Jimmy Akin is a Christian apologist and host of the popular podcast, Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World, which looks at mysteries, all kinds of mysteries, paranormal, supernatural, scientific, historical, true crime, UFOs, and everything else. In this episode of the show, we talk with Jimmy about near-death experiences, ghosts, aliens, and more.
00:01:54.360I'm a Christian apologist, and so I do that for my day job.
00:01:58.640But on the side, I also do a lot of podcasts.
00:02:01.960And my most famous podcast is called Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World.
00:02:05.900It's a podcast that looks at mysteries, all different kinds of mysteries, paranormal, supernatural, scientific, historical, true crime, Bigfoot, UFOs, everything.
00:02:18.400And unlike a lot of shows that are focused on mysteries, we don't just try to generate wonder and imagine what if.
00:03:01.440But the idea, we're making it up as we go.
00:03:05.420We didn't really know what it was going to be, if it was going to be supernatural.
00:03:08.140And it just kind of delved down into this idea of looking at current day going-ons through a Christian biblical lens.
00:03:17.800Because as we progress, it's the only way that any of this makes sense.
00:03:22.480Otherwise, we're just kind of flailing wildly in the dark, right?
00:03:25.440Where there might be aliens, or there might be, you know, something's happening in politics, but we can't explain it.
00:03:31.220Something's happening culturally, we're not sure.
00:03:33.340And 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.
00:03:57.300I know I've covered a lot of similar topics.
00:03:59.620I mean, I've talked about the Nephilim.
00:04:02.180In fact, I just had the most recent episode of Mysterious World is on the Book of Jubilees, which talks about the Nephilim.
00:04:08.840I've got a two-parter coming out on the Book of First Enoch, which also talks about the Nephilim.
00:04:15.180I saw you guys had an exploration of the Book of Revelation.
00:04:18.820I've done a lot of exploration of the Book of Revelation.
00:04:22.280And also lately, I've done a lot of research on death-related phenomena.
00:04:28.580So this is not just near-death experiences, but also things that occur before and after near-death experiences.
00:04:36.060So that includes what are known as deathbed visions, which a person has before they die.
00:04:41.820And then the near-death experiences that happen when someone is either clinically dead or near-clinically dead.
00:04:50.060And 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.
00:05:00.840And these phenomena are much more common than people realize.
00:05:05.620For 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.
00:05:18.200So these are not talked about a lot, basically because of the prejudice against them in our society.
00:05:25.200In fact, near-death experiences weren't talked about really prior to the mid-1970s when Raymond Moody's book Life After Life came out.
00:05:32.560But all three of these different types of experiences really do point to an afterlife, and they mutually reinforce each other.
00:05:53.460I wonder, too, about the other side of the fence.
00:05:57.480So you mentioned after-death communications, and I only kind of, or not that I only, but I look at these things oftentimes through my own experiential lens.
00:06:08.580And I had a dream once where an uncle who was very close to me passed away, but before he passed away in this dream, and he wasn't, you know, in bad health either.
00:06:25.560Because he was doing actually pretty well, and he wasn't that old.
00:06:29.180He was maybe in his late 50s, and it was a medical accident that caused this event.
00:06:35.720But before he passed away, I had this dream that he and I were in a supermarket together, and he was, I always say he looked like Gandalf the White.
00:06:45.920If 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-
00:06:52.620People sometimes call me Gandalf the Red.
00:06:55.740So that film actually mirrors Christ on like three different levels, where you have the resurrection of Gandalf, you know, the resurrection of Christ.
00:07:06.000There's the return of the king, and then there's also the suffering of Frodo Baggins.
00:07:10.640So there's these three different Christ-like elements within the film, but he looked like Gandalf the White.
00:07:17.100His hair was uncharacteristically white.
00:07:19.360His beard was uncharacteristically white.
00:07:21.760Not that he had aged, but he just looked like almost grandiose.
00:07:24.640And then shortly afterwards, he ends up passing away in real life, and I always kind of held on to that connection.
00:07:33.100So to me, it seems like this phenomenon of death that awaits us all.
00:07:39.080Well, you know, obviously it's so integral to the human experience, and it's religious in nature because the existence of human beings is biblical in nature.
00:07:48.740But 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.
00:08:04.420Some 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.
00:08:22.700Somehow this place felt more real than the place that we inhabit now.
00:08:26.040Now, 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?
00:08:35.920Well, these are ones that I have done a lot of reading on.
00:08:42.300Now, in addition to my work as a Christian apologist, I also study parapsychology.
00:08:47.440And in fact, I teach parapsychology at the Ryan Education Center.
00:08:51.180Like this – later this month, I'm starting a course on Christianity and parapsychology and how the two relate to each other.
00:09:00.740But there's an extensive literature in parapsychology about death-related experiences.
00:09:09.820It's – survival of bodily death is one of the two main subject areas that parapsychology studies.
