hello everyone welcome to Beyond the Veil today. We hear from Bill Dolan, a TV director whose life was forever changed when his heart stopped mid-flight to Nashville for a documentary project. The profound encounter with the Divine that followed transformed his life, and what he learned on the other side will leave you speechless. January 28th, 1999, is the day that changed my life and changed my life forever. Now, I will tell you that like a lot of days that change your life, life, it's not one that I expected and definitely not the outcome I expected, but one that has changed me and has made me better. Because on that day, I died. Just so you have a little context, you need to know that I grew up in the world of television and entertainment. As a young kid, I loved Motion Pictures, and I loved storytelling. And so, as I got older, I recognized I wanted to maybe be a television director. And so, I went to school for it and very fortunately was able to marry my high school sweetheart, start a family, and

land a job in television for one of the major networks. That was so much fun and I will tell you every day going to work was a day when I got to learn, I got to stretch, I got to work with great producers, great talent, celebrities, people from all over the world. And it was one of those things that I just found myself immersed in and I loved, I truly, truly loved. And even today with our creative agency, I love it. Well, one of the things that happens is when you're doing something that you love, there is a price that you pay. And sometimes the price you pay is the price that others that you love don't get all of you. And sadly, that's what happened to me after my wife and I had our first child and our second child and then our third and fourth child. It was right around the time that my business took me all around the world. And instead of being there and being the best dad I could be and being the best husband I could be, I actually became somewhat of an

absentee father and husband. That wasn't intentional. It wasn't intentional at all. In fact, if I can say this, like probably like a lot of guys, I was oblivious. I mean, very much oblivious to what was going on because I felt I was doing all the right things. Go out, work hard, do something meaningful and valuable, something that brings joy to your heart, and then bring money home, uh, pay for a nice house, nice car, private school, all the things that you think that people want and strive for. Not realizing at that time that maybe one of the most precious gifts I could give my wife and my children was my presence. Then an opportunity arose and a friend of mine was working in the motion picture industry and particularly had produced some documentaries that had been very successful, and he asked me if I would be a part of another documentary project for him. Now, keep in mind, documentaries are cool and they're a different media form, kind of like Motion Pictures in that you pour yourself into it, just dive into it, and then once you produce the

product comes distribution, and in the distribution, you promote it. You try to get it to as many markets as possible. You try to see it through its natural life, and then you produce another one, and then you do it again. It's different than the production work that I was doing where I was on the road all the time. This is something I could sink my teeth into and maybe be home more, maybe be a better dad, maybe be a better husband, and it also was lucrative, potentially very lucrative. So I began the documentary project, and just as you'd ever hope, it's not just about, by the way, producing the documentary, it's about distribution. Distribution is key, and we found a distributor in Nashville that said, Come to Nashville, we love your product, we want to support you, we want to get this out to the market, and by the way, I've got a big waiting for you, hold on, you know, this could work, this could really, really work. So I remember that morning, January 28th, 1999, I got on playing with my best buddy.

Timothy Grenage, who is like one of the greatest gospel singers in the world, a great audio producer, music producer. He's worked with some of the biggest names in entertainment and so talented. He was on his way to Nashville too and uh sitting next to each other and about 20 minutes into the flight, I started to feel strange. Now I couldn't put my finger on because it's so bizarre. I was flying all the time so I was never sick for goodness sakes. I was hardly air sick anything like that so that was strange. And it was if things were kind of closing in on me. It was like kind of tingling. It was going in and out and I remember thinking to myself, no, no, I'm not sick. I'm not sick. No, I'm not sick. No, I'm not sick. But something was wrong and it got so bad I turned to Timothy and I said, Timothy, something's not right. And that's the last thing I said before my eyes rolled back in my head, my body went limp, and my heart stopped. Now at First

Timothy actually will tell you that he thought I was joking. You know, I always I see joking, what like the dead body on the plane, you know, joke. That's an old one. But the truth was he poked me and recognized know something was seriously wrong. And uh, so he didn't know CPR, but he didn't know chest compressions. So he began. And Timothy's a big guy, you know, for those that know me and my Irish heritage, they might think I'm descended from leprechauns because I'm not a giant guy. Timothy, on the other hand, looks like, you know, he's the lineman for an NFL team. So he's a giant guy, strong, so gifted. And he now begins doing compressions on my little leprechaun is body. It makes quite a scene, but the sad part is nothing happened. And he got really worried. And he picked me up and he put me in the aisle. And he began doing chest compressions, just chest compressions over and over again. Nothing was

happening absolutely nothing. And um, as Timothy tells me, he was just ready to break my ribs. So, he pulled back his fist, pulled back like, Okay, this is it, I'm going to break your ribs. And as he pulled his fist back, I took a breath and I came to. Now, for those that are kind of curious on the medical side, what the heck happened to Bill, they ended up making emergency landing 'cause it made quite a scene and people recognized there was something desperately wrong. And in fact, my heart had stopped, so they made an emergency landing. I ended up eventually back in a cardiac wing where I didn't have a heart attack, didn't have a stroke, anything like that. In fact, when they first checked me out, they couldn't find anything. They just said you dehydrated. But after further testing, they realized that I have a syndrome or a disease, not exactly how you define it, called neurogenic neurocardiogenic syncopy. So, and technically it's the kind that

can kill you. So they call it malignant neurocardiogenic syncope. And the only way they know to address it is to put a pacemaker in your chest. They don't know what causes it, but ultimately it means that your brain and your heart get out of sync, and your brain tells your heart to slow down or stop. In my case, it tells my heart to stop. So needless to say, that's not a good thing. And after putting in the pacemaker, I have to be paced on the average about six times a day. My heart rate drops to a dangerously low rate, and it has to pace me to keep me alive. It's a curious feeling knowing that on any given day when you go to bed at night, you might not wake up the next morning. But I'll tell you, it's a pretty powerful feeling when you get up the next morning, realizing you've been given another day of life. And that's just one of the consequences of having that experience. Now, as for the plane, you know

