The Counterfeit Heaven
It happened in a bar and the experience was terrifying. During an altercation, a man was shot several times in the chest. One of the bullets nicked his heart. But as he fell to the floor, the terror vanished. While he lay dying, the man left his body. Instantly, he felt himself taken up into a loving white light. Never had he seen anything so glorious and beautiful. But he didn’t just see it, he felt it. In this heavenly light he was welcomed, totally accepted and affirmed. Then the paramedics resuscitated him and he was back in his body again. Later, he told a cardiologist about his near-death experience. But he had a serious question. The whole thing had confused him. He had gone to heaven, but he knew that he belonged in hell.
The cardiologist was a man name Maurice Rawlings. In the early 1970’s Rawlings was definitely not a religious person. That changed in 1977 because of a disturbing experience. He was working with a team of nurses who were doing a stress test on a man who was having chest pain. Rawlings instructed them to work the man harder until the pain returned. While he was on the machine the patient had a heart attack. His heart stopped beating. As Rawlings worked to resuscitate him, a strange thing began to happen. Several times the man revived, but then his heart would stop again. And each time he regained consciousness he started screaming in absolute terror, pleading for the doctor to save him because every time his heart stopped he was in hell.
Being a good scientific materialist, Rawlings assumed it was just hallucinations. But his patient’s shrieks kept on and they were aggravating. When he was conscious, the man pleaded with Rawlings to pray for him. The doctor felt insulted. He wasn’t a priest or a psychiatrist. Finally, just to shut him up he made up a make-believe prayer. He told the man to say, “Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Keep me out of hell and if I live I’m on the hook. I’m yours.”
Of course, the words were all a fantasy. Rawlings didn’t believe any of it. But the man did as he was told and, suddenly, the strangest thing happened. No longer was he a screaming, wild-eyed lunatic. He became relaxed and calm. The terror vanished. Seeing such a transformation frightened Dr. Rawlings. Ultimately, it led to him ask Jesus to forgive his sins and be his Lord and Savior.
Over the following decades Rawlings entered into deep research about near death experiences. As a cardiologist he had many opportunities to witness people die. From those events he wrote several books including To Hell and Back where the story of the man who died in the bar can be found. During his years of observation Rawlings noticed some very strange phenomena. First, he observed people who had clear and terrifying experiences of hell and communicated those awful visions during the crisis of resuscitation. But very quickly as they recuperated, something odd occurred. The memory of hell that they had witnessed so clearly entirely vanished.
What had happened? Where had the terrifying memories gone?
Rawlings concluded that there was a logical answer. What happens when we go through other experiences that are deeply shocking and traumatic such as brutal car accidents? To protect us, often our conscious minds simply refuse to recall the trauma. The whole event submerges into our subconscious where it remains inaccessible, while it still affects us. Rawlings came to believe that this natural tendency toward psychological protection is the first reason why near death experiences of hell do not appear with great frequency in the literature. The vision is so horrible that the majority of “experiencers” automatically wipe it from their conscious memories.
But Rawlings discovered another reason why we don’t read more about near death visions of hell. As the years passed and he accumulated more and more records of these events, he contacted Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and other leading writers in the field, offering to share his files with them. They didn’t want to see them. They didn’t want to write about such negative visions. This led Rawlings to believe that near-death experiences of hell are being consciously suppressed by many in the medical community. And it’s understandable. Medical personnel are frightened of them and prefer not to think about them. And for those who are writers, you sell a lot more books by making people feel good.
But there is a third reason why near-death experiences of hell are not common. That takes us back to the man who was shot in the chest. In that near death view of what appeared to be heaven, the white light did not mention that three years previously he had murdered two people during a robbery. All he felt was peace and love. Why had he been shot in the chest? He had been in a bar and had started dancing with what he thought was a beautiful, young woman. But very quickly, he discovered that his partner was a cross-dresser. He hated gay people so he had beaten him up. The man had gone behind the bar, pulled out a gun and shot him.
So what did he say to Rawlings about his near-death experience? These are his words: “Well, it felt good to be in this beautiful place, but I kept wondering why the light never asked me about beating the heck out of the cross-dresser. And the light never mentioned the two killings from the past. I was glad he didn’t ask me about those things, but if he was from God, why didn’t he? I thought about bringing it up, but I said to myself, why knock a good thing and kept my mouth shut. I knew I should be in hell instead of this nice place. Doc, does God ever make mistakes?” That’s a good question for us. Did God make a mistake or did He just overlook the man’s awful, unrepented deeds? I believe there is a third possibility. Why are there not more experiences of hell? Could it be because many people are given visions of a fake heaven with lying messages to bring back to the world?