00:09:17.000So, parapsychology is the study of psychic function from a scientific perspective and the study of survival of bodily death from a scientific perspective.
00:09:28.000And so, there's been a lot of work done on these.
00:09:31.980And, of course, the basis of these experiences is, of course, experiences.
00:09:38.660You know, things that have happened to people, things that people report.
00:09:41.300And 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.
00:09:58.420Here, like on the subject of after-death communications, I read one collection that was primarily American, but I read another that was Icelandic, you know.
00:10:08.340So, 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.
00:10:22.200But 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.
00:10:34.260Do they report different things in America than they do in India?
00:12:31.780So, one of the things that I know makes me skeptical about not – it's not whether or not this stuff is happening.
00:12:37.840I know that there are these post-Death experiences and near-Death 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?
00:12:55.260Because I know you can test the spirits.
00:12:58.000This is something that I would be, like, concerned about.
00:13:00.440Okay, 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.
00:13:10.740That 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.
00:13:27.180So, that would be a pre-cognitive experience that pointed forward to your uncle's death.
00:13:33.520It was interesting just to note, in the dream, he was walking away from me.
00:13:37.600I couldn't get his attention no matter how much I tried.
00:13:41.500It 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.
00:13:52.040So, that's kind of the way that I interpret it.
00:13:54.420And that can be a sign of the inevitability of death.
00:13:57.520You know, we're not going to be able to stop it.
00:14:12.200So, if I understand your question correctly, you're asking about the – what in parapsychology is known as the veridicality or truthfulness of these experiences.
00:14:25.320And there are different ways of judging that.
00:14:28.680Now, 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.
00:14:42.300You know, we – and so that's all we've got to go with.
00:14:46.800And 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.
00:14:55.620Well, 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?
00:15:07.980Are people – is that where you're going with this, top?
00:15:10.040Yeah, it's not – I'm not asking about a mental illness because that will play a part, but we're kind of on this – have you ever heard of Dr. Jerry Marzynski?
00:15:45.760Okay, yeah, and it just – it raises concern for me whenever you have like a dead relative visit you, and from – after they've died, it's like a – is this a genuine spirit?
00:16:07.660Do you have any idea about the numbers on this kind of thing?
00:16:12.460Yeah, so in terms of numbers, I don't, but in terms of procedure, I do.
00:16:21.220So to me, the first question is, can we establish that anything paranormal is likely happening here, or could it just be purely natural?
00:16:30.360And then, if something paranormal is happening, then you can – so it's like, is it a spirit or is it not a spirit?
00:16:39.420If it's a spirit, you can then apply the test of the spirit's principles.
00:16:43.580So I would kind of split the question in two.
00:16:46.120First, is there anything paranormal here?
00:16:49.320Do we have evidence for an afterlife, or do we have evidence for a spirit?
00:16:52.980And then second, do we have evidence for deception taking place?
00:16:57.400And so, like with your guest, Dr. Marzinski, I am not at all opposed to the idea that certain types of schizophrenics are actually experiencing something paranormal,
00:17:13.220and it could be contact with a malicious, deceptive spirit in some cases.
00:17:17.460There are other cases where – that I know about anecdotally where when, you know, you go into a mental institution,
00:17:27.920and when you actually talk 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.
00:17:39.500And so there – some mental conditions may involve a kind of psychic openness to – and that openness, if you're picking up on the thoughts of doctors and nurses,
00:17:52.820you could also be picking up on the thoughts of evil spirits that are trying to mess with you.
00:17:57.160So I'd say we have to be careful in those areas, and we want to consider all the possibilities, not just the paranormal ones.
00:18:05.500In 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,
00:18:16.600and then you look at the natural explanations first, because natural phenomena are more common than paranormal phenomena.
00:18:28.140And so you always want to look at could this have a natural cause first.
00:18:32.580But in some cases, you get evidence that something beyond just the natural is going on.
00:18:38.180So, for example, if someone's reporting a death-related experience, whether it's before, during, or after,
00:18:45.640they tend to fit certain – they tend to have certain characteristics.
00:18:51.260Like, for example, in near-death experiences, seeing – floating above your body and seeing yourself.
00:18:57.380That's called autoscopy, seeing yourself.
00:19:00.800That's a common characteristic of near-death experiences.
00:19:04.500So is perceiving a very bright light that yet doesn't seem to hurt your eyes.
00:19:10.180So is having a review of your life in terms of did I do good or bad.
00:19:17.200So is seeing either departed loved ones or angels or, you know, some kind of religious figure welcoming you into the afterlife.
00:19:26.980So those are all common characteristics.
00:19:28.620Now, 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.
00:19:42.280It's something that, you know, has at least a modicum of credibility.
00:19:46.040But then you can build upon that and, in some cases, and get additional credibility for it.
00:19:54.900Like, 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?
00:20:06.660Meaning, 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?
00:20:36.500And while she was in the hospital, they, like, took her in at night so she couldn't even get a good look at the outside of the hospital.
