After 3 near-death experiences, this man’s mission is to comfort dying veterans

MYSTERY WIRE — What happens to us when we die? Scientists say physical death is the end of life. Religions believe our souls are immortal but where we go depends on what we did in life.

One Southern Nevada man believes both sides are wrong. Writer and speaker Dannion Brinkley says he has seen the other side at least three times.

Brinkley was a star athlete, U.S. Marine, and a successful businessman, not very interested in spiritual matters.

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But that changed in 1975 when a bolt of lightning struck a telephone pole, traveled down the phone line, and slammed into his body melting the phone he was holding.

“It went into the side of my head above my ear, it went down my spine,” Brinkley said. “It welded the nails of the heels of my shoes to the floor. It threw me up in the air, I see the ceiling, it slams me back down, a ball of fire comes through the room and blinds me. I am burning. I am on fire. I am paralyzed.“

Brinkley says he left his body, floated along with the ambulance as it raced to a hospital, and watched from above as doctors declared him dead. He said 28 minutes later he awoke in the hospital morgue.

During those 28 minutes, Brinkley says his consciousness traveled through a tunnel, where he encountered a spiritual being of light, and underwent a grueling replay of his entire life, as seen not only from his own perspective, but everyone he’d ever encountered. Something he says was extremely humbling.

“I saw my entire tire life past performing a 360 degree panorama, I had missed nothing. You know how many hairs were in the nose of the doctor who pulled you from your mother. You know everything that there is from the time you open your eyes. You have complete cognitive awareness, no doubt about it. And that’s all happening at the same time, no doubt about it. Then you watch the same life from a second-person point of view, as if you were your own best friend. So you can see how silly, how funny, how dumb, how stupid it was, but it’s one of your best friend, you know. There’s no judgments, just looking. And then you literally become every person that you ever encounter. And you feel the direct results of your interaction between you and that person. So no one gets away, with anyone, anything.”

Dannion Brinkley

And then, in a flash, he says he was back in his severely injured body.

It took him two years to be able to walk again. He didn’t tell many people what had happened, and when he did tell his family, they didn’t believe it.

But in the same year as the lightning bolt incident, a Georgia physician, Dr. Raymond Moody, wrote a book, “Life After Life,” and coined the term “near death experience,” or NDE.

Dr. Moody and his book were pilloried by medical colleagues and by 1977, he was financially strapped, despondent, and ready to quit. Then former bully Dannion Brinkley met Moody and became his staunchest defender.

In 1989, during open heart surgery, Brinkley died again. And once again said he visited what he perceived to be the afterlife.

Brinkley wrote the book, “Saved by the Light,” which became a runaway best seller, and led to television appearances, even a made-for-TV movie.

Skeptics and debunkers came after him, disputing biographical details and arguing that NDE’s happen because the brain is dying, not because people are visiting heaven.

Leslie Kean, a journalist who has written extensively about near-death experiences,  says there is evidence that human consciousness exists independently of the body and that it survives physical death.

In many NDE’s, similar to Brinkley’s, she writes, people are able to accurately describe what was happening while their brains were dead, when they had no ability to see or hear anything.

“There are many cases in which the cardiac arrest is happening with a doctor present. They’re documenting the fact that there’s no brain activity,” Kean told Mystery Wire in an earlier interview. “The case of Pam Reynolds is another extraordinary one, where they can’t possibly have consciousness, and yet they do have consciousness, they’re able to go out and report back things that were happening in the environment, things that they heard things that they saw in the environment, when they had absolutely no brain activity.”

Brinkley, who later had yet another NDE during brain surgery, says he’s happy to take on and doubters, including religious leaders, about what happens when we die.

“If I didn’t go to hell, in the last four journeys, nobody’s going to hell, okay,” Brinkley said. “So when you learn you don’t die, when you learn you’re a spiritual being, you’re not going to go to hell. That’s enough to inspire you to change.”

Brinkley put his beliefs into action. For decades, he’s been counseling terminal patients. Specifically, he is counselling his fellow veterans, assuring them they have nothing to fear from death.

He has spent tens of thousands of hours at the bedsides of the dying. He has been with more than 2,000 people as they passed on.

His passion led him to create a program called the Twilight Brigade. It works with the Veterans Administration to try to ensure that no military veteran should die alone.

A defiant Brinkley, hobbled by a lifetime of serious injuries, knows he has helped thousands of people who are facing death, whether science or religion believe him or not.

Brinkley added he does his talks “because nobody dies. It never happens. It’s not a part of the nature of reality, it’s not.”

The Twilight Brigade program that Dannion set up with the VA is basically inoperative now because of Covid.

During the pandemic, VA hospitals cut off most physical contact between seriously ill patients and members of the public, including family members and the counselors from Twilight Brigade.

Dannion says he is not sure when, or if, the program will resume. In the meantime, he says, a lot of military veterans will die alone.

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Below you can watch George Knapp’s entire interview with Dannion Brinkley. You can also read the transcript of the interview below the video.

George Knapp
For any members of our audience who do not know you, you have changed the lives of millions of people with your public presentations and the books that you’ve written about your amazing life. Can we start with the first near death experience what you were doing in your life as a career and how this experience changed you.

