Transcript: John Burke – What Happens When We Die? On Shawn Ryan Show

I believe if I’m…

JOHN BURKE: It’s been that long that I’ve been…

SHAWN RYAN: Researching and I know you tie in some science and I think we’re all looking for more proof. Right. And I don’t know if that ever stops. Like I said, I’m new in this journey, but that’s what kind of keeps me going is the symbology, things that are happened that have already been written. The near death experience stuff that you’re talking about is really fascinating me and so anyways, I’m just really excited that you’re here and I’ve been looking forward to this interview for quite a while.

JOHN BURKE: Well, I’m honored, I’m honored to be here.

SHAWN RYAN: Thank you.

JOHN BURKE: Thank you.

John Burke’s Professional Background

SHAWN RYAN: But we’ll start you up with an introduction here real quick. So, John Burke, you’re a pastor and authority, a New York Times best selling author with the book “Imagine Heaven,” where you discuss near death experiences in your new book, “Imagine the God of Heaven, Near Death Experiences.” That’s your latest book that you’ve written.

Your previous books include “Unshockable Love,” “Soul Revolution,” and “No Perfect People Allowed.” You are the founding pastor of Gateway Church in Austin, Texas. You and your wife Kathy started the church 26 years ago. And as we discussed at breakfast, you had just passed the baton on and you’re moving on to other things. Writing, correct?

JOHN BURKE: Writing, Speaking, Talking about this.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. So congratulations. You’ve analyzed over 1,000 near death experiences and have 35 plus years of research. You’re the president of Gateway Leadership Initiative, which is a nonprofit. Can you go into that a little bit, if you don’t mind?

JOHN BURKE: Yeah. Well, it’s part of what we talked about at breakfast that when we started Gateway Church, it was to provide a place for people like I was. Which we can get into. But I was a skeptic. You know, I was an engineer before I became a pastor. So I’ve always been like, how do you know the blind faith thing, that didn’t really work for me. I can have faith. We all have faith. But I need a little evidence.

So we started Gateway Church for people like me. So our motto was “no perfect people allowed.” Doubters are welcome. Just come as you are. And turns out there are a lot of people like that who maybe either have been burned by church or they’re curious. They have a lot of questions, but not a place to wrestle with it or a lot of struggles. And, you know, church wasn’t a safe place to be honest about addictions or struggles or marital struggles, whatever. There’s plenty. Right?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOHN BURKE: So Gateway Leadership Initiative was an organization I started that helped equip leaders. Really an understanding that the forming of the culture really affects how you live out your mission. I mean, you know that, right? I’m sure in SEAL teams, the culture that gets created is key to how that team performs.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOHN BURKE: And so similar thing of leadership to be able to start churches that would actually help people in a culture. So I ended up traveling to 30 different countries, speaking to leaders all over the world.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

JOHN BURKE: About 100,000 leaders all over the world about that.

SHAWN RYAN: How long have you been doing that?

JOHN BURKE: 27 years.

The Current State of Faith and Church

SHAWN RYAN: Wow, that’s incredible. You’re an international speaker. You’ve addressed hundreds of thousands of people in 30 countries on leadership, spiritual growth, and the exhilarating life to come. You’re married to Kathy. You have two grown children, two granddaughters, and you are a former agnostic engineer. Am I missing anything?

Well, like I said, John, I’m really excited to dig in here. I got a couple of questions that don’t really fit into my interview flow, so I’m just going to ask them real quick right here at the very beginning. But, you know, like I had mentioned, I’m recent, I’m new to faith, and about a year in, and, you know, one of the things, I started going to church. Then we kind of stopped, and we do it at our house now, as I was explaining to you at breakfast.

But, you know, I’m noticing this massive wave of people kind of coming to Christ. It seems like you’re seeing just all kinds of people just come out of the blue who are looking for answers. I think a lot of that is coming from what we’re seeing in just society today. I think our culture is being overrun, and there’s a lot of drastic changes taking place in the world that I think a lot of traditionalists don’t necessarily like or agree on. And it’s causing people to look for answers, which is bringing people into the church, including myself.

My question is, when I got to church and I started going, there seems to be this continuous message of how the church is shrinking. What do you think it is that is turning people away from church?

JOHN BURKE: People?

SHAWN RYAN: Anything in particular?

JOHN BURKE: Well, I mean, I think it’s – you know, I hate to generalize because I don’t know, who am I? But look after – you know, after leading a church for 26 years that, you know, like we talked about at breakfast, started off just so cool to me because it was just people who didn’t do church, didn’t go to church. They were coming from the bars. You know, we held church in bars, you know, former Purple Heart who led one of our campuses in a bar, you know, for people, and just creating a space for people to explore faith in God.

I think that’s the core of what it’s supposed to be about. I think that’s what Jesus was about. He went to people, you know, he healed people. He cared about people. He didn’t sit back and wait in a synagogue. And so I think that sometimes, though, the church gets – well, it’s a place where people are. And the truth is people are all in process. All of us. You know, I haven’t arrived. I don’t know anyone who’s arrived.

And so as a result, we all have wounds. And then sometimes we act out of those wounds and we do things that are not what God would want. We hurt each other. We’re hypocritical. I know very few people who…

SHAWN RYAN: Bingo.

JOHN BURKE: But here’s the problem is that I’m hypocritical. I’m guessing everybody would if you’re willing to be honest. Like, how many times have we said to ourselves, “I’ll never…” But you did.

SHAWN RYAN: Good point.

JOHN BURKE: That’s a hypocrite. And, you know, so we all struggle with that to a degree. I think the challenge of church, and when I say church, I don’t mean even like the church I led, you know, like we were talking about. I think church at the core is meant to be people learning to love God, love each other, and care for the world around them, care for people.

And the difficulty in living that out is we need each other to do that. You can’t do that alone. But when you get close to people, people hurt you and you hurt them. So that means you got to work through it in a new way. And I think that’s the challenge of it. And some do it better than others. But, you know, it’s hard not to divide it is.

SHAWN RYAN: It is. I mean, I’m going to be honest. That’s what, that’s what kept me out for a long time was hypocrisy and being judged. I just felt like it was a place where you walk in and you’re immediately judged.

JOHN BURKE: Which is so ironic when Jesus said, “Judge not lest you be judged.” You know, but people don’t always, you know, people who claim to follow Jesus aren’t in fact many times following him, you know.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOHN BURKE: I mean, like I always like to remind people, you know, it was the religious leaders of Jesus’ day who were playing a game that was really about power and prestige, you know, their own position, and in the name of God, protecting God, they crucified Jesus. So it happens. But I think one of the most important and difficult things to do is to not get God confused with people.

Reaching People in Non-Traditional Spaces

SHAWN RYAN: Great advice. My next question came from breakfast. You had mentioned, and you had just spoken about it, you had talked about how you were trying to take the culture back in your church and people started going out to bars, basically places where – how do I say this? Maybe God’s presence doesn’t thrive in these environments. Would that be a good way to say it?

JOHN BURKE: I don’t necessarily see because… Yeah, go ahead.

SHAWN RYAN: I guess what I’m trying to say is very non traditional places to recruit or maybe recruit them.

JOHN BURKE: Recruit. Just have conversation.

SHAWN RYAN: How would you bring that up? I mean, I’m just picturing myself at a bar or a nightclub and somebody approaching me about that 10 years ago would not have time for it. Would not be interested in it at all. I mean, how do you go to that kind of a environment and bring up the Bible, religion, God, Jesus, however you want to call it without being intrusive.

JOHN BURKE: Well, we weren’t doing that. I mean, we weren’t, like, walking into a bar and sitting down and saying, “Hey, I want to talk to you about God.”

SHAWN RYAN: Okay, how were you doing it?

JOHN BURKE: We were holding church in that bar, so we let people know they could come in and explore, but we weren’t, like, pushing it on people.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay, that makes sense.

JOHN BURKE: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: So it would basically be a conversation that people can overhear and maybe they want to join in on the conversation.

JOHN BURKE: Yeah. Coming at another time. But it’s a neutral space, you know?

SHAWN RYAN: Gotcha. Gotcha. I like that. That’s good. I always wonder, you know, I think that’s – I think that’s another thing that turns people off to include myself is when it’s too intrusive and it’s almost – the way of thinking is almost forced on you.

JOHN BURKE: Well, I mean, that’s not – from what – from what I’ve seen studying the life of Jesus. That’s not what he did. He respected people. He listened. You know, it’s fascinating. People don’t realize this, but he asked way more questions than he just told people what to do. It’s not that he didn’t teach. I mean, he did, without a doubt, but he asked things like, “What can I do for you? What do you want? Do you want to be healed?”

It’s a strange thing. What do you mean, do I want to be healed? I’m blind. Well, but sometimes we get used to our wounds and we get comfortable with them. And without a person’s willingness, God respects free will immensely, which causes a ton of problems, honestly.

Free Will and Divine Sovereignty

SHAWN RYAN: You believe we have free will?

JOHN BURKE: I do. I do.

SHAWN RYAN: Complete free will.

JOHN BURKE: Oh boy. Wow. We’re going to the deep end. Okay.

SHAWN RYAN: Might as well, right?

JOHN BURKE: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s what we’re here to do.

JOHN BURKE: Well, free will. So I believe God has a free will as well, which means that he can work with our free wills and we can do things against his will, and yet he can still work things according to his will. So some would say then our will is somewhat constrained.

I mean, I think we got to get into a little of my research first because when you look at it completely from our finite three dimensional one dimension of time world, it doesn’t make sense. But when you start to look at it from what these people I’ve interviewed who’ve had near death experiences, what they say, then you start to go, “Oh, okay, so it’s not in the box I thought it was when I’m trying to answer these confusing, mysterious questions.” There’s a whole other way of looking at it.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay, well, if I don’t, if you think of it, remind me to ask that question at the end. Then I think we have free will to choose whether we believe or not. And I think that’s about it. But what do I know? So I love to dig in.

JOHN BURKE: Okay, let’s go back to that after.

SHAWN RYAN: We, after we wrap this up. But hey, before we get started, everybody gets a gift on the show.

JOHN BURKE: Oh, thank you.

SHAWN RYAN: So awesome. Yeah, go ahead and dig into that. There’s a book in there that might be familiar to you.

JOHN BURKE: He gave me my own book. But should I read it?

SHAWN RYAN: That’s my, that’s my shameless plug to plug your book in the show. All right, and then, and then those are Vigilance Elite gummy bears. Made in the USA in all 50 states. So.

JOHN BURKE: Dude, I ate these every day in German class in middle school. You’re tempting me. Hey, I shouldn’t.

SHAWN RYAN: A little something for the ride home. They’re gluten free too. Just so you know. But, and then, and then lastly, before we dive 100% into the near death experience stuff and everything that we’re going to talk about, I have a Patreon account. It’s a subscription account. There are top supporters. They’re the reason I get to do this and why you’re here. And they just, they’ve been around since the beginning.

So one thing I do is I give them an opportunity to ask a question. The first question. And so there’s two questions here. First one is from John Phillips. “Pastors rarely speak about heaven and the Bible is somewhat vague in my opinion. Why is this?”

Why Pastors Don’t Speak About Heaven

JOHN BURKE: Man? Well, I don’t know why pastors don’t speak about heaven, but maybe it is, you know, I mean, if you read what I’ve written, you see, the Bible has not been silent. And what I’m showing is how these near death experiences, what they’re reporting commonly, how it aligns amazingly well.

But I don’t know that many take the time to really systematically look across the scriptures as what is the expectation of life after this? And you know, it didn’t come quickly to me. Like I said, it’s been a 35 year journey, so I don’t fault them for that, but.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh good.

JOHN BURKE: But that is what I’m trying to do. Okay, so I’m trying to correct what he rightly noticed.

Non-Human Intelligence and Religion

SHAWN RYAN: Perfect. This next one is from Jake Gillen. It’s an interesting one. We cover a lot of the UFO stuff. And anyways, if it did in fact turn out that there was non human intelligence visiting us from other dimensions, how would this play into religion? Or would it?

JOHN BURKE: Well, I think what near death experiences tell us is that there are definitely other dimensions and there are definitely intelligences on the other side, whether you label them as aliens or UFOs or whatever. I don’t know. You know, I don’t know what that would play in, you know, in terms of how it would affect things.

For me personally, I mean, God is an incredibly creative creator, if there’s a creator. All right, we’ve cataloged 2 million species on planet Earth. But our scientists say they think there are probably 7 million species that we haven’t yet. You know, there are another five we haven’t discovered because we’re discovering new ones at that rate every year.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

JOHN BURKE: So we’re talking about a mind that is so creative, right? So why would we think if there are dimensions beyond ours, which by the way, science has postulated that, right? I mean, Einstein’s equations of general relativity perfectly work for massive objects, you know, like planets and suns and galaxies and all that. And quantum physics, quantum mechanics perfectly describes the subatomic, but the two would never work together.

So there was always a search for this unified field theory. But back around the time, in the late 30s, Einstein time, two scientists, Kaluza and Klein, came up with equations that if you introduce a fifth dimension, those two theories work together, otherwise they don’t work together. And so what they basically proved is that there must be a fifth dimension at least to show how our mathematical formulas of the large and the small work.

Since then, I mean, string theory has gone beyond that to propose that there might be 11 dimensions to our universe that we don’t, you know, we don’t see all of them. We see three dimensions of space and one dimension of time.

SHAWN RYAN: Really? I did not know 11 dimensions.

JOHN BURKE: Well, they don’t, they haven’t proven that that’s a theory. It’s called string theory.

SHAWN RYAN: I’ve looked into a little bit. What? Do you have any idea what the 11 dimensions are? How much have you looked into this?

JOHN BURKE: Oh, man, now I’m getting out of my lane. If I go down that road. Well, I mean, they’re like, they talk about curled up dimensions. I try to, you know, my former engineering brain, I try to think about.

SHAWN RYAN: It and they’re like, how would you describe another dimension?

The Two-Dimensional Analogy

JOHN BURKE: Okay, so this is an analogy for, you know, just so people listening know, my research has been into near death experiences. And after interviewing, you know, well over a thousand of them, studying them, what I’ve come up with is an analogy of what they’re experiencing when we’re talking about a cardiac arrest where there’s no heartbeat, no brainwaves, and yet they come back.

Either modern medicine resuscitates them or, I don’t know, miracle, because we’re talking about people who have hospital records that they were dead 1 hour and 45 minutes, a medical doctor dead 30 minutes, pinned under a waterfall in a kayak, and yet she comes back. And what they come back commonly saying is that they were more alive than they’ve ever been. What’s that? How do you be more alive than this? Right, but that’s what they say in a place more real, in a place more beautiful, experiencing things that are just hard to describe.

And so the way I like it is imagine if we’re living this three dimensional experience on a flat black and white painting here in this room. So we only have up and down, side to side, we don’t even have a third dimension. We don’t have in or out, okay? So we don’t even, we can’t even conceive of that.

So death is when you’re, I believe, when your soul leaves your body, so your soul’s peeled off this third three dimensional form. So imagine at death, your two dimensional image is peeled off that two dimensional black and white painting and now brought out into this three dimensional world of color that’s been around you all the time. And yet you couldn’t even conceive of it, even though your flat black and white world was contained within this larger realm, this larger reality, and you can see it for what it is.

And now imagine after experiencing this, you get brought back to two dimensional life, you get pressed back into the two dimensional black and white painting, and now you’re trying to describe three dimensions of color in two dimensional black and white terms. How would you do it? And as I have interviewed these people, they say that’s exactly the struggle because they’re experiencing dimensions of space beyond ours and of time beyond ours.

SHAWN RYAN: So you’re basically saying it’s basically impossible for the human mind to comprehend what another dimension would be unless you’ve actually experienced it, because it would defy everything.

From Skeptic to Believer

JOHN BURKE: We know, apart from analogy. But what is fascinating. So you talked about evidence, there’s evidence, lots of evidence. So, you know, for me, I started into all this as an agnostic and a skeptic. You know, we both, you know, had some church background, but it was very formal, ritualistic. And I was just like, “How do you know this stuff is real? How do you know there’s a God, Jesus, the son of God?” I mean, legend, come on, you know that, you know.

And I had lots of questions. Like I said, engineer, skeptic, that was the way my brain’s always worked. And when people didn’t seem to care or want to address my questions or have answers, I was just like, “I’m done with this.”

Well, my dad was dying of cancer and someone gave him the very first research on near death experiences. And I saw it by his bedside table and I start thumbing through it and I couldn’t stop reading it. I read it in one night and at the end of it I was like, “Oh my gosh, this might be evidence, actual evidence. This whole afterlife God, Jesus stuff is real because of how many people were talking about it.”

So that didn’t change my mind. It just opened me up and I started exploring. So kind of like you, there was just a group of people meeting in a home and they were reading and talking about the Bible. And I got invited into it. And because of that I was like, all right. I told them, I said, “You’re not going to want me there because I’ve got a lot of questions.” And they’re like, “No, bring it.”

And so that’s actually where I came to faith in Christ. And then later I went from a career in engineering into becoming a pastor, really to help people like me, skeptics. Because I found that not many churches made space for people to doubt and wonder and process. And I found that there are real answers. There’s a ton of evidence. Right now it would take more faith for me not to believe than to believe because of the evidence.

SHAWN RYAN: Really?

JOHN BURKE: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Would you say the majority of the evidence that you’ve that brought you here is from near death experiences? No. No, no.

