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 Round Trip Death, everybody.
And I would like to welcome all the way from Orlando, Florida, our special guest today,
Brian Jackson and Rudy.
We can't see Rudy.
There he is.
Get him up there.
Wave, little buddy.
For those that are listening to the audio-only version of the podcast, they can't see.
Cute little Rudy.
What kind of dog is he, Brian?
Rudy's a little Chihuahua.
He's about 16 years old.
He has a lot of gray.
I was wondering how old he is.
Yes, we're running the same lifeline.
You two kind of match each other a little bit.
Well, hey, before we jump into your NDE, and I'm going to give people a little heads up
on this one.
We have had hellish experiences on the show before.
This one's not as scary as some of those, but it's also not all roses and corn flakes
and unicorns or however we describe that nowadays.
It's not the happiest thing in the world, but I think we can always find a happy ending,
can't we?
That's right.
Tell us about you, Brian.
I live in just south of Orlando, Florida, living in a community, Davenport, Florida.
I work for one of the theme parks down here driving a bus.
I have one of the most incredible jobs in the whole wide world.
I am living a life that's beyond my dreams, and it's a life that I never could have designed.
I'm married.
We've been married for about 43 years.
Sweet darling golly.
I couldn't have picked any better.
We've been here probably about 13, 14 years, and I grew up in central Alabama anyway.
Hobbies are things like antique cars and stuff like that, mowing the grass, eating dinner.
What an awesome attitude.
I love it.
Everything is perfect in your life.
When you said that you worked at one of the theme parks, I had you pictured for playing
Gaston.
How's that?
That would be good.
I'm not quite as muscular.
I might have the attitude if called off.
I was trying to build you up a little bit.
I was really the beast.
You were the beast.
All right.
I was the beast, yeah.
I want to jump into this.
We're going to go back quite a few years here.
Your life was not in such a good place back then.
Go ahead and just give us a little background.
What was your life like so that we know what led up to this experience?
Early on, I remember at about four years old, my mother used to, she'd put on 45 records
of gospel singing, and that's what she would do to keep me busy.
I would sit and listen to those.
As a matter of fact, most of what I would listen to is Tennessee Ernie Ford.
Funny thing, listening to him.
He was, Tennessee Ernie Ford was a bass singer.
At four years old, I learned the bass part.
I've only discovered that in the last few years.
I've been a bass singer for years, forever.
But anyway, that's what I remember.
I remember hearing the voice of God.
I remember that still small voice.
Then as life progressed on, I was in a very deeply religious atmosphere where my dad was,
he was one of the leaders of the church.
I just remember, and all of this has really come back to me just in the last few years,
that his description of who God is in the organization that we were in was totally different
from what I understood from my own personal experience.
But I was not in a place where I could decide for myself.
So a lot of the teaching that I got twisted and bent, who my understanding of who God
is.
And I found myself through my life actually running away, trying to get away from the
God who I've misunderstood.
At about 17 years old, my parents divorced.
My world seemed to begin to implode.
I started experimenting with drugs and alcohol.
I had a bluegrass band there in central Alabama.
So several friends of us, we were doing pretty good.
And within about four years, when I was about, I guess about 19 years old, or 79, we won
a band contest.
And I'm drinking pretty heavy at the time, still running from God.
We won this contest that took us to Nashville, Tennessee.
And we met several celebrities there.
And eventually we were invited to play on Grand LaBri.
And I'd say about four or five months after that invitation, the band imploded, I left
the band, got married in 81, and I never got to have that part of a dream.
And so how could a loving God do something like that to me?
So I just, I kept drifting away.
And then not only just drifting, I was running.
At 33 years old, I found myself in a place where I could not function.
I was sent to an alcohol rehab center.
And I was tricked into that because I didn't have an alcohol problem.
I had a living problem.
I got off of the alcohol just long enough to find out that I really had no ambition.
There was no direction.
I had pretty much gotten to the place to where, if there is a God, he doesn't want anything
to do with me just through a series of events that led into my NDE.
It almost sounds like you were blaming God for leaving you.
Wasn't it maybe the other way around?
That's the way I saw it, but that's not the way it was.
That's the way I saw it at the time.
It was his fault that I was so miserable.
And I don't want to have anything to do with somebody or something that's making me miserable.
It was a great misunderstanding of the God that I knew when I was small.