Dannion Brinkley
Well, I grew up as a tough guy in South Carolina, I was a macho sports guy, you know, religion was not a big deal to me. And I was a, well, basically a jackass, and a typical southern redneck, all the things that go with that. And then I served in the Marine Corps. and in the course of that particular period of time in history, there were many things going on in the world of adrenaline driven individuals, that became interesting ways and pathways of life. And we grew up we own grocery stores, and I would buy and sell old antique cars and restored them. And I was going on about my business, you know, I had fallen in love and I’m living I think, the best life in good shape and not very spiritually grounded George. But in all of those other aspects, I was really grounded. You know, and then one day in 1975, I was talking on the telephone with a friend and I heard the thunder. And I told Tom, I had to get off the phone. And he said, what are you afraid of a little lightning, and I said yes. Lightning came down the phone line. That was when we had phone lines, you know, telephone poles not wireless. It followed the line down came into the house, it went into the side of my head above my ear, it went down my spine, it welded the nails of the heels of my shoes to the floor. It threw me up in the air, I see the ceiling, it slams me back down, a ball of fire comes through the room and blinds me. I am burning, I am on fire. I am paralyzed. I cannot move and I cannot see. Okay, so my vision came back into focus a little but I wore welder’s glasses for a year because I couldn’t handle life. I was completely paralyzed for six days, personally paralyzed for seven months. And it took me two years to learn to walk and feed myself. And in the course of that I had what is now known in 1975 as a classic near death experience. And in the wisk of a 28 minute period when they said I was dead because when they brought me into the emergency room, it said patient unconscious, patient not breathing, no EKG. That pretty much covered it. I don’t know about any of that stuff, George. Because from the time that ambulance got there, the phone was melted. Okay, my shoes are welded to the floor because they were over the nails I had on Bass Weejuns with nails. heels are nailed on. And they were over the nails in the floor. And that’s what grounded in keeping me from blowing to smithereens. But I lifted out of my body George. Right here at this point, I’d like everybody who’s going to this issue of what’s happening and being afraid and everybody’s scared to death of death. I’d like to reassure everybody that what I’m telling you you can trust to be true. And why I say this is that you know as well as everybody that I have been dead so many times it’s like a comedy routine. Okay, I mean, when you get to talking about being dead, George, I got it down pat. Okay. So then the first one I lift up out of my body. I was not on fire. I was not burning. I could move. And I could see. And I was watching all the things that were going on. Okay. They put me in an ambulance. And I went with my body because I thought it was important that I stayed with it. I was completely and totally disinterested in it. That world I had just left other than Sandy who I was in love with. Other than that nothing mattered. I had no interest in it. I didn’t care about it. And I won’t say I was overly materialistic. But I was materialistic. Okay, so that meant nothing. And I just kind of went with the body. And so I’m watching the paramedic and I’m over his shoulder. And he says he’s gone, he’s gone. Okay? This is the truth. I thought, gone where? Okay, I’m still Dannion, I’m still me. Okay, I’m just in my energetic body, which I never looked at, or paid any attention to it. And when he said he was gone, I could feel this movement over my left shoulder. And it was like a tunnel. And I started down this tunnel. Like the way I described it, George, it was moving, whether I was moving or not. And it was like taking off layers of me, like an onion peeling away that I could tell that probably cynical, skeptical, anal retentive personality disorder, which is my basic personality, you know, and you add jackasses that you pretty well covered me. When you’re peeling those away, you becoming lighter, becoming more fluid. And you come to the end of the tunnel. And when I got to the end of the tunnel, I understand being in scary situations in places in my life, because my life took me in places that were scary. And I’m always trying to acclimate. I look down at my right hand. Now I’m left handed. So I still worry about why did I look at my right hand as opposed to my left hand. You know, this is the kind of stuff back here, you think about. It wasn’t there. But as I focused in this blue silvery, sensational place, my hand appeared. And it’s like when you put your hand underwater, it looked like my fingers were longer. It wasn’t like Michael Jackson’s glove. But it was a shimmering essence, to reinforce me that I still had a consciousness of a body, that I had to be reaffirmed and reassured that wherever it was, I was, I could relate to it. I  now know that that’s the reason 45 years later, you know. When you look at this, and you realize where this has taken me in my life, you do a lot of analysis, and you do a lot of study, you pay attention. And as you know, after this happened, when I got up to walk again, I became a hospice volunteer. And I’ve been a hospice volunteer for 42 years. And I have more than 34,000 hours at the bedside. And I’ve been with more than 2,000 people going from this world to the next world. And I can tell you this, that there might be people who know more about the death experience, or the life experience than me, but at the bedside, there’s nobody who knows more. And I’ve been dead four times. Struck by lightning, a death experience. Lightning did so much damage inside of me. Open heart surgery, a near death experience, that was 13 years later, seven years later, brain surgery. And then 20 years later, open heart surgery again, at 68 years old with an aneurysm under the aortic valve, near death experience. And five days 2018. Five days later, I went into cardiac arrest at two o’clock on a Sunday morning. And watched them revived me. I came back into my body. I went and stayed three or four or five minutes and I went into cardiac arrest again two times, probably took them 20 – 25 minutes, to do the whole thing to resuscitate. But flatlined. So when I cohesively look at all that George, I have all the interactions and the knowledge of what happens to a family and to the person in transition and what they need and how. And to the people who leave them. Because I have watched it my entire adult life. So the most important thing, George that people can draw from the near death experience is this. About 27% of every time you hear somebody tell you about a near death experience, it’s not true. They’ve either emotionally or psychologically framed it to fit some kind of paradigm in their life, drug overdose some something that they can use that name and that term to brand their reality. Okay, but the rest of those are people who have deep mystical spiritual experiences.

