Out of Body Experience, a Taco Bell Dollar, and the Supernatural

Do you believe in the supernatural? Have you ever had anything happen that you can't explain? In this episode, I share a few stories that I believe are supernatural. Many times, we are so distracted that we don't pay attention to what God is showing us. We excuse things as coincidences instead of realizing that sometimes the spiritual realm collides with our physical realm. I hope you enjoy this fun and eye-opening episode. 

This episode is marked explicit due to a brief mention of smoking pot as a teen. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Okay, well, here we are again. Welcome back to the Dissatisfied Podcast. I am Rochelle Smith. I really appreciate you listening. Hopefully, you will enjoy today's episode. We are going to talk about the supernatural. And that's always a fun subject to talk about because the reality is the Bible doesn't give us a whole lot of information about the supernatural. It just gives us a little bit. So it's fun to talk about. It's fun to share experiences that we have because I know for myself I've had experiences that I would say are supernatural, and we're going to talk about some of those today. And I know some of you have probably had experiences like that, which I would love to hear about. So at the end of this episode, I'm going to leave my email. And I would love for anybody to email me any of your, you know, supernatural experiences that you feel you've had. So listen at the end for my email. But as a Christian, as a believer, and I know many of you listening are Christians, we believe in a supernatural God who does supernatural things. And when we read the Bible, that's what we see all throughout the Bible are these mind-blowing, miraculous, amazing, supernatural events. You've got God speaking from the burning bush, right? That didn't burn up. You have the plagues in Egypt. That whole story of God delivering the Israelites from Egypt is just crazy. So you have the parting of the Red Sea in that story. You have the pillar of cloud and fire that went before the Israelites while they were in the desert. You've got a donkey who spoke. You have Joshua who commanded the sun and the moon to stand still, and they did. Was it Joshua? I think it was Joshua. I mean, and that's just a tiny bit of some of the stuff that happened in the Old Testament. And then you have in the New Testament, of course, Jesus, who performed 37 documented miracles, but then in John 21, 25, it says Jesus did many other things. If they were all written down, I suppose the whole world could not contain the books that would be written. And I think, okay, well, that's just a clue that we're only getting a tiny bit of what Jesus actually did when he was on the earth. And then, of course, the greatest miracle and supernatural thing was his resurrection. You have angels appearing to people, you have the supernatural tearing of the temple veil when Jesus died. You know, you have, of course, even after Jesus died and rose back to heaven, you have his disciples continuing on with miraculous works, healing people, raising people from the dead, delivering people from demons. So if you're a Christian, you believe in these things. You believe in the supernatural. So we're because of that, we're already connected to the supernatural. And we are made up of body, soul, and spirit. So our body is what experiences the physical realm, right? Our body is physical, it experiences the physical realm. And then our soul is made up of our mind, will, and emotions, which I believe those are the things that are gateways to experience the supernatural in the physical, for it to manifest in the physical sometimes, if that makes sense. Hopefully it does. And then, of course, our spirits are what connects us to God. So now that I've laid that down, we're just gonna dive in. So we're gonna rewind just a few years to when I was 14, and I want to just give a little warning. We are gonna talk about, not we, I, I am gonna talk about smoking pot. So if you have littles around or, you know, somebody that you don't want to hear the story, then just keep that in mind. So when I was 14 years old, I smoked pot for the very first time. And where I smoked it, I was outside sitting on a deck by a swimming pool with some people. And I remember somebody had the pot and they were smoking it, and I said, you know, I've kind of always wanted to try that. So they let me and I smoked it. And of course I could feel the effects of it. And then all of a sudden, well, let me say this first. When I think of this, when I think of the fact that I was 14, it blows my mind because my youngest son, Joel, is 14. I can't even imagine that he would be somewhere smoking weed. It just is laughable to me. What in the world? But anyway, so smoke the pot, start to feel the effects of it, and then all of a sudden, I was outside of my body. Outside my body. And I know that that sounds absolutely insane, but it's true. I was floating up and outside of my body, and I could see myself below, and I could see the people that I was with below me. I could see the swimming pool and I could see the