From the time that they pronounced me deaf was a good 45 minutes.
They cut my clothes and then they paddled my heart, my heart had stopped.
And I could see people screaming and crying, but I didn't realize that was actually my
physical body because I was somewhere else.
The only thing that I could feel, if you could imagine, absolute love and peace, there wasn't
anything else to be felt.
I was greeted by people I'd known in the past.
I'm back home again.
Incredibly safe and felt at home.
Welcome to Round Trip Death, everybody, and welcome to our very special guest from South
Florida, Dr. Joy Pugh.
How are you today, Joy?
I'm doing good in the South Georgia, but I am very close to Florida.
But I'm in the very end of Georgia, down by the Okefenoke Swamp, where the most people
have heard about and cartoons and things of that nature.
We're going through a little cold snap.
And of course, it's really pretty in South Georgia.
I just appreciate you asking me to be on your show today and look forward to our discussion.
You're welcome.
And whether it's Georgia or Florida, we'll just call you a Southern Belle.
How's that?
Thank you so much.
I do have a little bit of a Southern drawl.
That's okay.
We like it.
Before we jump into your NDE and other experiences that you've had in your life, which are, there's
a lot of them, tell us just a little bit about you.
And I'm going to throw in first, you're a very prolific writer.
You've written a bunch of books.
Tell us a little bit about that in your life in general.
Well, I've written 15 books, and most of them are about the end of days and about end
of times.
So they are all nonfiction books that I write.
And then I have a couple of unique books that talk about my life.
One parables of joy on a Georgia farm that talks about a dream that I had when I was
six years of age and really saw what I believed was the end of time and actually absolutely
saw what I believed was Jesus.
And so since I was a little girl, writing and putting things down on paper have been
very important to me.
And I was fortunate when I was born that the first week that I was here on this earth,
my grandparents took me to church.
And of course, I came to know the Lord and was saved at the age of 11 in a southern Baptist
church here in South Georgia, not far from where I live.
And so all of my work revolves around the understanding of where we are in this particular
age in which we are living.
I mean, that was one of the things that I grew up wanting to know more than anything after
having this dream at age six, that I would live to see what I am now seeing in the headlines
across the world.
So everything that I have done in all the work that I do, again, is nonfiction and to
have had my work in a large variety, I guess, of platforms.
And I feel very, I guess, humbled because I feel like God really put me on a path to
do what I do.
And I really want people to understand that we are not just grains of sand floating in
the space.
Every one of us has a rhyme and a reason to be here.
And I think that's one of the things that over the course of my life and having seen
and heard about people who had near-death experiences, why I always incorporated that into my research
and why I always took the time to try to find people or to let people know that I was interested
in this field of work and would have them come and sit down and we would have a long
discussion and let me record them and talk to them and that kind of thing.
And really, my hope was is to take and correlate all that information together for people to
see that we don't die.
You know, Scripture has always told us that we do not really die.
It says, the physical body goes to sleep, but it never tells us that our spirit body
and our soul ever die.
So anything that kind of correlates to my work and confirms it gives it more credibility.
And in a world in which we are living now where fake news is the big thing, I want people
when they read my work to know that I have done every possible rabbit hole to make sure
that I give you the complete truth of what is out there.
And maybe that goes back because my undergraduate work for two years was in pre-law.
My father always wanted to be an attorney.
So when you read my work, I put you in a box and I kind of box you in with all the information.
I've thought about every possible possibility of every question you might ask in regard
to that particular thing that I'm discussing with you because I want you to know the truth
because I believe the truth will set you free.
Oh, I'll bet you haven't thought of all my questions.
I'm hoping that this is how I learned.
My listeners know I come up with some weird stuff and it's how I learn.
And so I appreciate it.
You mentioned end of days and end of time.
What's the difference?
Well, the end of days is what we see as it being like a 24-hour period.
And I think that that's the thing that's most interesting to me is how in scripture it talks
about that there will come a time when we will go through a period when everything will
change to something different than what it is now.
And because I've studied what light is and what pure light is, I believe that time actually
stands still from a scientific standpoint is that it is all-encompassing.
So it's not like our 24-hour days that we have on this planet because in reality, whether
you're on this planet or you're on Mars or if you're on Jupiter or Saturn, the days
are totally different.
So time in essence is different because it's spinning at a different frequency.
And frequency is something that I've been very interested in.
In fact, in my new book, Be Smart, that has just come out, I talk about a lot of what
frequency and how it affects us because time is really based on us, on the earth, but it's
not time in general because of infinity.
And then the end of time, we think about when we talk about Jesus and God and how our
Alpha and Omega, we can understand that from Alpha to Omega, and if we think about eternity,
then it's just on and on and on and on and on.
So the time that we know as a 24-hour period of time, once we either step into a field
of paradise or into a gate of hell, that time will become something that is eternal.
It's not like night and day, 24 hours, sun, moon, morning, the next day.
And people that have had NDEs say that when they were out of their body, away from here,
that time did not exist.
That's a very common thing that people say.
Totally different.
And I know that we're going to talk about what happened to me about 20 something years
ago, and that is that I feel like that I absolutely was out of my body.
I don't know whether I had quit breathing, have no idea whether I had quit breathing.
I was laying flat down on the bed next to my husband, and all of a sudden, which I was
usually a stomach sleeper.
I like to roll over and sleep on my stomach since I was a child, but it was like all of
a sudden I was standing on the outside of our bed on the side actually facing the lake
where I live, and the curtains were drawn behind me, and I could see the room clearly.
It was dimly lit like at night when you would be asleep.
And I remember standing there and looking at the bed, and I'm seeing myself laying in
that position flat on my stomach, and him actually sitting and laying facing straight
up looking at the ceiling, of course he was asleep.
And I stood there looking at that, and then all of a sudden I look down at me, and I'm
like, it's still me, and I am still here.