George Knapp
Let’s go back to your first one.

Dannion Brinkley
I’m going right now. So I get to the end, there’s time I look at my hand, my hand, just not when I take my focus because I can feel something moving toward me, I take my focus off my hand, George. And it disappeared before I quit looking at it, it went back into the mist, I turned to my right, my left, there’s a being, a being that had form and shape was, you can’t say vibrating, but it was emanating an energetic pattern, you know, I’m watching it. And then I had what I think is absolutely the single most important thing about the near death experience. And this is something that I have studied for 43 years, a panoramic life review, the hall of records, the book of judgment, all those things that you hear, I saw my entire life pass before me in a 360 degree panorama, I had missed nothing. You know how many hairs was in the nose of the doctor who pulled you from your mother. You know everything that there is from the time you open your eyes, you have complete cognitive awareness, no doubt about it. And it’s all happening at the same time. No doubt about it. Then you watch the same live from a second person point of view, as if you were your own best friend. So you can see how silly, how funny,  how dumb, how stupid it was, but it’s from your best friend, you know, there’s no judgments just looking. And then you literally become every person that you ever encounter. And you feel the direct results of your interaction between you and that person. So no one gets away with anyone, anything. And you are responsible for the intention of why you did what you did. And you’re not going to rationalize it, you’re going to become them. And then this question comes, and I have to use a Dannionism because it’s it’s too hard to explain. But this question comes, and I’ll say, God, if God couldn’t come today, and God sent you, in the life you just reviewed, what difference did you and God make? You judge you, nobody knows more about you than you. But the person, the being, that is witnessing this event is a far greater, more expansive, wonderous spiritual being than the human being you interacted with, as he lived in this physical life. Once that was over, and I didn’t have a lot of really good stuff, George you know, when I look at my life, golley, and even from a second person point of view, when I was a bully, tough guy, you know, intimidating, and you know all the things that we as, as young guys, especially rednecks, all the kind of personality traits that comes with that, I had a legendary overhand left and a really good right upper-cut. So my fights lasted maybe three minutes, okay, but I won. So that arrogant kind of place. So I couldn’t figure out much of what me and the divine had ever done, except maybe a couple of times helped a dog or something like that. But mostly it was the agony anguish and the inadequate value I put in people that affect their ego and their self recognition and appreciation of themselves. So I decided to dedicate my life to quit being that. I have never quite been successful at it yet, but I’m still trying.

George Knapp 
When you have that first one, and you’re floating out of your body looking at it, are you wondering, where the hell am I? What’s going on here or not really?

Dannion Brinkley  
No, you know, the system. As I look back now, you know the system. There was a conscious part of you that is aware of this process. There is not a I don’t know where I am or Lord, I’m scared. Or maybe this and maybe that, the very moment you separate every attachment that you had to, other than love, has no value. And I came up with the saying, I said listen, everybody, you have never seen a U-Haul on the back of a hearse. The only place that ever happened was in Egypt. When they buried you with everything and three or four wives and all you entrails goes in jars. There is nothing about this dimension, or this level of consciousness that has any value the moment you lift out,

George Knapp  
As you’re recovering, all those months recovering, trying to be able to walk again, gives you time to reflect. Is that when you sort of decided, I’m going to make a change?

