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, welcome to RoundTripDeath everybody.
And please, please give a big smile and welcome for our special guest today, Randy K.
How are you, Randy?
I'm great, Eric, and thank you for having me.
Well, you're welcome.
I've been trying to get you on the show for a while and we finally lucked out and got
a little hole in your schedule.
You are a busy man.
Would you mind telling us a little bit about you before we get going?
Yes.
Well, we're both busy and I think most people tend to be that way.
I won't go back to childhood if you don't mind.
I won't go back that far.
I aspired toward a career in business and medicine.
So I was a bit strange in that way.
And I was an agnostic, by the way, in my youth.
I went to Northwestern University.
I was an agnostic at that point, tried to disprove all religions.
That's how ardent or militaristic I was in my agnosticism.
So anyway, I graduated from there, went on to work for Proctor and Gamble in Cincinnati,
Ohio, right out of school, fondly called P&G or Proctor and God.
And we were in a very straight-laced environment to be raised in a corporate environment.
And then I was part of a startup of a healthcare division in that company.
Now, apart from anything they'd done previously, but then I knew from my work with P&G that
the model really was Johnson & Johnson.
They were the largest healthcare company in the world.
So I jumped ship and I went on board with Johnson & Johnson, spent much of my career
there and then kind of caught the entrepreneurial bug.
I came down to San Diego and then I worked with a company as a corporate operations director
for a company called the Lawn Pharmaceuticals.
At that time, it was the fastest growing pharma company in the world.
We were launching an Alzheimer's drug that would be a potential cure and our scientists
were on all of the major networks and we were out in Washington, D.C. We were on the front
cover of Time Magazine.
It was a big deal.
And then we had some patients in last late stage clinical trials who developed encephalitis,
which is a swelling in the brain.
And so the FDA recalled that drug.
Well, immediately overnight, we lost millions of dollars and much of our savings.
And so I went over to a biotech company.
I was a CEO of a biotech company and spent some time there and anyone that's aware of
that kind of motor supper on day with a startup, you have to raise money.
And so I was doing dog and pony shows around the country and eventually I had to raise
about $80 million and it sounds outrageous, but that's kind of how it goes in that environment.
I decided to divest the company and we had invested much of our resources, remaining
resources into that company.
So I worked then in the cardiovascular space.
I went from neurology to cardiovascular and minimally invasive heart surgery at a clinical
team.
We went in and we taught surgeons how to not crack the chest.
They could do it through ports and they could perform valve replacements and the patient
could be out within a matter of a couple of days as opposed to weeks.
From that, I went into consultancy and still worked for that company, but long story short,
that's where it leads into the near death experience is that I went out to try to join
my alma mater, Johnson & Johnson, and I was eventually offered that job.
But what happened is after coming back from the series of interviews, I ended up waking
up in San Diego or home overnight at three o'clock in the morning.
My calf was swollen.
I couldn't walk down the stairs.
I foolishly tried to bicycle up the coast thinking I had maybe a muscle strain.
I should have known better.
That exacerbated the condition I had.
It was a straight road and it seemed like an incline and I would be dead in a matter
of just a few hours.
Wow.
Because you had this scientific background, you mentioned you were agnostic, but really,
did you believe in God and an afterlife at this point of your life before your experience?
I did believe in God.
I remember staring out the window, my window, looking out at the sky and saying to this
unknown God, if you're out there, I need to know you more than pages in the book.
I had some, I have to be honest, I had some hostility toward Christians and other religious,
I call them zealous at the time.
But eventually, I had a severe accident, which the reports, and this was in Cincinnati, on
the news where there was a fatality and the fatality was me and they had to correct the
news that I had survived.
The car was just completely crushed.
I was in a coma, when I was in a semi-coma for a few weeks and I remember, I could just
stare at the ceiling when I came to.
I think that incident really changed me.
And oddly enough, it opened me to this unknown God.
And so, eventually, I walked into a church, which was like, to me, that would be like
a parting of the waters, you know?
That was a miracle.
Full miracle.
A personal miracle.
Yes.
And then I prayed and I became a Christian.
So I became the person I, well, I'll say it, I'm the person I hated.
But I didn't, Eric, I didn't believe in near-death experiences.
I was as ardently because of the scientific kind of foundation and how my mindset was,
I thought they were contrived.