The Journey from Skepticism to Belief

JOHN BURKE: I mean, those are huge. And it was what began me on this journey. Now I also, for 35 years have been curious, what are these near death experiences and how does the commonality of what they report align with what I’ve also found to be what I think is evidence for God’s existence in history and in other ways. And what made me actually believe that the Bible is worth considering? Because I didn’t, I didn’t think that originally. And so that’s what I’ve always been curious about. And finally wrote on how the two of those come together in Imagine Heaven, which I wrote in 2015.

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s get into some near death experience stuff. So your dad was dying of cancer, he had a book, you read it, you got fascinated. How do you go from agnostic engineer into interviewing thousands of people who had had near death experiences?

JOHN BURKE: I mean, Sean, I didn’t set out to do that. And that’s the thing that you look at those coincidences of how things work. I mean, so it turned out I was working out in Santa Barbara, California as an engineer and I kept running into them or hearing about them, and my brain was so curious, I think, because that’s what opened me up to faith. And so I started collecting them.

Or what turned out to be is that in the early days, this is the 80s, when all of this just became kind of known in the medical community as more and more modern medicine’s resuscitating people and more and more of these stories are coming forth, it turns out that a big population of research was being done in Santa Barbara, California, where I worked. And so looking back, I’m kind of like, wow, that’s curious.

But I kept running into them, kept hearing them, and in fact, I came across some things I wrote down in 1988, preparing for a talk I did at the University of California, Santa Barbara. And I was looking at the different organizations of what people report and the different types of evidence. And so, yeah, so it’s just been this long, steady collecting the data, sifting through it. I wondered later in life, like even in the 2000s, am I supposed to write on this? But that’s not how it started for me. It was more of just this, I don’t know, almost obsession, curiosity.

The First Compelling Case

SHAWN RYAN: What was maybe one of the first ones that really just grabbed you and got your attention? Was there one in particular that really made you want to dive in deeper?

JOHN BURKE: Yeah, I mean, so one of the things that initially I was like, well, maybe this is just hallucinating or maybe it’s just something that happens in the brain or there have been a lot of alternate explanations. And in the new book and Imagine the God of Heaven, I go into the 10 points of evidence that really did convince me.

One of them is veridical observation. So when a person dies, when their heart stops beating, no brainwaves say they have a heart attack and they have a near death experience, they say they leave their body. Usually they’re initially up above their body in the room where their resuscitation is happening. And they commonly say I was still myself. Most say I had a body, but it was like a spiritual body. And not with five senses, more like 50 senses and blended senses, which that’s hard to describe.

SHAWN RYAN: What does that mean, blended senses?

JOHN BURKE: Oh, say things like, I couldn’t, I couldn’t. It’s not that I just saw it, I heard it, I didn’t just smell it, but I could see the smell too.

SHAWN RYAN: So like an intuition maybe?

JOHN BURKE: No, not intuition. Blended senses. So the senses we think of, of sight, smell, touch, taste, all that, but an aroma would also have a sound to it and a visual. I don’t know. I’m just telling you what they say. I’ve never experienced anything like that.

The Pam Reynolds Case

But they’re initially up above their body and they’re watching what’s happening in the room of their resuscitation. Now this was key because when they are resuscitated, when they come back, they can report observations that can be checked out as either yes or no. Right. Either that really happened or that didn’t.

So one of the key ones that early on really convinced me or didn’t convince me, but it really got my attention. But there are many like this Pam Reynolds, she was a well known singer, I think from Nashville actually. And she had a deep brain aneurysm and she was going to die unless they did this radical exploratory surgery, which is more common now.

But what they have to do is they have to lower the body temperature down to 50 degrees Fahrenheit. They drain the brain completely of all blood. They have to make sure the brain is completely shut down because they’re going to have to go down deep into the brain to fix the aneurysm. And so as a result, they’re monitoring with an EEG. They tape the eyes shut so there are no external stimulation to the eyes. They put 100 decibel clickers in the ears so that then they can make sure there’s nothing registering in the brain, just flat EEG.

Okay, so this is all counts of clinical death are certain for the surgery to happen. And not many survive the surgery. So it only happens when there’s no other option, usually. So Pam is going into this surgery and she’s put into the deepest state of anesthesia for two hours. And Dr. Spetzler was her neurosurgeon who reported on this. Another cardiologist that I interviewed, Dr. Sabim, also studied the case. There was a residential, Dr. Green, who has also testified because he was there when all this happened. So you’ve got medical doctors who are confirming what Pam ended up saying.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

JOHN BURKE: Yeah. And what people don’t realize is like, these accounts have been written up in the Journal of the American Medical Association, in the Lancet, Europe’s most prestigious medical journal in psychiatry, in about 900 peer reviewed scholarly journals that have reported on near death experiences. Because there’s something there, right? I mean, all these medical doctors wouldn’t, they’d be like, yeah. And that’s what many of them are at first, like, I’ve never heard of that. But they didn’t ask. And when they start asking, people start reporting.

So Pam says she was out of her body and she’s watching what’s happening. And some of the things she later reports is that there was a female doctor down by her legs saying, “We can’t find it, I can’t find it.” And the male doctor, Dr. Spetzler, said, “Try the other leg.” And she registered that as strange because it was brain surgery. Like, what are they doing down by my legs? Well, they were trying to find an artery down there.

And then she. It was about over an hour into surgery that they actually took out the saw. And most people have never seen a brain saw. And you think it’s a saw, it’s just going to cut. And she reported that when they took it out, it’s called the Midas Rex, and she said it actually looked like an electric toothbrush and they had like a, it almost looked like my dad’s socket set, she said, with all these blades in it, that they opened up.

They didn’t open that up until an hour into the deepest state of anesthesia and an hour into surgery when she couldn’t have seen anything. Her eyes are taped shut. There was no brainwave. So where is this memory being registered? Right.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

JOHN BURKE: Because she’s got 100 decibel clickers in her ears and they’re monitoring that there’s no activity in the EEG in her brain, yet she perfectly reports about that. Then she claims she traveled and this is another commonality of near death experiences. Through a tunnel to a place of exquisite beauty. She felt the presence, I think it was of her grandfather and knew that God was there, this God of light and love who told her she must go back.

She comes back and as she’s coming back, they’re sewing her up and they’re playing Hotel California and she hears that and then they shocked her to get her heart started again, not once, but twice. And she reports that. So when she is revived, all these things that she reports check out. Now you could say, oh, that’s just a good story.

SHAWN RYAN: Right. Who’s she reporting this to?

JOHN BURKE: To the doctors.

SHAWN RYAN: Is this right after surgery?

JOHN BURKE: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: What are they saying?

Medical Verification and Additional Cases

JOHN BURKE: Well, I was just in a movie called After Death, which was just in the theaters this fall, and you can see Dr. Green, who is a resident there, and he says she reported things she should not have seen. Dr. Spetzler, who was the neurosurgeon, he’s done interviews, he said the same thing. Dr. Sabim, who was also in the movie, he researched it and said, yeah, I mean, she should not have been able to report that.

Now it’s not. That’s not a one off. That’s the thing. So another cardiologist that I spoke with, Dr. Pim van Lommel in the Netherlands, in Holland, he was the one who actually wrote the case up in the Lancet, Europe’s medical journal of a man who was found dead in a park, brought in or didn’t have a heartbeat. They brought him into the ER. They were going to shock him, but they had to intubate him because he wasn’t breathing.

And the nurse found dentures. So took the dentures out, put them in the lower drawer of the crash cart. They intubated him, they shocked him, they got his heart started again, but he never came to in the ER. They wheel him out, put him in another room. A week later he comes to and he’s asking, where are his dentures? You know, you lost my dentures.

And then he sees the nurse in the hallway and says, “Wait, that nurse. Get that nurse. That nurse knows where my dentures are.” And then he explains that he was in the ER up above, trying to get everybody’s attention. And he described the doctors, how many were there, who was there, the nurses, what they were wearing, and how that nurse had taken his dentures out and put it in the lower drawer of the cart with all the bottles on it, and that’s where they found his dentures. So he writes this up in the Lancet.

Statistical Evidence

Now, Dr. Janice Jan Holden actually did a study on verifiable observations of near death experiencers. So she took close to 100 patients who had had cardiac arrest and claimed to have a near death experience. And then each one might make 10 or 15 observations of what was going on. Right. And she went to hospital records, went and interviewed the people there to verify those observations.

She found that 92% of their observations were completely accurate. Think about that. 92% were completely accurate. Another 6% were mostly accurate. Only 2%, which turned out to be one patient, were inaccurate.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

JOHN BURKE: Compared to control groups of people who had had a cardiac arrest. And they ask them, what do you think happened during your resuscitation? And it was guesswork. It was like what they’d seen on ER, 20% accurate, maybe. Man, that’s one of the 10 points of evidence that I write about in Imagine the God of Heaven. That convinced me. But not just me. Many of these skeptical medical doctors, most of the ones I know, are believers now because of what they’ve seen and heard studying these.

Skeptical Doctors and Their Explanations

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, when you’re interviewing these doctors, let’s say, before they are believers, what do they. Do they have any. Is there any other explanations?

JOHN BURKE: Well, yeah. So Dr. Sabim, he was a Christian, and he actually set out. So he read the first research I did and said, “Bogus. I’m a cardiologist. I’ve never heard a patient say anything about watching resuscitation or traveling this place of beauty or this God of light or any of that.” And so he set out to disprove it. But when he starts asking his patients, he starts to hear the same things.

Now, there’s an important reason for that. I mean, back to our analogy. If you experience something more real than this, more amazing, more beautiful, more more, and it’s kind of sacred to you, and when you try to explain it, people kind of look at you like, is the drugs, and they just kind of dismiss you’re crazy. And so it shuts people down.

So until more recently, people haven’t been willing, not very willing to come forth. I’m amazed at the number of people, when I speak on this, will come up to me and say, “That happened to me.” And they’ll tell me, and I’ll ask, if I’m speaking at a church. “Have you ever told your pastor?” “No, never have.” Or just. “Have you ever told anyone?” “Well, I’ve told my wife, but that’s it.”

SHAWN RYAN: So.

The Scientific Evidence Behind Near-Death Experiences

JOHN BURKE: Dr. Sabum set out to disprove them, starts interviewing his patients, and hears more and more evidence like this. You know, like this one guy, Pete, he said when he was doing resuscitation on me, he had a heart attack, and he was up above his body. He said, “Tell me what you saw.” And Dr. Sabum said, you know, if I had recorded what he said, I could have used that to teach physicians how to do resuscitation. He said he should not have been able to know that.

And so he spent five years going through medical hospital records trying to disprove scientifically near death experiences. And instead he’s the one who wrote the article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, having changed his mind and saying this is grounded in reality.

Dr. Jeffrey Long was an oncologist who read that JAMA article and he too, he said, “No, that can’t be true. That’s not right.” Because most of these guys are coming from what’s called a materialistic point of view, right? Worldview, which says that our brain is like the computer that runs the body. There’s no soul. It’s just what happens in your brain. It’s just electrodes and you know, what happens across electrical synapses in your brain.

But this has changed a lot of people’s minds. And so Dr. Long also starts asking patients, starts hearing more and more, and then he sets up a whole research foundation and he’s now studied thousands. He’s another, like me, who studied thousands of them. And he said, he said that near death experiences are, he came to this astounding conclusion that they are scientific proof of a life to come. That was his conclusion.

The Nature of Consciousness

SHAWN RYAN: What do you think? I’m going to keep going with some of the people that you’ve interviewed on this, but I mean, when you interview these people and you see these commonalities and then you see physicians and surgeons and people at the top of their field who are completely reversing their initial thoughts about near death experiences, I mean, what do you, it has to spark a question on what is consciousness with everybody you’ve talked to and with what you know now, I mean, what do you think consciousness is? Where does it come from?

JOHN BURKE: Well, personally, and not just from near death experience evidence, but also because like I said, I don’t think, you know, 48% of people having near death experiences. And I’ve interviewed, for the new book, I’ve interviewed 70 people personally on every continent and every religious background. 48% of people having a near death experience encounter the same God of light and love, who is personal, who knows them intimately, whose presence they never ever want to leave.

So I don’t think that God had just showed up, just decided to show up in our age of modern medical resuscitation. And that’s what I’m trying to show, that the same God has been revealing things about himself throughout history because what he really wants is relationship. So for me, my answer to that question is I think it’s the soul. I think that’s what the Bible talks about. The soul of a human is our seat of consciousness.

SHAWN RYAN: Now do you think we have a collective consciousness as well?

JOHN BURKE: Yeah, I thought you were going there. And so here’s the thing. Another commonality of what near death experiencers say is that when they leave their body, they realize that they were inhibited here. So there’s more fascinating side note is I think the Apostle Paul probably had a near death experience.

The Apostle Paul’s Possible Near-Death Experience

SHAWN RYAN: Why do you think that?

JOHN BURKE: Well, because in Acts chapter 14, and you know, for those who don’t know the Apostle Paul, he wrote a good chunk of the New Testament, right? And by the way, he was not a believer in Jesus. He was a Pharisee. He was one of the ones who had Jesus crucified. He wasn’t well, he was of that leadership and he was actually on his way to have Christians jailed and even killed. He stood there, thumbs up while Stephen was killed for his faith in Jesus because he did not believe.

When he is on the Damascus road and this brilliant God of light appears to him just like is appearing to near death experiencers all around the globe today. Same one. And he asked, “Who are you, Lord?” And he says, “I’m Jesus, the one you’re persecuting.” And I like to point out, you know, Jesus didn’t tell him what to do. He didn’t explain anything else. He later sends Ananias a person to explain all that Jesus had did. And Paul still had a free will.

So Paul could have either decided to follow Jesus, but it was going to cost him a lot because he was a wealthy, powerful Pharisee. So he was about to lose his whole life and he still had a choice. And I point that out because I think that’s true with what near death experiences are that, you know, just because they encounter God, that doesn’t. They still come back and they have a free will. They can either pursue, they can seek God or they can just keep going their own way or, you know, they still have a free will. I find many do seek and when they do, they find.

But you know, and that’s kind of what I’m pointing out as well. But I think it’s the soul that leaves the body but expands in powers. And Paul talks about this. That’s where I was going. In Acts chapter 14 it says that a mob turned on Paul and he got stoned to death in Lystra. Stoned to death with rocks. Got to always make that clear for people who don’t know the Bible. That’s how they killed people back then.

SHAWN RYAN: Right on.

JOHN BURKE: So they stone him. It says they stoned him to death, dragged him out of the city and left him for dead. And then his friends gathered around him and are praying for him. And it says he gets back up and goes back into the city. So he’s a badass, right? He’s going back to the ones who just killed him.

But Paul says in 2 Corinthians 12, and I think he might be referring back, he says, “14 years ago, whether I was in my body or out of my body, I don’t know, only God knows. I was taken up to paradise and I saw and heard things. Inexpressible.” Okay. So I wonder if that’s when that happened.

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting.

Expanded Consciousness and Spiritual Bodies

JOHN BURKE: And then Paul talks in 1 Corinthians 15 about how when our bodies are buried, they’re buried in wheat. They’re buried a natural body, but they’re raised a spiritual body. He says they’re buried in weakness, but they’re raised in. The Greek word is dunamos, which means power. They’re raised in new power.

And that’s exactly what near death experiencers talk about, that they have this expanded experience. They have eyesight that’s telescopic, like they can see thousands of miles zoomed, as if right up close, every detail. Communication, they say, is pure. Some use the word telepathy, but it’s more than that. It’s thought to thought, but it’s also feeling to feeling. It’s perfect understanding. That is the communication on the other side.

Travel, we’re not limited like in this body, so it can be instantaneous in a thought. It can be kind of like on a people mover, almost like a floating or a flying. I’ve interviewed two different commercial airline pilots who clinically died. And I find it so fascinating that both of them, God gave them a fly in over the holy city of God that John describes in the Bible in Revelation 21.

And both these guys, one of them who was an agnostic when he died and cried out last minute. The other who was. He was a believer, but, you know, kind of just doing his own thing, both of them get a fly in over the city. And both of them said, “I think God thought that’d be cool for me. Since I was a commercial airline pilot, I’ve done holding routes over every major city in the world.”

SHAWN RYAN: Wow, very interesting.

JOHN BURKE: By the way, I interviewed a Hindu who’d never read the Bible before, who described that exact same city, no kidding, to the T.

Burke’s Personal Journey to Faith

SHAWN RYAN: It sounds like when you started, if I remember correctly, when you started looking into near death experiences, it took about eight months for you to become a believer. Is that correct? Am I often saying that?

JOHN BURKE: Believer in near death experience, a believer in Jesus.

SHAWN RYAN: In Jesus.

JOHN BURKE: No, it was probably a year, two years, year to two years later.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay, what, what was it that made you flip? Was it, was it a collective of all of the research you’d done or was there a specific point where, you.

JOHN BURKE: You know, that’s a great question, because here’s the thing, I had all this evidence and it wasn’t just near death experiences. You know, in the Old Testament, one thing people don’t realize, they think the Bible is a book. It’s not a book, it’s a library. It was written. It’s actually 66 books written over 1500 years.

I mean, think about going and trying to pull out 66 books from the library and get any congruency about any one topic. And yet that’s what this is. It’s written by 40 different authors over 66 books, 1500 years. And yet there are these common themes of the person of God. God’s, you know, it goes all the way back and that this is the God of all nations.

You know, most gods are tribal gods. They’re like the God of this people group or of that people group. But you know, in Genesis chapter 12, I mean, all the way back, the whole story of the Bible is that God created people because God is love. And he created us for love, for a relationship, which seems bizarre, right? But I don’t know, you know, you have a kid, when there is love, there’s room for more love, right?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

The Nature of Love and Free Will

JOHN BURKE: You know, I have granddaughters, it’s even greater. It’s amazing. And God’s like that. And so he creates us for love. But go back to our free will issue. Love is a tricky thing because think about it, you can’t buy love. You know, you fall in love with someone, you can buy them lots of gifts and they might stick around with you, but how do you know they’re not sticking around for the gifts? How do you know they really love you?

