SID: John, I see NDE, near-death experiences, more and more. What is your definition of a near-death experience, John?
JOHN: Well, it’s when someone has a clinical death, like their heart actually stops, and then they’re resuscitated. In some cases, their brainwaves stop. They’re dead, but modern medicine resuscitates them. In some cases, they’re on the verge of death. But what’s common is they come back and talk about their experience of a life beyond this life. I’ve interviewed doctors, bank presidents, college professors, commercial airline pilots, pastors, little kids, people of all socioeconomic backgrounds, and yet they’re consistent. There are commonalities of what they say, and that’s what I was trying to do writing “Imagine Heaven” is tie them together with what the Bible’s already told us. You see a picture unfold before you of the life to come.
SID: You know what the thing that just literally blew me away, and after talking with you I know you, too. People born blind. Tell me about Vicky?
JOHN: Yeah. Yeah, in “Imagine Heaven” I take about 100 of the 1000 or so near-death experiences I studied and I’m showing through their eyes what happened and how it fits with the Bible. But the ones, there are about three in there of blind people. I think this is one of the things that has convinced skeptics, definitely convinced me, the blind people see. When they die, like Vicky, she was in an auto accident. She’d been blind from birth, never seen. She leaves her body and this is common. She’s looking down at the site of the accident and later she’s taken to the hospital and then she’s above the hospital bed and she doesn’t know what it is she’s experiencing. She doesn’t have words for it. Then she notices there’s a ring on this body of this girl she’s looking at and it’s her ring. She recognizes it. She has long hair. She recognizes, “I must be dead.” She didn’t know because you feel, they say, more alive than you’ve ever felt before.
This is not less real, this is more real than what we experience here. She’s taken then through– She didn’t know what to call it. There was light and color and then suddenly none. She comes out on this pastoral garden area, beautiful grass and trees and flowers, and a vast number of people. All the people, and even the flowers and the leaves and everything, was shining with this light, but the light didn’t shine on things, it came out of everything. She said the light was also love. It was like love and light and life coming out of everything. Now, what’s fascinating to me is that blind people consistently say what sighted people say, that the light of Heaven comes out of everything. Now, how would a blind person ever get that idea?
You wouldn’t hear it here, light shines on things, not out of things, right? Commonly people talk about this welcoming committee of their friends or relatives or others who had gone on before. Vicky, she grew up in a home for blind children and there were two girls, Debbie and Diane, who had died at nine and age 11. She sees them and they hug, they recognize each other. She said they were in their prime and they were whole and healthy. Then she sees Jesus. He is brighter than any of them, filled with love. She hugs Him. The hug, she said, was unlike any hug you’ve ever experienced. She describes Him like we would see Jesus. Then Jesus tells her, “It’s not your time yet. You must go back.” She goes back and what’s fascinating, she was able to see Debbie and Diane and herself, but she didn’t see that because she was blind, and yet she was able to explain it and the house mother verified it.
In chapter two of “Imagine Heaven,” I write about skeptical doctors in the afterlife, of what convinced so many skeptical oncologists, cardiologists that I studied or that I interviewed was that many people when they die they’ll be above the operating table. One doctor I interviewed, Dr. Sabum, said this one patient was above the operating table when their heart stopped during surgery and noticed that the other surgeon there had failed to wear scuffs over his white shoes and described the shoes. Another patient had a brain aneurysm. They drained their entire body of all blood, stopped the brainwaves, covered the eyes, put clickers in the ear to make sure there were no senses at all, and yet she’s above the table and is able to describe what went wrong with the procedure and how they had to put something in her artery in her leg, could describe the saw that looked more like a toothbrush with a socket set, she said, not what you would think of as a saw.
SID: How did these doctors–
JOHN: Again and again–
SID: They have no grid for this.
JOHN: Well, this has been written up in the journal of the American Medical Association, in Europe’s most prestigious medical journal, “The Lancet.” 900 scholarly publications. There is incredible evidence that there is, in fact, life after death, but what I find even more fascinating is when you look, everyone is a bit different, and they all have their interpretation of it. Because truly, it’s an experience of life beyond our dimensions. There’s beauty. There are mountains and trees and flowers, but all of it, they say, they experience not with five senses. It’s more like with 50 senses. What I’ve come to believe is that this experience is the shadow of the real thing.
SID: Now, we have it reversed. Most of us hang onto Earth for dear life, but we should be hanging onto Heaven for dear life.
JOHN: Exactly.
SID: You know what I’d like to find out? When we come back, there are so many, and this is the greatest apologetic that there is a Heaven, the Bible is true, Jesus is real. By interviewing some 1000 people, he found patterns of things that almost all the people had, which then give us real insight into what Heaven’s like. Do you want to find out a few more of these? Be right back.
