OUT OF THE BODY

When I was nineteen years old, I became a soldier on the Danish island of Bornholm, out in the Baltic Sea.

In the military, I soon became part of a crowd that was into alcohol and drugs. And, to be honest, that was the kind of person I was. We got drunk a lot, and we wanted to smoke hash every day if we could, just to get a little artificial peace in our minds. We also experimented with different kinds of pills. And back then, there was a drug called LSD.

When you took LSD, anything could happen. Sometimes it felt as if you were floating on a pink cloud where everything was perfect. But at other times, it felt as if you were being chased by demons.

One afternoon, we were sitting in a basement in the town of Rønne. We were drinking beer, smoking hash, and that day we had also taken LSD. Before long, I had what people call a bad trip.

I was overwhelmed by intense panic, and I just had to get out of that basement. But when I got outside, I became even more afraid. I remember thinking, What if I meet some children, lose control of my hands, and end up killing them?

I was terrified because of these thoughts. It was as if the LSD had opened a door into the world of demons, and something dark and evil had entered me—something that was trying to take control of my thoughts and my body.

So, to avoid meeting any children, I hurried out of town and headed toward the countryside. But by the time I reached the edge of town, it had started to get dark. And now I was too afraid to go on. I was really scared.

So I just wandered around where the town meets the open fields. And that’s when the hallucinations became overwhelming. Eventually, they became so intense that I no longer had control of my body.

I had to lie down on a construction site beneath a huge pile of dirt. I could feel myself slowly slipping away. I hit my body. I did push-ups. I did everything I could to hold on to reality.

But I couldn’t stay inside my body anymore. In the end, I simply gave up.

And then something very strange happened.

I left my body. I floated above it and looked down at myself. I was convinced that I was dead, and I believed I could never return to my body again.

But after a while, the LSD slowly began to wear off. Three or four hours later, I was finally able to get back on my feet.

This happened in the winter, when the temperature was just above freezing. But even though I had been lying completely still on the ground for several hours, I wasn’t cold at all. My hands were completely warm. It was really strange.

It almost felt as if something—or someone—had been protecting me from dying of cold.

That experience changed my life completely. Until then, I had no interest in spiritual things whatsoever. But now I became deeply fascinated by everything connected with the unseen world.

At the library in Rønne, I found lots of books about these subjects. I started by reading books about death. Some people had actually researched what happens when we die, because I was convinced that I had experienced exactly that.

I also became convinced that when a person dies and leaves the body, they don’t simply stop existing. You can still say, “I am,” even without a body.

I also started reading books about parapsychology, yoga, theosophy, Buddhism, Hinduism, shamanism, and many other spiritual subjects.

That experience with LSD had truly opened my eyes to the spiritual world.

THE FIRE

While I was in the military, I did some very stupid things whenever I got drunk. I actually ended up in jail three times—for 10, 20, and 30 days.

So the officers were probably relieved when I asked to be released from my contract.

After leaving the military, I joined a movement called Transcendental Meditation. It was a form of meditation rooted in Hinduism, and it was very popular at the time. The people there promised that meditation was the answer to all of life’s problems.

But it didn’t change my life. And my addictions didn’t disappear either. If anything, my problems only got worse.

At the beginning of 1982, I attended a folk high school in Rørvig for people who were interested in meditation. I lived in a small wooden cabin with a few other students.

One weekend, when everyone else had gone home, I went out drinking. When I came back to the cabin, I collapsed onto my bed, fully dressed, and fell asleep on top of the quilt.

Right above my head hung a bare light bulb with no lampshade. While I was drunk, I must have knocked the whole thing loose, so that it fell down and became jammed between the wall and my pillow.

As I slept, the heat from the bulb slowly set both the pillow and the wall on fire. The fire never burst into flames. It just kept smoldering.

As the fire spread, smoke collected beneath the ceiling and slowly worked its way down through the room. Eventually, it reached my face.

The moment the smoke entered my nose, I woke up. I rolled out of bed and fell onto the floor. The light bulb was still on.

