Blurry Creatures - EP: 316 Where We Go When We Die with John Burke

Episode Date: April 8, 2025

In this thought-provoking episode of Blurry Creatures, John Burke joins the crew to explore one of life's most profound questions: Where do we go when we die? Drawing from his extensive research, testimonies, and spiritual insights, John delves into near-death experiences, biblical perspectives, and the fascinating intersection of science and faith. Whether you’re a skeptic or a believer, this episode will challenge your views on the afterlife and offer new perspectives on what happens beyond this life. What is Heaven actually like? And what happens in utter darkness? This episode is sponsored by: https://rocketmoney.com/blurry — Cancel unwanted subscriptions with Rocket Money. The average person saves up to $740 a year when using all the app’s features! 👕 Merch from "Blurry Creatures" https://www.blurrycreatures.com/store Become a member! https://blurrycreatures.supercast.com Get our Book of Enoch! https://amzn.to/4gpV4yZ Listen to Blurry Creatures: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/blurry-creatures/id1526885135 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5uPilMKgeZRAJ2AVwSdFRL?si=f42b58855ac7417e Website: blurrycreatures.com Blurry Creatures Socials https://www.tiktok.com/@blurrycreatures https://www.instagram.com/blurrycreatures https://www.facebook.com/blurrycreatures/ https://www.twitter.com/blurrycreatures/ Special Thanks for Platinum Members! Joshua Drummond Maureen Munoz Amber Freeman Nicolle Benz Zach Mills Adam Dougherty Desiree Nichols Kate Logan Kimberly Lee Fayola Shakes Suzanna Wenzel Kent Denmark Michelle Watkins Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Luke so often, people email us and they have this story. They're out in their woods and they're looking in the bushes. and they go, what's that? And when you are pouring your dog food and your dog's bowl, that's the last thing you want to say. What is that? What is the stuff coming out of this bag? You know, I don't think a lot of us think about maybe what we feed our dogs.

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Just cover the shipping. Go to Rough Greens.com and use discount code blurry. That's RUFF Greens.com discount code blurry. Rough Greens makes any dog food better. So when these people leave their bodies and they're still in the room of their recessive, They can see and report what's going on and even the specific medical things that are done to them, who's in the room, even though, you know, they have no consciousness. Even though their EEG, their brainwaves are flat. The near-death experiences, observations were 92% completely accurate.

92% were completely accurate. Another 6% had some varying detail. Only 2% were inaccurate. blind people. People blind from birth having a near death experience can see in their near death experience, even though when they come back, they're still blind. And they report all the same commonalities. Leaving the body, still yourself, have a spiritual body, just like Paul talks about 1 Corinthians 15. And then this travel. Sometimes it's traveled through this portal or this tunnel, which is described differently. It's not always this black tunnel. Sometimes it's a tunnel of light.

I've come to believe it's a tunnel or a portal of protection. Here you've got people from all over the world. And by the way, these aren't crazy wild people. These are spine surgeons and commercial airline pilots and manufacturing engineers and who maybe had no concept of Revelation 21 in the Holy City of God. And yet they're like triangulating all these details about it. What I started to realize listening to all these near-death experiences is that it is otherworldly. But it's tangible.

It's more real. It's not less real. It's more real. That's what they commonly say. Everything is made of or infused with the glory of God. It's the light and love and life of God that infuses everything. The history of our earth. is so different from what we can imagine.

The Smithsonian that if they found out about a large skeleton somewhere was to go get it. I'm going to assume at least one person is right, because if one person's right to bust the paradigm, it all goes back to the fallen chair. And the problem with the modern day church,

they have a very truncated view of the supernatural. This backdrop that's just pregnant with all kinds of meaning associated with this Mount Hermon event. And this guy defects from the kingdom. That's a big deal. We are back in the blurry basement. Excited to have John Burke on the show today.

John, welcome to blurry creatures. You're an author. Good to be here. Yeah, yeah. You've written books about the afterlife and near-death experiences. And we're going to hop right in. I know our listeners are ready for this conversation. We just had Mickey in, who had a near-death experience.

And he just told his own personal story for the whole podcast. podcast a couple episodes ago. So we're excited to get into the sort of the collection. You've written books on over 1,500 people you've interviewed and had their story specifically about what they've seen, where they've gone. And our listeners are awe way down the blurry trail so they know the weirdness coming. But welcome to the podcast. John, what are your thoughts on Bigfoot? And then we want to get into some, get into some of these stories. I had no idea really. We got you.

We sniped you. Well, yeah, okay. Well, you really want to go there right now. Let's go there. Yep. It's morning time. We're ready. You know, a lot of the blurry, confusing things make me wonder if some of it's deception.

Alien abductions, Bigfoot, some of the other stuff. But I don't know. I'm not an expert on that. So it's just my opinion. Yeah. I mean, that's what we, we sort of kick off the show just to get your mind ready for the things that are about to come in the episode that might be hard. That might be. We don't know.

That's the whole point. And so the blurry creatures is trying to ask those questions and get those stories. But you do know a lot. But you know, what I appreciate about what you guys are doing is I feel like, you know, like with near-death experiences. So many people, and Christians especially, you know, shoot first and ask questions later, which doesn't work real well, right? It's like, let's kill it because we don't understand it.

And, you know, instead of you have to hold a kind of, here's what I know for sure, and I can hold solidly to that. And there is a bunch of mystery to life in the universe. universe and it's okay to ask questions about it and seek and try to understand, well, how does it fit together? You know, so that's kind of the way my mind works. I was an engineer. So I'm pretty analytical.

But I also have, I think, this ability to hold things in tension until they resolve. I like to say it all goes back to my thermodynamics class in college, which I made, I came out with a 63 average and turned out to be the top of the class and make an A. I love it. It's ridiculous, right? You're like, John and the Gospels, I'm the fastest, all right? But the disciples, I'm the fastest, right? I've got to put this down to posterity.

You're like, I got an A. I got the top score. And I love it, John. Well, because what I learned from that is there's so much, you know, it takes a long time for your mind to put all these things together and you have to be patient. And sometimes you have to keep going, keep going and just waiting. You think you're failing at it. But, you know, eventually it starts to piece together or in my case still only 63%. Yeah, I think a lot of people in this space want to be automatic experts. They want to know everything there is to know about everything right away. And I think what we found over the course of five years is all the above is usually the truth. Is some of the stuff that people experience deception? Yes. And a lot of people will just- And is there some truth in it? Yes. Yeah. And that's, you know, and that's, That's true, too. The best deception is 80, 90% true. Yeah. And that's the tricky part, right? John, you've written at least like three books about the afterlife, right? You've got the Imagine Heaven,

which is massively popular, New York Times bestseller, imagine the God of Heaven, what's afterlife? Which you as an engineer, I love your approach, right? It reminds me in some ways of in the same way, but different, you know, Lee Strobel when there's a friend who's a lawyer. So you get analytical. And on our show, we want to talk about best we can. We talk about the data. Like, what can, it's great to examine things, but what, what does the data say? And what do we, you know, what do we make? What kind of conclusions do we make from that?

I mean, how did you end up, like, just for briefly, like, how did you end up on NDEs and why NDEs? And then what do you believe, you know, why can we, why do you think we can trust these stories? And then what are they saying? Especially, I mean, you've written about heaven. What they, we'll get to that, what does say about heaven and what, what happens after sort of this corporate?

Yeah, you're trying to set us up on a blind date. What does she look like? You know what I mean? Tell us what you know. It's got a great personality. That sounds like a catch. Real nice. I don't know.

Bad joke. All right. I started into this. Well, I didn't mean to. I was, like I was sharing with you guys before the show, you know, growing up in the, you know, growing up in the you know in the 70s my parents took me to church kind of everybody did i had lots of questions you know my mind's always been like how do you know why and how does that work and so i'd ask questions and i just nobody would would or could had really thought

it through and so i concluded well jesus was probably a good man a good teacher just grew into a legend God, who knows? There's just, there's no evidence. So I just don't know. So I was, I was an agnostic. My dad was dying of cancer and someone gave him the very first book that coined the term near death experience. So it was the very first research that reported, um, these things called near death experiences.

And I saw it on his bedside table and picked it up and started reading it. And I was, I was intrigued. I was like, oh my gosh. like, what is this? And could this be the evidence I've been looking for? And I read the whole thing in one night. And, you know, here are people clinically dying and being resuscitated by modern medicine or, I don't know, just miracle.

Because, I mean, I've interviewed people with hospital records showing they were clinically dead for an hour and 45 minutes. So most doctors will say, yeah, resuscitation doesn't bring you back after that. but you're bringing it up for like eight minutes right like whatever it is with with if your brain is void of oxygen you you're you're a vegetable if they bring you back right that's why they don't paddle you after a certain time right yeah almost usually that's that's true i think yeah i think they're starting to catch on like we got to keep going because a lot of these people do right you know do come back but i i read this book and um you know i was i i was intrigued and because so many of

these people are saying things like I was in a I watched myself rise above my body I could see my body the room they travel to this place of exquisite beauty they said things like it was more real than anything I've ever experienced on earth um in the presence of this god of light who is love beyond imagination many of them see and and converse with Jesus and I'm just you know I'm kind of like what? So it actually opened me up as a skeptic to start reading and studying the Bible. And for other reasons, more of the historical fulfillment of, you know, what God said he would do and actually did. That I came to faith in Christ. And then, but I was always curious about these near-death experiences. And so I'm working as an engineer out in California. And I kept, keep running into more and more of these.

