Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World is a podcast that looks at mysteries, all different kinds of mysteries, paranormal, supernatural, historical, true crime, UFOs, and everything in between. In this episode, we talk to Jimmy about his new show, "Nephilim Death Squad", and how he came up with the name of the show.
00:03:33.340I'm a Christian apologist, and so I do that for my day job.
00:03:37.220But on the side, I also do a lot of podcasts.
00:03:40.300And my most famous podcast is called Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World.
00:03:44.020It's a podcast that looks at mysteries, all different kinds of mysteries, paranormal, supernatural, scientific, historical, true crime, Bigfoot, UFOs, everything.
00:03:57.600And unlike a lot of shows that are focused on mysteries, we don't just try to generate wonder and imagine what if.
00:04:05.660And so we look at every mystery, we give the background, and then we look at it from the twin perspectives of faith and reason and say, what would reason tell us about this?
00:04:14.140And what would the Christian faith tell us about this?
00:04:16.900And it's a top 20 podcast among documentary podcasts on Apple Podcasts, and we've got more than 200,000 listeners a week.
00:04:39.820But the idea, we're making it up as we go.
00:04:43.800We didn't really know what it was going to be, if it was going to be supernatural.
00:04:46.500And it just kind of delved down into this idea of looking at current day going-ons through a Christian biblical lens.
00:04:56.200Because as we progress, it's the only way that any of this makes sense.
00:05:00.860Otherwise, we're just kind of flailing wildly in the dark, right?
00:05:04.160Where there might be aliens or there might be, you know, something's happening in politics, but we can't explain it.
00:05:09.600Something's happening culturally, we're not sure.
00:05:11.220And then you start reading the Bible and getting some great guests that come on and can really decipher and explain a lot of these things to you.
00:05:19.500And it's like, wow, picking up this prism has made my life a lot easier in many different facets.
00:05:28.340So you're like, you're right at home on this show.
00:05:35.640I know I've covered a lot of similar topics.
00:05:37.820I mean, I've talked about the Nephilim.
00:05:39.700In fact, I just had the most recent episode of Mysterious World is on the Book of Jubilees, which talks about the Nephilim.
00:05:47.220I've got a two-parter coming out on the Book of First Enoch, which also talks about the Nephilim.
00:05:53.520I saw you guys had an exploration of the Book of Revelation.
00:05:57.040I've done a lot of exploration of the Book of Revelation.
00:06:00.620And also lately, I've done a lot of research on death-related phenomena.
00:06:06.520So this is not just near-death experiences, but also things that occur before and after near-death experiences.
00:06:14.240So that includes what are known as deathbed visions, you know, which a person has before they die.
00:06:20.200And then the near-death experiences that happen when someone is either clinically dead or near-clinically dead.
00:06:27.440And then after-death, there are what are known as after-death communications, which are just spontaneous, where people will report their loved ones coming back and giving them a message.
00:06:39.220And these phenomena are much more common than people realize.
00:06:44.020For example, with spontaneous after-death communications, or ADCs, between 40 and 50 percent of the population reports having an after-death communication at least once in their life.
00:06:56.580So these are not talked about a lot because of basically because of the prejudice against them in our society.
00:07:03.120In fact, near-death experiences weren't talked about really prior to the mid-1970s when Raymond Moody's book Life After Life came out.
00:07:11.080But all three of these different types of experiences really do point to an afterlife, and they mutually reinforce each other.
00:07:21.100They have elements in common, and so I think it's good to look, you know, broadly at death-related phenomena and see what we can learn from them.
00:07:29.960In the heat of battle, your squad relies on you.
00:09:07.160And it was a medical accident that caused this event.
00:09:12.040But before he passed away, I had this dream that he and I were in a supermarket together.
00:09:18.680And he was, I always say he looked like Gandalf the White.
00:09:22.240If you're familiar with Lord of the Rings, there's Gandalf the Gray, and then there's Gandalf the White when Gandalf is resurrected, which those films.
00:09:28.960People sometimes call me Gandalf the Red.
00:09:53.420His hair was uncharacteristically white.
00:09:55.680His beard was uncharacteristically white.
00:09:58.060Not that he had aged, but he just looked like almost grandiose.
00:10:01.500And then shortly afterwards, he ends up passing away in real life.
00:10:06.760And I always kind of held on to that connection.
00:10:09.100So to me, it seems like this phenomenon of death that awaits us all, you know, obviously, it's so integral to the human experience.
00:10:18.980And it's religious in nature because the existence of human beings is biblical in nature.
00:10:25.060But it permeates the people surrounding the person who passes away, too, in such a way that, you know, it's like if your life is filled with signs and symbols, which oftentimes when we hear these near-death experiences, I only have a peripheral knowledge.
00:10:40.740Some of the stories that I've read myself, testimonies and such, they're heavily symbolic, almost like, I don't want to say coded messages, but you get a lot of different things coming back from people who have had near-death experiences.
00:10:59.000Somehow this place felt more real than the place that we inhabit now.
00:11:02.360Now, did you – have you collected these through testimony, people that you've communicated with, or are these things that you've read and come across yourself?
00:11:11.660Well, these are ones that I have done a lot of reading on.
00:11:18.620Now, I – in addition to my work as a Christian apologist, I also study parapsychology, and in fact, I teach parapsychology at the Ryan Education Center.
00:11:27.480Like this – later this month, I'm starting a course on Christianity and parapsychology and how the two relate to each other.
00:11:36.140But there's an extensive literature in parapsychology about death-related experiences.
00:11:46.140It's – survival of bodily death is one of the two main subject areas that parapsychology studies.
00:11:54.080So parapsychology is the study of psychic functioning from a scientific perspective and the study of survival of bodily death from a scientific perspective.
00:12:04.100And so there's been a lot of work done on these.
00:12:08.300And there – and, of course, the basis of these – of these experiences is, of course, experiences, you know, things that have happened to people, things that people report.
00:12:18.180And so there are varieties of different collections that have been made of hundreds of near-death experiences and hundreds of deathbed visions and hundreds of after-death communications.
00:12:31.880They're done in different countries here, like on the subject of after-death communications.
