EP. 27: Interview with John Burke

Spiritual well-being is something we often don't talk about. 

A lot happened for me this past fall… my husband had an accident that led to a life flight, we found out we were pregnant with our third (which was a complete surprise), and then I decided it was time to quit my job. I found myself searching spiritually and somehow this brought me to John Burke’s interview on the Shawn Ryan podcast and seeking to read his book, “Imagine Heaven”. It was all life-changing. 

John Burke is an engineer, the co-founder and former pastor of Gateway Church, a NY Times Best Selling Author, and has dedicated his life to studying over 1,000 near-death experiences (NDEs).

“There are about 40 commonalities in what people consistently say in these NDE interviews. I think that NDEs help people see this life with a new perspective - the good, the bad, the struggles, the suffering, and why love is so important and so hard.”

John shares specific NDE examples in this episode and of course, I requested more information on his research.

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Show Notes

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2
0:00:00
Welcome to the Holistic Health with Dr. Heather podcast. A little bit about how I found you. I listened to your interview on Sean Ryan.

8
0:00:14
Oh, awesome.

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0:00:15
And I've always been, I'll say religious. I grew up Protestant. I converted to Catholicism in college. Go to church every week. However, this past fall, my husband had an accident. He was life flighted.

2
0:00:34
We found out I was pregnant and I quit my job. So a lot of life changes.

11
0:00:39
Wow.

2
0:00:40
And I figured I've always been one where I try to control everything. I'm like, okay, this is God's sign. I just need to pass it over. So then I heard your Interview with Sean and I'm like, ah, this is life-changing. Why have I not found him before?

2
0:00:56
So, thank you. So well, thanks coming on Yeah a little bit About yourself that you want to share with your listeners. I know you're the founder and former lead pastor of gateway. You're a New York Times selling author, you have the book, which I'm going to plug, which I love, Imagine Heaven. Talk to me and talk to my listeners about where you've been with the whole evolution from being an engineer to becoming a pastor and authoring and your NDEs and all of that.

1
0:01:33
Yeah, it's a wild story. When I look back, I'm now a granddad. So I have little granddaughters, I think the age of your kids. Mine are four and two.

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0:01:48
Yeah, I have three, 15, and a newborn now.

1
0:01:53
Oh, you have a 15-year-old too?

2
0:01:55
Oh, 15-month-old.

1
0:01:56
Oh, 15-month. Oh, I was going to say, okay. Oh, yeah. And they are just... They're the love of my life. I mean, it's just hard. I like to say, you know, grandparenting is the reason to have kids.

1
0:02:13
They're just so fun. But yeah, when I started first hearing about near-death experiences, which is what I've become an expert on over the years, I was an agnostic. I grew up with my parents taking me to church, but I've always had this engineering mind. It's why I studied engineering and worked as an engineer. So I'm very analytical, and I want to know why.

1
0:02:52
I want to know how do things fit and why does it work, how do you know? So I was a very troubling child, I'm sure, because I was always asking questions. And so I didn't find many answers, or at that point I just felt like, well, you know, I mean, Jesus, probably the son of God thing is a legend. You know how that happens and because nobody can give me any other reasons. And God, I mean, who knows? Maybe there's a God, maybe there's not.

1
0:03:26
You just can't know. There's no evidence. Right. Well, then my dad is dying of cancer. And someone gave him and this is decades ago, someone gave him the very first research that coined the term near-death experience.

1
0:03:40
You know, it's when a person clinically dies and yet modern medicine resuscitates them, which of course is happening more and more in our day over the last 40, 50 years. And what they say consistently is they clinically died so we're talking about people who have no heartbeat no brainwaves in a lot of cases and Yet when they come back they say I was more alive than I've ever felt in a place more real than this has ever been many times in the presence of this God of light and

1
0:04:18
Love whose presence they never wanted to leave and and many other things, you know that I've traced over the years, but when I first read this, I read the whole, I found the book on my dad's night, you know, bedside table. Yeah. And I just pick it up, I start looking, I'm like, what? And I start reading the first page, and the second, I couldn't put it down. And at the end of reading it in one night, I said, oh my gosh, like, maybe this is the evidence I've been looking for. That there's something real to this whole afterlife, even

1
0:04:53
God-Jesus stuff, because so many were talking about experiencing this God of light and love and Jesus. And so as a result, I kept coming across these near-death stories. And the more I heard them, my mind, just the way it works, is like, oh, I've heard that before over here, and that.

1
0:05:29
And so I just, I mean, it's weird looking back. I think it's a God thing looking back, but at the time I didn't know, it was just this weird obsession I had with collecting these and then trying to frame them. I'm like, okay, that looks like something I've read over here in the Bible and yet they're consistently saying that. So I've been studying these for well over 35 years. In fact, the first talk I gave on the commonalities of these near-death experiences, And what I was really interested in is how I was seeing how they align with what the Bible's been saying all along.

