Can you believe this book:  Proof of Heaven  A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife by Eben Alexander, M.D. ?

     This book relates the “near-death experience” (NDE) of a neurosurgeon.  There are hundreds of such accounts in the media, but this book claims that its author’s experience was both unique and compelling enough to render proof that consciousness exists independent of bodily existence, that life goes on after death.  Woody Allen once said, “I don’t believe in an afterlife but I’m taking a change of underwear anyway.”  We share his equivocation but we prefer to know for sure if we should pack those skivvies. 

     Twenty-one years ago, I wrote a report on the NDE for a college class.  I began my research by attending a meeting of a local chapter of the International Association for Near-Death Studies, where I met and heard the stories of several NDE’rs.  Why do such accounts fascinate us?  Perhaps because they offer the best elements from both a good old-fashioned ghost story and a bulletin from the frontiers of science.  They tantalize us with the promise of eternal life, a form of comfort that formerly only religious faith could supply.  While faith is the purview of the devout, belief is available to all if it is supported by scientific “fact.”  In an age of conflict between science and religion, any revelation that purports to reconcile the two paradigms offers us psychological integration or what used to be called peace of mind.  This new field of study, dignified with the multi-syllabic Latin name “circumthanatology,” has been cleansed of superstition and religious dogma and sanctified instead by statistical study.

           The book under discussion, however, is just one more of many “anecdotal reports,” anathema to the scientific mind.  The author claims that what makes it different is the absolute incapacitation of the “human” parts of his brain while in a coma with e-Coli meningitis.  He even includes, in Appendix B, rebuttals to various neuro-scientific hypotheses that would explain the NDE experience.  Yes, his account of factual details and more emotional, human-interest details was fascinating and compelling.  I was convinced.  Or was I?  One unique feature of Dr. Alexander’s NDE was that he had no sense of self, no awareness of an individual identity while in that state.  He points to that fact as further proof of the independence existence of consciousness.  Couldn’t one also hypothesize that the very fact that his neo-cortex was “bathed in pus” and therefore totally inactivated, was the cause of his lack of a sense of identity?  If proven, that hypothesis would strengthen the “brain produces consciousness” theory.

     So, before packing my underwear in anticipation of my own journey into the afterlife, I checked out the web site of his nonprofit organization, Eternea, at www.Eternea.org.  Interesting.  The site states that “anyone can join” yet the fee for basic membership is $50 and there are tiers of membership according to the amount of the “donation” given, with increased privileges for those higher on the tiers.  Proof of hierarchy based on financial status, even among Heaven’s advocates?
     The most compelling statements in the book, for me, were those that revealed that, and I paraphrase, God is love; love and compassion are real, concrete, and are the very fabric of the spiritual relm.  Further, Alexander states that God loves us.  How well this harmonizes with the basic precepts of the great religions of the world.  Take this statement as an example, "You must...look toward each other and then toward mankind with the utmost love and kindness...This has been the essence ...of the teaching of the Prophets, saints, seers and philosophers..."  Abdu'l-Baha.  For more about and from Abdu'l-Baha and the Baha'i Faith, go to www.usnsa@usbnc.org.

Why I Love American Indians

WHY I LOVE AMERICAN INDIANS

First Story -- Grandma

Grandma’s name was Ona Raney.  She was born in Aransas after the turn of the last century, child of a full-blooded Cherokee mother and a white father.  As an adult, on a tiny farm in Oklahoma, she personified the best of both races.  Her life was a template for a woman living with energy, courage, integrity and grace.  This blog will feature several stories about her, and about my other contacts with Native Americans and their culture and rituals.

Against the dark, joyless backdrop of my childhood her memory stands forth in a gentle wash of pastel colors.  Her essence is warm, round and soft amid the jagged fragments of bitter reminiscence.

“Grandma, why do you always do things so fast?”

She looked up, surprise in her blue eyes, not knowing I had been watching her.

“Well, Hon, I guess I just got used to moving quick-like.  I always had so much to do, seems like doing it on the run was the only way it got done.”

Grandma bent her silvered head over the dough board.  It was five-thirty a.m.; the roosters hadn’t yet begun to crow but the usual morning fare of fresh biscuits and gravy would soon be on the table.

With seven children to raise, Grandma still had to help Grandpa in the fields as well as tend her flower and vegetable gardens.  That seventh and last child had arrived when Grandma was well into middle age, and Grandpa approached seventy.

Grandma’s house.  The smell of those biscuits, fried chicken and apples -- that’s what I remember.  I picture her in the doorway, plump in her flower-sprigged cotton dress, wiping her hands on her apron, pausing to smooth her pinned-up hair.  In greeting she would smile broadly and enfold us all, in turn, in a cheerful, enormous hug.  In parting she would wipe away her tears with an embroidered handkerchief.  “Ya’ll come,” she’d say, as we trooped onto the porch, and then she’d wave us out of sight down the dusty track.

She didn’t know that even then she and her way of life were anachronisms, that her way of speaking was quaint -- tomorrow’s caricature, and that she was creating for me treasured antiques for the mind.

We spent the summer I was eight there on the farm.  It comes back in vivid remnants mostly -- the shocking pink, orange and scarlet of tiny moss rose flowers lying lank upon hot, sandy earth.  Tomatoes and corn fresh from the garden.  Chickens scrambling for the parched, cracked corn I tossed.  Eggs discovered one by one in hidden nests.