00:12:39.000I read one collection that was primarily American, but I read another that was Icelandic, you know.
00:12:44.660So in the study of deathbed visions, I've got one collection or one book that's considered a classic in the field that is a study of reports from over 800 doctors and nurses.
00:12:58.500But they're divided between the United States and India because they wanted to compare cross-culturally and see how do these things change cross-culturally.
00:13:10.580Do they report different things in America than they do in India or are they substantially the same?
00:13:15.720And it turns out they're substantially the same.
00:13:17.480So I have, you know, talked to people who have had such experiences.
00:13:23.980In fact, I have family members who have had both deathbed visions and near-death experiences and after-death communications.
00:13:34.200So I have talked to people who've had them, and I even think I may have had an after-death communication myself, which I'm happy to tell you about if you want.
00:13:43.740But primarily what I'm drawn on today is case study collections and surveys and looking at the phenomena in aggregate, you know, so not just one person.
00:13:57.020In fact, there's even reason to be suspicious.
00:13:59.700If you see, like, a book that someone says, I had a near-death experience and here's my book about it.
00:14:07.100Well, most people don't have enough of an experience to get a whole book out of.
00:14:13.060So that's an atypical experience at the minimum.
00:14:17.420And atypical experiences, often you've got to treat them a little more skeptically.
00:14:22.040And especially if someone's making money off it with a book, there's reason to be suspicious about that.
00:14:28.520You might start grasping when you can't fill the whole book, well, what do you do?
00:14:32.380Maybe you start filling in details that weren't necessarily true.
00:14:35.280I do want to just draw attention to the fact that this stream will end to the general public probably around the 15 to 20-minute mark, and it will stream exclusively to our Patreon members at patreon.com backslash Nephilim Death Squad.
00:14:48.080The entire episode will drop in its totality this next week, next week on Thursday.
00:14:55.280On Thursday, so the following Thursday, it will air for free on our channels.
00:14:59.320But if you want to gain early access to it, then patreon.com backslash Nephilim Death Squad is for you.
00:15:08.100So one of the things that I know makes me skeptical about, it's not whether or not this stuff is happening.
00:15:14.160I know that there are these post-Deaf experiences and near-Deaf experiences, but how much of these are actually the person that is visiting their loved one after, and how much of this is like a glamour or a magic sort of thing?
00:15:31.580Because I know you can test the spirits.
00:15:34.320This is something that I would be concerned about.
00:15:36.740Okay, so, oh, and before I answer that, let me also just mention, Raven, your experience that you mentioned with your uncle who looked like Gandalf the White, that would be, assuming that was, you know, not just a random dream, because we all have random dreams, but assuming it was something more than that, that would be a premonition, a warning ahead of time of something that was later going to happen, if your interpretation of it is correct.
00:16:03.500So that would be a precognitive experience that pointed forward to your uncle's death.
00:16:09.840It was interesting, just to note, in the dream, he was walking away from me.
00:16:13.920I couldn't get his attention, no matter how much I tried.
00:16:17.820It seemed that the aisles of the supermarket had narrowed in such a way that I couldn't maneuver around him, and despite my attempts to get his attention, he just kept walking away.
00:16:28.360So that's kind of the way that I interpret it.
00:16:30.740And that can be a sign of the inevitability of death.
00:16:33.840You know, we're not going to be able to stop it.
00:16:48.000So if I understand your question correctly, you're asking about what in parapsychology is known as the veridicality or truthfulness of these experiences.
00:17:01.640And there are different ways of judging that.
00:17:04.980Now, in a lot of cases, whether it's a deathbed vision or near-death experience or an after-death communication, we don't really have more than the experience report.
00:17:18.620You know, and so that's all we've got to go with.
00:17:23.040And you could say, well, this is a person's imagination or they're making it up or they're mentally ill or it was the product of a dying brain or any number of things.
00:17:31.940Well, to interject, top, is it really that you are alluding to whether or not this is, not that the near-death experience itself is a deception, but can you be deceived?
00:17:44.300Are people be, is that where you're going with this, top?
00:17:46.360Yeah, it's not, it's not a, I'm not asking about a mental illness because that will play a part.
00:17:51.660But we're kind of on this, have you ever heard of Dr. Jerry Marzinski?
00:18:23.420And it just, it raises concern for me whenever you have like a dead relative visit you and from, uh, after they've died, it's like, uh, is this, uh, is this a genuine spirit?
00:18:35.940Are they, are they just walking around?
00:19:37.640And then if something paranormal is happening, then you can, then, so it's like, is it a spirit or is it not a spirit?
00:19:45.860If it's a spirit, you can then apply the test of the spirits principles.
00:19:49.860So I would kind of split the question in two.
00:19:52.520First, um, is there anything paranormal here?
00:19:55.780Do we have evidence for an afterlife or do we have evidence for a spirit?
00:19:59.240And then second, do we have evidence for deception taking place?
00:20:03.840And so like with your, um, with your guest, Dr. Marzinski, um, I, I, I am not at all opposed to the idea that certain types of schizophrenics are actually experiencing something paranormal and it could be contact with a malicious deceptive spirit.
00:20:23.140In some cases, there are other cases where, that I, I know about anecdotally where, when, you know, you go into a mental institution and when you actually talk to the, uh, to the patients there, they seem to be picking up on things like the thoughts of the doctors and the nurses and things like that.
00:20:45.920And, um, and so there, some, some, some mental conditions may involve a kind of psychic openness to, and that, and that openness, if you're picking up on the thoughts of doctors and nurses, you could also be picking up on the thoughts of evil spirits that are trying to mess with you.
00:21:03.620So I'd say we have to be careful in those areas and we, we want to consider all the possibilities, not just the paranormal ones.
00:21:11.940In fact, I'm a paranormal investigator and the first rule of doing a paranormal investigation is you make a list of everything that could possibly explain the experiences that are being reported.
00:21:23.040And then you look at the natural explanations first, because natural phenomena are more common than paranormal phenomena.
00:21:34.240And so you always want to look at, could this have a natural cause first?
