Dannion Brinkley may be the most electric person on the planet. It's not just that he's been struck by lightning twice. Or that he's been clinically dead twice and had one of the most dynamic near-death experiences ever recorded. It's his livewire personality, spellbinding story and shocking statements.

I called to get some of those statements firsthand, but Brinkley wouldn't talk to me. There was a thunder storm in Aiken, South Carolina that morning and Dannion never talks on the telephone during a storm. You can't blame him. Doing that twenty years ago killed him. While talking to a business partner, he heard something that sounded like a freight train coming into my ear at the speed of light. A split second later, seared by lightning from the inside out, he was jolted out of his body, and not just spiritually. The nails in his shoes welded to the nails in the floor so that when I was thrown into the air I was pulled out of them. As he looked down from his out-of-body position in mid-air, he saw his stuck shoes smoking and the phone he had just held melting in his hand.

What happened next is brilliantly captured in Brinkley's best-selling book, Saved by the Light. He writes of travelling to a Crystal City, entering shimmering, gothic-like cathedrals, watching a panoramic life review, meeting thirteen Beings of Light and being given graphic visions of the future, as well as detailed instructions on relaxation centers which he was to build when he returned to his body, now crisscrossed with blue lines marking the path the lightning had taken as it surged from his head to the floor.

But all that was twenty years ago. Today he's on fire about healthcare and hospice. I believe, he says in a lowered tone, that healthcare is a battle for the souls of men, that the issues being debated now are the most important we have faced in the history of this nation. Quite a statement from a man who saw scenes of nuclear destruction, war between Russia and China, economic earthquakes and numerous other catastrophic global events while on the other side. If we don't pay close attention to what's happening in the reductions of Medicare and Medicaid and support the Office of Alternative Medicine, he continues, we will be making the biggest mistake of our generation. In the years to come, you will thank me for letting you know that this was where the spiritual fight was. It's not in Bosnia or China or Russia and all that stuff we can't control. It's in the quality of the final days of people we love and in our right to choose our own way of taking care of ourselves.

Brinkley's passionate commitment to individual choice in healthcare comes from his personal experience with alternative medicine. Clinically dead for twenty-eight minutes after the lightning strike, completely paralyzed for six days and partially paralyzed for seven months, it took him two years to learn to walk and feed himself again. He lost sixty-nine pounds and was never given more than a week to live for the first three years after his near-death experience. In fact, more than once he overheard hospital personnel betting on how long he would survive. So, as he understates it, I used alternative techniques because modern standard medicine said I wouldn't make it. He listened to Steven Halpern's healing music and meticulously studied the muscles in Gray's Anatomy, using a headdress made from a coat hanger and a pencil so he could turn the pages with the eraser on the pencil by moving his head.

Having lost nearly everything during his painful years of rehabilitation, Brinkley revitalized former businesses and built on new abilities. One business sold surge suppressors, a device designed to prevent power surges from ruining household equipment. He quips, I was the perfect salesman, being a living example of what happens to human equipment that gets too much juice! He returned to the anti-bugging work he had previously done for the government, manufacturing and installing electronic masking systems to prevent eavesdropping. Another business utilized an anti-fouling device which Brinkley was shown in one of his visions. It kept barnacles off the hulls of ships by transmitting electrical tones through the hull, cutting down on fuel consumption caused by drag and reducing discharge from the toxic paint used prior to his invention (paint so toxic that an accidental dip meant an emergency trip to the hospital)! He also did work with the deaf, again using a device shown to him in visions, modifying an audio transducer to convert speech into vibration. As if this wasn't already a taxing schedule for anyone, let alone someone who had lost 30% of his heart function, Brinkley began working as a hospice volunteer and has now recruited between 5,000 and 7,000 new members, more than any single person in the history of the movement.

It was sitting at the bedside of the dying that Brinkley made an important realization about the connection between breath and spirit. I realized, he says, that we breathe for spirit. We breathe so that the spiritual world can operate over here. He has since developed that realization into a program for hospice volunteers, who learn to breathe in a step- by-step pattern through the eight sinus chambers into the third eye area in synchrony with the person that's crossing over to the other side. It is through the mystical sharing of breath that Brinkley feels the world can be saved. When you're breathing with a patient who's dying, he says, the moment of death expands and the two places overlap. The quality of their final breath and the quality of your breath that will stay and go on creates an expanded state of consciousness. The quality of death and of life in the final days is the key.

The forty-five-year-old Brinkley, who has died with 148 people so far, claims he doesn't like having friends younger than 90. I like having a relationship with someone who's going to a place I'm eventually going, he laughs. His humor is pervasive, often earthy, and much appreciated by audiences attending the seminars he gives nationwide. My workshops, he says, are places where people can take what's happened to me and use part of it in their lives; the stuff I teach gives them a way to prepare for what we all eventually face. He keeps them laughing, in between intensely moving statements about life, death and his experiences over there. The greatest experience of near death, according to Brinkley, is the panoramic life review, where we are shown a movie of the life just lived, re-experiencing every emotion we've ever felt, as well as the emotions of those we have hurt or helped. Admittedly a bad child who brought pain to his parents and torment to his schoolmates, Brinkley became an assassin for the government and was appalled when reliving his life from the perspective of his victims. Expecting at least admonishment and reproach, he was amazed at the loving compassion afforded him by the Light Being watching the review with him. All that fire and brimstone, I never saw any of that on the other side. And if I didn't go to hell, few people are going. Trust me, I know.