00:20:42.360You know, they rushed her there in an ambulance.
00:20:44.960And in the hospital, she suffered a cardiac arrest.
00:20:50.220And 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.
00:21:01.280So this is pretty early in resuscitation technology.
00:21:04.200But they're working to restart her heart.
00:23:04.660And because Maria did not find the shoe, it was the hospital worker, we've got an independent witness.
00:23:10.620And so independent witnesses of things also provide additional evidence for the reality of the experience.
00:23:19.940Now, there are still other ways of interpreting it.
00:23:23.100You could say, and this was 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, then it was called psychical research.
00:23:37.040When that first started, you had a lot of researchers who were sometimes very prominent scientists, like, for example, the American William James or the British, I'm going to blank on his first name, but Crooks.
00:23:56.500And one of the things they considered in some of these survival-related experiences is could this, instead of really being survival of consciousness beyond bodily death, could it just be psychic functioning?
00:24:10.200So you could say, okay, maybe Maria never left her body.
00:24:14.320Maybe 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.
00:24:29.000And so there are other ways of looking at these things.
00:24:32.720You could also say, well, maybe a demon planted that in her head.
00:24:37.700Well, okay, so you can say such things, but how do you decide between these options?
00:24:42.620Now, there's no way to do so 100%, but I rely on a principle that we all rely on.
00:24:49.860In philosophy, it's sometimes called phenomenal conservatism.
00:24:53.620And 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.
00:25:08.560If 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.
00:25:22.300And the logical way to interpret this experience is it's my wife serving me an ordinary dinner.
00:25:29.600It would be paranoid to assume, without any evidence, that it's not your wife.
00:25:37.840It's her evil twin that you have no evidence even exists, and she's not feeding you.
00:25:45.040You just messed up the rest of my wife's evening because this is what I'm going to be doing.
00:25:54.440Incidentally, that's called Capgras Syndrome.
00:25:56.500It's known where you think your loved ones are being replaced by imposters.
00:26:00.300It's kind of like Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
00:26:02.220Well, have you ever heard those stories of, like, the mimics, right, where it's like you hear your wife's voice, let's say, coming from the other side of the house, and you kind of wonder to yourself, like, oh, when did she get home?
00:26:12.140And you respond, and she doesn't say anything back.
00:26:14.740And then 10 minutes later, she walks through the door, and you're going, wait a second.
00:26:19.860I've read stories like that that will make your hair stand up on end, but what you're talking about here – go ahead.
00:26:26.160Well, just to tie it up, you know, if you assume it's your wife's evil twin when you don't even have any evidence she's got a twin, and if you assume it's not an ordinary dinner, she's trying to poison you so she can get insurance money.
00:26:37.700Well, that's possible, but it's not how the experience presents itself, and it's frankly paranoid, disordered thinking to propose that without evidence.
00:26:47.800Now, if you got evidence that that's what's happening, go with the evidence.
00:26:52.800But if you don't have evidence, then you need to behave normally.
00:26:57.520And in the same way, when you have something like Maria's experience with the shoe, okay, she perceived herself leaving her body and seeing the shoe.
00:27:06.140So that would be the logical way to interpret it until you get evidence for, no, it was just a psychic experience and she misinterpreted it, or you get evidence that, oh, there was a demon involved doing it.
00:27:20.440But it's paranoid to go with one of those other interpretations without evidence.
00:27:26.820As long as you don't have evidence for something else happening, you should interpret the experience as it presents itself.
00:27:34.440So that's how I'd sort through, you know, the apparent interpretation of something versus other possible interpretations that we don't actually have evidence for.
00:27:44.480Well, I'm at the point now in 2024 where when I hear you say something like this, my mind immediately goes, as you're explaining this woman's experience, what it sounds like to me is that she had a forced event of astral projection, which is something that I know people do.
00:28:04.160I know Anton LaVey did that when we started talking about like the silver cord and this stuff is mimicked throughout Disney movies and other, you know, media.
00:28:12.340I mean, even, uh, what's that, that new show with the upside down, it's with the kids or whatever.
00:30:03.600Subsequent to that, um, there's been research done on this type of experience today to avoid the religious connotations of theosophy.
00:30:12.320And these have been reported all the way through history.
00:30:14.720There, there's even an example of what looks like one in the Bible.
00:30:18.420Um, in fact, more than one example, um, like when St. Paul in second Corinthians says he was caught up to the third heaven and he didn't know, was I in my body or not?
00:30:31.320Well, he just raised the possibility that he was not in his body and that would be an out of body experience.
00:30:37.860And so that's what those are called today in parapsychological circles.
00:30:41.080Look, they're called out of body experiences where you view your point of view is somewhere outside of your body and you're looking at stuff.
00:30:49.740And in recent surveys of out of body experiencers, they've asked about things like, do you see a silver cord?