And so and the way my brain works, I'm like, oh, I heard that over here. And I'm studying the Bible. I'm like, oh, that fits what this says here. And I start literally putting together a chart, you know, and writing stuff up. And I did my first talk on this at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1989. So since then, I have studied and chronicled and interviewed people from every continent and about, like you said, about 1,500 of them. And, and, you know, what, what convinced me, though, you know, because when I was, when I was starting to study these, I had a lot of questions.

There's a lot of confusion. Sometimes it feels like when you get that phone bill, it's like the crash site document. You can't read it. There's a bunch of numbers, random fees, vague language, stuff's blacked out. You're like, what am I actually paying for? I don't know about you, but I like keeping my money where I can see it. I like to be simple. I like to be easy.

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and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. The first thing was, when I saw that they were having verifiable observations. So when these people leave their bodies and they're still in the room of their resuscitation,

they can see and report what's going on and even the specific medical things that are done to them, who's in the room, even though they have no consciousness, even though their EEG, their brainwaves are flat. And there have been studies done. So like, just like an example,

I report in Imagine the God of Heaven of this woman in a hospital in the 90s in London who dies giving child births. She's up above her body. She goes, you know, to this place, have this incredible loving conversation with this God of light and a life review. And he says,

you know, your son's going to live and you need to go. back he's going to need you and as she's coming back into the room she passes through the ceiling and notices on the top side of the ceiling fan a red sticker she comes back to her body she's trying to explain to the doctors and nurses this incredible experience she had and seeing god and they're all like yeah it's it's it's psychosis yeah and she finally gets one nurse and tells the nurse what she did what she said and the nurse knew she was unconscious how did she know that and then mary this this woman said i can prove it to you go get a ladder look on the top side of the ceiling fan there's a red

sticker and here's what it says ha ha and she the nurse gets an orderly and they do and sure enough it's there wow now you could say well you know those that's like sounds like a good internet story right right but there are hundreds and thousands of them and in fact there have been studies done. So when Dr. Jan Holden did a study of about 100 patients having a cardiac arrest, having a near-death experience, making verifiable observations, and so each may make multiple observations, you know, five or 10 or 20 or whatever, the one she could check out, she found that the near-death experiences observations were 92% completely accurate. 92% were completely accurate.

Another 6% had some varying detail. Only 2% were inaccurate. Wow. Yeah. So that's, I mean, if you really look at that, compared to control groups of people having cardiac arrest and they ask what happened during your resuscitation and they're just, you know, they're making up what they saw on ER. Right.

And they're like, yeah, I mean, 15% maybe, 20% accurate. So that got my attention. So I mean, you've been clearly down the road along. time. And I think, for instance, like our show, you know, after here a thousand Sasquatch encounters, you're like, you start to piece together. What is this creature? What is it doing? You start to see similarities between stories and you can sort of outline the data. And I think a lot of it is testimony. But the cool thing about a near-death experience is there's this other provable part of it that says you can prove this. And we've tried to go there with all the stories that come on our shows. How do you

prove this creature exists? How do you prove this phenomenon exists? Somebody found, a piece of the wreckage or somebody has a footprint, right? There's this physical data that proves to the skeptic, this is more than just drugs or whatever. I mean, I had a concussion. I had an out-of-body experience, so I know, I'm tracking with you. That's what happened. That's what happened to me. I was like sitting there watching myself. It was a weird experience. I was too young to even know what was happening. But you have all these stories. What does heaven look like? What is, you know, Can we start to put together what you've learned? Yeah.

And piece together and create a picture for our audience. Yeah. Because if you're doing the data, right, you've got like, you've probably have a good bin diagram from all these 1500 plus people, right? Like what is? I do. What does it look like? I mean, well, and so let me, let me tell, let me illustrate it and some of the different

points I'll point out along the way. Yeah. With the story of Vicky because the second thing that really convinced me, these are not, you know, like Joe Rogan interviewed Dr. Michael Shermer about near-death experiences and he said, well, yeah, we know these are in the brain, right? So these are just brain bases, chemicals flooding the brain as a humans dying, but they're not, that does not explain the evidence. Yeah.

Not at all. Doesn't explain verifiable observations. Doesn't explain how blind people, people blind from birth having a near-death experience can see in their near-death experience, even though when they come back, they're still blind. Wow. and they report all the same commonalities. So I won't go through all of them, but in Imagine Heaven,

I show about 40 of the commonalities. Millions of people have had these. They've been studied all around the globe. Yeah. And yet there are about 40 commonalities, even though each one is somewhat unique. So Vicki's blind from birth. She is in an auto accident at 22.

She leaves her body. She's up above watching in the hospital as they're freaking out because she's dying and they're panicking. And she's like, what do you guys? I'm fine. Stop. You know? But she can't get their attention. And she's kind of confused because, and I love listening to how blind people describe trying to understand this new sense of perception that they've never had.

And she said, I finally realized, I must be dead. because that's me on the table. She said, I recognized my long hair and the orange blossom wedding ring, which was unique. And she's like, I know where I'm going. She was a believer in Jesus.

She's like, I'm out of here. And her spirit or her soul, like starts to take off through the hospital and out of the hospital. And it was like this portal opens up. So these are all commonalities, leaving the body, still yourself, have a spiritual body, just like Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians 15. And then this travel, sometimes it's travel through this portal or this tunnel, which is described differently. It's not always this

black tunnel. Sometimes it's a tunnel of light. I've come to believe it's a tunnel or a portal of protection. We'll talk more about that later. Let's go. Let's go. Yeah. I think that's important. Okay. Because if not, there are usually angels there with them and they and they shoot out and it's, I mean, it's really wild out beyond our atmosphere. They're seeing earth go beyond and then out into the stars and and either that way or like Vicky did through this tunnel and at the end of the tunnel they see there's there's a light and Vicki comes out of this tunnel into she's standing on grass in this garden beautiful garden like setting and she's looking around and it's you know gorgeous you know it's not unlike earth it's trees and flowers and plants and you know birds and people

And this group of people coming toward her. Now, these are commonalities too, is this place of exquisite beauty, but so much more vivid and colors way beyond our color spectrum, which also has an interesting tie to the Bible I found. But we'll go back to that. She sees this welcoming committee. That's what they typically call it, a friends or family who had previously died. She sees her grandmother.

she sees Diane and Debbie, her friends who she grew up with in a home for blind children. They had died at age nine and seven, but here they're in their prime, she said. And people mostly are look about 30. That's what near-death experiencers say. John, do they, let me ask this. That's what I've always wondered. Like, so you see your grandmother and she's 30, but you know her. Like there's this idea that you know who they are in spite and ever.

because I wouldn't, my grandmother just passed away, which is really interesting to talk about this, because she had some real crazy things that she was dying, like hearing music, saying she couldn't get out the window, talking to her great-grandmother, who she never met. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed-sponsor jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75-sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply.

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It's very common. My friend Lee Strobel, who I think you guys know, yeah, just wrote a book and also talking about these deathbed visions as also evidence of the life. come that as people are dying many times they're starting to it's getting blurry right yeah the this world and the world to come they're starting to to enter and yeah that many times happens but they so you we're all in our prime i was i was so curious about people what their experience was but you also are interacting with your family and they're in their prime but you know them right this is what i think is fascinating because you think about the bible right and jesus when he returns um he has the holes in in his hands, right? But he walks through walls, which is kind of wild. He's also God incarnate,

so you have that going on. But it's not unlike what you're talking about going through ceilings. And these folks when they're, and then also people don't recognize them, which I think is a weird, I don't know if you've touched on that at all, but I'll let you continue because I think this is so interesting. We just had Mickey Robinson on, as Nate was saying a couple weeks ago. And he talked about going through a portal, like in the, and it closing, he kind of sneaking through and then, you know. And we talk about portals all the time on the show. And we also talk about the silver cord, which is sort of this spiritual ambilical cord connected between the body and the soul. Oh, fascinating. So that has connections. Okay. We'll let you go here about it. So everybody is

in their prime. Well, then let's come back to the spiritual body too, because I think it's fascinating. Jesus, so I like to say this is version 1.0 of our body, right? But when we die, we get an upgrade. It's version 2.0. And it has new power. And by the way, you know, again, all this is in the Bible. I mean, Paul says, and I think, I think Paul had a near-death experience. In Acts chapter 14, it says he got stone to death in the town of Listra, right? Stone to death with rocks. Just got to always make that clear.

Yeah. He gets, he gets, that's an 80s joke. Well done, sir. Well, it wasn't, it wasn't strong enough in the 80s to die. But no. Maybe it was. Maybe nowadays. I don't know.

Yeah. But getting stone to death was getting calm. Different experience. Anyway, he's stone to death with rocks. They drag him out of the city dead and leave him for dead. And yet the believers rally around him, praying for him. He gets back up and goes back in the city and keeps going. I'm like, yeah, that's crazy.