If you want to read some darkly hilarious literature I suggest reading books that come from “advanced spirit beings” that “channel” their wisdom through a human “medium”. One of the classics of channeled literature is a book entitled Seth Speaks. According to the jacket, and I quote “Seth is a personality no longer focused in physical reality.” Having spent time creating television series, I’ve known a network executive or two who fit that description. But we won’t go there.
In 1963, a woman named Jane Roberts and her husband started playing with a Ouija board. Suddenly, messages began coming from it. This led Jane to become a trance medium in order to channel the wisdom of an entity who called himself Seth. Was Jane really channeling “Seth” or was it all just regurgitated from her imagination? I think there is good reason to believe she was actually in touch with something beyond. The voice and the style of speech were entirely different from her own. And what it said was completely out of character for her. What she experienced was spirit possession. We’re going to get into all of that in future episodes.
When you read so-called channeled literature you are wading in a swamp of mental poo right up to your eyeballs. But in the middle of all the asinine blather you may come upon a fragment of fascinating information. Seth has a very big mouth and he loves to boast. He wanted everyone to believe that in him resides the wisdom of the ages. In his book he spends a number of chapters telling people what will happen to them after death. Buried in the mountain of poo is a scintillating factoid that I think represents truth.
Seth is a very busy entity and he has many associates.
According to him, all of these advanced beings are deeply interested in helping poor benighted humans like you and me. Seth informs us that one of their most important activities is to assist people at the moment of, in his words, “transition out of the body.” In fact, it’s one of their regular assignments. Seth and his colleagues have a great concern. It is their desire to meet the spiritual expectations of every human when we “die”.
Seth wants us to know that all human belief systems are just hallucinations. Once we are dead, he and his friends become guides to help us transition through and beyond our infantile religious beliefs. According to Seth, in order to facilitate this important work he and his entity cohorts become whatever “god” you expect to see. Here are his own words as “channeled” through Jane.
“The situation is rather tricky from a guide’s viewpoint, for psychologically, the utmost discretion must be used. One man’s Moses, as I discovered, may not be another man’s Moses. I have served as a rather creditable Moses on several occasions, and once, though this is hard to believe, to an Arab. The Arab was a very interesting character. Let me tell you about him. He hated Jews, but somehow was obsessed with the idea that Moses was more powerful than Allah and for years this was the secret sin upon his conscience. He was killed by the Crusaders in the most horrible way. They forced his mouth open and stuffed it with burning coals as a starter. As he died, he cried to Allah, then in greater desperation to Moses. And as his consciousness left his body, Moses was there. He believed in Moses more than he did Allah and I did not know until the last moment which form I was to assume.”
With consummate pride, Seth tells us that he and his disembodied colleagues staged a grand pageant for the Arab’s benefit with Allah and Moses fighting each other for his soul because, for some unknown reason, that was what the man expected to see. In many near-death experiences, Seth and his demon god colleagues are there with lovely, lying visions and messages which will be taken back and shared with the world. And their most important message of all? Everything is going to be all right.
Beneath the asinine hilarity of maestro Seth, a chilling statement is being made. When the Apostle Paul writes in II Corinthians 11:14 that Satan can masquerade as an angel of light, we should take that very seriously. Before his fall, Satan was in God’s Presence and his name was Lucifer, light bearer. Once one of the most powerful angels, he is able to mimic the Light and Love of God Himself. Being a master delusionist, he can create a fake heaven that looks almost like the real thing. Now I’m sure what he creates is a very poor copy, but for people who have never experienced the original it is an alluring counterfeit. He can make it feel as though you are in God’s presence, then tell you anything he wants.
No discussion about near death phenomena is complete without recounting the very first experience to go viral in America. It started the flood of stories that have continued to this day. The NDE happened to a professional writer named William Dudley Pelley when he was 38 years old in 1928. In 1929, his story appeared in the March issue of the American Magazine and drew thousands of responses.
Bill Dudley was born into a strict Methodist family. His father was a minister. The man couldn’t make it in that profession, so he went into the toilet paper manufacturing business where he was very successful. There is so much dark humor in that, but I won’t touch it.
Bill never really bought the whole Christian thing, but he did sort of like Jesus. Leaving the toilet paper business of his family he started what became a successful writing career specializing in treacly romantic/heroic short stories that he sold to newspapers. These were successful enough to lead him to Hollywood where he became a working screenwriter in the era of silent films. You could say he went from toilet paper to toilet. I’m sorry, I couldn’t help that.
