What Happens After You Die? Near-Death Experiences that Prove the Existence of Your Soul!

Hey guys, I have really good news for you. Christians are right. You have a soul and the idea that nothing happens when you die, it isn't true. And today I talked to John Burke, who has actually done extensive research on near-death experiences. People who have stories that aren't just reducible to hallucinations. That their souls left their body, came back, and they had memories of what happened on the other side. And let's face it, we all actually really do hope there's another side and that it has the potential of being good. Good news. It is good. Before we jump into this topic, there's a link below the video to join our newsletter. If you sign up for our newsletter, you get notified about all the cool stuff that we want to give you for free just to inspire you to live the life that God made you for. And, added bonus, guys, no one else is doing this with their newsletters. We are signing you up just for joining our newsletter for the chance to win a trip with me and Jimmy Wahlberg. Doesn't cover the air, but the ground only, but our pilgrimage to Our Lady of Guadalupe, just for being part of our newsletter. So it lets us bless you with all the stuff that we put out to the world and you get entered for the possibility of winning that trip. Wow. All that today and more on the Chris Tavanek Show. John Burke. Chris. I've been excited for this conversation for a very long time. Well, thanks. Me too. I love what you're doing. Praise God. Thanks. I love what you're doing. Imagineheaven.net. All right, go check that out. Imagineheaven.net. You wrote best-selling books, Imagine Heaven and Imagine the God of Heaven. You were a pastor for many years and a trainer of pastors, but now you're full-time into this. Yeah. And I think it's safe to say you've interviewed more people who have had near-death experiences than any living person. How many interviews so far? There's one other, a few others who maybe are, okay. Yeah. Well, we're just going to claim it because unless they write in. Yeah. Yeah. I have studied or interviewed over probably about 1,500 people who have clinically died and been resuscitated and came back talking about being more alive than they've ever been in a place more real than this is. That's amazing. All right. Before I jump into some of the experiences, what got you obsessed on this topic that you'd... Obsessed is a good word. I mean, that's a lot of interviews. Yeah. That's a lot of conversations. So I never set out to do this. I was raised in church, in a very liturgical church. I later became an engineer. So my mind thinks like that, very analytical. And growing up, I was always asking the question like, okay, well, how do you know Jesus is the son of God? And how do you know there's a God? And I was always asking questions and I didn't find many people who either had answers or had time or cared. So as I grew up, I basically determined Jesus was a good man who was made legend. God, probably not. There's just no evidence, but who can know? So I was in agnostic and my dad was dying of cancer. And, you know, death kind of wakes you up. So someone gave my dad the very first research that coined the term near-death experience. And I saw it on his bedside table, picked it up and just was thumbing through it. I'm like, what is this? Just as a consolation to him? Was that the motive? Because it was very hopeful. Like, God is real. Heaven is real. This is real. And it was the first book on that. It was, I mean, this is in the late 70s. So this is a long time ago. And I couldn't put it down. I read the whole thing in one night. And at the end of it, I said, oh my gosh, this could be evidence that I was looking for. So that opened my mind up. And because so many of them were talking about seeing this God of light, who has love, whose presence they never wanted to leave, many cases seeing Jesus, I was like, okay, maybe I should be open to the Bible. So about a year later, I got into a small group that were studying the Bible. Someone invited me. And because of that, I was like, okay, I should be open. And for other reasons, you know, really more of the historical reasons that scripture has been confirmed, I came to faith in Christ. And as I continue to grow, okay, now, how did these near-death experiences correlate with what I'm learning about God through the scriptures and heaven and all this? And I ended up working as an engineer in Santa Barbara, California, which I didn't know until later, but Santa Barbara turned out to be the place where early research was being done by a lot of the doctors who had formed this association to study near-death experiences. So I kept running into them. I kept hearing more and more, coming across more and more. And I'd be like, wait, they said that, and this one said that too. And that's what I read in scripture over here. And so I literally started making a chart. And I did my first talk on this at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1989. So I've just been kind of obsessed with it ever since then. So for 35 years, I've just continued to study it and put the pieces together. And all I can figure now is that's maybe