Too many people view death as a punishment. And while losing a loved one is always painful and difficult, our loved ones who have passed are having a very different experience. This Afterlife TV episode explains why some of us feel like death is a punishment — how we came to believe it — and how Bob Olson, afterlife investigator for 28 years, now sees that we’ve got death all wrong.
Bob Olson is the author of Answers About The Afterlife, host of Afterlife TV. and founder of Best Psychic Directory, featuring hundreds of credible and reputable psychics, mediums, animal communicators, and energy healers. https://www.bestpsychicdirectory.com
If you’d like to watch this video, We’ve Got Death All Wrong! It’s not a punishment, but rather…, visit www.afterlifetv.com/?p=3914
Intro
Hey everybody, Bob Olson here with Afterlife TV. You can find us at afterlifetv.com. I am here to talk about something that has been bothering me a little bit because I feel like we’ve gotten death all wrong. After having investigated the afterlife for 28 years, I recognize that there are certain things that we have learned perhaps as we were growing up that led us to have certain beliefs that have led us to believe that perhaps death is a punishment. And maybe it’s a punishment by God.
Today, I’m going to talk to you about how easy it is to make these erroneous assumptions. Picture me as a teenager. I’m looking out the window. My father is taking the lawnmower out of the garage. I can see him. He’s taking it out and he puts it in front of the door. And then he comes inside and whatever. He goes and does something. And I’m always as a boy trying to stay on the right side of my father and he would do these things where he would sort of send these signals, these little hints to me.
So, I decide that he wants to have the lawn mowed. And he’s trying to tell me this without actually saying it. And even though I don’t think the lawn really needs to be mowed, I decide, okay, I’m going to go out there. I’m going to mow the lawn. So, uh, I got about half the lawn mowed. And then one of my father’s friends pulls in in his pickup truck. My father comes out the front door, shoots me a look of disgust, confusion at least, and grabs the lawnmower from me, shuts it off, helps his friend put it in the back of his pickup truck. My father had taken the lawnmower out of the garage so that his friend could come borrow it.
How We Got It Wrong
All right, we’ve all made assumptions like this. And I think that many of us have made assumptions that somehow death is a punishment because of things that they learned. And maybe they learned it from their religion growing up. Now, I grew up Catholic and I went to a Catholic church. I went to catechism from ages 8 to 18. I even went to a Catholic college. I took courses on theology. And I remember one was called the Gospels. And I had to read the Bible from beginning to end a couple of times.
And one of the things I remember when going to church as a boy was that the priest was often talking about us being sinners. Sinners. You’re sinners. You’re all sinners. And that was a big thing. Being sinners. The worst part was that from my understanding, we were sinners from birth. We were sinners just because we were born. How do you get out of that one? It’s just like, wow.
And so it seemed like we were kind of doomed from the start and the thing is as I started to investigate the afterlife, I started to think about some of these things because a lot of people seem to see death as a punishment. They came to believe that God decided whether good or bad things were going to happen to us. Like he had that kind of control.
And since we were sinners since birth, I can understand why people made this leap to believe that maybe God was just waiting for us to mess up and punish us for doing that. I think it’s a common belief, at least in our society, that dying is bad, death is tragic, the end of life is a ripoff. We’ve got ripped off. Oh my goodness. You know, he died in his 60s, but boy, he got ripped off of, you know, a good 20 or 30 years.
And I think because people think of God as a father figure, we start to think that God is in charge of things like whether we get cancer or whether a hurricane might level our house. And so if you were given a cancer diagnosis or your house was wiped out by a hurricane, some folks might surmise that you might have done something to deserve it or they at least question it.
And if God didn’t specifically do that to you, well, he certainly allowed it to happen. And so there’s something right there. Why did God allow that bad thing to happen to that person? And if you really think about it, we’re really setting ourselves up for failure here. I mean, if the big guy in the sky is in charge of hurricanes and tornadoes and viruses and cancer and decides whether or not we’re going to be negatively affected by these things, then we do feel like we’re kind of doomed.
If we’re not really careful, if we’re not really good people, when I was growing up, it was about being a good Christian in this way. It’s easy to see why some people thought that dying was a price that we pay for our sins and hence a lot of people think of death as a punishment.
But maybe this is an erroneous assumption just like I made with the lawnmower. Maybe in our effort to remain on the right side of our father, as I was trying to remain on the right side of my father, we made these assumptions that aren’t actually accurate. Maybe these things are just part of life. Maybe they are happening to us because we’re going to learn from those experiences. Or maybe maybe it’s just random.
But ultimately, it just gets worse when we start to think that there’s a guy in the sky that we call our father who is either making these things happen to us or allowing them.