00:21:39.000But in some cases you get evidence that something beyond just the natural is going on.
00:21:44.620So for example, um, if someone's reporting a death related experience, whether it's before, during, or after, they tend to fit certain, they tend to have certain characteristics.
00:21:57.360Like for example, in near death experiences, seeing the, floating above your body and seeing yourself, that's called autoscopy, seeing yourself.
00:22:06.460Um, that's a common characteristic of near death experiences.
00:22:10.640So is, uh, perceiving a very bright light that yet doesn't seem to hurt your eyes.
00:22:16.820So is having a review of your life in terms of, did I do good or bad?
00:22:23.260Uh, so is seeing either departed loved ones or angels or, you know, some kind of religious figure welcoming you into the afterlife.
00:22:33.300So those are all common characteristics.
00:22:35.100Now, if a particular experience has those common characteristics, then there's at least a little bit more confidence that, okay, this is a standard one.
00:22:46.320This is not, this is not totally weird.
00:22:48.680It's something that, you know, has at least a modicum of credibility.
00:22:52.500But then you can build upon that and, um, and get in, in some cases and get additional credibility for it.
00:23:01.240Like for example, just to stick with near death experiences for the moment, did the person retrieve veridical information while they were in the near death experience?
00:23:13.080Meaning, did they learn something that they didn't previously know and that they had no natural way of knowing and that's too specific to be guessed by random chance?
00:23:28.320To give a classic example, in the 1970s, there was a woman named Maria.
00:23:33.180She was a migrant worker from Latin America, but she was here in the United States.
00:23:37.160And she began to suffer, uh, heart failure and they took her to a hospital and while she was in the hospital, she, they like took her in at night.
00:23:45.500So she couldn't even get a good look at the end, at the outside of the hospital.
00:23:48.680You know, they rushed her there in an ambulance and, um, in the hospital, she suffered a cardiac arrest.
00:23:56.660And while she, while the doctors and nurses were working on her to try to restart her heart, which is something that really only became possible in the 1960s.
00:24:07.780So this is pretty early in resuscitation technology, but they're working to restart her heart.
00:24:14.780She looks down, she sees the doctors and nurses working on her.
00:24:17.760And then, so she had autoscopy and then she starts looking around the rest of the hospital and she sees something very odd that you would not expect to see.
00:24:32.180And they get her heart restarted and she, she doesn't really speak English.
00:24:36.620So she's, she's really excited and talking in Spanish and they bring in a hospital worker, um, to, who speaks some Spanish to talk to her because it wasn't as common to speak Spanish back in the 1970s as it is now.
00:24:49.840And, and she tells the hospital worker about her near death experience.
00:24:54.300And she says, I saw a men's dark blue tennis shoe with some scuff marks on it and the shoelace wrapped around it on a ledge outside a window on one of the upper floors of the hospital.
00:26:10.900And because Maria did not find the shoe, it was the hospital worker, we've got an independent witness.
00:26:17.980And so independent witnesses of things also, uh, provide additional evidence for the reality of the experience.
00:26:26.540Now there are still other ways of interpreting it.
00:26:28.920And you could say, and this was, uh, this was, uh, an idea that was explored even as early as the late 1800s when what was then called psychical research, or it's now called parapsychology.
00:26:42.020Then it was called psychical research.
00:26:43.660When that first started, you know, you had a lot of, uh, you had a lot of researchers who were sometimes very prominent scientists.
00:26:51.440Like for example, the American William James or the British, um, I'm going to blank on his first name, but crooks, he's, you know, won a Nobel prize.
00:27:00.480You had these, uh, psychical researchers.
00:27:02.940And one of the things they considered in some of these survival related experiences is could this, instead of really be in survival of consciousness beyond bodily death, could it just be psychic functioning?
00:27:15.780So you could say, okay, maybe Maria never left her body.
00:27:20.960Maybe, maybe she just psychically perceived there's a shoe up there and then interpreted that as something she saw as part of an out-of-body experience, even though that didn't really happen.
00:27:35.440And so there are other ways of looking at these things.
00:27:38.780Um, you could also say, well, maybe a demon planted that in her head.
00:27:43.160Well, okay, so you can say such things, but how do you decide between these options?
00:27:49.540Now, there's no way to do so a hundred percent, but I rely on a principle that we all rely on in philosophy.
00:27:57.320It's sometimes called phenomenal conservatism.
00:28:00.020And the idea of phenomenal conservatism is you take every experience as it appears until you get evidence that it should be taken in some other way.
00:28:15.540Um, if you, let's say, I don't know if you gentlemen happen to be married, but let's say you are, you come home one day after work, there's a woman there who looks like your wife and she's making dinner and she feeds you a dinner.
00:28:28.360And the logical way to interpret this experience is, is it's my wife serving me an ordinary dinner.
00:28:36.460It would be paranoid to assume based without any evidence that it's not your wife.
00:28:44.060It's her evil twin that you have no evidence even exists.
00:42:57.320And then what Elisha says is, did not my heart go with you to meet with this guy where you got the robes and the stuff?
00:43:06.500Okay, this is sounding like an out-of-body experience.
00:43:10.600If his heart went with you, but his body didn't go with him, this is sounding like an out-of-body experience.
00:43:20.360And there are similar reports all the way down through history, including in the Christian community.
00:43:24.600So I would say, however you explain these phenomena, what happened was Helena Blavatsky came up with her own ideas about him and then talked about him in terms of her ideas.
00:43:39.980And that influenced the discussion for a while because she helped popularize him.
00:43:45.380But then these days, at least in parapsychology, they've tried to scrape off all the Helena Blavatsky stuff and say, let's take this material out of it and just look at it from a scientific perspective and try to describe it as neutrally as possible without presumptions about silver cords and astral bodies and stuff and see what we find.
00:44:07.320And when they did that, they found no evidence, basically, for a silver cord and mixed evidence for whether something leaves you.
00:44:16.060But there have been thinkers in Christian history who have proposed that in addition to our body and our spirit, there might be some kind of in-between thing that we have that could potentially be sent out.
00:44:32.680You find some thinkers, for example, in the Middle Ages talking about that.