I thought they were either imagined or there was some other explanation.
But I didn't set out to disprove NDE years like I did a lot of religious people or Christians.
But I still, anytime, you know, I saw something, an article or whatever, I thought it was just
imaginary.
So let's do this.
Let's go back to this day that you went for the bike ride.
This was the day and I'm going to give kind of a spoiler alert here.
We have a pulmonary embolism coming up.
So what are the symptoms of that?
What were your symptoms and did you have any idea what was coming?
Well, it's a good question because I think this will be helpful to people in general
because I was a normally healthy individual, exercised.
But pulmonary embolism essentially is a blood clot.
The longer you let it go, especially if you go exercising like I did and bicycling up
the coast, the more pressure you put on the calf, the more pressure blood flows, pushes
from the calf to the upper leg.
The vessels get larger.
Therefore the blood clots get larger.
And by the time I was in the emergency room having collapsed, there were seven of them.
And they had occluded, that is they had stopped the blood flow into the lungs because the
pulmonary artery is the main artery or the artery for blood flow to the lungs.
So when we say a deep vein thrombosis, which is usually in the calf, that's a blood clot
in the calf.
When we say pulmonary emboli, emboli being plural because there are several clots, that
means it's in the valve, blocking the valve to the lungs.
So it's the third leading cause of death.
There was a patient who came in previously in the morning who died from this lesser case
than mine.
The doctor came in after the test, D dimer, which is tests blood clotting, CAT scan and
so forth.
And he said, you were a walking dead man.
We just haven't seen somebody at the severity of what you have who has survived.
And they were going to helicopter me to a specialist who had opened, cracked the chest
and tried to remove the clots, but they decided I would be dead by that time.
So it was kind of a wait and see that pumped with heavy doses of anticoagulants, blood
thinners that would eventually cause some bleeding in the brain.
And then of all things, I contracted MRSA.
There was a patient next to me who had MRSA.
And the MRSA exacerbated my condition, so I was blood clotting now throughout my body.
For example, the doctor came in to draw blood from my arm and could not do so.
It was like a traffic jam of clots now through my body.
So I was literally at that point at a state in which there was no viable way or no interventional
way for me to survive.
So what did you do?
I mean, you're there in the hospital.
Did you have family around?
Were you saying goodbye?
Or did it all just happen too fast?
It happened very fast, Eric.
And I called my wife and I said, this is serious.
I mean, that's when I could speak because there was a point in which I couldn't speak,
of course.
I had to have the intubation.
And I knew that having been in the medical field that there was a likelihood that I would
succumb to this.
And I was on the bed and I was just in a state of panic at that point.
And eventually as this was progressing and progressing to the point of non-viability,
I started flopping around on the bed like a fish out of water.
I was out of control.
My entire body was giving out and just fighting to survive.
And then I went still.
And I was still on the bed, the reason I can tell you I was still is because immediately
after that happened, I felt like a tugging at my shirt, my hospital gown.
And that's what it was.
Like it felt like that.
And I felt that was the, I didn't know at the time, I feel now that it was my spirit
coming out of my body.
And I could see my body, my still body.
My first thought was, well, this is strange because the prior thought was I was out of
control and now I was looking down and I was being pulled up.
I know that sounds cliche, but there was a light and it was pulling me up at a rapid
pace and then it was somewhat galactical in what I was looking at.
Again, I'm a scientifically minded person, so this is all, I'm on the ride now.
I'm not able to interpret any of it, but then I'm in a space that is very different.
It's not heaven.
It's a space just that was more the next phase of this journey faded.
There was a faded background of hills and then there were figures on either side.
There were, again, this sounds fantastical, but they were gargantuan in size.
And on the right side, that light was shining on them as it was on me and they were battling
over these figures on the left side, which were also very tall and very gangly.
And I thought, well, I didn't think, I thought, I am on this ride and I don't know what's
going on.
I was seeing these things and I had impressions from what was going on and I believe I was
in the place of spiritual warfare looking back.
Much of what I've been able to assimilate, Eric, has been from my having to digest what
I was observing versus in the moment I was just taking it in.
Sure.
And this was how many years ago?
Well right now, it's almost 19 years ago, so it's been a while.
So you've had a lot of time to digest it.
Mm-hmm.
You've had a lot of time to digest it.
For 14 years, I did not share it at all.