5
0:06:07
Right.

1
0:06:08
And the first time I gave a talk on this was in 1989 at the University of California, Santa Barbara. So I've been doing it for over 35 years and I went from a career in engineering to becoming a pastor. My wife and I started a church 26 years ago for skeptics, for people like me, because I found that people just need a safe space to ask their questions and doubt and struggle because there is evidence and there's amazing evidence. And also, even though there's mystery to this thing called faith, there's also reason.

1
0:06:55
So I found something so real and so important, and I think so helpful and hopeful to the whole world, that's actually why I left my career in engineering and started doing this. So in 2015 I wrote a book called Imagine Heaven, which what I was doing in Imagine Heaven was taking this 35 years of research and finally putting it in a book and showing how there are about 40 commonalities of what people consistently say in these near-death experiences and showing how that aligns with what God's been revealing in the scriptures all along

1
0:07:34
so that people, I think, see this life in a new perspective. I really think it does. I think it gives perspective on the good, the bad, the struggles, the suffering, why love is so important and why it's so hard. You know, so all of that.

1
0:08:02
And then last year I wrote a new book called Imagine the God of Heaven, which I went and I wouldn't have been able to do this before, but I interviewed 70 people, people on every continent in the world, from every background imaginable. And what I'm showing is that it doesn't matter what their expectation of the life to come or of God or none, they're experiencing the same God and the characteristics of this God, you know, I'm showing how that all aligns and really so that people, you know, we all put God in a box.

1
0:08:47
And I'm trying to help people expand that box, to realize that, you know, like they commonly said to me, of all the beauty of heaven, of all the wonders of this new experience, of all the loving reunions of people that we've lost coming to Greece, said nothing could compare to just being in the presence of God. Like God is the love you've always wanted. I think most people don't think that or know that or believe that but when you start to realize that boy it

1
0:09:17
It changes everything. Oh

2
0:09:19
Absolutely. Absolutely. I could see that now one thing, you know Growing up. I always asked because kind of similar to you. I have a scientific mind I'm like, well if you're raised Hindu, you think that's the right religion. How do you know? Christianity is wrong or vice versa and from your interviews, say for example, a Hindu near-death experience,

2
0:09:43
they still see God, correct?

1
0:09:45
Yeah, I mean, so it's more complicated than that. Which is why a whole book. But yeah, so in the new book, in Imagine the God of Heaven, for instance, Santosh Akarchi is one of the first stories in there. It's actually woven throughout.

1
0:10:07
And he was a Hindu manufacturing engineer, grew up in India, the Hindu scriptures is all he knew, never read the Bible. And he told me, he said, when I died, I thought it was just nothing, or maybe you come back as another life form. But that's not what happened to me. And he had his gall bladder erupted into his pancreas. And he was in the hospital for a week and they couldn't get his

1
0:10:41
blood pressure down, it was like 200 beats per minute, couldn't get it down to operate. And he hears code blue, code blue, everything goes chaos. And then suddenly he's up above his body watching this chaos and he's like, what's going on? And then he said, this divine light comes to me. And so this is a commonality. And they say this light, he said, I knew this was a divine light, brighter than the sun, like a thousand times. If I were in my body, it would just blow my eyes out. But it was mesmerizing to look at. And he said, I fell in love with this light

1
0:11:24
because I knew it was for me and protecting me. And so he begins to follow and travel. And this is another commonality. And by the way, I'll put a little pause that we ought to come back to. You know, one of the things that convinced me that these aren't just, you know, these internet stories that, oh, you know, isn't that cool, but wish it were true, it's just not, right? Is that when people are out of their bodies, they say they have a spiritual body.

1
0:11:57
They're still themselves, fully themselves. In fact, more alive than ever with like five, 50 senses, 100 senses, not just 5. But what's important is they also many times are able to observe what's going on in the room where their resuscitation is taking place. And that's really key, because that was what got my analytical, skeptical mind engaged. And I can come back to that, because in Imagine the God of Heaven, I go through 10 points of evidence that convince me, you know, and why so many of these alternate theories don't really, they're like throwing spaghetti

1
0:12:34
against the wall just hoping it'll stick, but it doesn't make sense of the evidence. So anyway, that's a commonality. So Santosh travels, another commonality, sometimes it's through a tunnel, sometimes it's just almost like through outer space but in another dimension. But interestingly, a dimension that our dimensionality is contained within. So I give the analogy, and I think that's part of what's going on. I give the analogy of, imagine if we're living this three-dimensional life on a flat, two-dimensional

1
0:13:09
black and white painting in your room. And death means separation. So the soul at death peels off that two-dimensional frame and is gone from that world. But you can now, you're now in a three-dimensional world of color, that was always there. And you can even look back and see what's going on in the flat two-dimensional world you just left, because it's contained within, right?