So you can’t buy love, can’t force love. I mean, you could say “I love you” and hold a gun to her head and make her live with you and, you know, tell you she loves you. But we all know, well, that’s not love. Because love can’t be forced. It must be free or it’s not love. And that’s true even with God. That God in creating creatures that could love God and love each other. Created, basically just chose to limit his own power, to not force free will, but to somehow work within it.

So all the way back, the story of humanity is that we’ve all gone our own way. We’ve all at some point flipped off God and said, “No, my will be done. I don’t care about yours. I want my will done.” And I mean, that’s me, that’s all of us. That’s my everyday struggle. I don’t wake up every day going, “What do you want today, God?” I mean, I try more and more, but it’s usually like, “What do I want to do? How am I going to get it done?” And that’s the world we live in.

And so all the way back, though, in Genesis 12, God claims that he raises up two people, Abraham and Sarah, and he says to them, this is Genesis 12:1. “I’m going to form you into a nation, and I’m going to bless you so that all nations on earth may be blessed.” So from the very beginning, even in all of our rebellion, God had a plan to bless all people, to bring us all back, everybody who wants to come back.

And you see, throughout the Old Testament, and this is actually what convinced me all the way back, you know, that was 2000 BC that he said that. So that’s before any sacred writing of any world religion is put down. So this is just oral tradition at this point, then about 14, 1500 BC is when the sacred writings of many of the world’s religions start to be canonized, start to be written.

And at that point, this same God of light appears to Moses on Mount Sinai, right, and calls himself the “I am.” Now, fascinatingly, I interviewed a woman in Tehran who has a heart attack and sees this God who says to her, “I am he who is.” And then, boom, she’s back in her body. That’s how it was translated into English. And she was speaking Farsi when I heard this. Another woman, Penny. Same thing. This same God of light. And he says, “I am.”

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

Biblical Prophecy and Historical Evidence

JOHN BURKE: And so you’re pointing all the way back now to Moses. God said, “Here’s how you’ll know I am truly God. I alone know what’s going to happen in history. I alone can tell you in advance what’s going to happen. And then it happens. And that’s how you’ll know.” So all the way back 1500 B.C. he says this.

Well, then you have things happen in the prophets. So one of the most convincing to me, and this, by the way, is near death experiences opened my mind. Then I started giving the Bible a chance and started reading, asking questions. And then I came across this and I was like, “Why didn’t anybody know this? Why didn’t anybody tell me this?” Like this is evidence.

So Isaiah is a Jewish prophet writing in 780 B.C. And he’s claiming that God is revealing things to people through him. And I believe that part of what God was saying, that he wants to bless the whole world through the Jewish people. You know, you hear they’re the chosen people. Well, they’re not chosen like they’re better than. Chosen is a responsibility. So they had a responsibility. And the responsibility was to preserve what God was revealing for all nations.

And part of what he was revealing was when he would enter our world in a form we could relate to, to pay his own price of justice. So that’s a foreshadowing.

The Dead Sea Scrolls Discovery

So in Isaiah chapter nine, let me back up because sometimes what I’m about to say, people will say, “Well I’m sure they, you know, Jesus lived. They probably took the book of Isaiah, doctored it up after the fact.” Right, that would be what would be going through skeptics minds. What would be going through my mind.

In 1948 in the Dead Sea Scrolls. You familiar with the Dead Sea Scrolls we found?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOHN BURKE: So in the caves of Qumran, which I’ve been there, fascinating story. These two shepherd boys were chasing their goats up in there, threw a rock in, hear something crash. They discover this pottery sealed with 2000 year old scrolls. One of them was called the great Isaiah scroll. Is a complete copy of the scroll, the Book of Isaiah, carbon dating from 150 to 250 years before Jesus. 150 to 250 BC. You can go read it online. I mean it’s in Hebrew, but you can read the translation online.

So we have a copy of Isaiah, proof positive, predating Jesus. And yet what Isaiah foretells about the coming of Jesus, the Messiah is phenomenal.

Isaiah’s Prophecies About the Messiah

So Isaiah chapter nine says the region of Galilee that was in darkness will see a great light. A light will dawn. So particular place, the whole earth, Galilee. And then six verses down and it says, “For to us a child is born, a son is given, the government will be on his shoulders and his name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Everlasting Father, Mighty God, Prince of Peace. And his rule and reign will never end.”

So this is Judaism in 700 BC and their creed is there’s only one God. And don’t ever call anything or anyone else God. And so to say that there is going to be a child born, a human called Mighty God. And this began this mystery in the Jewish tradition of this Messiah that would come.

Now, 700 years later, Jesus did most of his ministry in Galilee. And he did claim to be the Son of God. That’s what got him crucified. Because they were expecting a conqueror to overthrow their Roman oppressors. Not what Isaiah said the Messiah would first do.

So you skip forward to Isaiah chapter 53 and it says that the Messiah is going to reveal the arm of God. So imagine our two dimensional painting again. So this isn’t all there is to God. This is God’s arm reaching in as a slice into our two dimensional world. So we’re only seeing a slice of the greater reality of God in the form of Jesus. He’s the representation in our three dimensional form of God.

So Isaiah 53, and again, 780 years before Jesus, he writes this, and it says, “He will be pierced for our transgressions.” He was nailed to a cross. “He will suffer, and by his wounds we will be healed. Because all of us, like sheep, have wandered off, we’ve gone our own way. But God laid on him the sins or iniquities of us all.”

So this Messiah, this arm of God reaching in, is first going to suffer to pay for all of humanity’s wrongs. It later goes on and says, “But after he has suffered, he will see the light of life and live” – resurrection. But this is in Isaiah 53, 780 years before Jesus ever came. And again, he’s going to come to Galilee, specific place.

And that’s just 2 of about 60 of what God put throughout these 1500 years of writing, foretelling what he was going to do in human history.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

JOHN BURKE: And that’s what, for me, as a skeptical engineer, NDEs opened me up. Then I started learning that and I was like, “Okay, this is real historical evidence.”

SHAWN RYAN: So NDEs is what got your attention? Right?

JOHN BURKE: But then I started reading the Bible and then I started learning about this other historical evidence. And then I started to see that what NDEs are commonly saying is also what the Bible seems to be saying about the expectation of life to come about who God is, about what God’s like.

Continuing Research on Near-Death Experiences

SHAWN RYAN: Why do you continue? I mean, thousands, how many do you know exactly how many people that have had NDEs you’ve interviewed? It’s over a thousand.

JOHN BURKE: It’s closer to 1500 now.

SHAWN RYAN: 1500. So you continue to do this?

JOHN BURKE: Oh yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Just curious. 1500 accounts. Why do you keep going? What are you still looking for something?

JOHN BURKE: Well, you know, I feel like I’m supposed to keep writing about this from different angles. So what I was trying to write about in “Imagine the God of Heaven” is to show people more that we all put God in a box. We can’t help it, we’re finite. Right. And what these near death experiencers are saying, but what the scriptures also say, you know, God is far more mysterious and beautiful and powerful and sovereign and this genius mind than we’ve ever imagined.

But he’s also far more relatable, personable, funny, enjoyable. I mean most people…

SHAWN RYAN: Whoa, whoa, whoa.

JOHN BURKE: I don’t go there. No. And that’s a problem. We got a very small box and I’m trying to show people that.

SHAWN RYAN: No.

JOHN BURKE: Who God has revealed himself to be and what these people are saying. The reason they consistently say “I never wanted to leave his presence” is because he is the love we’ve always wanted.

Comparing NDEs to Psychedelic Experiences

SHAWN RYAN: When you know, there’s a… We had spoken a little bit about this on the way here from breakfast and I brought up psychedelics and we were kind of talking about some of the commonalities between a near death experience and psychedelic therapy, which I have not had a near death experience. I’ve done psychedelic therapy and it did amazing things for me.

But kind of where I’m going with this is the presence of relatives felt that. Or people that you love felt that. A lot of people that I’ve talked to or have gone through that type of therapy with have felt that the presence of ancestors or loved ones. The tunnel that you speak of. In the psychedelic world we call that a wormhole.

JOHN BURKE: Well, I imagine heaven, I postulate, could this be a wormhole from our kind of time space dimension to God’s expanded dimensionalities.

SHAWN RYAN: The light, the light that you feel, the presence, the oneness or unity. I mean these are all… When I hear some of your talks or read about some of the near death experiences that you’ve studied it, there are a lot of commonalities and kind of where I’m going with this is, I mean, what are your… And to get there, a lot of times it’s an ego death where people actually, I mean when I did it, not a doubt in my mind, I was dying. It’s a you experience dying.

JOHN BURKE: When you did DMT?

SHAWN RYAN: Yes, when I did 5-MeO-DMT, it was a death experience. Then when you come out.

JOHN BURKE: But did you literally die?

SHAWN RYAN: No, you don’t. But you, in your mind, you…

JOHN BURKE: Feel like you’re dying.

SHAWN RYAN: Yes. You don’t feel like you’re dying. You are a hundred percent certain you are dying.

JOHN BURKE: Really? And was that scary?

Psychedelic Therapy and Spiritual Perspectives

SHAWN RYAN: I’ve been in a lot of scary situations as a war fighter and that takes the cake. It was the most anxiety and the most fear I’ve ever felt. And then when you come out the other side, it is pure bliss.

And so I want to ask, you know, what is a pastor? What are your thoughts on psychedelics? I hear all kinds of things from the Christian community, most of which are derogatory towards the treatment. But you know, I’ve seen amazing things happen because of that type of therapy. Truly amazing, like cures, addiction, cures, anxieties, cures, gives people another perspective on very traumatizing incidents that they’ve been through. Sexual traumatic incidences, rapes, wartime stuff.

I mean, I had a friend that was shot in the head and could not walk without a cane for years and I continually talked to him about this. He finally went down and did it 24 hours, left his cane there, didn’t need sunglasses anymore on cloudy days because of the light sensitivity. Just changed his entire life.

Well, I’m just curious what your thoughts are on psychedelics and if you’ve heard of any of the commonalities.

Psychedelics and Near-Death Experiences: A Comparison

JOHN BURKE: You know, so I’ve heard people say things to me like, “Well, near death experiences, that’s exactly what DMT does,” or you know, other psychedelic drugs. Some have said ketamine, other. And I’ve interviewed people who have had near death experiences who have also had psychedelic drug experiences who have told me it’s not the same and in particular the vividness, the reality of it is of an order of magnitude different.

Now having said that, like we talked about, I think it’s possible that psychedelic drugs are called gateway drugs sometimes. Right. There was an interesting experiment done, wasn’t really an experiment. It was a doctor, Dr. Walter Penfield, in the 50s, I believe it was the 50s, worked on epileptic patients and would basically open their brain and while they were lucid, would stimulate parts of the brain with electrodes trying to cure epilepsy. And he kind of mapped the brain in doing that.

But what he found is he would stimulate across an area and their left arm would go up and they would say “I’m not doing that, you’re doing that.” Which completely changed Dr. Penfield’s view because he went from believing that the brain was who we are to realizing there’s a someone in there that can observe something completely separate from what’s happening in the brain.

But Penfield also found a spot where he put electrodes across the brain and the person said, “I’m leaving my body.” And then when you stop would come back. Now I don’t know for sure, but I wonder if there’s like a trigger in our brain where our soul can release from our body. And so at a point of near death trauma, or maybe that is the passing of death, at least of the soul leaving the body, that something happens that is a release mechanism.

And so do psychedelic drugs actually affect that in the sense that your soul maybe is traveling or going somewhere or experiencing some things of a greater dimensionality of reality around us? I think that could be possible. The problem is that you’re going into another realm unprotected.

Protection in the Spiritual Realm

And when I’ve interviewed near death experiencers, one of the common things they’ve said to me is that when they’re there, they’re out of their bodies. And generally either angels or what they call a welcoming committee, relatives or friends who have died before them are there to greet them. They say, you know, love them and guide them on their journey home and protect them.

Like Dr. Mary Neal was the spine surgeon whose kayak got pinned under the waterfall dead for 30 minutes, you know, and she said, “I knew they were there to protect me.” I said, “Protect you from what?” And she said, “I don’t know. I just intuitively knew they were there to protect me.” And enough said that that it registered for me.

And so what I wonder is, you know, if we are through psychedelics going into. And there are other ways, you know, to shut down the neocortex as well and have altered experiences of consciousness or awareness, maybe you are going into a realm of other dimensionalities all around us. But the thing you got to be aware of is that there’s good and there’s evil in this world. There’s good and there’s evil on the other side too. And so you don’t always know what you’re going to encounter. And if you’re going in unprotected, as the NDEs would kind of hint at, you can be deceived.

SHAWN RYAN: So.

Therapeutic Applications of Psychedelics

JOHN BURKE: Let me go though to the. I’ve interestingly recently had a firefighter who came to Faith in Christ in our church who, you know, went through tons of abuse growing up, a lot of trauma, then becomes a firefighter, you know, first responder. So there’s a lot of trauma there. And he was recently telling me about doing therapy in a controlled setting with psilocybin and that it really helped him.

I also a woman who also came to Faith in our church who had undergone severe sexual abuse trauma. Same kind of story. And I have a good friend who is a Christian therapist. I told you, he runs affairrecovery.com it’s the largest affair recovery network. And he serves the military, and so he deals with a ton of trauma.

And he said there are multiple therapies that can get at reintegrating a memory that’s a traumatic memory with our neocortex so that you can put new thoughts, new context to that memory. Because if you know memory is stored in a neural network and if it’s a traumatic memory, many times for survival, it shuts off from our neocortex where most of our thinking, daily thinking is being done. So we can just. You couldn’t make it in a constant traumatized state. Right. And so that’s the brain’s way of protecting us from constant trauma.

But then when it gets triggered by something, you’re just there and there’s no way to associate it with a new thought. Like if you were a kid growing up just being beaten on by your father or sexually traumatized, and you felt, you know, “I’m never safe” or whatever, and you get this thought associated. When that trauma comes up, it’s just pure terror. You’re feeling the same thing again.

But if that can somehow be reconnected to your neocortex, you can start to associate new thoughts with it. “I’m an adult now. I’m not helpless. Not everyone that looks like that or does that is going to harm me.” And so it can begin to reintegrate that memory with a new perspective.

Personal Experiences with Psychedelic Therapy

SHAWN RYAN: I had a conversation with a good friend of mine last week who also is a special ops veteran and found a lot of healing through psychedelic therapy and then found God kind of, or strengthened his belief in God through psychedelic therapy. And we got into an interesting discussion about, you know, whether it’s, it’s a sin to do or not. And a lot of people have told me this is the forbidden fruit. This is, this is satanic. This is all kinds of negative things. All the things that I’ve seen happen from psychedelic therapy are positive. I’ve seen very few. When it’s in the right setting, when you’re doing it with the right intent.

JOHN BURKE: Yeah. Like my therapist friend said, you know, like some are more effective than others, like psilocybin, you know, if you have to maintain a microdose, you have to keep to feel good, well, then that’s not complete healing. That doesn’t mean there can’t be some healing. But of course the goal is to not have to be dependent.

But look, I don’t speak for the Christian community. I’m sure this will not so far go over well. I’m just telling you what I somewhat recently heard and you know, I’ve thought about it like. Well, I mean there are a lot of dangerous drugs that are used in medicine. When controlled, that can be very helpful, but when abused can be harmful. And so might these be some that have not yet been, you know, found to be useful in a controlled way?

Ketamine. Ketamine can be abused. Right. But I have a friend right now undergoing trauma therapy using ketamine in a. And it’s legal and it’s, it’s okay in a medical setting. So I don’t know, I mean, maybe, you know, it’s, it’s out of my lane here, by the way.

Biblical Perspectives and Healing

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I’m just, I’m being very respected in what you’re doing. So that’s why I’m asking is because I don’t, you know, it’s a, it’s a touchy subject, but it is, I’m interested to hear your opinions and, and you know, so we got into this discussion and he was saying that he thinks, and I don’t want to drag on on this too long, but he thinks there are certain sections of the Bible that have been pulled throughout the years. One of them is top. He thinks that self healing through things like mushrooms or ibogaine. Iboga Ayahuasca. He thinks that maybe there had been sections out of that that have been pulled because it is a direct connection, he believes, to God. And I’m kind of curious what your.

JOHN BURKE: I don’t think I would go there because I know people who have had hellish trips and many who have had trips that started good and everything was good and they kept going because it was so awesome until it wasn’t.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, there is a caveat to that. And some people, I’m not saying that the trips are all beautiful and glorious and blissful by any means. All I’m saying is they are healing. In fact, a lot of people have had horrific experiences, but then the long term effects kick in and it’s like I was telling you, I haven’t drank in over two years.

Stanford just wrapped up a study where they brought guys down with traumatic brain injuries where half of the brain isn’t lit up, dark spots all over the brain. They do the ibogaine treatment, they fly right back immediately they do another brain scan and the entire brain’s lit up. There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of science coming out of it.

And you know, it makes me wonder you’ve heard this. Maybe you’ve heard this story about the guy he was in a flood and he’s on his roof and the water’s coming and they send a boat and he’s like, “No, Jesus is going to save me.” And then they send a helicopter and he’s like, “No, I’m not getting on that helicopter. Jesus is going to stop, save me.” And then they send something else and he says, “No, Jesus is going to save me.” And the water keeps rising, he winds up drowning. He goes to heaven and he’s like, “Why didn’t you save me?” And he’s like, “I sent you a boat, I sent you a helicopter and I sent you the other thing.” Maybe, maybe psychedelics is one of those things.