I didn't want to share it.
I would not share it.
That's so typical.
Yes.
Yeah, that is very typical.
I have a couple of questions up to this point.
First of all, the warfare thing I don't hear about a lot when I interview people.
Do you have an idea of who was at war and why?
I believe I was in the angelic realm.
Again, looking back on this, a lot of study and prayer and what have you, as you said,
it takes a lot of time, years, oftentimes to digest the reality of what was this all
was.
It's not defined by any clinical studies or the like.
And I think I saw warfare over my soul.
I just understand that, if you will, that when I went into this experience, I was at
a point of consternation.
That is, I had some serious doubt about God.
I had lost my finances.
I went from having a nice home in San Diego near the ocean.
I had thought I achieved success.
I'd been promoted 14 times within the corporate arena.
I was heading up operations and it was virtually lost overnight.
And then my daughter suffered strokes.
And so I was paying on average about $1,000 a day, sometimes upwards of $5,000 a day for
her treatment.
So it's just the perfect storm.
So my wife and I were in a coffee shop and we were drowning our sorrows in lattes.
And we were talking about this, how we went from the pinnacle to the actual dump yard.
And I said, well, at least we have our health.
And she saw me in a crisis of faith.
Because she said, where's God?
I said, where is he?
I cried out.
I prayed.
Where is he?
And so that was a crisis of faith.
But I said to her, finally, I want to end with this, Eric.
I said, at least we have our health.
Two weeks later, I was dead.
So another thing that a lot of people tell me, and then we're going to keep moving on,
I'm sorry to slow you down a little bit with your story.
But is some people, as they are leaving their body in a hospital room?
Yes, some go straight through this tunnel.
Some immediately are in some other place.
Some hang around in that room.
And they're like up in the corner of the room, watching what's happening to their body.
It sounds like you had a little bit of that before you moved on.
If so, tell us, what did it feel like when you're looking down and seeing your body that
now the heart has stopped?
And honestly, Eric, I didn't feel much of anything.
I mean, I was just in a state where I had been kind of a control freak, if you will.
And now I had to give it up.
I mean, I was forced to give it up.
I was just in a state not of a reasoning mind as I would try to reason everything to one
of just taking it in and trying to assimilate it in some fashion.
So especially in the place I was, I think there was something going on, a battle over
the rise of my soul, because there were times when I would fear and be anxious.
And there were other times where I had peace and joy.
And so I think that had to do with the warring that was going over the rights to speak into
my soul.
I can't express it any other way.
That's after the fact, of course, but at the time it was happening, I was just looking
at this bizarre, these bizarre figures in this space that I couldn't really put together
in the context of our world.
I was just viewing it.
I was watching it.
But I knew that I had this, I still had an inkling of faith left.
And so I cried out the name of Jesus.
I mean, this was not just a tempered cry.
I mean a full-fledged, desperate cry of Jesus.
I just said his name.
And immediately I was just pulled, yanked, and I was cheek to cheek with this figure.
And I could feel the bristles on his cheek, or my cheek, excuse me.
And I dropped to my knees.
The first thought I had was, so this is love.
So this is love.
I knew love is an emotion, had loving family members and friends.
But this was different.
That was a person of love.
And I was like, I just started sobbing.
I was like a wet rag.
He reached down, turned around, reached down and pulled me up gently.
He turned me face to face with him.
And I looked into the eyes of love.
And they tunneled into every dark place within me, illuminating me with the love of Jesus.
And all of my doubts evaporated.
All was a perfect peace.
And I thought, I rejected him.
I knew him.
I didn't know him.
I rejected him once.
I rejected him twice.
And he leaned over in my right ear.
He whispered two words.
He whispered, trust me.
And certainly I had never been a trusting person.
I had always had to prove things, including God.
And those two words said everything to me.
And they still speak to me to this day.
And then he took me on a journey of my life.
I went through a series of life reviews.
And we started as early as when I was a little boy watching at a wake of my uncle Carlisle.
And then he walked me through my childhood.
And then he walked me through what happened to cause my agnosticism.
He showed me what that event was.
And I can tell you if you'd like me to share that.
And then he walked me through to the point where I was prior to rejecting him again and
saying, you know, you've abandoned me, God.
And each time.
So here's the thing, Eric, is that every time I failed, every time I just, I mean, really
failed, that those failures didn't condemn me.