why God made me. I don't know. Wow. I love seeing someone's own personal conversion tied to the work they're doing. Because then it doesn't feel like work. It's like, hey, don't you guys see this is awesome, right? I also love when you share your conversion, how you pick up that book and at this moment when you're saying goodbye to your dad, I mean, there's something in you that wanted the faith you were raised with to be true. I get comments from atheists sometimes in our videos, and usually not real friendly, but I'm always thinking like, dude, why are you watching? Do you want me to be right? You probably want me to be right. It's like, who doesn't want this to be true? I'll tell you. I mean, now there is so much evidence. There is more than enough evidence if evidence is actually what you want. And that's what I've realized is like, there's evidence and I found evidence and I became convinced this is true. What was fascinating is that then there was still my will and that was still an issue. Like, okay, so God is real. Jesus is real. Now what? Who's making the next move? Well, and that's the part of being truly open is like, if this is true, am I willing to let God be God? Because that means me giving up being God. And no one would ever say, well, I'm playing God, but think about it. I wake up every day going, my will be done through me, through you. And by the way, through God too. And if you don't do my will, I'm going to be upset or just say you're not there. And yet, and this is part of what's motivated my writing. When you understand how wonderful God is, how good God is and how even the reason we have that choice is because what God wants is relationship. He doesn't want robots. That was always my fear. Like if I give God my life, he's going to ruin it. Like he couldn't ruin it if he wanted to right now, right? Anyway. So there is that then surrender of the will, but when you realize how wonderful God is, that's not a problem. Praise God. Yeah. The evidence doesn't, doesn't produce the faith. It's that it's like marriage, right? I got, I learned the facts about my wife. There's evidence that she's the right one, right? The will's got to kick in and cause the end goal is not a topic. It's a person, it's a relationship. And that's true with the Lord. Yeah. You know, there's a reason Jesus summarized all the commandments. One love God, two love people. He said, that is what sums up all the commands of the Bible. And so it is all about love, which means it requires God to give us freedom to choose because love can't be forced. And yet, you know, to make the choice, there's got to be evidence that makes the choice make sense. Like my wife, you know, wasn't on meth. Like, I'd be like, Hey, there's a, there's a reason to not move my will to marry this person. Right. So the evidence lines up, help us, you know, someone's watching and thinking, yeah, okay. Near-death experience. I've already heard about this stuff. And yet I'm just writing this off right now because I've studied hallucinations and all this sounds like stuff you'd see by someone who's doing acid or when O2 is leaving the brain, your oxygen is running out. Yeah. And then all of a sudden you have a light and a tunnel and blackout like, yeah, fighter pilot syndrome. Yeah, there you go. How is this stuff that we're about to dive into different from what can be reproduced without it being real, frankly? Yeah. And I, and I went as a skeptic still. So even after I came to faith in Jesus, I was still skeptical about these near-death experiences. I was still trying to figure it out. And so I ask all these questions and in, in the new book, imagine the God of heaven chapter two is science, skeptics, and NDEs. And it's my 10 points of evidence that convinced me that this cannot be brain-based. You know, that's typically what skeptics or, or agnostics atheists will say, like Dr. Michael Shermer who's, who's written about this. And, and he says it, we know it's brain-based because of some of the things like DMT or other hallucinogenics will, will produce some of the elements or it sounds similar, right? Yeah. What are their best arguments besides, so there's things like hallucination or brain-based. Well, but they're not good arguments. And that's what I'm trying to point out is they don't take into account these 10 points of evidence that actually convinced me. So they all can be summarized as it's brain-based. It's something happening across the, you know, electrical synapses of the brain as a person's dying or coming back. So I'll give you three of the 10. I won't go through all of them. Buckle up, man. I'm excited here. So the, the, the most compelling to me first, when people have a near-death experience, what they say is commonly they, they leave their body, but they're still alive. In fact, they feel more alive than they ever did. And not just with five senses, many times they say like 50 senses and blended senses. And so they're still themselves. In fact, one, one person said, you'll never be more yourself than when you first leave your body and you really realize who you are. So the, the key though, is they say, initially, they still are themselves. They have a spiritual body. Paul talks about this