00:44:37.320It seems that you find quite a bit of that as well in Testimony of Alien Abduction, that some of it, at least, doesn't seem to actually happen in a physical sense.
00:44:51.680But all of the emotion and the experience of being removed from your home by these shadowy entities is there.
00:44:59.840But, you know, if you look around the room, if you have a camera, let's say, set up, it's evident that you never actually went anywhere.
00:45:08.980You know, when you're talking about all these things, these are things that a lot of the medical industry would dismiss as hallucinations, including the near-death experiences.
00:45:22.460But the problem with that is that just as you've described here, over hundreds, if not thousands of cases, there are discernible patterns, which kind of betrays the idea that these would be hallucinations.
00:45:36.580Dr. Marzinski, who we talked about earlier, would say that...
00:45:41.560Yeah, every time we mention, we can't help but mention the guy all the time, but he would say that hallucinations, by definition, don't adhere to patterns.
00:45:51.400And so once you have a series of patterns, especially in the way that you've been describing, it seems pretty obvious that there's something else going on here.
00:46:00.680For the longest time, these things were kind of dismissed by the medical and scientific community as a pseudoscience.
00:46:08.680There's always been a paranormal study that is the underbelly of these aforementioned industries, right, the scientific one and the medical industry.
00:46:19.900But for the longest time, they've been ridiculed.
00:46:25.120We just had recently, what's this guy's name, Tucker Carlson.
00:46:30.360Tucker Carlson, he's making the rounds, and he said something pretty interesting, and it's that the West, in the West, I'm paraphrasing, we've lost our understanding of spirituality and more than likely by design.
00:46:45.800It's just funny because where we sit right now, and I don't know if you feel this way, Jimmy, but the state of things suggests that we need to understand we've got a lot of catching up to do.
00:47:01.660Because it seems imperative, based off of just world events, and especially in the West, the state of America, that we familiarize ourselves with the spiritual realm because it seems pretty obvious that there is one and that we're constantly engaging with it, unbeknownst to the average person who's just going through the nine-to-five grind.
00:47:21.180You know, whatever you're doing, public transportation, you come home, you live your life on repeat, but in a million ways a day.
00:47:27.000Is this my wife cooking dinner? We don't know.
00:47:58.460So I've actually been reading a good bit about hallucinations recently.
00:48:03.060For example, Oliver Sacks, the neurologist, has a whole book about him, and it's really fascinating.
00:48:10.980One of the things that I think we have to be open to is that there could be hallucinations that have common patterns.
00:48:21.480Now, most hallucinations seem to be quite random, and I know your other guest talked about that.
00:48:31.980But in principle, if, let's say, there's a particular kind of hallucination that's based on a certain kind of bodily malfunction, it could generate similar experiences.
00:48:46.100So, for example, one of the commonly reported phenomena in near-death experiences, you often hear about going through a dark tunnel.
00:48:57.720Sometimes it's just a sense of motion towards a light.
00:49:01.980And in some cultures, reportedly, it's not even moving through darkness.
00:49:08.940It's like crossing a bridge to a beautiful park or something.
00:49:12.980But however, in all these different situations, though, it seems that there's some kind of transitional movement or experience of transitional movement that frequently is through darkness to some kind of light or lighter realm.
00:49:27.720Now, there has been a proposal, and I believe this was proposed by the British researcher Susan Blackmore.
00:49:38.460That what's responsible for this is the dying of the visual cortex, and that the visual cortex goes offline in such a way that your field of vision kind of narrows, and you perceive light in the distance, and it's kind of like you're moving towards this light.
00:50:06.560And so, okay, I think we've got to entertain that possibility.
00:50:12.500Now, what that's not going to do is explain Maria Shue or other aspects of the experience where someone comes back with vertical information.
00:50:22.840So even though I'd say it's hypothetically possible that there could be hallucinations that people experience that are based on, say, a physiological process that's shutting down or working wrong, I don't want to dismiss that.
00:50:44.220But I also want to acknowledge that most hallucinations that people have tend to be very random.
00:50:49.580They're like dreams, and deathbed visions, near-death experiences, and after-death communications are not like dreams, although after-death communications sometimes occur in dreams.
00:51:00.660But there's enough here that you can't, even if Susan Blackmore was right about the visual cortex being responsible for this aspect, and she's just speculating.
00:51:12.740There's no proof that that's what's happening.
00:51:16.460But even if that guess turned out to be correct, there's other stuff happening in these experiences that that will not explain and that does not have any normal explanation.
00:51:28.280That has to be paranormal if someone's coming back with knowledge that's that specific that they couldn't, that they had no natural way of knowing.
00:51:38.080And that's something that you find in the other experiences as well.
00:51:42.220It's not just near-death experiences, you get vertical information like that in both deathbed visions and in after-death communications.
00:51:50.220Let me give you an example of one of the types of information that people sometimes get in deathbed visions.
00:52:00.380They also get this in NDEs, but it appeared first in the literature in the study of deathbed visions.
00:52:06.340It's what's known as a peak in Darien experience.
00:52:10.200Now, that's P-E-A-K, like a mountain peak, and Darien is a province in Panama, and there's an old poem about climbing a peak in Darien, province Panama, and when you get to the top of the peak, you suddenly unexpectedly see the Pacific Ocean on the other side of the peak, you know, which are like explorers would have this kind of experience when they were first exploring Panama.
00:52:35.880And so in parapsychology, the term peak in Darien has become associated with a type of experience where you see something totally unexpected, and the thing that you see is someone you didn't know was dead.
00:52:54.020So, in hallucinations that people have, they will hallucinate anybody.
00:53:04.380They'll hallucinate people they don't know.
00:53:06.760They'll hallucinate people they do know who are still alive.
00:53:10.300They'll hallucinate all kinds of people.
00:54:09.660This one was documented quite early in the late 1800s.
00:54:13.600There was a British family where you had a woman who's dying, and she's surrounded by most of her siblings, but some of her siblings are dead.
00:54:22.720And so, as she's having her deathbed vision, she says, oh, here's my first sibling, who everybody knew was dead.