As I lay there, I could see the underside of the smoke hanging perhaps 20 or 30 centimeters above me. But down where I was lying, there was no smoke at all.

I sobered up instantly.

Fortunately, the bathroom was right next to my room, and the shower hose was just long enough to reach through the doorway. So I was able to put out the fire.

Afterward, I saw how serious it had been. A large section of the wall above my bed had burned. You could clearly see how the fire had worked its way down along both sides of my head and shoulders and continued down alongside my body—only a few centimeters away.

But the fire had not touched me at all.

My hair wasn’t burned. My skin wasn’t burned. And my clothes weren’t burned either.

It was as if the fire had gone around my body. You could clearly see the outline of where I had been lying in the bed.

My bedside table had also been partially burned, and several of the books lying on it had been destroyed by the fire.

Except for one book—a Bible.

I had once received it as a gift, but I never read it.

Once again, I felt that something—or someone—had been watching over me. Back in Rønne, after taking LSD, I had been saved from freezing to death.

And now I had been saved from burning to death.

After this experience, I became much more interested in Christianity. I couldn’t forget what had happened. The books about meditation had burned, but the Bible was almost untouched.

THE LIGHT

I took this experience as a sign and left the Transcendental Meditation movement right away, after being involved with it for about four years.

But my longing for a deeper meaning in life didn’t disappear. If anything, it became even stronger.

In the middle of the 1980s, I started attending a New Age center in Copenhagen.

One afternoon, I went to a meeting where we could choose whether to meditate on the energies of Buddha or the energies of Christ. I chose Christ because I had never tried that before.

We were told to call upon the “Master.” And the very moment I silently spoke the name of Jesus, something strange happened.

It’s difficult to describe. But it was as if a great field of light came down over me. And in that light there was a deep purity that filled me—a holy power flowing through me.

I remember looking at the other two people in the room to see how they reacted. But they didn’t seem to be aware of the light at all.

In that light, I suddenly became deeply aware of the darkness and sin within me. I could suddenly see that something was terribly wrong with my life.

I remember looking down at my hands and thinking about all the evil I had done with them.

For weeks, I wept over my own misery and also over the misery of the whole world. I hadn’t cried for years. But now I cried so much that the front of my T-shirt became soaking wet.

And when you’ve been crying long enough, your nose starts running too. So snot hung from my beard.

That day, my heart of stone was truly broken.

And because of the power I had experienced, my spiritual search from then on became focused almost entirely on Jesus Christ.

Although He was invisible, He was obviously alive. And He could be reached if you called on Him, just as I had done.

But after this powerful experience of light, it was almost as if the powers of darkness had decided to destroy me completely.

My addictions became worse and worse, and I lost the last bit of my dignity. I picked up cigarette butts from the street. I begged for money. Several times, I was found unconscious in the street with my trousers soaked in urine.

Whenever I went on a drinking binge, I hardly ate anything. So afterward, I was completely exhausted.

Three times, I also stayed at a homeless shelter in Copenhagen. The fourth time, they refused to let me in.

Every time I came to my senses after another binge, I regretted it deeply. But I simply didn’t have the strength to live according to my conscience.

For about three years, I also attended Kofoed’s School, a place that helped people struggling with addiction. You could always get something to eat there whenever you had spent all your money.

THE DEMONS

In the spring of 1988, I went to visit my parents in northern Denmark.

By then, I had started reading the Bible. So I had come to understand that God was my friend and that the Devil was my enemy. He was the one trying to destroy me.

One evening, just before midnight, I told my family that I was going into the forest to confront Satan.

Of course, I was drunk. Otherwise, I probably never would have had such an idea.

You should never go to war against the Devil alone, without God.

I knew of a place in the forest where I had heard that a crime had once been committed. So I thought that maybe I could make contact with the Evil One there.

I had barely entered the forest when I encountered the demons. It was as if they had heard my declaration of war and had been waiting for me.

What happened next was the most terrifying experience I have ever had.

