That their brain was on
low power mode, too weak
to respond to stimuli, but
active enough to draw on memories
and prior beliefs.
But Eben says his brain
was too damaged to make this up.
These bacteria were devouring my
brain. They'd already eaten all the
glucose in my cerebrospinal
fluid, and they were really
attacking the brain.
There was no part of the neocortex
spared that might have offered up
any kind of dream or hallucination
or phenomenal conscious experience.
Not only that, my brain stem was
badly damaged from the get-go.
If his comatose brain was too weak
to conjure a trip to the afterlife,
his almost comatose brain might
not have been.
There were plenty of critiques and
theories about Eben's NDE.
Early on when I went public with
this, Sam Harris criticized
my telling of my experience and said
Alexander obviously had a DMT
experience, you know, case close.
That theory was probably the most
interesting one.
Sam Harris, a neuroscientist
and prominent figure of the New
Atheist Movement, wrote about it on
his blog.
But you might know him from his
viral debates with religious people.
If you wake up tomorrow morning
thinking that saying a few Latin
words over your pancakes is
going to turn them into the body of
Elvis Presley,
you have lost your mind.
But if you think more or less the
same thing about a cracker and the
body of Jesus, you're just a
Catholic.
He said, Eben's NDE
bore an uncanny resemblance to
a psychedelic trip with DMT,
or dimethyltryptamine,
the psychoactive ingredient in
ayahuasca.
It induces short,
mystical, and sometimes terrifying
experiences.
And while an Amazonian shaman
might extract it from local plants,
you don't need to go quite so far
to find DMT.
It exists inside our own
bodies.
Scientists find these homegrown
chemicals in the blood,
plasma, urine, cerebrospinal
fluid, even the brain and
lungs of mammals.
And Harris's argument builds
off something that's been speculated
before.
Maybe the body produces a
surge of DMT at the
moment of death.
Maybe what Eben experienced
as heaven was actually
him getting high off his
own body's supply.
After the break, does a
DMT trip mirror
death.
Over 30 years ago, a psychiatrist
named Rick Strassman ran
a series of DMT studies
at the University of New Mexico.
His work is so foundational
that his name came up in almost
every conversation I had about
death and DMT.
We do know that you know the near
death state is very visual,
very emotional, memories come
back. DMT, you know, has
those kinds of effects as well.
He popularized the speculative
theory that DMT might
surge during near death experiences
in a seminal book.
The title of you know the DMT book
is, "The Spirit Molecule."
A practicing Zen Buddhist at the
time, Rick theorized that DMT
is produced in the pineal gland,
a pea-sized organ at the center
of the brain.
Borrowing from Buddhist and Hindu
traditions, the gland is often
referred to as the third eye because
of its location.
Rick wanted to find the biological
basis of spiritual experiences.
But this was the war on drugs era,
so he ran studies looking at DMT's
impacts in case it had medical
use.
It was just so weird.
There was no one in this country,
you know, giving psychedelics
and there was no one in in the world
giving DMT anywhere.
There weren't a bunch of people
lining up for this research, but he
managed to find 60.
The first ones through the door were
his friends.
Mostly white collar professionals,
you know, lawyers, physicians,
psychologists.
They were the kinds of folks you
would expect at a you know
psychedelic event in you
know the late nineteen eighties,
early nineteen nineties.
Nearly all the DMT sessions were
held inside an Albuquerque hospital,
a pretty sterile place for a
psychedelic experience.
His team refurbished room 531,
a roughly 15 by 15
foot space.
He hired carpenters to cover
the tubes, pipes, and hoses.
The bright white walls were
repainted blue.
The room was outfitted with blue
chairs with a subtle pattern.
Rick was going for soothing, but
not dull.
He got a rocking chair for himself
from where he'd observe study
participants.
They would lie on a bed as he
gave them somewhere between .05
and .4 milligrams of DMT
intravenously.
I would just you know sit there, you
know, praying, like I hope
they're having a good time.
People could have an extraordinarily
wonderful time and you wouldn't know
it, or people might be having a
horrific hellish time and you
wouldn't know it until they you know
began talking with you.
Thirty minutes, maybe forty.
That's about how long participants
would be on a trip.
Rick warned them that it started
fast, sometimes before the
injection was even done.
It would often start with a rush,
then a sound.
Oftentimes there would be a high
pitched kind of whine like
Then a breakthrough and visuals.
You're almost instantly transported
into this realm of light.