Let's jump a little bit forward to the NDE part.
What happened on that particular day?
So March the 5th of 1993.
Actually I went into treatment on February the 22nd of 1993, and that's my last drink
that day.
March the 5th, I've left home.
I'm staying in a hotel that a friend of mine owns that's on the outskirts of town.
I'm in a 10 by 10 room.
And these people that I'm talking to have suggested that I eat three meals a day and
understanding that I've been on a liquid diet for a while.
So I'm trying to do that.
And I'm at a truck stop about a mile away from the hotel.
And I'm having my square meal for dinner.
And I realized that my vision was beginning to close in on me from the peripheral vision
was going away.
And I thought, boy, I might better get myself back to the hotel.
Because if I'm going blind, this is not going to be good.
So I got back to the hotel and I looked in the mirror.
And it was the most awful sight that I remember is burned in my brain.
I looked in my own eyes and it was dark.
The light had gone out.
And I sat there and I thought, you know what?
I really, I can't do this anymore.
I don't have anything left in me to push forward.
This is it.
I don't want to live anymore, which which I discovered is I lost the will to live.
I do not want to live.
Suicide had been an option, but I was afraid that I would hurt myself and then have to,
you know, go through life with some disability.
So I just would never do that.
But now I'm in a place where I just don't want to live anymore.
And so I crawled into the bed.
I pulled the covers over my head.
I do remember I was trying to find the time reference for all of this.
The sun was was beginning to go down.
It would have probably been late afternoon.
I pulled the covers over my head and I quit.
I don't know if it was a clinical death.
I can't tell you if my body died.
I don't know.
I do know that my spirit was done.
My mind had gone to a place where there was nothing left and my body was just it quit.
And then I remember a noise and it was it was dark as I recall.
It was just darker than than you can imagine dark.
So there's nothing to see.
And I remember this noise.
And so in the sound business, we call it paint noise, white noise, gray noise, whatever,
you know, to to the layman, I would say it would be like standing close to a jet engine.
It was every sound frequency from high to low.
And it was so loud that I couldn't I couldn't hear myself think there was nothing.
And there was a fleeting moment where I thought I know where I am and I'm in hell.
But there's no way out because I've never been told.
I mean, this is it.
There are no friends.
There are there is no love.
There is no light.
There is no joy.
There is no peace.
It is nothing.
It's kind of like what I was describing to you earlier as we started it.
If you took a mason jar and pulled everything out of the jar with a vacuum and sealed it
shut, how do you describe what is in the jar?
And it is nothing.
So for me, that was my experience of being in hell and knowing that I'm there.
Here's the odd thing.
I didn't care.
I pretty much knew where I was and I really I didn't care.
Wow.
Did you feel like you were going to be there forever?
That was it.
I knew and I didn't care.
Some people talk to me about a thing called the that's known as the void, which is just
a place where it's usually their experiences that it's very dark.
There's just nothing there.
It varies.
Some people don't see anything, but they kind of feel life around them.
It can actually be a good thing.
I know you said you were in hell.
Do you think it could have been this void that other people have mentioned?
Well, I think they're one and the same for me.
It is the total absence of God in anything that has to do with His goodness.
It is not there.
There apparently to me is a place like what is described in the beginning.
God created the heaven and the earth and it was without void, which to me means there
was a void before He did the creation.
And I don't think He's finished creating, which means there still is a void to me,
which is where I went.
That's interesting.
Well, I guess a good definition of hell would be the lack of God.
He's not there.
Yeah.
But there's always a but.
A friend of mine who was a counselor told me he said at some point in your life, you'll
get at the foot of your bed and you'll ask God for help.
And let me tell you, Eric, I have nothing to lose.
There is nothing.
I have nothing to lose.
And when the thought crossed my mind, I debated it.
It's hard to understand that there's no real thoughts going through here, but this suggestion
has come in.
And I don't really, from my teaching, there's no way out of this.
It's over.
And so I have nothing to lose, whatever.
I don't believe that anything is going to happen.
I just know that that little suggestion became the smallest piece of hope.
And so I crawled out of bed and I got on my knees and I said, God, I can't do this anymore.
And everything went totally silent.
The noise stopped.
I opened my eyes and the sun had been down for, I don't know how long.
It was probably nine or 10 o'clock at night.
So we're talking about a five, maybe a five or six hour period of time.