Suddenly, I saw hundreds of demons with terrifying faces, reaching out toward me with their horrific hands. It was as if they were trying to drive me insane.

And in my heart, I knew what those evil spirits wanted. They wanted to capture me and drag my soul down beneath the earth into eternal darkness—into the fire I had read about in the Bible.

This was far worse than what I had experienced on LSD fifteen years earlier.

Back then, I had only caught a glimpse of what it was like to die when the soul leaves the body. But this was something much worse—a spiritual death, where I would be lost forever.

I was absolutely terrified.

And I ran out of the forest as fast as I could.

But the demons followed me. They were still trying to capture me.

When I got home, I was afraid to fall asleep. I could hear the evil spirits moving around me, breathing into my ear. They were trying to drive me insane.

I was really frightened.

But then I began calling out to God and to Jesus. And it was as if the demons could no longer reach me.

This battle continued for the next three days. The nights were especially terrible.

But because I kept calling on God and Jesus, the demons finally left me.

At least for a while.

DELIVERANCE

After visiting my parents in northern Denmark, I returned to Copenhagen.

A couple of months later, I passed through Nørreport Station—very drunk, of course. There, I found a white plastic bag full of pills. It had probably been dropped or forgotten by a drug addict in the middle of a binge.

I took about ten Ketogan tablets, a strong painkiller, and swallowed them. I also took a large number of small pink pills called diazepam—about fifty of them. More than enough to kill me.

I quickly lost consciousness. The police picked me up, and I ended up in a holding cell.

After that, I was very sick. Once again, I had come close to death.

But slowly, I fought my way back to life.

Then, one week later, on June 7, 1988, I was walking home from Kofoed’s School—the place for people struggling with addiction—to the small one-room apartment that the local council had given me.

As I passed a square called Kultorvet, I stopped to listen to a group of Christians singing and sharing their faith.

A woman was speaking. She said that it was possible to be set free from alcoholism and receive a completely new life.

That day, I decided to surrender my life to Jesus Christ.

I immediately began attending their Christian fellowship.

And exactly twelve days later, something remarkable happened.

Demons were cast out of me.

Yes, you heard that right.

It is actually possible to be bound by demonic powers that can control and destroy our lives.

It happened in a dramatic and unusual way. But I don’t think I’ll tell that story here. I’ll save it for another time.

Later that same evening, after I went to bed, something truly amazing happened.

The same light—the light I had experienced years earlier when I was in the New Age movement, meditating on Christ—came over me again.

But this time, it was much stronger.

I was completely filled with joy. I stayed awake all night, yet I wasn’t the least bit tired the next morning.

I also remember being amazed that I never needed to turn over in bed. It was almost as if I was floating—as if every single cell in my body was being carried by something supernatural.

I was absolutely convinced that I had entered into a deep relationship with God.

I was truly happy. Truly joyful.

Again and again, I whispered, “Thank You… Thank You… Thank You. Thank You, Jesus. Thank You, God.”

I just knew that God had forgiven me.

And I felt completely clean.

The first time God’s light had come over me, I had felt very unclean—guilty and full of sin. But this time, the light did exactly the opposite.

Now I felt completely cleansed.

Later, I came to understand what had happened.

I had experienced what the Bible calls being born again.

God had become my Father.

And I had become His child.

A WHOLE NEW BEGINNING

This experience completely changed my life.

From one day to the next, I stopped smoking. I never thought that would be possible, but I simply lost the desire.

The same thing happened with hashish. The artificial peace it had given me was replaced by a different kind of peace—a deep peace that only God can give.

My apartment had been just as run-down as my life had been. But after I gave my life to Christ, I cleaned it up, repaired it, and turned it into a home that reflected the new life God had given me.

I was also offered a job, even though the people who recommended me knew about my drinking and how unstable I had been. Everything I did seemed to succeed.

From that point on, doors just seemed to open for me.

And then, after a couple of months, I had the opportunity to move to Sweden and leave my old environment behind. It became a kind of rehabilitation for me.

Thanks to God, I had been given a completely new beginning.

I was lost, but now I had been found.