00:31:01.380That seems to be so I've, from what I've heard, uh, most of the time, people are unaware of the state of their body at all.
00:31:09.220Meaning like sometimes they are out of body and can see their physical body, but there's never really a description of like, and was also aware of my new astral body.
00:31:17.940There's, there seems to be an absence of, of any descriptive, uh, you know, about the body.
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00:32:13.660That, that was the next thing I was going to mention, which is, there's also a dispute among out-of-body experiencers about, does anything leave your body when you have an out-of-body experience?
00:32:29.480Um, or is it just a shift of viewpoint, which would be like travel and clairvoyance?
00:32:35.160And some out-of-body experiencers say, yeah, I think something does leave.
00:32:41.180For example, there is a guy named Alex Tanis, who, um, did research with the American Society for Psychological Research back in the 1980s.
00:32:51.520And he did astral projection or out-of-body experiences.
00:32:54.960He could do them, you know, on demand when people requested him to.
00:32:58.880And so they did a bunch of experiments where they'd like have him lay down in one room and they, uh, would then have a target in another room and say, can you go down the hall to this other room and tell us what the target is?
00:33:22.500So what Alex said was, well, I'm, my soul is obviously not leaving my body because if it did, I'd be dead.
00:33:30.140But he thought that there was something that left his body, which he referred to as Alex two.
00:33:36.780So Alex one is laying here on the bed and Alex two is going down the hall to view the target.
00:33:42.580But not all out-of-body experiencers agree with that.
00:33:46.140There is a British gentleman named Graham Nichols, who is an out-of-body experiencer.
00:33:50.680He can also do it, you know, on command.
00:33:52.900I mean, he has to get ready for it, but he can do it on command.
00:33:55.380And he says, no, nothing leaves my body.
00:33:57.880This is, this is travel and clairvoyance where I'm shifting my point of view to look at something in the distance and it's related, but not necessarily the same thing as remote viewing.
00:34:11.600Most remote viewers do not have out-of-body experiences.
00:34:15.220They, um, instead, uh, will like sit at a desk with a pad of paper in front of them and just try to pick up impressions about a distant target.
00:34:27.100And, and, and so they, they don't have their viewpoint and, and often they don't even get a general look at the target.
00:34:38.160They just get little details like, oh, it's smooth and it's, it's metal and it's pointed and it's got tourists.
00:34:47.320Oh, it's the Eiffel tower, but it's not like they get an image of the Eiffel tower and they can zoom around it and stuff.
00:34:53.240On the other hand, because there is a similarity, uh, between these two kinds of experiences, it could be that they exist on a spectrum and that remote viewing is at kind of one end of the spectrum and then full out-of-body experiences are at the more immersive end of the spectrum.
00:35:13.000But all of this is still currently debated and there are studies underway to try to figure out how all this works.
00:35:21.660What are your, uh, so we, we mentioned Helena Blavatsky for a moment there and in my limited peripheral understanding of her, she was, uh, a Satanist, uh, maybe to put it in simply.
00:35:31.080No, no, that's not an accurate description.
00:35:33.180No, she hybridized, um, she hybridized, um, Christian thought with Hindu thought and Buddhist thought and some other stuff that she made up herself.
00:35:46.960She claimed that she was in communication with living people who lived in, who lived in, um, like Tibet and places like that, who she called the ascended masters and they were her supposed source of information, but she didn't worship the devil.
00:36:03.660Now, um, there are actual Satanists who do that, but she didn't happen to be one of them.
00:36:10.580So when, when you hear that, right, this ascended masters notion, this, um, uh, description of, uh, astral projection, the, the presence of a silver cord, um, you know, your astral body, do you think that there's any room for that?
00:36:26.460What, what, in your opinion was, if this is a separate thing, because, uh, in, in testimony, people don't necessarily describe the presence of a silver cord, uh, do you think that Blavatsky was wrong in her assumptions or, or her descriptions?
00:36:43.760Or do you think that these are two separate things and there may well be something, some sort of function that, uh, one could undertake that would fit more accurately the description of what Blavatsky was talking about?
00:36:54.860Well, there are out-of-body experiences and they're not dependent on Helena, on Helena Blavatsky and her theosophical society.
00:37:03.760I mean, they would try to tell you, here's how you can have one maybe, but they've been reported all the way through history.
00:37:10.360Um, there's another example from the old Testament where it's, it sounds like either remote viewing or out of body, but there's a particular instance, you know, where Naaman, the leper comes to the prophet Elisha.
00:37:22.860And wants to get healed of his leprosy and he thinks I'm going to have to do something really amazing.
00:37:28.060And Elisha just tells him, go down and go down to the river and, and bathe in the Jordan seven times.
00:37:34.020And he kind of scoffs at that, but eventually he does it and he gets cured and he comes back and says, thank you so much.
00:45:59.880And so, okay, I think we've got to entertain that possibility.
00:46:05.700Now, what that's not going to do is explain Maria Shue or other aspects of the experience where someone comes back with vertical information.