00:54:29.680And here's my second sibling, who everyone knew was dead.
00:54:32.560And here's my third sibling, who everyone knew was dead, because people died a lot back then.
00:54:37.440But then she says, oh, and here's my brother, who he's in the afterlife too, welcoming me.
00:54:45.800And everyone thinks her brother is over in India and is just fine.
00:54:53.440And the idea that their other fourth sibling is dead, he's there in the afterlife, was so disturbing to one of the women, one of the other sisters who was present.
00:55:08.660Well, then they get a letter saying, we forgot to inform you, your brother in India died, and he died at a date that turned out to be before this woman had her deathbed vision.
00:55:23.020So, she had a Pekindarian experience, where she discerned that her brother was in the afterlife, even though nobody there knew that.
00:55:33.840Another early one, this is from around 1923, you have another woman, she's in a maternity hospital, and she's got a heart condition.
00:55:45.280And she, because of her heart condition, she has been on bed rest for a long time.
00:55:53.200And, and she has given birth, and then after the birth, she's getting ready to die, because the strain of the birth was too much for her heart.
00:56:03.760And so, she's getting ready to die, and she's having a deathbed vision.
00:56:07.640And she's talking about how beautiful everything is that she's seeing and hearing.
00:56:11.620People see light, they see a beautiful realm, they hear beautiful music.
00:56:14.820And she says, oh, and here's my father, come to welcome me into the next world.
00:57:03.240And so, every letter that comes in from her, from a friend, before she gets to read it, her husband reads it to make sure nobody mentions Vida's death.
00:57:12.220So, she had no way of knowing that Vida had died, and then she sees her in the afterlife, in her deathbed vision, welcoming her into the afterlife with her departed father.
00:57:25.400And so, this would be another example of a peak in Darien experience that counts as veridical information that would support the idea that this is a real experience.
00:57:36.620It's not just a hallucination due to the breakdown of, you know, the mind or anything like that.
00:57:48.200It seems like maybe the similarities here would be the chemicals that are released in the brain upon death or upon a strenuous situation that would let you kind of pull back this veil.
00:58:01.940Because you'll see, you know, you'll hear about experiences like this when people do psychedelics or DMT and things like that.
00:58:09.640I know that there's similar chemicals that are released in the brain naturally, like specifically DMT.
00:58:15.240And it seems like people are able to just kind of take a peek behind the curtain there right when they do these certain things, whether it's intentional or not.
00:58:23.880Have your studies led you anywhere there?
00:58:25.740There's a definite association between, now, so we kind of got two things going on here.
00:58:33.320These are death-connected phenomena, but in both death-related phenomena and non-death-related phenomena, there is an association between gain in paranormal information, that's ESP, and an altered state of consciousness.
00:58:51.320There was a researcher in the mid-20th century named Louisa Rine, and she collected case reports of people who had paranormal experiences, and she classified them.
00:59:08.200And so she did statistical studies of them.
00:59:10.160And one of the things she found is that when precognitive experiences occur, like, Raven, your experience about your uncle, 60% of the time, it's in the form of a realistic dream.
00:59:25.560Yours was a symbolic dream if it was referred to your uncle's death.
00:59:29.400But 60% of the time when people have precognitive experiences, it's in the form of a realistic dream.
00:59:35.540And dreams, of course, are an altered state of consciousness.
00:59:39.240We're not in normal, alert wakefulness when we're having a dream.
00:59:43.440There are other altered states of consciousness, too, including things just like relaxation and letting your mind wander, you know, instead of being alert.
00:59:53.640And there is an association that modern parapsychologists have found between certain altered states of consciousness and expanded awareness of things.
01:00:05.540Now, it's not all altered states of consciousness.
01:00:08.360Like, if you hyper-caffeinate yourself, so you're all jittery, actually, that's not going to help you be psychic.
01:00:18.900But there are various states, like relaxation and so forth, that can.
01:00:26.000In terms of specifically death-related experiences, people do, you know, as they're getting ready to die, they do enter altered states.
01:00:42.560And this is something that's been commented on for a long time in the history of Christian thought.
01:00:47.860St. Augustine, who lived back around the year 400, he has a whole discussion in—actually, it's in the 12th book, I think, of his literal commentary on Genesis,
01:01:01.340where he talks about how when the mind is quiet and when it starts to partially disengage from worldly affairs and things like that,
01:01:12.620that people can or are reported to have expanded awareness of things, and so they may predict the future or something.
01:01:21.300Pope St. Gregory the Great, who lived about the year 600, he has a discussion where he also talks about,
01:01:29.300it's like when your mind is starting to disengage from your body, you can have greater awareness and can learn about the future.
01:01:39.300In fact, Pope St. Gregory the Great says that there are two ways that people can learn about the future precognitively.
01:01:46.840We're not talking about God giving you the information. That's divine revelation.
01:01:53.300And what Pope St. Gregory the Great is talking about is a little different.
01:01:57.940He says some people seem to have a subtle quality to their soul that allows them to learn at least a little bit about the future.
01:02:07.640But other people, when they're getting ready to die, and their soul is starting to detach from the body, they may have visions.
01:02:18.960And they may learn something that's going to happen in the future.
01:02:22.880So there is a definite association between paranormal acquisition of information and altered states of consciousness.
01:02:31.820You mentioned DMT in particular, and actually in the mid-20th century, there were parapsychologists who would test things like LSD and magic mushrooms and stuff like that to see, can we make someone psychic?
01:05:16.540And one of the things that the figure of Isaiah does in the book to prepare for visions is fast.
01:05:21.660Now, it could be that if you fast long enough and strictly enough, that that's going to help with the detachment that you need from ordinary worldly life to have an expanded awareness of things.
01:05:39.500It also, though, could be a sign of religious devotion, that you're denying yourself in order to make a stronger connection with God and ask God to give you a vision.
01:05:51.960So it could, to the extent fasting gets associated with things like visions or precognition or whatever, it could be because of a natural effect, or it could be because of a spiritual effect, where you're doing an act of devotion to reach out to God, and then God chooses to reward that by giving you a vision.