Bill didn’t like the Hollywood biz and didn’t get along with studio executives. I can tell you from my career in Hollywood that there’s a long history of that among industry writers. To escape the pressure of what he called the Hollywood fleshpots, he bought a bungalow in the remote mountains of Altadena east of LA. One day, very depressed by what he was forced to write, he went to the bungalow alone with his dog. It was that night when the life-changing experience began.
Bill was sleeping when, suddenly, he jerked awake in great pain. It was 2 o’clock in the morning and he was having a heart attack. Instantly, he knew he was dying. The bedroom vanished and he felt himself plunging bodily through a cool blue space. But in the middle of the plunge he felt strong arms reach out and catch him. It was a man who told him he was all right and they were there to help him, but he should keep his eyes closed a little longer. When Pelley opened them, he was lying nude on a white, marble slab in a lovely building. Nearby was a pool of water in a white stone basin. An exquisite opal radiance flooded the room and it was coming from within the stone. As Bill lay there, he felt ecstasy such as he had never known in his life. He was in Heaven.
Two men dressed in white were standing over him. To his shock, one of them was a friend who had been the editor of the American Magazine. The man had been killed years before in WWI. His friend invited him to bathe in the pool. This he did and it was wonderful beyond anything he had ever felt. Pelley wrote that, though he was dead and had left his physical body, he was in a physical body. The men gave him clothes. Then a conversation began. They told him that he had visited this beautiful place many times before, but he just didn’t remember it. They told him that reincarnation was true and he had come here after all his previous lives.
Pelley had been trying to write a book on the meaning of the various races of humanity and been having difficulty with it. His friend knew all about it. This quote is from the book that Pelley wrote about the entire experience entitled, Seven Minutes in Eternity and Their Aftermath. This is what the man in white said to him, “You’re writing a book on the peculiarities of earthly races. You came to the point where you wondered what the races were. I’ll tell you what they are. They are classifications of humanity epitomizing gradations of spiritual development, starting with the black man and proceeding upward in cycles to the white. Each race is an earthly classroom to which people go to get certain lessons in specific things.”
Well, there’s an interesting message from “heaven”. Based on that, many lifetimes ago William Pelley must have been a poor black man, but through advanced spiritual evolution proceeded upward from that great depth, constantly reincarnating, until he reached the height of white skin. Pelley neglects to write about that spiritual evolution in his book. Aren’t the messages of fake heaven illuminating?
After his heavenly, racial education, William Pelley went back into his body in the bungalow. This NDE was the beginning of other very real and overwhelming supernatural experiences. In one of them he met a powerful individual whom he called, “Jesus the Christ”. In that meeting he was given the mission of bringing in the Christian Millennium. William Dudley Pelley became one of the leading racist anti-Semites of his day. Writing voluminously, he dedicated his life to the promotion of a putrefying stew of pseudo-Christian millennialism, racism, anti-Semitism and fascist ideology.
When Nazism appeared in Germany he sucked right up to it. He started an organization in America called the Silver Shirts. Across the country, thousands of men joined and armed themselves meeting in camps preparing to go to war within America. They were dedicated to bringing in a Christian fascist millennium. So you don’t think fake heavens and fake Jesuses exist? Oh, they do and all of them are created by Satan, who is the ultimate racist and anti-Semite. As Seth told us, these wonderful beings are waiting to give you the glistening experience of heaven that you expect. But behind the curtain is hell.
When WWII began William Dudley Pelley was convicted of sedition and went to prison. His Silver Shirt movement fell apart. When the war ended and he was released he continued his writing, founding a dirty, little cult. He died in 1965. At which point, I’m sure he had a very unpleasant awakening in the opposite of heaven. But let’s be clear about one thing. There is every reason to believe that Mr. Pelley was telling the truth about his NDE. The delusion of fake heaven was a real experience that changed his entire life, empowering every hate and stupidity.
In II Corinthians 11:4 the Apostle Paul warns his readers about people who preach a fake Jesus. Where do their lies come from? In every form, their source is the Father of Lies who can present himself as an angel of light. Filled with glory, he leads into eternal destruction all those who believe his fascinating illusions.
In John 14:6, Jesus Christ said, “I am the way the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” No one goes to the real Heaven except by receiving forgiveness for sin from the real Jesus, God’s Son, who gave His life to save you and me. Don’t be fooled, there is no other way. In the next essay we’re going to look at one of the most important experiences of a false Heaven that has ever been recorded.
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