00:46:16.180So, even though I'd say it's hypothetically possible that there could be hallucinations that people experience
00:46:27.620that are based on, say, a physiological process that's shutting down or working wrong,
00:46:33.380I don't want to dismiss that, but I also want to acknowledge that most hallucinations that people have tend to be very random.
00:46:42.800They're like dreams, and deathbed visions, near-death experiences, and after-death communications are not like dreams.
00:46:50.680Although, after-death communications sometimes occur in dreams, but there's enough here that you can't,
00:46:58.220even if Susan Blackmore was right about the visual cortex being responsible for this aspect,
00:48:10.620And there's an old poem about climbing a peak in Darien, province Panama.
00:48:16.780And when you get to the top of the peak, you suddenly unexpectedly see the Pacific Ocean on the other side of the peak,
00:48:24.200you know, which are like explorers would have this kind of experience when they were first exploring Panama.
00:48:29.220And so in parapsychology, the term peak in Darien has become associated with a type of experience where you see something totally unexpected.
00:48:41.880And the thing that you see is someone you didn't know was dead.
00:48:48.200So in death, in hallucinations that people have, they will hallucinate anybody.
00:48:57.140They'll hallucinate people they don't know.
00:48:59.920They'll hallucinate people they do know who are still alive.
00:49:03.620They'll hallucinate all kinds of people.
00:49:05.420Well, in deathbed visions, they don't hallucinate people who are still alive.
00:49:11.800And they don't hallucinate random strangers.
00:49:14.860They specifically see departed loved ones who are here to welcome them into the afterlife and to help them cross over.
00:49:23.000But sometimes one of their departed loved ones is someone they didn't know was dead.
00:49:29.860So, for example, one early, this one was documented quite early in the late 1800s.
00:49:36.880There was a British family where you had a woman who's dying and she's surrounded by most of her siblings.
00:49:45.900And so as she's having her deathbed vision, she says, oh, here's my first sibling who everybody knew was dead.
00:49:53.020And here's my second sibling who everyone knew was dead.
00:49:55.940And here's my third sibling who everyone knew was dead because people died a lot back then.
00:50:00.860But then she says, oh, and here's my brother who he's in the afterlife, too, welcoming me.
00:50:09.000And everyone thinks her brother is over in India and is just fine.
00:50:17.220And 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.
00:52:26.460And 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.
00:52:35.420So 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.
00:52:48.400And so this would be another example of a peak in Darian experience that counts as veridical information that would support the idea that this is a real experience.
00:52:59.800It's not just a hallucination due to the breakdown of, you know, the mind or anything like that.
00:53:11.420It 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.
00:53:25.140Because you'll see, you know, you'll hear about experiences like this when people do psychedelics or DMT and things like that.
00:53:32.840I know that there's similar chemicals that are released in the brain naturally, like specifically DMT.
00:53:38.460And 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.
00:53:47.040Have your studies led you anywhere there?
00:53:48.940There's a definite association between, now, so we kind of got two things going on here.
00:53:56.520These 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.
00:54:14.520There 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.
00:54:31.400And so she did statistical studies of them.
00:54:33.360And 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.
00:54:48.780Yours was a symbolic dream if it was referred to your uncle's death.
00:54:52.600But 60% of the time when people have precognitive experiences, it's in the form of a realistic dream.
00:54:58.760And dreams, of course, are an altered state of consciousness.
00:55:02.440We're not in normal, alert wakefulness when we're having a dream.
00:55:06.640There are other altered states of consciousness, too, including things just like relaxation and letting your mind wander, you know, instead of being alert.
00:55:16.840And there is an association that modern parapsychologists have found between certain altered states of consciousness and expanded awareness of things.
00:55:28.760Now, it's not all altered states of consciousness.
00:55:31.560Like, if you hyper-caffeinate yourself, so you're all jittery, actually, that's not going to help you be psychic.
00:55:42.140But there are various states, like relaxation and so forth, that can.
00:55:49.200In terms of specifically death-related experiences, people do, you know, as they're getting ready to die, they do enter altered states.
00:56:05.760And this is something that's been commented on for a long time in the history of Christian thought.
00:56:11.060St. 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,
00:56:24.560where he talks about how when the mind is quiet and when it starts to partially disengage from worldly affairs and things like that,
00:56:35.840that people can or are reported to have expanded awareness of things, and so they may predict the future or something.
00:56:44.520Pope St. Gregory the Great, who lived about the year 600, he has a discussion where he also talks about,
00:56:52.500it's like when your mind is starting to disengage from your body, you can have greater awareness and can learn about the future.
00:57:02.540In fact, Pope St. Gregory the Great says that there are two ways that people can learn about the future precognitively.
00:57:10.040We're not talking about God giving you the information. That's divine revelation.
00:57:16.500And what Pope St. Gregory the Great is talking about is a little different.
00:57:21.160He 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.
