← Imagine Heaven Podcast with John Burke
Imagine Heaven Podcast with John Burke
3 Incredible Proofs of Heaven: What Global Near-death Experiences Reveal
01:03:24
What if Heaven is more real than we ever imagined? And what will it be like? John Burke has spent over 40 years researching 1000+ near-death experiences (NDEs) and wrote the New York Times bestseller Imagine Heaven, with over 1 million copies sold. In...
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- [00:00]
John Burke
After studying over a thousand near death experiences when someone is literally dead for minutes to hours and then somehow they come back and they consistently say the same things, that should get our attention. I'm John Burke, author of the New York Times bestselling book Imagine Heaven. Welcome to the Imagine Heaven podcast. Today I'm going to share with you how I went from being a skeptical agnostic engineer to faith in God and becoming a researcher, an author and pastor after studying over a thousand near death experiences during a 35 year period of time. Today you're going to hear from Joe Rogan interviewing skeptic and atheist Dr. Michael Shermer as they talk about their alternate explanations for what a near death experience really is.
- [00:52]
Joe Rogan
Things that are happening while your brain is basically on the edge of death, right?
- [00:58]
Dr. Michael Shermer
So it's important to remember that they're near death experiences. You're not actually dead. So there's a liminal transitional stage there where you're sliding into some other state of consciousness.
- [01:09]
John Burke
And I'm going to present to you evidence and you're going to hear from some of the people I've interviewed, even people blind from birth who say that during their near death experience they could see.
- [01:20]
Dean Braxton
I knew that I was experiencing a sense that I never experienced before. How could I know about traffic going up and down street spine surgeons, commercial.
- [01:31]
John Burke
Airline pilots, CEOs talking about their experience. So let's dive in.
- [01:36]
Brad Burroughs
The boat and I were immediately and completely submerged under about 8 or 10ft of water. I knew that I had been underwater already too long to still be alive. My spirit rose up and out of the river. I saw my body being pulled ashore. I saw the guys start cpr and I could look at my body and recognize that that was my body, that that represented my life here.
- [02:01]
Santosh
We were in an accident where another horse ran into my horse. She reared up, flipped over backwards with me on her back and fell across my body. As she hit my chest, I immediately left my body. I was up 30, 40ft in the air.
- [02:17]
Dean Braxton
I was looking down at a airplane that had crashed. I had seen a body over here that was dead.
- [02:25]
John Burke
But I knew this body really. It hit me. I'm not my body. There's my body, but here's me. When I first heard of near death experiences like these, I was still a skeptic. I was an agnostic. I thought Jesus was probably a legend. God, you just couldn't know. And by the way, you know, if you still are a skeptic or an atheist, but you are open minded, keep listening because there is actually tons of evidence. If evidence is really what you want, if you're truly open minded, I think you'll find a lot of evidence. And that's kind of what I'm hoping for in this podcast, is to give people who are skeptical like I was, the evidence that I found. But if you're a believer, I think this podcast is really going to help you ground your faith, to know that you know there are reasons to believe what you do, but also to inspire you, not only with the hope of what's to come after this life, but how that actually makes a difference in how we live our best life today. So when I first heard of these near death experiences, it was when my dad was dying of cancer and someone gave him the very first research that coined the term near death experience. It was actually on his bedside table. And I picked it up and I started reading it and I was shocked because, like I said, I was an agnostic and I thought there's just no evidence. And yet I read the whole book in one night. And I thought, oh my gosh, like, if this is legitimate, this could be actual evidence for this afterlife and God and Jesus stuff. Because so many of them were talking about they were clinically dead, in other words, no heartbeat, no brain waves. And yet when they were resuscitated, whether by modern medicine or miracle or whatever brought them back, they claimed that they were more alive than they'd ever felt in a place more real than this has ever felt. A place of incredible beauty, not unlike earth, but far more vivid. And many times in the presence of this God of light and love, whose presence they never wanted to leave. And so I read this book in one night and it opened my mind. And because of what I read of so many of these people encountering this God of light and love, and many of them encountering Jesus, I started reading the Bible. And as a result, over the next few years, I came to faith in Christ. Since then, I actually have gone from a career in engineering to becoming a pastor to help people who are skeptical or doubting or struggling really understand why not only is there evidence, but also how do we live the life that God intended us to. Many people don't realize this, but millions of people all around the globe have had near death experiences. In 2019, the European Academy of Neurology did reported on a study across 35 countries and they found that 10% of the populations of those countries claim they had a near death experience. Now, I dove into the details of that research and I think it's more like 5% of people who were clinically dead and had a near death experience. And by the way, that's what I focus on. Like if there's actual evidence they're clinically dead, when someone is literally dead for minutes to hours and then somehow they come back and they consistently say the same things that should get our attention, right? Because after all, we all are going to die. So what could be more important than figuring out, is there anything after and how should that affect what I'm doing now and how I'm living now? You know, there have actually been about 900 scholarly articles written about near death experiences. So these have been greatly highly studied over the last 40 years. There have been articles written in the Journal of the American Medical association by a doctor I interviewed, Dr. Michael Sabim. He wrote up an article after five years of research trying to disprove near death experiences and he became convinced there's something real here. Cardiologist Dr. Pim Van Lommel, who you'll hear from in a little bit. He also wrote in the Lancet. But what about alternate explanations? I mean, when I first came across this research and I was still skeptical, I thought, well, maybe it's hallucination, you know, maybe it's just something that happens in the brain as you're dying, or maybe it's chemicals flooding the brain that that does this. And there have been lots of alternate explanations. I've thought through a lot of them. I write about a lot of them. But let's hear from some of them because Joe Rogan, interestingly interviewing Dr. Michael Shermer, who you may know is an atheist, editor of Skeptic magazine, he talks about quite a few of them.