And then my mind, I knew, you know, my husband meowing the bed, I knew that that was me laying
there, but at the same time I was like standing out there knowing that this is me too.
And my mind was there, and I'm so processing all of this, and it's quite like, you just,
unless you ever have this happen, it's hard to describe how amazing that is.
It's absolutely amazing to know that you can get outside of your body.
You know, I'm standing there just observing everything because that's me.
I ask a million questions, I've always been that way, so I'm like observing everything,
everything.
And then all of a sudden it's like I'm pulled back into my body, and when I get back into
my body, immediately my eyes open up.
I remember the pillow being right in front of my face and taking my hands because I was
always athletic, just like a push-up.
And I took my hands straight up and pushed straight back into bed and come straight up
off the bed.
And I'm looking around because I knew that I had been outside of my body.
I was in exactly the position that I had seen myself in.
And of course my husband, who had been asleep, when I come straight off of that bed, pushing
back like that, and I'm just grasping for air.
So I don't know whether, again, I had stopped breathing.
I don't know.
But I will tell you, I was grasping for air and breathing very hard.
My heart was going 100 miles an hour, and I'm like looking at me and making sure I'm
okay, but it's like, what just happened to me?
And of course he's jumping up thinking something terrible is wrong, and he's trying to comfort
me, and I'm kind of just trying to get air in, and it's scaring him.
And then finally, when I finally quit doing all of that, and he's understanding that I'm
not dying or something weird thing, I'm like, you just won't believe what just happened.
And of course he was trying to console me, it'll be okay, you're okay, because I think
he was so scared by the way I was trembling and breathing.
But we finally talked about it a little bit, and at that point in time, I was not really
understanding what really just happened to me.
Did I die?
Was I dead?
There was all these questions just coming into my mind.
I remember that night, he laid back down, and I don't know if he ever went back to sleep,
but I'm going to tell you, Eric, I never went back to sleep.
I laid there, I'm looking at the ceiling, I look over to my left, and I'd see where I
had been standing, and I would look at, and it looked identical, the lighting in the room
at that time of the morning, everything.
So I had to have seen it.
It was not like I could have dreamed it.
I knew that what had happened to me was that I had been on face down on that bed, I saw
myself, I've been standing over there in front of those blinds, how the room, everything
looked, how he looked laying there, sleeping, everything, it was just everything.
And so I did not go back to sleep.
I don't know whether I didn't go back to sleep because I was scared that I had almost died,
and maybe I just wanted to feel my heart keep beating.
Maybe you were afraid it was going to happen again.
I don't know.
I don't think I'm scared of dying.
I just think it was just a revelation.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, but tell me more about that.
This was a very brief experience, and just to remind our listeners, NDEs, near-death
experiences include some other definitions like outer-body experiences, some spiritually
transformative experiences, things like that.
And I think some people, I don't know, maybe they don't give enough credibility or something
to an experience they've had because it was very brief, like what you're talking about.
And that's one of the reasons that I wanted you to talk about this today, because it's
probably more relatable to some people that haven't had their heart stop and they had
the big experience through the tunnel and the light and met other beings and things
like that.
These things can be very short and sweet, and as in your case, you can learn a whole
lot from it too.
Yes.
I think that that was the thing, is because I have always wanted to know what it was like
in the spiritual realm, and of course reading and scripture about where different prophets
were able to see in the spiritual realm and how they would talk about the things that
were there.
It just gave me, and I always believe this.
I believe God allowed that to happen to me so that the work that I do and the people
that I've talked to and that have had near-death experiences that I didn't laugh it off, that
I took them very seriously, that I ask every question I could ask of that experience, watching
how they reacted and how it manifested in their lives, how it changed their lives.
Because it's like this, it's like seeing is believing, and we know that even when Jesus
died on the cross, he had a disciple that said, unless I see him, I'm not going to believe
you all that he's alive.
Unfortunately, we're all that way, whether it be people seeing a UFO or a UAP, they call
them now.
Seeing is believing, and so I really believe that because the Lord called me to do the
work in the ministry that I do, that He has allowed many things, not just this, but many
things for me to have to walk through because my life has had a lot of hills and valleys
of things that people would never dream that I've walked through.
But it's allowed me to have that understanding at a level that you need to have when you're
dealing with people under certain circumstances.
And I think that made me, this experience made me understand definitely life after death.
Definitely my spirit body looks like my physical body.
Definitely that my mind is not laying in that so-called physical shell.
It is with me.
It has not left me.
I am always going to be me like scripture says, the spirit and the soul never die.
So the moment you step out of that body, you are you and you know who you are and you know
where you are and you know the people you're looking at.
So that helped me when I had people coming in to sit down to do consultations or counseling
or just wanting help to understand what did they go through and I need to talk to someone
about it.
And I think that gave me, if they wanted to take 10 hours, Eric, to talk about it, I took
10 hours to talk about it.
And you've done that for counseling and for your research.
I'm just curious.
Tell me maybe a couple of questions that you've asked that have come up that have had some
really sort of, oh, I don't want to call them outlandish answers, but some really special
fun answers.
And what are some of your favorite questions?
And I'll try to keep them in mind so I can do my job better here too.
Sure.
I had a, I'll talk about one of the near-death experiences, one of the guys that I knew.
He was married to a girl that I actually went to high school with.
She was a little bit younger than I was.
And he went down to have a liver transplant in Jacksonville and he was waiting to get
the liver transplant and he died on the operating table, was pronounced dead the whole nine
yards.
And so because the girl knew about my work, when her husband started talking about what
had happened to him, she says, oh, I just want you to tell Dr. Joy, please, please promise
me.
So her mother still went to church where I went to church and she told me that her daughter
and husband were really wanting to speak with me about something.
And unfortunately, Christians, unfortunately, don't want to talk about stuff like that.
They're scared.
I mean, I can tell you stories about people that don't want to stand up and say anything
about it.
I'm like, it proves to us that there's life after death.
But anyway, this man, he asked me if I would speak with him and I said I would.