in, in first Corinthians 15, where we're buried a natural body. We're raised a spiritual body. We're buried in weakness, but raised in dunamay. It's the word for power. We translate it power, but it's the word for dynamite. Dang. That's cool. Yeah. And that's what people say. It's like eyesight. That's telescopic communication. That's thought to thought just pure. You feel everything, think everything it's and these senses that are sometimes they've described as blended. So it's heightened awareness. It's heightened reality. Now the key is many times they're still above their body, watching their resuscitation right after they die. So when they're resuscitated, they're able to describe what was going on in the room. Yet they had no heartbeat and no brainwaves in many cases. So if it's brain based, where are these visuals being stored? So for instance, so that can't be a hallucination or an acid trip. If someone's got accurate memories, no, when they're brain dead. And, you know, like Dr. Pim van Lommel, who I interviewed, it's a cardiologist in Holland, a Dutch cardiologist. He did a study across 10 hospitals in Holland and published on it and said this drugs anesthesia can't explain it. And there's nothing brain based that can explain it. That was from his research. And he reports, he actually wrote an article in the Lancet, Europe's most prestigious medical journal, where a guy, a patient was brought into the ER. He had been found in a park. It took 30 minutes to get him in, but he was dead in the park. So they bring him in, they're going to, to, you know, shock his heart. But first they had to intubate him. The nurse saw dentures, takes the dentures out, puts them in the lower drawer of a crash cart. And then they intubate him, shock him. They got his heart going again in ER, but he never came to. So then they roll him out, take him to another room in the hospital. And a week later, he comes out of coma. And he's bothered, you know, where are my dentures? And then he sees a nurse and says that nurse knows where my dentures are. And then he explains that he was up above his body trying to get everybody's attention. He could name what everybody in the room looked like, what they did. And he said, that nurse took my dentures and put them in the lower drawer of that, that cart with all the bottles on it. And that's where they found his dentures. Now that those would be kind of like, you know, Oh, internet stories, right? That you pass on, share it with a friend, but they are so numerous. You wouldn't believe it. Wow. And as a result of actually been studies done. So Dr. Jan Holden actually did a study of near-death experiencers who claim to have verifiable observations while out of their body. Each one might make five or 10 observations, right? And what she found is that 92% of their observations were completely accurate. 92%, 6%, there was some variation, 2% were inaccurate, which turned out to be one of about a hundred patients in the study. So we're talking about verifiable observation. So when I was a skeptical engineer, this grounded this experience in our reality. So that was, that was the first thing that convinced me. And let me, let me say a little thing that might help your listeners. What I've realized, and I've used this analogy with many near-death experiencers I've interviewed and they said, Oh, that's it. Imagine we're living a three-dimensional experience, right? But imagine if we're living this experience on a flat two-dimensional black and white painting on the wall of your living room. Okay. So we have up and down and we have side to side. We don't even have in or out. We don't have a third dimension like that. Death is when your soul leaves your body, right? So imagine at death, your two-dimensional soul peels off that two-dimensional world and comes out into a three-dimensional world that was around you all the time, but you had no concept of it. Right. And you're actually able to look and see what's going on in your two-dimensional world from a world that is in another dimension. And then you experience color and three dimensions. So it feels more alive and more real. And then you're pressed back in, you're resuscitated in your two-dimensional world. Probably a little disappointed that you just woke up in that two-dimensional world. And, and how would you describe three dimensions of color in two-dimensional black and white terms? My gosh. And that also, if you've ever read Revelation, like John describing heaven and the holy city, and there's stuff that's very confusing sounding. And that's the same thing near-death experiencers say. They say it's, it's exactly like that. That is what's happening. Wow. So these people then are able to verify observations that can be checked out. That's the first thing that convinced me, this is real. Some skeptics will say, well, what's happening, see, is that our ears and our eyes are somehow picking up what's going on. Right. That's what I was wondering. As far as our brain reboots, it kind of makes sense of all this. And it tells this story and this is just, you know, and it's in, it's, it's the neurotransmitters flooding your brain. It's kind of just helping ease your passing. So they say all those kinds