- [07:52]
Joe Rogan
Listen, did you go over near death experiences?
- [07:56]
Dr. Michael Shermer
I do, yeah. I have a chapter on that.
- [07:58]
Joe Rogan
What do you think is going on? Like when people like the ones that have fascinated me are people in the hospital bed that see their body from above and you're dealing with a bunch of chemicals that are released in the body.
- [08:09]
Dean Braxton
Right.
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Joe Rogan
There's morphine and all sorts of different things, psychedelic chemicals and all these different things that are happening while your brain is basically on the edge of death.
- [08:21]
Dr. Michael Shermer
Right. So it's important to remember that they're near death experiences. You're not actually dead. So there's a liminal transitional stage there where you're sliding into some other state of consciousness. Consciousness, an altered state of consciousness. And we know that if you inject or you take hallucinogens, you know, those are molecules that operate on a lock and key. Mechanism with the synapses in your brain, in your neurons. So if they, these external drugs work in this molecular lock and key mechanism, there must be natural chemicals similar molecularly to that in the brain already, just in smaller doses. So one theory about near death experiences is that this is a way of transitioning from living to dead without feeling anxious and falling apart and upset and depressed or whatever. It's kind of a smooth feel, good, you know, better than a morphine drip kind of way of making the transition. And. But we know, for example, that this scientist named Dr. James Winery worked for the United States Air Force, working with pilots, accelerating them in a centrifuge. And they would black out as part of their training. You know, two GS, three GS, four GS, boom, out you go at some point, like 10 GS. And most of them have these little dreamlit states that he called them, which are kind of like, I saw a tunnel, a white light at the end of the tunnel. I felt myself floating out of the seat and having these sort of weird experiences. And we know exactly what that is. You know, the blood is being compressed to the center of the body, including the center of the brain. The last thing to go is your brain stem, of course, to keep you alive. So the cortex is shutting down from the outside in. That would create this kind of tunneling effect on the back of your skull where your visual cortex is. That would create some of that open brain surgeries. These are on epileptic patients where they cut them open and they poke around to see where the seizures are starting. And so they could zap those neurons instead of some big crude attack. Anyway, so while they're doing that, they get permission from the patient to wake them up while they're under and the brain is open and they tap around with electrodes. So this is one way to map what the brain is doing. So what do you report when I tap here? Oh, I just had a vision of my 10th birthday or whatever. And it's like, okay, that's where that, that's stored right there. Well, there's another spot right on the, the temporal lobes just above your ears where you can tap it. And the person says, oh, I'm floating out of my body. I'm up by the ceiling now. And you tap a little to the left on. My left leg is up, my right leg is up now my left arm is floating, my right arm is floating. I'm way up here now. Now I'm coming back down just by, you know, with a rheostat just controlling how much electricity is going into the neurons in that one particular spot. So we know for sure that the near death experiences are in the brain.
- [11:05]
John Burke
Joe Rogan and Michael Shermer talk about several alternate hypotheses to what a near death experience is. In other words, the vast majority of people who have near death experiences, and again, I've studied thousands of them, I've interviewed many of them and they consistently say I was still alive, my consciousness survived my body. We go on, there is life after life. But what they're saying is, well, it's a flood of chemicals. It's happening. You know, these chemical molecular reactions happen in your brain. The people aren't really dead, dead. Shermer talked about fighter pilot syndrome, anoxia. When, when these fighter pilots go through this training, what happens is there's a lack of oxygen to the brain. And of course when you're dying, there's that. And as a result, the fighter pilots feel like they're going through this tunnel that gets narrow and narrow and a bright light at the end. So they're saying, well, see, these things are reproduced in the brain in these different scenarios. He also talks about some research that I've looked into by Dr. Walter Penfield. This was decades ago. Penfield was doing brain surgery on epileptic patients trying to cure epilepsy. It's kind of a weird deal, but he would open up their brain and they would be conscious and he would zap it with electrodes and he was mapping the brain of where different neural networks store memories and things like that. And he would zap a part of the brain and their arm would raise up. But here's what's fascinating is Penfield thought that we are our brains, right? So there's not a dualism like Shermer talked about which he would not believe in, that there's both a soul and a body and that the soul is separate from the body. Now, interestingly, Penfield changed his mind because these epileptic patients, when their right arm would go up, when he zapped a part of their brain, their arm would go up. But they would say, I'm not doing that, you're doing that. And that confused Penfield because he's like, well, who is the I if it's not the brain? It's like there's a soul saying that. You're making me do that by moving the electrodes or zapping the electrodes in my brain. I'm not doing that. So Penfield actually became a dualist, believing there is a soul separate from the body. But he also came across this trigger point in the brain where like Shermer said, they would say things like I'm leaving my body now and then come back in. That doesn't mean that these are happening in the brain. I think that could actually mean there is a trigger point in our brain that releases our soul. I think that might even be what's happening with, you know, the so called gateway drugs. And Rogan and Shermer talk about some of those dmt, ayahuasca, others that seem to give this kind of release of the soul from the body into the spiritual experience. Maybe that's actually happening, but it's not necessarily a safe way to go to the other side, so to speak. That's something we'll