Dannion Brinkley 
Well, once you realize two things, well three things, once you realize that you are a spiritual being, and I term it this, a great powerful and mighty spiritual being with dignity, direction, and purpose. That’s who you are, I have never been able to doubt that in my four journeys, and the things that I have witnessed at the bedside of people going from this world to the next. Okay, and the things that I have seen 34,000 hours, a lot of two or three o’clock in the morning, and what happens that as ever not reinforced that. Second, if I didn’t go to hell, in the last four journeys, nobody’s going to hell, okay. So when you learn you don’t die, when you learn you’re a spiritual being, you’re not going to go to hell. That’s enough to inspire you to change, not to be threatened to change. My heart goes out George, in this insanity that we’re living in all those people who have lost somebody, or is in fear of losing their own life, or in fear of causing someone they love death, by being close to them. My heart goes out to them, but they have to know this. This life is just a part of your life. And it’s a part of who you are. And it’s something that you chose to do. And it was something that you were chosen to do with the emphasis on being chosen. I mean, these are the rules. You know, I look at websites and things about people who, in their brilliant psychological nature and their brilliant physics have come to the conclusion that you don’t have a soul. Well those types of  people are basically silly. I look at them with a sense of humor, you know, because first, I say that you’re not only, I don’t know the term what soul means. But I can tell you unequivocally you’re a spiritual being, and I can tell you unequivocally you will lift out of your body will have a life review. And what I did is, you know, the saying, in my father’s house there are many mansions, and I go to prepare a place for you. Well, after I had this panoramic life with you, and I had a moment to reflect on it, this being and I, we went to this, I called it a crystal city, you know, you try to find words George, to describe something that there’s no words in English that describe it. But you have to try to give people an understanding of the experience. I went to this crystal city, and as I went to enter it, the being, who had come to guide me, merged with me. Okay, it merged. I and it became the same. Now I’ve worried about that. And I’ve listened to 1000s, well, probably 400, near death experiences, real ones from the old days. Okay, from the old days. And when that being merged with me, I had a heightened sense of me. I mean, I was more aware of I was less the Dannion who left South Carolina and more aware of the Dannion as the being, the spiritual being, than I was even to the near death experience, to the panoramic life. And I came to this place, and it was amazing to me, because it looked like it was built of light. And it had a nuclei like you look at atoms and you see that nuclei. But it was just those arcs and the waves and the movement of it. And then these 12 beings appear. And there was a 13th being to the right, just above the 12 in front of me. And it would designate one of the beings not in order, and then all of a sudden, that being would resonate colors, emanating colors, and it would resonate to where it was the only thing I saw. And then it was like a laptop, it was like a box of knowledge, which is what I call them, came and it would open up and I would see these series of events, okay, and it was like I could smell them. It was like I was physically being aware of them, although I am not physical anymore. And that one would go. And when I used to laugh and tell jokes in the lectures, you know, I used to tell people, maybe I died and went to the Radio Shack. Because when you try to think about it, but I went through 12 of these boxes. I never did quite understand in the first couple of years what that was. But it was burned into me. It was burned into me as, as I was always thought it yours was going to be a guidepost for something that would be shown me. And when I saw what I thought was these events, these events would allow me to see markers, I knew there was a destiny being designed for me, I just didn’t know what it was, I knew that I had agreed to it. And I knew that I was chosen for it. That’s the same thing everybody that’s watching this got here and it’s the same thing you’re doing here. And it’s the same structure that I’m describing. No doubt about it, not maybe, no doubt about. Okay, so as I, all of a sudden, I am floating above my body, covered in a sheet in a room because it had been busy at the hospital. I know the details because my brother was there. My father was there. Sandy was there. The guy on the other end of the phone Tommy was there, and his wife at that time Alice was there. They were all there. My father, they’re all there. So listening to all their stories about what happened during just how I understand. The one that I could never put together was my father’s description of saying seeing me on a slab. I could never find that place, you know. And then I had some Dannion debunker. And he was a doctor from my little southern fundamentalist Baptist town who said that he had come to see me and then I was awake. And it’s just like up on the internet. And I could never find anybody who ever remembered see him. And the doctor on duty never found him. And then I went to him. And he had no record of a file because I haven’t seen him since I was like nine years old. You know, his little local doctor. But as I pieced it all together, Tommy had come into the room, and I could feel him coming down the hallway, George, and I could feel that we’ve been friends all our lives. And it was a corpsman in the Navy. So he knew the lingo. He knew what to do. That’s what kept me at least kept air in my lungs. And he kept doing what he was doing. And Sandy, and I could feel that sense of love and grief. And that’s when I started to understand bereavement loss, grief and pain, and the sense of being loved. You know, and so God, so it has to be in a love that’s about appreciation, honoring the friendship, you know, and all of a sudden, I’m back in my body. It is burning. It’s on fire. I can barely see. I mean, everything, all the lights are burning my eyes. And I realized I was not breathing. I mean, I am in the body, alive, not breathing. And now had to fight to take a breath, and I took a breath and I blew on the sheet. Tommy saw the sheet blowing. And he went and yelled for the doctors. They came in, they took me back, they stabilize me. And I spent the next two years learning to walk and feed myself and destroying probably one of the greatest relationships I ever had. Because of the struggled and the pain and the hardship I was putting her through. And when people talk about grieving George, if you think about me saying I’ve been dead three or four times, think about what I have done to my family and people who have loved me. Like in 2018 when they all came here to say goodbye because no one thought I would make it. So my brother and my sister for the third time came to tell me goodbye, and Catherine to say goodbye. So I understand from a spiritual emotional point of view what people are going through. But why I’m doing these talks, George, is because nobody dies. It never happens. It’s not a part of the nature of reality. It’s not. And I say that from 10s of 1000s of hours. Knowing what people go through, you have loss, you have bereavement, you have abandonment, and then you have grief. I designed my life to keep people from getting to grief. I created the Twilight Brigade, one of the largest end of life care volunteer programs for dying veterans in American history. And I’ve died with more veterans and anybody else, anywhere, anytime as a volunteer. Why, I served in the Marine Corps Semper fidelis – ever faithful. I know what they go through. I know what combat does, I understand the mindset and I created instruction programs that would allow a person to frame the issues to help a person, see the value of their life, celebrate their love, and go from this world to the next. That was number one.

George Knapp  
Dannion, I want to talk about the Twilight Brigade in detail. But back to your journey. So you write a series of books, I think they’ve been read by millions of people, they’ve helped change people’s lives. But along the way, you’ve been bashed by both sides. On one hand, science will say, near death experiences, the tunnel, the light, all that stuff, that’s just the brain dying, nothing happens when you’re dead, you’re dead. On the other hand, religion, which has always taught us about, we are spiritual beings, but we go to heaven or hell. They’re not really comfortable with near death experiences, I don’t believe either. Talk about that struggle that where you find yourself kind of in the middle of the two and how you’ve dealt with?