They just reflected the grace of Jesus, the grace of God in all of those times.
In other words, he wasn't trying to, you know, shame me.
He was showing me how he kind of weaved together my life to bring me to that point where I
could see the God of love.
And it was the most amazing journey because the life reviews, they weren't like watching
a movie theater, the screen.
They were real.
I was there.
And each of those events in these sequence of events that he had called out, called CULLED
out to show me why I was the way I was, how I became the person I was.
And it was incredible.
I was seeing not just every facet of my life, but the ones that were chosen somehow to reveal
God's redemptive plan.
There's no way else I can explain it.
I'd like to know exactly what you're feeling as you're going through that because you're
feeling his love.
But didn't some of these experiences have you feeling guilt, shame, some of those kinds
of emotions as well?
Not really.
No.
I mean, I thought I would think before going into this that it would cause shame or guilt.
But I just, I felt overwhelmingly that he wanted to forgive me more than I wanted to
forgive myself.
He wanted to save me more than I wanted to save myself.
And it was incredible.
I expected Eric to be judged and judged according to my sins because, again, I had doubted
him.
I had multiple occasions.
I had persecuted Christians.
I got them off campus.
I was really ardently against anyone who was a religious nature.
So no, I didn't feel that way.
I never felt that way.
And that, looking back, absolutely shocked me.
That first thought that I had being cheek to cheek with him was, so this is love.
So this is love.
And I've experienced love with family and friends, whatever, but this was consummate
love.
This was the person of love.
And so therefore I did not feel condemn.
I felt like I was, I was just loved through all of my failures because he knew my heart.
I want to talk about this love.
Someone that hasn't felt it, but they have felt some other kind of love in their life,
a love of a spouse, a love of a new baby, things like that.
How can you compare this?
I ask people all the time, explain this love to me, even though it's inexplainable, try
to put it into words.
Explain the impossible.
Well, I could explain the greatest superlative or the greatest love experience we've had,
whether it be a love of a parent or a love of a spouse or a love of a child, whatever
it is, multiplied by thousands of times.
And it would be minuscule, minuscule.
It would be like trying to explain the color blue.
It was the person of love was the first time and only time I have met love.
And I mean met the person of love.
So when we say love, God is love or, you know, that there's this presence that is love, I
think it somewhat demeans it.
That is God, the God or the God of love.
I think the closest comparison I could have to what that felt like was that I was the
most important person in the world.
It was like, and that's how I felt.
I felt like, I knew that God was looking over millions of people, but I felt like I was
the only one that mattered.
I was the only one he cared about.
I felt like I was the cast me out.
I was the end all be all.
I felt like I was it.
And it wasn't an eotistical feeling.
I just felt like I was what this was all about.
And I knew it was for everyone else that God felt that way.
But I felt that I was the most special person in the world.
And I've never felt that way with anyone.
I've never felt that degree of exclusivity, absolute devotion, absolute attention, absolute,
unfettered.
You know, people say, I love you and they've got, they're thinking of 10 different things.
He was thinking just of me, just of me and me exclusively.
And I know that happens for everyone.
But that's how I felt.
I was the most special person in the world.
It's hard to comprehend.
All right.
Everybody's going to be curious and you probably get this question a lot.
You saw him face to face.
What did he look like?
Yeah, that's probably the most common question.
And I hesitate to answer that because that's not what he was about, but I'll, I'll, I'll
try to.
And I totally get that.
And I almost hate to ask it.
I'm just trying to ask what's on people's minds.
Absolutely.
I know.
And that's, that's important to try to answer.
So this, this light was emanating from him.
Brilliant light.
And I believe because I was a spirit body at that point, I could, I wouldn't, I wouldn't
be destroyed by that light because I had, I could, the light penetrated through me and
it was immense and it was powerful.
And yet there was the figure that I could see.
I began with the eyes because that's what impressed me the most.
They were what I would, what I term now the colors of the ocean.
You know how the light refracts against the water, especially the ocean.
And it can be browns and blues and greens and beautiful colors.
And that's how I explained his eyes.
I know people get mired in blue, brown, black, whatever.
They were a mix of colors in an effervescence that was unlike any person I've ever met.
And there was of course the beard and there was the middle eastern look, kind of the nose
was a bit crooked and long.