talk about later in another podcast. What Shermer and Joe Rogan are missing is the real hardcore evidence that none of those alternate explanations account for. And that's what I want to go over. What convinced me when I was still a skeptical engineer, but it's also convinced many skeptical medical doctors. And there are actually 10 points of evidence that I put in my book, Imagine the God of Heaven. I'm just going to give you three of them verifiable observations. When people are out of their bodies, they can see what's going on with their resuscitation and later report on it and it can be verified. The second one is that blind people, when they have a near death experience, they can see. And the third is that people all over the globe who had maybe different religious backgrounds, different expectations or no expectation, encountered the same God of light and love consistently all over the globe. And those three things alone cannot be accounted for if this is just brain based like Shermer talks about. So let's dive into each one. So the first thing that really convinced me were verifiable observations. You know, when, when people clinically die, they say that they leave their body, but they still had a body. They say I had a spiritual body and I was still myself, but not just with five senses, more like 50 senses, like hyper senses, new powers of sight and communication. And at the same time, they many times claim that they were up above their physical body and able to observe their resuscitation or what was happening in the room or in the accident where their body was still lying. When they are resuscitated or when they come back to earth, they're able to describe things that they should not have been able to see, especially when they had no brain waves. How would they see these things. Shermer said, well, they weren't really dead. But I want you to listen to a few of the people that I've interviewed, like Dean Braxton, who has the medical records from the hospital showing how long he was dead. Also Dr. Mary Neal, who's a spine surgeon that I interviewed, she had a near death experience when her kayak was pinned under a waterfall. Randy Kay, who was a CEO when I interviewed him. And listen to what they say about this wasn't near death, this was dead dead.
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Dr. Mary Neal
Everything in my body started shutting down. According to the medical records, it was an hour and 45 minutes that I was not breathing or heart beating. During that time frame.
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Brad Burroughs
I knew that I had been underwater already too long to still be alive. The people who resuscitated me would say I was underwater 30 minutes. They would say that I was dead.
- [17:47]
John Burke
The nine wheels at the driver's side of the truck just rolled over the car. So I was just really killed instantly. Blunt force trauma. They pronounced me dead on the scene. So how do we know these people were truly dead? Doctors, cardiologists, oncologists have actually been able to look at medical records to show, yeah, these people were truly dead by all the ways that we would clinically talk about death. As to how long I was clinically dead without brain function or heart function.
- [18:22]
Dr. Mary Neal
At least 30 minutes because of not having oxygen to my brain that long, I should not be able to function like I'm functioning because I didn't have any brain wave at that time.
- [18:33]
John Burke
That fact that the near death experiences are occurring during that time, that consciousness should be a blank slate, is medically inexplicable. It should be impossible for them to be remembering anything.
- [18:44]
Dr. Mary Neal
You may say I didn't go to heaven, but you can't say I didn't die.
- [18:48]
John Burke
So they're not nearly dead. It's interesting, you know, why do they even call it near death experience? And I was tempted to call it something else, but that term was out there. And I wanted people to see how these things align with scripture. Because there are like 40 commonalities that I traced to these near death experiences. And all of them are found in the Bible. That's what I was really writing about in my first book, Imagine Heaven. Shermer's saying they aren't dead. And yet that's not consistent with the evidence. I mean, how do you have someone who has no heartbeat for 30 minutes and you can't call them dead, they're just near death, yet they had no brain waves Dean Braxton. An hour and 45 minutes, Randy. 30 minutes. They tell you that that deterioration of the brain starts to happen within about five minutes. So there's something pretty wild, I would even say miraculous happening here. And yet people have hospital records. I want you to just note these aren't just like wild, crazy people making up stories. Why would a spine surgeon or a CEO or a commercial airline pilot. Why would they make up these wild stories? It only hurts their career, right? And yet they've told me it was the most important and the most real thing that's ever happened. And they have to talk about it. In fact, they believe God sent them back to talk about it for our benefit. And that's honestly why I'm doing this. Well, interestingly, you know, Paul writes about a lot of these things, like this spiritual body and these new powers. And I believe that Paul, who wrote a good chunk of the New Testament, may have actually had a near death experience. You know, it says in the New Testament in Acts chapter 14 that Paul was in Lystra. This is a city around Turkey, Greece area. And a mob turned on him and stoned him to death. Here's what it says in Acts 14:19. They stoned Paul and dragged him out of town thinking he was dead. But as the believers gathered around him, he got up and went back into the town. Personally, I would not go back into the town where they just stoned me to death. But that's Paul, I guess. But you know, they knew how to kill people back then. They didn't make mistakes when they're heaping big stones on him and then drag him out of the, out of the city dead. Okay. And yet, interestingly, Paul resuscitates somehow, seemingly in a miraculous way that he would go back into the city. But this is what's fascinating. He writes this Years later, in 2nd Corinthians 12, 2, 4, he says, I was caught up to the third heaven 14 years ago. Maybe this is what happened in lystra, you know, 14 years earlier. Not sure. But I wonder, he says, whether I was in my body or out of my body. I don't know. Only God knows. Why did only God know? Well, because we still have a body, like people say, like near death experiencers