Dannion Brinkley
Well, a lot of us have mystical things happen to us. A lot of us have what you call divine interventions. Okay. For me, and, you know, I went on about my business, I went on about my life, I changed so much about me George, because I could no longer face the fact that I was responsible for the personality that I basically have. But that my intention was for the wrong reason. Everybody has to understand it’s never what you do that matters. It’s why you do it that matters. So you have to change why, which begins to shift and change your life. I would come and help Dr. Raymond Moody who wrote “Life after Life,” who coined the term near death experience. He lived in Augusta, Georgia, 12 miles from me, and he was going to medical school in the hospital, they brought me into. So star athlete dies in the hospital, comes back to life. He read this article. And so he tracked me down. And he had a program. This is like ’77, he had a program and I went to it and we became fast friends. But I was processing this George, you know, you can’t go from where I was, to where I had become. And the reality of what had happened to me and me not be able to talk myself out of it. No one was trying harder than me for it not to be true. I promise you that. Because I alienated everybody. And I alienated them in such a way because they rather have that jackass back. The Dannion or Danny that they knew, than this one that that was emerging. This one, you know when you want to know if somebody had a near death experience, George, the first thing you ask them is what did they do for the next six months of their life? And if you listen to that, you know if they’re telling you, I won’t say lie, if they’re telling you the truth or not. Well, I read Bibles. Books of the dead. Okay, Raymond’s book was just coming out. And when I read the galleys of that book, I knew Raymond was cool. I didn’t talk to anybody. I told a couple of people the stories because Sandy was there, Tommy was there, my dad was there. They didn’t buy into. Okay, this is 1976-77. So when I watched Raymond through the years, George, I watched Raymond and Raymond was not equipped to handle the onslaught of negative press power and humiliation. Since I’m nobody, and you can’t hurt my feelings, all you can do is make me mad. I don’t have that you can hurt my feelings. You know, I’m not like that. I don’t have that way about me. I don’t give a damn but I care. So I watched Raymond and I watched this destroy his life. And near death experience literally destroys basically the life of the person who had it. When people say I wish I had a near death experience that makes you crazy. Okay, Be glad that you got me telling that to you and I’m telling you the truth. I don’t have to paint anything. You know me, George. You know exactly how I you know, we’ve been on a lot of shows together and Coast to Coast. You know, I appreciate people’s opinions, George. But I am not a really learned person. But you don’t know how many times you have to kill me before I get to be a really curious individual. Okay, you know, and I studied every religious context and every book and Oral Roberts and everybody and Billy Graham and looking at, I was into the Egyptian book of the dead and the dead poco v all for the Maya and the Aztec calendar and all this stuff. And I want to tell you some that I don’t want to talk about in this show. But I want to tell you something. I never talked about this. But as I would crawl out of the bed, I had to roll and hit the floor. And I had to crawl to get in my rocking chair. And I would work my feet to get my legs to work. And I would rock. Because I had days George, when I would get out the door, I would fall and hit the wall. Pass out, wake up, blood everywhere, ants in my nose and in my eyes, and I can’t move. And this goes on for hours till somebody comes by. Another time, I go out to look at my van, I put my hand on the van, I pushed the door off, and I black out. And I pulled my shoulder out of socket. And I hang there for three hours screaming until my dad got there coming back because somebody called. So to crawl and get in my rocking chair. In those first couple of weeks George, I would go to these levels. I did not function here. I was not here. My body was here, but I was and I will travel through these levels of consciousness. And every so often, I can now look at it, you’re just showing me stuff, you know, because I could not live inside of myself in South Carolina and 1975 with the spiritual religious issues that people deal with and the medical establishment disavowing reality, I would have blown up, okay. Or I would have done some damage. But I never knew what these beings were George and I’d like to explore it some time with you. And I was talking to Katherine and I decided to tell her we were sitting on the porch one evening, and we saw this zigzag in the sky. And we couldn’t figure out what it was in Vegas. And I started to tell her and she told me that these beings that I saw after the first near death experience, these beings I saw were insectoids, okay. I don’t know what an insectoid is. The thing I care about a UFO is if they want to poke me and feel me and punch, dip their fingers in some orpheus, just let me drive. I am a NASCAR man. Show me this scared whale show me the gas pedal. Tell me how many miles per gallon this turkey gets. Let me take it around the moon and back. If you know some aliens and they need to poke and probe. I’m their man, alright. So Catherine started telling me what this all was, insectoids. And I look up all that, I have not seen them since those early days. George. Okay. 1975. But after this open heart surgery. I saw them again. And what was so interesting about them, because this is after the surgery because I had to go back in the hospital two or three times? And I was down to 12% heart function, you know, and I live in an 18% and I’m on oxygen and all the stuff waiting on me to die. Okay. And I saw them again. And this time George they were dressed up. They had on their little robes and they had on their little breast plates, you know, okay, you know, they were like dressing up for me. Okay, you know, this is how I saw it from the first ones I’ve solved to the next time. But I saw them and I passed through that in that era. And that’s just something I wanted to put in because I look at this UFO story. I cannot not believe that there are extraterrestrial life. Because the sheer numbers of what the satellites and the Galileo and the Hubble and that Spanish satellite. When you photograph the universe joins. There is no way that would 10 trillion planets and stars we’re the only ones here. That becomes a stupid thought. Stupid. Okay, I know that there are dimensional existences. I know right here, right now, less than a breath away. And the time that you breathe in, hold on, and breathe out. Another world is that close. When you breathe in, pay attention to when you breathe in. And when you breathe out in order to breathe out, you would have to stop breathing in, and then breathe out. So in that space, right there is where everything happens. And that’s as far as away you are from that dimension.