And I listened to his story and of course he did exactly like what you normally see
in the situation where someone goes into kind of the paradise thing and not into the hell
situation.
But he was there, his heart quit beating the whole nine yards.
They were in the middle of trying to do the, put the liver in the and everything went south.
Okay.
And he said he immediately was hovering above his body and that he could see everybody.
He knew what was who put the people were in there and what they were doing.
The doctors, he'd hear them clearly.
Everything was happening in real time and that he was hovering above them and he was
watching all this happen.
Like me, he said, I knew it was me because I could look at me and see it was me, but
there was also me and they're on the operating table.
Dot dead.
And then he said it was like a quick pull and he felt like he was going on under miles
an hour through this tunnel.
And he said he got up in through the tunnel and that he started meeting people that he
had known throughout his life, like a grandmother, things of that nature.
And they, you know, he knew them and they knew him.
And as he got closer and closer up the tunnel that he got into this beautiful, beautiful
light and most all of the ones that I've ever, you know, talked with about this, they would
say the light you could almost feel it.
It felt like love.
It felt like you could feel, you could feel this love emotion that we typically maybe
feel in the arms of our grandparents or something that you, that you feel this thing.
And he said he could feel that emotion in the light.
And as he got closer in almost to the gates, he believed that the person that he met was
Jesus and that he told him he had to go back.
And of course, everyone that's ever had a near-death experience and saw Jesus, I would
tell you, not one of the cases that I've ever dealt with wanted to come back.
I don't care if they were young, old, had children, had grandchildren, were wealthy,
everyone that I've ever taught with told me, Joy, if I could have stayed there, I would
have never come back.
And I didn't want to hear you got to go back.
And he said that he was begging not to come back and that he heard someone call his name.
And he said, I turned to look to see what was, and he said, you can feel yourself coming
back down into, you know, this tunnel.
And he said, when he got to his body that he saw his, he was coming back and he saw
his body laying there dead.
Okay.
And as he's coming in, he said, the weirdest thing happened.
And I had never heard this before.
It's quite interesting to me.
He said, I flipped over and went in through my mouth.
So that was a feature.
That's unusual.
Most unusual feature that I had heard because I had never had anybody when I had interviewed
them.
How did you get back in?
I don't remember that I was laying flat on the bed.
So I just remember standing and then all of a sudden being faced down in the pillow and
pushing back.
So I didn't know how I got back in.
So that was an interesting feature that he said I rolled over and went right in through
my mouth.
And that's very common too for people to not remember how they got back in.
But I think it's interesting that sometimes it's somebody calling to you that brings you
back.
And in his case, it may have been a doctor.
Sometimes it's a loved one at bedside or something like that.
Other times, and I've probably had, I don't know, almost half the people that can tell
me about coming back into their body use a term like slammed into my body.
Like it happened kind of hard and fast and wamo.
And some people say, I didn't know how I could fit back in that body because I felt so big
in that body, it looks so little, all these kinds of things.
I think that's a fascinating topic right there, the whole coming back into your body.
Well, you know, the thing that I had often wondered, you know, I've studied things in
the Egyptian literature and they always talked about releasing the soul from the body and
they use some kind of thing that they opened their mouths with and locked into the jaw
some way.
And so I've never really gone into that aspect of trying to understand, but that it was to
free the soul.
But the interesting thing is, I think they opened the mouth as if the mouth was where
it was going out and coming in.
But he was the only person that I've ever had tell me that he literally saw how he went
back in his body.
And it was, you know, through the mouth.
Everybody else is just like I was, you were there one minute and all of a sudden your
eyes open and you're like, whoa, I'm back in and whatever.
And in lots of situations, it's very painful because this man talked about, he says, I
had no pain.
And he says, you go back into a body that's laying there that's been operated on, they're
trying to do the liver the whole nine yards.
And he says, you talk about excruciating pain when you're right back in and everything
is as it is.
And he talks about how they had no pain.
One of the most interesting ones, and I'll tell this briefly, I was actually involved
in a company where I interviewed people.
This man comes in and we get to talking.
And the first thing I noticed without saying anything is his whole face is totally destroyed.
I mean, he looked pathetic and that was keeping him from finding work.
So he was looking for me to help him find work in an area that would not be looking at
him physical parents.
And you kind of wanted to go, can you tell me what happened to you?
But without being forward, I guess, in some way, and I never wanted to make him feel uncomfortable.
But during the course of the conversation, he was talking about how he wanted to find
something like an accounting or whatever, where he was not going to be face to face
looking at people.
I said, so can you tell me a little bit about what happened to you as a child?
Because I thought maybe something, he was born that way.
He tells me that he's a young man in his late teens and that he was riding a bicycle.
He went to cross the street and didn't look at a car that was coming at another angle.
He looked back and when he looked up, the other car was at him.
And his bicycle hit the front of the car and his head went through the windshield.
And he said, Dr. Joy, the strangest thing happened and I don't want to sound crazy,
but I just want to tell you about what happened.
He says, because most people won't believe it.
Well, you know, I'm sitting there thinking, what is this man fixing to tell me?
And then he starts on a near-death experience.
Well, I want to tell you, Eric, I spent the other people that were waiting to be interviewed
by me had to wait a long time before I let that man out of my office because he literally
talked about the glass.
He saw all the glass stuck into him and to his eyes and how he looked.
He described it to a horrific situation, but he explained what I was seeing, how physically
messed up he was in his face and his brain and everything.
So he told about how his body, his head is stuck through that glass and how all the glass
in the windshield was stuck into him and that he realizes all of a sudden he's seeing himself
go through and he's hung in the windshield and then all of a sudden he is hovering above
his body and he can see his entire body.
He can see his bicycle completely crunched and he can see his body laying flat across
the hood and his head is through that windshield with all that glass.
And then he said he could hear people getting out of the cars and screaming and blood running
everywhere off of that car.