01:06:12.840I want to kind of take this in a bit of a strange direction, and this might not yield any fruit.
01:06:23.720So there's actually something that is concerning that I've heard, and I hope that it's not true.
01:06:31.540But when it comes to these sort of like New Age teachings and things of that nature, oftentimes there's a lot of, how would you put it, detail to these things.
01:06:41.520And so one suspects that the idea at least came from somewhere.
01:06:49.860So the first one is that there's this concept that when you die and you're entering this light that, you know, many people do describe, that this is actually an attempt by something called the Archons, if I'm not mistaken.
01:07:05.220You're trying to trap you in this karmic loop of rebirth, that there's this cycle that we're trapped in.
01:07:15.780And one of the things that makes that a little compelling is that you do come across these, in some cases, rather shocking descriptions, sometimes even by children, of their past lives.
01:07:30.720Which is something that, as I'm looking at the world through a Christian lens, through a biblical lens, becomes a little bit difficult to define.
01:07:42.160And so I take that, this, you know, anecdotally, you'll have a child who goes on for an extended period of time at a shockingly young age about a family that existed before.
01:07:54.340And let's say one that I'm aware of, a descriptive of dying in the ocean.
01:08:04.220Right. And I don't know necessarily that that one is, it just sticks out to me.
01:08:09.540But there's a lot, you know, arguably what is a lot.
01:08:13.080But there are more that go along with that one.
01:08:16.180And then, you know, lo and behold, they end up investigating because it's such a constant in the child's life that they feel the need to kind of put it to rest.
01:08:24.800And so they find, through one means or another, that, well, there actually was a family that lived in this location that did have a little boy that did perish, you know, in the water, that did have this sister, that dog.
01:08:38.940And then, you know, you kind of hear those things and you go, wow, I don't know what to do with that.
01:08:45.600And I find it fascinating, but it's, you, you know, unless you're a parapsychology investigator, if you're just an average person, you hit a wall as far as the investigation goes.
01:08:58.480And so, like I said, I just got to put those things in my back pocket.
01:09:01.740I wonder if in your studies you've come across that or what you make of it.
01:09:04.860Well, so that is part of survival research, and I've done a lot of survival research, including on what are called cases of the reincarnation type.
01:09:19.760We're not saying this is reincarnation, but it's suggestive of reincarnation.
01:09:24.160And so cases of the reincarnation type, C-O-R-T, or court, is something I've actually looked at a lot.
01:09:31.300I've read numerous books on the subject.
01:09:33.140I did a two-part look at them on Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World, where in part one, I survey what current reincarnation research has come up with.
01:09:43.560And then in part two, I look at potential explanations for it.
01:09:46.960I'll give you a brief answer now about the archons and stuff, strictly from the faith perspective.
01:09:53.100But if you'd like to talk about this more, why don't you all have me on again, and we can talk reincarnation, because it's a whole other big subject.
01:09:59.560I have your YouTube page pulled up here, and one of the first things is like, was Bigfoot on Noah's Ark?
01:10:04.460And I'm like, let's talk about this too, man.
01:10:08.680We're going to be dragging you back on.
01:10:10.560We're going to be dragging you back on.
01:10:13.060In the case of was Bigfoot on Noah's Ark, that was a question someone posed to me, and I don't have a huge amount to say about that.
01:10:24.940In terms of the scenario you sketched, now I'm going to have to, I think, from two perspectives.
01:10:31.140The reason perspective, which is what would science tell us about this, and the faith perspective.
01:10:36.060And so I'm going to skip over the reason perspective now, and we can talk about that in the future.
01:10:41.660But from the faith perspective, so Hebrews tells us that, well, okay, the consistent message of the New Testament is what happened to Jesus is going to happen to us.
01:11:19.340They just have some Christian elements.
01:11:21.000Kind of like Islam is a separate religion, but it's got some Christian elements in it.
01:11:27.020Okay, so that's the basic message of Christianity.
01:11:31.340But could—now, the archons that you mentioned, that's a concept from Gnosticism.
01:11:39.620The Gnostics believed that there were these various spiritual emanations from an unknowable ultimate God that ruled things in creation, and they're called the archons.
01:11:53.180So I would say from a Christian faith perspective, what evidence do we have that there even are any archons?
01:11:59.720You know, they're not in the Orthodox tradition of the Church Fathers.
01:12:06.360This is really a concept that's being imported from another religion.
01:12:09.760So even supposing, though—I mean, maybe it's not archons.
01:12:19.160You know, could demons be trying to trap us in reincarnation?
01:12:22.860Well, the book of Hebrews, in chapter 10, says, it is appointed for man once to die, and then comes the judgment.
01:12:33.940And so—and he's clearly responding to, like, Greco-Roman beliefs in reincarnation, you know, because there were people in the ancient Greco-Roman world who did believe in reincarnation.
01:12:44.720And he's saying, that's not the way it is.
01:12:46.460It is appointed for man once to die, and then comes the judgment.
01:13:16.280Well, maybe Lazarus and the widow of Nain's son and Jairus' daughter and people like that.
01:13:22.900So, yeah, it looks like there's a few exceptions to the first part of the rule.
01:13:27.420And if there are a few exceptions to the first part of the rule, hypothetically, there could maybe be others.
01:13:36.760But if so, and even that's wildly speculative, they've got to be a tiny minority.
01:13:44.320The rule is that it is appointed for man once to die, and then comes the judgment, no reincarnation.
01:13:54.500Now, speaking from a faith perspective, so I would look at the proposal that there are archons or demons or whatever who are trying to trap us into a cycle of reincarnation very skeptically as a result.
01:14:12.580But that's something, frankly, I wouldn't be worried about.
01:14:21.080The state of your soul is when you die, you're either in God's friendship or you're not.
01:14:26.620If you're not in God's friendship, a demon is not going to try to get you to go back so you can have another chance.
01:14:32.700And if you're in God's friendship, then God's going to protect you.
01:14:37.880You know, Jesus talks about in his parable of Lazarus and the rich man, he talks about when Lazarus, who's one of God's friends, when he dies, the angels come and escort him to Abraham's bosom.