house. And then I would float a little bit higher, and then I could see some of the neighborhood. And I kept floating higher and higher. And I started to feel scared because I was like, oh my gosh, I'm gonna float out into outer space and die. So I remember focusing on my body, like looking at it below me and trying to like will myself back into my body. And then it was like super speed and crash. I was back in my body. And I remember hearing the sound of myself coming back into my body. It was so wild. But I didn't tell anyone about this experience, mostly because I didn't want anybody to know I smoked pot. And then, of course, I didn't want people to think I was nuts. So I just put it in the back of my mind, chucked it up to the pot, and you know, life moves on, and it wasn't until years later that I understood what that was. And it was after I got saved and I started to really study the Bible. I was reading a ton of Christian books at that time, and I came across a story in a book about astral projection. Have you heard of this? So you spell it A-S-T-R-A-L, Astral Projection. And that's what the New Age calls it. So the New Age calls it astral projection, and as I read about it, that experience came flooding back. And I realized that that's what had happened to me, unwillingly, of course. And apparently, I guess for me, smoking pot wasn't a gateway to other drugs, it was a gateway to something supernatural that now I believe was demonic. But when you read about astral projection, you'll find that it's widely used in witchcraft. So if you go to Google and you search up witchcraft and astral projection, you're gonna find plenty of things to read. A lot of them will be written by witches and warlocks, talking about how they use that to cast spells on people, put curses on people, where they actually leave their bodies and go to, you know, another place to cast spells and curses. Sounds wild, but I believe it because I had that crazy experience. So these ex-witches share some stories on podcasts I've listened to. They talk about other dimensions that they can enter, and they also share how they run into demonic entities, which is just insane. And had I not had that experience when I was 14, I probably wouldn't believe any of this because it sounds like too much. That's just too much for Shell. You want me to believe that you floated outside your body and that people can willfully do that and travel around. I mean, I get it. It sounds made up, but it's true. Now, some of the stuff that you read online will try to explain those types of experiences, out-of-body experiences, with speculation and fancy words to make it sound like it's not supernatural. But let me tell you this: the CIA ran an entire experiment on it called the Gateway Project. And you can go to CIA.gov, the government website for the CIA, and you can look up this experiment or this project, I guess you would call it. And here's just a couple of the things that were said in this report. It's like a 28-page report, so I didn't read the whole thing, but I read quite a bit of it. And it's just insane to me. And also, this 28 pages was just the approved pages. These are the things that were just approved that the public could read. Can you imagine the stuff that isn't even available to the public? Goodness. Okay, so here are a couple of the things that were in this report. And hang on with me because it sounds crazy. So one of them said this. It said, human consciousness can, with enough practice, move beyond the dimension of time space and interface with other energy systems in other dimensions. Okay, did you get that? I know it sounds very sci-fi. The other another thing it says is the tentative conclusion to be drawn is that the out-of-body state may be regarded as an extremely effective way of accelerating the process of enhancing consciousness and of interfacing with dimensions beyond time space. Oh my gosh, you guys, I feel like I'm reading out of a sci-fi book. But no, this is a CIA document. Another thing, it says, having ascertained that human consciousness is able to separate from physical reality and interact with other intelligence in other dimensions. I I read that, the emphasis on that was weird. I'm sorry. So yeah, having ascertained that human consciousness is able to separate from physical reality and interact with other intelligences in other dimensions. What? So they have discovered that people can leave their bodies and interact with spirits in other dimensions. That is what this report is saying. Now, can you imagine the stuff that they didn't approve to be released to the public? So it totally sounds like I was reading from a sci-fi movie, but no, you can go look it up. CIA.gov, the Gateway Project. But it's interesting because they don't ever mention God in this report, but throughout the pages that I read, they mention something called the absolute, and they capitalize that word in the middle of sentences, like you would capitalize God. And so I thought that was very interesting. I'm like, they're pointing to something that they call the absolute. They're not saying it's God, but they know it's something that has absolute