But he talks about in 2 Corinthians 12, he said 14 years ago, and he's talking about himself, whether I was in my body or out of my body, I don't know. Only God knows. Why? Well, because we still have a spiritual body and we're still ourselves. And he said, I was taken up to paradise. I was taken to the third heaven and saw and heard things inexpressible and things no one's allowed to tell. So I think he had one of these experiences when he got stone to death in Listra. And that's what he's talking about. And so, In 1 Corinthians 15, he says our bodies are buried in weakness, but they're raised in power. They're buried a natural body, but they're raised a spiritual body.

And that word for power is the word duname in Greek, from which we get our word dynamite. They're raised in powers. And these near-death experiences talk about this. Eyesight that is telescopic. You can see like thousands of miles as have zoomed in right up close. communication that's um some use the word telepathic but they they say no it's more than just thoughts it's it's thoughts it's feelings it's all the associated connections and boom it's right there there's no way to misunderstand um so yeah and movement you know so people are flying right

and this is our this is our version 2.0 body but jesus interestingly has version 3 so he is not just a you know a spiritual body but his spiritual body was reunited to his reconstituted or resurrected physical body and the two were joined into one and that is why people who are dead cannot cannot interact or communicate with us not not usually I mean sometimes I think I think God sends them on missions and they can. But Jesus could. So just like you said, he could pass through walls and he wasn't confined by this world, but he could also be touched by Thomas and he could eat fish in his resurrected body.

And I think that foretells what's going to happen when the new heaven and the new earth are joined together. That's the future. That right now, earth, which is. I think, you know, we are here on Earth confined to three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. But there are dimensions of both space and time that we're contained in that are beyond us. And I think that's where these near-death experiences are happening. And in the end, when things are made right, and God is truly the ruler over both, because he's not fully on earth now, which is why Jesus taught us to pray, your will be done, your kingdom come on earth,

as it is in heaven because it's not yet on earth's right so so it's going to be joined together again and then we too will have bodies 3.0 because it says Jesus is the first fruits of what will experience and then we'll be able to pass through what now is the you know the the second third heaven that is talked about in the Bible but that's basically the spiritual realms in other dimensions, but we'll also be able to live and interact on Earth. That's my theory. John, so what about boy, I got off. I love, no, I loved it. I think that's it's important, right, because I think we have this sort of ethereal idea of the of heaven, right? But the Bible talks about some of the things that are interesting. That's what I want to, so Vicki goes to a garden and her family greets her. The Bible talks

about, of course, the throne of God, a sea of glass, roads, and walls, and this idea, which feels- They see all that. Yeah, so what do they, lay it on us? What are they, what are they seeing? They see all that. Is it a physical reality to them, though? Is it like they're walking? It's physical in the sense of their perceptions, right? Like, it's not, it's not like everything's misty. Yeah, yeah. So, so the way I like to say it is, look, it's, it's not death, it's life, abundant. it's more life.

In fact, Dr. Mary Neal, who, you know, was a surgeon whose kayak got pinned under a waterfall for 30 minutes. And then she resuscitated. And this commercial airline pilot who died in a plane crash in Burbank, California, Dale Black, both of them described to me like coming up to this city. and it's a walled city, thousands of miles. And interestingly, Dale is a commercial airline pilot.

God actually let him fly in over this city, just like he would do on a holding pattern. He said, you know, he's flown into every major city on earth. And he said it was just like that. And they're describing this walled city. And what's fascinating is it's real.

It's touchable. It's tangible. It's a wall, but it also, and it's in Dr. Neil said it was like made of these giant blocks of stone, you know, kind of like you would see in an arch, kind of like an ancient Roman gate archway, but more beautiful than you can ever imagine. And it also, and so many of them would say, but the stones were made of light. Mary said they were they were tangible and physical but they were made of love and she said I know that's nonsensical but that's true and so what's weird is that it is so I interviewed a Hindu man a man who grew up in India manufacturing engineer this brilliant God of Light takes him to a platform and he describes the same city though he'd never read the Bible because by the way this is exactly the the city described in Revelation 21.

The New Jerusalem. And he describes it the same way, a walled city square and shape, thousands of miles. He said, because your eyesight's telescopic, inside these gorgeous grounds. And he said, and mansions and buildings, these gorgeous buildings of otherworldly building material. He's a manufacturing engineer. So, you know, it's fascinating how he notices that. He wants to go in.

He's trying to find a way in. and he says, I count it. There were 12 gates all around the city. Kayak gets my flight, hotel, and rental car right. So I can tune out travel advice that's just plain wrong. Bro, Skycoin, way better than points. Never fly during a Scorpio full moon. Just tell the manager you'll sue.

Instant room upgrade. Stop taking bad travel advice. Start comparing hundreds of sites with kayak and get your trip right. Kayak, got that right. But they were closed to me and they were guarded by angels. And that's when I realized I'm looking at the kingdom of heaven. So, I mean, it's wild because here you've got people from all over the world. And by the way, these aren't crazy wild people.

These are spine surgeons and commercial airline pilots and manufacturing engineers and who maybe had no concept of Revelation 21 in the Holy See, of God, and yet they're like triangulating all these details about it. So what I've realized is, you know, I used to read Revelation 21. And, you know, it says stuff about, you know, these streets of gold and, you know, the, the gate was made of pearl and, you know, the city was made of gold, but crystal clear as glass. And I used to just kind of think, like, it's metaphor.

I mean, even for a long time as a pastor, I was like, yeah, I mean, that that kind of sounds like a cheesy 80s televangelist set, right? Yeah, yeah. Just kind of cheesy and gaudy to me. That's our speed. John, so perfect, yeah. But what I started to realize listening to all these near-death experiencers is that it is otherworldly, but it's tangible. It's more real. It's not less real.

It's more real. That's what they commonly say. Yeah. But it's made of, it's made of everything is, is made of or infused with the glory of God. Well, it's the light and love and life of God that infuses everything. And that's what, even blind people. And so this is crazy. So Vicki says that.

So does Brad, this blind kid who, who touches that wall. And he said there was like light coming out of it. And I was kind of scared to touch it, but it was beautiful. And then he said he goes into this archway. He called it a tube, but it was an archway, just like the others described. And the stone in that was was smooth like glass. Now, he's never seen Pearl. Right.

Right. But that's what this gate is made of. They say the gates like a Roman archway, but it's it's lined inside because remember the wall is 214 feet thick and 200 or so feet high according to to John in Revelation. That's what near-death experiences are saying. The archway, it's like this pearlescent, almost like a living material that you can see through it, but it also is a material that then lines all the way through this, what turns out to be a tunnel into the city. And you have this blind kid describing it as a tube with smooth stone instead of the other stone that was on the wall. So you have all these triangulations of data that are just like, wow, this is just otherworldly. Yeah.

And Vicki, so what I was going to say is Vicki says, she comes into this garden and she said, and the light there was not like light I had felt on earth. She said the light was palpable. It was love. It was life. And this love and light was coming out of the grass and coming out of the trees and coming out of the birds and even coming out of the people who were coming to welcome me. Now, this too has a fascinating connection because, you know, most people don't know the Bible well enough to know that the ancient prophet Isaiah, you know, who writing about 780 BC. in Isaiah 60 says there is no sun or moon in heaven. God is its light. And then John in Revelation 21

says of the holy city and there is no sun or moon for the glory of God is its light and Jesus or the lamb Jesus is its lamp and the nations will walk in that light. Wow. And here you have blind people testifying that the light of heaven along with sighted near death experiences this light that is love and life, which God is love. Jesus said, I'm the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but have the light of life. And we're going to share, it says, in the glory of God.

Romans 8, we're going to share in the glory of God if we share in his sufferings. Well, what does all that mean? Well, it means exactly what Jesus said in Matthew 13, when he said, and then the righteous will shine like the sun in their father's kingdom forever. So here you have Vicky, a blind person, seeing these people coming toward her. And just like Jesus said, this light that is also love and life is bursting out of them toward her. Which I would have said is weird. And yet, you know, what I started to see is, oh, you know, this is, first of all, what the Bible has been telling us all along.

but this what this turns out to be is a new way of relating it's like the love and life of god so think about like the very source of all the love you've ever experienced all the fun all the joy all the life and we get to not only share in it but pass it to one another share it with one another so think about the relational connections um you know you know, that will happen, along with perfect communication. That'll, that'll solve all your relationship. Yeah, yeah, right. That's the big one. Are you talking about counseling when we're on a pre-roll? That'll take care of a lot of issues. It will. Do you think that they are sort of just looking through a window at people who are fully there, but they're not fully there yet? They're sort

of still attached to their earthly body in some sense. So it's like they're not. Yeah, that whole court of life thing. Kind of like when we're coming out of a dream state or whatever, it's not like we're fully here yet. We're sort of in between. Like they're getting a vision of something of a civilization that exists, the civilization of heaven. They're looking at it's real. Yeah, it's real. It's a place you could go. I don't think so. I think there is a mystery to it. So another commonality is that people come to a border or a boundary that they need. they couldn't cross over and still come back. So that's like 30% of near-death experiences say this.

