Free Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey Into the Afterlife by Eben Alexander Page A

half of Richard’s navy class, failed to emerge from the planes, and Ann got it in her head that I might have been killed over there myself.
    Once in her mind the image refused to fade, and for years she was convinced that I’d died a grisly death in the rice paddies of Vietnam. She certainly would have been surprised to know that at that time I was just a few miles away from her in Chapel Hill!
    In the summer of 2008, I met up with my biological father, his brother Bob, and his brother-in-law, also named Bob, at Litchfield Beach, South Carolina. Brother Bob was a decoratedhero in the navy during the Korean War and a test pilot at China Lake (the navy’s weapons test center in the California desert, where he perfected the Sidewinder missile system and flew F-104 Starfighters). Meanwhile Richard’s brother-in-law Bob set a speed record during Operation Sun Run in 1957, a circumglobal relay record in F-101 Voodoo jet fighters “outflying the sun” by circling the earth at an average speed of over 1,000 miles per hour.
    It felt like Old Home Week for me.
    Those meetings with my birth parents heralded the end of what I’ve come to think of as my Years of Not Knowing. Years that, I came at last to learn, had been characterized by the same terrible pain for my birthparents as they had been for me.
    There was only one wound that wouldn’t heal: the loss, ten years earlier in 1998, of my biological sister Betsy (yes, the same name as one of the sisters in my adoptive family, and they both married Robs, but that’s another story). She’d had a big heart, everyone told me, and, when not working at the rape crisis center where she spent most of her time, she could usually be found feeding and caring for a menagerie of stray dogs and cats. “A real angel,” Ann called her. Kathy promised to send me a picture of her. Betsy had struggled with alcohol just as I had, and learning of her loss, fueled in part by those struggles, made me realize once again how fortunate I had been in resolving my own problem. I longed to meet Betsy, to comfort her—to tell her that wounds could heal, and that all would be okay.
    Because, strangely enough, meeting my birth family was the first time in my life that I felt that things really were, somehow, okay. Family mattered, and I’d gotten mine—most of mine—back. This was my first real education in how profoundly knowledge of one’s origins can heal a person’s life in unexpected ways.Knowing where I came from, my biological origins, allowed me to see, and to accept, things in myself that I’d never dreamed I’d have been able to. Through meeting them, I was allowed to throw away, at last, the nagging suspicion that I’d carried around without even being aware of it: a suspicion that, wherever I had come from, biologically speaking, I had not been loved or cared about. Subconsciously, I had believed that I didn’t deserve to be loved, or even to exist. Discovering that I had been loved, since the very beginning, began to heal me in the most profound way imaginable. I felt a wholeness I had never known before.
    It was not, however, the only discovery in this area that I would make. The other question that I thought had been answered in the car with Eben that day—the question of whether there really is a loving God out there—still held, and the answer in my mind was still no.
    It wasn’t until I spent seven days in coma that I revisited that question. I discovered an entirely unexpected answer there as well . . .

12.
The Core
    S omething pulled at me. Not like someone grabbing my arm, but something subtler, less physical. It was a little like when the sun dips behind a cloud and you feel your mood change instantly in response.
    I was going back, away from the Core. Its inky-bright darkness faded into the green landscape of the Gateway, with all of its dazzling landscape. Looking down, I saw the villagers again, the trees and sparkling streams and the waterfalls, as well as the