2
0:13:35
Right, that makes sense.

1
0:13:36
But because they don't even, they have up or down, and they have side to side, they don't even have in or out. So they can't conceive of where you are out from their world. That's another dimension they don't even understand. I think that's what's going on here. So anyway, Santosh follows this brilliant god of light who he tells me parks over this

1
0:14:02
giant compound. That's what he called it. Now, if you've ever been to India, which I have many times because we helped build a hospital in India for people who couldn't afford medical care, and everywhere in India there are these compounds, like high-walled, gated communities, areas. He said this, though, on the other side he said, your eyesight is telescopic.

1
0:14:28
It's like you can see thousands of miles. And it was this hot, very high wall, gorgeous walls, square in shape, thousands of miles. And inside, he said, just gorgeous. The beauty of the grounds and these buildings, he said, of otherworldly material.

1
0:14:45
And he saw people there and he longed to go in. And he was looking for a way in and he said and I I counted there were 12 gates I counted them all the way around 12 gates and He looked he said at the the gate closest to him And he said I saw angels guarding the gates and then I knew I'm looking at the kingdom of heaven Okay now

1
0:15:08
pause for a second second. If you go read Revelation chapter 21, this is exactly what John, one of Jesus' disciples, who claims he was taken in the Spirit or given a vision of heaven and the holy city of God, and he describes it as this high wall, you know, 200 feet wall, 200 feet high and 200 feet thick walls, gorgeous, the light comes out of everything. 1400 miles in a square shape and 12 gates.

1
0:15:45
And angels guarding the gates.

10
0:15:47
Wild.

1
0:15:48
And it's like, okay, well, why in the world? And so it's a longer story and I go into the whole thing. It's really fascinating because he sees the Lord in another form and God gives him like a parable. And he comes back, he says he's sending him back, and Santosh comes back and he is seeking God.

1
0:16:12
He is like everyday praying, like, Who are you Lord? Who is this God of compassion and mercy? Because he realized he had done wrong, and yet he was given a lot of grace, he said, and mercy and compassion. And anyway, he told me, like I said, a longer story, he told me he started reading the Bible

1
0:16:34
and he said, everything I read was what I experienced. But not just Santosh, Bibi from Tehran, who, and you know, this is just another mind blowing because her son comes to my church because there was an Iranian family that were coming to my church and he asked to meet with me and I go to lunch with him and his mom's there and his mom, Bibi, only speaks Farsi and he speaks English and he's telling me about how he went from... he was Hezbollah growing up. So he's Hezbollah.

1
0:17:18
So, you know, pretty militant Muslim.

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0:17:22
Right, right.

1
0:17:23
And how he came to faith in Jesus, and how it just crushed his mom, because she's related to the Prophet Muhammad. And I asked, well, is your mom still Muslim? And he said, no. And I said, well, why?

1
0:17:36
And he said, well, I'll let her tell you. So then she's telling me in Farsi through him, okay, but this is crazy because He didn't know I was an expert on near-death experiences. He didn't know anything about me. He didn't know I'd written any books or anything She starts telling me of her near-death experience When she has a heart attack She's expecting to be judged by the Prophet Ali, which is kind of in their culture, and because her

1
0:18:07
kids had become followers of Jesus, she felt incredible shame, like she had failed. So she expected judgment, she said, but instead this brilliant man of light comes to her, who she knows has ultimate authority, and says, I am he who is, and boom, she's back in her body. And she said, but with a peace and with a joy she had never felt. Now, here's the crazy thing, is you know, all over the globe, these people are experiencing either this brilliant God of light,

1
0:18:44
who is love, or in some cases, it's this man of light who they don't know who he is or some know he's Jesus but it goes all the way back to 3,500 years ago Moses on Mount Sinai sees this brilliant light that won't burn the bush up. Why not? Well it's the same light people are experiencing and that light says to Moses when he asked, who are you? He says, I am he who is. Exactly what he says to Bibi in Tehran in our modern day, right? I mean then you have, and what I like to point out, is all the way back in Genesis chapter 12, God raises up Abraham and

1
0:19:30
Sarah and says to them, I'm going to bless you to bless all the nations. So, the God of the Scriptures often gets, I think, misunderstood, and in some cases because religious people can really misrepresent, right? And I like to point out that it was religious people in the name of God who crucified Jesus, so this is not new. But when you really take the Scriptures in the heart of God and what He's been revealing all along, He's the God of all nations. And 500 times through the Old Testament prophets, He speaks to all the nations. And one of the things that I'm showing in Imagining the God of Heaven is that He was even foretelling what he was going to do in entering our world.