And they say it in different ways. So like Captain Dale Black was there before he described the glass sea, just like you were talking about and this crystal staircase going up to the throne of God. And they commonly say this gargantuan figure, but you can't look at his face because it's like, It's not just the sun's brighter than the sun, but not a yellow light, a light that's just like hard to comprehend

and yet so mesmerizing and enthralling. Like all you want to do is be in it. So he is there and he has this knowledge. There's this angel that's guarding the stairway, a massive angel like 15 feet, tall and he knew that this angel had lots of power and was there to guard that stairway and and he started to think wait i can't go up that stairway i can't i can't go up that stairway and still go back and he's thinking go back go back why would i go back i don't want to go back because they

don't once they're there they resist going back um and that that's one example of this border or boundaries sometimes people will come to a river and they know they they can't if they cross that river in this near-death experience they won't be able to go back to earth in some cases people meet with jesus this one university professor in australia that i interviewed he met with jesus and the angels when he had his heart attack and he was asking is this heaven and he said no Um, you, you can go on, but we came out to meet you. Or you can go back. He said, you know, but you haven't died yet.

Which is interesting because he had no heart beat and no brain waves. So clinically he was dead. And I, and I think to your point that there is some, I don't know what you call it, chord of life, um, that, that is these near death experience. are entering a real realm, and I think they're really experiencing it because they're hugging and they're, you know, they're feeling the hug. Vicky then goes and sees this person brighter than all of the rest. And she recognizes him immediately. It's Jesus. And she runs to him and he hugs her. And she said the hug was deeper than any hug. She'd ever felt on earth. She felt

his beard against her face. But she said the beard, she was intrigued. The beard had light coming out of it. And so it's real and it's tangible. And I think they are fully experiencing this. However, I think they have not crossed over into either eternal life or eternal death. They're somehow still connected to our time on Earth. Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery shopping this week. We start with only the freshest items. Then review your list and carefully choose each one.

Then we pack it all up and deliver it in as little as 30 minutes. So you can feel confident it's what you ordered. Fresh groceries, your way with Ralph's delivery and pickup. Get free delivery during online deal days plus $30 off your first online order. Ralph's, fresh for everyone. And I think that's actually why people in their near-death experiences. Some of them who have hellish experiences cry out to God. for forgiveness, cry out to Jesus to be saved.

And he does. He saves them every time. And I think part of that is their decisions are still not eternalized. So they're between. They haven't crossed into eternity. They're still somehow connected to Earth. And I don't fully understand that. And in that moment, they're aware they need of the reality that there is a heaven.

you know, there's this whole afterlife and they always cry out? Or do they? What, in the hellish ones? Well, I didn't, I guess we can get into that. I want to get into that. Can I ask a couple things first, John? Like, does everybody, does everybody have an experience with God or with Jesus? Does everybody to a T?

Like, that is a believer? 48% in the book, Imagine the God of Heaven. I interviewed 70 people on every continent from every religious background, even agnostic. even agnostic and atheist, and they're experiencing the same God. Every one of them. It's unbelievable. Like Santosh, that Hindu manufacturing engineer, you know, after describing the holy city also sees a vision of hell and then experiences God not just as this brilliant

light, but a giant man on a throne and he looks into his eyes and he says eyes like lightning and he has an instant life review. And so these are all other commonalities. So time doesn't work the same way on the other side. John, we, I think this is really like a great episode on the opposite side of what we normally talk about. Because we talk a lot about the golden age when, when, you know, in Genesis 6, when angels gave us heaven technology here. And what do the ancients build? they build these kinds of cities on earth with these massive stones and it doesn't make a lot of sense to the way that humans would build something here but it seems as though part of that knowledge leaked into our world and we ripped off heaven

and we've taken 40 we took 40 people to Peru and looked at this stuff I mean some of these stones are the size of cars and they fit together like puzzle pieces perfectly and it's like I know I was thinking about that with the Solomon's temple yeah the wailing wall I mean They're 15 foot long blocks of, you know, it's like how? And I went to the Taj Mahal a couple years ago. And I was like, oh my gosh, how'd they build that? But they get that idea because somebody, either angelic being came down here and told, or somebody saw it. Somebody went there and saw it.

We're going to make that here. We're going to create that here. And in a way, it was a rebellion. A lot of people come on our show and describe that it was a rebellion on earth. We're going to make heaven here. we're going to do it down here we don't need god we're going to recreate what we've seen and know here and it it's just a whole tower of babel idea exactly what do they build they're building structures that they're ripping it off from somewhere they're stealing the blueprints so here's

another little fascinating correlation is in i think it's hebrews eight it says of you know the tabernacle they they you know god had moses build the tuesday build the to a tabernacle according to a pattern that was in heaven. And it says that they serve, the priests serve in a copy, a shadow of the real thing in heaven. We were just talking about with a Hindu guy. So it's really interesting, like his description of God, it sounds a lot like what John says in Revelation,

which just lines up for me, right? Like his eyes are like lightning, his hair is like snow. John's talking about his sort of encounters with God. And he even, Santosh, Josh said, and he was, because he fell down on his face and he realized when he saw his whole life, which a life review is a commonality, time working a different way. You know, Peter says to the Lord a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like a day. Well, that's exactly what near-death experiences say. And I talk and imagine heaven about two-dimensional or three-dimensional

time and how it would have, it would have the exact effect in feeling of what they're describing. so they relive their lives but yeah so these people from all over the globe bb from teheran um has a heart attack i interviewed her through a translator um and and by the way a lot of these you can you can hear them on my podcast i i play these interviews and you can hear them yourself and so you can hear her through a translator and what happened is she dies of heart attack and she's there waiting for the prophet Ali to come and judge her because that's what she eyes think happens when you die and she said but that didn't happen this giant man in a robe just like Santosh described comes to her this majestic being of light who says

I am he who is. That's how she translated it to me. It was translated. I am he who is. And boom, she's back in her body, but with a peace and a joy she'd never felt before. And she ends up going on this search for who is this God who says, I am he who is.

Well, of course, it's the god of light who appeared to Moses on Mount Sinai and said, you know, my name is I am. I am the self-existent one. when you have these folks from other religions that show up and have the same experience, but they, they then, they have a salvation moment then because they realize it's not Allah, it's not Krishna, it's not these gods that I've been, or God or gods I've been following in Hinduism or Islam. But it's, but it's Jesus because it's fascinating, right? Because they don't really, because they come back.

So they're not, they're not being judged at this point, but they're getting a chance to see the truth? Is that, am I understanding that correctly? Yeah. And, you know, so this confused me for many years as well. I'm like, well, if it's really Jesus, why didn't he just tell him who he is? Right. Why didn't he tell him the gospel? Right. As if he couldn't right now if that's what he wanted to do. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's, we've talked about with John Doyle, who's written a couple of books, he's, he's written too on Muslim dreams and visions. It's just fascinating, right, that these thousands and thousands of Muslims are having dreams about Jesus and not just one but like some people for 30 years but I'm not sure if they I'm sure they see it but what you're describing

sounds more like a free will conversation of like well so so what they commonly experience is this God of Light who is love beyond reason I mean I love listening to them try to describe this love who knows them intimately, who is literally crazy about them. Like you'd be crazy about your own children, right? And they feel all this. They also have a life review and in their life review, because time isn't working the same, they relive their lives. And what God is showing them is not so much what they accomplished in their life,

but mainly their interactions with people. And not only do they watch it like this three-dimensional panoramic replay, they're also re-experiencing what they were thinking and feeling and they are experiencing from God's perspective what the other person felt and thought. And even sometimes the ripple life to life to life from either their acts of kindness or their meanness. and it is a what they commonly say is i was i was judging myself god was not judging me he was loving me and supporting me but it was really hard to look at sometimes and and some of it gave gives god this great sense of joy and they feel that too and some of it really is is hurtful which is just wild but but think about this so all over the globe they come back saying god is love and secondly how we treat one another,

how we love one another is what matters most to God. Wow. Who said that? Moses and Jesus reiterated it. The greatest two commandments. Love God with all your heart and love your neighbors yourself and all the commandments hang on this.

You have a memory of your earthly life, which is probably... It's not just a memory. It's a record. Wow. And I believe... It's terrifying a little bit, John, isn't it? It's a little terrifying.

I believe... Well, yeah, let's talk about that. I believe the angels are assigned to us and they are, so our guardian, we have guardian angels, but I think we also have scribe angels and their warrior angels that near-death experiencers talk about. And I believe the guardian angels are, they're ministering to us. The scribe angels are actually recording our lives, everything. And we have a book of our lives. And it is in what many have seen, the halls of knowledge.

It's like the libraries of heaven, which we can talk more about. It sounds bizarre. Why would they need books? Well, it's not really books like we have books. It's a record. But many people have seen this and report on it. And Revelation, of course, talks about this, you know, in the last days. There's the book of life, but there are many other books.

I report on in India, people who are having near-death experiences, and they're seeing this white-robed man with a beard with a book of accounts. It's common. It's unbelievably common. So yeah. So these things are consistent. and what is amazing is all these people around the globe experience God as the love they've always wanted. But he oftentimes, he doesn't give them the gospel, he gives them a parable many times, which is fascinating.