00:57:30.840But other people, when they're getting ready to die, and their soul is starting to detach from the body, they may have visions.
00:57:42.160And they may learn something that's going to happen in the future.
00:57:46.080So there is a definite association between paranormal acquisition of information and altered states of consciousness.
00:57:55.020You 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?
01:00:09.120And one of the things that the figure of Isaiah does in the book to prepare for visions is fast.
01:00:16.200Now, 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.
01:00:32.600It 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.
01:00:45.460So 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,
01:00:57.780where you're, you're doing an act of devotion to reach out to God, and then God chooses to reward that by giving you a vision.
01:01:06.820I want to kind of take this in a bit of a strange direction, and this might not yield any fruit.
01:01:16.840So there's actually something that, that is concerning that I've heard, and I, and I hope that it's not true.
01:01:24.200But 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.
01:01:35.140And so one suspects that the idea at least came from somewhere.
01:01:42.860So the first one is that there's this concept that when you die and you're entering this, this light that, you know, many people do describe,
01:01:52.200that this is actually an attempt by something called the Archons, if I'm not mistaken, to trap you in this karmic loop of, of rebirth.
01:02:05.900That, that there's this cycle that we're trapped in.
01:02:08.760And 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.
01:02:24.020Which is something that, as I'm, as I'm looking at the world through a Christian lens, through a biblical lens, becomes a little bit difficult to, to define.
01:02:35.260And 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.
01:02:47.440And let's say one that I'm aware of, a descriptive of, of dying in the ocean, but having a dog, having a sister.
01:02:57.320Right. And I don't know necessarily that that one is, it just sticks out to me, but there's, there's a lot, you know, arguably what is a lot, but there are more that go along with that one.
01:03:09.140And then, you know, lo and behold, they end up investigating because it's such a, a constant in the child's life that they feel the need to kind of put it to rest.
01:03:17.900And 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.
01:03:31.860And, and then, you know, you kind of hear those things and you go, wow, I don't know what to do with that.
01:03:38.740I find it fascinating, but it's, you, you know, unless you're a, a parapsychology investigator, if you're just an average person, you hit a wall as far as the investigation goes and there's nothing else to do there.
01:03:51.560And so, like I said, I just got to put those things in my back pocket.
01:03:54.820I wonder if in your studies, you've come across that or what you make of it.
01:03:57.940Well, so it, 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.
01:04:12.920We're not saying this is reincarnation, but it's suggestive of reincarnation.
01:04:17.240And so cases of the reincarnation type, C-O-R-T or court, is something I've actually looked at a lot.
01:04:24.400I've read numerous books on the subject.
01:04:26.220I 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.
01:04:36.660And then in part two, I look at potential explanations for it.
01:04:40.060I'll give you a brief answer now about the archons and stuff, strictly from the faith perspective.
01:04:46.200But 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.
01:04:52.660I have your YouTube page pulled up here and one of the first things is like, was Bigfoot on Noah's Ark?
01:04:57.540And I'm like, I want to talk about this too, man.
01:05:01.200We're going to be dragging you back on.
01:05:03.640We're going to be dragging you back on.
01:05:06.160In the case of Bigfoot, was Bigfoot on Noah's Ark?
01:05:08.820That was a question someone posed to me and I don't have a huge amount to say about that.
01:05:17.980In terms of the scenario you sketch, now I'm going to have to, I think, from two perspectives.
01:05:24.240The reason perspective, which is what would science tell us about this, and the faith perspective.
01:05:29.380And so I'm going to skip over the reason perspective now, and we can talk about that in the future.
01:05:34.720But 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.
01:06:12.400They just have some Christian elements.
01:06:14.080Kind of like Islam is a separate religion, but it's got some Christian elements in it.
01:06:20.140Okay, so that's the basic message of Christianity.
01:06:24.440But could—now, the archons that you mentioned, that's a concept from Gnosticism.
01:06:32.700The 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.
01:06:46.260So I would say from a Christian faith perspective, what evidence do we have that there even are any archons?
01:06:52.820You know, they're not in the Orthodox tradition of the Church Fathers.
01:06:59.460This is really a concept that's being imported from another religion.
01:07:02.840So even supposing, though—I mean, maybe it's not archons.
01:07:12.240You know, could demons be trying to trap us in reincarnation?
01:07:15.940Well, the book of Hebrews, in chapter 10, says it is appointed for man once to die, and then comes the judgment.
01:07:27.040And 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.
01:07:37.800And he's saying, that's not the way it is.
01:07:39.660It is appointed for man once to die, and then comes the judgment.
01:08:09.380Well, maybe Lazarus and the widow of Nain's son and Jairus' daughter and people like that.
01:08:16.000So, yeah, it looks like there's a few exceptions to the first part of the rule.
01:08:20.500And if there are a few exceptions to the first part of the rule, hypothetically, there could maybe be others.