Colorful, morphing,
kaleidoscopic, fractal
like.
Beings.
The majority of the folks
felt an intelligence that
would even materialize into
recognizable things,
which you took all manner of
shape and form.
You know, humanoid, robotic,
insect like, plant like,
even sentient furniture.
Sometimes, it was harrowing.
One person felt you
know paranoid and trapped
like a jack in the box popped
out and was kind of leering at him.
The Jack in the Box character said,
I've got you now, I've got you now.
And he felt quite scared.
Sometimes it was comforting.
The insights, the ideas which were
you know transmitted
were kind of
trite, like you know, love is all
there is.
Realer than real.
Everyday reality pales
in comparison with the reality
value of the DMT
experience.
But is the DMT experience the
same as Eben's so called journey
through the afterlife?
There are some obvious overlaps
between an NDE and a DMT
trip.
Bright light, realness,
God, even sentient beings.
It actually led Rick to suggest
in his book that dying
people should go on a DMT trip
as a kind of dress rehearsal for
death.
Why do our bodies produce DMT?
Oh, who knows?
I I mean only God knows.
Some researchers think it helps us
through traumatic moments to
dissociate and go to a safe
place.
Some say that it's neuroprotective
to reduce brain damage after injury.
You could speed recovery from a
stroke in experimental
animals in the presence of DMT.
There's one problem though.
No one has ever proved that
DMT surges in humans
during a stroke, a coma,
or death.
But Rick managed to inspire
one scientist who wanted to study
it.
I actually contacted Dr. Strassman
and said, Oh, if you don't have any
data, those would be kind of things
that we could collaborate on.
This is Jimo Borjigin.
She's a professor at the University
of Michigan's Medical School, where
she studies the dying brain.
I was born in China and
grew up in the environment
that life after life
or soul or heaven or
hell that's never in my education.
She says her brain is averse to
religious ideologies.
She wanted to explore naturally
occurring DMT and NDEs.
So she got Rick to consult on a
study at her lab.
It examined 36 rats
whose brains were implanted with
microdialysis probes.
The idea was to measure
in real time whether rats'
brains secreted DMT
after a lethal injection.
In our twenty nineteen paper
published in scientific reports,
which show very
increase of a dimethyltriptamine
DMT in the dying rats.
Her data showed that in a few rats,
DMT levels increased fourfold
or even fivefold.
But in most, It was far less.
Many people thought that was the
evidence to show in the DMT
levels increased in the dying
animals.
But Jimo wasn't quite as convinced by that
data. Because a one to five
fold increase in DMT is small
potatoes when compared to other
chemical surges.
In a study looking at other
neurotransmitters in dying rats,
Jimo saw a quote, stupendous
increase.
That include dopamine, which
increases more than fortyfold,
norepinephrine, which is responsible
for alertness, increased
to more than sixty fold compared to
the baseline.
And we see serotonin levels
surges more than two hundredfold
in the dying rat.
In other words, the surge of DMT
doesn't even come close to the surge
of other neurotransmitters,
which all have pretty remarkable
effects.
Norepinephrines
increase your alertness.
So I think a norepinephrine level
to me perhaps is associated
with the realer than real sensation
that these survivors report.
Dopamine on the other hand is
associated with the feeling good,
you know.
And she thinks it's significant that
serotonin is in the mix
because it binds to receptors in
the body that are associated with
hallucinations.
So perhaps seratonin levels
increase in the dying states
are contributed to visual
hallucinations and seeing
light and so forth.
But these theories are all limited
by the lack of human data.
Jimo says a human study
would be hard to design.
It would require volunteers who
agree to spending their final
moments being hooked up to an
EEG machine and having
their bodily fluids measured for
neurochemicals.
Moreover, since the volunteer
dies, there's no way to confirm
whether they saw a light, a
deity, or something else when they
experienced a surge of brain
activity.
What we do know is that
NDEs have been reported
for a long time and by
people all over the world.
They're written in the ancient Greek
and Roman literature.
There are accounts from ancient
Egypt.
They're in Polynesia.
They're in Australian Aboriginal
cultures.
They're everywhere.
This is Dr. Bruce Greyson,
a retired psychiatrist.
I called him up because he's also
one of the top scholars of NDEs
at the University of Virginia
Charlottesville.
And yes, you can be a scholar
in that.
Around the 1970s, NDEs
became a sort of academic
discipline.