of things. But again, it doesn't make sense of even these three things that convinced me. Tell me the story about Pam, who I read about in your book. So Pam Reynolds, who you're talking about. This story blew my mind. Yeah. So she has a deep brain aneurysm. They have to do this kind of hail Mary last minute surgery, drain all the blood out of her head, which means they put her body temperature at 50 degrees Fahrenheit, drain all her blood. And then they put clickers in her ears, a hundred decibel clickers to monitor and make sure there are no brain waves. So that's how they monitor. And they taped her eyes shut to make sure there was no stimulation coming through the, through the eyes somehow. So that pretty much rules out skeptics saying, well, somehow your eyes or ears are picking stuff up yet an hour into the deepest state of anesthesia. She claims she's out of her body watching the surgery. And she describes the saw they used to saw her head open. And she said, it wasn't like what I would have thought it looked more like my, my dad's socket set and an electric toothbrush. And it's called the Midas Rex. That's exactly what it is. That's what it looks like. She also, then some of the other commonalities of near-death experience, she traveled, you know, through this tunnel to this place of beauty. And she was there in God's presence. And he said, it's not your time. And he sends her back. And as she's coming back, they're, they're getting ready to shock her. They're playing Hotel California and they had to shock her twice, not once. I'm not sure. I want to know that the brain surgeons are listening to Hotel California. Yeah, well, they, they, you wouldn't, there are all kinds of stories of what goes on. Watch out surgeons because someone might be So all these things, plus what, what one female doctor said who was down, couldn't find an artery in her leg. And she was like, I didn't know why they would be in my legs. Well, that, you know, the femoral artery they're trying to. Yeah. So all these things she couldn't possibly have known. She had zero brain waves, no, nothing on the EEG, you know, a hundred decibel clickers, eyes taped shut, doesn't explain it. Totally. So that's one. Yeah. So the second thing that really convinced me, Chris, is that when people blind from birth have a near-death experience, they can see, and they see the same thing as sighted people do. And the things they describe, they would not have heard on earth when they come back to earth, they're still blind. And, and, and so, you know, like I interviewed this one guy, Brad Burrows, who at eight years old, he was, he was in a home for children. It was actually a medical clinic and he suffocated and he had, he had to be resuscitated four minutes of CPR to bring him back. He said he, he suddenly is above the room, seeing his body and seeing his roommate running to get help. Cause he heard him choking. And then he passes up through another floor and sees what's going on in that floor. And then out above the hospital, and he's looking down on a road and he's seeing traffic and it's very congested and a trolley car down the middle of the street and lights. And he said to me, I was really confused. Cause I was like, how am I perceiving this? Cause I'm not really hearing it. So he has no visual perception, never dreamed in a, in a picture. Blind people don't dream in pictures at all. Yeah. And you're born blind. You're not going to be able to describe what a trolley car looks like. No. And, and, or he, he, he hadn't been outside to even know there was a trolley car running down the street of this facility. And then he, again, he travels through this, this tunnel or this portal. And he, you know, he described colors. He said, I was seeing all these colors, but I, I didn't know how to describe them because I didn't have words for them. But all I can say is there were varying brightnesses. And then he said, I enter this tunnel and suddenly there's, there's no color. And I thought, I wonder if this is black or darkness. And many people describe going through a tunnel that's, that's dark or black through blackness and a light. And he comes out onto this beautiful expanse, this, this kind of like mountain Valley of tall grasses. And he saw palm trees and, but, but here's the thing he said, the light was coming, was not like light on earth. Wow. He said the light was love and life and you felt it all together. And it was coming out of everything is coming out of the grass. It's coming out of the, the trees. And he could, he could see telescopically every leaf on every tree. And, and then he comes up to this, this walled city. And so, I mean, you know, he's saying all these things, but he was blind from birth and he was eight. And yet he's describing coming up to the holy city of God in revelation 21, not a scripture scholar. No, no. Okay. So I have interviewed multiple blind people talking about the light of heaven comes out of everything. Now you would have never, you would have never heard that on earth as a blind person, light shines on things and it's hot. It doesn't feel like love. It doesn't feel like life. Why would blind people describe it that way? And yet near-death experiencers consistently say