say. We have a spiritual body. We're still ourselves, but. But it's, it's enhanced, it's heightened. Paul goes on and says, but I. But I do know. I was caught up to paradise and I heard things so astounding, they cannot be express in words. This is exactly what near death experiencers say as well. Interestingly, Paul also talks about this spiritual body in other places in the New Testament, like 1 Corinthians 15. Paul says our bodies are buried in brokenness, but they'll be raised in glory. They're buried in weakness, but they'll be raised in strength. Or literally the word, the Greek word is dunam. It's where we get our word dynamite. It literally means power. And this is exactly what these people say. These new powers of telescopic sight or, or thought or these heightened senses. Paul says they're buried as natural human bodies, but they'll be raised as spiritual bodies. And it's exactly what near death experiencers are testifying about all over the globe today. Now what convinced me though, or what got my mind more interested is that they say they are still in the room, up above their bodies, watching their resuscitation. Now, after interviewing so many of these people, here's what I think is going on and I can only explain it by analogy. I think they're moving into another higher dimensional realm that's all around us, but we can't see it because we don't have that dimension. So by analogy, think if we're living this three dimensional experience, right? But imagine we're living it on a flat two dimensional black and white painting on the wall of your room, right? So we have up and down that dimension, we have side to side, we have that dimension, but we don't even have in or out. There's no third dimension in our world. So death means separation. At death our soul leaves our three dimensional body. So imagine at death your two dimensional soul leaves your two dimensional body and now is brought out into this three dimensional world that was all around you. You can look back and see your flat two dimensional world because it's contained within this greater reality. And you can also watch what's going on in that two dimensional world. Okay, then imagine being pressed back into that world. You're resuscitated in two dimensions and you're trying to describe three dimensions of color in two dimensional flat black and white terms. And when I've said this analogy to near death experiencers, they say that's exactly what it's like. And it's so hard because they're grappling for words, for describing other dimensionality dimensional realities, but at the same time it makes sense. So it's like if we were in three dimensions, we could see what's happening in two dimensions, but they couldn't conceive of where we are. And so that's actually what's happening. Like Mary, who I report on in Imagine the God of Heaven was in London giving birth to her child. This is in the 90s when they still had ceiling fans in hospitals. She loses too much blood, her heart stops, she dies and she leaves her body and she has this full blown experience of going through this tunnel into this beautiful place and this presence of this God of light, she knows his God, unconditional love, she doesn't want to come back. And he says to her, you must go back. Your child is going to live. He needs you. And as she's coming back, she says she passed through the ceiling and saw a red sticker on the top side of the ceiling fan. And then she's resuscitated and she's trying to tell the doctors and nurses this amazing experience she had. Of course they don't believe her at all, they think she's just psychotic. And she grabs one nurse and says, here's what you did and here's what you said and here's what the other people did and said. And the nurse was shocked because she was like, she knew she was completely comatose, no heartbeat when those things were happening. So Mary says to her, look, I can prove this to you. Go get a ladder and look on the top side of the ceiling fan and you're going to see a red sticker and here's what it says on it. And the nurse went, got an orderly, they got a ladder and sure enough found the red sticker that said exactly what Mary said. Now you might say, you know, oh, urban legend stories, but there are hundreds and thousands of them and there have actually been studies done of this. In fact, Dr. Pim van Lommel is a cardiologist in Holland who I've interviewed, who's studied thousands of near death experiences like I have. And he actually wrote up one of his cases in the Lancet, Europe's most prestigious journal, medical journal. And I want you to hear about this guy who was found dead in a park and brought into the ER and what Dr. Van Lommel says about it.
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Dr. Pim Van Lommel
But this patient that we're talking about was about 40 years old man who was found in a meadow unconscious by some people, passersby. And they started to do some simple chest compression and they called for an ambulance. And when they he was brought into a hospital cardiac ward, it was about more than 30 minutes later, they had been in the ambulance trying to do some resuscitation, defibrillation didn't succeed at all. When he came into Hospital he was already. His body was cold, was blue like just a dead body. No breathing, no circulation. Why did pupils didn't react to light. So the nurse who saw him first tried to give him extra oxygen by intubation to give him a tube to give him more oxygen in the lungs. And then he found out that he had still dentures in the mouth. So he took out the dentures, upper dentures and put it somewhere on the crash cart. They did it one and a half hour before he had blood pressure and circulation again. It was a long time, but he was young. So she the ventral. But it was still an artificial respiration. He was intimated he was in deep coma. So he was transported to an intensive care unit to continue artificial respiration for one week. It was one week in coma. Then he came back after one week on the cardiac ward. And he was just on the cardiac ward. A nurse came in for medication. And he saw the nurse and said, you know where my dentures are. And this was flabbergasted. He said, well, you know, you were there when I was coming to hospital. You took out my dentures, you put it on a car with all those bottles on it and I was sliding underneath and there you put my teeth. And you could describe the resuscitation room where he came in coma and he left in coma. He could exactly describe restitial proposition out and above his his body. He could recognize the nurses and doctors who had been busy with his cpr.