God’s Creation and Modern Medicine

JOHN BURKE: Well, I mean, it could be God, you know, God. If God created all there is, he also created things that can help us and heal us. You know, Paul says in the Bible, everything created is good. Everything God created is good. Now, can we abuse just about everything? Yeah, right. We can use good things in ways that do us or others harm. But yeah, I’m not saying that, you know, our modern medicine might not one day say, “Hey, a treatment using something like this can be helpful in a limited dose.”

And, you know, I mean, gosh, you know, I had someone in our church who had been on the streets a meth addict for 10 years. He came to Faith in my small group with his live in girlfriend he met in recovery. I married them both for 10 years. They were awesome. Completely clean, no alcohol, no drugs. They served. He served in our homeless ministry. She served our kids.

And then he started working on houses, falls off a ladder, goes in, and without asking, they start giving him opioids. He gets addicted again to opioids and ends up dead.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, man.

JOHN BURKE: You know, so not even everything that we do in modern medicine that’s safe is safe or done in a safe way.

SHAWN RYAN: So.

A Balanced Approach to Understanding

JOHN BURKE: Yeah, I think, you know, I think one of the problems you asked me, you know, kind of, why do Christians shoot at it? Well, you know, sometimes we shoot at things we don’t know, don’t understand because it, you know, rattles us. And I think a better approach is to listen. That’s what I’m trying to do right now is I’ve got these people that I trust that are telling me, you know, that this has been very helpful.

But at the same time, I think, you know, there’s a word of warning too, that you can become addicted to other things, that you trade one problem for another. And so I think what my firefighter friend and my psychotherapist friend both said is in a Guided situation. In a guided healing situation, it can be effective but unguided. Not necessarily.

But again, you got me talking out of my lane. I’m an expert on near death experiences in the Bible, not.

Back to Near-Death Experiences

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s get back into some near death experiences. You had spoken about a woman who was in a kayaking incident. I think I’m familiar with this incident. Could you elaborate on what happened there?

Dr. Mary Neal’s Near-Death Experience

JOHN BURKE: Yeah. Her name is Dr. Mary Neal. She’s a spine surgeon. She was kayaking with her husband and a group of people in Peru. Goes over a 15 foot, 15, 20 foot drop, which she said is not horrific for kayakers who know what they’re doing. But she ended up at an angle where she plunged in and the force of it pushed her down and the nose of her kayak got lodged between two boulders under the waterfall.

And so she’s pinned to the front of her boat. She can’t even release her spray skirt because the pounding of the waterfall. She did everything she could. She’s a surgeon, so she’s used to panic situations and she tried to release herself and pretty soon realized she shouldn’t be alive still.

And it was interesting because she said, right before that, when she realized she can’t free herself, she said, “I said, God, your will be done, whatever it is.” She just had this kind of surrendered posture to God, your will be done. And she said, what was interesting is I’d always feared a drowning death, like oxygen starvation that terrified me. And she said, I never felt that.

Instead, as soon as she called out to God, she felt Jesus physically holding her. She wasn’t even a very strong believer. She’d gone through medical school and kind of wandered away and kind of become a more of an agnostic materialist. And so she was, the first time she told me, she was very hesitant. She’s like, “Who am I that Jesus would care about me or be holding me?” But she said, “But I knew without a doubt.”

And she’s very logical and analytical and she said, “I was fascinated because on the one hand I’m having this conversation with him” and she’s having like this life review, which is another commonality of a near death experience. She feels better than she’s ever felt. This is more real than anything she’s ever felt. But she’s also aware that her knees are bending backward and breaking. So she realizes her legs are and she can somewhat feel it, but there’s no pain in it.

And then she feels this kind of like a pop and boom. She’s out of her body, up out of the water, and she’s watching her friends, panicked, swimming around, trying to find her in the waterfall.

The Welcoming Committee

And then she sees this, what many of them call a welcoming committee of these people. But these people, she said, and by the way, that welcoming committee appears on the other side. From what I understand, we can appear to each other just like we normally do, like this one. Bank president Mark Besteman said, “Yeah, I was in my favorite golf outfit, and the people I saw were in kind of their native garb or whatever they would like.” He saw people from all countries.

But sometimes they talk about these. They say they’re like robes of white, but it’s not robes of white. And it’s interesting because that’s found in Revelation, I think, three and five, somewhere like that, which I always thought I want a robe of white. It doesn’t sound good, but what I figured out is that they’re actually translucent. And there is the light and love and life of God which fills everything coming out of them.

So that’s what Mary said. She experienced these people that she knew, and out of them was bursting this love that was light welcoming her and greeting her. And she said it was the most joyous occasion. “We hugged and we danced, and it was like this big party, this big celebration.” And she said, “Because I knew these people, I had known them for as long as I existed.”

And then they began going down this path, this beautiful pathway, she said, lined with flowers. She loves flowers. And at the same time, though, she can see what’s going on on the riverbank. So she’s having kind of almost this dual experience.

The City of Life

And she ends up at this place, this large structure, and she can see in, and there are people in there. And it’s a city. She says, “It’s a city, like, bustling with life. There was life, there was activity. They were all busy doing something.” But she said it was almost like there was this momentary stopping to acknowledge and just welcome me. She said it was amazing. “Who am I? I’m nobody. And yet I felt so accepted and so just welcomed. Welcomed in.”

And at another point, she had an encounter with Jesus. And I asked her, so what did he look like? Right. Question. She said, “This isn’t going to make sense. But he looked like bottomless kindness and compassion.” I said, what do you mean? He said, “Well, he had physical features, yes, but what just struck me is just bottomless kindness and compassion.”

Interestingly, a neurosurgeon, a neurologist that I interviewed said something like that about standing there in the presence of God. That picture, the kindest person you’ve ever pictured or known, you had to multiply it by thousands. And that’s what he experienced combined with the power of standing five feet away from a nuclear explosion. I mean, try to put all that in your head, that’s what blows your box open, right?

Jesus Quotes Himself

So Mary, interestingly, she asked Jesus, she said, “Man, this is so amazing. Like, why don’t you give everybody this experience? Everybody would believe.” And I love this because he quotes himself. What he said to Dr. Neal is what he said to Thomas, who’s called Doubting Thomas. He’s the disciple who, when Jesus was resurrected, wasn’t there when Jesus first showed up to his followers and they were telling Thomas and he’s like, “I don’t believe it. I’m not going to believe it until I stick my finger in the hole in his side.”

And Jesus shows up again and he says, “Hey, Thomas, touch me. See, I’m not a ghost. I’m physical.” He eats fish with them, they touch him. So he says, “Stick your hand in and see I’m real.” And then Jesus said to Thomas, “Blessed are you because you have seen, but even more blessed are those who have believed and yet not seen.” And that’s what he said to Mary. I love that Jesus quoting himself, wow.

So she comes back and, I mean, it completely changed her. She was a materialist doctor.

SHAWN RYAN: Is she the one who also was told that her son would die?

The Prophecy About Her Son

JOHN BURKE: Yes. So when she came back. So she didn’t want to come back. So this is another commonality of near death experiencers. What they’ve told me is when you are in God’s presence, you’re with your best friend, the greatest dad you could ever imagine and love. That doesn’t even compare to the most wonderful spouse or romantic lover, which sounds bizarre, but God’s not a male or female. We’re created in his image, not him and ours. I use him, the Bible uses him. But it says male and female created in his image.

So yeah, I mean, they don’t want to come back. So she didn’t want to come back and she was fighting. This is another thing I love, Sean, is that people in God’s presence are themselves, their same sense of humor, their same, whatever things about them. They had and many times they argue with him and he gets it. He understands us.

And so he, she was very stubborn about it, like, “I am not going back.” She had two little kids at the time and she loved her kids, but that’s how great it is. And that’s common. And so he said to her, “Look, your son is not going to make it past age 18 or he’s going to die at age 18 or something like that, and your family’s going to need you to get through that.”

And then she came back and at first she tried to disprove her own near death experience. She’s like, that felt so real, but I want it to not be real because of what she was told was going to happen. But searching all the records of what happened to her and everything and then hearing about others too, and she realized, no, it’s real.

And she didn’t talk about it because one, and she didn’t write about it at first because how do you say to your kids, “Yeah, I didn’t want to come back for you.” That’s what she told me. I couldn’t explain that to them.

And then she had a time when she was probably. Her son was probably 16 or 17, and there was something they were talking about, when he’s married and 30 or 40 and has kids of his own and all that. And he looked at her and he said something like, “Mom, you know, I’m not going to live that long.” And she was like, I mean, it really struck her, but can you say that again?

SHAWN RYAN: Her son.

JOHN BURKE: Her son kind of knew somehow that he wasn’t going to live that long. And so then, sure enough, it was right after he was 18 and he was hit by a car and killed.

And I’ll tell you an interesting thing. Sean is Mary. Mary is a friend of mine and she told me and my wife Kathy, “I know how wonderful it’s going to be in the life to come. And I know how good God is. And I saw how his plan works together. It all works together and it makes sense in the end. But it doesn’t take away a mother’s grief. It doesn’t take away your grief for your friend you lost. You still have to go through that.” And it was hard for her.

SHAWN RYAN: I’ll bet it was. Are there any other maybe prophecies that you’ve seen come out of a near death experience?

JOHN BURKE: Like foreknowledge of things?

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. Or maybe even in the past?

Prophetic Knowledge from NDEs

JOHN BURKE: Yes, I find that those who’ve had near death experiences. It’s almost like whatever the veil is that separates us, kind of in our two dimensional painting from being able to see into the realm of around us is thin for them when they come back initially. After a while it seems to then kind of the fog settles in again. And so sometimes, yeah, they have premonitions of things that are going to happen before they happen.

SHAWN RYAN: Any other specific examples? I’ll bring something up. I don’t know how true this all is. It was, it was like I had mentioned I had watched Case for Heaven that you’re in. And then that sent me down a near death experience rabbit hole and I found a, it was a Hollywood movie and it was talking about a kid that got really sick, had a near death experience on the operating table, I believe, and saw Jesus was able to tell his parents that he had a, I can’t remember a sibling that didn’t make it past pregnancy. And he just had this little kid, had all these examples of things that had happened before he came around or that he was too young.

JOHN BURKE: Was this Colton Burpo?

SHAWN RYAN: It may have been.

JOHN BURKE: Was his father a pastor?

SHAWN RYAN: Yes.

JOHN BURKE: Yeah. Yeah. So he’s in my book Imagine Heaven.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

JOHN BURKE: Yeah. So what was the, what was the question?

SHAWN RYAN: Well, his son had knowledge of things that he shouldn’t have had knowledge of.

JOHN BURKE: Oh yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: From things that happened before he was born or that he was. Or maybe when he was too young to understand.

JOHN BURKE: Right.

SHAWN RYAN: Things like that. And so that’s, that’s why I’m asking, are there knowledge of. Is there. Do you see a lot of knowledge from people that have had NDEs, knowledge into the future or knowledge into the past that they could not have known?

Colton Burpo’s Experience

JOHN BURKE: Yeah. So the 10 points of evidence that I put in Imagine the God of Heaven, just, that’s chapter two, kind of to set the framework for why believe these, so the verifiable observations is one, but another one is encountering people on the other side that they didn’t know or didn’t know were dead. And Colton Burpo would be an example of that.

So he is a four year old kid who basically they thought they lost him on the operating table. His dad is a pastor. So his dad goes into the closet in the hospital and he is screaming at God. He’s so mad, because he’s a pastor, I mean, it’s true of all of us. We’re like, “Wait, I served you and you’re going to take my son what is going on?” And he was mad, he was angry.

Colton, meanwhile, this four year old said that he was there with Jesus and there were angels that were basically entertaining him while he was waiting. Because Jesus said, “You’re going to have to go back. Your time isn’t finished yet.” Which is a common thing that he’ll say, you still have a purpose or your time isn’t done yet.

SHAWN RYAN: And.

Verifiable Observations and Family Connections

JOHN BURKE: He sees his dad in that closet yelling at God. And when he comes back, he told them that he saw him in there and that Jesus told him, “We need to pray for your dad. Right now he’s struggling.” And so his son was praying for him in this struggle he’s having with his own faith.

And then Colton also said lots of things. One is he said when he comes back, he said Jesus had markers and his dad was like, “Markers? What do you mean? You mean like markers like you write with?” And he said, “Yes, he had markers right here and here.” And then he realized, oh, he’s got wounds. It’s like if you put a marker dot. So there’s a four year old trying to describe the wounds in Jesus’ wrists that near death experiencers commonly say – that’s a commonality. I have a Rwandan imam. Well, I’ll have to tell that one.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, good.

JOHN BURKE: But we’ll come back to that one. But what Colton also said – so this four year old comes back and he’s talking to. And this is coming out over time, right? Because he’s a four year old, he doesn’t know what he, he doesn’t even…

SHAWN RYAN: Realize that this isn’t normal or…

JOHN BURKE: Yeah, it all came out in the car when they’re driving along and they drive by the hospital and Colton says, “You know, that’s where the angels sang to me.” And it’s a funny story. He said. And the father’s like, “What are you talking about?” And he starts asking questions and he says, “Yeah, the angels sang to me.” “When did the angels sing to you?” “When I was sitting on Jesus’ lap.” “When were you sitting on Jesus’ lap?” “You know that when you were yelling at God in that closet.”

He’s like freaking out, like, how did my 4 year old son know I was in a closet yelling at God? And then along the way, Colton said, “I met my sister.” And they said, “You don’t have a sister.” “Yes, I met my sister and she wanted me to tell you she’s waiting for you.” And then they realized they had had a miscarriage but they had never told their four year old son and he told them it was a girl and she was waiting for them.

Now that’s not uncommon either where you have a sibling. There was another one in Finland, I believe, who…

SHAWN RYAN: She…

JOHN BURKE: This little girl dies, meets her sister Reggie on the other side, comes back and shares with her parents that she met Reggie. And they leave the room, they freak out because Reggie had died of accidental poisoning when she was like two before this little girl was ever born.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

JOHN BURKE: How’d she know that? So, you know, you’ve got verifiable observations. You have people seeing and meeting people on the other side they shouldn’t have known or that they didn’t know was dead yet. And when they come back, they find out they died. You have this one. Blows me away. You blind people.

The Significance of Family in the Afterlife

SHAWN RYAN: We’ll pick up on blind people and the Rwandan woman. Is it always lineage that people are welcomed by, you know?

JOHN BURKE: No, but a lot of the time.

SHAWN RYAN: Why do you think it’s always lineage?

JOHN BURKE: Because family matters to God. He put us in families for a reason. And it’s not just our immediate family, it’s ancestors, but it’s also friends. I mean, the bank president, Marv Besteman, said two of his friends, that they met together and prayed together regularly and they were important in each other’s spiritual lives. They were there. So I think it’s the people that God knows would mean the most to us. We meant the most to them.

Karina Martinez’s Near-Death Experience

Karina Martinez, who died in Covid. This is all new to her. And her pacemaker fails. She’s young, but she had to get a pacemaker because they misdiagnosed a heart issue. Anyway, she’s floating up above her body. She sees her husband there. She’s like, “Oh my gosh, am I dead?” She grew up in Colombia, so in the Catholic Church, but horrific past, her parents abandoned her. And you know, she went down the road doing everything you could to just prove she was worth something, you know, just use your imagination.

And she’s realizing, “Oh my gosh, I’m dead.” And she said, “And God is real.” She said she just had this instant realization and she just starts. She starts saying the Our Father that she had learned. But when she comes to “Father, forgive me,” she was like, “I meant it. I was like, I realized.” And she just started saying, “Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.” But she was headed to hell and she knew it.

And then an arm grabs her and turns her around and brings her up. And she’s going up into this Light. And she sees all these people, and she hears this voice that she knows is the voice of God and said, “Come, you’re home. Come.” And she said, “No, I can’t. I’m filthy. I’m horrible. I deserve hell. Send me back there. That’s what I deserve.”

And this is common, too, is that in God’s presence, it’s like the truth is the truth. It’s like, you know, we can hide and pretend and rationalize and justify and all that, but there you don’t. And so they commonly say, “God was not judging me. I was judging myself.” Which is interesting, because Jesus once said, “By your own words, will you be acquitted? By your own words, will you be condemned?” And Jesus said, “I didn’t come into the world to condemn the world. I came into the world that through me, the world might be saved or rescued.”

And so she cries out, anyway, she’s going up into this light. She sees all these people, and they’re, like, celebrating her. She’s like, “Me? Why are they celebrating me?” And she said, “I’m filthy. I deserve that.” And he says, “No, you’re worthy. Come. I love you.”

And she still is. See, and this is the thing that’s amazing, Sean. We’re ourselves. We don’t just, boom, change instantly from ourselves when we cross over. That’s why how we live our lives today matters, because we’re becoming something that continues on. And so here’s Jesus trying to encourage her she’s worthy. And what she later realized is that she had just asked his forgiveness. And that’s all it took. That’s all it takes is just wanting him. Wanting his forgiveness, wanting his love, wanting his guidance. That’s all it takes. You don’t have to be perfect. Anything can be forgiven. Anything.