that about the light of heaven. But guess what? Even though most Christians don't know this, so does the Jewish prophet Isaiah. In Isaiah chapter 60, there's no sun or moon for the, the light is the light of God. That's Isaiah 60, revelation 21. John says the city had no need of sun or moon for the glory of God was its light. And the lamb, Jesus is its lamp. And the nations will walk in that light. It's all right there. And yet blind people are describing that and blind people then come back having seen a life review in the presence of God, which is another commonality. And in the life review, they saw things that when they came back to earth, they were able to describe that they didn't know because they couldn't see. So one more point of verification. So verifiable observations, blind people seeing the third reason of these 10 is that I've interviewed people all over the globe in the new book and imagine the God of heaven. I interviewed 70 people on, on every continent, every religious background. And yet when they die, they see the same God, the same God of light. He's personal, knows him intimately, gives him this life review where they re-experience their whole life, all their good, but all their sins too. And nothing is hidden. It's just like Jesus said, everything, every motive of the heart is exposed. And in his presence, they feel an unconditional love. Like our word for love just doesn't do it justice. And yet he sends them back. And when they come back, they come back seeking. And when they seek, they find. And almost everyone, whether, I mean, Muslims, Buddhists, Jewish people, agnostics, atheists who have come back seeking have found Jesus because they realized, I mean, I had, I had one Hindu guy who, who came back, fully described the, the holy city of God, just like John did and sees, sees God on his throne. He, who he thinks now is Jesus on, on like overwhelming amount of rabbit holes. I can go down with you. I wish you had like a 15 hour show, put Joe Rogan to shame with the length of the show. But on one level, before you even talk about how this proves the Bible, it proves the validity of experience because you can't even say, well, this is just someone's psyche drumming up what they were raised with, with their ideas about heaven. Well, and that's my point. If this is brain-based, why would a Hindu say, and so one of the guys in my new book, Imagine the God of Heaven, grew up Hindu, became a medical doctor, became the chief anesthesiologist at the Bakersfield Heart Hospital, thought near-death experiences were totally bogus. He had brought many people back saying these things, gave them a shot of anti-psychotic drug and went and checked the stocks. And then he has a near-death experience. Really? Because he was pretty much an atheist by then. He didn't believe in anything and, and then become very abusive toward his son. I mean, he, he said this to me. He also was just a materialist, just, you know, his patients were just a number just to get him more money. And that's all he cared about was money. And initially he starts off in a hellish place and it's, it's hell. And he said to me, and you know, I was, I was repenting. He said, I realized, and I was repenting. And this is a long story. I write, you know, the whole thing, but basically two Christian angels come when he is begging God for forgiveness and take him out of that place and take him through again, this, this tunnel or this portal to this place of exquisite beauty, not unlike earth, you know, mountains and forests and valleys and trees. And he's like going with them over all this and seeing all this and bring him into the presence of this divine light brighter than the sun. Like they say thousands of times brighter, but not hard to look at. In fact, mesmerizing love that you can't even describe. And in his presence, he gets another life review because he realized, so this is a common thing to life. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This anesthesiologist, you know, when he was in hell, he realized I deserve this. Wow. So now in God's presence, he gets another life review. And, and again, he realizes the things that he had done wrong. And also the good, some of this, he's the good too, but God says, Rajiv, I'm sending you back. And he basically saw, he knew what he needed to change. And, and he said, I, I I'm sending you back. And I want you to become a healer. And he knew what he meant a healer of the soul of, of addictions, which he'd become an addict of abuse and soul wounds that then wound others, you know, and, and things like that. But at another point, so he comes back and he is seeking and his wife is disturbed. Like where were our Hindu gods? And he's like, I don't know. I don't know, but I want to know who is this, this God of light and love. And so a year later, he's telling his friend Naresh, who's dying of cancer, all about this God and about forgiveness and about, you know, his mercy. Naresh dies. And the night he dies, Rajiv wakes up to a vision of the same God of light and Naresh standing there with him. And it's like, again, he's out of his body in this experience. Whether it was a near-death experience or not, I don't know. But this time he asked, Lord, who