control. So are out-of-body experiences biblical? That's the next question. Well, the Bible talks about the spiritual realm, which is another word for dimension. And there's also a verse that might point to an out-of-body experience, and it's in 2 Corinthians, where Paul is telling the story of when he was caught up to the third heaven. And he says, whether it was in the body or out of the body, I do not know. And I thought, well, maybe that's a clue that Paul might have had an out-of-body experience, possibly. So I do believe that out-of-body experiences can be from God, and there's many accounts of people leaving their bodies when they die and seeing themselves and everything happening around them, or people, you know, that have died on the operating table and they float above their bodies and they can tell their family and the physicians everything that was happening during that time, and there's no way they could have known it. So sometimes I believe God allows those things to happen when they ultimately will bring people closer to him. But the enemy also has a purpose in those things because he's a counterfeiter. He counterfeits everything that belongs to God. So with my experience with the smoking pot and going out of my body, I believe it was demonic. That smoking pot actually opened a door for that to happen, and the enemy was trying to use it to pull me away from God. So, okay, moving on. I want to tell you about something else that seems like it could be just a coincidence, but I uh I believe it was supernatural. And it's just crazy how often we will call things coincidence when it's actually God speaking to us. We tend to just brush a lot of things off when it's like, no, God is trying to get your attention. So a few years after my dad died, I had something pretty cool happen. I was with my boyfriend at the time, and we lived out in my house in the country, and we decided we were going to drive into Jacksonville to get some food because we were hungry. It was dinner time, we didn't want to cook anything. So he wanted McDonald's, I wanted Taco Bell, which was crazy because I never wanted Taco Bell. So anyway, he was driving and we went through Taco Bell first. So we pay at the window with cash. You know, that was back in the day where you just had cash. So we give them the cash, they give us the change, and he handed it to me to hold because we were then going to drive through McDonald's. So we pull up to the window at McDonald's and I go to hand him the cash, right? Which was the change that we'd received from Taco Bell. And it was like a movie. And as I'm handing him the cash, it's like the street light shined on this dollar bill, and I saw something written on it. So I took it, handed in the rest of the cash, but I took this dollar bill and I look at it, and I was thinking, what in the world? And I said, This is my dad's writing. He was like, What? What are you talking about? And I said, This is my dad's writing on this dollar bill. And he didn't believe me, but on the bill it said, Happy birthday, Narn, 1986, I believe. I'd have to get out of my drawer. It's either 1986 or 1987. So happy birthday, Narn, and then the year. And it was my aunt Narlene. How many people do you know named Narn, right? But he still didn't believe me. And I said, okay, well, when we get back to the house, I'm gonna show this to Rich, my brother. He was there at the time, and I'm not even gonna say anything, and I'm gonna ask him whose writing that is. And remember, this is back in the day when that's what we did. We wrote things. We didn't text each other, we wrote notes to each other. And you would get to know your family and friends' writing because we would write everything. Like my dad and mom would leave us notes, we would leave them notes. So we knew their writing. So we get back to our house, I put the dollar bill down in front of Rich and I said, Whose writing is that? He said, Dad's, where did you get this? So I have that dollar bill laminated, and come to find out, a few years after my dad died, my aunt decided to spend it because she was kind of ticked at him. She said, You know, I was just mad at him and I didn't even want to look at that anymore. So she went and she spent it. And I looked up what it would be, what the statistics would be on something like that happening, and it is extremely low, an extremely low possibility for a dollar bill that has a family member's writing on it to come back to somebody in the same family. So anyway, that was something that back then I didn't really chuck it up to God trying to show me something or speak to me. You know, I looked at it more like, oh, look, dad's speaking to me. And maybe it's a little bit of that, but I look at it more like the Lord trying to give me some peace. Like, hey, your your dad's okay, your dad's with me. And now I know that that was the Lord letting me see that, letting me have that as something to give me peace. So that was just a cool experience. And I still have the dollar bell. If I was doing video, you guys would be able to see it. Maybe someday I'll be able to show you that. And then a couple years after that, I had something else that I