And she was still hesitant. She said, “God, if it really is okay, if it really is safe, show me someone who’s gone before me that I love.” And he said, “Look to your right.” So she looks to her right, and there is her dog that died the week before and her other dog that had died, like, three years earlier. And then she knew, and in she goes and has this amazing experience. Amazing. I don’t even go into more of it, but just the beauty and the joy and the excitement of it all. And she was like, “Let me go back. I want to tell everybody.” And that’s what she’s been doing since 2020. I got to kind of calm her down a little bit because she’s a little over the top sometimes. She’s so enthusiastic.

SHAWN RYAN: Why don’t you want to go deeper into what she saw, or do you want to do that later?

JOHN BURKE: I can. We can, or we can later. But what I was going to point out is that the people that welcome us sometimes are our relatives, sometimes are our friends, but in her case, it was her pets.

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting, interesting. Let’s go. The blind. The blind person.

Blind People’s Near-Death Experiences

JOHN BURKE: Yeah. So, you know, a third of the 10 points of evidence that convinced me is when people blind from birth have a near death experience, they can see and they report the same things that near death experiencers that are sighted report seeing on the other side.

SHAWN RYAN: No kidding?

JOHN BURKE: No kidding.

SHAWN RYAN: How many cases of this have you seen?

JOHN BURKE: I mean, I put, I think three in Imagine Heaven and three others I interviewed in Imagine the God of Heaven. So, like. Yeah, and this is wild. So Vicki, she died in a car accident. She was about 22, I think. And then they resuscitated her. Then the hospital, they’re operating on her and she codes again. And she’s up above her body.

And they say different things. Fascinating, because they’re like they’re trying to adjust to this new sense and they start to realize, “Oh, this must be sight.” But it’s a different kind of sight because it’s a different order of magnitude of sight as well. And so Vicki realizes from her wedding ring that it had an orange blossom on it, that she had felt that. And her long hair. “This must be her. I must be dead.” But she felt great.

And it was chaos. And she was like, “I’m out of here.” Like, she knew Jesus, she knew where she was going. She’s like, “I’m out of here. I don’t want to be right. I know where I’m going.” And she takes off and she said through this. She called it a tube or a tunnel. And what was colorful, all of a sudden she called no color black. But that’s the way she described it.

And she comes out in the end of this tube and is kind of like deposited in this garden, like setting grass and flowers and trees and just immaculate beauty. But as they commonly say, but with colors we don’t even have here on Earth, and a vividness we don’t even have here on Earth. But the way Vicki and other blind people describe it is they say things like, “It was different shades of brightness.” So, I mean, how would you describe color, you know, if you don’t really know it? But they would describe it like that.

But what’s fascinating is. So then she has this welcoming committee of people coming toward her. Her grandmother Debbie and Darlene who died, she grew up in a home for the blind. And they died at age 9 and 7 of other complications. And she said that “I knew I recognized them, but they were in their prime.” And this is a fascinating thing is people often say sometimes they’ll see like a grandparent as they remember them best, like they’re older, but sometimes most of the time people are about, they say in their 30s, late 20s, 30s. So she says they’re in their prime.

But here’s a fascinating thing. So Vicki and then Brad Burroughs, who is a 8 year old kid, also blind from birth when he died, he also sees his roommate hearing him choking and his roommate stumbling out. Later reported that he too, he goes up above the home that they lived in, saw the snow and the plow, you know, and he’d never seen his playground. And then he goes up and he’s in this meadow, this, he says this giant meadow of like beautiful tall grass. He saw palm trees. And he said, “But everything was soaking in this light. It was like this light just soaking in everything.” And the light was palpable. You could feel the light and the light conveyed love.

Now Vicki said almost the same thing. So she said this light was coming out of the birds, out of the trees, out of the flowers, and even out of the people. But the light was life and the light was love altogether. Okay, so hang on to that thought for a second.

Biblical Parallels to Near-Death Experiences

Blind people would not hear that light comes out of everything they would have heard on earth. That light shines on things. Right? So how do you have consistently blind people reporting that the light of heaven comes out of everything? And that’s what sighted near death experiencers say as well.

Now interestingly, back to the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah, chapter 60. God tells the prophet Isaiah there is no sun or moon in heaven because God is its light. Revelation, chapter 21. John, one of Jesus’ disciples said he was taken up in a vision of heaven, saw heaven, and he said the city of God, which he describes, he said he was up on a very high mountain. And he then describes this city of God and he said, “But there was no sun or moon, for the glory of God is its light. And the Lamb referring to Jesus is its lamp. And the nations will walk in that light.” This is Revelation 21.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

JOHN BURKE: Now how do you make this up to get people who are blind from birth claiming they did die and then claiming they’re talking about the light of heaven operating the way? A prophet from 780 BC and one of Jesus’ disciples in about 90 AD write the same thing. So that’s just three of the points of evidence, and there are many more.

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s hit the Rwandan, if you don’t mind, and then we’ll get into the all 10 of them.

The Rwandan Testimony

JOHN BURKE: So what’s fascinating in this new book, Shawn, is that I believe God brought me testimonies of people from every continent, every religious background, and yet they are consistently experiencing the same God. They’re describing the same God. It doesn’t matter where they are or what their expectation was.

So, for instance, this one guy in Rwanda, fascinating story. His mother was a Hutu and his father was a Tutsi. So if you know anything about the Rwandan genocide, those were the two that killed each other. And his father was a sheikh and an imam in the Muslim religion. Mom was a prophetess of the native goddess Baco.

And it’s a long story. Fascinating story. In the Rwandan genocide, his family got torn apart. His father gets put in prison, blames his mom, divorces his mom at age 8. He gets put out on the street, pretty much begging for food, ends up doing drugs and then dealing drugs to make money. And just, you know, been through a lot of trauma, a lot of stuff. And then he ends up getting blood cancer.

SHAWN RYAN: And.

JOHN BURKE: He’s dying of this blood cancer. They put him on palliative care. His father had tried to get the Muslims to do their rituals and pray for him, and they put the Quran on his head and all of this and nothing worked. His mom went to her goddess and tried all that. That didn’t work.

Her son’s dying. She goes to the Anglican Church because she had seen someone healed in the name of Jesus, and she was desperate. So she said, “Will you pray for my son in the name of Jesus?” And they were fasting and praying for a week. Meanwhile, her son dies.

So Svedik is his name. He dies and he finds himself in this hellish place. Hellish near death experiences are not uncommon, by the way, of people reporting near death experiences, 23% report hellish experiences.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

JOHN BURKE: So I do a whole chapter in Imagine Heaven, kind of trying to make sense of all that, because you can’t take the good and leave the bad. You got to make sense of both, right?

So he starts off having this hellish experience in this room that he called like a slaughterhouse. And these three creatures is all I can call them, attacking him. And when he said, into the room comes this man of light in a robe with a gold sash and light just coming out of him, shooting into Suydiq’s eyes, he said, and just going through my whole soul.

And he held out his arms like this and Suy Deek saw the holes in his hands. And then he knew who it was because Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ had come to Rwanda and he had seen it accidentally. And so Jesus says to him, “I died for mankind. You’re among those I died for. Never deny it and tell it to everyone.”

He wakes up, sits up with a cloth over his face and all these people just start screaming. And he looks down to his right and there’s a grave and he doesn’t know what’s going on. So it had been overnight and they were at his burial. And he sits up and he starts saying, “Jesus is here. Jesus saved me. Jesus is the one who brought me back.”

And all these Muslims are going, they’re just freaking out. About half of them did come to faith in Jesus that day because they saw it today. He is an Anglican pastor who has had seven attempts on his life, including his father trying to poison him because you can’t convert in an Islamic country.

And I talked to Sudik, I mean, he’s a courageous young guy and he’s like. I asked him, “Are you afraid?” And he’s like, “Why would I be afraid? He brought me back from death and he told me, tell everybody.” So he won’t shut up.

The 10 Points of Evidence

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. Let’s move into the 10 points of evidence. So after the 1500 interviews you’ve conducted with people that have had NDEs, what are those 10 points?

JOHN BURKE: Well, I’ve gone over three of them. You know, the verifiable observations, blind people being able to see and see things they shouldn’t have heard. Along with that are things that are commonly reported that are not common to earth. Like telepathic or thought to thought, heart to heart, communication experienced across the whole children, doctors, lawyers, CEOs.

A lot of the people I interview, by the way, they are professionals who have a lot to lose claiming they went to heaven and saw God, right? And yet they say it’s the most real thing that happened to me. So they’re willing to risk the harm it causes their career because it’s why they think they’re back here.

So blind people experiencing people they didn’t know had died on the other side. Like for instance, one woman in her near death experience sees this man who is smiling warmly at her with this kind of loving look. She doesn’t know who this is, but has a sense like, “I know him or I’m supposed to know him,” comes back 10 years later on her deathbed, her mother tells her she was born out of an extramarital affair. Shows the picture of the man, and that was the man she saw in her near death experience. Her father.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

JOHN BURKE: Or in other cases, someone who, you know, in one case it was a child who meets someone on the other side who tells them to tell this other person who they knew something and comes back and they didn’t even know that other person had died. But sure enough they had died and they were bringing a message back.

So, you know, that’s the third. The fourth is that I’ve chronicled about 40 commonly reported elements of a near death experience. You know, things like out of your body, you know, able to observe things, new powers of sight, for instance, telepathic communication. This place of exquisite beauty. Colors beyond our color spectrum. Beauty not unlike earth, but at the same time experienced in new dimensions. Time not working the same.

Understanding Time in the Afterlife

SHAWN RYAN: What do you mean by that time not working the same?

JOHN BURKE: Well, interestingly, another one of Jesus disciples, Peter, in 2 Peter 3:8 writes “to the Lord, a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years is like a day.” Well, NDErs say the same thing. They’ve said it this way to me. They’ve said there was no time on the other side. Or others say, “No there was time, but there was all the time you needed. Time didn’t work the same way there.” And it wasn’t always linear. Like we experience it here all happened together, which we can’t even conceptualize. But I talk in Imagine Heaven about how two dimensional time would give that appearance, it would have that feel to it. So yeah, so all these commonalities.

SHAWN RYAN: When you say there’s no concept of time, does that mean you’re experiencing everything all at once?

JOHN BURKE: Well, here’s the way I describe it. In this life, we experience time as a line going in one direction, one dimensional, right? So one point to the next, you can never go back. Right. Or that’s the way we experience it. That’s one dimensional time.

A second dimension would mean at every point on that timeline, there’s another line going vertical. So imagine if at every point on our linear timeline you could experience time on a vertical line that was infinitely up. Say that would have the feel that at each moment of time, even though time is moving or it can move, you also have all the time in the world at every point in time. I mean, we can’t experience it, we can only imagine it. Right. You know, which is part of what I’m trying to get people to do is imagine so much better than anything we’ve thought of.

You know, people. I find people fear heaven or the life to come, because anything in this life becomes boring. I don’t care how great it is. Right. Eventually it’s like I got to do something else. So we can’t imagine anything forever, but that’s assuming we’re talking about one dimensional time and just the same thing going on forever. And it’s not like that at all.

I like to say it’s more like if you’ve ever been in the zone. You know what I’m talking about? You know, if you’re creating something or you’re so absorbed in something you’re doing that time’s your enemy because you don’t want it to move on. It’s like you’re just, you’ve lost time. I think it’s more like that.

SHAWN RYAN: I’ve not heard that before. Thank you.

JOHN BURKE: Yeah. So you want me to keep going with the.

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, yeah.

JOHN BURKE: Evidences.

SHAWN RYAN: The 40 points is what we’re on.

Debunking Alternative Explanations

JOHN BURKE: Well, so there are 40 different commonalities that people report that I’ve chronicled in the books. And I’m showing how they align with what God’s been revealing all along. It’s not new, but if this was just in the brain. So some of the alternate hypotheses that people will say, and there are different ones that come out every year. There have been. Shawn, there have been 30 alternate explanations for near death experiences. I’ve heard them all. “Oh, that’s exactly like DMT. That’s no different.” Well, yeah, it is, because you can’t have vertical perception that can be checked out and observed. You know, blind people taking DMT can’t see. You know, it’s there’s a lot of different stuff. Right.

SHAWN RYAN: Plus you’re dead.

JOHN BURKE: Plus you’re dead.

SHAWN RYAN: You’re dead.

JOHN BURKE: I point that clinically. People, you know, some people will say to me, “Well, I wish I could have an experience like that.” No, you don’t. You don’t know what these people went through coming back. They almost all have a scar right there from their tracheotomy.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, here’s the good news. You will have an experience like that eventually. So.

JOHN BURKE: Well, that’s the good news.

SHAWN RYAN: You just won’t come back.

JOHN BURKE: The comeback is the bad part.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

JOHN BURKE: They’re often depressed coming back. They don’t want to come back. It’s hard coming back. One guy told me it’s like being put back into the sewer when you’ve experienced paradise.

So anyway, another alternate explanation that skeptics will say is that this is just in the brain. When you’re dying, endorphins are flooding the brain. There are a lot of chemicals flooding the brain. It’s the brain’s way of coping, and it just gives us a pleasurable way of shutting the computer down.

Well, most have gone away from that now because they realize that doesn’t explain most of these other phenomena. So they’ve now said, “Well, as the brain is rebooting, then it’s coming up with this experience.” And the reason they say that is because think about it. Our memories are stored in neural networks in our brain. That’s electrical activity. So when you have a flat EEG for hours, where are these memories being stored? That doesn’t work. Right. Which is another point of evidence.

So then they say, “Well, maybe it’s when the brain’s being rebooted that all this is happening.” But again, it doesn’t explain verifiable observations. It doesn’t explain the blind, doesn’t explain meeting people you didn’t know were dead on the other side.

And if it’s just in the brain, why aren’t these commonalities 100%? It’s just a human brain thing. Why is it that 57% of NDErs experience relatives who have died before them? Why isn’t it 100%, 57%, 57%, 31% get a life review? All right, so they have this panoramic reliving of their lives. But if it’s just a brain thing, why wouldn’t 100% or 0% get a life review?

48% experience the same God of light and love, who, as I said, is the same all around the globe. But why wouldn’t it be 100%? And why wouldn’t it be what their cultural expectation was?

So the very fact that there are commonalities but not commonalities that are all 100% the same, each is a bit unique. You know, if you have, let’s say you have a court of law, and, you know, we try to prove things beyond a reasonable doubt based on testimony, based on evidence, Right? If you have 10 people who say exactly the same thing about an accident or a crime, that usually is sketchy, that’s collusion, because that means they talked. If they say exactly the same thing, but if they say overlappingly the same thing with different details that aren’t the same, but unique. Well, that’s the strongest testimony and that’s what you have with near death experiences.

The Life Review Experience

SHAWN RYAN: What do you think the life reviews are?

JOHN BURKE: Yeah, so it’s actually the most life altering apart from being in the presence of God. Near death experiencers say the life review was the most life altering thing they’d ever experienced. It changes them.

So commonly after experiencing this God of light, who is love, who’s personal, who gets them, they can be themselves. You know, he will sometimes just tell them, sometimes ask them, “Do you want to review your life?” Sometimes he’s like, “I want you to see something” so it’s different and what happens again? Because time doesn’t work the same way. They can re experience their whole life and it doesn’t matter how long they were clinically dead on earth. And they say, you know, it’s like they re experience it all at once. But I’m telling it to you in.

SHAWN RYAN: Order, legitimately re experience their entire.

JOHN BURKE: Life, not certain portions.

SHAWN RYAN: No. Like from birth to death.

JOHN BURKE: Yes. And they say now again. And I think in part this is because we’re all unique and God knows our uniquenesses. So there’s some uniquenesses to each one. So some of them, they said God just showed me certain things that he wanted me to see. So it wasn’t all of it, but most of them I find it is all of it. Like if they’re 18, it’s up till they’re 18. If they’re 50, it’s all the way up till they’re 50.

And they’re watching their life replay as if almost like a hologram. But they’re there and they’re re-experiencing it. One really trippy one. This CEO, he was a pharmaceutical executive and then a CEO of several biomedical companies. Again, these guys are like, they got a lot to lose. In fact, when he first read my book “Imagine Heaven” and he came to me and he was nervous about talking publicly about it because he’s like, “My career will be gone.” And yet they do.

But he is there with Jesus. He had six embolisms travel up his leg and had a pulmonary embolism, blocked his breathing. Then his body goes into sepsis, shuts down. And he finds himself in again this incredibly beautiful place. And he’s with Jesus, he’s walking with him. And then Jesus starts to show him these vignettes of his life. And there’s like a life review.

Now in his case, it wasn’t everything but he showed him these different points and this one was, well, first he had a really hard upbringing, so he had no friends, he was in and out of the hospital a lot, he was overweight, so he was bullied a lot. And Jesus is showing him this and he’s like, “Why are you showing me this?” He’s basically like, “This sucks. Why are you making me relive this?”

Because they not only see it, you feel it, you think it, you remember everything as if you were re-experiencing it, but not just what you were thinking and feeling, what the other people you were interacting with were also thinking and feeling. So it’s like you experience your life in a relational way from God’s perspective. That’s what’s so life altering about it.

But what was kind of cool in Randy’s case is he asked, “Why are you showing me this?” And then it dawned on him, “Were you there with me?” And Jesus looks at me and he says, “I was always with you, just waiting for you to turn to me.” And he was basically showing him that even in all the suffering, he’s been there through it, he’s been there with him.

And he goes to another venue where he sees himself now. And he became an atheist, he went to Northwestern University, he tried to disprove God and disprove all religions and he went through this whole, he was a pretty mean atheist for a while. And so he’s working as an orderly in a hospital and he goes to serve food to this little seven year old boy dying of cancer.