1
0:20:31
Again, I think God entering our world as the Messiah would be kind of like me as a three-dimensional being entering a two-dimensional world, but I could only appear as a slice. And it was like through Jesus, not all there is to know or see about God, but in a slice called humanity that we could understand, enters. But all that was foretold. And I was convinced as a skeptical engineer of that, for separate reasons from near-death experiences, but I put that in the book, Imagine the God of Heaven.

1
0:21:06
But Jesus comes and he says things like, I am the light of the world, whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but have the light of life. Right? When he's transfigured, his followers said, he took him up on a mountain to show him his glory and his face became brighter than the sun. Okay. And then he says, after his crucifixion and resurrection, go tell all the nations, there's forgiveness in my name. That's what he was doing. In other words, he was making a way that all people of all nations

1
0:21:43
could be made right with God and know they're right with God simply by turning their hearts back. Like he removed every barrier between every person and himself except one, which is our pride and our free will. You know, I think that's really important because God is love and the one thing that love necessitates is free will.

1
0:22:07
You can't force someone to love you. And that's true of even God. He self-limits in creating creatures who could love him back. So anyway, yeah, there are people all over the world. Jewish girl whose mantra, her father was an atheist, very abusive. Every day he said to his three daughters, there is no God, your life is worthless, Jesus

1
0:22:35
Christ is the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on mankind. And yet despite that, she always believed in God and prayed to God every night as a little girl and would talk to this God she couldn't see about all the abuses in her home and felt comforted and almost like rocked to sleep at night. Okay, so here's what's really wild. At 16, her horse falls on her and crushes her, stepped off the side of a hill and falls back and crushes her and boom she's up 30 feet above her body. She knows she's dead. She said, I felt great.

1
0:23:16
I was just sad that watching my little sisters have to see this. And she sees a light over her shoulder and she turns and looks and there is floating 30 feet up with her a man of light, again, brighter than the sun. But she knew who it was and she said, I know you. And she said, this was Jesus and she said I knew that that this man was the God I had prayed to my whole life I just knew it and

1
0:23:47
Then he smiles at her and and and they communicate and communication on the other side is thought to thought It's like pure Every there's no misunderstanding and he says to her, you know, do you want to see your life? And she says, OK. And this is another commonality of a life review. And so, again, on the other side, time doesn't work the same way either.

1
0:24:13
So near-death experiencers have told me there was no time. But others have said, no, there was time. It's just there was all the time you needed. So time didn't work in a linear fashion. And interestingly, and these are the kinds of commonalities I trace, in 2 Peter 3, 8, one of Jesus' disciples, Peter, says,

1
0:24:37
To the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years is like a day. Now, I've had near-death experiences say almost the same thing. I was dead from my body 30 minutes, but I don't know if I relive my life in an instant or it took me 30 years. I couldn't tell, but they relive their lives. So Heidi is watching, almost like in a panoramic, three-dimensional, like a hologram, but the real thing, watching it play out again.

1
0:25:12
And she's there with Jesus, but she's also reliving it. But not only her thoughts and her feelings, but she also experienced, and this is common, the thoughts and feelings of every person

2
0:25:26
she was interacting with.

1
0:25:27
Oh, wow. And that's also what they commonly say, is that, when I came back, I realized, one, God is love, and two, how we love or treat one another is what matters most to God. And of course, that's exactly what Jesus said. He said, you know, when asked what's the greatest commandment, he said, love God with all your

1
0:25:49
heart, with all your soul, with everything. And the second is like it, love your neighbor as much as you love yourself. Fulfill those two and you fulfill all the commandments. And so this is what near-death experience is, and that's what I'm trying to show, that all these things they're coming back with, they align. In her life review, sees herself as a little 8-year-old girl, and growing up, praying at

1
0:26:16
night, and she said, he was there with me the whole time. I saw him. I saw him in my life review. He was the one comforting me at night, you know, and just think about it with all these I mean a little girl going through horrible abuses, you know, which she did and Just the compassion the compassion of God. Yeah, and so it's wild because then Jesus takes her to

1
0:26:40
to this heavenly realm and She experiences this God of light who she now says is like God the Father and She said to me. I I don't know how God can be light and God can be love and God can also be a man and How this God The Father was distinct from Jesus yet. They were the same. She said I don't understand it, but that's what I experienced.

1
0:27:17
So that's the wild thing that I'm showing is all over the globe. Swedik, a Muslim Imam in Rwanda, has a similar experience. Dr. Belchung, who is a PhD psychologist in Singapore, another professor in Australia, a lawyer in Australia, chief anesthesiologist of the Bakersfield Heart Hospital who grew up Hindu in India and thought near-death experiences were totally bogus. He had brought many patients back as a chief anesthesiologist and heard them say these

1
0:28:00
wild stories of traveling through a tunnel to this place of beauty and this God of light and he'd give him a shot of anti-psychotic drug. And then he had one himself. It happened to him. And it's just wild because it was exactly like what is recorded in Acts chapter 9 Where you know Paul?