are you? Out of the light steps a man with a beard and a robe who says to him, I'm Jesus, your savior. It's like a Damascus road. Right. You know, when, when Paul, and, and I think, I think that's an important thing for me to say at this point, near-death experiences are not crossing over into eternity. And that's very important. That's why people still have the ability to choose. You know, God, God said to Moses in Deuteronomy 30, choose life. You know, I've set before you the choice between life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life. That's what this life is. When we cross over into eternity, there's a thing called eternal life. There's also a thing called eternal death. It's also called the second death. Right. I don't think this is crossing over to that. And, and one of the reasons, one of the commonalities I was able to trace that people said again and again, and again, 30% of near-death experiencers told me they came to a border or a boundary in this otherworldly experience that they couldn't cross and still come back to earth. My uncle had that experience. Really? A door with a bunch of light coming out. It's different for different people, but it represents, sometimes it's a fence or a river, or in, in some cases, Jesus just says, do you, do you want to go on with us to heaven? Or do you want to go back? But they know if they go on, they can't, you know, there's like a certain crossing over. So what, and this is part of what took me so long. It took me 35 years of research before I wrote Imagine Heaven because there were a lot of confusing things. Well, it's a compulsion. Yeah. Just like you said, it was a compulsion. Right. And thank you for it, by the way. Yeah. Well, I never chose it. Praise God. All right. There's just so much to dive into here, man. It's, it's, the limits of time are almost depressing, but we're going to, we're making the call. We're going to have a second episode where we're talking about God, heaven, hell. I want, I want to talk a little more though, before we wrap here, about like, what's it, what's it like to be in your own skin? Right. So to speak, how do people experience things like, let's say time? Yeah. Dimension. We talked a little about dimensionality and color and all that, but what is time like on the other side? Is there no time? Is there a weird interaction? It's exactly what Peter writes in second Peter three, eight to the Lord. A day is like a thousand years and a thousand years is like a day. And near death experiencers have said almost the same exact thing to me, but, but they'll say it different ways. So some will say there was no time. And then others will say, no, there was time, but there was all the time you needed. Others will say it was past, present, and future all at the same time. But even saying that doesn't make total sense. Right. But what, what I talk about in the first book and imagine heaven is if they were experiencing time, we experienced time on one dimension, right? Linear one dimension, it moves forward. It can never move back point to point one dimension. But if you even had two dimensions of time, that means that every point on our timeline, there would be another timeline going infinitely this way in another dimension, which means at every point in time, you would have all the time you want to spend at that point in time, multidimensional, that would be two dimensional time. And interestingly this guy, Greg Rickert that I interviewed, who had a near death experience when he had a head on collision. He was, he is, he's Catholic and he has a head on collision. He leaves his body. He travels and is in the presence of, of God. He sees the throne of God, all these amazing things. But at another point, an angel shows him a portal and he said he experienced two dimensional time. So he actually describes it that way. This is in my second book. So in my first book, I postulated it could be two dimensional time. And then I actually have Greg Rickert explaining what it's like. And he said, it was like looking into, so he he's looking into ancient Egypt. And he's, he's seen this, this war taking place. But he said, I could also like experience what that person I focus on was experiencing, but I knew I couldn't go there. Wow. And, and then he experiences another second portal where he sees this young couple. And, and he notes this beautiful woman and this kind of funky guy with funky hair. And then he sees this ball of light there with him. And he asked the angel, what is that? And he said, that's their child. Okay. Fast forward two years later. And, and he meets this couple and this little two year old girl runs up to him and is looking at him like she knows him, but he's just met them. And, and then he realizes the woman says, I don't know why she's so enamored with you. And then he looks again at the woman and realizes, oh my gosh, this is the woman I saw in that portal two years ago. This must be the child that the angel was talking about. And so, yeah, so time, um, is experienced. That's why people can have a life review in the presence of Jesus. Uh, he gives them a life review. Now they just feel complete unconditional love from him because God is love. He can't do