George Knapp 
Let me ask you this, you’ve withstood so many attacks. Debunkers go after you, skeptics and things of that sort. Are you at all encouraged by sort of that research into consciousness? How much more willing scientists and academics are to look at it? Because it’s kind of a big mixing pot of things like near death experiences, UFO experiences. Their willingness to investigate consciousness is a is a road to both of those, don’t you think?

Dannion Brinkley
Absolutely. And you know what I take pride in that I helped start it. Remember, I was with Raymond Moody from the very beginning, from the very beginning. Okay, now, come 13 years later, I’m going on about my life, George, I’m studying, I’m learning. I got it. As soon as I could get up, I volunteered as a hospice volunteer. Because if God could come in today, and God sent me in the life I was going to review, I was gonna make the difference in the lives of those who was going to that level of consciousness next, and I already already been there. I know the way you can’t tell me nothing. I don’t care what you think, I will win this argument. Good luck to whoever thinks they think there’s no such thing as a life after this. That is a silly, nonsensical, illogical beating, end of story. I watched it Drive Raymond crazy. But here we are in 1989. open heart surgery, I get pero carditis from a cut on my hand, from putting a, I had a Volvo from like 1942. And I always rebuilt cars, because it kept me from thinking, and I would sell them and I’ve made money. Okay, so I’ve owned 55 cars, Rolls’s, everything, but it was always to fix them and sell them. So here we are. I have to go in for open heart surgery. I’m down in Charleston. I’m lying on the couch, George, in Charleston, and I’m sweating. True story. And I finally decided I’m going to go to the hospital which was just across the street. I get there. And because I didn’t have insurance, because I’d already lost everything I ever had. Because of what I was going through and God knows the pain and blacking out and my back and all that. Oh my god, people have no idea. So here I go. And I walk in there. I think I have the flu. All right. The little guy comes and you look like Doogie Howser, George. He’s got this little glasses on, he’s got these glasses on. He looks like he’s like 12 years old. Okay. So I’m like 30, I’m 38 years old. I don’t drink, do drugs. None of that stuff. Okay, that lightning broke me a lot of that habit. So he put his little his little stethoscope to my chest. And his eyes got big and he turned around and walked away pretty fast. The last thing I remember was him and a crash cart. That’s the last thing I remember. The people with the little green footies on and a little green hat, little green outfit coming at me, and I blacked out. I wake up and they’re shaving me. And the doctor came in and he said, and my dad came in and, 38 years old God knows George. And they told me they had to do open heart surgery and that I would be dead in less than 45 minutes. Okay, if I hadn’t come into the hospital. So my dad says. He says, “Well, what do you want to do?” Dad, I am out of here. That’s enough of this. Okay. I don’t want to have no open heart surgery. I don’t want to hear about it. I said, Dad, did you see the size of the hands on that guy that’s gonna be in my chest. I said, did you see the size of his hands? You can forget it. My dad, he couldn’t handle it but knows I am about it. You know, I’m a hospice volunteer. I go to the nursing homes, you know, I’m not that person. I say you can forget it. You know what my dad did? He called Raymond and flew Raymond over. Okay. So Raymond came in, and he’s just talking. You know, come on, dad. You got to stay. Come on, because I wouldn’t do it. I’m out of here. I’ll see you turkeys later. And finally, he said, “Please stay and help me. Stay and help me.” So I said, Okay. I watched the open heart surgery. I can describe the concept what went on? Who would make it and whether I would or not, and even some of the guys and I talked to him about it. All this is reality, George. This is not some hyperbole. This is how it happened. And I could witness it. I was pretty amazed because I always thought in surgery, it was like, doctor, what was that? Yeah, like Dr. Kildare, you know, they were in there talking about sex and well, who did what, they’re listening to Procol Harum. Okay, and they go in at it. Okay. And then I’m back down the tunnel. I didn’t see the being of light. Although I was aware of the beings presence. I didn’t see him. It was not the same as the first it was as though I had acclimated. And I didn’t go there in pain. I didn’t come from pain or suffering or any of that. And then I had that second panoramic live review. It was the worst thing about a panoramic life review. George, it starts over from the beginning. Doesn’t pick up where you left off! Okay, there is no escape from you facing you. You can forget it. It’s not gonna happen. And you are responsible both for why, not what. If why I killed someone to protect my wife and children. I’m gonna be punished for that. No way, was my intention.

George Knapp 
Tell me about the Twilight brigade.