would put in the category of supernatural, and it was a dream. So this was probably six years after my dad died, and I had a dream that I had walked into this big theater, kind of had a stadium seating, but it was a you know, half bowl theater, and it was dark in there, and I was standing kind of at the top of where the seats are, looking down at the stage. And on the stage there were two lights shining down, and underneath one of the lights was my dad, and underneath the other light was my grandpa, my dad's dad. My dad's dad had died two years before my dad did. But in the dream, so they're standing on the stage, a light shining on each of them, and their backs were to me, and they were looking in a mirror, standing next to each other, so I could see their reflection. So I was, you know, looking at their backs, but I could see their reflection in the mirror. And I remember knowing that it was a dream, and I said, What are you guys doing? Because they looked really good. My dad was putting a tie on, he had a really nice suit on, my grandpa looked great, really handsome, young. And I said, What are you guys doing? And my dad said, Well, I'm getting ready to take dad out for his birthday. And I was like, Oh, and I said, Can I go? And my dad said, No, sorry, you can't go. And then I woke up. And it was such a vivid real feeling dream. I knew it was significant. And so that day, that next day, I called my mom and I said, Hey, do you remember when Grandpa Brennan's birthday was? And she said, Let me think. She goes, Oh, she goes, actually, it's today. I mean, come on. Can you imagine how that made me feel? Like, how cool is that? So, and I know people with will say, Well, that's just a coincidence. His birthday was probably in your subconscious somewhere. Well, maybe, I don't know. I didn't remember when my grandpa's birthday was. Maybe it was in my subconscious, but I'm not gonna make an excuse for it so that I can excuse it away as coincidence, because it's not. I'm I've learned to receive these gifts as communication from the Lord, especially. And even in that dream, even now with things I'm learning, I do feel like it was really my dad and grandpa in that dream, that they were really getting ready to go out for my dad for my grandpa's birthday. You know, heaven, this will be a whole other conversation, but heaven isn't what isn't boring. It's not what many of us have been taught. A lot of it sounds so boring, and we think, you know, we don't want to go to heaven and just sing songs all day long, but I we don't comprehend, we don't understand what heaven really is. We we are still us. God created each of us individually, and he has plans and purposes for us here on earth, he has plans and purposes for us in heaven. But the dollar bill story and the dream were things for that season of my life that I really needed from the Lord. So I'm so thankful that he allowed me to get a little peek into the supernatural. So moving on, this one is a little bit, I guess you could say, sad and maybe a little scary, but the night that my brother died, the night that Rich died, Brennan had a nightmare. And Brennan was only nine years old at that time, so there were some things happening in the evening with Rich and my, you know, my brother's wife, and kind of talking on the phone back and forth, and some concerns had already been coming. Coming up. But Brennan was only nine years old. He was in bed sleeping. It was like 9 30 at night. And like I said, there was already some things happening that were a little concerning. But at about maybe 10, maybe 10 o'clock, Brennan came out to me in the kitchen and he was sweaty and he was really upset. And he said, Mom, I had a horrible nightmare. And I was like, Oh my goodness, what was it? And he said, I dreamt that really bad men broke into our house and they killed everybody. And so we prayed and prayed over him, prayed over his room, and prayed for peace. And he won he was able to go back to sleep. But it was maybe an hour later that we found out Rich killed himself. So I've I don't think I put that together right away. It took a few days for me to remember that Brennan had even had that dream, you know, because of the shock of everything. And then once I remembered, I realized that was connected. That his dream was absolutely connected to what was happening in the spirit realm. And I mean, again, I'm not going to excuse that as coincidence. But living through the things I've lived with, I realize there's so much we don't understand, but that doesn't mean we need to just throw it away. We need to understand that there was something happening in during that time that Brennan, for whatever reason, sensed in his spirit. And I just think that that's so interesting. There was something else that happened with Brennan when he was younger. He would have been six, maybe seven, because Joel was around two years old. But so Brennan's just a little kid, and he came in to the kitchen and he said, Mom, and this was during the day. He said, Mom, I just saw something. He said, I saw something run from the bathroom through Joel's wall into his room. And he described it as a short shadow figure. And