Timothy was working on me. He doesn't know, maybe two, three, four minutes. PR panicked, but I will tell you that for me, I had the most profound experience you could ever imagine. For all practical purposes, while in the dimension of time and space, he was working on me for 2, three, 4 minutes. I may have been away for two, three, four minutes, million years because it was in that second, that blink of an eye when I crossed over from the dimension of time and space to the dimension of no time, to Eternity. I recognized I moved into a place where everything that ever has happened and everything that ever will happen has happened. And it's a profound Revelation, but without a doubt, the most powerful thing I experienced was coming face to face with God. Now, so you have a little context of why that's so meaningful as if coming face to face with God wasn't meaningful enough. Growing up, my father was very ill, and through most of my growing up years, he was actually supposed to die.

and he had a hideous, hideous disease that caused so much pain in him that he constantly was lashing out. And like a lot of people that are in pain, you lash out at people that are near you. That was me. So I experienced a lot of verbal abuse, physical abuse, and it was tough. It was tough growing up. But probably the worst part about that is that a lot of us will superimpose our perceptions of God based upon our experience with authorities in our life, particularly our parents. And even though I grew up in somewhat of a religious household, and look, I could tell you, Oh, does all the things that people say. Does God love you? Oh, yeah, God loves you. Does God care about you? Oh, yeah, God cares about you. Do you love God? Oh, yeah, I love God. I could give lip service to all that stuff, but secretly, if you asked me if I ever wanted to come face to face with God, no, no, no. I was so convinced that if I ever came face to face with

God, he's going to take his finger and put it right in my face and let me know you failed, you so disappointed me, you never lift up to your potential, you make me so angry. And I hear the because of my father's voice superimposed over what I believed was the voice of God. So if you said, Do you love God? Oh, I love God. Do you ever want to meet God? No, I'm not sure I could take it. I don't want to be subjected to the horror of having the creator of the universe tell me what a failure I was. And then I met him, and I'll never forget that overwhelming sensation of being in the presence of the Divine. And it's as if like a laser beam went through my head, and all of a sudden I understood, I understood things that I never understood before, I felt things I hadn't felt before. And whoever this was in front of me, I trusted, and I was overwhelmed with pure love. And it wasn't like the kind of love

like I love you. You know, I'm going to treat you with love, or I'm going to act like I love you, or do loving things. I was in the presence of the total embodiment of love. I was in the presence of the author of love. I was in the presence of the source of love, and it was consuming, totally consuming. It's as if, if I tried to look to the right to say, Oh, was there's an end to this? No, there was no end. I could look to the left, I could look up. God was infinite, and the presence of God's love and who he was was as infinite and as deep and eternal as he was eternal, and so was his love for me. That changes you, it changed me. There was a point where it was time to come back, and it wasn't as if we, you know, had this Divine talk and, you know, walked down Golden Rose. It was nothing like I've read about other people saying, or angels singing. In fact, I couldn't even tell you if I was

in heaven per se, there were no identification signs like welcome to Heaven or anything like that. I was in the presence of God, and that's all that mattered. That's all that mattered. And then it was time to come back. A lot of people talk about the tunnel experience as if when you die, you go through a tunnel. I mean, when I died, my heart stopped. It was like literally transformed from the dimension of time and space to the time of Eternity, the dimension of Infinity. Coming back, that was where the journey was. It was as if every scene of my life had been cut up into tiny puzzle pieces, and it was blowing at me like a tornado. And I was blowing through that tunnel of scene after scene after scene after scene after scene after scene after scene after scene after scene. And then I'm back. I honestly wish everybody could die and then come back because it would change how you live. First part, among many, is certainly the recognition that your life is a gift. The next breath you take is a gift. It was abundantly clear.

that even as I'm here with you now, the breath I take, I didn't earn it. I can't say I deserve it. The truth is, the fact that we are here right now breathing together, it's a gift. It's a gift from God, and it is a gift that doesn't just say, I love you, I acknowledge you. It's a gift that says, You're here for a purpose. The gift you're about to take, the gift you're the breath you're about to take, and the gift that you're about to receive isn't given arbitrarily. It's given because there is a powerful and Divine Purpose, and just because you might not feel like you know that purpose doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Part of life is walking in that Discovery process and learning that and discovering that and being patient with that and then celebrating that, but without a doubt knowing that it exists. I think the other piece just blew me away is that the creator of the universe doesn't just know you, doesn't just like

you doesn't just love you, but the creator of the universe is madly in love with you. Madly in love with you and has hoped every hope with you, has dreamed every dream, has shed every tear, has felt those moments when you've had doubts and concerns and questions. He's been there with you the whole way. And in fact, it's not just loving you and not just madly love you, but the creator of the universe is your greatest cheerleader, your biggest cheerleader. So when I think about the privilege of dying and coming back, I'm reminded of a lot of lessons. And I can tell you, even though it's been several years, there's not a day goes by that I don't recognize how powerful and what a privilege it was to have that experience. But I learn something new about God every day, and I believe that's hopefully a lesson that everyone will take, that God is worthy to be trusted. Your life has meaning and purpose, and if you're willing to show up, that you're going to experience hardship.

tragedy. Wonder Triumph, but the most exciting, page-turning Stu story that anyone can ever live. You're here for a purpose. Thanks for watching today's video. If you want to learn how to create a profitable YouTube channel like this one, click the link in the description and let us show you how. [Music] [Music]

TV Producer Dies And Encounters God And Eternity; What He Was Told Will Shock You (NDE)

Scripts