The hair was long about shoulder length.
And there was a little bit of a hair, a piece of hair, his hair over the ear.
It was, it was wavy.
He was about, about my height.
I'm six feet.
So who was about, if we're at parody, he was about six feet.
And then there were the hands.
Now there was an impartation through the head, that hug.
Oh, oh, oh.
You must miss that.
Oh, I miss it to the end, I long for it every single day, Eric.
I long for it every single day.
I miss him.
I miss him so, so much because he wouldn't let go.
He wouldn't let go.
I was sobbing.
I was crying even now.
I'm just the after effect, you know, almost 20 years, 19 years.
And it was so powerful.
And yet he hung on to me.
And I knew he would hold on to me.
And there was a time when we were walking in heaven that he told me I was going to return.
So I had these vignettes of, that were amazing.
He showed me when I gave up on, well, I didn't give up on God.
I just, well, he showed me when I turned against him.
And then he showed me so many different vignettes, living waters and, and the people.
And I saw this, I don't know if you want me to talk about this, Eric, but I saw these
I saw a woman.
I'll, I'll leave it with this.
But so there was this woman who was painting this brilliant landscape.
Absolutely brilliant.
I mean, of heaven, of heaven, the undulating waters, like, like thousands of millions of
melted diamonds, trees growing before me and all of the fragrances beautiful and flowers,
colors of a different varieties.
Anyway, all of this is going on.
She was painting this landscape.
And I asked Jesus, I said, well, what, she's a master artist.
She's like, she could put to shame the master artist, you know, that we can, we would think
of in this world.
And he told me that it wasn't that way in this world.
She didn't have a mastery of art, that maybe she was a step above my artistic ability,
which is one step above stick figures.
But she certainly wasn't a master artist.
But in heaven, what he told me is that she always wanted to paint loved art, even though
she wasn't a good artist on earth, the mastery of her desire, her love of art came to its
greatness in heaven.
And that was, that was true of everyone.
I knew it implicitly.
I loved to write and I don't consider myself a great writer, but I love to write.
I was trained in writing and journalism.
My first job actually was in journalism.
And I felt like I could write a masterpiece that would rival Shakespeare in heaven.
That's just, I felt, and I felt like the person I always wanted to be.
I felt like I was perfected in heaven to the point where the person I always wanted to
be was in heaven.
And that was absolutely incredible.
And I realized during the journey that I was essentially seeing through the eyes of Jesus
because I was loving people more.
I was seeing things with greater wisdom or understanding.
And all of these things were the cumulative effect of that impartation that I felt initially
that was that light from Jesus that illuminated every dark place within me.
And now, now, I was at home.
And this was home.
This, I still to this day, I consider that place home.
I'm like an alien, I feel like, in this world.
You keep answering my questions before I ask them.
I was just going to ask you that very thing.
Did it feel like home or did you feel like an outsider and thank you for the perfect
answer?
Before we move on, tell me what else you're seeing.
Did you see other people?
Did you see beautiful landscapes?
What are you seeing here?
I felt, yes, I felt a lot of them.
The artist was one example.
I saw all over.
I saw them traveling from abodes.
I saw them nestling with animals of all varieties.
I saw including lions and what were, you know, they weren't feasting on prey.
They had a gentle nature about them.
In fact, there was one instance where I was bullied when I was a child.
I was severely bullied and I was sick, sickly, a sickly child.
I was in and out of the hospital.
So I was very, and I stuttered and I was overweight.
Anyway, I had this little dog, Casey, and Casey was my savior.
I had no friends as a child growing up.
And my parents gave me this little fox terrier, Casey, and he was my only friend, really,
growing up in grade school and junior high school.
And so he had passed away when I was in college.
He was jumping up and down.
And there was Casey.
It was Casey.
And Jesus said, see, I give you the desires of your heart.
And I spent a little time with Casey, held him and then set him down and he ran through
some pastures into those flowers.
And this river was running all through heaven.
And then there was an occasion, and Jesus was by my side the whole time, the entire time,
when he wasn't by my side.
He was across the river.
He was holding these two bottles.
They looked like flask full of water.
And these rivers were just pristine, crystal clear.
And I didn't know what that was about.
So I asked him and he said, I've been collecting your tears during your life.
And then what he did next, he took them and he poured out those waters.
I'll call them living waters into the stream.