I'm sure it was horrific.
And then he could hear somebody calling 911.
He could tell you which direction people were coming, what they looked like, what kind of
cars they were driving.
And I was asking all these questions.
Then he told me he could hear the ambulance coming in the distance.
I mean, he was literally there hearing all of this stuff happening in real time.
He said, but Joy, the thing about it was he said, I wasn't hurting.
He says, I didn't feel anything.
I felt perfectly normal.
And he says, I'm looking at that body going, that is me down there.
He says, he was totally lifeless.
He says, I know that I was dead.
He said, I know.
He said, I was not moving.
My chest was, you know, my back was not going up and down like I was breathing more.
He said, I was dead.
And he said, but I was looking at myself going, I'm not hurting.
So then he said that he kept floating a little bit higher, a little bit higher.
And he said, you could just see all the area from where the highways came together.
And he said he just kept floating.
And then all of a sudden he was in that tunnel like everybody talks about.
And he was going and he started meeting people that he knew, grandparents, aunts, different
people like that.
And then he got to the Prilly Gates, the same situation, and talked about the beauty of
all that was there.
He didn't ever go into the gates, but he knew that it was heaven.
No doubt it was heaven.
And he said the colors, and that was another thing that the man that died on the table
with the liver transplant, he actually went on to do a presentation for churches because
he was in techno kind of stuff and he could kind of make it look like he saw it.
But they all said the colors are nothing like the colors here.
They're a billion times more bright and you could almost feel the colors.
They said that they were just beyond explanation as far as the colors were concerned and the
beauty of the plants and the trees and all the stuff that they were able to see.
But like happened with the other guy that had the liver transplant, this man encountered
Jesus.
He explained what he kind of looked like.
Again, he told he was going to have to go back.
And he said, I beg not to go back.
He said, I literally beg.
He says, you have to go back.
And again, he said he heard someone call his name and he turned and he said at the moment
I turned he was like, shh.
And he said, here I was now inside of an ambulance going to the hospital and that the guy goes,
oh my gosh, he's back.
You know, and he said, joy, the pain.
The pain was unreal.
I can only imagine just knowing how bad his face and skull and all the fractures that he
had, how he had to be in so much pain.
But he said he'll never forget that guy going, oh my gosh, he's back.
The ambulance people, he was gone.
They were having been working and working and working on him, trying to get back to the
hospital with him.
So it's pretty amazing stuff when you see the physical scars and you really realize what
was going on and you got the opportunity to really know these people.
And like I say, every person that I have had the privilege of knowing and doing this counseling
with or listening to their stories and trying to incorporate them in the research that I
do, every last one of them that had the near-death experience for paradise did not want to come
back.
And it's been all ages.
I was in Walmart one day and when a lady was checking out an old woman, she said to the
clerk, I'm just glad to be alive.
And so the lady looked at her and she says, oh, it's nice to be alive.
She says, yes, it is because she said, I died on a table in the operating room a couple
of weeks ago.
And the girl that was behind the cash register says, oh, really?
Oh, okay.
And she started taking my stuff and kind of pushing the lady away.
And I was thinking to myself, I'm not believing this.
I'm in line behind a lady that I just got to talk to.
So the lady took off and I'm trying to get this girl to get me checked out.
And I went running out in the parking lot.
As fast as I could to try to find this woman.
And I found her.
Her doctor was a doctor that had known all my life.
And so I said, look, do you mind if I talk with you about this?
And so we must have stayed in the Walmart a lot for about two or three hours.
And then I said, is it possible for me to call you and continue this conversation because
I want to know all of this?
But the interesting factor of hers was that the doctor knew her really well.
When she died on the table, Dr. Morgan, his sweetest guy in the world, he's passed on
now, but he was a great Christian man.
And I knew him very well.
He kept going, don't you die on me.
Don't you die on me.
Don't you leave me.
Because the woman was an older lady and had been friends.
And he was trying desperately with every recitation method possible.
And he kept screaming, don't you die on me.
And of course, when she did and everything went flatline, she saw all of that.
And she saw how upset he was and the people in the room were before she left out.
And then of course, had that same kind of situation where she went in and believes she
believes she saw that Jesus and the same kind of thing.
She heard her name.
She was back in the body.
And of course, they had already covered her up.
When Dr. Morgan found out she was still alive, he came to her room and she literally did
tell him, this is what happened.
And she said, and I'm going to tell you that I know that I was outside of my body.
And she began telling all the stuff that happened and how it was set up and who the nurses were
and what kind of stuff they used, things, medical terms that she would not have known.
And she said, but I'm going to tell you that you were screaming at me.
Don't you do this to me.
Don't you leave me.
So things of that nature, Eric, when you see all of this and you hear all this, it's amazing.
It's been an amazing ride for me to have had opportunities to get to know people on a personal
level about this and to have it be told to me.
Now, the ones that I've done where they actually saw hell remind me of the new movie called
After Death that has just come out the Angel Studios.
Yeah, I've seen it.
It's very well done for people.
If you haven't seen it, it's very well done.
It just came out at the end of October here in 2023.
There's also on our website, roundtripdeath.com.
There's a link to buy tickets there too, and people can find where it's playing around
them.
But go ahead, because the hell part is interesting.
The ones that didn't get the chance to see Jesus, really, if you go to see this movie
after death, you're going to see this man describe these black things that come to get
you and that you start falling into a blackness and that these beings or creatures start
gnawing on you and tearing you and pulling you.
And I will tell you that the people that I've interviewed that have had that happen, one
of them said that they saw this last light that was a little tiny like a pencil light
and that they started screaming, Jesus saved me.
And that the moment when they did that, that they started going back up toward the light
and that they came back into their body away from all that.
But those people, they don't do anything wrong.
They don't drink, they don't cuss, they don't smoke.
They go to church.
They are truthfully, you know, they know, they know they saw what hell was going to be like.
And they know that there is an afterlife and their lives completely changed.