We never really liked Jesus teaching in parables, by the way, but he did. And why did he? Because there is something about free will that yes, God is sovereign and he has a plan and his plan can't be thwarted and all that. But part of his plan is he's so sovereign. He can work through the free will choices of billions of creatures. And he is. And so he really does give us a free will. So he says, if you seek me with all your heart, you'll find me. And that's exactly what happens with most of these people. So Bibi comes back. And so Bibi comes back. and she starts to seek this God who gave her such peace and joy and and she starts to find out about this God Yahweh who called himself I am and and she becomes more open over that year and then she has a vision and it's a vision of this same man of light but he's now human size and when he touches her she knows this is Jesus. And she said it was like, you know, it was like he was the love I was always waiting for. And he picks her up. And it's a whole, a whole story from there. But Santosh, this Hindu manufacturing engineer. So after he describes, perfectly describes the same holy city of God in

revelation, then he looks down. He's like, where am I? Because he's up on this high platform. and he looks down to his left of where he would fall if he fell off the platform and it is i believe god opening up a vision of hell because he describes where he would fall into this abyss of darkness that he knew if i go there it's it's hopeless i can't get out and a lake of fire at the bottom wow i mean that's a hindu guy and then and so he's like i all i with all my heart one to go in this city. This is the place, this is the place that every human would long to live. I don't want to go there to that abyss. What's, what's another option? Because he said, when, when he died, he thought at death, you would come back as another living thing. He said, but that was not

what happened. And so then he turns and he sees, like I said, this, he said, I knew this was the almighty on a throne. I didn't have to ask. I knew intuitively. And he looks into his eyes and it is the, Jesus appears differently to different people, right? So sometimes it's like the human Jesus. Sometimes it's like the glorified Jesus.

John describes in Revelation 1. And in this case, it was the glorified Jesus. And he looks into his eyes and they're like lightning, he said, he sees his whole life before him, falls down to his knees, because he saw all his sins. And he said, Lord, forgive me, forgive me, forgive me. Now, Santosh said, finally the Lord spoke to him.

And he said, Santosh, I'm sending you back. And when you go back, you must love your family and especially your daughter. She needs you right now. Which is mind-blowing, right? That this God knows us so intimately, even if we don't know him, he knows us so intimately and cares about every detail. He cared about Santosh's daughter because she was going through something at the time.

And Santosh said, when he spoke to me, I was expecting him to cast me into hell. He said, but there was such compassion and love and tenderness in his voice. And so they start to have this incredible conversation. And as they're having this conversation, he sees to the side of this throne what he called a very narrow like so narrow it was it was odd looking how narrow this opening that he called a gate or a doorway that actually opened into

the kingdom of heaven remember he said the 12 gates were closed to him but this very narrow gate or door was open to him and he knew he couldn't go in he wanted to go in but he knew he couldn't go in without the permission of the Almighty. And so because of the love and compassion and mercy, he felt from God, he said, Lord, if you're sending me back, when I come back, I want to go through that narrow gate. How do I go through that narrow gate? And the only conversation that they had is he said, because Santosh was thinking about which, what do I do? What do I go to a church or a mosque or a synagogue or a temple or, you know, what do I do, kind of religious doing? And the Lord said, no, I want relationship. I want to see how sincere, how honest you'll be with me, not one day a week,

but 24-7, seven, you know, seven days a week, 365 days of the year, walk with me, he said. Wow. And he and he said, the wages of sin is death. surrender yourself and and Santosh said completely and he said I should underline completely in your daily life. And then he sends him back. So and so that so it's a wild thing because I see this common. It's like a parable. It's like God gave him a parable. And he comes back seeking and and for two years he's praying every day. He's like, who was this God of light and love and compassion? He's not like, the Hindu gods I studied and he kept saying, Lord, you know, I want to know you, I want to follow

you. And his daughter is invited to sing and acquire with her friend at a church because she was a choral major in college. Santosh goes to hear her, walks in and feels the same love, overwhelm him that he experienced in this God of Light's presence. And then the message that day is on Matthew 7, you must enter through the narrow gate. Wow. And John 10, where Jesus says, I am the gate for the sheep. Whoever enters in through me will be saved. And Santosh was like, oh my gosh, this was just for me.

And he goes back, he starts reading the Bible. And he said, everything in this book is what I experienced. You know, I... That's just how God works. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's so, yeah. I love that story.

You get chills. It's like, I mean, I don't know how. John, I don't know how you compile these listening stories and aren't changed. It's like massively convicting, right, of your own life. Like, I'm going to have to watch it and live it, right? I really want to be proud of what I do. And then at the same time, it's like, it's so interesting. You talk about free will that God sends him back and gives him these clues.

But it's still about his journey. And he leads him there, but he doesn't give him just like this mandate, like, oh, this is what you do. And this is who I am. He's it's so Jesus to have a parable, right? He gave us a free will because he is love. And he created us for love. Yeah. First to love him.

Yeah. And it's a crazy love, you guys. I mean, I just put out two weeks, two or three weeks ago, this podcast called the ecstatic love of God. And when you hear them try to describe, I mean, it's mind-blowing. It's like everything we've ever longed for in any relationship. and they'll use like times a billion. Stuff like that.

Yeah. So it's, you know, and so free will matters to God because you can't have love without free will. You know, you can't force love. You can put a gun to someone's head and say, love me, and they can do act like they love. But we know if love is not free, it's not really love. Yeah. I mean, I mean, what you describe, I think, is a lot of what we go through.

I think, you know, books, recording, writing things down, our government system, kings, queens, the way we build architecture. I think a lot of it, we ripped off from heaven. We brought it here. And I think that's true. Yeah. I think it's, I think this. And near-death experiencers consistently say, this life is the shadow.

That's the real thing. Yeah. It's like where this is the eight-bit version for going back to our previous conversation before the thing started. And then there's this whole new life 2.0 like beyond our, you know, our wildest imagination. I want to get back to something because I think this is where we are in the, I'm a visual person. This is this is where we are. So we kind of know where they're going to. And you said earlier this portal of protection.

And they can look down and see this other thing. And kind of the other side of these stories, it reminds me I said this in the last episode, there's an Irish proverb like a toast, like a blessing, may you be in heaven a full half hour before the devil knows you're dead, right? So there's this idea. So I'm wondering, this portal protection, this Irish proverb is like this thought that, you know, we have this vulnerable time where we're between realities. Can you talk about that? So many of them, talk about that and i think you know in the bible um in the hebrew mind there there were three heavens right the first heaven is just like you look up at the stars and they call that the heavens or the

first heaven the second heaven they believed was the spiritual realm all around us the third heaven like paul said i was i was taken to the third heaven is what santosh described right it's the the holy city of God. It's paradise, which, which interestingly, paradise is the grounds outside the city, but it's, it's massive, but it's very much like Earth. It's where the gardeners hang out. What? Paradiso, Paradiso is garden. It's where the gardens hang out. It's the gardeners. Yeah, the gardeners. Yeah. That's what we've heard too. Isn't it fascinating though that near death experiencers commonly say, they say that, that paradise is what the inhabitants of heaven call the the place outside the walls of the city. And it's where people usually come first to get acclimated.

It's very much like Earth. And it's exactly what Jesus said to the thief on the cross. Today you'll be with me in paradise. Yeah. Wild. Wild. Yeah. So he's hanging out. He's hanging out waiting to go in. Is kind of what you're saying. It's like you're in the courts, but you're. Well, I think, um, I think some are going to have some adjustment to do. Uh, Because they've been very tied to the earth, and they haven't, you know, they haven't spent much time thinking about God or spiritual matters or developing truly their being who they are. Yeah. So, okay, so you were going to the, so the second heaven is the spiritual realm all around us.

And, you know, like you were talking about the eight bit, the analogy I use is imagine if we were living our lives like this, this full experience on a flat black and white painting in the living room, right? And so we only have two dimensions. We can go up and down. We can go side to side. We don't even have a concept of in or out. We don't have that third dimension. So death means separation. So imagine you're living your life in their flat two-dimensional world and at death your two-dimensional self suddenly peels off the flat plane of your existence and comes out in this three-dimensional realm of color that was around you all the time. So you're still living as a two-dimensional being now in greater reality of three dimensions.

Yeah. And color. And so you have an experience that is more real than that because that's contained within this. You can see what's going on. on in your flat world, but from a place that they can't even conceive of where are you, right? And then imagine you get pressed back into your flat black and white world and you're trying to describe three dimensions of color in two-dimensional black and white terms. Yeah. And that's exactly what's happening with these near-death experiencers. So you move out into this spiritual realm that is all

around us. And it's real. But it's also the realm Jesus said that for a time is ruled by evil. So he said the angels who rebelled against God were cast to the earth. So earth, and this is a blurry mystery, maybe even

hell or what people experienced temporarily as hell, is in the spiritual realm of the earth. And I interviewed a Buddhist woman who fascinating story she had you know she she came from Laos to here you know went through high school and college here she'd always heard from her parents you know well Jesus is the the American god but we worship our ancestral gods our ancestors and she you know she was just had a really

rough time bad relationship with her family family, starts doing drugs, you know, bad relationship, abusive relationship. She's like, I'm done. And she gets despondent, decides to commit suicide. And right before she does, she looks in the mirror and she says, you know, God, I don't even know if you're real. People say you are. I don't know.

