What Happens When You Die?

After 3 near-death experiences, this man’s mission is to comfort dying veterans
by: George Knapp, May 7, 2021

What happens to us when we die? Scientists say physical death is the end of life. Our souls are immortal but where we go first, right after we die, depends on what we did in life says writer and speaker Dannion Brinkley. Brinkley says he has seen the other side three times.

Brinkley was a star athlete, U.S. Marine, and a successful businessman, not very interested in spiritual matters.But that changed in 1975 when a bolt of lightning struck a telephone pole, traveled down the phone line, and slammed into his body melting the phone he was holding.

“It went into the side of my head above my ear, it went down my spine,” Brinkley said. “It welded the nails of the heels of my shoes to the floor. It threw me up in the air, I see the ceiling, it slams me back down, a ball of fire comes through the room and blinds me. I am burning. I am on fire. I am paralyzed.“

Brinkley says he left his body, floated along with the ambulance as it raced to a hospital, and watched from above as doctors declared him dead. He said 28 minutes later he awoke in the hospital morgue.

During those 28 minutes, Brinkley says his consciousness traveled through a tunnel, where he encountered a spiritual being of light, and underwent a grueling replay of his entire life, as seen not only from his own perspective, but everyone he’d ever encountered. Something he says was extremely humbling.

“I saw my entire tire life past performing a 360 degree panorama, I had missed nothing. You know how many hairs were in the nose of the doctor who pulled you from your mother. You know everything that there is from the time you open your eyes. You have complete cognitive awareness, no doubt about it. And that’s all happening at the same time, no doubt about it. Then you watch the same life from a second-person point of view, as if you were your own best friend. So you can see how silly, how funny, how dumb, how stupid it was, but it’s one of your best friend, you know. There’s no judgments, just looking. And then you literally become every person that you ever encounter. And you feel the direct results of your interaction between you and that person. So no one gets away, with anyone, anything.”

And then, in a flash, he says he was back in his severely injured body.

It took him two years to be able to walk again. He didn’t tell many people what had happened, and when he did tell his family, they didn’t believe it. But in the same year as the lightning bolt incident, a Georgia physician, Dr. Raymond Moody, wrote a book, “Life After Life,” and coined the term “near death experience,” or NDE.

Dr. Moody and his book were pilloried by medical colleagues and by 1977, he was financially strapped, despondent, and ready to quit. Then former bully Dannion Brinkley met Moody and became his staunchest defender.

In 1989, during open heart surgery, Brinkley died again. And once again said he visited what he perceived to be the afterlife. Brinkley wrote the book, “Saved by the Light,” which became a runaway best seller, and led to television appearances, even a made-for-TV movie.

Skeptics and debunkers came after him, disputing biographical details and arguing that NDE’s happen because the brain is dying, not because people are visiting heaven. Leslie Kean, a journalist who has written extensively about near-death experiences, says there is evidence that human consciousness exists independently of the body and that it survives physical death.

In many NDE’s, similar to Brinkley’s, she writes, people are able to accurately describe what was happening while their brains were dead, when they had no ability to see or hear anything.

“There are many cases in which the cardiac arrest is happening with a doctor present. They’re documenting the fact that there’s no brain activity,” Kean told Mystery Wire in an earlier interview. “The case of Pam Reynolds is another extraordinary one, where they can’t possibly have consciousness, and yet they do have consciousness, they’re able to go out and report back things that were happening in the environment, things that they heard things that they saw in the environment, when they had absolutely no brain activity.”

Brinkley, later had another NDE during brain surgery. He says he’s happy to take on and doubters, including religious leaders, about what happens when we die. He experienced death 3 times.