Along with telepathy,
NDEs fall under the category of
parapsychology,
which, depending on who you ask,
is a fringe science or a
pseudoscience.
Bruce says he wasn't primed
to believe in this stuff.
I was raised in a scientific
household.
I went through college and medical
school with that mindset that all
our thoughts and feelings are
produced by the brain.
There's nothing else.
Bruce's interest in NDEs started
with a patient he met while in
training.
She said she left her body while
unconscious and was able to
accurately describe events in a
different hospital room.
He couldn't explain it, and
when he learned other people had
similar experiences, he
found himself studying NDEs
for the next 50 years.
Today, Bruce and his colleagues
at the University of Virginia
Charlottesville maintain a database
of over a thousand NDE
reports.
And the accounts have strikingly
similar elements.
Such as a sense of overwhelming
peace and well-being when they are
in fact in dire straits.
They often feel a sense of leaving
their physical bodies and
accurately report what's going on
around the body from an out-of-body
perspective.
They may encounter other entities
that they feel are not physically
present. Some of them they may
recognize as deceased individuals
or as what they think are deities.
They often go through a review of
their entire lives, and
at some point they may come
to a decision to return
to their bodies or are sent back.
Bruce developed a 32-point
questionnaire to measure NDEs.
It includes questions that range
from, did you have a feeling of
peace or pleasantness?
To did you see deceased
spirits or religious figures?
It's used in near-death studies
around the world and referred to as
the Greyson Scale, named
after Bruce, though he
wishes people would stop calling it
that.
I prefer not to call it the Greyson
scale.
Really?
I have never called it that.
No, I have always called it the NDE
scale.
Most people score 15 out of
32 on the scale.
Eben Alexander, whom Bruce
knows personally, scored 29.
Which is very high in the top
two or three percent.
The deceased relative, the joy
and peace of heaven, the meeting
with Om.
It's all reflective of the classic
NDE.
But the thing that also struck me
about Eben's experience
is that it sounds so American.
Heaven and Om are not American
inventions, but they are everywhere
in this country's spiritual lexicon.
How influenced are NDEs
by where you are and how
you were raised?
Most people who have a near death
experience will say, you know, there
just aren't any words to describe
it. So they have to use metaphors
because there aren't words for it.
And your metaphors come from your
culture.
So for example, people all over the
world and going back through time
will talk about a warm, loving being
of light.
And if you're an American, Jewish
or Christian person, you may say
that was God, or you
may say that was Christ.
I've read papers about NDEs
on the other side of the world.
And yes, they also feature
the classic elements Bruce
describes.
But there are other things that are
just so culturally specific.
People in a study from Iran reported
meeting Shia imams or meeting
Ayatollah Khomeini.
If they reflect your prior religious
belief or your cultural context,
can that be an indication that
the memories and teachings that are
stored in the brain are playing
a role in the experience?
Well, of course, every experience
that we talk about, no matter where
it's coming from, it has to be
filtered through the brain and
through our language.
The fact that culture determines
how you describe it does not mean
that the culture determines whether
or not you have an experience or
what kind you're going to have.
Bruce doesn't put much stock in
theories that suggest DMT
or other brain activity produces
NDEs.
The data is too limited.
Instead, he sees things more like
Eben Alexander.
So I think I'm open to the idea that
there is consciousness beyond
the physical brain that can survive
death of the physical brain.
But I wondered, what if
someone, somewhere, someday
in the distant future managed
to prove that humans release
a surge of DMT or
some other chemical during near
death experiences?
Would that change your mind about
consciousness at all?
Or would it I don't know, would it
just kind of complicate
It would certainly complicate
things. It would make us more likely
to look at what's going on with this
DMT surge.
But it wouldn't negate Bruce's view
of consciousness or the spiritual
nature of NDEs.
I think there are different ways of
looking at any object.
It can be looked through a spiritual
lens or a physical lens.
And those are not necessarily
conflicting ways of looking at
things. They're complementary ways.
You know, when you're moved by a
beautiful sunset, that
can be felt as a spiritual
experience. It's also obviously a
physical experience.
Does one negate the other?
Not at all.
Eben Alexander was tired of
people dismissing his experience of
heaven as just naturally occurring
DMT.
In 2018, a decade
after his NDE, he
decided to see the difference for
himself.
I had a colleague who was
very experienced in this kind of
thing, and he facilitated
my ability to smoke
some five-methoxy-DMT
Also known as 5-MEo-DMT.
He wanted to settle the score once
and for all about psychedelics
and near-death experiences.