And I've heard that if you commit suicide, you go to hell, but I don't care. I would rather go to hell than live this hell on earth. and then she does she she takes pills and drinks vodka and as she's dying she said it was like she moved into this realm that she said was more real it wasn't fuzzy or blurry at all it was absolutely real and she saw a cage coming down and up like she was going to be encaged and suddenly she realized oh my gosh it's real she said john I didn't really believe hell was real, but this is real. And I felt the hopelessness and the darkest, blackest evil.

And she heard these voices as well. And she's like, no, come back, come back. She's trying to not die. And as a result, she picks up the phone and calls her therapist. She goes 911. As she's going in the ambulance, she says, God, I'm sorry. I was wrong. It's real.

And if you're real, please, if you can do anything, just keep me out of that place. Well, she does die again. And this time she said, she finds herself up above her body and then just suck down through the mattress and into the earth. And she's dropping in this, she's dropping and she threw the layers of the earth. She said, I could see them. And I was dropping at a lightning speed, but I could also see them. And I was thinking, this is fascinating. I studied this in college.

You know, like there's the mantle and there's the. And yet she's going into this abyss of darkness. And she said ultimately she fell into this pit. And it was blacker than black. And near death experiences, this is common. My friend Paul, who had a cocaine overdose, same thing. He said, suddenly I was, I was. I was not high anymore.

And it's like someone took me and just dropped me. And I was rushing through this abyss of darkness. Of course, Jesus talked about the outer darkness, right, where they'll be wailing and gnashing of teeth. And she ends up in this pit. She called it a pit.

And it was blacker than black. And she said, I couldn't see anything, but I knew there were these creatures all around me. And she said, they began to speak to me, put their thoughts into my mind. And their thoughts were kind of what she had thought before, which is there is no God. God doesn't care about you.

You know, and she said as they're bombarding me with these thoughts, I started, I had this intuitive sense. If I agree with them, if I partner with these thoughts, these thoughts are lies. and if I agree, this is where I'm going to be forever. So are you saying that the original death experience with the cage is different than the abyss? Different place? She knew with the cage

because she knew she was in hell in this abyss because she said these were the same voices and it was the same darkness she knew she was going to. But she wasn't there yet. And it wasn't the same things that she was, I mean, fascinating. It was the same thing she was telling herself. before she committed suicide, right? These are the same.

Right. Which is... Well, and I don't think it was her telling herself. That's what I'm getting at, right? This is how evil works in the world. You know, one of the things I like to say as a pastor is not every thought is your own. Yep. Well, we...

And I ask that question because people talk about there's a difference between Abraham's bosom and to Tartarus and the deepest, darkest parts reserved for the angels that sinned against creation, right? So there's these levels of, you say that there's three levels of heaven. We've heard people describe the three levels of, almost three levels of hell. So I just put out a podcast called The Dark Side of Inde's, and I let you hear from people like Yen, who I'm, who was talking about, but others. And they talk about the different levels. So describe that. Yeah. Describe it for us. I can understand, now getting this, John, I can understand why you did six hours.

Yeah. I'm allowed to do a part two. Talk about rabbi. There are so many rabbit holes we can go down and never come back out. But this is, this is good. The listeners like, well, what about this over here? Yes, always. And you never finish that.

Well, I think the problem, John, is a lot of people will smash all three levels of heaven here into our two-dimensional space and say, everything the Bible is describing is happening in first, second, in third heaven are happening all right here. And so I'm going to, I'm going to build an entire existence based on my understanding of this. And then same with hell. It's just this, you know, and it's like we've come to realize it's way more complicated. It is. I mean, our world is vast. Yeah. But the world to come is way, way beyond. And this is an important point too, because I like to say, don't go believing

what every near-death experiencer says because they have one tiny little glimpse of a vast world and sometimes they can misinterpret their experience.

If they have a shallow experience, I'll give you another hellish good example. So if Yen's is classified as the outer darkness, some talk about a void. I think that's actually different than the outer darkness. But if hers is like the pit

of hell or the outer darkness, I think there's also a hell on earth. So Howard Storm was an atheist college professor who dies of a rupture in his lower intestine while he's in France doing an art tour with students in France. He thought, you know, when you you die, it's just lights out. Unplug the computer. There's nothing. And so he, he suddenly finds himself standing by the bed in the hospital. And he feels, he said, I felt like Superman. He said, and I ask him, I said, did you know you were dead? And he said, not yet. He said, because, you know, one minute I felt horrible. And the next minute, I'm, I feel wonderful and all these heightened senses. Like he said, you know, like I could, I could feel every bump in the floor like, like with my fingers. And I

hear perfectly even the buzzing of the fluorescent lights and all my senses were heightened. This welcoming committee of people come into the hallway of the hospital. Remember, he had been waiting eight hours to go to surgery and he finally died. It was a weekend in France and no surgeons were on duty. And so this nice welcoming committee of people are in the hallway saying, Howard, come, we're here for you. And he said, I need surgery. I've been waiting.

They said, oh, we know. We know all about you. Come. Don't you want to get better? Come on. And they were wearing hospital uniforms. And he couldn't quite see them clearly. And so he thinks it's the hospital staff and he starts to follow them.

Okay, now. They were a little blurry. They were a little blurry. Did you interview him? No. No, it's true. Yeah. They were.

They were kind of for some reason, hazy. He couldn't quite. make out their features. But here's an important thing is if Howard had been resuscitated right then, let's say, in this near-death experience, what would have been his interpretation? Atheists go to the other side and have a great life and they're nice people and, man, I felt like Superman. It doesn't matter what you think, what you believe, what you do.

Right. It's universalism, right? But that's not how it ended. Yeah, yeah. So they end up leading him. And again, time doesn't work the same way, but space doesn't work the same way either. So he's walking with them. And he said after a while, I realized the hospital can't be this big because he was on the third floor and they hadn't gone up or down.

And they kept walking. And it gets dimmer and dimmer until it's this black darkness. And he's like, I'm not going any further. He realized because they started to be snide and make these marks like, hurry up, come on, get going. And the darker it got, the more they enclosed close to him. And so he's like, I'm not going any farther. Oh, yes, you are.

We have a lot farther to take you. And he started to fight and try to get away. And they start punching and kicking and laughing. And then it got worse. And he's described this to me numerous times, and he said, biting and tearing and taking pieces of him. And he said, what I realize is they were, they were just playing with me. Like these, and what he realized is these were not demons. These were kindred spirits.

He said, he realized intuitively, these were people just like him, who had lived just like him. And he said, you know, I had come to the conclusion that the biggest baddest bear in the woods wins. And I used people. I didn't really care about my students. I wasn't faithful to my wife, you know, the band and the choir concerts and the little league sports. I wasn't there because I was too busy making something of myself. And he says this to me in tears, you know. and he realized that these people had been like him but had devolved.

So when you choose in hell, I believe, is a choosing. You think you're choosing to reject God because, you know, I know what's best for me. My will be done. But when there's no God, there is no light, there is no love, there is no life. There's hopelessness. and it's the free will creature. It's, this is what Howard said. It's victim or victimizer.

It's dominate or be dominated. And so he realized if I stay here, I'm going to become like one of these people. And I'm going to have to learn to dominate others to survive. You don't really survive. So, and he told me, he said, they did things to me I don't even want to talk about. And I mean, so you just think about the worst prison scene on earth. Yeah. And that's what he experienced.

And what's wild. So now I think that is a level of hell. Others describe it as seeing people bound to this earth, but still locked into the things that that enslaved them. So what was their God? So like they see people in bars trying to graze. grab for drinks and the people drink the drinks, they can't see them. But they're just jonesing for this, for alcohol or drugs or controlling a mother following her son and just badgering him, even though she's dead.

He didn't even know she was there. And the guy, Dr. Ritchie, who experienced Jesus showing him this, what I call hell on earth, said, I had this thought like, where your treasure is there, will your heart be also? And he said, I realized that was from the Bible and that Jesus was giving me this thought. And he said, had these people so, so loved above everything else, this, you know, whatever the drugs or alcohol or controlling other people or whatever it was, that they were tied to it? He said, that would be a form of hell. So anyway, I do think fascinating. let me tell you the conclusion of the two hellish stories

because this is how so many of the men that are near-death experiencers. Yen in this pit realizes I can't partner with these thoughts, their lies. Now, I think that was God last chance speaking to her

because she decides no, no, there is a God. No, God does love me. No, God does care about me. She starts saying this. And she said, even though I wasn't sure if I believed it, but I was just saying it because I knew I couldn't partner with them. And she said, suddenly into this. And she said, I had dropped like thousands of miles into the center of the earth.

She said, I was, yeah, I mean, it looked like I felt like I dropped thousands and thousands of miles. And suddenly, boom, burst in this light. and she said, brighter than the sun, but not hard to look at, but all I could make out is a white horse and a figure on the horse,

but his face was like the sun. So I couldn't make out his features. And he lifted me up and took me out of that pit. And her story goes on and she goes past, she goes past her right back up through the layers and through her bed and out above the streets of Milwaukee and out into the

universe. And she comes to what she realized was out, out away from heaven, but she hears the angels. She said she heard them singing and all these different languages, but the languages and the words all melded together. And she says, it's the most beautiful, loving, peaceful things she'd ever heard or felt. And she said, that was in contrast to these demonic voices she was hearing. And anyway, so he sends her back and she starts seeking and she becomes not only a follower of Jesus, she becomes a missionary. Wow.