And then he came by my side and I felt compelled to reach down into the waters.
And so I reached into these waters that he poured my tears into.
And I drank them and I was so full of life and joy and overflowing, overflowing everything
that's positive.
And it's immense joy and then he did something which was incredible.
He reached down and he did the same and he baptized me.
He poured the water over my head.
It's the most amazing thing.
The refreshment.
It came from those living waters that just seemed to flow through me.
I could feel, I could feel it in my body.
It wasn't just the top of my head, like we would pour water.
I could actually feel them infused through my body.
It was the most amazing sense.
And I'll just end with this, Eric.
You talked about being at home and I feel like heaven is more real than this world.
Heaven is more real than this world.
I know it.
I know it's more real than this world.
How did it end?
Were you told to go back?
Yes.
Yes, I was in one of those fields and a butterfly rested on my left shoulder.
And I knew everything in heaven was intentional.
There's nothing happenstance.
Everything has purpose to it.
And so I asked Jesus about that and he said that the butterfly, which rests beautiful
butterfly by the way, just iridescent in multiple colors, he said that butterfly represents
wisdom that will guide you when you return.
He was telling me that I would return.
And it was the first time I really lost my peace.
And I so much wanted him to say to me when I came there, well done, my good and fifth,
in the Bible, I so much wanted him to say something like that.
But he was saying I had to return.
I felt like a little kid who woke up on Christmas Day and looked at his presence and was told
to go back to bed.
I just was absolutely distraught that I would leave my home.
And then I asked him for a blueprint.
Now I was a type A person.
I planned out five, 10 years ahead.
So I asked him for the plan for my life.
And he refused me.
He said if I were to give you, show your life, you would not remain dependent upon me.
And then he said moment by moment, I will reveal your purpose to you.
Really transform me not just there in heaven, but to this very day.
Because now I'm not looking for the next wrong that leads to the next wrong and so forth.
I'm not doing any of that.
I'm totally, I'm in a ministry.
I'm Randy King ministries.
I am focused to by and large, my stinking thinking gets in the way sometimes.
But by and large, I'm focused in the moment.
So I'll see somebody in the grocery store and I'll say, Lord, I have a prompting.
Should I pray for that person?
And then I'll pray or I'll talk to that person.
I see them and I see them over a homeless person.
I'll go buy a hot dog or whatever and go over there and ask about their life or whatever.
This is so antithetical to the way I used to be.
But it was his instruction to me at that point.
He said moment by moment, I will reveal your purpose to you.
And that's for the most part, the way I live.
It's changed everything.
And the other, where the two words he spoke to me, trust me.
You were already a good person.
It obviously made you a better person.
What else changed personally?
A lot of people that I speak to that have had NDEs, they change careers.
Unfortunately, a lot of them change spouses.
They change all kinds of things in their life.
So personally, what else happened with you afterwards?
Well my wife is still my wife over 30 years now.
So that didn't change.
But I didn't share with her much.
I said, after they revived me, I said, I'm at Jesus.
I was like, okay.
But what changed in my life was my empathy foremost, I think.
And I can prove this, by the way, Eric, because I've been in the field of training.
I used to train corporations.
I am in ministry today.
So obviously that changed from being in the business field and the healthcare medical
field.
I would give people an empathy test.
It would be an empathy test, and this is a validated test.
It's been validated for years.
It's the benchmark in the industry.
And it would test on versatility, which is being able to empathize essentially, or be
versatile in terms of speaking with somebody and kind of adopting or adapting to them,
you know, showing more interest and feeling more of what they feel.
So before this experience, I tested way down the line.
In other words, I did not have much empathy for people.
And that worked for me in getting things done.
But after this experience, I was at the highest level on the test.
I mean, it was a validation to show how diametrically shifted my character or personality he had
been.
Now, I'm not, hopefully it doesn't sound like boasting.
I shocked myself, because again, I was not an empathetic person.
But just that test showed me part of him was left with me in this world.
And I never cried, by the way.
Never did that.
I was broken.
I was healed.
I was made tender.
So I guess so that I could be more purposeful.
And so I'm in a ministry now.
I started a ministry and we've worked with an organization in San Diego feeding thousands
of people clothing.
We have a warehouse.
We just are in a lot of different places around the world.
And it's a totally diametrical opposition to what I was doing before.