01:08:29.840But if so, and even that's wildly speculative, they've got to be a tiny minority.
01:08:37.420The rule is that it is appointed for man once to die, and then comes the judgment, no reincarnation.
01:08:47.600Now, 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.
01:09:05.680I, that's something, frankly, I wouldn't be worried about.
01:09:11.160I, you know, I don't, the state of your soul is when you die, you're either in God's friendship or you're not.
01:09:19.680If 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.
01:09:25.800And if you're in God's friendship, then God's going to protect you.
01:09:30.960You know, Jesus talks about in his parable of Lazarus and the rich man, he talks about when Lazarus, who's in one of God's friends, when he dies, the angels come and escort him to Abraham's bosom.
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01:10:29.360And that parallels what we see in deathbed visions and near-death experiences where people say, oh yeah, angels or departed loved ones.
01:10:39.540You know, they came, they had all this peace, and they led me or were leading me into the good place in the afterlife.
01:10:46.000And so I would look at the Archon theory very skeptically from the faith perspective.
01:10:53.280I also, from the reason perspective, I would say, what evidence do we have that this is what's happening, as opposed to just a story that someone has come up with?
01:11:03.960And if someone has evidence for it, I'd be happy to consider it from the reason perspective.
01:11:13.740But if it were to happen, you would consider it maybe an aberration of that minority that you talked about earlier.
01:11:21.020So 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.
01:11:29.000Then these might fit into the same category as maybe a Lazarus or something of that nature.
01:11:33.780Well, 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.
01:11:47.780There 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.
01:12:01.380They're what are called, they're soul theories, residue theories, and psychic theories.
01:12:09.520And soul theories are like what you find in Hinduism.
01:12:13.460In Hinduism, they believe that you have a soul, they call it an Atman, and your Atman, or soul, passes from one body to another over a course of different lives.
01:13:50.280On 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.
01:13:58.660That there are some NPCs around, non-player characters around us?
01:14:01.540Not 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?
01:14:12.000And 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.
01:14:17.440How 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.
01:14:25.920Are there a finite amount of souls in this realm?
01:14:30.880Maybe you can almost incapacitate the function of someone's soul by giving them so much stimulation, right?
01:14:38.260Yeah, you put them on drugs, you give them a million and a half different things to pay attention to, stimulation, stimulation shows, your phone, things of that nature.
01:14:45.680Can you effectively kind of make them formant?
01:14:53.980Yeah, it—aspects of that touch on what's actually a debate in philosophy.
01:15:00.180That's what my academic training is in, is in philosophy.
01:15:03.240And there's a debate over what are called philosophical zombies.
01:15:06.460The 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.
01:15:18.460It just has a glazed look over its eyes.
01:15:30.520So 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.
01:15:42.780And with this sort of thing—oh man, I just lost my thought.
01:15:47.000We were saying the NPCs and the philosophical zombies?
01:15:51.020Yes, so the philosophical zombies, there was like maybe 10 years ago, very popular movement throughout the culture with zombies.
01:17:15.020On 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.
01:17:25.580If 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.
01:17:38.780One 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.
01:17:50.920The gods that Hindus observe and worship in some cases, they are also not biblical, but they are there.
01:17:58.760And 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.
01:18:11.860They're kind of the same thing, renamed, slightly different.
01:18:15.320And then, you know, you'll read the Book of Enoch.
01:18:16.940And 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.
01:18:25.320It's written by fallen angels, inspired by fallen angels in a way, so you're getting information.
01:18:30.600Yes, it's—yeah, it's the—it's the historical—
01:18:33.320How do you—how do you—well, okay, I mean, it obviously talks about fallen angels.
01:18:41.260Well, 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.
01:18:55.320was, you know, the latest possible for one of the books.
01:19:01.320And so none of them were actually written by Enoch.
01:19:05.860But there are people who think it is in the Bible.
01:19:11.260If you're in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, they've got it in their Bible.
01:20:40.220I don't know that I see the angel worship in it that you do, but I'd have to review it.
01:20:46.880This idea that like in the beginning of the book of Enoch, it says that this book was meant for the tribulation generation.
01:20:51.520And then I believe the book of Enoch was found with the Dead Sea Scrolls in like the 40s, maybe something like that.
01:21:00.220Do you look at that and entertain the idea that we might be in the tribulation generation and that the book was meant to be found?
01:21:10.800I don't think that Enoch provides—I don't think that Enoch provides us with evidence for that, because Enoch, we've had it for the last 2,000 years.
01:21:27.780Yeah, and its greatest period of popularity was around the time of Jesus.
01:21:35.860And if you think about how a lot of Jewish people looked at the world then, they thought they were in the end times.
01:21:43.060You know, we've got the Romans, there'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.
01:21:50.240And then we'll have this wonderful new world in the Messianic Age, because they had a political understanding of what the Messiah was going to be and do, rather than a spiritual understanding of the Messiah.
