When we die, our spirit, our soul separates from our physical body and goes either to be in Paradise with God or in Hades to be separated from God. Then ultimately, at the end of history when Jesus returns, we’re united with our resurrected bodies and we go through final judgment and then we spend eternity in a very physical place, either heaven or hell. So I needed to know what evidence is there that our soul does separate from our body at the time of death. I was a skeptic about this thing of near-death experiences. I thought it was kind of new-agey. I thought maybe it’s explainable by oxygen deprivation in the brain. hallucinations or whatever. But there have been 900 scholarly articles written in scientific and medical journals over the last 40 years on this phenomenon. This is a very well-researched phenomenon. And I was only willing to believe those things I could corroborate. I wasn’t going to believe someone who said “I died and I met Jesus and he’s five foot ten, he’s got brown eyes, really nice guy, got a great sense of humor.” I don’t know if that’s true or not. I can’t tell. There have been people who’ve made up stories and published books about things that they later admitted weren’t true so unless I can corroborate it, I’m not interested.
What I found and I document this in my book, there are many cases that are corroborated. I’ll give you an example. Maria, a young woman, dies of a heart attack in the hospital. She’s clinically dead and yet her spirit, her soul, her consciousness separated from her body, she watched the resuscitation efforts, her spirit floated out of the hospital and then when she was ultimately revived, her spirit returned to her body and she said “There’s a tennis shoe on the roof of the hospital, on the third story ledge. It’s a man’s shoe, it’s dark blue, it’s left footed, there’s a little wear over the little toe and the shoelace is tucked under the heel.” So they go up and they look and sure enough, it’s exactly what she said. It’s corroboration, it’s confirmation that this is true. You can’t deny that something is going on there.
There’s another woman, 34 years old, from Atlanta, Georgia, who had bleeding in her brain, brain aneurysm. They had to do a very radical surgery. They cooled her body to 60 degrees, they drained every drop of blood from her head. Three clinical tests showed no brain activity, her heart stopped beating, her breathing stopped, she was clinically dead. They put ear plugs in her ear with a hundred decibels of noise, which is the equivalent of a subway train going next to you. They taped her eyes shut and yet during the surgeries she said” I was alive the whole time. I watched the surgery and then I went off and I went through a tunnel and I met some relatives who were deceased, I was in the very presence the light of God and and then I I returned to the body.” And she said “There’s a dent in one of the surgical tools that they were using on me” and she was able to describe the actual surgical instruments that were used. She had no way of seeing those. She recalled the conversation in the room where the nurse said “We have a problem. The artery’s too small.” and a male nurse said “Try the other leg.” She even recalled that the song Hotel California was playing during the surgery. How do you explain this stuff unless indeed it is true that at the moment of death our spirit, our soul does separate from our body.
I have more than a dozen examples of people seeing things and hearing things that they would not normally be able to hear because of this. In fact one guy studied 21 cases of blind people, most of them blind since birth, and yet during their near-death experience they were able to see, many for the first time. One woman was in a car accident, she was in a coma, she was clinically dead and yet she described watching the resuscitation, she described seeing flowers and birds and people for the first time and then when her spirit returned to her body, she was blind again. One medical doctor said this is medically impossible.
One guy studied 92 cases of people who made verifiable observations when they were out of their body. 93 percent of those were absolutely accurate, another six percent were almost totally accurate. Something is going on here and I think because of the corroboration, it’s safe to say that our body and our soul do separate death.