Like on the on the show, you'll see that those people were very aware that they had been
in hell and that there is an afterlife and you better be choosing to follow into the
good side of life and not be choosing to follow into the satanic kind of side of life because
there is two places.
And that's one thing that I've noted.
There's either in a near death experience, either one in paradise or one in hell.
There's nobody floating around in purgatory.
Okay.
Hey, we're going so fast.
I'm going to take a step back real quick.
Sure.
One of the things that you mentioned about the person on the bicycle going through the
windshield of the car.
I find this fascinating and I've heard this before.
And that is in a traumatic accident like that.
It sounds like and in the case that you just mentioned, like that young man's body left
or spirit left his body before his head went through the windshield, which actually killed
him.
Right?
Yes.
I assume that it did.
He just said that when he hit the windshield, that he saw the glass coming and I'm not seeing
that with his own eyes going into the windshield.
Okay.
It sounded like you were saying he was observing it from just above, which may or may not have
been, but I've heard from other people that have been in traumatic accidents, automobile
accidents and things that right before the moment of impact or the moment of flying off
a cliff, they were already out of their body and not experiencing physically that trauma
until later when they came back in their body, which I find very interesting and people can
make whatever they want out of that.
I'm going to let that go.
Okay.
That's what I wanted to talk about because you had mentioned pastors in your faith and
you're very strong Christian and I have had a number of people on this show tell me after
their near-death experience, they just were dying to talk to somebody about it and they
thought, well, what better person than my pastor, my priest, my minister, whoever?
And I went in and I told this person and did not get the reaction I expected.
What a reaction that was like either that's something from Satan or you're crazy.
Let's talk about that for the religious leaders that are listening.
What can they learn from this?
Well, let me just tell you an experience.
I had a lady that I had known all of my life.
She was a doctor of education like myself and a very brilliant woman and she was a musician
and I was a musician, we had been together in the church for years and years and years.
She was a good bit older than I was and her husband had been a deacon for years and years
and years and years.
Wonderful.
So, I need school teacher at the whole nine yards and she goes into the hospital and dies
on the table and she has a near-death experience in which she is drawn into the tunnel, she
goes and she sees the whole nine yards, Jesus, paradise, the whole everything.
And again, she hears her voice and she turns and she ends up back in her body and she
would tell you or she did tell me if I could say, like I say, everyone that I ever interviewed
said they would have stayed.
But she was at a meeting one day and we were having a dinner and I did not know this had
happened.
I knew that she had been very sick and she had been in the hospital and all these kind
of things a couple of months before.
And so, I'm in line getting food and she eases up to me and she says, Dr. Joy, she says,
is it possible that you and I might have a few minutes together?
And I said, sure.
And she said, well, let's just see if we can maybe go over there and eat at one of those
tables and it was away from everybody.
And I thought, okay, well, she's got something and she feels like she needs to, you know,
cancel, have to cancel or talk with or whatever.
So I went over there and sat down and she sat down and from me she says, now I'm going
to tell you something.
And first of all, what I'm going to tell it to you about, she says, this is between you
and I.
And she says, and I don't want anybody else to know about what we've been talking about.
I said, fine.
She starts telling me this near-death experience.
And I'm like, oh my gosh, you know, because I've known her all my life.
I mean, I know from the way she, her expression, the way she's looking at me, the way she's
describing it, I have noticed there's no doubt in my mind that everything she is telling
me is exactly as she saw it.
So I'm getting what I feel the most credible witness that I could get about near-death
experience and getting to see what she saw.
And I'm like, oh, this is wonderful because I'm thinking, you need to stand up in the
church and you need to talk about this and you need to tell everybody.
And she goes, no.
And I'm like, what?
She says, no, because my husband and I, he's just scared that if I do that, everybody's
going to think I'm crazy.
And that happens, unfortunately.
And I was like, no, they won't.
People need to hear this.
But do you know until the day she died, she never stood up and did that.
And I'm going to tell you that that testimony would have been beyond words, Eric.
But I could not convince her.
You know, I'm the kind of person God gave me.
Like I said, I've had a lot of things happen to me, but I'm not afraid to stand up for
what I see and I believe.
You know, if you don't want to believe me, fine, but I'm going to tell it the way I saw
it, the most truthful way I can tell it.
And I feel like if you come at me with repercussions, though you're crazy, you're stupid, you're
off your DPN, whatever you want to do, you could go at me 100 miles an hour, but I know
what I saw.
I know what I felt.
I know what I'm aware of.
So, you know, I have never been affected by what other people think or do.
And thankfully God has always put me in positions that I didn't have to, like maybe working
for a company and they go, Dr. Joy, you can't talk about that.
It's kind of like when John Mack tried to come out about the UFO phenomena and they,
you know, wanted to slaughter people who opened the gates to that kind of thing.
Professionally, they tried to destroy people like that.
And I think in the same cases when your death experiences that that has been utilized in
some ways too, oh, you're crazy, that didn't happen, you know, conspiracy, whatever, to
keep the truth from being known.
And I've always had the scientific mind and the desire to know what God wants us to know
and be open and honest about it.
So when I see science and religion converging to prove what scripture says, Eric, I feel
that's the most important thing in the world.
But why are some religious leaders saying, no, that didn't happen, you're crazy?
I think that they're scared.
I don't think that they have a lot.
I hate to say it.
There are some preachers who are anointed and you can tell they're anointed.
There are some people that just want to go and be preachers and they learn what a book
says and then they just regurgitate the book.
But they don't know the book.
They don't feel the book.
They have not experienced the book.
And I think that's the difference.
It's kind of like playing basketball.
If you had to read the manual to play basketball, if you've ever read, and I encourage people
to do this, if you don't believe me, read how to just dribble a basketball.
And you've never seen a basketball and you don't know what dribbling is.
And see if you can figure out how to dribble a basketball, just reading about it, seeing
it, seeing the ball and absolutely having somebody show you how to do it makes a difference.