So this is Randy standing with Jesus in this heavenly experience, watching and experiencing this scene play out again. And the little boy, he comes in, the little boy said, “I’m dying but I’m going to go to heaven.” And Randy said, “Well I’m really sorry but if there is a heaven, I’m sure you will go there.” And the little boy said, “Do you believe in Jesus?” And he said, “No, I don’t really believe in all that, but I’m glad you do, I’m sure you’ll be there.”

And the little boy, this little seven year old dying of cancer, right? And he says to him, “I’m going to pray for you and you’ll be there too.” And Randy’s standing there with Jesus in heaven watching this little boy pray for him who he didn’t even know and he realizes that God used even that in all the things of his life to get him there.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

The Life Review Experience

JOHN BURKE: And so the reliving these, yeah, these life reviews, what people commonly say to me is that it was their whole life. And like Dr. Mary Neal said, it was like my life was laid bare for all it’s good and all it’s bad. And so they’re seeing this again. Now, here’s the thing, Sean, is most people fear that. I have. There are things in my life I don’t want to sit there and watch before God, right?

And then I started to realize, okay, wait a second. This is God. Do I really think I’ve been hiding? Do I really think he doesn’t know everything and that’s the reality? No. He’s been with you always. And when you start to realize the character of God, that God cares about us, like you care for your little son, like I care for my daughter and son, my little granddaughters. More so. Infinitesimally more so.

And he has compassion and mercy and he wants to help us. He’s not a condemning. That’s what Jesus said. “I didn’t come to condemn, I came to rescue.” And so that’s what near death experiencers commonly say. I say God was not judging me, I was judging myself. God was unconditionally loving me and supporting me through this, learning about my life.

SHAWN RYAN: Why do you think humanity does put God in that box that we were discussing at the beginning? Where it is judgment rules, it’s like a…

I’ve always viewed him as an authority, like a discipline enforcer.

JOHN BURKE: What, the cosmic cop.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, the cosmic cop, I like that one.

God’s True Character

JOHN BURKE: Yeah. My friend likes to say, we look at God like he’s sitting up there, and he’s just a little bit perturbed and angry and like, “Is anybody having fun down there? Well, cut it out. Get back to work.”

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, where did that come from?

JOHN BURKE: Nothing can be further from the truth. The last thing Jesus said his last night on earth before he knew he was going to be crucified, which by the way, I like to point out, he willingly took the bullet for us. It wasn’t forced on him. He said, “You could do nothing to me if it weren’t the will of my Father in heaven.” He took the bullet.

And right before that, that night before he said, this is in John chapter 15, he said, “I’ve told you these things so that my joy would be in you and your joy would overflow.” So think about it, everything we love about this life, every good thing, every beautiful thing, all the pleasures, all the adventures, all the competition. I’m a soccer player. I still play I love it.

Where do we think we got the ability to experience good things like that? Even sex. Somehow think God doesn’t know about sex? Who thought this up? Who thought it up to be pleasurable? Right? Every good gift can be abused without a doubt. But that’s what you see when people encounter God in these near death experiences. But I’m also trying to show that is who God has revealed himself to be all along through scripture. They’re not different.

And God is the most charismatic, winsome. I don’t know, what do you want to say? Cool person being imaginable, but also the like, drop to your knees in awe, powerful. I mean, I had people tell me that, it just brought them to their knees.

And this one neurologist told me, he’s the guy who he got stabbed. I don’t know if I told you this, but one of his patients turned on him, had a psychotic break, stabbed him 13 times. And right before the 14th, going for his heart, he said time froze. And he said, “Suddenly I’m standing there in front of this nuclear explosion of light brighter than the sun like a thousand times that I knew I must be dead because otherwise how could I look at this and not have my retina burned out?” That’s common.

And he said it was like roiling with energy. Like if you were standing five feet from an atomic explosion. This commercial airline pilot, who I told you, flew into the holy city and said at the center of the city was this light that he said, “All I can describe is if you’ve ever seen the light right at the detonation of a nuclear explosion. It was like that continuously,” same thing.

So Ron, this neurologist, he describes these characteristics of God that just imprint on him suddenly. And he said, “Love is the one quality that summarizes it and wraps it all up.” But he said, “Our word love doesn’t even work really.” He said, “Our love, think about all the romantic love, all the love of a parent or a grandparent, all the love you have for a child. All that,” he said, “is like standing in the ocean and it’s gentle waves of love lapping up against your knees. And then comes a tsunami of love. That’s God’s love.”

And it just washes away all fear, all worry. He said, “I didn’t even think about this thing that was happening to me, this tragedy,” he said, “that turned out to be the best moment of my life.”

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. Wow.

JOHN BURKE: And he showed me the scar that went right through. And he knows all the medical terms he shouldn’t have lived. It went right through and came out the other side.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you serious?

JOHN BURKE: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

JOHN BURKE: There was a documentary made on his life years ago.

SHAWN RYAN: Some fascinating stuff. Let’s take a break, and when we come back, we’ll dive into hell.

SHAWN RYAN: All right, John, we’re back from the break and we’re going to dive into, we’re getting ready to dive into some NDEs that are very hellish in kind of painting a picture of what hell looks like.

Hellish Near-Death Experiences: The Other Side of the Story

JOHN BURKE: Yeah, yeah. As I said before in one study, you know, and again, I told you, near death experiencers are reticent to come forward because this is a sacred experience that is hard to describe in our three dimensional terms. So they don’t often come forward readily. But even of those who have come forward, 23%, according to one study, came forward talking about having a hellish experience to some degree or another. And so these are common.

This 2019 European Academy of Neurology did a study across 35 countries found that 5% of the population, or 1 out of 20, claims to have had a near death experience. But they also found an even greater percentage that had hellish experiences or negative experiences. So you got to make sense of these as well.

You know, interestingly, Jesus talked about hell a lot as something real, but not as a scare tactic. I think it’s more as a look, this is reality. And what he came to do was that no one would go there, but some do in their near death experience.

Howard’s Story: An Atheist Professor’s Hellish Experience

So for instance, I interviewed this atheist college professor, tenured college professor, who was, he was an art professor who was doing a tour with students in Europe, in France, and his lower duodeum ruptured. You usually have like five to six hours before you’re dead because you’re spilling all that junk into your cavity. And it was a weekend, so they couldn’t find a surgeon in France. And after eight hours he died.

Now he thought, when you die, it’s just unplug, the computer screen goes blank, there’s nothing. And that’s not what happened. And instead he said he was standing there by his bed. He felt the worst he had ever felt in his life. And suddenly he felt wonderful. And he doesn’t even know he’s dead. He doesn’t realize he’s dead because he’s sitting there thinking something happened. I feel wonderful. And he feels these new senses.

This group of people then come into the hallway and he can see him in the hallway and they’re calling to him, “Howard, come, come with us.” And he said, “I’m sick, I need a surgeon.” You know, that’s what he’s been waiting for. And they said, “Oh, we know, we know all about you. Come, come with us. Don’t you want us to help you? We’re going to help you. Come on. We’ve been waiting a long time. Come with us.”

Okay, so time out. I like to point out that not every near death experience is as deep as others, meaning all the elements. So some just. There’s an out of body experience and they’re back in. Those can be interpreted in a million ways, right? A million worldviews can wrap around that. If Howard had at this point come back to his body and been resuscitated, his interpretation probably would have been, “Hey, it’s all good. Atheists go to heaven. It feels great, it’s nice people, everything’s good.” But that’s not what happened.

The Deception Unfolds

So he starts to follow these people and again, time. And even distance, it doesn’t work the same on the other side, which I don’t fully understand that, except that by analogy, you know, think about, you know, from here to Austin, Texas, where I live, Nashville to Austin, it’s a long way, right? It’s a two hour flight. But what if I could think it and be there? How far is it now? Right? All of a sudden, distance doesn’t mean the same thing. So on the other side.

So he couldn’t tell. And he follows these people and they end up. He starts to realize they’re deceiving him, they’re starting to mock him, they’re cursing him, all these, you know, and he starts to realize this is not good. And then he realizes he’s in this darkness and it keeps getting darker. And he tries to say, “Hey, I want to go back.” And they’re like, “You’re not going anywhere.” And they start pushing and shoving and he’s in. And he calls it a darkness that’s darker than black.

And I’ve heard people commonly say that Jesus called it the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Meaning, just, it’s, you know, I don’t know, I guess just horrific. And that’s what he experienced. And so he finally realizes he’s being deceived by these creatures that he couldn’t fully see completely because they were kind of veiled. But now it’s dark and he can’t see them, but he can feel them. And they start to maul him. He starts to try to fight to get away and they just. And they’re having fun.

So I’ve had him talk to me about this four times and he starts to describe it and then he says to me, “I can’t go any farther,” because he had PTSD from it every single time.

SHAWN RYAN: And you interviewed him. He couldn’t push past.

JOHN BURKE: Yeah, there’s a certain point that he would say, “I can’t go any farther because it’s taken me a long time to.” He had what, you know, vets would call PTSD because it’s real. It’s more real than this. And I think that’s a very important point to note, that what’s ahead is better than the best we’ve experienced, but what’s ahead is worse than the worst we’ve experienced, too.

And I believe that we are in a temporal time capsule for a purpose. We are in a time of choosing. We’re in a time of choosing. What kingdom do we want to be a part of? Is it me and my kingdom? And I rule? Because, as it turns out, that’s what hell is. Hell is the creature wanting to play God, and it’s dominate or be dominated. And that’s what Howard realized in this place.

The Nature of Hell: Dominate or Be Dominated

It was really interesting because he said, I mean, first of all, picture the worst prison scene. The worst. Years ago, I saw a movie, Midnight Express. You ever see that?

SHAWN RYAN: No, I haven’t.

JOHN BURKE: Turkish prison, you know, just getting brutalized and raped daily and all kinds of. It’s a pretty gruesome movie. That’s what was going on. And just being eviscerated. And what he said. Several things he said that was interesting. He said, “You know, I realized that these people were my kindred spirits.” I said, “What do you mean?” So I realized that they were like me on Earth. I came to a point in my life when I thought the biggest, baddest bear in the woods wins, and that’s how I lived.

And he said “I wasn’t good to my. I wasn’t nice to my students. I was all about me and building my monuments to myself and my ego. I cheated on my wife a lot. It was all about me.” And he said, “What I realized is that these people were like me on Earth, but when the good was gone, it just spirals down worse and worse.”

The Battle Against Pride

So he’s in this place, and this is really fascinating. He hears, he said, in his solar plex, because he still was himself. And he said he heard, “Pray to God.” And his first thought is, “I don’t believe in God.” And he feels it again, “Pray to God.” And he’s like, “I don’t.” He’s fighting. And this is a very important thing, Sean, because the ego can imprison us. Our egos can absolutely imprison us.

And here he is literally in a hellish place, experiencing the worst things you can imagine. And he’s hearing this, “Pray to God,” but he’s fighting it. And finally, the third time, he’s like, “I don’t even know what to pray.” And he starts just saying this, “God bless America” and “Thy country, ’tis of thee.” And, you know, he’s just piecing things together and he’s saying these things, but when he says the name of God, they become more angry and are threatening him even more. But he also noticed backing off. So he keeps doing it because it’s working.

And then he ends up just alone there. And he said, “For how long? I don’t know.” He said, “Time doesn’t work the same. It could have been decades.” But he was just thinking about his life and he was thinking about, you know, how again on the other side, truth is truth, there’s no hiding. And he’s like, “This is who I become. This is what I deserve.” But at the same time, he didn’t want that.

The Moment of Surrender

And he hears in his soul the song he heard when someone took him to church as a kid. “Jesus loves me.” And he couldn’t remember anymore except “Jesus loves me.” And he had this thought, and he now thinks God was even in that, trying to reach him, you know, in this battle he’s having in his own spirit, even then.

And he finally gets to the end of himself. You know, we all have to hit rock bottom before we look up. That’s a famous recovery principle. Some different people have different rock bottoms. But, you know, many times we have to hit rock bottom before we look up. And Howard said to me, “My rock bottom was low.”

And he cries out, you know, he thinks to himself, “Even if Jesus does exist, why would he care about me? I’ve been so horrible.” But in desperation, he just cried out, “Jesus, save me.” And he said, into this darkness, he sees a speck of light coming, getting brighter and brighter and brighter, until again, he described as brighter than the sun, but he could look at it, and it was mesmerizing. And arms reach out, pick him up, take him out of there. And he’s then standing before these angels being held by Jesus, and he gives them a life review.

The Radical Life Change

Now, I want to fast forward for a second because the story sounds so like you got to be making this up. But after this near death experience, this Howard, this atheist, tenured college professor, once you have tenure, you don’t leave that. You can’t be fired. It’s the most secure thing you could have. Two years after his near death experience, he leaves his tenured college professorship to become a Christian pastor. His wife divorces him because she’s still an atheist and thinks he’s crazy. How do you explain that?

Yeah, and what he would say. Jesus, you know, in the presence of Jesus, he’s getting this life review. And he said some very interesting things. So he had a very abusive father and beat him daily, cursed him out daily, nothing was ever good enough. And he said, “You know, I was seeing these scenes in my life play out and I was seeing that my father was, he was a horrible person. But I was also seeing that it was a two way street, that I resented him and I did things to provoke him and to rebel against him.”

And he said, “The places where I always thought, well, I’m the victim, I’m the good guy and everybody else is the bad guy.” He said, “No, I realize that God wants us to take responsibility for ourselves. He’ll take responsibility of what’s right and wrong and who’s where and what. All we can do is take responsibility for ourselves.”

Reconciliation and Restoration

And so when he came back, he reconciled with his father and his brothers and sisters disowned him for a while because they were like, “How in the world can you reach out to him and become friends with him? He was horrible.” And yet that’s what God does. He restores what evil has torn apart and broke, you know, and was broken. And so Howard has seen all this played out.

And another funny thing in his life review is he comes to this one point and again, what I love is that, you know, Howard is, he’s funny, but he’s also crass. And he’s just himself with Jesus. He feels so comfortable just to be himself because he said, “I’m here with who I realize is my Lord and Savior and friend and creator.” And he said, “The most loving, wonderful being I’ve ever imagined being with.”

And in his life review, he’s seen these scenes of him using and abusing other people. And he said “It was like I could feel how it was hurting him, like I was stabbing him with a knife.” He said, “Not literally, but it felt that way.”

SHAWN RYAN: He was feeling the pain that he inflicted on others. Is that what you’re saying?

JOHN BURKE: He was feeling the pain it caused Jesus when he was inflicting pain on others. And then conversely, he showed him as well, a time really simple thing when his, I think his sister had lost a pet and was grieving and he heard her crying in the middle of the night. And he got up and he went in there and he just hugged her. And he said, “I was overwhelmed because it caused God so much joy that I would do that simple thing.” Which is wild if you think about it.

SHAWN RYAN: It is.

The Connection Between God and Humanity

JOHN BURKE: But, you know, that’s what Jesus said to Paul when he appears as this brilliant God of light on the Damascus road. And Paul was persecuting believers in Jesus. And he said, “Who are you?” Paul said, “Who are you, Lord?” And Jesus said, “I’m Jesus, who you’re persecuting.” But he wasn’t persecuting Jesus. He’s persecuting people. But that’s that oneness, right, that we come from God, and God has a connection to us.

He is. You know, Paul said, “In him, we live and move and have our being.” Acts chapter 17. In other words, he is the life force that keeps us going. He’s always been with you through the highs and lows. There’s no one who gets you more because there’s no one else who’s been through everything with you, understands the whys and the hows. And, you know, it’s amazing.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah. How many accounts of hellish NDEs do you think you’ve had?

JOHN BURKE: A lot. I mean, half, quarter. You know, I haven’t counted, interestingly, you know, some of the ones that are now my friends are now pastors.

SHAWN RYAN: Really.

JOHN BURKE: It’s fascinating where all of them were.

Hell Experiences and Demonic Encounters

SHAWN RYAN: All of them atheists.

JOHN BURKE: No, Paul Ojeda is a good friend of mine. He was a cocaine addict. He and his wife. His wife was a stripper. She wasn’t his wife. They just lived together. They were a part of a car. They were in and out of cartels. I mean, it was. And he has a cocaine overdose, and suddenly he’s dropping. He said, “I was sober and I was dropping through this. Blacker than black.” He described the same way. And he was like, “What is happening? I’m not high.” And he knew, “I’m going to hell.”

And he was like, “Oh, my gosh, I can’t go to hell. I’m a good person. I didn’t do anything wrong. I’ve never murdered.” And he’s justified. “I’ve never murdered anybody. I haven’t been mean to anybody.” And he said, the more he justified, the faster he felt himself dropping, until finally he said he got to his end and he just cried out, “God save me. God help me. You got to help me.”

And he didn’t stop dropping. He didn’t stop falling. He felt God’s presence there right with him. He didn’t see anything visual, but he knew. And he hears a voice direct to his soul, “Paul, what have you done with the life I’ve given you?” And then, boom, he sees his life, the whole thing, the whole life review. And at the end of it, his conclusion was, “I deserve this.”

And he says, “God, I want people to know. I want people to know.” And he’s back in the hospital, and he comes to and says to Lillian, who’s now his wife, “I don’t know what you’re going to do, but I’m going to find the God that just saved me.”

And he ends up then coming to Faith in Jesus and starting a church in Austin accidentally, because he just kept telling people about his experience who had been in. A lot of people in, addicted drugs, Wiccan, a lot of stuff. A lot of suicidal ideations and all that. And they would call him and he would explain what happened to him and they would open their lives to Jesus and they would find peace.