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01:15:36.300And that parallels what we see in deathbed visions and near-death experiences where people say, oh yeah, angels or departed loved ones.
01:15:46.340You know, they came, they had all this peace, and they led me or were leading me.
01:15:50.680In the heat of battle, your squad relies on you.
01:16:50.760But if it were to happen, you would consider it maybe an avarition of that minority that you talked about earlier.
01:16:57.920So, like, let's say hypothetically it was proven that this young boy did have this experience or any of these number of people who have this testimony to share.
01:17:06.020Then these might fit into the same category as maybe a Lazarus or something of that nature.
01:17:10.820So, hypothetically, but I don't know that we need to go even that far, because there are other explanations for why one person can have another person's memories besides I used to be that person.
01:17:23.320There are—and just to preview a little bit what we can talk about in the future—I classify the different theories about what could explain cases of the reincarnation type into three groups.
01:17:39.200There are what are called—they're soul theories, residue theories, and psychic theories.
01:17:45.320And soul theories are like what you find in Hinduism.
01:17:50.480In Hinduism, they believe that you have a soul.
01:17:52.900They call it an Atman, and your Atman, or soul, passes from one body to another over a course of different lives.
01:19:26.680On that, as David's talking about the NPC theory, it's something that I floated out there as like a joke, just on Twitter kind of, you know, having fun.
01:19:35.700That there are NPCs around, non-player characters around us?
01:19:38.560Not just some, but I mean, when you're walking around in like Walmart and you're like, are these people have soul—like, are these people—do they have that spark in them?
01:19:49.040And I know it's kind of like demeaning what God can create, but I'm like, there's a lot of damn people around us.
01:19:54.460How many of them are actually like functioning awake, have that—it's a great analogy, that little spark that's been passed on from one thing to the next.
01:20:02.920Are there a finite amount of souls in this realm?
01:20:31.000The idea—aspects of that touch on what's actually a debate in philosophy.
01:20:37.220That's what my academic training is in, is in philosophy.
01:20:40.300And there's a debate over what are called philosophical zombies.
01:20:44.760The idea of a philosophical zombie is it looks like a person, it behaves like a person, exactly like a person, but it has no consciousness.
01:20:55.500It just has a glazed look over its eyes.
01:20:58.580It responds exactly the way you expect a person to respond.
01:21:02.300It's just there's nothing going on in its head.
01:21:04.640You know, it's funny, all this precognition stuff.
01:21:07.540So with the near-death experiences, you've got Stephen King books like The Shining and Dr. Sleep where this guy, he knows something because he's writing directly about a lot of these features of life.
01:21:19.080And with this sort of thing—oh, man, I just lost my thought.
01:21:24.160We were saying the NPCs and the philosophical zombies.
01:21:28.140Yes, so the philosophical zombies, there was like maybe 10 years ago, very popular movement throughout the culture with zombies.
01:22:51.680On the residue theory, that's fascinating because I wonder if that fragment of a person or a fragment of a soul could pass down multiple times.
01:23:03.240If there was a historical figure, let's say, because you get a lot of people that are like, I'm the—I have the memories of, you know, name, you know, historical figure.
01:23:15.820One of the things I wanted to touch on, too, before we go back into the zombies, we brought up—so you brought up the archons, and you're like, well, there's no really, like, biblical precedent or historical precedent for the archons.
01:23:27.220The gods that Hindus observe and worship in some cases, they are also not biblical, but they are there.
01:23:36.340And then if we want to think about the Atlanteans or the Greek pantheon, what we've been thinking and hypothesizing on the show is that a lot of these entities are—they overlap.
01:23:48.900They're kind of the same thing, renamed, slightly different.
01:23:51.980And then, you know, you'll read the Book of Enoch, and in the Book of Enoch, there's a lot of good information, but it's not in the Bible for a reason, because it was—it's not written by God, inspired by God.
01:24:02.380It's written by fallen angels, inspired by fallen angels in a way.
01:24:17.560Yeah, well, okay, so the modern scholarly view is that it was—it's actually about six different books that got stitched together, and they were all written between 200, 300 B.C. and A.D. 70 was, you know, the latest possible for one of the books.
01:24:36.480And so none of them were actually written by Enoch, but there are people who think it is in the Bible.
01:24:48.280If you're in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, they've got it in their Bible.
01:24:53.940Other Christians don't, but the Ethiopian Orthodox do have it in their Bible.
01:24:58.380The reason I say that, it seems like a lot of angel worship when you read this book.
01:25:02.800It seems like they're glorifying the abilities of these angels, and it just doesn't sit right with me.
01:25:07.720So I'm weary when I read it as to what information is true and what is not.
01:25:15.200I think we should not—and I've got a two-parter coming up on the book of Enoch.
01:25:20.020I think we need to be careful about reading it and how we process different pieces of information in it, but I'd hesitate to just say the book was written by fallen angels because Jude quotes it.
01:25:34.500He says, as Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied, and then he's got a quotation.
01:25:40.440So that's a positive endorsement of this book.
01:25:43.020It may not make it biblical, but that's a positive statement in the book of Jude.
01:25:49.220What I mean is when you read the book, it just seems like there's testimony from, like, Enoch is telling you what he's being told from one side.
01:25:57.120Then he goes to God, and then he's saying this.
01:25:59.080So it's like part of the—not all of this is coming from God.
01:27:21.400There's going to be this great war between the sons of light and the sons of darkness, and the Messiah is going to come in and he's going to kick butt.
01:27:27.260And then we'll have this wonderful new world in the Messianic Age.
01:27:32.680Because they had a political understanding of what the Messiah was going to be and do, rather than a spiritual understanding of the Messiah.
01:27:39.480So I think the natural way to read, you know, like, this is for the last generation type stuff is in those terms.
01:28:16.420So I don't think we could use its modern—because even today, the vast majority of people have never heard of the Book of Enoch, even in Christian circles.
01:28:50.180So we spoke to—I think it was Paul of Understanding Conspiracy and JT Follows JC, both of them excellent content creators, doing very much the same thing, probably to a higher degree than what we do, looking at the world through the biblical lens.