Because you feel it, you see it, you experience it.
And I think that's the difference is that there are some people who are so caught up
and let's just keep it based on words alone.
And that's not the case.
It's not the case.
And in Scripture, we know that there were times when even Jesus himself was transfigured
and his own disciples saw that.
And they wanted to build a temple to magnify what had happened there on that mountain when
they saw him be transfigured and he's talking to supposedly dead people.
And then he comes back and he's still alive.
Again, it's like seeing the Red Sea parting.
Okay, the Israelites saw that with their eyes.
They walked through it on dry ground.
But a lot of people think that they can go where they just walked across and need, you
know, need deep water.
They don't get the power of the miracle.
And I think that's the problem is that there are a lot of pastors who are not anointed.
They do not understand how science and religion can make religion provable more so.
I guess it's because we've been taught to keep science over here and religion over here
and never bring the two together.
And all the work that I do and all the books that I write, I bring the two together because
I believe, and maybe that's the study of a lawyer as a young person, is that if I can
make the case more true to what it is, then I want to use every element that's out there
to show you that this is how it really, truthfully is.
And it's sad because I believe truthfully, I believe there are at least 10% or more of
people in congregations who have had out of body experiences and near death experiences.
If they were allowed to stand up and tell their stories without somebody being critical,
putting them down, that that would give more credibility to people wanting to follow Jesus
Christ because they know there is an afterlife.
And right now, we just celebrated Halloween.
Look at all the death, look at all the stuff that you see this promoted in the squirrel
on a day of death, on a day of evil.
People don't get, I don't think they get it's real.
They really think that the devil is this little guy with these, with the pitchfork and horns
walking around and dancing on TV.
I don't think they get that we're talking about an eternity.
We're dropping the bucket at 100, we live all lived to be 120 years old on this planet.
That is a drop in the bucket as far as what will be eternal and forever and ever and ever
and ever.
And it's going to be one place or the other.
But our society is teaching people to think hell is going to be a fun place.
There is nobody that's had these near death experiences that says that was fun.
They weren't having sex, they weren't drinking at a bar, they weren't having an orgy.
There was no Satan guy dancing around in a red soup partying with them.
They were literally being tor- and eaten and pulled and all the stuff that scripture tells
us the worm never dies.
And I've told somebody, I said, even look at the tree that Moses encountered, you know,
the burning bush.
The bush was on fire, but it was not consumed.
When you are in an eternal body, you could burn and burn and burn and burn and burn and
burn and burn and you'd never be consumed because you're immortal.
But people are not putting that in perspective that it's either paradise or hell.
And it's not a fun place in the hell.
And they need to be paying attention about what it said.
I read the book, I'm probably sure you have too, that Bill Weiss wrote 23 Minutes in Hell
that was a New York bestseller.
I mean, if you look at that, it was a traumatic experience.
It was nothing positive.
If you go to see that after death movie, you're going to see that that was a terrible, horrible
thing to know that your body was being attacked in a spiritual dimension and you could feel
it.
And by the way, most of the experiences in the movie are positive.
Just I didn't want people to think it's all negative like that.
The reason that I brought this up about religious clergy a minute ago is not to put them down
at all, but to let them know, I think we need to listen more.
Amen.
Right?
I think there is something from these stories, whatever religion you're part of, I think there's
something from these experiences that people, number one, it's good for them to be able
to share and it's good for other people to be able to listen and learn from these things.
And if we do that in the right way, it can be a very faith promoting type of experience.
So that's why I brought that up.
I agree.
And I think, I think really angel production should be applauded for bringing this Christian
movie to the forefront about this concern because I'm like you, the clergy needs to support
that.
Okay.
Let's go back to when you were six years old before we finish up here.
We're going in kind of reverse order all over the place.
That's okay.
And you talked about a dream that you had.
Hey, I had dreams when I was six years old.
I can't remember any of them.
I can't remember a dream from last week.
This must have been very special.
Tell me why you can remember it and what you dreamed about.
Well, you know, it's one of those things that I, in my lifetime, I've had dreams and then
they stay with me.
So I have always felt like that it was more than a dream because most dreams, like you
say, you might remember first thing in the morning, then they're gone.
But this particular dream, I was just a little South Georgia girl living on a farm.
I was in the bedroom with my sister.
I was six years old.
I laid down to go to sleep like a little kid.
I am asleep.
And then all of a sudden I'm standing in this open field and I can see for miles and miles
and miles and miles.
And you misunderstand in South Georgia, we have pine trees and you cannot see for miles
and miles and miles.
So that was the first thing that I noted in the dream that I could see.
It was this huge valley, which no doubt in my mind, now that I've studied all of this,
that I was looking at the valley, which we know will be where the Battle of Armageddon
will be fought.
And the destruction that I saw and the way the sky was magenta and how it looked in
the destruction that was there was absolutely overwhelming.
And the thing that was most noted was the loss of almost like sound.
It was like, it was this weird, weird phenomena that I can't really describe.
It was bone chilling.
And of course now in the stream, I'm six years old.
I am looking at me and I'm this little girl and then I'm looking around and I'm looking
at all this destruction and how terrible it is.
And the thing, Eric, that I first realized is that there's nobody else left.
And I'm standing there and I'm thinking, oh my gosh, there's nobody else left.
And I'm alone.
And destruction was just, it was beyond words.
And so I was about ready to panic.
You can imagine being six years old and thinking, I mean, just imagine you can't find your mother
or father when you're six years old.
How are you panicking?
Imagine what I was feeling like looking at something that I had never seen anything
like in my entire life with fire and brimstone.
And just, it was just unreal.
I'm standing there scared to really dead and looking down at myself and I had my arm in
a sling.
It looked like he'd been wrapped.
And so I look around because I'm thinking, where can I hide and all this is terrible.
And so I looked kind of to my left and there was like these huge boulders and they were
jagged.
