Eben Alexander Quotations

Physical life is characterized by defensiveness, whereas spiritual life is just the opposite.

I finally chalked it up to the fact that the brain is truly an extraordinary device: more extraordinary than we can even guess.

We can only see what our brain’s filter allows through.

The part of my brain that was responsible for creating the world I lived and moved in and for taking the raw data that came in through my senses and fashioning it into a meaningful universe: that part of my brain was down, and out. And yet despite all of this, I had been alive, and aware, truly aware, in a universe characterized above all by love, consciousness, and reality. There was, for me, simply no arguing this fact. I knew it so completely that I ached.

Love is, without a doubt, the basis of everything.

I understand what happens to the brain when people are near death, and I had always believed there were good scientific explanations for the heavenly out-of-body journeys described by those who narrowly escaped death.

I'm not the first person to have discovered evidence that consciousness exists beyond the body. Brief, wonderful glimpses of this realm are as old as human history.

Our spirit is not dependent on the brain or body. It is eternal, and no one has one sentence worth of hard evidence that it isn’t.

I grew up in a scientific world, the son of a neurosurgeon.

As a neurosurgeon, I did not believe in the phenomenon of near-death experiences.