Dannion Brinkley
George, that’s the third one. Twilight brigade came out in 1997 when I had that brain surgery, okay, when I had to have brain surgery, I’m still at number two. I need people to listen to this and however you edit this to listen to it that I’m telling you the truth. Okay, this person’s experience, one person’s experience and in in a time where everybody’s scared to death to death. Let me tell you what happens based on my own experience, my own experience, and watching 1000s of people go from this world to the next. So I go to this, not to the city of light. I go to this place where light is healing and frequencies and the healing modalities was energetic and frequencies and it was showing me how things operate in this reality and in the levels of how we function. And it was to educate me about the nature of the physical being as an electrical entity. Now think how crazy that is for me to be able to see. So I come back. I go to Raymond’s I go to Raymond’s. I come out of that open heart surgery, another nine months of cutting the chest open and the damage inside of me George inside of me, I look horrible. There’s so much scar tissue in there. You know my heart. Okay, all that all on the left side. You know, my back is, you know, we just I’m sorry, but that’s where it is. So I go to see Raymond. Raymond’s sitting in a house with no electricity and no water on on Christmas Eve by himself. And he was broken. His world of coming as someone that’s never had the experience who brought it forth, his own people had beaten him. The doctors and the psychologist and the physicist and all that. So I cut the electricity on and I took him out to dinner, we got the water turned on before Christmas Eve, and we got it all done. And he ate, probably hadn’t eaten in a day. And we ate and we sat around. And that was the moment that I decided that everybody needed to pick on somebody their own sides. And I decided that that was me. You want to come argue with me about whether there’s life after death? Kiss my ass? Come get you some. I’ve spent my whole life and death George. I don’t care who you are, what you think. You will lose this argument. There is a life after death. And not only that, no one dies, to think that you’re going to die is nuts. Alright, so I wrote “Saved by the Light.” Raymond and I created experiments, we worked on programs. And I came in I met the publisher, and I wrote “Saved by the Light,” and I put the boxes of knowledge in “Saved by the Light,” which turned out to be future events. I call that part Nostra-Dannion. Because I don’t buy into half the stuff I hear George, you know, I have to live in the swami business. But that’s because I couldn’t fund the Twilight Brigade. Okay, so I don’t believe all that. But I put the boxes of knowledge. And that was 1993, published in 1994. In 1997, at the height and fame of the great Dannian King of Death, I blow five subdural hematomas in my brain. And I have to have brain surgery. So I had to do it, because the pain was so horrible and so pressing. And though whatever it was pushing on my spine that was driving those nerves and my lower back, I could not take it. I either had to die, or I had to have something. Well, in the third one, George, I was standing at the end of the bed. I was not above it like the first two. I was standing at the end of the bed. I watched him roll my head over. I watched him shave my head. And I watched him start drilling holes in my head. And I moved into the place that I always describe where people are floating above, which I call that the transition place. The place where you acclimate from leaving the physical, becoming ethereal and from ethereal becoming spiritual or a spirit in spirit. Okay. But this time, I realized that this place was a level of consciousness that I never saw in the first two. Okay, so I get down the tunnel, George. I already know the panoramic life review. So I go through probably a third of it. The worst part, but I was so drawn back to that place, that was a level of consciousness because, look, I’ve been at death and dying now like 20 years. I’ve been already dead again. Okay, so it’s nothing new to me. But I saw this place where people can get trapped, people become obsessive compulsive and narcissistic and controlling and manipulating and alcoholism and all those places. And when you come into this place as a physical being you are given freewill. It’s a part of the nature of what this life is about, there is freewill. And you don’t have to go anywhere. You can stay there, you can stay there forever. But you understand I didn’t know where it ghosts came from. I never know where ghosts came from and I didn’t care. You know, I’ve never seen a ghost. Okay, but then I knew what ghosts came from. I knew where possessions come from, where attachments come from, depending on what days of the month is or what year it is based on whichever calendar explores that anxious religious contextual nature relationship, but I saw so many veterans, so many soldiers and so many people, so many people abused and would not allow themselves to go to the light. And when I got up from the dead that time I built the Twilight Brigade. Because I’d been going with veterans and visiting veterans. But it was not an organization because by then George, I figured out how you did it. I’m 22, 23 years later. And so I know what to do. People need to know their life has value. And they need to know that they made a difference in your life. And the fact that you’re there to see them means that what you’re saying is true. You cannot lie to somebody and transition because in transition, you are not fully conscious. You begin to make the transition no matter what because you have an appointed time with destiny, you came to breathe X amount of breaths and in that X amount of breaths, you set a series of goals for yourself, and you will, very few people ever say I ever, ever fail, many of us sell out. Because that nature of when an intention becomes a motive is the spiritual trap that you take on. So I built the Twilight Brigade.  Again, it became one of the largest end of life care volunteer programs for dying veterans. I spent 37 years in the VA dying with veterans. 37 years, 34,000 hours. But I built an organization that birthed what is now called the No Vet Dies Alone program, which is institutional-wide in the VA. And I am a member of the No Vet Dies Alone advisory board, and I helped co write the standard end of life care model for the Veterans Administration. Well, with a lot of other people. So my dreams live on in the lives of dying veterans. My biggest crisis right now George’s I cannot get to my boys. I know what it’s like to be a veteran and to be dying. And I think that where we are in our lives right now everybody, where we are in our lives is a test of our real true moral nature. What has value. So for me as Dannion Brinkley and understand that nobody dies. Nobody. And to think that is some absurd concept that spiritual being could possibly conceive of dying is insane. That’s insane. And that when you take a deep breath, and I think there is evil afoot and deception is afoot, because I saw it as a box of knowledge. Anybody who reads “Saved by the Light” chapter five, box 12, the book I wrote 26 years ago published in 1994. And the final vision and cut on the news, I have said for 45 years that the battle for the souls of humankind would be fought in healthcare. So I took myself to health care, palliative and end of life, why I know everything about it, from sitting at the bedside, to being the person doing it to my family. Them watching me die in the agony of what they’ve had to witness and go through, and how much I’ve destroyed of their lives trying to survive in this world. You know, I have no problems about its price I was willing to pay. But the title of chapter box 12. George, is Technology and the Virus.