And they started going like, “You got to move here.” He was living on a golf course in Houston. He’s a master plumber living on a golf course in Houston. He sells his house on the golf course and moves to Austin and just starts helping these people. And now he has one of the largest Hispanic churches in Austin.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. Wow. What are some. Do you have any more accounts where there maybe are demons that are encountered?

The Reality of Good and Evil

JOHN BURKE: Yeah, yeah. I’ll tell you, Shawn, I mean, studying these has actually changed my theology in this sense. Even as a Christian and even as a pastor, I used to think a lot of it was just fantastical, metaphorical, or. But hearing enough of these people saying the things they say, what I’ve come to is that on the good side, all of our, in some ways, wildest dreams and fantasies and fiction and the things we only dream of that might be possible, that’s better than that.

And the horror that we can imagine and see and come up with, it’s worse than that. And that both are based in a reality that’s beyond this life.

So this one guy that I interviewed for the new book for Imagine the God of Heaven, he’s in there. His name is Jim Woodford, and he was a commercial airline pilot. Agnostic. He grew up Catholic, but then kind of just, it didn’t mean anything to him ever. He said, never prayed a day in his life. His wife was a Christian and was praying for him. He was also a very wealthy businessman.

So he started multimillion dollar businesses. He’s a Canadian. He had a horse farm, had 19 British sports cars in a garage, a yacht, his own airplane. But he got Guillain Barre disease, which is very painful. Got addicted to opioids. And one night he was out checking the fence lines of his property, feeling the pain coming on. He’s facing the setting sun, and he went and took the rest of the bottle. And he forgot that he had already taken more that day.

And he said to me, “You know, when you’re dying?” He said, “I felt it coming up like this fire coming up through me.” And he said, “I knew it.” And he had this realization that “I’ve never thanked God for the life I thought was my own making.” It’s like, boom. He just has that realization, which I have heard enough of these to realize that you don’t want to wait till the last minute, but God is pursuing people to the last minute.

And in that last minute, as his head is about to hit the steering wheel, he cries out, “God, forgive me.” And then he dies. Jim is actually a jokester, so I like to joke with him. I think you beat the thief on the cross for last minute. Yeah. And he did. And he says, “That’s who I identify,” because there were two thieves on the cross. They’re probably murderers.

And one of them mocked Jesus, and the other realized that he was probably the Messiah that was foretold. And he said, “Jesus, when you come in your kingdom, remember me.” That was it. Jesus said nothing to the guy mocking him and demanding that he get them all down off the cross if he’s really God, which is fascinating. We say, “Prove yourself to me, God.” “I don’t need to.”

But the humble guy who realizes “We deserve this, he doesn’t. Will you remember me?” And Jesus said to him, “You’ll be with me in paradise today.” It’s a great thing to remember. There’s nothing we can do to keep ourselves from God and his love, except say, “I don’t need you. I’m good.”

SHAWN RYAN: What are some of the commonalities that you see when it comes to hell experiences?

JOHN BURKE: Well, let me finish telling you about Jim. So Jim then is going up, and he is going through this tunnel of. He calls it a tunnel of light. And then he comes out and he interestingly had a. I wouldn’t say this is common, but I’ve seen more common like this, where they both get a heavenly and a hellish experience.

And I find that those who cry out to God for forgiveness last minute, it’s almost like he lets them see where they were headed before rescuing them. I don’t know if that’s what’s really going on, or maybe he’s just saying, “I know you’re going back and I want you to see the reality of both.” I don’t know.

But Jim, then he sees this beauty on the right, but then it’s almost. He said there was almost like a line of delineation. And then it got more and more gray and black and then like a. Almost like a black charcoal crevasse that just dropped off into nothingness. And I don’t know why, but out of curiosity, he starts to go over there to see what it is.

And it’s like he said, “Imagine looking down into the darkest black valley you can imagine, but darker than that.” And then he saw a tiny pinpoint of light, almost like a campfire in the distance. And he hears something open up and he sees this, what he called a creature come out of it.

SHAWN RYAN: And.

JOHN BURKE: I mean, it’s in the book, but basically that creature comes for him and knows his name and he realizes that it wanted to claim him, which I know. I mean, honestly, if I were listening to this as my skeptical self, I’d be like, “Oh, this is make believe.” And when Jim told it to me, that’s what I was thinking. And if I hadn’t heard enough of them, but I have that. I think there’s a reality to it.

The Nature of Demons and Angels

SHAWN RYAN: Who do you think the demons are, these creatures?

JOHN BURKE: I think they are created by God. I think they were angels. And that is what the Bible tells us. That God created another species called the angelic species. Just like we’re a species and dogs are a species and cats are a species. There are angels, and there are even either subspecies or other species within that. There are seraphim, there are cherubim. They don’t look like humans with wings. They look otherworldly. And I’ve had near death experiencers describe them to me.

SHAWN RYAN: What do they look like?

JOHN BURKE: Creatures with eyes all over them.

SHAWN RYAN: How do they describe them?

JOHN BURKE: I mean, Ezekiel in the Bible describes the same things that I’ve heard near death experiencers describe. So there are life forms and there are creatures beyond just what we know and see and imagine.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, I’d love to hear some descriptions of what these look like.

JOHN BURKE: Well, okay, so interestingly Seraphim looks somewhat like a serpent, but with wings and not exactly like we would think. And according to the Jewish prophets like Ezekiel, who claims that they saw these creatures around God’s throne, they inhabit that place.

Now it’s fascinating because Satan, who we call Satan, which just means accuser, that’s what Satan means. So a Satan is an accuser. Lucifer is who we mean. And Lucifer means light bearer. But he was a cherubim. He was one of these creatures around God’s throne guarding the most. I mean, what near death experiencers have told me who have seen that or been there is. It is the most powerful place in the universe.

It’s also the most blended, spectacular, energized. It’s where everyone would want to be, but also it’s solid and physical but crystal clear at the same time, which I don’t know what that means, but that’s what they say. But interestingly, that’s what John describes in the book of Revelation, that’s what Ezekiel, a Jewish prophet, describes.

So, yeah, so there are species that God created beyond humanity that are not bound by time and space like we are, that exist in dimensionalities beyond ours. I believe all that. I think the Bible teaches that, I think near death experiencers confirm that.

SHAWN RYAN: And.

The Origin of Evil and Suffering

JOHN BURKE: Not all of them follow God or God’s will. So, as the biblical story goes, Lucifer rebels and decides he wants to raise himself above the most high, above God, “My will be done.” And other angels and creatures that God created followed him.

And in eternity this gets into why, I think, that age old question, why would God, if God is all loving and God is all powerful, why in the world would he allow us to suffer like we do on this earth? Right? So age old question and the one many atheists level at God like that just proves there is no God.

Which interestingly it can be turned back around. Because if there is no God, why are we bothered by suffering? It just is, it always has been. Why should it bother us? We evolved this way, but in fact the reason we unanimously are opposed to it is that there’s something in us that tells us something’s not right. But not right according to who? Right? So it actually turns, I think into an argument for God.

But I think the answer to that question is that there are creatures created by God that rebelled against God in eternity, which decisions that aren’t made in a sequence of time. When we make a decision in a sequence of time, we can change because it’s not an eternal decision. So we get to choose and we can correct our mistakes in our temporal world.

But angels who chose “My will, not God’s will.” There’s only one place where God stays out. And Jesus said he created hell for the angels, not for humans. So hell is the place where the love and the light and the life and the rulership of God, the will of God being done, does not happen. God says, “Okay” to the free will creature. “Have it your way.”

And so hell is angels becoming demons and people devolving into our worst selves, tyrannizing one another. Fight to dominate or be dominated.

Common Elements of Hell Experiences

SHAWN RYAN: What are some of the commonalities that you see on hellish experiences?

JOHN BURKE: Yes, in Imagine Heaven, in the chapter I do on hell, I kind of saw three or four. I don’t know if you call it levels, but different descriptions. So one is. And I don’t even know. I don’t know if it’s hell per se, but it’s like a void. So some experience just this void. They go into a void and it’s just kind of like a void of nothingness.

Another is what I called hell on earth. So this one, he was actually stationed at Camp Barkley in Texas before World War II. Dr. George Ritchie. In fact, he was the very first one to start talking about his near death experience, which then led to Moody, the first one who researched it, which is the book I read decades ago.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

JOHN BURKE: But he heard George Ritchie lecture at the University of Virginia. Moody, did. And then started asking his students in his philosophy class if they had ever had any encounter with death. And he hears more and more of those stories and wrote them down. And that’s what I read the first time.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

Hell on Earth and Spiritual Bondage

JOHN BURKE: But George Ritchie has this experience where he dies of intense double pneumonia. Before he was being deployed, he was going to medical school, but through the army. And he leaves his body, same kind of thing. And he’s confused because he doesn’t understand where he is because he still feels alive. And he’s trying to find – he’s supposed to be on the train to get to medical school.

And so he starts looking, he starts traveling and going, and he’s – again, I don’t understand how you kind of go like, what do you mean? You don’t know you’re dead, you’re flying across the earth? I don’t know. But this is what he said. He realizes he’s traveling and he’s going across and it’s our Earth and he’s trying to get to medical school, and he ends up coming to this place. And I think it was right across the Mississippi River. So again, he was in Camp Berkeley in Texas. He ends up at this bar across this river in the city he’d never been to.

SHAWN RYAN: And.

JOHN BURKE: He sees someone standing outside this bar with Pabst Blue Ribbon sign. And he stops there, and he’s trying to get his attention because he’s trying to figure out, where am I and how do I get to med school? And he keeps trying to tap the guy on the shoulder, and there’s nothing. Like, he goes right through him. And so he starts to realize, what am I? Where am I? Am I dead?

And long story short, he makes his way back. This is actually in Imagine Heaven. But he makes his way back to his room and sees his body and then realizes I am dead. And at that moment, this light comes into the room, same as usual, brighter than the sun. But he sees it’s not a light. It’s a man made of light. And he had the thought instantly, “I’m standing before the Son of God.”

And again, he gets a life review. And he knows this is Jesus. And Jesus takes him and shows him first these people on Earth who are – and this is why I called it hell on Earth, is that they are bound to the things they worshiped or idolized on Earth. So one guy he sees is in a bar desperately trying to steal a drink from somebody. So he’s still enslaved, but he’s incorporeal, so he can’t fulfill the need.

And he sees that. He sees a woman following her son, just nagging him, just nagging him still. And so he gets this understanding, like, you know, that when God is not God, you know, what Jesus said is, “Love God first. Love your neighbor as yourself.” That sums up the whole Bible, he said, right. But when we put other things as God, you know, what he was kind of seeing is that that’s a form of hell. We continue on from this life and still trying to get it or that person or that thing to fulfill what only God can fulfill.

And so he sees that that’s another kind of level of hell that I talk about. Another one is this outer darkness, which I already described, that Howard Storm, the tenured professor, went through. Interestingly, others have described the same thing.

The Anesthesiologist’s Experience

Dr. Rajiv Parti was chief anesthesiologist at the Bakersfield Heart Hospital. He didn’t – you know, he was an anesthesiologist. So he had brought many people back claiming to have near death experiences and all the things we’ve talked about. And he’d give them a shot of antipsychotic drug and go check the stock market because he thought they’re delusional. He didn’t believe it. And then he had one.

SHAWN RYAN: He had one.

JOHN BURKE: He had one and he had – yeah, he ends up in the LA hospital. Ruptured, septic, the whole thing. He codes. He finds himself initially in a hellish place and very similar to Howard. And he described – I mean, this is an anesthesiologist who’s Hindu, who grew up in India. He’s got a lot to lose. And he’s describing hell as this place of both darkness and fire and these evil creatures that are running around torturing him and others.

SHAWN RYAN: How descriptive did he get with the torturing?

JOHN BURKE: Descriptive?

SHAWN RYAN: What, like what?

JOHN BURKE: You know, and I don’t even like to describe it because it just doesn’t sound real, you know, but like stuff we would do to torture each other, you know, like bed of nails kind of stuff and cutting open, but in ways to prolong the pain and the agony.

So here’s the other weird thing, Sean, that I don’t know, that I fully understand, is that it seems like on the other side, we do still have a body. We still are ourselves. We can still feel stuff. And in fact, we feel it exponentially more. The good and the bad and a lot of the evil things we see on earth. It’s just when evil can use us to get its will done to each other. But there’s God’s spirit constraining and there’s law, which is from God as well, constraining evil here.

What happens when you take that away and evil’s not constrained and it just devolves? So, yeah, I mean, they describe stuff like that. And that is why I believe God allows the suffering we’re going through now. We say, “How could God allow so much suffering?” What if instead it’s God’s merciful warning for a short period of time, truncated immensely.

In other words, we’ve been squeezed down in our experience of good so that we can only experience a small amount of hell. Evil things can get. So this life is a taste of heaven and a taste of hell, very reduced. So that we choose, so that we see that God’s will is good and he did what he did through Jesus to forgive us all. So the only thing that can keep us separated from God is ourselves.

You know, CS Lewis, who’s – he was an Oxford scholar, he’s one of my favorite authors, once said “the gates of hell are locked from the inside.” I think he’s right. I think after interviewing so many near death experiencers, and some have even said it, it’s like it’s not God’s will that anyone would go to hell, but if they don’t want God, like if you’re a Hitler, you know, or Stalin or, you know, Taliban or whatever, and you want to be God, you want to determine who lives, who dies, who does my will, what’s God supposed to do?

Take someone into heaven and make them obey against their will? Well, that would be hell for them, right? And so, in fact, I think God allows the suffering, but in the midst of the good. And he’s always with us through it. And he’s also always trying to get us to just turn to him so that he can lead and guide us not only through it, but out of it, and to undo evil with good.

Commonalities in Hellish Experiences

SHAWN RYAN: What about commonalities between the people that have hellish experiences? Have you noticed anything in common with the folks that have those type of experiences versus having a more blissful.

JOHN BURKE: Well, yeah. I mean, here’s one of the – both hopeful and also interesting is that most of the hellish experiences I’ve talked to have at some point they cried out to God for forgiveness and he rescued them.

So this Rajiv Parti, like I said, Hindu anesthesiologist, he does from that. He cries out to God and he said he used the word repenting. “I was realizing my wrongs.” He’d been verbally abusive toward his son. He had become addicted to painkillers. He was just all about materialism. He also got a life review and saw how he treated his patients poorly. They were just an object to make more money.

He sees all this and then he said, these two angels take him through this tunnel, out of this hellish experience to this place of exquisite beauty, you know, mountains and rivers and forests and all this, and into the presence of this God of light, who knows him, who is love.

And later he encounters the same God of light and says to him, just like Paul in the Damascus Road, “Who are you, Lord?” Because he realizes this is not one of the gods I learned of in Hinduism. He’s merciful, he’s loving, he’s compassionate. I thought he was going to send me back to hell. I deserved it. But he didn’t. And he sends me back and he says, “You still have a purpose and I want you to learn and I want you to love.”

And so he sees this God of light again and he says, “Who are you, Lord?” And he says out of the light steps a man in a robe with a beard, gold sash, and says to him, “I’m Jesus, your savior.”

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. Wow.

JOHN BURKE: So you got a Rwandan imam, you got an anesthesiologist who is Hindu. Another I have a manufacturing engineer I haven’t told you about fully who grew up in India as well, describes the holy city of God.

SHAWN RYAN: The cartel couple.

JOHN BURKE: Cartel couple. And here’s the point. God is good even to those who don’t deserve it. And none of us deserve it.

Levels of Hell and Heaven

SHAWN RYAN: Do you think there are different levels of hell?

JOHN BURKE: I do, because Dave told me those that – those that near death experiencers who had a taste said some like Howard said, they even told him that, like “this is nothing. Wait till you see where we’re going to take you.”

SHAWN RYAN: How many levels?

JOHN BURKE: I don’t know. Let me say different places, different, you know, what I would say is the world to come is vast, you know.

SHAWN RYAN: So.

JOHN BURKE: There are vast amounts of good places in the world to come.

SHAWN RYAN: Are there levels to heaven?

JOHN BURKE: Yeah, which will throw some people. But in this sense, like.

SHAWN RYAN: So.

JOHN BURKE: The center of the holy city of God is the throne of God now. And I talk about this in Imagine the God of Heaven, that even talking about the throne of God and God the Father on his throne in this spectacular thing, God is more than that. So God incarnated in the person of Jesus as a representation of God in human form.

I personally believe that there in the heavenly city, where when we’re not bound by our three dimensions, but we’re our spiritual bodily selves in a new realm that God the Father manifests in a way that the residents of heaven can see God. But the Bible tells us that God is spirit and that he is both everywhere simultaneously and beyond everything he’s created. So he’s in everything and sustaining everything. There’s nowhere he’s not at any point in time. But he’s not just the sum of all of his creation. He transcends. He’s beyond all this creation.

And what’s wild is hearing near death experiencers who had no theological understanding, no biblical understanding, and they’re describing the same thing.

End Times and God’s Testimony

SHAWN RYAN: A lot of people are talking as if we’re now in end times. I’m just curious if you see any symbology or if you think that we’re approaching end times.

JOHN BURKE: You know, I don’t typically go there. And the reason I don’t is because Jesus said no one knows the day or the time. So I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what I do know. That I find fascinating.

One thing is, as evil seems to be increasing, I believe God is giving increasing testimony of his reality and goodness. And I think these near death experiences all over the world are that I think he is saying in this day of global Internet connectedness, “Look, I’m the God of all people. I love all people equally. It doesn’t matter where they live or their background or what they’ve been through. And what he did through Jesus, he did for all people for all time.” So I think he’s doing that now.