- [29:41]
John Burke
So this is wild. I mean, you know, here's a cardiologist and he's saying, you know, they shouldn't be able to see these things. But this guy claimed he was up above his body. You know, in the er. He saw the nurse put the dentures in the crash cart. He knew who was in there and yet he was comatose in the er. He didn't come to until a week later in another room. Now there are many examples of this. And in fact, Dr. Jan Holden studied verifiable observations that near death experiencers made. So, you know, Shermer talks about, you know, there's just no evidence, there's no scientific evidence. Well, if you have consistent verifiable testimony that is evidence. It may not be repeatable in a laboratory, but that's how we know things in a court of law. Anything that happens in history, you can have multiple eyewitnesses. And if there's testimony that is beyond a reasonable doubt, then we believe it. We say this must be what's true. And that's exactly what you have with these near death experiencers and verifiable observations. So Dr. Jan Holden studied close to 100 patients who had had cardiac arrest, had near death experiences and reported each one might report five or 10 observations that could be checked out. So she studied all of their observations and found that the ones that can be checked out, she found that they were 92% completely accurate. 92% accurate of what was happening during their resuscitation. Another 6% of their observations were mostly accurate, but maybe a few details were missing. Only 2% were inaccurate. That turned out to be one person in the study who you know, was probably making it up. So this to me was like, okay, nothing brain based can explain how people having no brain waves could see things that could be later verified and checked out. And it's not just one person, it's, it's, it's hundreds of people and it's happening all over the globe. What Rogin and Shermer described can't explain that. But even more what can explain it is how blind people, when they have a near death experience, can see. So when people who are born blind have a near death experience, they claim that they can see and they report all of the same commonalities as sighted people having near death experiences all over the globe. Now if that's just brain based, how in the world is that working? Nobody who's come up with these alternate explanations have ever explained that. I'll give you an example. Brad Burroughs is a man who I interviewed. Brad was blind from birth, yet at age 8, Brad was living in the Boston center for Blind Children and he contracted a severe case of pneumonia. He learned later from a nurse that his heart had indeed stopped for four minutes and it was only because of CPR that they brought him back. Sorry we couldn't get the video working, but that's kind of how life goes, isn't it?
- [33:26]
Dean Braxton
Yes.
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John Burke
So I wanted to talk to you about your near death experience. But maybe even before you get to that, just tell us a little bit about yourself. You, you were born without eyesight and.
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Dean Braxton
I was born totally blind. Yes.
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John Burke
You don't, you don't have mental images like, or dream in pictures or anything like that, do you?
- [33:50]
Dean Braxton
No, my, all my images, whether being, whether awake or asleep, are non visual, completely non visual. In fact. I, in my dreams, for instance, I can hear and I can touch. In my dreams I have a tactile sense and I have a sense of smell on rare occasion in my dreams, but I have no visual sense whatsoever.
- [34:14]
John Burke
So when you were 8. You had a near death experience and suddenly could see.
- [34:24]
Dean Braxton
I actually was able to see through much of the experience, yes.
- [34:30]
John Burke
So tell us, tell us about that, tell us what that was. What happened that night.
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Dean Braxton
My breathing stopped altogether. And after that very frightening moment, very quickly developed a sense of tremendous peace, as if everything was going to be very, very good. My actual body was still on the bed. But I started enter going slowly upward through the room that I was in, through the ceiling, through another room where someone was occupying a bed. But I didn't get a chance to look very much but through that ceiling and the roof of the building. And then I started noticing that I could tell traffic was moving slowly and awkwardly on a street that was bordering this building. But I couldn't figure out how I knew the traffic was moving. I knew I could hear something, some, some of the traffic, but I could tell it was moving without even hearing it. And I thought this was peculiar, very peculiar. And there were different shades of light constantly moving with, along with the cars.
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John Burke
And you realize you were visually perceiving things.