If I had to try to find how long this lasted, the light was on in the room.
I don't remember turning the light on the room.
I don't remember it being on.
And the light was on in the room and the noise stopped.
And then I heard the still small voice that I would hear when I was four.
And he said, go see Wayne.
Wayne's the guy that owns a hotel.
Okay.
I know who I hear.
I know that I'm not where I was.
And I'm not sure about where this is going, but it has to be better than where I just
left.
So I go sit down and I see Wayne in the lobby office there and he's reading his, his deceased
father's large print Bible and the words that he, that it's open to jump off the page.
And they tell me where I've been, where I am and where I'm going and my life has not
been the same sense.
What really thrills me, especially these days is when I go to the IAINDS conventions and
I hear people talk about being in the light and being in heaven and being in joy and
being in music and being in the sunlight.
And I know what that feels like because I've been in the darkest place and just their description,
I can see it.
That's beautiful.
A couple of other questions.
And I believe everything that you're telling me.
Some people might ask, how do you know you weren't just asleep and having a bad dream?
It's a good question.
What difference does it make?
Okay.
You could call it a spiritual experience.
You could call it a spiritual awakening, which for me was my spirit woke up from a dead place
in a, and when it woke up, I was in a dead place.
I wasn't in a place where there is no like, joy, peace, wonderful, nothing, no light,
nothing.
I don't get into the details about whether or not I was clinically dead.
I do mention it to you because it is a question that has come up.
You can decide for yourself.
What I'm describing is, is what I experienced.
It's kind of like taking somebody to the Grand Canyon and having them to tow up to the edge
and say, tell me what you see.
Nice analogy.
How did this whole experience change your life?
It changed everything about me.
I am not running from, I am running to.
And all of this happened in 93.
So I didn't talk about this very much, you know, for 25 years.
I discover I ends by accident somehow.
And you know, there's no such thing as an accident.
And I discover there are people like me, there are a few who have these negative experiences
and dark experiences, if you want to call it hellish, whatever.
And it seems most of the hellish experiences have a lot of differences, not only in how
they got there, but what your description is.
To me, it's like, you know, everybody has different fingerprints.
You know, my fingerprints are different from yours, but I have fingerprints.
And my, my experience with my death experience is somewhat different from the others.
But what I have heard is the despair and the lack of joy and the lack of a future, anything.
And to go from that to where I am today is, is an absolute miracle.
And I didn't do it because I'm not supposed to be here.
I'm supposed to be dead by the direction that I was headed.
I came down to a choice and I made a choice to not stay.
I don't know if everybody gets that opportunity or even if they take it.
That's kind of why I talk about it today, because it's not over and it's not said and
done until it's said and done.
You know, if somebody asked me, they said, what would you tell the listener if they found
themselves in a place that you describe?
And it's easy.
Get on your knees and ask for help, even if you don't believe.
So that's, I mean, that's where I'm coming from.
As far as changing my life, I see people walking around on this earth in that dead space just
before they quit.
And I look for them.
And that's part of what I have been given as a gift, if you will, for where I am today.
It doesn't mean that I do anything about it every time, but the empathy that I have today
for people who are struggling with whatever it is, if it's something with the um or outside
of the whatever it is, I have the ability today to look in somebody's eyes and I see
it.
I can see the light or I can see the dark.
And I have to ask my God, am I supposed to say or do anything or not?
You've mentioned Ions a couple of times.
New listeners here probably don't know what that is.
You and I both do.
In fact, you're wearing your t-shirt from Arizona.
I was down there in the heat too at the end of August this year.
Tell people what Ions is and how it helped you.
And this is not an ad for Ions, by the way.
They don't pay me anything for this.
Well it's part of our experience.
It's really how we have connected you and I.
But Ions is an international association where people have had either light or dark
experiences.
They've died on the operating table.
They've died in automobile accidents for whatever.
Ions is from what I have seen is where consciousness continues after the body and the mind have
stopped.
There's no brainwaves.
Most of these people tell stories about they see themselves.
They see themselves on the operating table.
They remember conversations.
I am fascinated by that stuff and telling specifics about what happened and then coming
back to tell about it.
And some of the experiences where they actually get to go to the place where the light is
and just before they're able to actually be able to stay, they're either told that they
have to come back or they're given the choice to come back and tell about it.
For me, everybody who has had a near-death experience, an NDE, I was tasked with telling
it because my experience is so, so different.