And I'd never seen anything big boulders like that.
I mean, in South Georgia, it's just sand and clay.
So I had never seen anything like boulders, like big stones on stack on top of each other.
Now that I know and have studied those stones look like the Temple Mount where you got these
huge stones and there, and there were same color as that.
And they were stacked like this, except everything was gone except this one wall side.
And so I'm thinking to myself, that's the only thing that's left standing.
I'm going to go run and get behind it.
And so I go running as fast as I can scared so bad and I run around the side of the wall
and there's this man larger than I stand in there.
I never forget he was dressed in this white linen.
He had this kind of gold kind of thing wrapped around his waist and he was staring out over
that wall.
His hair was flowing down on his shoulders and into his back and he had a beard and
he was looking at.
And he looked so sad, but almost like the wind was like blowing through his hair, but
you couldn't feel the wind, but it was like his hair was doing that.
And when I looked up at him and you know, it's kind of like going from being scared
to death, to seeing somebody there and you're not by yourself and I'm looking at your six
years old and this is most tragic, wonderful thing you've ever seen.
It's a wonderful thing to see somebody standing there.
And so he turned and he looked at me and when he did, all I can say is it reminds me of
the way people talked about the emanation of love.
You can feel it.
It was like I could feel that and his eyes were as blue.
I mean, Paul Newman's eyes don't even come clearly and Paul Newman to me had the most
perfect blue eyes that I've ever seen in my life.
They were all inspiring.
And it's like, oh my gosh, you know, just a little kid.
You're like, you know, and you could feel it.
You could feel his eyes.
You could feel his love.
And he looked at me and he was like, you know, I am with you always, even until the end.
And then all of a sudden I felt this feeling of like everything's okay.
And then I sit straight up in bed and I'm looking around and I'm going, oh my gosh,
you know, it's a little kid.
Well, it scared me to death.
So I go running down the hall to where my grandparents, they lived in the house with
us and I would run down the hall to where my grandparents are in the room, they were
in the bedroom down the hall from where I was.
And I went to my grandmother.
She was my my son, he's school teacher, but she was also the later in life, senior school
teacher, but she was just my confidant.
And I was like, I called her mommy and I was like, mommy, mommy, mommy, wake up, wake
up.
You know, it's in the middle of the night.
She's like, what, what, what baby?
What?
And I'm just, I gotta go to the church.
I need to go to church right now.
And this is a six year old kid and she's going, you know, what's wrong?
What's wrong?
She's trying to console me.
I'm trying to go because I'm thinking this is six and to happen.
I'm like, I've never seen anything like it, but I knew I wanted to go to the church like
right then.
So she gets up out of the bed, she comes, she walks me back down the hall, she puts
me back in the bed and she's, she's trying to console me and I'm going, we're going to
go to church right now.
We need to go to church right now.
And she was like, just calm down.
You just had a bad dream.
And I'm like, it's not a dream.
It's not a dream.
And I would, she'd go, just calm down, calm down.
And so she says, I'm gonna lay here on the bed with you just to get you to quiet and
down.
And so I was continuing.
I got to go, going to go to the church.
So finally she told me, she says, Joy, when it gets daylight, I will take you over to
the church.
Now, why I thought I needed to be at the church, I have no idea.
But it was almost like I felt like was the only place that you could have safety, that
there was something really bad coming and that I had seen it.
At that age, the next, that's morning when I, when daylight finally came, because I don't
think I ever went back to sleep because I could just see all that same stuff.
What it did to me at six, you know, because I had been in church like it's safe since
first week that was born, my grandmother always sticks to communion for the church.
And she would let my sister and I have the little great Jesus in the little bread at
the end.
Well, what happened, Eric, was now when it came time to communion, I wanted to take communion.
And she'd go, no, you know, you got to be 12 years old.
I believe that you had to be like the age of common ability to make a decision about
Christ.
I'm going to tell you from that moment on, when I would take and do that, I would think
about I knew, I knew.
So again, you know, I waited until I was 11 years of age and my sister was 10 and we joined
the church and gave her a life to Christ.
But I can honestly tell you, I knew that at six.
And I have, I told, you know, I told my mother and my grandmother and everything about that
I knew, you know, what was going on.
And I've told people, if you have a child at six years of age that tells you they're
ready to join the church, they're ready to give their life to Christ, you listen to them
because I knew the truth.
I knew the truth.
And sure enough, I had had preached that so much to my mother and my grandmother and my
sister who had heard it, that when she had a daughter, that child, that child at six
years of age wanted to join the church.
We were in church, that child wanted to join the church and she got up.
And I thought if somebody says, you're not going to let that child go down there and
give her a life to Christ, I'm going to stand up and give a testimony that she needs to
be accepted at six years.
Well, because of what I had gone through, they allowed her to join the church and give
her a life at the age of six.
I knew the truth then.
I understood it.
I knew that this was going to happen to me in my life and from that day on, I had been
searching, reading the Bible.
And what Jesus told me, I couldn't even read hardly other than run, spot, run, you know,
when you're six years old in the first grade.
I mean, that's a long time ago.
That's about where I was at as far as reading.
And then a couple of years later, I run across the very thing that Jesus says, you know,
you're not alone, I'm going to be with you always, even until the end.
And I thought it was weird because the word is, I will be with you always instead of always.
And he said, always, just like it was in the scripture, but I had never read that.
You know, years later, I'm like, oh my gosh, that's what he told me.
So it was confirmation.
And so then that led me on, you know, when I became 13 years of age, I sat down to read
the book of Revelation because I wanted to know the truth.
And how Lindsay's Great Late Planet Earth came out.
And I was in a Rexall drag store with my mother.
And I saw that book and picked it up off the little rack that went rounding around back
in the day.
So little paperbacks.
And I looked at it and I went running up to her.
I never forget the counter.
I said, mama, please buy this book for me.
She looked at me and she says, what is this?
And I'm like, I want to read this book.