What Death Really Is
I want to back up for a moment. You know, I just want to mention that I’m not here to talk about our grief. This whole video is not talking about loss. The fact is that death is awful. When we experience the death of a loved one, it just sucks, right? There’s nothing good about it. But it’s not a punishment to the person who has passed.
Regardless of how they passed, the transition from physical dimension to spiritual dimension doesn’t feel like a punishment to them. And this is based on the 28 years of me investigating the afterlife. And here’s what I found that passing feels like to the people whose lives have ended.
One, it feels like a going home. You know, it feels like one of the first things that happen is they have a welcome home party. There’s a celebration. All the loved ones who have passed before them are there to greet them. Family members, friends, spirit guides, and all your dogs and cats and horses are there to greet you when you have crossed over, when your life has ended, and now you’re back, and you have a homecoming celebration. Death is a going home, not a punishment.
Also, one of the things that we hear from people who have had near-death experiences is they comment on what it felt like to shed this dense, restrictive body, to leave this dense, restrictive physical dimension and exit the body. So many described it as a butterfly exiting the cocoon, like they just felt free. They felt light. They felt unencumbered. They no longer felt the aches and pains that they felt on a daily basis. It was all just — they felt like light. They felt like energy. They felt like they could fly.
What else does death feel like? It feels like a graduation of sorts. People recognize that we came to this temporary school of learning here and they learned what they were meant to learn. And so it’s their time to go home. It’s time to graduate. It’s time to go back to where we started.
Just like teenagers who graduate from high school and they maybe go away to college. It’s a going away. But when they graduate from college, they come home. We do the same. We start in the spiritual dimension. We come here to the physical dimension. We have a human life. It’s a schooling of sorts. And we learn from the experiences that we’re having — all of them, the good ones, the bad ones.
The reason that the bad ones are allowed to happen is because we learn more from those difficult, challenging experiences than we even do from the happy times.
One of the other things about people when they pass is, you know, for us, we feel like they’re separated from us. They’ve left us. They’re gone. To them, one of the things that’s been commented — both from people who have had near-death experiences and from people who speak through mediums (now they’re spirits, right? And they’re speaking from the spiritual dimension through mediums) — and they’re just telling us that they feel closer to us than they ever felt before.
They never felt this close to us when they were here in the physical dimension. So, they’re not separate from us. They’re feeling a sense of unity and connection with us more than they ever could before. They’re here with us. They’re watching over us. They’re witnessing our lives from the spiritual dimension, which is not in the clouds. It’s not up in the air. It’s not in some other place. It’s right next to ours. They’re vibrating at such a high frequency that most of us cannot see or hear them, but there are people who can.
And many of us normal folks who may not have abilities such as psychics and mediums have, we get glimpses of it. We may hear our loved one speak to us. They may come to us in a dream. We might even see a vision of them. You know, I’m reminded of a woman, a friend of my mother-in-law’s, who talked to me about — she saw her husband walking up the stairs after he had passed. She saw his spirit.
I know many other people have seen them. For some reason, it happens a lot. They’re at the end of the bed. They see that quite often. They see their loved one in spirit at the end of the bed. They’re waking up. And I think the reason it happens there so often is because in that waking-up phase — and it’s probably similar to the going-to-sleep phase — but in the waking-up phase, they’re hovering between worlds. They’re hovering between dimensions. It allows us to be able to have these abilities that mediums have, which is they can hear and see things that we might not normally see. And in this case, we can see spirits or hear spirits.
To us, it feels like an ending, a separation, even a darkness when someone passes. To them, it’s a new beginning. It’s, as I said, a unity and a closeness. And we hear so much about the light. People who have had near-death experiences talk about the light all the time. They go into the light. The closer they get to the light — which is brighter than 100 times brighter than the sun and yet it never hurts your eyes — but the closer they get to it, the more they go into it, the more love they feel, the more peace they feel, the more comfort and joy they feel in the light.
This is where our loved ones are going. It’s not a punishment. It’s an emancipation. It’s an incredible experience, and it’s a going home.
Where Faith Is Required
A lot of people talk about having faith. And it’s really interesting because what I’ve learned is that people die when it’s their turn to go home. And this is something that can’t be proven. I can’t prove that to you. So, it must be taken on faith that it’s true. But in 28 years, I have certainly come to the conclusion — and I’ve tested it many times — that whether someone lives for a day, or a year, or five years, or 50 years, or 100 years… they pass when they’re supposed to pass.
Even if they pass because of an illness, or an accident, or even a crime, there are opportunities that our spirit guides look for as: okay, they need to come home now. They’re done. They’ve done what they wanted to do there. And yes, even if we live for an hour, maybe that’s all we meant to do. Maybe that’s the experience we meant to have. Maybe we lived for an hour for somebody else, because of the experiences that they were going to have — such as the parents of that child.