It's one of those where I'm really beginning to believe that most people who have an experience
like I did won't talk about it so they keep it to themselves and struggle.
That's really true.
There's a lot of that.
Whether it's scary to talk about, embarrassing to talk about, or whatever, the negative experiences,
a lot more people have them than we think because they don't want to talk about them.
Now, you mentioned how your experience was so different.
There's also some similarities.
First of all, people that have a wonderful heavenly go-to-the-light kind of experience,
those are all different too, as well as the distressing ones like yours.
Those are different from each other.
Here's one thing that I find is a real huge commonality.
People like you that had a distressing experience, you do not want to stay there.
You do not want it to keep going.
Correct?
That's correct.
People that have a beautiful experience, a heavenly kind of experience, they do want
it to go on.
They do want it to last forever.
If they need to come back, they have a hard time making that decision or committing to
it.
It's a very difficult thing to come back.
We don't hear about the people that are over there and have a decision and choose to stay
because they're not around for us to talk about, but I know it's an awful lot of them.
Yes.
Do you have any thoughts on that?
I have a friend that I met at the last convention and she and I met by chance.
We were introduced to each other.
We were standing in a hallway there talking about our experiences and when I would talk
about something, her mouth would fly open and she would talk about her experience and
my mouth would fly open.
We have discovered that our life line from beginning to this day are polar opposites.
She loved God.
She was so in love with God, had the NDE, so she tells me and she struggles today because
she's not in the place that she went to.
Kind of like what you're talking about.
My mind was a run away from and I succeeded, went to the darkest place that's ever imaginable,
even worse than imaginables and I'm here and I am loving life to the fullest.
She and I are talking about maybe trying to come up with something for the IAINS convention
where we can share our stories and show how they are so opposite, but we're working on
that.
I heard this time at the convention, I heard so many people who are struggling with having
to come back.
What they experienced is where they wanted to be and stay and they're not there.
I hear that a lot.
I'm a lot of people that have such a wonderful experience there, it's really difficult to
come back.
One of the things that can help a lot is having somebody to talk to about it.
But who do you talk to?
Maybe at a bad traffic accident or something, your doctor doesn't know how to talk to you
about it.
Your nurse doesn't know.
There are a few therapists out there that get it, have training in this or experience
in it, but most don't.
That's one of the things that, again, I'm not doing a sales pitch for IAINS, but that's
one of the things that I find it can be very, very helpful for people.
It's almost like a giant group therapy session.
It is that in a lot of ways, yeah.
If you or somebody that you know is struggling with either what happened to me, I don't get
it, I don't know how to process it, or I'm back and I'm really struggling being back.
My whole life is changing because I'm a different person.
I think IAINS can be a good place to start.
You don't have to go to the national conference.
There is one every year, but there are local groups all over the country.
So just look up IAINDS.org, International Association for Neurodeath Studies.
Highly recommend them.
Go there.
Do some exploration.
So really IAINDS is more about a connection in the spirit than it is in the mind and body.
And a psychiatrist, unless he's had an NDE, near-death experience, is going to have a
difficult time with it.
And the physicians, they don't understand it because how can the body die and somebody
tell a story about what happened to them?
It doesn't make sense.
The scary and the hard part about being able to talk about it, like you say, is finding
somebody to talk to because they lock people like me up.
Oh boy, this one's crazy.
And we need to put him away because this is nuts.
And so even if you've had an experience like what we're talking about and have been told
by a psychiatrist or a doctor, you need to keep that to yourself, there's a lot of us
in IAINDS that have been told that.
Don't talk about this.
That was drug induced or that was not real.
And there are studies today.
There are doctors, even doctors who have had near-death experiences that are explaining
the brain was dead.
The body was dead for a period of time.
And they talk about things that are of the spirit and then come back.
And that's the hard part.
Finding somebody to talk to, you really have to do a diligent search and be careful who
you talk to.
But IAINDS is a great, it's the only place, one of the only places that I would talk about
it other than with you, Eric.
Thanks.
Well, it is a very, very safe place.
That's one of the things about the conventions is that it's like this giant love fest, everybody
is just so non-judgmental.
There are lots of different beliefs and religious backgrounds and all kinds of other things.
And it doesn't matter.
Everybody skits along and helps each other out.