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Dean Braxton
I knew that I was experiencing a sense that I never experienced before. How could I know about traffic going up and down streets or a trolley when the only right or trolley when the only thing I knew as a living person was how they sounded. This was all without really hearing them. And that was puzzling to me. Here it was still rising up through the air. And the cars, the vehicles were getting smaller as perspective was changing. There were even streetcars, there were trolleys along the same street going up or down this track in the middle of the street or a set of tracks. And I could tell how they were moving on these tracks. But as I was rising, the every vehicle was getting, was shrinking in size. And then I found myself entering a very, very fast moving, whirling tunnel. And as I was entering this tunnel, it began to narrow the tunnel itself. It was a very steep rising tunnel, but I was almost effortlessly rising through it. And while I was in that tunnel, there was nothing visual striking me at all. I. It was, you would describe it as dark, completely dark. Something like what I can only describe as vision. But I knew there was an open meadow ahead of me, very steep in terms of grade. It was a very. I couldn't have done a hill like that easily back on the earthly plane back here. But I noticed I was coming out into it. And as the meadow was becoming more and more clear to me, I started noticing very tall trees and tremendously impressive height of the trees. Just not really knowing how to measure them. They were far greater and far higher than I could ever picture a tree. And yet these were things I never was touching. I was only noticing them through what I can only call vision. Then I knew the grass was amazingly lush and very alive. And by that time, I started noticing also that there was not only light shining at me, but there was literally light emanating out of me as well. And I thought, this is something I don't know how to explain. Not at all. And yet there it was. I know it was as if I was totally bathed in that light. And that. The light.
- [39:00]
John Burke
Yeah, describe. Describe that light.
- [39:03]
Dean Braxton
Sure. I will do the best I can because it is in many respects, beyond most description, but it was. It was a light that literally entered me and literally pervaded my entire being. Light. At that time, it was extremely bright whiteness of light. And it was a. It was a. It was color. A brilliant, brilliant color. Like I had never again. I'd never known any light like this before, but it was so bright that I got the impression that if I were to notice it anything like this on my normal earthly plane, it would be far more than I could take, far more than I could possibly soak in. And yet, during that time, I had no problem soaking it in. In fact, I loved it. I thought. I. I just felt like I was part of that light as the light was shining in and on me at once. And. But again, much of what I noticed, I couldn't even describe at all. It was far beyond that description. Oh, by the way, by this time, I was starting to hear the music, the singing. Thousands of voices singing. But what's weird is I could not. I did not see them. I did not visualize them at all. It was as if they were in the distance. And yet I was coming closer and closer to them, and I wanted to come close. I was moving fast, was moving rapidly.
- [41:01]
John Burke
Up a hill. And. And this is like. Is this like a valley? And. And what does it look like?
- [41:07]
Dean Braxton
It looks like to me. This. It looked to me like the side of a very high mountain. I was actually climbing up the side of possibly from a valley upward in a very steep grade, tremendously steep. But I. But then I got to this. Another thing I noticed was a gate. An archway, actually, more accurately. And I could tell the archway because one thing that was peculiar about it was it had a multitude of colors, many different kinds of colors. And because I didn't know how to describe the colors, those were brilliant in themselves. And then at that point, I noted ahead of me, a very imposing, very tall figure. If I. If I were to estimate it now, it would have been somewhere around nine feet in height, but it was definitely an angel of some sort, or at least very likely. And I noticed him, and he started speaking to me in thoughts. It was not in an actual voice, but it was more like thought, saying, brad, and it's not your time yet. And I thought to myself, why? Why not? I want to be here. There's some more love and more light and more now that I could ever even think of. I. I want to be here. I want to go further. And he told me in thought again, if I were to allow that love to pervade my life, I would see this place again. And that I had a mission to fulfill on earth. And. And that's why it was not my time yet. I could tell there was a great deal of love in what he was telling me. And as soon as I began to agree, boom, I was back on my bed.
- [43:20]
John Burke
Okay, so think about this, because I report on other blind people in both my books, like Vicki, another near death experiencer, blind from birth, who at 22, she is in a car accident. And she also describes going up through this tunnel that's dark into this world of otherworldly music and light, very similar to what Brad said. She comes out in this beautiful garden. She sees her deceased grandmother and two childhood friends who died at age 9 and age 7, along with a bunch of other people who are coming to welcome her. And here's what she said. She said she was in a place of tremendous light. And the light, Vicki said, was something you could feel as well as see. Everybody there was made of light, and what the light conveyed was love. And there was love everywhere. And it was like love came out of the grass and love came out of the birds and love came out of the trees. And so she's describing this light that is also love, and it's coming out of everything. Now, fascinatingly, blind people like Brad and Vicki would have heard that light shines on things, right? They've never seen light. Why are they describing light coming out of everything? And yet that's what near death experiencers who have sight also say. Captain Dale Black, the commercial airline pilot you heard from, and Dr. Mary Neal, the surgeon, said the same thing, that the light of heaven, Dale said, it is light and life and love, all as one and coming out of everything. Dr. Neal said the same thing. Now, how do you get multiple blind people, spine surgeons, commercial airline pilots, to all agree on some crazy notion that the light of heaven comes out of everything, you know, even. Even shines out of the people. And