Though he never killed Christians, and though his turnaround was more stunning than blinding, like the Apostle Paul, Brinkley has come to embrace those he once scorned. I know who you are, I know you, he almost reverently told attendees at a recent Whole Life Expo in Los Angeles. What does the near-death experience mean? asks the man who would have scoffed at the very mention of such an experience before his own. I'll tell you what it means: It means there is a God, there is a life after this one and it means there is a place based on love, regardless of what dogma you choose to attach to it. NDE symbolizes there is a magnificent system designed by laws based on love eons of time before we came here. And those systems will be in place eons of time after we're gone. It's very safe, very natural, it's wondrous. He tells every audience that we are not human beings trying to have spiritual experiences, but spiritual beings having an earthly experience. Like most of the fourteen million Americans who have had a near-death experience, Brinkley had a hard time readjusting to his earthly experience. I wanted this whole thing to go away, he says. A friend once accused me of sounding like a retarded fundamentalist. I'm a reluctant messiah, just a guy from South Carolina who had this happen to him, who had a mission given to him.

That mission includes fostering spiritual capitalism by creating centers with seven special rooms where people can go to relax and reduce fear and stress, thereby realizing that they are higher spiritual beings who can rely on their higher selves instead of on government and churches. The centers consist of a psychotherapy room, a massage clinic where participants would both give and receive massage, a sensory deprivation room, a room equipped with biofeedback machines showing the extent to which people can control their emotions, an area for readings that allows those with psychic abilities to provide patients with personal insights, a room with a bed whose musical components enable a person to relax so deeply that he can actually leave his body, and a reflection chamber made of polished steel or copper and shaped in such a way that the person inside can't see his or her own reflection. This last room is still somewhat puzzling to its inventor. I know it has to do with tones, humming and sound refraction so that it sets a resonant frequency that lets the body move dimensionally, he says, but other than that, I don't know how it works.

An eighth component would be to revisit the biofeedback room, enter a deep state of relaxation (while hooked up) and be guided to a spiritual realm. The biofeedback instruments would reflect what feelings are required to reach such a state. The purpose of the whole complex is to show people that they can be in control of their lives through God. During his near-death experience, Brinkley was shown the operating room of the future, one devoid of scalpels or other sharp instruments. All healing there is done by special lights that correct the vibration of diseased cells, tissues and organs. To date, Brinkley, who had to deduce how to construct the technical aspects of the centers from watching Spirit Beings operate the equipment, has completed a model center, located in South Carolina. He has tested the special bed with positive results at Dr. Raymond Moody's Theater of the Mind, where he currently assists Dr. Moody in his paranormal research.

Brinkley sees a correlation between these centers and the temples of spirit and mystery that were popular in ancient Greece. For instance, he states, what takes place in the bed is similar to the dream incubation that took place in the temples of Asklepios. The reading area represents the temple of Delphi, where people used to talk to spirits. The reflection chamber is the necromanteum of Ephyra where the ancients went to see apparitions of their departed loved ones. He feels that the rise and fall of civilizations shows us the cyclical nature of life, and that there is a pattern by which they fall. Every time a civilization develops a religion that does not grow with the people, then we separate ourselves from our spiritual selves and we choose intellectual and economic stability as the reason and value for why we live on this earth. We relegate our spirituality to doctors, churches and institutions; we get thicker and more earthbound and further away from our true identity. We have to learn that we are spiritual creatures; we come here for specific reasons with very well designed programs. If technological advances are not spiritually based, then that civilization will crumble and fall.

You might think someone exposed to such a broad spectrum of awareness would have difficulty staying grounded. Not so in the case of Dannion Brinkley. He takes a pragmatic view of the whole thing. I wouldn't have gotten this job if I was some swami out here hoping for the best. They needed a strategist, someone who would look at it logistically, someone who would stay the course and be willing to plan things up to ten years in advance. An interesting by-product of Brinkley's experience, however, was the development of clairvoyant abilities. He found himself responding to questions before they had been asked, seeing home movies of the lives of strangers he would meet and scenes of earlier centuries when visiting particular places. At first he used these talents to gain advantages in business dealings and win at card games. Soon, though, he realized he wanted to use these gifts to help others, and has since focused them unselfishly. I kept my day job so I wouldn't become dependent on this. I want to keep my spiritual self very pure.

Though his larger-than-life story is being made into a full-length movie by 20th Century Fox, Brinkley isn't even advising on it. He's more interested in The Death and Times of Dannion Brinkley, a three-part documentary that first tells his story, then shows people how to die with a loved one and concludes with legal advice to help make the best decisions and reduce stress afterward. That, he says, is my mission. When I do a lecture I always read about some new mission I've supposedly been given; but if I can make people feel safe and comfortable with dying I rekindle the strength in God that people should have. The place I've been is very logical, very systematic, very just, very fair and very righteous, it is a very reassuring place. I'm trying to give everybody else that place, because if we can face death by hospice we are not afraid of dying, and once we're not afraid they cannot take our freedoms. Once you're standing up for the rights of people in their last days you really have something to fight for and all the conspiracies in the world don't intimidate you.

Brinkley sounds a call to action; I beg everybody to write their Congressmen and Senators in support of The Office of Alternative Medicine at the National Institute For Health. Request information. Be mindful of healthcare and what's going on. If you're not political, become political. Pay attention to health care and how it's evolving, because you're talking about your right to choose how to take care of yourself. Supporting the NIH is the most important thing you can do in your life. As long as there's an Office of Alternative Medicine they can't create HMO's (Health Maintenance Organizations), Managed Care and give us a national insurance health card, that's the mark of the beast, ain't no doubt in my mind.