To Heaven - How do we go to Heaven? This is also something that we can learn from people who actually die and have experiences of Heaven beyond death where a deeper insight of Heavens gate is revealed through research of Near Death Experiences.

Here is an excerpt from Chapter Seven on How to go to Heaven:

“Going to heaven that January morning wasn’t my choice. The only choice in all of this is that day I turned to Jesus Christ and accepted him as my Savior. Unworthy as I am, he allowed me to go to heaven.”

Here in chapter seventeen of 90 Minutes in Heaven, Piper tells us that it was the choice of accepting Jesus Christ as his savior that allowed him to go to heaven. Also on his website under “How to go to Heaven” we are told about his experience of heaven through his accident:

But the most important decision in Don's life occurred NOT on his drive home but when he accepted Christ as Lord at the age of sixteen. Deciding to accept Christ meant Don had an eternal home in Heaven no matter when he died. Acknowledging Christ as Savior guarantees that you will spend eternity with Him.

   Piper also tells us that Jesus “died in our place or for our sins” which together with the above paragraph leads to the Christian doctrine that accepting Christ alone equals automatic acceptance into heaven. This narrow idea of heaven implies a kind of sole Christian automatic fast track to heaven and again this dogma is not supported by NDE research.

   While entry into heaven does seem to be a natural process, there is again no evidence to support that it requires a belief in a specific religious figure as NDEs seem to occur equally to people of all walks of life, religious affiliations, spiritual beliefs, and life experiences.

   From David’s testimony we can learn that entry into heaven, or the Light, does not require any ritual at all:    

I didn’t go through a tunnel; the light appeared in a distance and I moved towards it. I don’t know if I moved towards it or it moved towards me, but there was movement into the light. And it was the most natural thing in the world, most natural thing beyond this world. It didn’t require any sort of ritual. I didn’t have to jump through any sort of hoops or anything. It was just a matter of…I was ready to go towards that light and I moved towards that light.

   Here David gives us a very valuable insight from his NDE; that entering the light, or heaven, is the most natural thing in the world and that is doesn’t require “any sort of ritual.”

   Also Cheryl explains the same as David here:   

From my own experience it wasn’t difficult at all. It was a staged process and like I said I don’t think that I have been a perfect little angel, and yet, in my dying it was kind of in stages. I mean I first saw my body from a distance, I viewed what was happening; my body was being destroyed and I watched it from a ways away. And then I found myself in a place of beauty, of light; bright aqua blue beautiful light. It was a place of perfect harmony and bliss. And then I found myself in the bright light. It’s not like I tried to go or I had to be judged to go. I was the white light; I was in the white light. There was no difficulty in going there at all. So for me it was perfectly easy.     

   “Perfectly easy” would fit with the majority of people in my study where I found that 85 percent disagreed that: “Entry into Heaven is difficult and only for a few.” In fact, NDE research agrees that entry into heaven is a natural thing that we do not need to effort for.

   I asked P. M. H. Atwater, based on her research of over 4,000 NDEs, whether heaven as a goal was difficult to reach, and this was her answer:

A goal is something that you do, it’s something you achieve. It’s something that you effort for. But returning to God, returning to that love, that reality; that’s not something you effort for: that happens. That’s a natural thing. Easy or hard that depends on the individual but it’s a natural thing. It’s where we go.

   Atwater’s answer gives us one of the main insights about heaven’s gate that we can learn from the NDE: Entry into Heaven is a natural process for all of us but as an individual we can make it difficult. 

   This deep insight into the gate of heaven and that there are two sides to entering the Light is also what we can learn from David’s testimony:

It was very natural to me. I drowned and it was a very violent death because it was in a storm and it was very violent. Before I went into the light I found myself in a darkness but the darkness was…I can see where it might be frightening for some people. But for me it wasn’t, it was more of a curiosity to me and it was warm and welcoming. And the transition from the darkness to the light just seemed like to most natural process in the world for me.