And then we are we're hosting an afterlife conference in San Diego, California.
So Andy Denier goes to this stuff and it's like, this is crazy.
It's amazing how people can change, isn't it?
Okay, I've got some questions for you now that there's no right or wrong answers.
I want to get your opinion on some things, maybe have you speculate just a little bit.
And you've not only had your own experience, you've talked to many, many people that have
also had near-death experiences.
You've written books on the topic.
You just mentioned your conference.
By the way, if people want to find you and all your stuff, randike.org.
Yes.
Correct.
Okay.
They can find everything there, including your books and you promised to send me one.
I'm going to hold you that promise.
Yes.
Why do you think that's different people have different kinds of experiences in their NDE's?
As you know, some are disturbing, some are wonderful like yours.
There's everything in between.
Some see people they know, some don't.
Give me your thoughts on that whole thing.
Well, I did see my grandmother in heaven.
So I checked that box, but I get your point that, and it's a very good one because as
you all know, these experiences do vary.
So there's a journey that I guess each of us take.
I don't think anyone has the definitive answer.
So to try to extrapolate too much, I would be, I think I would be over-speaking what
should be said.
I think bottom line, I would say that people have a tendency to assimilate their experiences
based on what they understand at that given time.
In other words, if they come from a non-religious background and they stay non-religious, they're
focusing on some of the ethereal points that speak to them in a personal way that speak
to I think what is important to them.
And then there are those who enter in with some religious maybe experience or even a
preconception.
And when they come back, some of that is filtered through that experience or that belief.
And then there are others who are kind of, they're still searching.
And so a lot of heaven, I think, or a lot of afterlife experiences in my opinion are
so far apart from the world in which we live.
There are some familiar things and there are some non-familiar things that the overinterpretation
of some of those experiences can get us into trouble.
So for example, if I saw, and I did see a building or structure that was made of stones
and other things and people were going through it and they were fellowship with one another
and things of that sort.
My point of view is to try to translate that from a biblical standpoint where a mansion
in heaven, right?
Well, so I did a further study in that and it wasn't, it was the mansion in heaven really
was the presence.
I did a word study.
So my interpretation was different coming back.
I just took it in, assimilated, but I think that assimilation can only be done to a certain
point because it relies on the listener or the ones that is the objective point of view
as you and others who are listening to this to make a determination for themselves.
But all I can say is, and I did this as an agnostic, is pray that if you're not a believer,
just pray, seek the truth.
Seek the truth.
I studied all things.
I'm not saying I'm the Oracle of Truth here.
I'm just saying that be a truth seeker and seek the God of love.
And if anyone spoils that or has, you know, then I have questions, you know, because I've
interviewed a lot of people who have had hellish experiences or hell experiences and they
come back and one fell into a very rigid, religious dogmatic group.
And another one became a Christian.
What I'm saying is that they tend to want to group together in a way that helps explain
what they went through as opposed to, I don't want to use a term open mind, as opposed to
just seeking the truth, being a truth seeker, I guess is what I'm saying.
And I think that truth seeking will come to the conclusion and saying, I just want to
know.
I just want to understand.
And moreover, most importantly, I think I just want, I want to have a more loving heart
is what I want.
I know that sounds cliche and, you know, trite sometimes, but I think that's the bottom line
is we if it imparts love and a more loving attitude, if it has that effect, I think it's
good if it doesn't.
And I think that deserves more intro or extra inspection, if you will.
Something else that I've theorized and you give me your opinion on this is that people
are only given how much they can handle or how much is going to make sense to them.
If there was someone who had no belief in Jesus or had not studied at all, and they had an
experience like yours, I don't know, maybe to be a little, a little more than they could
handle.
Some other people have are studying, you know, Eastern religions and other things like that,
and they have experiences a little bit more down those lines.
So I've sort of come to the conclusion that we have experiences that are really best for
us, that we can learn the most from, get the most from.
There's obviously commonalities, the feeling of love that you talked about and things like
that.
Do you have any thoughts on that?
Yes.
Well, the fact is that all of us returned.
Otherwise, we wouldn't be speaking to you or with you.
There's a commonality.
There's a commonality, yes.
So then there's a reason why that is.
I wanted to stay.
I did not want to return.
But I think I mentioned that I wanted to hear these words.