01:22:02.440So I think the natural way to read, you know, like this is for the last generation type stuff, is in those terms.
01:22:10.880So 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.
01:22:23.520It's really a niche thing, so I don't think we could look at its little flower and of popularity right now as a sign that we're in the end.
01:22:32.000What are your thoughts on the little season?
01:22:43.620So 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.
01:22:57.360But 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.
01:23:06.900And they gave some pretty compelling, interesting, you know, supportive pieces to help kind of paint that idea.
01:23:14.060And one of them was that this erection recently of Tartaria—I'm sure you're familiar with it to some degree, right?
01:23:21.100Tartaria is like this—it kind of took the conspiracy realm by storm, maybe over the past, like, four to five years.
01:23:29.780And it's this remnants of ancient architecture that was mostly covered up by a mud flood.
01:23:36.380And long story short, people are suggesting that a great deal of our history has been erased, and 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.
01:23:51.080But 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.
01:24:04.620And 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.
01:24:25.640They're showing you this one thing, and it suddenly looks like End Times prophecy is coming true.
01:24:29.480Another thing happens on the world stage.
01:24:31.540And 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.
01:24:38.980It's like, you know, you have the red heifer situation.
01:24:42.240Well, 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.
01:24:49.700And, you know, there's a bunch of different, once again, anecdotal ways that you could suggest that they're doing this.
01:24:54.460But if they are doing this, then it might be, and it's a very sexy theory.
01:25:04.240Is that they're manufacturing End Times prophecy to obfuscate where we are in the biblical timeline.
01:25:11.280And there is also this notion that somewhere along our history, we gained, I believe it is we gained and or lost, we gained or lost a thousand years.
01:25:21.720And they had some pretty interesting evidence to back that up as well.
01:25:24.820I don't know that I did it justice, but it was a very cool episode.
01:25:31.140Are you familiar at all with this idea?
01:25:32.740Satan's small season, I think, is probably more accurately what it's called.
01:25:36.360I'm familiar with aspects of what you just mentioned.
01:25:40.900And I'll give you my impression on those, but I know we only have a few minutes left, so I'll be very brief.
01:25:45.820In terms of the entire scenario that you just sketched.
01:25:53.680I think it is not supported by the evidence.
01:25:57.700Like, we're not missing several centuries.
01:26:01.040There 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.
01:26:10.800You can, with hundreds and thousands of synchronisms, you can show there's no missing gap.
01:26:18.420Having 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?
01:27:20.940So, Christ 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, where Christians were a teeny, teeny, tiny little minority of just a few hundred or thousand people.
01:27:37.900Today, two billion people, a third of the global population are Christian, and half of the global population worships the God of Abraham.
01:27:47.300The devil has been bound in such a way that he has not been able to stop the proclamation of the gospel.
01:27:54.500So I would say the historic Christian view that we're living in the millennium right now, that's true.
01:28:00.200But then we have to face the question of, well, could it have just ended, or could we be right at the end of it?
01:28:07.300Well, there are certainly disturbing trends in the world.
01:28:09.840On the other hand, if you study history, there have been disturbing trends everywhere.
01:28:14.980And we got a thousand, so I'll give you two pieces of evidence that point in opposite directions.
01:28:20.500One piece of evidence is that a third of the global population is still Christian.
01:28:27.740You 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.
01:28:35.020So that would suggest that, you know, it's still farther in the second coming, is still farther in the future.
01:28:41.800On the other hand, related to that, the prophecy from Romans 9 to 11 of the Jewish people are going to convert.
01:28:49.580That doesn't look like that's happened either.
01:28:51.560So that would suggest it's again in the future.
01:28:54.400On the other hand, Israel did just get its land back.
01:28:59.400And that, I have a hard time saying that's by accident.
01:29:03.520And so that's something that could suggest, even if it's still in the future, the second coming is still in the future away, it could be closer.
01:29:10.520I mean, it's always getting closer, but it could be a bit closer than you might otherwise think.
01:29:15.320So 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.
01:30:08.560So 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.
01:30:20.560And look, look for the signs to come of things, but especially because it's one of the most contested, not contested, but like, I guess, argued over books in the Bible, right?
01:30:31.480Where everybody's got a bunch of different theories.
01:30:33.600So I think it's fascinating every time we talk to him, you know, and we get to learn a little bit more from a bunch of different perspectives.
01:30:40.040So, you know, I enjoy doing the series, but I do feel like this, this episode, Jimmy, we barely scratched the surface.
01:30:46.720It's very clear, guys, 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.
01:31:03.800This thumbnail here, I'll just pull up your page, but I got to step up my thumbnail game and it's not even like making it, like doing crazy stuff.
01:31:13.580But this one right here, he's wrong, just pointed to his face.
01:31:16.040It's like, dude, I'm going to watch that video right now.
01:31:18.580Like, what's, who's making these, Jimmy?
01:31:19.980Are you making your own thumbnails, Jimmy?