Howard in this hellish place, here's in his, he said, it came from my chest, this thought pray to God. And he said, I thought to myself, I don't believe in God. why would I pray to God? And again, pray to God. He's like, I don't even know how to pray. Third time, stronger, pray to God. And so he, and again, I think this is God seeking us to the very last moment. You got a half an hour, the Irish say, right? So there's this time even in before we're fully cut off. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, maybe. Yeah. I mean, these are Inde's, yes. And that's going to frustrate a lot of Christians, you know,

because Christians have a very black or white way of viewing everything. Oh, these people come back, too. So maybe there's a dichotomy here where, I mean, God forbid, you die that atheist and you don't have another option. You don't have a second chance, if you will, right? Like, there isn't a But maybe there is. Maybe there's a transition state where we're still not completely, like you said, severed from earth time, but we're also experiencing heaven time. I don't know. I do know near-death experiencers can make decisions. Howard, Howard ends up from there remembering. So as he, this is, this is pretty wild. He starts piecing together like, my country tis of the, God bless America. He just, he couldn't think of anything with God in it, you know, anything he

could and they get so angry. And they said, you think this is bad. Now we're really going to hurt you. Wait till you see where we're going to take you now. But they were backing off. Every time he used the name of God, they were backing off. And so he kept doing it. And then he's and then he remembers a song from being taken to a church as a kid.

Jesus loves me. and he thinks even if Jesus is real, why would he love me? He must hate me. But he said enough. And he cries out, Jesus, save me. And into this outer darkness comes this pinpoint of light, gets brighter and brighter till it's brighter than the sun, arms reach out, pick him up and hold him as he balls like a baby realizing how wrong he was.

And then this is wild. and then he feels him just start to gently rub his back. He said like a mom or a dad comforting a child who had been lost and now was found. And you know, it's like. I don't get chills. I mean, I don't know how you. And Paul O'Hadam, my friend with the cocaine overdose too. He's dropping this outer darkness.

He starts thinking. And now you've got to remember, he was living with his girl friend who was a stripper who had introduced him to drug cartel from Columbia. They were dealing and doing a whole plate of cocaine. And then, and so right before this, she says, because she grew up with faith, but just a lot of trauma, a lot of bad stuff happened to her. And she ended up in the cabaret and doing drugs. But she still had this God sense.

And she said to him, Paul, God is going to use you for great things. one day. God is going to use you to rescue people from darkness. And he's sitting there with a whole plate of cocaine. He's like, uh, I don't think so. And then he does the whole plate and ODs. And he said he was instantly sober and dropping. And as he's dropping, he's like, I knew I was going to hell. And hopelessness and a pulling away from God. They commonly say this. The worst part of hell is the pulling away from God and you know it. And he said, he's, he's justified. He's like, you must have made some mistake. I'm a good person. I mean, you know, I haven't really, I haven't murdered anybody. I haven't robbed anybody. And he said it started speeding up.

The more justification, the faster it was going until finally he comes to the end of himself and he cries out, God, help me. Please, just help me. And boom. there he felt the spirit of God he didn't slow down but the spirit of God was right there and a love and a peace and anyway he has a whole life review and god ask him paul what have you done with the life i've given you and then he sees it and he's like you're right this is what i deserve and he says but if you'll give me a chance i'll go back and i'll tell everybody about you boom he's in the hospital comes to so think about this yen and howard and paul and another guy who had a hellish experience where he saw these people in this level jonesing for drugs and he was an alcoholic

and just trying to get this stuff but they couldn't they couldn't satiate the craving that didn't go away because the craving was sewn into their soul not just a physical body right And all four of them come back from these hellish experiences. Today they're all Christian ministers or pastors or missionaries. It's amazing. I love it. And I think, Not wild.

It's wild. How do you make a tenured professor leaves his profession and his wife divorces him because she was still an atheist, thought he was crazy. But you know, it's not because of hell, they say. It's because of the love of God and the mercy of God. Come on. You know, they don't want anybody to go there, but more so they want everybody to know, you know, the lies that keep us away from this incredible relationship with God.

And the portal of protection. Yeah. Is that? Oh, yeah, we never got there. Yeah. And we went all the way to hell and back, John. Yeah. Well, so Jesus talked about, you know, many times, he said, the ruler of this world, right?

That's what he called him. The ruler of this world. Wasn't Jesus God incarnate? But Satan and the fallen angels were cast to the earth, which makes Yen's story interesting, right? Going through the levels of the layers of the earth. But the realm of the spiritual realm around the earth is real. And I think when people enter it,

and I think you can enter it through maybe these gateway drugs, DMT, LSD, ayahuasca, you know, deep, deep transcendental meditation. You're talking about this. You're talking about the second half. Astral travel. Yep. You can go there. But you're going into a realm unprotected.

And remember these near death experiences that are being guided to heaven, when they have this welcoming committee, they say to me, I knew that this welcoming committee was there to love me and guide me on my journey. and protect me. And I always ask them, protect you from what? And they always say, I don't know. I just intuitively knew they were also there to protect me. Wow.

So I do think, and I've had near-death experiencers, even in the tunnel journey, see and hear probably demonic beings outside that tunnel trying to get them to come, to come to them. in fact erika who had first a heavenly near-death experience but god showed her a hellish experience and as she was going back through the tunnel it stopped and and she was being called out of it and she did go and she experiences just the the misery of these creatures but all also the not just the misery the thoughts and it's fascinating because the thoughts are thoughts like

see i told you did you ever read the great divorce by c s lewis yeah yeah like that just like that fact i think c s lewis when he got blown up yeah in war war one by that grenade maybe he had a near-death experience but they were just like that they're like um i told you so and and and see i was right all along and you know what you know Why can't you understand? It just, just these egotistical, self-centered, you know,

uh, kind of thoughts and ideas and just imprisoning them in, in, in, uh, you know, a very demoralized place. Doing this,

doing this show, John, it seems like there are spirits that have almost like a weird personality and they attack, attach onto us in this realm, and they sort of give us the similar thoughts and behaviors. And it, you know, they give me more. What do you mean? Kind of like people say, oh, it's the spirit of Jezebel, but Jezebel has character traits. And they kind of, they get humans to live out those character traits. And it's like that person

is different than this person over here is struggling with selfishness. It's like there's something, there's like a spiritual character trait. And like people say, oh, they're a narcissist or whatever. And then it's clinically diagnosed. You can say this person on this continent does the same thing as this person over here. It's like how are we all performing this selfish, like life the same exact way? It feels like maybe some of those spirits that are in that portal outside of the portal protection. It's like they are sort of last-ditch effort to grab us, but they sort of haunt us here on earth almost. You know? Well, I think absolutely. I mean, you know, Jesus, Jesus cast out many demonic spirits. And, but I think, I think it's very misunderstood how, how that works. Those seem to be a specific type of spirit as well. You know what I'm saying? Like they, they had bodies at one point. They're trying to get into our body and sort of drive us around. And then there's other, it's like there's other things. I think, I think, I

I'm just saying there's a hierarchy of dark creatures that we have sort of loosely talked about over the years. And it's complicated. It just seems I can understand how when we're going from here to there, even then, there's these other things that are trying to... Well, there is a battle. There's a war taking place, which is bizarre. The CEO that I interviewed Randy, as he dies of six pulmonary. He's blocking his heart, 30 minutes dead in the hospital. He's leaving his body.

And he was, he was a, he was a Christian, but he was also, he had gone through a lot. And he was kind of angry at God and, and just, you know, kind of like, yeah, not done with God, but he was, but he was very disillusioned, let's say. And as he's going up, he sees his body, he's going up in the spiritual body and he's in the realm of the earth, but he's looking out and he's seeing, again, telescopic vision across these hills. And he said, he saw this battle taking place between these gargantuan creatures. And he was describing these warrior-like angels and these demonic-like fallen angels. And there was a battle going on. And he intuitively realized it was a battle for him.

And he cries out to Jesus and then he is, he's taken and next thing he knows, Jesus is holding him, you know, like face to face, cheek to cheek and feel his beard. Real. It's real. It's all real. But let me tell you another little theory I have that down the rabbit hole you guys would probably be interested in. So I was saying how we are assigned guardian angels, right?