that it's not like light on earth, it's love and life, okay? And yet, interestingly, what most people who have read the Bible don't even know is that that's exactly what the Bible says. You know, Isaiah was a Jewish prophet writing in 780 B.C. so, you know, 780 years before Jesus ever came. But he says this in Isaiah 60. No longer will you need the sun to shine by day, nor the moon to give its light by night. For the Lord your God will be your everlasting light. He's talking about in. In the life to come. And then John, one of Jesus disciples, claims he was taken up to heaven or given a vision of heaven. And In Revelation chapter 21, he describes it and he says, he describes this, the holy city of God. And he says, the city has no need of sun or moon, for the glory of God illuminates the city. And the Lamb referring to Jesus is its light. The nations will walk in its light. Fascinating. Now think about that. What these people writing the scriptures talk about thousands of years ago is if what blind people having near death experiences see, and it agrees with what people all around the globe having near death experiences see. Interestingly, Jesus also said something similar in Matthew 13:43, even about people. He said, then the righteous will shine like the sun in their Father's kingdom. And as we'll talk about in other episodes, you know, we can appear to each other just like we see each other now. But sometimes there's this light and love that I believe is the glory of God, that we are sharing in. Imagine sharing in the love, the source of love and life bursting forth through you. It's fascinating to think about, and maybe even the way we allow God's light and God's love to shine through us on this earth is creating capacity for us to experience more of that in the life to come. That's something else we'll explore in episodes ahead. But this is just fascinating because, you know, the Bible says that God is love, right? And that God is light. You know, all the way back in 3,500 years ago, Moses sees this God of brilliant light in a burning bush who tells him the greatest commandment is love. To love God with all your heart and to love your neighbor as yourself. Jesus comes along and he says, I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life. Okay? And by the way, when Jesus was transfigured before several of his disciples. He showed them his glory and they said his face shone like the sun. All right. And that's exactly who these people are experiencing all over the globe as, as we'll see. But before we jump there, just stop and think. If, like Shermer said, we know that these near death experiences are just in the brain, they're brain based, then how in the world do blind people who have never had any kind of visual perception in their brain or any memory of that, have visual perception that aligns not only with scripture, but with what sighted near death experiencers say all over the globe? And how do people out of their bodies accurately describe what was happening in our reality? If they had no brainwaves, where are the memories being stored? But the third reason that I really became convinced that not only is heaven real, but God is real and he's far better than we've ever imagined is because all over the globe doesn't matter their religious background or their cultural expectations. They experience the same God of light and love who is personal, who knows them intimately, who loves them with an unconditional love they find very hard to even describe. They never want to leave this God's presence. And yet they might not have had any concept of the God they end up describing. You know, I've interviewed 70 people from every continent describing this God of compassion who knows them so intimately. And many of them are describing a God that was not at all in their cultural or religious expectation. I want you to hear from a few of them that I've personally gotten to know and interview, like Heidi, who, who grew up in a. A Jewish family, but her father was an atheist and very abusive by the way. He had this mantra. He didn't believe in God or Jesus at all, but she did. And she prayed to God every night. And then at 16, she has a near death experience. Karina is a woman from Colombia, grew up in the Catholic Church, but left the church because she had a very pretty abusive past and ended up going down, you know, every wild road you can imagine. And then she, her heart stops, she is leaving her body and suddenly she realizes, oh my gosh, there is an afterlife and God is real. And she starts praying the Our Father or the Lord's Prayer, but sincerely from her heart. And listen to what she talks about. Or how about Siddiq, who you're going to hear from, he's in Rwanda, he was a Muslim imam and he dies of blood cancer. And listen to what he says. And then Santosh, a Hindu who grew up in India. The Hindu scriptures was all he knew. Never had read the Bible. He's a manufacturing engineer and he codes in the hospital. He hears code blue. Code blue. His heart stopped. Listen to what he describes of the God he experiences as well.
- [52:04]
Santosh
My dad had a mantra. There is no God. There is no heaven, there is no hell. Jesus Christ is the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on mankind. My horse hit my chest. I was up 30, 40ft in the air. I realized there was a person standing right there. And he moved forward and I looked at him and he looked at me. And it's like, oh, Jesus. I was not thinking, what is a nice Jewish girl like me seeing? Jesus. No, I knew this man. I saw him from the time I was formed in my mother's womb. He had been with me, you know, just when I used to talk to God at night when I was a little kid. He'd been there. He'd been there sitting by my bed. I saw that. I can't explain how God can be a light and God can be a man and God can be love. I can't explain it. I can't. But that's what I experienced.
- [52:56]
John Burke
They even called me Karina.
- [52:58]
Santosh
Come, come.
- [52:58]
John Burke
They were celebrating me. I'm like me out of everybody. And I kept saying, God, I don't deserve you. I'm filthy. Send me back to hell. I know I was going there. And he said, come, I love you. I knew I was home. That is home.
- [53:12]
Siddiq
When I died, I found myself in a very big. In a very big room. A person wearing a white garment with the sandals, you know, all holding his hand, you know, showing them to me with the very. These very big holes into his heart. He told me, I died for men. You are among those I died for. Never deny it again. And tell this to everyone. I woke up, people had come for body. So I. I started shouting, Jesus is in front of you. I'm seeing him. He is there. He's the one who has brought me back.