01:29:04.500But one of the things that they suggested was that the Millennial Kingdom has already happened, and what we are currently in is the Satan's small season.
01:29:14.060And they gave some pretty compelling, interesting, supportive pieces to help kind of paint that idea.
01:29:21.220And one of them was that this erection recently of Tartaria—I'm sure you're familiar with it to some degree, right?
01:29:28.260Tartaria is like this—it kind of took the conspiracy realm by storm maybe over the past, like, four to five years.
01:29:36.940And it's this remnants of ancient architecture that was mostly covered up by a mud flood.
01:29:43.740And long story short, people are suggesting that a great deal of our history has been erased.
01:29:48.980And there was a sprawling empire called Tartaria that started off in, like, Eastern Asia, I believe, and ended up all the way to the Americas.
01:29:58.240But that what they're suggesting—you know, I don't think it's something that they would say definitively they hold to be true—but what they're suggesting is that Tartaria is actually remnants of Christ's Millennial Kingdom.
01:30:11.760And there was a lot of other things to go along with that, but one of the things that also paired with it was this idea that if you look around through a kind of conspiratorial lens, you might see things that suggest that the elites, as they were, are manufacturing end times prophecy in one way or another.
01:30:32.800They're showing you this one thing, and it suddenly looks like end times prophecy is coming true.
01:30:36.640Another thing happens on the world stage.
01:30:38.700And I'm not saying anecdotally, like we just mentioned a moment ago, about how all people throughout history thought they were in the end times.
01:30:46.120It's like, you know, you have the red heifer situation.
01:30:49.400Well, the ways in which they manufacture that is there's actually a ranch out in Texas that is trying to genetically modify the perfect red heifer.
01:30:56.840And, you know, there's a bunch of different, once again, anecdotal ways that you can suggest that they're doing this.
01:31:01.760But if they are doing this, then it might be—and it's a very sexy theory.
01:32:08.300There are ways to show that through what are known historically, through what are known as synchronisms, where you can show this person lived at the same time as that person, and they lived at the same time as this person.
01:32:17.800With hundreds and thousands of synchronisms, you can show there's no missing gap.
01:32:27.020Having said that, if we take away these elements in this lost civilization and things like that and say, could the millennium have already happened, and could we be in the little period where Satan gets unleashed before the second coming?
01:32:48.200The standard view through most of Christian history that most Christians have adhered to is called amillennialism.
01:32:59.460And the idea in amillennialism is that Christ is reigning right now in heaven and through his church on earth.
01:33:07.140And the devil—this is a key thing from Revelation 20—and if you ever want me to talk about Revelation and prophetic theories with you,
01:33:14.120let me know—but it says in Revelation 20 that during the millennium, which is symbolic for a long period of time, the devil will be bound in such a way that he can no longer deceive the nations.
01:33:28.520Christ is reigning in heaven right now and through his church on earth, and the devil has been bound in such a way that we are in a vastly different situation now than in the first century,
01:33:39.680where Christians were a teeny, teeny, tiny, tiny little minority of just a few hundred or thousand people.
01:33:45.040Today, two billion people, a third of the global population are Christian, and half of the global population worships the God of Abraham.
01:33:55.000The devil has been bound in such a way that he has not been able to stop the proclamation of the gospel.
01:34:01.420So I would say the historic Christian view that we're living in the millennium right now, that's true.
01:34:07.360But then we have to face the question of, well, could it have just ended, or could we be right at the end of it?
01:34:14.380Well, there are certainly disturbing trends in the world.
01:34:17.400On the other hand, if you study history, there have been disturbing trends everywhere.
01:34:21.400And we got a thousand, so I'll give you two pieces of evidence that point in opposite directions.
01:34:27.620One piece of evidence is that a third of the global population is still Christian.
01:34:35.960You know, it doesn't sound like we haven't had this massive fallen away where the church is persecuted almost to the point of death.
01:34:42.180So that would suggest that, you know, it's still farther in, the second coming is still farther in the future.
01:34:48.060On the other hand, and related to that, the prophecy from Romans 9 to 11 of the Jewish people are going to convert, that doesn't look like that's happened either.
01:34:58.740So that would suggest it's again in the future.
01:35:02.100On the other hand, Israel did just get its land back.
01:35:06.680And that, I have a hard time saying that's by accident.
01:35:09.940And so that's something that could suggest, even if it's still in the future, the second coming is still in the future a way, it could be closer.
01:35:17.660I mean, it's always getting closer, but it could be a bit closer than you might otherwise think.
01:35:22.440So I'm agnostic on when the second coming is, but those are some of the parameters that I bring to bear in considering the question.
01:35:30.880You can talk for another hour about just Israel getting their land back and how it's done in such a way.
01:35:40.640And also what are Jews, like who are the Jews?
01:35:44.100Revelation 3, 9, I believe it's like they say that they are, but there's a lot going on here.
01:35:50.920And it's all smoke and mirrors at this point.
01:35:53.020And I'm waiting for the dust to settle to see a little bit more clearly about what exactly is going on.
01:35:58.380But we like to entertain some kind of crazy theory sometimes.
01:36:02.520Every Friday, I wanted to mention Ed Mabry, we do a series on the book of Revelation and we go chapter by chapter and we let him break it down for us and tell him what he thinks.
01:36:14.880So if I thought we were in the little season, I wouldn't bother doing that on Friday because I think we, you know, it's still good to read this book as if we are in possibly the end time generation and look for the signs to come of things.
01:36:31.240Especially because it's one of the most contested, not contested, but like, I guess, argued over books in the Bible, right?
01:36:38.660Where everybody's got a bunch of different theories.
01:36:40.760So I think it's fascinating every time we talk to him.
01:36:43.340You know, and we get to learn a little bit more from a bunch of different perspectives.
01:36:47.180So, you know, I enjoy doing the series.
01:36:49.640But I do feel like this episode, Jimmy, we barely scratched the surface.
01:36:54.720Guys, for the listeners out there, I highly recommend going and checking out Jimmy's page because as soon as you scroll just through the thumbnails alone, I struggle to know which one, which topic I want to have you back for first.