I think maybe a guardian angel and a scribe angel. I'm amazed how many near-death experiencers have two. It's not just one, but two. And I think that what God is doing here is allowing us to go through this because he's trying to make eternally free loving creatures who will never rebel again. Wow. And here's what I mean. and here's why so think about it yeah yeah the angels in heaven were also created to love and worship

god and yet and because they have a free will some of them chose not god some of them chose no i think i know best i want i want my will in my way and so god gave them what they wanted but when someone does not want God, where is not God? Well, it's a place where there is no light, no love, no life, no joy, no kindness, because that's all from God, right? And so he creates a place, and Jesus said this. Hell was not created for people. It was created for the fallen angels who made an eternal choice.

so there's no second chance for the angels because second chances only happen in linear time right right yeah if there's infinite two-dimensional three-dimensional time where the past present and future all happen in an eternal moment there's no second chance now now think about this so god creates humans with a similar free will but in the knowledge of both good and evil for a time for a temporal compressed and that's a fascinating thing right so we say to god you know like how could you allow so much evil and suffering well if you believe in the ears who experience both hell and heaven it's like one one thousandth of what's to come of how good it's going to be or how horrible so he has compressed us limited our little taste of

of heaven, of the goodness and the kindness and the beauty and the love and the joy and the fun and excitement. That's all from God. And of the hell of the human creature saying, no, God, I think I know best, my will be done. And then the domination and trying to get people to do what I want. And, you know, I mean, all our problems come out of that, right? Yeah. So we get a little taste to heaven and a little taste to hell in this time of choosing. And what the choosing is is choosing God. And that the love and the will of God is perfect and good and honestly what we want. But I think he's allowing it because not only when we then cross into eternity, which I think then our decisions are eternalized, which I don't honestly know what that means.

but if the angels made a decision that was eternal, there's no going back and there's no second chance, then I think when we cross over that border or boundary, our decisions somehow maybe are eternalized. And so what's happening here, the reason God is assigning guardian angels and scribes recording our lives, which is what gets played out in the life review,

but it's also in the books of our lives, is he's teaching the innocent angels why never again choose to say my will instead of God's will? And it says this in Scripture. The angels long to look into these things of God's grace. Wow. It's interesting. It's like, so you're saying there's, there's beings behind the veil watching it all,

and then are part of helping the beings under the veil, which is us. And we're all training for utopia. We're training to learn what we need to learn, there was a previous rebellion. There was, there was a story before our story. Exactly. And Christians don't often want to think that way because we are the center of this whole story. And there's a lot. Yeah. Yeah. And I love that because I think both then, both of us then learn about God's love in a unique way. And we kind of get there, have gone through the flames. We're not burnt up, but we're toasted. We got burn marks on our

bodies. We've got our closer a little bit tattered because we've gone through the the desert and we've we're finally here. We're finally here where we can accept it. When we cross over, you know, if it's going to be about love, which that is what the Bible tells us, then we have to still be free. And so this always confuse me. Like, well, why would we not rebel again? Yeah. Right. and and and and then i started to think oh maybe that's the why you know but that in eternity we will still have the collective memory of earth and then i realized reading the scriptures like oh you know angels long to look at these they're ministering to us now but then it says we will rule over them not rule over like in but but we will we will have authority they'll judge them why well because

we lived it yeah and and and and and and and a more bizarre thing is that the God who is infinite and eternal entered in and joined himself somehow with humanity. Yeah. Forever. I mean, Jesus still has his earthly body. And his marks. Yeah.

That's cool. And his marks. Yeah. And he will. And that's the kind of intimacy God wants with human creatures. So, you know, what you were saying is, you know, we make it all about us and there's much more. And that's absolutely true. And what's equally bizarre and true is how many dear death experiences say

when I was with God or when I was in the presence of Jesus. And they know he's one and the same. In fact, it's fascinating to hear him describe the triune nature of God. But in his presence, they consistently say, you know, John, I know this couldn't be true, but I felt like I was. like his favorite one. Like I was the only child. Like he loved me more than

any. And his love for me is growing. They would say things like that consistently. So both are true, which is wild. That's crazy. You know, it's not all about us. It's about God and his story being played out. And we're a part of that story,

but we're not the whole story. But on the other hand, we're also. more valuable and loved than we've ever imagined. And not realizing that is also what causes so many of our problems, right? Because instead of living out of this confidence of love and value and worth and bringing our uniqueness to serve those around us, we're constantly trying to prove we're lovable.

Prove we're worth something. And it messes up living out our purpose. You know, John, this is what a lot of Tim Alberino talked about. This is the story of the prodigal son you're talking about, that the older brother is the angels in heaven and the younger brother is us going through and the father loves both of his sons equally. But we both equally struggle with a different thing. Because if I'm in heaven hanging out, I'm just like, Dad, why do you care about these things down here? They don't care about you. They spoil your inheritance. They're not taking care of the animals. Like, I. am up here and then we have this jealousy and then we're in this where's god where's my dad my dad doesn't love me my dad doesn't care i'm hanging out with the prostitutes and the pigs and i'm just living in Vegas but then i but then i finally realize i'm at the bottom and i come home and god rushes out to meet me and throws the party and then the older brother can go wow dad really loves both of us doesn't he he loves both of us and it's a family this whole story is a family and so

It is. It is. We almost have to go through this life experience for a reason. I love that. As an epic way of looking at it. And it's often why so many bizarre stuff comes on our show and it's like, why do we go through this crazy trauma and experiences? And it's like, okay, there's a point.

There's a point. No matter how dark it gets, we're getting towards the light. And I just, I love that, John. I feel like we can. You know, one of the things I love most is I have interviewed people who have burned to death. you know people who have i mean had the most traumatic i mean abused rape tortured to death and yet on the other side it's amazing how in god's presence it all makes sense not not that that was his will it's very clear that was against his will but at the same time it all

makes sense and it is all going to work out. It truly, I mean, they see an experience in another dimension of time when Romans 8 says, you know, God works all things for good for those who love him and are called according to his purpose. It's true. Yeah. It's awesome. Well, thank you so much. I feel like we could do like 10 episodes. Yeah, I understand why Sean did six hours. It's like you feel like we have so many different trails. I think I have one last question. The rabbit trails are endless. I got one last question before we close here.

But like you spent 35 years doing this. Like how is this most changed to you? Like do you think in this experience? Because I mean, you're just to everybody else's experience. Well, I mean, completely. I was an agnostic. It opened me up to seeking to learn about Jesus. and the Bible, which then for completely other reasons, the, like I said, the historical prophetic

reasons I came to faith, I think these near-death experiences, I don't recommend that people use them as the filter to interpret reality. I think God gave us the scriptures for that reason. But the scriptures, there's still a lot of mystery beyond. And all truth is God's truth. So I think we've got to be careful just listening to near-death experiencers alone. We've got to filter it through the scriptures. And so, you know, doing that for myself then led me to a place where I was like, why don't people know this?

And so I started, like I said, in 1989 is the first talk I gave on it. And then I left engineering and went into ministry. And my whole life has been lived trying to get to the day when, you know, every day, walking with God, just like he told Santosh. And then when I step over to the other side that, you know, my life review is going to be a lot of fun. Yeah. I mean, there are going to be a lot of things I regretted.

Yeah. But Jesus has paid for all that. And that's what he wants us to know. there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus so that we can see his great grace, but also he's going to reward us for every little act of kindness, everything, every motive done to please God and to love and serve God and other people. It all counts. I love that.

And so it's changed everything about my life. I mean, it's why I'm doing what I'm doing. I recently actually resigned from leading the church. I started 27 years ago because I felt like this message is for our global world. I believe, I mean, I couldn't have done this five years ago. I couldn't have interviewed people all over the world and shown it to people all over the world. But everyone with a smartphone, I was in India a couple years ago in this remote village

and everyone had a smartphone. And I realized this can get to everyone on earth. Yeah. And I think that's why God is raising up these testimonies of people from every continent and religious background. And I'm trying to show the God they're experiencing is the same God that Paul encountered on the Damascus Road when he wasn't a believer either, right? Yeah.

This brilliant light. Who are you, Lord? I'm Jesus. I love your stories, John, because even the most hardcore denier, once they have this time in between, they're instantly, God. help me there's no more doubt there's no more they know where they don't want to go and they they cry out for help and I think that for some reason on this in this realm you know we're very skeptical we're very materialistic and how we view everything and I think it takes shows

and like ours and yours and all these people talking about the paranormal supernatural near-death experiences to kind of wake some of those people up to it. And this episode is fantastic because I think it draws and connects a lot of the things we've heard on various stories on our show. Like for instance, like, you know, people who have astral projection or out-of-body experiences and they go places and they say, I was there. I was watching some other part of the world. And people go, oh, that's crazy. That's all happening in the brain. And people telepathically communicating with a creature or somebody else. That doesn't happen.

You know, all these little things. This whole episode is just, or megalithic technology, why the ancients built the way they built. I mean, I just love these episodes because there's so many questions that an episode will bring up, but this ties a lot of the, it gives us more answers. And even just going through layers of the earth down underground where we've, that's bizarre. But they're seeing the layers and they're like, okay, so that's the, the macele, the little whatever. I would not have believed that if I hadn't heard multiple people

talking about it. You know, I don't encourage people to go to the other side because you're going to the other side unprotected. Sure. And it's ruled by evil. And so if God is not calling you there, don't go. That's, you know, that's my advice. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I would love to have you back on and kind of maybe nail down like some specifics because we are very episodic and we try to talk about a specific thing. But this is wonderful. This is great. This is like a shotgun blast of all the good stuff.

And mixed in is some of the heart truths of hell and where there is no love, you know, where God isn't able to be. But tell our listeners where they can find your podcast, buy your books, and get involved what you're doing and appreciate you so much john thank you yeah i mean you can you can find it all out on imagine heaven.net that's the website and the books are imagine heaven and imagine the god of heaven and my podcast is the imagine heaven podcast with john burke so let's go thanks john pretty similar if you ever want to do this again we're up for it yeah we'd love to have it yeah i would be that's fun awesome well thanks john thanks for spending extra time with us too i know you're busy man so

appreciate it all right see you guys see you john