1
0:28:28
Who was one of the Pharisees he was one of the religious leaders of the group that had Jesus crucified? right and the reason that happened is they had a lot of power and a lot of wealth and Jesus really called him out on it. He said you're hypocrites. You're whitewashed tombs You know you look all pretty on the outside, but you're rotting. Your hearts are not in the right place with God.

1
0:28:53
You're not about love. You're not about loving God and loving people. You're all about maintaining. Well, they didn't like that, and they ultimately crucified him. But of course, God used that for the greatest good. But Paul was one of them.

1
0:29:08
And he was actually, this is after Jesus resurrected, he's on his way arresting followers of Jesus, putting them in prison and even having them killed. Because he thought, you know, they're blaspheming, they're just wrong. So, he's doing this in the name of God, right? And it says, he's on his way, went on the Damascus road, this is Acts chapter 9, this brilliant light appears to him, okay, sound familiar? And he says, who are you, Lord?

1
0:29:43
Because he knows this is God, just like Santosh did. He said, no one had to tell me, I knew. There's no doubt who this is. And this brilliant light says, I'm Jesus, who you're persecuting. And Paul, then, you know, that's basically all he tells him.

1
0:30:03
And then Ananias, this guy, comes to Paul later and explains what Jesus did. And so Paul still had a choice. And I like to point this out because near-death experiencers can experience all this wonder and this God of love, and they have a choice when they come back. They can either seek to know and follow this God, or they can still seek their own will in their own ways. And most don't, but some do.

1
0:30:28
And so Paul though, you know, he ends up, of course, following Jesus and writes a good chunk of the New Testament. And interestingly, I think might've had a near-death experience when he was later in Acts chapter 14, it talks about

1
0:30:46
how he was stoned to death and then he talks in 2nd Corinthians 12 he says of himself 14 years ago whether I was in my body or out of my body I don't know but I was taken up to heaven and I heard and saw things inexpressible and so I think that might have happened you know even in All that to say though, here this Hindu man, Dr. Parthi, chief anesthesiologist at the Bakersfield Heart Hospital,

1
0:31:19
has the same experience. And he asked this God of light and love, who are you, Lord? And he tells me, out of this light steps a man with a beard and a robe, who stretches out his arms to him and says, I'm Jesus your Savior. And he drops to his knees and says, Namaste. So yes, 70 people all over the globe I'm reporting on. And what I'm trying to show,

1
0:31:47
and I think this is an important point because it gets misunderstood. Because many people go like, oh, so you're saying that Christianity is the right religion, right? That's kind of where people go.

4
0:32:04
Sure.

1
0:32:05
No, no, what I'm trying to show is there is only one God who created all people of all nations to be his children, all of us. And what he happened to do throughout history, and ultimately through Jesus, was for the sake of all people of all nations, so that anyone, anywhere, at any point, could know they are right with God, and walk in confidence of this loving relationship.

1
0:32:38
That's the amazing thing, what God told Santosh, because he sees this very narrow gate that was opened to him into the kingdom of heaven. And he says, Lord, I want to go through that narrow gate when I come back. How do I go through that? And he's thinking, what temple, what mosque, what church, what, you know, what religious

1
0:33:00
practice do I do?

4
0:33:03
Right.

1
0:33:04
And the Lord says to him, no, I want relationship. I want to see how honest, how truthful, how real and sincere will you be with me? Not one day a week, you know, like going to a church or going to a temple or going to a mosque. 24-7, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, walk with me. That's what he told Santosh.

4
0:33:30
Cool. That's really cool.

2
0:33:33
How do you find your case studies and these individuals to interview?

1
0:33:38
Well, it took me 35 years. I will say though, I wrote Imagine Heaven in 2015. And so since then, it became a New York Times bestseller and is in like 25 languages. And so I've had more and more people reaching out to me from all over the globe.

4
0:34:04
Wow.

2
0:34:05
Now, one thing that kind of surprised me listening to you is the hellish experiences that some of these NDEs have as well. Can you elaborate a little bit about that? Because we automatically think of the heavenly experiences.

9
0:34:23
Yeah.

2
0:34:24
Yeah. I'm curious about those.

1
0:34:27
Yeah, so initially, so back in the 80s when I first started studying these and collecting them, no one was coming forward with any hellish experiences. And so as a result, you know, people make interpretations with the data they have, right? And that's one of the things I like to point out, is that someone can have what I would call a very shallow near-death experience. Like let's say they leave their body, they have this new spiritual body, they feel wonderful,

1
0:35:05
new powers of sight and senses and all this, and then they come back into their body, and you can interpret that in any world view in any way you want, right? And people do, right? And what is sometimes shocking to me, but I guess I understand it somewhat, is they're not taking into account the thousands of other near-death experiences. They're just acting like, well, mine was the supreme one, and I have the right now to interpret

1
0:35:35
all reality based on this one mystical experience I had. And I don't think that's wise.