But the one thing that I am completely convinced of — but you have to take on faith — is that we go home when it’s our turn to go home. And again, it’s not a punishment.
When I Investigated a Horrific Crime
When I was working as a private investigator — many of you know I used to work on murder cases — and I had this one murder investigation in this old mill town in Massachusetts. And I was interviewing — there were a lot of witnesses to this murder and it was a horrific murder. And this mill town was poverty-stricken because the mills had all closed down and there was no work anymore. And the nearest city was pretty far away.
And because of all the poverty, and because this murder had taken place in this small community that everybody knew about, everything just felt very dark and bleak to me. And of course, I’m talking to everybody about this murder. So that would be my experience.
Well, I went to interview one of the witnesses, and it was a woman. She met me at the front door and — it was kind of in the middle of town and you might say it had a city feel to it — but I walked into her house and she brought me through the house, and then we walked outside the back door to this fenced-in area that… the contrast was unbelievable.
There were trees in bloom and she must have been a master gardener. I mean, she just had beautiful flowers everywhere, all different colors. They all seemed like they were in bloom. There were just colors and greenery and — for the first time since I’d been doing this murder investigation — I noticed birds. I noticed there were bees. I could smell the flowers. The contrast was amazing.
The Contrast from Life to the Afterlife
And quite often I think of the transition from the physical dimension — where we do have all these aches and pains, and we have these troubles, and we have these worries, and we have these fears — and then it’s our time to go home. And we leave, and we go into the spiritual dimension. And it’s beautiful. And it’s peaceful. And it’s loving. And we feel so much joy and comfort there.
And it reminds me of this transition from being in this town and walking through this woman’s house into this little sanctuary that she had created for herself. And you never would have known that she had that there.
And it’s always reminded me a little bit of what it must have been like for all our loved ones to experience heaven — to leave, as I often refer to it, this dense physical dimension where there’s a sense of… it’s challenging. It can be dark. And of course, there’s a lot of light here, too.
Final Takeaways
I would like you to walk away from this video by just thinking that if you’ve been thinking of death as a punishment or a ripoff or somehow it’s just a bad thing — it’s not, to the person who has left their body and gone back to the spiritual dimension. For them, death is a reward. Death is a celebration.
It’s even a celebration of their courage to come here to this school, to experience a human lifetime. I think that if we can stop thinking of death as a punishment and recognize that they are being rewarded for their time here, and they now get to celebrate everything that they have experienced and learned and are now sharing with other spirits in the spiritual dimension — and they get to see the ripple effects of their lives as they witness ours still in the making — I think it can add a little comfort and peace to our experience here and our experience with loss.
And for that, I hope that has been helpful to you. And I appreciate you sharing with me and watching this video.
I’m just going to let you know I’m the author of Answers About the Afterlife. I’m also the author of The Magic Mala. And a third book that you probably don’t know about just came out last year — Insight from Hindsight. I wasn’t doing videos when the book came out, so I haven’t really told too many people about it.
And what Insight from Hindsight is all about is — for 30 years I was writing stories about my own life that taught messages and really taught me that when — we’ll just say — seemingly bad things happen in my life, I have learned from all these experiences that there’s a message in it for me. There’s something for me to learn, or it’s pointing me in a new direction from which I can grow.
And when I had those kinds of experiences, I always wrote about them, usually within hours or days. And I just wanted to compile a book of 30 years of these stories — my favorite stories, with the greatest lessons. And some of them are humorous, and some of them are heartwarming, and some of them are just even hard to believe.
And they’re all there. On the cover, Cheryl Richardson says, “Bob Olson’s stories are medicine for the soul.” I hope that they are healing for you. If you read this book, you can find it on Amazon. Again: Insight from Hindsight: Stories That Reveal What Life Is Trying to Teach You.
And I’ll just end with — you know that I am the founder of Best Psychic Directory, filled with mediums and psychics and energy healers and tarot readers — practitioners of all sorts.
Thank you so much for joining me today. I look forward to seeing you in the next video. Have a great week. All right. Bye.
Afterlife TV is presented by Afterlife Investigator & Psychic Medium Researcher Bob Olson, who is the author of Answers about the Afterlife: A Private Investigator's 15-Year Research Unlocks the Mysteries of Life after Death.
Check out Bob Olson's other sites: BestPsychicDirectory.com (a directory of hundreds of psychics & mediums by location with reviews & Instant Readings) & BestPsychicMediums.com (his personal recommended list of tested psychics and mediums) or visit Bob's Facebook Page. Bob also has a popular workshop for psychics and mediums at PsychicMediumWorkshop.com.
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