otherwise. Right. I mean, he, he loves more than we love our own children a thousand times more. That's what near-death experiencers say. Yeah. So he can't not love us, but he often will give the personal life review, meaning they re-experience their whole life again, because time works a different way. And so, and they experience not only what they were thinking and feeling in, in every situation, but they also experienced what the other person was thinking and feeling. So they see the ripple effect of their kindness, their little acts of kindness and generosity, but they also see their, their hurtful actions and the way it actually felt and they feel it and they come back changed. And, and interestingly, they also see the ripple effect through humanity, like one little act of kindness. It's Matthew 25, where Jesus said in the end, you know, the, the, the sheep and the goats will stand before the King. Right. And the sheep will say, when did we visit you in prison and, you know, bring you a meal or, or, you know, visit you when you were sick or, you know, do this kind act to you. And he'll say, when you did it to the least of these, you did it to me. Praise God. And when you didn't, you didn't, you didn't. Yeah. And they experienced this. You have a chapter five in your book. You'll be rad. You'll be yourself. Finally. I just, just reading that just like a, ah, so many people are going to see that chapter and take a deep breath because so much of life is like fighting to like, who am I? And can I rest in my own skin and be, it's being loved, beloved, you know, but this, that experience of selfhood is radically different from, um, I almost said Eastern religions, but I got to remember that Christianity came from the East technically. And then we have our Byzantine Orthodox, but, um, but, but like Buddhism would say your heaven is when you're, it's total self negation. You disappear. Yeah. Right. The extinction of the self. Yeah. It's like in the spiritual path, which can look like Christian asceticism becomes almost like a metaphysical suicide path. Right. Yeah. And, um, instead we're becoming fully ourselves while we become fully alive. I just speak into that for a second, man. Like how, how do people experience self-awareness? Yeah. Well, when they, they say when they leave their bodies right away, um, they're more aware like this one, Dr. Dr. Mary Neal said, and she got pinned under a waterfall in a kayak dead for 30 minutes. Now I like to point out she's a spine surgeon. These are spine surgeons, lawyers, doctors, CEOs. Why would they make this up, man? You know, it only hurts their career. And yet she said, um, that Jesus was holding her. As soon as she cried out to him, he was holding her. Um, she also, you know, got, got a life review. Um, but what she said and what they commonly say is I was alive. And then more, a lot, I was conscious. And then more conscious. She said, I don't, I didn't die. You know, Jesus said this, you know, that, that all who believe in him will never die. We'll never, they're already, they've already gone from death to life already. Isn't that amazing. It makes you less afraid to die. Oh my gosh. Really studying this stuff. Are you like death? Bring it. Does your fear of death decrease a little with every interview? I am absolutely not afraid to die. I'm afraid to almost die. I don't want to come back. I've said that to the Lord many times. Like, you know, when there was a hairy situation or something, I'm like, Hey, I'm ready. Just, just don't make me do what those people do who have to come back and testify. And you know, I, I point that out that many times to people like, well, why couldn't I have a near death experience? I said, well, most of them have a scar right here from a tracheotomy because it's not easy to come back. Yeah. Dang. Yeah. All right. I want to, I want to pick up next time talking about God, heaven, hell. Uh, but to land this plane, cause this is his camera. Can you talk to that camera for one second? The skeptic who's watching right now, he's like, I don't know. What would you say to that guy? Um, be open-minded if you're truly open-minded, uh, and you're willing to seek, I mean, just, just read chapter two of imagine the God of heaven, uh, and, and then, you know, decide. Awesome. And I want to add to that in my camera over here, right? Please don't be afraid to have been wrong. Like, cause sometimes people can pride themselves just like a Christian can pride himself on being an extra pious and Holy. Yeah. I'm an agnostic. I'm too smart for all this. Like, it's okay to have been wrong. And, and, and one more thing I would say is, have you ever actually read the eyewitness accounts of Jesus in the Bible, Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, and just like, but read them with an open mind and an open heart, because if God is real and you say to him, if you're real, I'm really willing to follow you. Like let you be God and watch what happens. Amen. Yeah. And if you want us to be right, dude, come on. The water's great over here. Praise God. Okay. And the website again, say it, uh, imagine heaven.net not.com. Think of fishing net.net. Awesome. We'll see you next time, dude. Thank you so much for this.