8
0:35:41
Right. Sure. Yeah.

1
0:35:43
Because they contradict each other in some cases. So what I'm trying to show is that what they commonly report, in other words, the things they report right when they come back that do overlap each other, not just any one-off.

1
0:36:01
So I don't believe what every near-death experiencer says I'm always skeptical I'm always like yeah, maybe and I'm and I'm waiting to see Okay, do do others say the same thing consistently? How does that align with other things that I'm sure of that have been revealed? So and that's what I'm trying to trying to put together But the hellish ones, so more and more people,

1
0:36:22
one of the things you have to understand is people are very reticent to come forward at all. Sure. When they would, they would have, I mean, just like Dr. Partee,

7
0:36:34
they would think they're psychotic.

1
0:36:36
Right. And the nurses and the doctors, when they share these kinds of things. And so they just kind of shut up about it. Because it's sacred. It's like, how do you explain something more real than this? Right?

6
0:37:01
Yeah, exactly.

1
0:37:03
But just like if we were living in a two-dimensional world and then you experience three dimensions of color, how do you explain three dimensions of color in black and white two-dimensional words. It would be almost impossible. And I've used that example with enough that I've interviewed and they said exactly. Yeah, that's why. And so they grapple for words. So people started coming forward though sharing hellish near-death experiences. In one study, 23% of the people who came forward sharing a near-death experience had a hellish or troubling one.

1
0:37:41
More recently, and this is what people don't realize is there are millions of these. So in 2019, the European Academy of Neurology reported on a study done across 35 countries and found, they reported that 10% of the population has had a near-death experience. So, you know, if someone says they had some experience that has similarities, but they're not clinically dead, I don't know what to do with that. It's like, okay, well maybe, but you know, but when someone has no brain waves, when

1
0:38:18
they're dead and have a hospital record of an hour and 45 minutes without brain waves, that's worth listening to. And especially when you have a lot of them saying the same things. So that's where I go with my research. So all that to say, in that European study, across 35 countries, the number who reported hellish experiences was even greater.

1
0:39:09
So you have to take the good with the bad, and you have to make sense of all of it. So I'll tell you one example is a guy named Howard who was a professor, a tenured professor, an atheist. He was traveling through France and his lower duodenum ruptured, which basically spills poison into your gut cavity. You have five to maybe eight hours before you die. It was Saturday, so they couldn't find a surgeon. And after eight hours, he dies. Now he told me, I thought it was just, you unplug the computer and the screen goes blank.

1
0:39:55
There's nothing. He said, but what happened is suddenly I feel the worst I've ever felt in my life, and suddenly I feel wonderful. I'm standing by my bed in the room, and I said, you didn't know you were dead? And he said, no, because I wasn't expecting that. And he said, I felt wonderful.

1
0:40:17
And I'm sitting there thinking, what's going on? Because I feel so good. In fact, I have, you know, he said I had these heightened senses. I felt better than I've ever felt. And then there are these people in the hallway calling his name. Howard, we're here for you.

1
0:40:33
Come with us. Now, interestingly, another commonality of near-death experiences is that oftentimes there is a welcoming committee of people. It's like people who are blind from birth. When they have a near-death experience, they can see. And they report the same things as sighted people.

1
0:40:59
So like Vicky is seeing these people in this heavenly realm coming toward her, and everything is just bursting with light, but she says the light was love and life, and it was coming out of everything. And there's this welcoming committee and she sees her grandmother who had died and two of her close friend childhood friends who had died. They're all coming toward her. So that's a commonality. And interestingly, Jesus said that in Luke chapter 16, he says, use your worldly resources

1
0:41:30
to make friends in this life, so that when it's all gone, they'll welcome you into an eternal home. So this welcoming committee is real and normal. Interestingly, blind people plus sighted people all over the world talk about the light of the world, right? Follow me and you'll walk in the light of life. Okay, but fascinatingly, in Isaiah, Isaiah chapter 60, so the ancient Jewish prophet and John in Revelation 21 says there's no sun or moon in heaven.

1
0:42:17
The glory of God is its light and the nations will walk in that light. And so here you have blind people saying that, yet they wouldn't have heard that, because when they come back, when they're resuscitated, they're still blind. I'm about to interview another guy today who died at age 8 and was blind. I kind of went on a tangent. My point is, the welcoming committee is a commonality. But with Howard, he has a welcoming committee as well, but he doesn't know who this is. He thinks these people in the hallway who are calling to him, come with us, are the

1
0:42:56
hospital staff. And he says to them, I need surgery. And they say, we know, come with us. Don't you want to get better? We've been waiting for you a long time. We don't you want to get better?