  Here David admits that, while entry into the Light was very natural to him, he can still see how this natural process may be frightening to some people. In another part of David’s testimony that we looked at in chapter six, he also revealed that in order to re-integrate with the Light we have to shed our “humanness” and it is the fear of shedding this human aspect that can be frightening to some people.   

      Atwater explains further about the entry into heaven is a natural thing:

Easy or hard that depends on the individual but it’s a natural thing. It’s where we go. Some people struggle against it because they can’t believe it. Some people don’t want to go back to that light, they want to stay here. They have their own perception, or their own idea of what the world is and they don’t want to leave it. Maybe they are afraid, or maybe they believe some kind of story about death and crossing over and where they might end up. And indeed maybe some of those fears, or stories, or hesitations are correct because some people don’t end up in pleasant places.

   In order to fully understand what Atwater here is telling us we have to go back to what we looked at in chapter six about hell. Here we made the conclusion that God is not angry and does not punish, however, for the same reason that entry into heaven is not one-sided we also find that our view on hell is split into perspective.

   In the last chapter on hell Atwater told us that she had yet to hear of a single experience in the world who had met an angry God in their NDE. However, she also revealed that while there was nothing negative in the Light, still people could be overwhelmed by the power of the experience:   

As far as the one great light, what you and I would call God; no. Nothing negative, nothing horrific, nothing frightening…I am going to have to hitch a little bit on the word “frightening” because sometimes that greater light is so piercing and raw and so powerful that it is frightening in the sense that it is awesome. It is so awesome that it is overwhelming. So, in that sense it can be a little scary or a little frightening; not because it is negative but because it is so big and so powerful. So, some people are intimidated by that or overpowered by that.

   The Light is all love and there is absolutely no anger in God. But as Atwater explains even though our welcoming is so profoundly positive, still some people can be overpowered and intimidated by this powerful experience. This intimidating power of the NDE is what we have looked at earlier and the result of the sheer power of the NDE that I found in my study.

   As I just mentioned again in the last chapter, this was the 78 percent that said the sensation was stronger than here on earth, with 26 percent saying 50 – 100 times stronger than in this dimension, and 53 percent saying a thousand times stronger or beyond description.

   While this intense sensation can be experienced negatively through an inverted experience of the Light, this sheer power of the Light itself, while being positive, can also be a frightening aspect of entering heaven.

This light exploded and went out in all directions. I could see it and this light spread out in all directions…It was infinite and not only was it infinite but there was nothing else to this light but love. And you know there aren’t any words. If I had been in flesh I think that I would just have disintegrated in the power of this love.

   Here in this part of Kimberly’s testimony, she explains her experience of the Light as an explosion and that if she had been in the flesh she would be disintegrated by the power of the love. This is very common in NDE research, where people often use the word “explosion” of love or even a “cosmic orgasm,” to describe the sheer power of the Light.

   There is usually nothing here in this dimension that comes close to this experience, which is why people say that it is beyond their “ability to describe,” but Kimberly actually does make one good analogy. Relating her experience of going to Niagara Falls with two friends and going behind the water falls she reveals that, 

They took me to Niagara Falls and they took me behind the falls and I was back in my near death experience. There was something about that thundering power of that water and the energy to be behind the falls. And I invite anyone; if you want to know what it might be like to be with this kind of brilliance and perfection and energy – you can get behind Niagara Falls and just let it…It’s a glimpse.

   Other people have used the parallel to the pull of gravity in the free fall, but the analogy with the power of millions of gallons of water in a water fall that Kimberly here makes is very good. We have to imagine that once we leave the body and enter into the other dimension on the other side, then the power and intensity of this otherworldly dimension is beyond human comprehension because this other dimension is not like here on earth.

   While merging with the Light and entering Heaven is a natural process, still some people do become frightened by the sheer power of this experience. This is not God that punishes us in ‘hell;’ it is our own inability to embrace the profound love of the Light that makes us reject God. In this way, as we saw in chapter six, the experience of hell is our separation from God through our inability to reunite with God.