- [53:58]
Karina
I fell in love with that light because it was protecting me from any harm. Taking me somewhere safer. The light stopped. And I saw that light was shining on top of a beautiful compound. Inside that compound, what complex I should say is. There's a lot of mansions, big buildings, absolutely gorgeous. Square shaped. It is, very high walls. And I saw there is 12 magnificent gates there. Beautiful gates. Many angels. They're protecting that gate. I knew I was looking at the kingdom of heaven. I saw there was a huge throne. And on that throne there was the Almighty. I knew he was the Almighty. I knew it automatically. His eyes were like lightning bolts. And all the sins I committed in my life was flushed before my eyes. So I kept repeating the same thing, that Lord, please forgive me, please forgive me. And then finally he spoke to me. His voice was full of tenderness, mercy and the grace. He said, I'm sending you back to the earth. When the Lord spoke to me, I experienced the love, tenderness from him that I did not expect. Just a few short distance from him on the, on the platform level, I saw a very narrow door or a narrow gate that was open. And that is the only gate through whom I can enter into the kingdom of Heaven. I asked the Lord, lord, when youn see me again, please tell me how I can go to this narrow door this next time. When you see me, Lord, I want to go to the narrow door.
- [56:11]
John Burke
Okay, so how do you explain this? I mean, if all of this near death experience is just happening in the brain, then why would a 16 year old Jewish girl who was told that Jesus is just a hoax, see Jesus? And why would she come back knowing that Jesus is the God she had prayed to her whole life? How do you make sense of that? And why would this Colombian woman, who didn't even know if God existed, come back saying that Jesus saved her when she prayed the Lord's Prayer? And why would a Muslim Imam come back from death? I don't know if you caught it, but he came to at his burial and he came back proclaiming that Jesus saved him from this hellish near death experience. Today he's an Anglican priest who has had seven attempts on his life because he will not stop talking about Jesus. Why would he do that? How do you explain these things? And then how do you explain a Hindu manufacturing engineer who experiences the same God of light and love who takes him to look out over the same city of God that John describes In Revelation, chapter 21, when John says this. So he took me in the Spirit to a great high mountain and he showed me the holy city. It shone with the glory of God. The city wall was broad and high, just like Santosh described, with 12 gates guarded by 12 angels. It was a square as wide as it was long, and John said, thousands of miles, 1400 miles in each direction. Santosh describes the same city, but he had never read the Bible. So how do you explain this? And Santosh comes back. In fact, all these people came back seeking this God of love and compassion, praying daily to know him. And two years later, a friend invited his daughter to sing In a choir at church. She was a choral major in college. Santosh goes to hear her and walks into the church and feels the same love overwhelm him. This unconditional love. He felt the presence of that God of light. And here's what the message was on that day. Two passages, Matthew chapter seven. You can enter God's kingdom only through the narrow gate. And then the pastor goes on and explains in John chapter 10 where Jesus says, I tell you the truth, I am the gate for the sheep, Yes, I am the gate. Those who come in through me will be saved. Santosh told me that he went home and started reading the Bible. And he said, everything I experienced I found in this book. And he became a follower of Jesus as most of these people I've interviewed have, not all. And we'll talk about that as well in episodes to come. But here's the thing, you guys, I mean, how do you explain these things if these near death experiences are just happening in the brain? Why would people, you know, be able to observe things that they shouldn't have been able to see accurately? Why would blind people see the same things and even things that they would not have heard of on earth? And it aligned with the scriptures. And why would people of all different religious cultures experience the same God unless it's real? And here's the thing, you know, interestingly, God has always claimed to be the God of all nations. Genesis chapter 12. God says to Abraham and Sarah, I'm going to raise you up as a nation in order to bless all nations. That's what we're seeing him do today. And we can hear global evidence of it. You know, the Bible is the only evidence of a God who cares about all the nations. 500 times in the Jewish Old Testament prophets, God is speaking to all the nations. And then Jesus comes and we'll talk more about how that was, that was foretold. And there is hardcore evidence that actually convinced me of God's reality and the Bible's reality more than near death experiences. Near death experiences just opened my mind. But we'll look at some of that later. But Jesus comes and, and he claims that he is paying the price of God's justice so that all people can be forgiven of all wrongs if they simply turn back to God and they want his forgiveness and they want relationship. And the purpose of that is because God is love. But love can't be forced. And so God gives us free will to choose whether we will love him and seek him and follow him or not. And he says if you seek me with all your heart, you will find me. And that's what these near death experiencers, many of them are finding the same thing. They come back seeking him and they do find Him. And Jesus said, go tell this to all the nations. There's forgiveness for everything offered through My name. And then in Revelation, chapter seven, John said when he saw heaven, he saw people from every nation, every tribe, every language and every people group. They're gathered around the throne of God. So here's the thing. God loves every single one of us. We were all created to be his children from every nation on earth. And there's nothing he wouldn't do to set you right with Him. And really all he wants is a relationship, a loving relationship. Interestingly, he said something to Santosh and, and I'll. I'll play this clip for you at another time in another episode. But he said to Santosh, what I want is relationship. I want to see how honest you'll be with me. Not one day a week, but 24, 7. Seven days a week, 365 days a year. Walk with me. In honesty. It's pretty cool because it's really that simple and it's a message of hope for all people of all nations. I hope you'll join me for more of these. We're going to dive deep into a lot of the questions, a lot of the things that come up, a lot of the discrepancies that people have and wonder about. So post your comments, give me the things you'd like to hear me address along the way and join me as we continue to dive into near death experiences and the Bible and how it helps us live our best life today.