1
0:43:09
Come with us. Okay, so what I like to point out is, if Howard's near-death experience had ended there, right, he's resuscitated, he would have come back saying, it's all good, atheists go to heaven, I had this new spiritual body, I felt wonderful, there were these nice people, you know, life goes on.

2
0:43:32
I don't need to change.

1
0:43:35
Nothing matters, doesn't matter what you think, what you believe, how you act, because he told me, I was not a good person, he said. He wasn't faithful to his wife, he wasn't good to his kids, he said, I was just about me and building my own personal fame and worth. But what happened, and I report this full story, it's pretty wild, in Imagine Heaven, in the chapter on hellish near-death experiences. He follows them

1
0:44:04
and again time doesn't work the same way, distance doesn't work the same way, so he's following them and he ends up realizing we've gone too far, like the hospital can't be this big. And this is very trippy but he realizes they're deceiving him. And then they start, like, mocking him and, you know, pushing him and shoving him. And he finds himself in this place of outer darkness. This is just what Jesus talked about, a place of outer darkness, where there's weeping and gnashing of teeth.

1
0:44:45
That's the way Jesus described it. And he tries to get away and then they start to just kick him and shove him and bite him and do things to him. So Howard is a good friend now. He's become a good friend over the years and I've interviewed him many times. And he's told me as I've asked more and more details, he says consistently, I can't go farther than that in explaining to you what happened. He said, because I've had PTSD from it.

1
0:45:19
Because it's more real than this. So the wild thing, and I won't tell the whole story, but Howard in this darkness though, hears in his soul, and they are doing things to... I mean, imagine the worst prison scene. Imagine the worst things that people can do to other people and then multiply it. And here's, I'll put a little pin on it, here's why. Because hell, God did not create hell for people.

1
0:45:56
You know, he doesn't want anybody to go there. But God created people for love. God is love. And he created us for his love and to love him back. But like I said, I can't buy someone else's love. I can give them gifts, but maybe they love the gifts,

1
0:46:17
but don't love me. I can't put a gun to their head and make them love me. They may parrot stuff, but we all know that's not real love. So God allows us in free will even to reject God. And so I believe that is why we are in this temporary, temporal world. For a time, not forever.

1
0:46:41
And we are experiencing both a taste of heaven and a taste of hell. You know, why does God, if he loves us, allow so much suffering? Well, what if God, because He loves us, is allowing so much less suffering for a time in hopes that we'll see what's missing? Which is God, and God's will, and God's love, and God's light, and yet He's not removed completely.

1
0:47:12
So in this world, we can still, we have a conscience and we have, I think, the promptings of God's spirit and even law. Those things constrain evil. But the only place that God stays out is hell. So God created a place where free will creatures who say, I don't want you God, I want my will be done. I know what's best for me, you know?

4
0:47:41
Right.

1
0:47:42
And basically reject his love. And so there's no love, there's no light, there's no life. Every good thing we've ever enjoyed and created, you know, we're deceived if we think we somehow thought that up. He created us to be able to experience all that.

5
0:47:58
Right.

1
0:47:59
So that is what hell is and Howard told me It is the free will creature then Without the love and life and light of God Just saying my will be done. So it is dominate or be dominated Yes, and he experienced it, but here's the love and the grace and the mercy of God even in that

1
0:48:20
place he hears in his he said in his like his solar plexus like his heart soul he hears pray to God and he hears it again pray to God and he's so here's the thing about the ego our egos can imprison us in our self-will if we're not careful so even as he's being eviscerated in this outer darkness. He's thinking I don't believe in God. I don't pray to God What would I pray even if I? you know, it's craziness and

1
0:48:58
yet because of all this he starts just saying words with God's name in it and these people Who he realized he said to me I realized that these people were my kindred spirits."

4
0:49:14
Wow.

1
0:49:15
So he said, I realized on earth they had lived like I had lived for me. And he said, I knew I was going to become like them if I kept on this journey away from God with them. But when he starts saying even the name of God, first they get even more angry and said, we're gonna hurt you even worse,

1
0:49:45
we're gonna take you, you'll never get out. I mean, all these horrible things, but they're backing off. And he hears in his mind again, the song when someone took him to church as a little kid, Jesus loves me. It comes into his mind. And he thinks, even if there is Jesus, why would he love me? You know, because he realized, I mean on the other side, here you can hide from the truth and we can rationalize and deceive

1
0:50:17
ourselves, but you can't over there. You don't. I mean, everybody says that. And so he ends up just in desperation crying out, Jesus, if you are real, save me. OK, so here's crazy. A tenured atheist professor is saying this, that into this darkness comes this pinpoint of light,

1
0:50:46
brighter and brighter, till it becomes bright as the sun, arms reach out, pick him up and hold him like a mother comforting a little baby as he just sobs. Because he just realized I was so wrong. And yet then he feels a hand just kind of like stroking his back, just like comforting him.

