The SHOCKING Truth About Punishment in the Afterlife: What NDEs Tell Us!

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Hi there, welcome to Grief to Growth Podcast. Your host is Brian D Smith, spiritual seeker, bestselling author, grief survivor, and life coach. Brian believes that the worst tragedies of life provide the greatest opportunity for growth. Brian says he was planted, not buried, and he is here to help you grow where you've been planted by the difficulties in life. In each episode, Brian and his guests will share what has helped them to survive and thrive. It is his sincere hope this episode helps you today.

Hey everybody, wanted to make another short video answering a question that I get a lot from the NDE videos.

You guys ask—

you don't ask easy questions, but I'm gonna, I'm gonna take them on. So I may not know the answers, but I've always got an opinion. So this one comes from someone who talked about— they dismissed the fact of an NDE. I think it was John Davis's NDE, NDE, because there was no talk of— sometimes people say because there's no talk of God or Jesus in the NDE experiences, they miss it, but also because there's no talk of punishment. And the thing is, this person actually even used the word retribution, you know, why isn't there any retribution in this video? So therefore, I dismiss it. So I want to talk about the idea of punishment, what we can learn from the NDE about punishment, what we think we can learn from the NDE by just using our common sense, you know, etc. So the first thing is this idea of punishment, the idea that we should be punished in the afterlife for the deeds that we've committed here. And people like to bring up the name of Hitler, you know, it's like, what is going to be like for Hitler? What was it like for Hitler when, when he crossed over? You know, what would his life review be like? Things like things of that nature. So if you believe in punishment, if you believe there's punishment waiting there for things, we like to bring up the worst possible people. The fact is, most of us are not Hitler. We'll, we'll address that in a minute. But most of us are not Hitler. Most of us are not Mother Teresa, we're somewhere in between. There's a great show I loved, it was on NBC called The Good Place. And the whole thing was about people going to heaven or going to hell. And they kind of looked at this idea of the fact this binary choice that I was taught as a child, that it's either eternal bliss or eternal punishment. And they're like, most of us are medium. Most of, most of us are not deserving of eternal punishment. Most of us is not deserving of eternal bliss, if anybody's deserving of eternal bliss. But what would it take to be worthy of eternal punishment? Now, the way I was raised, the way I grew up, it was just being born. The fact that you inherited Adam's original sin, the fact that you were born into this world made you worthy of punishment, eternal punishment, being held and kept alive for eternity being punished. And I believe this comes from the idea back in the ancient days that the worse— the higher the level, the higher the station, the person that you offended, the worse the punishment would be. So if God is the ultimate high of good, then that means literally anything that we do, any sin, as Christians teach us, is the same. And any sin is worthy of eternal punishment. So let's think about this again. Let's go back to Hitler. And let's go back to— let's say that you were meting out punishment for Hitler. Now, he was responsible for the deaths of millions of people. So let's say you torture Hitler for a while. You torture him, right? You're going to literally take the guy and torture him. How long would you do that? How would you— would you torture? Would it be a year, 10 years, 20 years, a million years? Is there ever a point in time when that— when that punishment would be enough, but it will fill up what, what should have been his punishment? And when we think about the idea of eternal hell, and you think about it, Most of us, again, are not Hitler. So are we— can we ever do anything worthy of that? So the people that bring up this question about punishment are typically people, frankly, who are Christians or who believe in some sort of eternal hell, and they don't like the NDE because it doesn't really teach that. So let's talk about what it does teach. Okay, so does it mean that we all go to eternal bliss and we just skip out on any bad things we might have done here? There's a lot of— a lot in the NDE indicate that that is not the case. There's something called a life review,. This is more than just sitting down and having the movies of your life run in your head. This is actually— sometimes people say literally living through every moment of your life over again, from your perspective, and the perspective of the people around you and feeling the pain that you caused. And Peter Panagore talks about how painful this experience can actually be. So as a person who studied the NDE, and as a person who doesn't believe in hell or eternal punishment, I do live my life in terms of how my life review is going to be.. And I believe from studying the NDE that the life review is a self-inflicted punishment, if you will. Let's look at a couple of other things from the NDE. And I'm going to give you a couple of