Eben Alexander III met his sister in the most profound way. His experience has a lesson for all of us.

Eben did his medical training at Duke and later taught neurosurgery at Harvard. He was a pure materialist, insisting consciousness was created by the brain.

Eben contracted bacterial meningoencephalitis and fell into a prolonged coma. As professionals cared for his motionless body, he took an astounding metaphysical journey. Defying odds, his body fully recovered. After studying his medical record, Eben concluded his brain had been far too ill to have created his experience, and that his consciousness had operated independent of his badly injured body.

Eben later told me of his guide in the other realm. He said, “The guardian angel I met . . . became a deeply personal ally in my journey.”

Being adopted, Eben hadn’t known of his biological sister, Betsy, who’d died two years before his illness. He first saw a photograph of Betsy four months after his hospitalization. He immediately recognized her. She’d been his guide.

“Her messages were delivered telepathically with full emotional engagement,” Eben told me. “I knew her deeply and personally from the encounters yet came back to this world not knowing her identity. Receiving the photo of my birth sister four months after my coma connected all the dots . . . Biggest shock of my life! It all came together in those moments.”

Eben now teaches about non-local consciousness, that consciousness exists despite the brain, not because of it, that it exists independent of the brain and body. Before reading anyone else’s so-called near-death experience, Eben wrote everything he could remember about his own, and later published it in the New York Times bestselling book, Proof of Heaven.

Our messengers, guides, angels, advisors—call them what you like—love us. They’re connected to us, often more than we realize. Trust and go forward.