1
0:51:09
And they shoot out of there and then he talks about how in the presence with Jesus holding him in The presence of angels they show him his life his life review Now, I mean, it's a crazy wild story, but Howard comes back from that experience Jesus sends him back and Two years later. He leaves a tenured professorship So tenure is what every professor wants.

1
0:51:38
You can't be fired. This atheist leaves a tenured professorship to go to seminary to become a pastor. His wife leaves him because she's still an atheist and she thinks he's just gone crazy. But he is for years now just trying to help people understand the reality of the love of God and how you know God can and will forgive anything of anyone at any point Because all he wants is our hearts walking with him

1
0:52:13
One more question I do want to ask what about Guardian Angels

2
0:52:16
Anything with NDE's or research with that?

1
0:52:27
Yeah, yeah, and it's fascinating because many say they experience these angels with them and each one is different to a degree and unique, each near-death experience, but angels are one of those. And many times they know, like Jim Woodford, interestingly that I interviewed was a commercial airline pilot. He had never prayed a day in his life, very wealthy man. He had a horse farm, 19 British sports cars in his garage, a yacht, his own airplane. And then he gets Guillain-Barre, a very painful disease, becomes addicted to opioids and accidentally

1
0:53:30
overdoses. His wife was a believer and was praying for him. He grew up Catholic but had just kind of walked away from it. He said, I had never really thought about God or prayed to God. I didn't need God. Why do I need God? But he said, John, you know when you're dying. And in his truck that day he knew,

1
0:53:53
oh no, what have I done? Because he accidentally took too many opioids. And he said, I had this thought, you've never thanked God for the life you thought was your own doing. Which he thinks now was the voice of God in him, just giving him one last like, hey buddy, I'm here, what are you going to do? And I've seen this, that God is pursuing people to the last moment. And as his head is hitting the steering wheel, he cries out,

1
0:54:27
Lord, forgive me. And I jokingly say to Jim, I think you beat the thief on the cross next to Jesus for last minute. And he says, that's actually who I identify with. You know, the thief on the cross who

1
0:54:43
one of them said, Jesus, if you're really the Messiah, you know, use your power and get me down off here. And Jesus said nothing to him. The other guy says, we deserve this. He doesn't. Lord, when you come in your kingdom, remember me. That's all he said. And Jesus looks at the guy and says, you'll be with me today. It's such a beautiful reminder of, it's just our hearts, you know, turning back to him, not in pride, but in humility. And that's what he needs.

1
0:55:10
So Jim, interestingly, then first experiences more of a hellish experience. And I've noticed that, that in some cases when people just are crying out to God, when they realize that at the last moment, like Karina, this Colombian woman I interviewed, she leaves her body and suddenly she realizes, oh my gosh, there's an afterlife and there is a God. And again, she grew up Catholic too. She starts praying the, our Father, the, you know, the Lord's Prayer, but sincerely. And she too experiences like she's headed to somewhere

1
0:55:52
hellish, but God rescues her. So this happens to Jim as well. And it's these three angels that rescue him. And so he sees these three magnificent creatures. And this is a commonality that, and again, I don't believe everything every near-death experiencer tells me, but then when they start saying the same things over and over, I'm like, interesting. So they commonly say, like, he said one was 10 feet tall another was like 12 feet tall another

1
0:56:30
like 15 feet tall and and and the 10-foot one he later found out was his guardian angel who had been with him from conception Wow the 12-foot one and again they're they're they're just regal in nature. He said they had these violet eyes, but eyes of love for him. And the tallest one, he said, was a warrior, looked like a warrior. Mean interesting at first, you know, I kind of put that on the shelf like yeah, maybe yeah

1
0:57:17
But then when I hear again and again and again Similar descriptions like this. I'm like wild, right? Well, I don't want to take too much of your time, thank you so much John I

4
0:57:27
Really appreciate this

2
0:57:29
What's the best way for our listeners to follow you, get a hold of you, and kind of go from

1
0:57:44
there? Yeah, all the information is out on ImagineHeaven.net. ImagineHeaven.net. Yeah, and all the stories I've been telling and how it all aligns is in Imagine Heaven or Imagine the God of Heaven.

3
0:58:00
Awesome.

2
0:58:01
Well, thank you so much. It's been a treat. Well, thanks Heather. Well, thank you so much. It's been a treat. Well, thanks Heather.

1
0:58:04
Appreciate it. Take care.

Transcribed with Cockatoo