But it's worth noting here that the
comparison was limited.
5-MEo-DMT and DMT are psychedelic
tryptomines, but they have different
chemical structures and effects.
But Eben forged ahead and took
the drug anyway.
On his trip, he saw fractal
imagery that he described as
tremendous.
There was some sense of beings,
you know, of entities that were
there. And I sensed them as friendly
and indestructive and and
knowledgeable.
So I didn't feel alone in the
process. I felt kind of guided and
helped.
But it didn't come close to his NDE.
To compare my DMT experience
with what I had during my near-death
experience is kind of like trying to
look at something through a keyhole.
It was very difficult to discern any
information.
And yet compare that with
the way I described my NDE,
which was a penthouse panoramic
vista to the horizons
of reality about the nature of
all existence.
When it comes to death, studies
about NDEs offer us some threads
to pull on, but they don't come
close to answering the big
question.
What happens after?
I was 13 when my grandmother
asked that question.
She'd just been widowed, and
like me and millions of other
Muslims, she was taught that death
has a script: an angel,
a waiting period, judgment,
then heaven or hell.
But one night after my grandfather
died, she paused by my mom's
bedroom door and flatly
asked where his soul was
now.
We all fell back on our scripts,
probably so we could put the
unsettling topic and ourselves
to bed.
Maybe that's also why so much of the
public couldn't look away from
Eben's account.
It's another script,
one that's bright and benevolent.
A proof of heaven that quiet
the dread of not knowing.
And in many ways, the DMT
theory offers another script.
If a drug can mimic death,
maybe we can know what we're in
for.
Maybe we can do what Rick suggested
in his DMT book.
Use the psychedelic as a test
run.
I you know ran that by my Zen
Buddhist monk friends.
You know, they said, you know,
number one, what happens if it's
a bad trip?
And number two, what happens if
you're wrong?
You know, what happens if there is
no relationship between being
dead and the DMT
experience? You might be chasing a
wild goose and you know
then you're shocked, you know, when
it isn't anything like a DMT
experience.
A lot has changed since Rick
Strassman wrote his DMT book
25 years ago.
He's in his 70s now.
He's returned to his Jewish roots,
and he's changed his mind about some
things.
Would you now ever take DMT
to prepare for death?
Me?
No, no.
I would just get my ducks
in a row.
What does that mean like writing a
will or just, you know?
I mean, you know, you want to
develop your virtues, you wanna be
a good person.
You wanna think, you know, godly
thoughts, you don't wanna have a lot
of regrets.
You wanna be a you know good person
on your deathbed.
My grandmother died during the
pandemic.
I couldn't be with her.
She'd gone back to Pakistan
and was thousands of miles away.
But the nurses said something
that gave my family comfort.
Before her last breath,
my grandmother uttered one word.
Sarfaraz, the name
of her sister who died just months
earlier.
Was her sister there to guide
her tenderly to the other side?
Had death been gentle, inviting
even.
One day, I'll know the
answer, and someone else will be
left behind to wonder where I've
gone.
They might believe that death
was a gateway to an afterlife
or to nothingness, but
they won't be able to prove either.
And whether death is ushered
by angels or feel good chemicals,
or both or neither, I think
we're all just hoping it doesn't
matter.
That death is good if we've
been decent people.
Because we have no control over how
we die, just how we live.
This episode was reported and
produced by Haleema Shah.
Altered States is a production of
the UC Berkeley Center for the
Science of Psychedelics and PRX.
Adizah Eghan is our senior editor.
Our executive editor is Malia
Wollan. Jennie Cataldo
is our senior producer.
Our researcher is Cassady Rosenblum.
Our associate producer is Jade Abdul
Malik.
Our audio engineers are Terence
Bernardo and Jennie Cataldo.
Fact-checking by Graham Hacia.
Special thanks to David Presty.
Our executive producers are Malia
Wollan and Jocelyn Gonzales.
And our project manager is Edwin
Ochoa.
Our theme music is by Thao Nguyen
and Nate Brenner.
I'm your host, Arielle Duhaime-Ross.
Be sure to subscribe, rate, and
review Altered States wherever you
get your podcasts.
We'll be back next week.
Most well-known psychedelics remain
illegal around the world, including
the United States, where it is a
criminal offense to manufacture,
possess, dispense, or supply most
psychedelics, with few exceptions.
Altered States does not recommend
or encourage the use of psychedelics
or offer instructions in their use.