I looked at him and I gotta be honest, I remember it was a little scary. I was like, wait a second. And I said, I asked him to repeat it. And I, and you know, kids have imaginations, we know this. So as a mom, I was concerned that maybe he was making something up. He's a little kid. So I had him repeat himself a few times, and then I said, Are you sure? Are you sure it wasn't your imagination? And he got mad at me and he hit me because he was so frustrated. And so I said, Okay, you need to go back to your room and you need to pray and you need to think about this, and I'm gonna come back there in a few minutes. So after a few minutes, I went back to his room and I had him tell me again, and I said, Okay, I believe you. I believe you. You know, his story didn't change, and he was very adamant about it and so upset that I seemed like I didn't believe him. So I told him, I do believe you. Well, guess who woke up sick that night? And Joel was still in a crib. He woke up, had puked, and he was sick with a fever. And that's where Brennan saw this thing run to. He saw it run through the wall into Joel's room. And again, that is not a coincidence. There was something happening in the spirit, and Brennan saw it. The veil thinned so Brennan could see something that was happening. So we talk about that sometimes, how crazy that is. Brennan was actually very sensitive to spiritual things when he was younger. He still is, but you know, as we grow up, sometimes those things become a little more distant. So you might think that a lot of this sounds crazy, but these things are true. They really happened. And you even have the CIA doing programs and reporting on supernatural things, although their intentions with that stuff are probably nefarious, but they have a whole report on it. You can go look it up. And here's my question: if we can access another dimension, another realm, according to the CIA, we can, then of course, other things from other realms can access this one, right? And the Bible literally says that our battle is against spirits in the unseen realm. 2 Corinthians talks about it. Ephesians 6 talks about it. And I'm not saying let's put all of our focus on the supernatural, I'm just saying let's at least pay attention since our God is supernatural and he speaks in supernatural ways. Let's pay attention. So I wanted to wrap this episode up with yes, another story. I've got lots of them. A few weeks ago, I was taking a walk and I was thinking through a lot of the crazy stuff that's happened to me and my family the last couple of years, just talking to God about it, praying about it. And I was walking down our road in between these awesome evergreen trees that we have on our street. And I had been feeling kind of like God was distant, just feeling like I hadn't really been hearing his voice very clearly lately. So I was just praying about all sorts of stuff, and I get pretty needy when it comes to wanting to hear God's voice all the time. So when I go through seasons where I feel like I'm not hearing his voice, I don't like that. So I was really just pouring my heart out to God. And I was walking and praying in this really nice area of our road, and I said out loud, I said, God, I want to see. And I didn't even get to finish my sentence. And the moment those words left my lips, I saw a bald eagle flying above me, somewhat low, and it fly, it fly, it flew right above me, right over me, right over the evergreen trees. And I couldn't get my phone out quick enough to try to get a good picture, but I did get a picture, but it was further away by the time I took it. But you can still tell it's a bald eagle. And again, I'm not even exaggerating it. It was like the movies where I'm in the moment, I'm saying, God, I want to see. And I was gonna say, God, I want to see you and I want to hear you. And the moment that I'm speaking those words, I see a bald eagle fly over me. You just can't make this stuff up sometimes. Well, I mean, I guess you could, but I'm not a liar. I'm not making it up. So I took that as a sign from the Lord. He's saying, Okay, you want to see me? Look. Look with your eyes. You want to hear me, open your ears. Listen to what I'm saying. I think what happens is we go through our lives and we are so used to the regular humdrum of life that we forget to look around to see what God's showing us, and we forget to tune other noises out to try to tune into him. So I think that God is always speaking. I think he is always showing us. It's just that we don't take the time to really see or hear him. So I would encourage you to pray, to ask God, say, God, show me. Show me what you want me to see. Lord, speak to me. I want to hear what you have to say. That should be a daily prayer that all of us have. So, anyway, I hope you have enjoyed these stories. I hope you've enjoyed this episode, and I would love to hear some of your stories about supernatural encounters that you feel that you've had in your life. So you could email me at dissatisfiedpodcast at gmail.com. Dissatisfiedpodcast at gmail.com. Tell me some of your stories. I would love to hear them. Thanks again for listening, and I hope you join me next week.