examples. A guy named Howard Storm, who was an avowed atheist who had an NDE, and a guy named Dr. Rajiv Parti, who was also an atheist that had an NDE. And both of these NDEs had a hellish experience. Now, it's interesting because most NDEs don't, A few do. Some percentage of people do experience a hellish type experience. But what I've noticed about pretty much all those people that have those experiences is they're, they're short periods of time that they're in this hellish-like state. And as soon as they're ready to leave, as soon as they call for help, they're taken out. That was the case with Howard Storm. That was also the case with Dr. Pardi. And I've heard of other ones like this. There's, if you look at the movie Nosolar, or Astral City, which is based on the book by Chico Xavier. That experience the guy talked about seems to be almost like a purgatory. But the guy goes to this place where there is some sort of torment, but it's only until the person decides that they're ready to leave that state and they're taken out. So there does seem to be some indication that there might be some sort of punishment in the afterlife or some sort of levels. For example, Swedenborg talks about levels and It sounds like we kind of like when we leave the body, we go to like a higher level, we're taken up by angels. But people that aren't really ready for those levels, it's actually kind of painful for them. And they slowly work their way down to a level where they're comfortable. Now, it's not really a form of punishment, they're not put in a place where they don't want to be. They're just, they're really uncomfortable at the higher places. And they kind of work their way down to a place where they do feel like they're around people around energy like they're more, more in line with. So those are kind of my thoughts on— or those are my thoughts on, on punishment. And I would ask you, if you're, if you're really upset about a lack of punishment, and ask yourself why that is. Do you feel like you need punishment to keep you being a good person? I sure hope not. I want to be good. I want to be a good person for the sake of being a good person. And the other thing that, you know, that comes up a lot of times when we talk about punishment is this idea of soul planning, a life plan. And you'll say, well, if you were if you planned to be a murderer, if you plan to be a Hitler, then you shouldn't be punished. And that makes some sense to me. Now, I don't know that soul planning goes to that level. I don't know if anybody really comes here planning to do bad things. Here's what I do know. There are different levels of reality, and there's different rules for different levels, right? So on this level, doing bad things to people is not a good thing to do. It's not— it's never a good thing, for example, to torture the innocent, to torture babies. That's not something that's good on any level. So we could say maybe at a certain level, the idea of good and evil dissolves and everything's just an experience. But why on earth we have rules to live by? I know that my role here is to do as much good as possible, and to do as little harm as possible. That's my soul plan. I can't worry about what other people's soul plans are, I cannot be responsible for what other people's plans are. So it's not my business what happens to Hitler or somebody like that. It's maybe kind of fun to speculate.. But I'm also not going to go out and do bad things for the— and say, well, that's just part of my plan. And the thing about this planning is we all have to live as though there is free will, we all have to live as though there are decisions, even if we may be here to play a role. For example, I got up this morning, I decided to put on this shirt. Now, was that predestined? Was that something that I had no choice in? But sure felt like I had a choice. I feel like I could have put on another shirt. And that's the way I have to live my life. So as I go through this world, as I look at what my purpose is here, as I look at what my soul plan is, I I'm trying to reach what I consider to be a higher level of consciousness. And that involves not harming others, whether there's punishment waiting for me for that or not. So I would encourage you also, as you live your life, to live your life according to what you think that your soul plan is. And I don't know that anybody really believes that the soul plan is to do evil. So those are my thoughts based upon what I've discovered from studying the NDE and studying other sources. I'd also ask you to think about, you know, the proportionality of justice. That's something I think is very important in human terms. So when you think about eternal torment, if you knew of someone on earth that was doing that, if you knew of a judge, for example, that every person that came to them, they had the discretion, they gave the death penalty. You were speeding, we're going to give you the death penalty. You stole a piece of candy, we're gonna give you the death penalty. That's kind of what the idea of eternal hell is like. That's exactly what it's like. It's like one punishment, no matter what, if you even believe in that sort of punishment. So I hope that helps. Keep the questions coming. I'll keep trying to answer them. And have a great day.

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