But I think getting back to what you were saying a minute ago, I think it's sad that
the medical scientific field, they can't even agree on a definition of what death is.
Is it when your heart stops?
Is it when your brain stops?
Or is it if you never come back, then you're dead?
In other words, if your heart stops, but you come back a half hour later, you weren't dead
in the first place.
There's no way to explain it.
But it's been going on for centuries.
Absolutely.
Yes.
Somebody that we're going to have on the show hopefully pretty soon, Dr. Jeff Adriskel,
he's an ER doc that has studied this.
And one of the things that came out in his most recent research was the number of people
that are having near-death experiences is flabbergasting.
It is amazing how many there are.
And I don't have the numbers in front of me.
I know if you were in that session, it was something like 15 million people a year.
It was this huge amount.
I would believe that.
So these things are actually very, very common.
We think they're so uncommon, they're not.
They're common.
It's okay to talk about them.
It's okay if you don't understand.
But let's bring these things into the normal sphere, shall we say, to make up a new term.
And be open and talk about them.
And I appreciate that you're willing to.
Thank you.
It's an honor really to go from the worst place.
And I don't worry about dying.
I'm not afraid to die.
I've already done it once.
And I talked to a friend of mine who said, you know, even if I ended up in hell again,
I know how to get back out.
So I'm not that concerned about it.
Right now, I'm spending time inviting people to the table.
There's so much.
There's so much to gather from those of us who have been to places that we've only, you
know, read or heard about.
Well, you just answered one of my questions.
I love to ask people about their fear of death because usually from experiencers, it is zero.
Yes.
Is that where yours is at?
Zero.
And as a matter of fact, two years ago, my mother's sister, my aunt, we pretty much adopted
her.
She was in her nineties and she was about to run out of money.
She was no family except for me.
And so I invited her to come live with us here in Florida.
And she thrived for a year and a half until she decided it was time to go.
And she died here at my house.
And that she taught me about the process of actually dying because I listened to her.
The last thing she told me, she said, I'm okay.
She knew where she was going and she was not afraid of it.
What we saw was the physical anxiety of actually dying.
That was hard for her because you don't know what it's going to feel like until you've
been there.
It might be different this next time around for me, but I'm not, I do not question the
afterlife.
I do not.
I'm seeing glimpses of it here.
I think it's okay to have a little bit of fear of what the process may be like because
there may be some pain.
There may be some unpleasant things.
And so what you're talking about as far as not being afraid of death is really knowing
there's an afterlife, knowing that it's going to be better.
And I can tell the way that you've lived your life ever since this happened around 30 years
ago, you're not going back to that same place.
There's no way.
It's going to be a great experience next time around.
You're going to want to stay.
I know it.
And, you know, if I get to go and come back and tell about it, that, yeah, but I'm living
vicariously of people who have had the light, the good experiences.
Being a musician, I look forward to the music.
I can't wait for that.
I hear, you know, I hear glimpses of that here in my heart, in my spirit.
I believe that a lot of the composers who are long gone and some that are still composing
today, that is, it's divinely inspired in its pieces of what it'll be, what we'll hear.
I'm not going to get into any specifics because it's my opinion, but, but I look forward to
that.
I get to go see my granddaddy.
I look forward to seeing him.
What's his name?
His name is Henry Eugene Jackson, senior.
He was my hero.
Well, someday in the distant future from now, will you introduce me to him?
Yes.
Oh, gosh, yes.
I can't wait to meet him.
All right.
One last thought.
You've been such a wonderful breath of fresh air and positively positive.
I appreciate it so very much.
Why don't you leave everybody with just a thought for the day?
A thought for the day?
Yeah.
Make somebody's day a little bit better right now.
Whatever troubles you have, whatever you're going through, don't do it by yourself.
I heard the mind that caused all this trouble can't fix it, whatever it is.
If you're struggling with an NDE, find us.
We'll be in Chicago Labor Day for the IONS convention.
In 2025 to clarify.
Yeah.
And if it was a good experience, share that too, especially for people like me.
You don't know who you run into.
If we look for each other, we'll find each other.
This is a great platform that you have.
And I'm grateful for the opportunity.
There is hope in a hopeless situation.
It just seems hopeless.
Just don't do it alone.
Brian, thank you so much.
I appreciate it.
Rudy's off running around now, but thank Rudy too.
Yes.
Thank you.
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 Eric at roundtriptest.com.
Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.