And I'd always been an avid reader.
I always loved reading.
She finally gives in.
Eric, I went home and in that afternoon, I read that entire book.
And for the first time in my life, I was like, oh my goodness, somebody really understands
what I saw.
But that was almost seven years later.
And if anything, you know, a lot of kids would laugh and cut up and have fun days and stuff.
It made me go inward because I would ask a hundred million questions of my Sunday school
teachers.
I had one man that would come out and look at my grandmother and go, Miss Selma, I don't
know where Joy comes up with these questions, but I don't know how to answer them.
I have no way of answering her questions.
She's asking me things because I would talk about what I, you know, be asking questions
about the end of time and what does this mean?
What does this mean?
They could not answer.
Don't worry about it, don't worry about it.
It's just symbols.
It's not right for us to know.
We probably will never know.
It's not something for you to worry about at this age, but Eric, it was.
And I never got away from that.
From the time I had that dream, it has been something that's always been a part of my
life.
I went on to school and studied to be a lot of different kinds of things.
I went on and got my doctorate, but I'm going to tell you the majority of books that I was
reading was still trying to find those answers.
That we are living at the end of days that I'm going to see this happen.
And I want to know everything I can know about our afterlife because it's real.
And the more I can give people true evidence and show them, then they can't be doubting
Thomas's anymore.
They will come to the truth and make wise decisions because we know, and I know that
my mind and my spirit body was just like this physical body that I'm walking around in.
And that it will live forever.
Jesus resurrected.
I mean, a lot of the research that I do is on the Stroud of Turin.
It clearly shows that he resurrected through that cloth and that one day all of us are
going to have a resurrected body that we do not literally die when he told the thief on
that cross that begged for him to remember him when we came into his kingdom.
Jesus said, this day you will be with me in paradise.
He didn't say you're going to be laying out there in the grave.
See, that's the thing that most people think is that all those people are laying out there
dead in those graves waiting.
No, they are not.
The moment you stop breathing, you are either headed to paradise or headed in the gates
of hell and the parable of the rich man and Lazarus that Jesus taught in scripture tells
you Lazarus was in hell.
He was begging for somebody to cool his tongue.
I have two more quick questions before we wrap up and we're about out of time here.
Recently one of our episodes, we had an interview with a woman and her NDE was spectacular.
It was long and detailed and she met all these various people and I've had a couple of people
asked me since, do you believe that one?
Now I try to be very non-judgmental on this show.
Also if I feel when I'm doing the interview or previous to the interview, like maybe there's
some mental instability or something else going on, then it doesn't become part of the
show.
So my question for you is, how do you know who to believe and not believe when you hear
these things?
Well, I guess I've done them so much now that usually the first thing is that they don't
want anybody else to know.
If I got somebody that wants everybody to know and I want to write an article about it and
I want to become famous and maybe be on CNN talking about it, then I have a little bit
of a question.
But that doesn't mean it's a lie.
It's not true.
That's right.
That's what it means.
But it just doesn't seem that the people who really are genuinely wanting to know, did
this really happen to me and what I saw, what does it mean?
What is your research told you about this?
How does this line up with what other people say?
One thing that I have had a great opportunity and I think that the Holy Spirit has given
me is discernment.
I feel it.
I feel it's because I work with handicapped people and you had to read body language.
Body language will tell you so much in a person because sometimes people, they can't speak
good or they can't clearly tell you information and then they may do it in childlike terms.
So you've got to be looking at other things than just the person's words.
So I think discernment and body language and the ability to tell the story clearly over
and over without changing anything.
It doesn't become something different in time.
If you, it's like when I saw the dream, I saw it, but I remember that dream like if
I could close my eyes and relive it right now and see it.
And lots of times when I'm talking about it, I can see it happening.
I can literally visualize it.
So the people that I greatly have talked to, I have not run into anybody except one person
that I felt like had read something and used that to get in to see me, to just see what
I thought about it.
And I just never felt that connection that really happened.
And if it did happen, it happened the way they said it did.
But other than that, the people that I talked to, I think were as genuine in describing
it exactly to the T and really not caring about getting any kind of notoriety.
You know, I just say, well, you know, I'll never use your name.
Would it be okay if I discuss this on a radio show if I write about it or whatever, you
know, that middle-aged woman came to me, I ran into you at Walmart, those kinds of things.
Nobody's going to know who your name is.
So it's never like take my name and put it out there, anything like that.
But I always felt in the discernment area of my life, and I have to do that a lot with
what I do, that I felt like everything was truthful.
And like I say, only on that one time that I feel like that there might have been, can
you help me get popular or something of that nature?
Right.
And I hope that we've never had anybody on this podcast that has made some things up,
but there's no way to prove one way or the other.
So I just want to give people sort of a little tool, you know, of how they can know for themselves
when they hear things and discernment makes sense.
And that is a talent that we can develop and become better at.
My last question is this, I love to leave our listeners with some kind of a message
of hope.
So from all of your experiences and all your interviews and all your research and all this,
can you capsize this very briefly into a message everybody is going to put a smile on their
face today?
Okay.
Your soul is your greatest asset.
It's going to end up in one or two places.
Choose wisely.
Is there any question that there is an afterlife or not?
In my mind, there is an afterlife.
And because of what happened to me, I honestly will tell you that it is a great knowing and
it is once you know, you know.
So live your life not believing that it's lights out or you're some grain of sand floating
on a beach somewhere that everything is this has no meaning.
That's the one thing that I found in the research that I did for my book, Be Smart, is that we
all have a DNA that's vibrating.
We all have our own song and our own teen and our creator knows our song.
That's beautiful.
Thank you so much, Dr. Joy.
I appreciate your time today.
Listen, Eric, thank you for having me on this podcast.
I've enjoyed it so much.
Thanks again for listening and sharing this podcast.
If you've had a round trip death experience, we would love to hear from you.
Send an email to eric at roundtriptest.com.
Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.