One day I got very sick.  Grandma said it was dysentery.  They didn’t seem very surprised:  the outhouse, no running water, the shared dipper for drinking from the bucket that stood by the well.  Perhaps it was understandable.  The illness flashed through me so violently that within twenty-four hours I was a fevered, empty shell lying weakly in bed.  I was scarcely able to sip water and eating was something I neither desired nor was able to do.  Over the next days, I felt my already scrawny frame shrivel, grow weightless against the rough muslin sheets.

Grandma sat by me.  She brewed hot tea for me from the bark of one of her peach trees.  Peach tree tea was only one of many remedies passé down to her by her Cherokee mother.  The medicine was bitter, but the expression of concern and tenderness on her face helped it go down easier.  She cared deeply but she didn’t cluck and coo -- she was not a demonstrative woman.  For her generation, stoicism was not a repressive aberration; it was the requirement of a demanding lifestyle.  I was happy to heal for her.

     I'd like to share some ideas, opinions and some deeper thoughts about life with anyone interested.  I'll share my ideas about current events, about the challenges of being an author, and just about anything else that strikes our fancy.  This blog will be free of profanity, insults and other negative sputterings.
     Here is my first offering, because Labor day and September bring back-to-school memories. 

Mount Algebra

      Some years ago I was a (politically correct) “returning” or “non-traditional student,” (read old person) at the local community college.  I had taken five or six fun and easy courses, each rewarded with an “A” and a ratchet up in self-confidence.  Finally I felt ready to take Beginning Algebra.  Be impressed.  This move demonstrated a bravery possibly equal to that of throwing myself on a live grenade, considering the fact that I had a math phobia and had managed to graduate high school innocent of even rudimentary contact with algebra.

That first day in class I realized that my peers, most of whom were less than one-half my age, had taken algebra before and just needed a refresher.  This class was designed for them, not an algebraically uninitiated like me.  The teacher blithely prattle on about formulas, equations, real numbers, natural numbers and irrational numbers.  She wrote x-s, and y-s, a-s and b-s on the blackboard, instead of any of the aforementioned mysterious numbers and some of the letters were embraced by parentheses, which I had foolishly assumed were used only to cozy up groups of words.  The language of algebra was worse than gibberish to me.  I felt as if I was about to become an irrational number so at the break I swiftly exited, not for the scheduled ten minutes, but for good. 

Next semester I took the same class with a different teacher.  Same result, except this time I was able to delay my panic attack until class was dismissed.  Devastated, I dropped that class too.  But I had committed to earning a degree, which would be the first in my family of origin.  No academic institution would award that coveted B.A. until I had passed College Algebra, which was four courses and a universe away.

Before the start of next semester I asked around: who was the best algebra teacher in the school?  I made an appointment to talk with that awesome lady.  I related my humiliating story and in anguish, asked, “Will I have to give up getting a college degree because I can’t do algebra?”  She reassured and encouraged me.

I prepared for her class as if mounting an assault on Mount Everest.  I purchased the text book weeks beforehand and perused it until it sent me and my irritable bowel to the bathroom.  (I considered just abandoning it there for my every-morning bathroom read.)  Later when I talked to my next door neighbor, who was trained as a teacher and was home-schooling her children, she agreed to help me with homework if I got stuck.  Then I introduced myself and gave fair warning to the staff at the college math lab, where they provided free tutoring during school hours.  The first day of the class felt like a long workout on a balance beam but I stuck the landing -- er, the first class and the second.

This wonderful teacher had a precise grading system.  She awarded the usual zero to one hundred points for tests, of course, but also awarded one point each for every class attended, for each homework assignment handed in, and for each of a limited number of extra credit assignments.  Together, the points totaled one thousand, a perfect “A.”  As I looked at the syllabus with that grading system, an outrageous idea struck.  Maybe I could get an A in this class to match all the others on my transcript:  a very seductive prospect.

As the weeks went by, this possibility was nurtured by modest success.  I did every homework assignment.  I checked my own work with the answers in the book, and the few times I had to consult my next door neighbor it was because there was a misprint in the book.  It was tough.  Each homework session produced a relentless headache, which I figured was the result of newborn algebra synapses firing off furiously in my brain.  One day I felt especially overwhelmed; I decided to skip class.  No problem.  Next week I was back plodding away, still reasonably on track for my A.

Now, about my obsession with grades:  no one would ground me if I got a C or even an F, and no one rewarded or congratulated me for my As.  But during my early years in school I was an under-achiever, and now I felt I had something to prove to myself.  Those As, like potato chips, create a craving for more.

The semester wound down.  Before the final exam, I checked my accumulated points and knew I had to get at least a 92 to get the coveted A.  The exam was excruciating.  I was the last person to leave the classroom.  The teacher posted exam results on her classroom door, identified by the last four digits of the students’ social security numbers.  I held my breath as I located my grade.  91.  Mount Everest, ha!  I had failed to reach the summit; I was nauseated; maybe I was suffering from altitude sickness.  A sympathetic friend told me I should ask the teacher to give me an extra point.  I considered it, but what stopped me was the memory of that one day I had skipped class.  One day, one point.  I got what I deserved.  Two weeks later when my grade report for all my classes came in the mail, lo and behold, an A in Algebra, stacked sweetly in a column with the others.  To this day, I wonder:  did the teacher give me a pity A, or when I totaled class points, did I make a mistake in my math?

     Now the moral(s) of the story, my takeaway from this experience: first, show up; if you’re afraid of the answer, ask the question anyway; always, but always, do your best; don’t be afraid to ask for help; persistence trumps brilliance.

Happy studying,

Sharon Sterling