Having said that, there’s something that happened in 1948 that was a precursor to the end, whatever the end, whenever the end is. And it also was one of the things that most convinced me that God is real back 30 plus years ago when I was still trying to really think all this through and understand is there evidence for it?

SHAWN RYAN: So.

The Prophecy of Israel’s Restoration

JOHN BURKE: In the book of Isaiah, Isaiah wrote, like I said, in 780 BC, 780 years before Jesus. In Isaiah 11, God says to him, “In the last days, I will put a sign before all the nations.” Again, he’s speaking to all the nations. People don’t realize that about the Bible. He’s always thinking about everyone.

And he says, “I will regather the scattered people of Judah, the Jewish people from the four quarters of the earth,” so north, south, east and west, “and re-establish them in their land again and they will never be displaced again.” So he says that in Isaiah chapter 11. And the second time he was going to regather them.

The first time was in 586 BC when they were scattered to the Babylonian. They were conquered by the Babylonians, they were displaced from their land. Then they came back, they rebuilt the temple, they rebuilt Jerusalem, all that. In 30 AD Jesus is crucified. And the week before that he comes in on the donkey and he is looking out over Jerusalem and it says he weeps over the city.

And he says, “If you had only known on this day what would bring you peace, but now your enemies are going to come on you and scatter you to the nations because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you.” So he says that. So Jesus is crucified in 30 AD. This is all history. Like historians would not doubt this.

70 AD, 40 years later. Okay, so 40 years was the time of the Israelites wandering in the desert when they rebelled against God. I believe from crucifying Jesus, you know, 40 years. I think God was giving them time to see their mistake. But 70 AD, Roman General Titus marches on Jerusalem, levels the city, levels the Temple. Temple still hasn’t been rebuilt to this day. But the Jewish people were scattered. And Jesus had said that was going to happen. Isaiah, the Prophet, 700 years had said, “That’s going to happen as a sign to all the nations.”

From 70 AD to 1948, 1900 years, the Jewish people didn’t have a land, they didn’t have a king or a president. They didn’t have a common language. I mean, when has there ever been a people scattered for 1900 years with none of that, that remained a people? How could they?

And yet in Isaiah, chapter 66, again written before Jesus, God says through Isaiah, “Can a nation be born overnight?” Of course the answer is no. It’s never happened. He said, “Yet no sooner is Zion,” and Zion is the mountain on which Jerusalem is established, “in labor, than she gives birth to her children.” And he says, “I will bring Jerusalem back and celebrate with Jerusalem.”

In 1948, okay, after the Holocaust. I mean, imagine the birth pangs of this birth that’s to come. Evil’s trying to wipe out the Jewish people. And I believe, because this is a major sign to all the nations, you know, it’s God’s sign that he cares for all nations. That’s what he said it was. Jewish people from Russian Jews, German Jews, Ethiopian Jews, Australian Jews, American Jews from all over come back and start to resettle Israel. And in 1948, the UN declared Israel a nation overnight. I have the article in the New York Times.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

JOHN BURKE: But God said it, you know, 2,700 years ago, Jesus said it, and then it happened. And he said it would be a sign to all the nations. So that had to happen before the end.

Jesus then also said in Matthew, chapter 24, he was talking about all the things that are going to happen in the end times. And he said something that was interesting. He said, “When you see the fig tree start to blossom, you know, it’s spring. Even so, you know, summer is near. In the same way, when these things start to happen, this generation will not pass away until all of it is accomplished.”

Okay? So I always thought, well, wait a second, that’s not true. Like the generation he was talking to there did pass away, and it wasn’t all accomplished. But maybe what he meant is the fig tree. The fig tree was always a symbol of Israel. And so when the fig tree starts to blossom, you know, summer’s near. When the leaves come out again, when it’s brought back to life.

So does that mean when Israel was brought back to life in 1948, one generation, and then the question is, what’s a generation? Is a generation 70 years? Or is it everyone who was alive in 1948 and might be 100 years old? So it might be 1958? I don’t know and I don’t speculate.

You know what I say to people who are all worried and fearful that it’s going to be the end? I say, “You’re right. It’s going to happen in your lifetime. It’s going to end in your lifetime because we’re all going to die.” So I don’t know how, you know, but we don’t need to worry about that. It’s like live for what matters and there’s nothing to fear.

Conversion After Hellish Experiences

SHAWN RYAN: When these folks that have the hellish NDE experience, do you, all of them do, the majority of them, do they convert?

JOHN BURKE: I mean, a lot do. Not all do. I don’t know, actually. Do I know anyone who’s had a hellish experience? I think if they don’t, they don’t talk about it. They bury it and run from it. Because I can’t think of anyone who hasn’t. But maybe it’s, maybe they just don’t talk about it. I don’t know.

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting. I would think they would. They would. But it sounds like everybody that you brought up had.

JOHN BURKE: Yeah, I mean, kind of converted. Well, and convert, I guess. What do you mean by that?

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, are they a believer now?

JOHN BURKE: Yeah, you know, I mean, all the people I’ve just about all the people I’ve talked about are followers of Jesus. So they came back seeking and, you know, they discovered.

The Hindu Man’s Vision of the City of God

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s talk. We have a couple of random topics to bring up that you thought would be a good idea. So I’m just going to bring them up. Let’s talk about the Hindu man that describes the city of God.

JOHN BURKE: Well, and this is in the category of why I wrote “Imagine the God of Heaven.” Like I said before, I really believe that God is raising up these testimonies all over the globe, that he is the God of all nations, you know, from Genesis 12, like we talked about, where he said he’s going to raise up Abraham and Sarah to bless all nations.

Jesus comes, he says he took the bullet, you know, because we are all meant to be his children. And so like a good parent, he went in front of the line of fire what is required for justice, and he took the bullet for us so we don’t have to. And then he said, “Tell all the nations there’s forgiveness offered in my name.” So again, all the nations.

Revelation, chapter 7. John is seeing heaven. And he said, “There, around the throne of God are people from every nation and tribe and language and people group.” So God’s going to do it like somehow, some way. And I think that’s part of what these near death experiences in our age of global communication.

When I couldn’t have written this book five years ago because I interviewed this Rwandan imam and Australian and guy in Singapore and all these people all over the world that I could interview by Zoom and their story can be heard, but that couldn’t have happened even five years ago. And so that’s what I think he’s doing.

So Santosh became a good friend of mine. Dear man. He grew up in India and Hindu background. His father was a Sanskrit scholar, so he knew the Hindu scriptures really well. He has his gallbladder erupted into his pancreas and caused his blood pressure to shoot up over 200. Or his heartbeat was like 200 beats per minute. And they couldn’t get it down, they couldn’t operate. And he coded and he hears “Code blue, code blue.”

And then he’s above his body and this brilliant God of light he knew was a divine light. He said, and he said to me in the interview, he said, “You know, I always thought when you die, it’s either nothing or maybe I would come back as another life form.” He said, “But that didn’t happen. Instead, this divine light comes to him and he said, I fell in love with this light because I knew it was good and there to protect me and cared about me.”

And he follows and he travels through again these tunnels that he said they went through. And he comes to this place and he’s parked up on a platform overlooking what he described it to me as a giant compound. I’ve been to India many times. We helped build a hospital in India. And India, if you’ve ever been, have you ever been, you know, they’re compounds, they’re high walled, gated communities everywhere, at least where I’ve been. And he described it that way.

But he said on the other side, your eyesight is like telescopic. So I could see like thousands of miles each side. And it was square shaped and thousands of miles and inside, just lush, gorgeous, just spectacular beauty and grounds of nature, but also these buildings of otherworldly building material. And he’s a manufacturing engineer, so that’s what he would notice, otherworldly building material, these spectacular beautiful buildings.

And he saw people. He saw and he said, “I long to go in there.” He said, “I realized this is the place we all would love to be.” That’s what he said. And he saw 12 gates. He said, “I counted them. I could see them all, 12 gates all the way around.” And he said, “They were closed to me.” And he looks at the nearest to try to find a way in. And he sees angels outside the gates. And he said, “Then I realized I’m looking at the kingdom of heaven.”

All right. Now, what he described is to the T what John describes in Revelation chapter 21 when he says he was taken in his spirit up to a very high mountain that others have described as these mountains, taller than the Himalayas, overlooking the city. And interestingly, John says he describes the city and somehow he reads the names on the foundation stones. How? Unless he’s saying he too had telescopic vision. And this is in the Bible. Right.

John describes a walled, gated city, square shaped, and 12 gates and angels outside the gates, exactly as Santosh described. Santosh had never read the Bible. All he knew was Hinduism.

And then interestingly, he’s like, “Where am I?” And he’s looking around. He realizes he’s up on a high platform, very high, and there’s no railing. And he looks down to his left and he says it was hell. He said he was looking into what I think was a vision of hell. I don’t think hell is right outside the city of God. And again, I think that’s where time and distance and space, they work differently. But God showed him that.

And he said it was an abyss. He said it was a dark, hopeless abyss that he said had a lake of fire at the bottom, which even as a pastor, I thought that was metaphor because I was like, you can’t have utter darkness and a lake of fire. The fire lights up the darkness. I don’t get it.

SHAWN RYAN: Not there, huh?

JOHN BURKE: I don’t get it. But they said it. And this is a Hindu guy.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOHN BURKE: You know, this is not someone trying to prove the Bible. So I, you know, there’s a lot of this that changed me to kind of go, well, maybe it’s not all metaphor like I thought, you know, or as much metaphor as I thought.

So then Santosh is like, he doesn’t want to go there. He wants to go in the city, and he’s looking for another way in. And he turns and looks, and there he said he sees a throne. And who, he said he knew this was the Almighty, so this is God. And he knew the brilliant light was God. But in this case, he was in the form of a man, but giant which again, I would have said, like, what? But I heard so many say this, so I don’t know what they do.

SHAWN RYAN: This is all, all of these. Wow. All the descriptions are very similar.

JOHN BURKE: Very similar. They overlap. The ones I’m all the ones I’m telling you have others who say the same things. Otherwise I kind of just put them on a shelf until I hear multiple ones reporting the same things. I kind of put it on a shelf and like, yeah, maybe.

SHAWN RYAN: Do you have this all mapped out somewhere?

JOHN BURKE: Oh, I wrote two books.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, yeah, I mean, I mean, but 1500.

JOHN BURKE: Oh, yeah. I have interviews. I have so many documents. Just, you know, word documents of interviews and zoom. Interviews recorded and, you know, audio interviews recorded.

SHAWN RYAN: How were you able to map them all into.

The Divine Mission and Engineering Mind

JOHN BURKE: Commonalities? Yeah, took 35 years. I’m not kidding. It’s like, I didn’t just set out to do this. I’m just obsessively curious and I don’t know why. I now know why. I think this is God’s mission for me.

There were a lot of things along the way that I’d ask, like, why did I do that? Why did I become an engineer if you wanted me to start a church for skeptics? But all of it had a reason. Now I see that my engineer brain trained me. When things don’t make sense, just hold on to them, keep at it until the puzzle pieces start to fit. And that’s what he’s used in this research too.

Santosh’s Encounter with the Almighty

So real quick with Santosh, what was amazing is in the presence of the Almighty, and he told me later he believes this was the glorified Jesus on his throne. Because what he described is what John described in Revelation, chapter one. It’s what Daniel described in Daniel, chapter seven. This man of light feet, glowing bronze and face like the sun, eyes like lightning. He doesn’t always appear like that. He doesn’t. But he did to Santosh, he did to Bibi in Tehran.

SHAWN RYAN: So.

JOHN BURKE: Appears differently at times to different people. But Santosh thinks he’s going to cast him into hell because he has a life review and he sees all his sins and he knows that’s what I deserve. And when God speaks to him, he said, “I felt such tenderness and mercy and compassion and love. He said, ‘Santosh, I’m sending you back to Earth. And when you go back, you must love your family and especially your daughter. She needs your help right now.'” Which is fascinating.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

JOHN BURKE: I mean, this is supposedly the Christian God. Here’s a Hindu man, but he knows intimately what his daughter is going through and how his daughter needs her father. Isn’t that amazing?

The Narrow Gate and Divine Instruction

He comes back and, well, first of all, when he feels this compassion and tenderness and forgiveness from the Lord, he gets bold and he sees right next to the throne. He said he called it this very narrow gate or door that was open to him. It was the only one that was open into what he called the kingdom of heaven.

And he said, “Lord, when I come back, how do I go through that door? I want to go through that door into your kingdom. How do I do it?” Which is interesting because God does not often give instruction or direction. And again, I think it’s because he wants to know, will we seek him? And he says, “If you seek me with all your heart, you’ll find me.”

But he did say this to Santosh because Santosh was thinking, what church do I go to? What mosque, what temple? I’ll go anywhere. And he was thinking, religion, like once a week religion. That’s what he was thinking in his mind. And the Lord said, “No, I want relationship. I want to know how honest, how sincere will you be with me? Not one day a week, 365 days a year, how sincere and honest will you be with me?”

And then he said to him, “The wages of sin is death,” which is a Bible verse. The next part of it is, “But the free gift of God is forgiveness through Jesus.” But he didn’t tell him that part, which is interesting. He waited for him to come back and seek. And then he said to him, “Surrender yourself to me daily and walk with me.”

The Search for Truth

Santosh told me I was actually confused when I came back, because I was like, I know the gods of the Hindu scriptures and this God of light and love, this mighty almighty giant. He said he was compassionate and tender and he knew all my wrongs. I knew what I deserved, and yet he forgave me. He was compassionate. Who was this?

And he’s seeking him. He’s praying every day. “I want to know you. I want to know you.” Two years later, his daughter is invited to sing. She was a choral major in college. She’s invited to sing in a choir at a church with her friend. Santosh goes to hear her. And when he walked in, he felt the same loving presence of that God of light.

And the message that day is on the narrow gate. And how Jesus is the gate through which you enter into the kingdom of Heaven. And he told me, “I was like, this is just for me.” And he goes home and he starts reading the Bible. And he said, “Everything I experienced was in this book.” And he became a very devoted follower of Jesus.

A Life Transformed

Now, Santosh passed away last month. And yeah, it’s been pretty cool, because what he wanted more than anything, he loved his family so much, and he knew that’s what God wanted him to do, was to love his family. And so I’ve been able to be a little bit in contact with him. And it’s really cool to see them even opening up to what he was saying.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I’ll bet. I’ll bet that.

JOHN BURKE: Because again, people get caught up in like, “Well, you’re saying your religion is the right religion.” No, no. Muslims don’t perfectly keep the five pillars of Islam. Buddhists don’t perfectly keep the Eightfold path of Buddhism. Christians and Jews don’t perfectly keep the Ten Commandments. Atheists don’t perfectly keep their own moral code. They, too, hurt people and do things that they later regret and have to apologize for.

None of us are perfect. And what God wants people to know is that he is a God who is willing to forgive all so that we’ll walk with him, just like he told Santosh.

The Purpose Behind “Imagine the God of Heaven”

SHAWN RYAN: Man, I was going to go further, but that seems like the perfect way to end this. But so, John, if there’s nothing else that you’d like to discuss, I say we cut it right there.

JOHN BURKE: Sounds good.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, man, I just want to say thank you for coming on and sharing your experiences and with interviewing these people and your take on a multitude of different subjects that I threw at you. I’m sure some of them were surprised, but actually, there is one last question. That is, why did you write “Imagine the God of Heaven”? What was the goal behind that one?

JOHN BURKE: Sean, it was because I want people to see how God gets you. And he’s crazy about you. Like, crazy about you. Which sounds weird, but what I’ve realized is that each one of us is unique to Him.

People will say to me, “There are billions of people. How could he care about me?” I have that same thought when I go through airports. I look at all these people, and they’re like, it’s just a crowd to me. Right? And yet what near-death experiencers have told me is that when they were with him consistently, they say, “I felt like I was the only one he loved.”

One, Jim Woodford said, “I thought about others, and then I realized, oh, he loves them like they’re the only ones.” And that’s because, and another one, Dean Braxton, told me that what he realized experiencing that, is that God has a unique love that’s only for you because no one else he created is like you.

Evidence and Faith

And I want skeptics to know, like, when I was a skeptic, there’s a ton of evidence this is not blind faith. There’s a ton of evidence that this is real and this is true so that they will put their trust in God. Faith. Why does God care about faith? Because faith is just trust. And you can’t have a relationship without trust. And relationship is what God wants.

And so then, for others to see how the heart and the character of God is good and accessible, that even though it’s mysterious. And I’ll admit, how do you hear the voice of God? How do you walk with a God you can’t see and can’t hear? And I go into that because just like communication on the other side is thought to thought. That’s how God speaks to us, to our thoughts. And you have to start to learn to discern.

And as you act on those, you look back and you see, in an amazing way, like, “Oh, my gosh, okay, he is with me.” And when I’m willing to listen and do what I think he’s saying, he shows me.

Universal Love and Justice

And so I wrote it for that reason because I want people to see that God is the God of all nations. He doesn’t like one group of people more than another. One’s not more special than the other. There’s nothing you have done or ever could do that could change God’s love for you.

And he proved that by taking the bullet so that he could be just. And he is just. Wrongs have to be paid for, wrongs have to be righted to set things right. But he was willing to pay that price for us so that we can walk with him and become the people he created us to be.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, thank you for doing it.

JOHN BURKE: Thanks for having me on.

SHAWN RYAN: It’s my pleasure. And once again, John, it’s a real honor to have you here.

JOHN BURKE: So it’s an honor to be here. Thank you.

SHAWN RYAN: I hope to meet you again.

JOHN BURKE: Same, God bless.

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