I wanted to hear, well done, my good and faithful servants.
So for any Christian, that's like the end all be all.
Go to heaven.
Jesus says that to you and you're in.
Your life is complete, or not complete, but it's basically been codified by God.
And I've dwelt on that.
Why didn't I hear those words?
I so much wanted to hear.
And I know it's now, I believe, that it's because my life was unfinished.
So I believe I'll hear those words, whatever may not be verbatim, those words, because
I felt it in heaven.
And I didn't feel like God would return me unless He was going to bring me back.
That would be, from my vantage point, cruel to go through that and not being able to return.
And that's not the God I met.
So every time I talk with somebody who has an afterlife survivor who has a different
translation or an experience that is kind of filtered through and expressed in a different
way, I just say to them, essentially, I believe you first.
I believe you.
Secondly, I don't save anybody.
That's not my job.
And I was an agnostic, and the only way I came to it was not through Christians being kind
to me and good to me.
No, it was quite the opposite, actually.
It was through seeking the truth and allowing that to be unimpeded to some extent.
But again, of course, I made my own determination, but I don't judge somebody who doesn't make
the same determination.
I'm commanded to love them.
And that's my only charge.
And that's really hard sometimes.
But I know that my responsibility, trust me, trust God, stay in the moment, and just love
on people.
And there was somebody not too long ago who spat on my face.
And I've gotten some really kind of nasty things.
And I don't think I don't express nasty things, but I don't think.
But this person, for some reason, had a lot of animosity spat on my face.
I just paused, and then I just dropped to my knees.
And I said, Lord, God, what about how it is shouting vitriol?
I mean, I can't repeat, obviously, but so I finally, okay, trust me, return good for
evil.
I stood up and I said, God loves you so much, you don't have.
I never understood that.
I died and I met him, he loves you so much.
And if I didn't have an inkling of that love, I would be so enraged with you, but I forgive
you.
I forgive you.
And he saw it was sincere and I was sincere.
And he didn't know how to deal with it.
And I think I saw it tearing his eye.
I think I saw it and I ended up talking with him for a while.
And he shared his life a little bit and I realized why he was this angry, angry person,
bitter person.
And then he became humanized.
And then we were able to talk and we parted ways and I wasn't trying to processize him.
That's not my job.
I was just trying to share that love a little bit of that love.
And I think it tenderized his heart a little bit.
That's beautiful.
Before we wind down here, I'm just wondering if there was anything about your experience
that really surprised you?
Like what?
Why did that happen?
Or anything funny?
Well, besides all of it.
That surprised me, I guess.
There was a time that I had this funny conversation with Jesus.
Just silly talk.
And I said to him, I said, I hate the taste of toothpaste.
Why?
I mean, it was like we were in the moment of having this banter.
And his response back to me is I didn't invent it.
And we chuckled together.
That's perfect.
But yeah, I mean, the biggest surprise probably was the people I saw there.
Because I had an understanding of where they came from.
It was, I could understand people and the person.
And I had some insight into their lives in some cases.
And these were people I would never associate with on earth.
I mean, whoa, even that person?
Yes, even that person.
And that surprised me probably the most.
And again, that reflected on the grace of God.
All right, any last thoughts before we wrap up?
Eric, you have a wonderful tender heart about you.
And I mentioned this before, how you accept us for our experience in a non-judgmental
sort of way.
And that's so much appreciated because that's one thing I think that near-death experiences
as you know are very reticent about sharing with others.
I enjoy hearing other people's story, but I hesitate to share my story.
And then I come across somebody like Eric Bennett who opens the door to understanding
and to sharing in a way that is genuine.
And so I thank you for that.
I thank you for what you do and bringing these stories to light.
Because I think we as afterlife survivors or near-death experiences, I tend to term
afterlife survivors as people who died.
And then your death can be coma or whatever.
But I think we feel like orphaned children a lot of times.
Like we're not accepted.
I did lose my career.
I did, well, there were a lot of sacrifices because we're viewed a different way.
And I thank you for honoring us with exposing us in a positive way.
Well, thank you for being with me today, Randy.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks again for listening and sharing this podcast.
Don't forget to hit the follow or subscribe button and sign up for our newsletter at roundtriptest.com.
If you want to share your near-death experience or if you have questions or comments about
the show, send an email to ericatroundtriptest.com.
Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.