George Knapp  
I read it a long time ago. I’ve got a copy right here. I’m going to go and get it.

Dannion Brinkley
And then read the final vision. And when it starts to talk about refugees flooding over the border and having to put military on the border that would tell the timing of when it is to execute the next step. Okay, so I wrote this 25 years ago, and it happened to me 45 years ago when I was dead. Okay, so you know, people can puff and talk and sell wolf tickets, and they can do some equations and come up with all kind of theories about what they believe and why they don’t believe. But I wrote 26 years ago with Paul Perry, a vision I had of a box of knowledge that I described when I was dead in September the 17th in 1975. And I have lived my entire life based on the battle for the souls of humankind, and I took the fight to them. I took the fight to them. So is there a life after death? Absolutely. Do you die? That is impossible. It cannot happen. There is no possible way. Are you going to hell? I looked up halos, the Greek word, the words in the Bible, the eight times it’s used in the Bible. I just can’t figure out how in the world based on all the religious dogma that describes going to hell, I have never been there. Okay, I have seen a place where people trapped themselves and that could be the emptying of the gulp. You know the whole thing about the well of the souls and all that in Revelations, I’m a pretty good thumper. You can kill me and think I don’t search spirituality. And no, I don’t look at it now. And what I do I’ve read and how I try to understand because people need to not be afraid of something that does not happen. And they can’t let the fear of their love be a weapon. So I thank the devil or the Luciferian Sabbatarians for this two things. As I watched this game, their play, it’s the 1968 playbook in politics. It’s 1968, that means they will use racism. And I as a 70 year old southerner who grew up in segregation, my pride that I owe the devil, or Luciferians is that we are not a racist nation. We have grown to the point where you cannot incite us Americans, not just white people, but us. You cannot incite us, we are not racist. Okay, I take the greatest joy in that pride that my country has grown to that place in herself as she’s evolving, right. And to know that, if I saw it 45 years ago, and I’ve designed my entire life around it, and I wrote about it 25 years ago, and you can read it and see it today, the virus and technology, the technology and the virus, and you can look through those boxes, some I’ve never seen, some I’ve never seen, and maybe George because of how I was looking at it. Because when Paul and I was writing it, and I thank Paul Perry for a lot of the words we use. When we were writing it, maybe how I was looking at it, because I wanted to write it in 1975 terms I was writing “Saved by the Light.” Okay, say by the light was what happened. And I didn’t want to bring it up to date. I’m a lot smarter now about what I wrote in 1975. But it was about 1975. I’m a lot smarter. Okay. But to know, now as I look at that people need to pay attention to their health care, and the quality of taking care of themselves because the true spiritual test is how well you take care of yourself in a routine perspective every day. And instead of realizing that this stuff is basically not true. So the other thing I want to thank the Luciferians for is this. If my mother and my father were alive, which they are not, and I passed with both of them, if they were alive, is what I know about hospice. There is nothing you could do to stop me from getting to them. There is nothing. So based on my new self is just how many times I have to make bail. Based on my old self, I this the ranks pretty quick. No one will stop me from getting to the bedside of my mother or my father, you better figure out a way for me to be able to do it. Because I’ve drawn a line in the sand. And I’m fighting right now to get to my veterans. And I study and look at those vaccines and I’m not the kind of person George that casually listens to a vaccine. That’s a gene therapy. I don’t listen to that. I read every word look it up in the dictionary, go to CDC website. This is what I have been doing for 42 years. 42 years I’ve been looking up illnesses and diseases and actions and how to advise a family. I mean, I’ve been doing this normally it didn’t just start like the last week. I’ve been doing this my whole life. I know the deal. So to put it in a tight package everybody. George Knapp is an absolutely fabulous magnificent human being, with a sense of curiosity, because we live in a state that has so much groundable knowledge about extra-terrestrial existences, only someone who is able to blind themselves from the truth could not be researching it as a good journalist, a good investigative journalist. That’s a fact and I’ve known George for 25 years. And number two, you will not die. It will never happen. Never. And whatever is got you so afraid of death. The day it gets to be your love, that is the weapon or your love for someone. You can’t touch them. You can’t hold them. You can’t squeeze them. You got to stay away from them. There is absolutely no way that could be spiritually grounded in truth. There is no way love could be doing as the power that’s happening to us now. That is divinely impossible.