On July 2, 1984, nightclub owner Ned Dougherty died, entered a tunnel of light and met Lt. Dan Campbell, a friend killed during the Vietnam War. Campbell, communicating telepathically, told Ned to remember everything because he would be going back; he had a mission and this experience would guide him in that mission.

Dougherty’s near-death experience (NDE) was vividly detailed. When he touched the wall of the tunnel of light, which looked like a tubular ocean wave, crystal-like liquid sparks exploded into brilliant colors. The sparks of dancing light were accompanied by the synchronous sounds of crystal-like chimes. The end of the tunnel opened to a universe of brilliant stars and the approach of a beautiful golden light.

And that was just the beginning.

During his epic NDE, Dougherty was filled with universal knowledge. His life review occurred in a crystal sphere surrounded by melodious sound waves of energy emitted by thousands of spiritual beings in a crystal amphitheater.

It was not an easy life review to bear, but it soon opened to a universe unlike ours and then to a beautiful garden setting. A radiant angelic being appeared. The Lady of Light, as Dougherty came to know her, showed him scenes of his future life: a former real estate broker and nightclub owner, now writing a book, involved in a film in his hometown, working with hospice patients and feeding the hungry through a foundation called The Mission of Angels.

Most of these events have already come true, and so have several of the world prophecies shown to Dougherty by The Lady of Light.

She took him to what he would later come to know as the Akashic Hall of Records and showed him a large globe of Earth. She pointed to the Middle East, where he saw a flashpoint of light, then to Italy, where he saw another flashpoint of light. The flashpoints broke out rapidly across the Middle East and Europe and represented acts of aggression, terrorism and war.

As Dougherty would write in his book, Fast Lane to Heaven: Celestial Encounters that Changed My Life (Hampton Roads Publishing, 2001), "Fanatical, self-proclaimed religious groups supposedly acting in the name of God performed many of these acts, but I was told that acts of war and aggression were not part of God’s plan." He was shown a vision of a dry, dusty, barren region of the Middle East that would give rise to a chain reaction of man-made catastrophic events, first in the Middle East, then in Africa and Europe, followed by events in Russia and China.

The Lady of Light next showed him a vision of the Earth suspended in space. He watched as Earth’s axis shifted and could not tell when it began or how long it took. But he clearly observed the geophysical changes: great earthquakes erupting throughout the world changing the shapes of the major continents, and volcanic smoke and ash billowing into the atmosphere. He watched black and white movies of these events. A massive tidal wave hit the coastline of Long Island and New York City, then Miami Beach. A new land mass rose out of the ocean.

It didn’t have to be this way, The Lady of the Light told him, as so many Marian apparitions have promised before. Prayer could mitigate these events: prayer as a call to God, and meditation to receive God’s message. Essentially, wrote Dougherty in his book, "I was told that the fate of mankind rested on our ability, individually and collective, to change the direction of mankind in accordance with God’s plan."

What would that look like, we might wonder?

I pondered this question in February of 2004, while driving up to Hazleton, Pa., Dougherty’s childhood home, for an early premiere of Mel Gibson’s blockbuster movie, "The Passion of the Christ," which Dougherty was sponsoring for friends in Hazleton. He had a priest and a rabbi speak before the movie and facilitate a discussion afterward.

Having read Dougherty’s book, I had found myself identifying with him in many ways: the alcoholic family and Catholic background initially. But then, Dougherty succumbed to his alcoholic tendencies and pursued the material life, ultimately becoming the owner of two exclusive, trendy nightclubs, Club Marakesh in the well-heeled Hamptons suburb of Long Beach, New York, and another Club Marakesh in ritzy West Palm Beach, Fla.

Dougherty (an Irish name, pronounced Dock-erty) had always lived in the fast lane. He drove a Mercedes-Benz convertible, traveled by jet, helicopter and limousine, and brandished a mercenary motto: "He who dies with the most toys, wins!" I could not identify with any of that and even less with his supporting a bloody, brutal movie on Jesus's life. After watching it, I grew angry at the movie’s manipulation of people’s feelings and feared that it would evoke in viewers even more guilt-ridden, fear-based religiosity, precisely the kind of right-wing politick that has landed our nation in war and chaos resembling that of the best-selling "Left Behind" novels (based on Armageddon in the Christian Book of Revelation.).

I was puzzled. Why would someone given divine gifts promote what seemed to me the opposite of love and peace?

That was a very good question, I would learn in a four-hour interview with Dougherty in a noisy Hazleton diner.

Why would he promote "The Passion of the Christ" movie, touted by orthodox, fundamentalist religions as the Last Chance Texaco for spiritual redemption? Dougherty’s answer to that question deserves our open-minded attention, so I hope you will read this article all the way through.

Judith: We have defined "end times" as the long-awaited spiritual awakening on Earth. My question was, "Are we in these end-times now," and you said yes, as indicated by 9/11 and this "Passion" movie, which you say is a powerful catalyst for a requisite "interior" event, as predicted by The Lady of Light in several Marian apparitions over time. What else do you interiorly sense or know?

Ned: I came back from my experience with two time periods. In the original manuscript, I said that the transitional period that would result in the end-times would take place from 1998 to 2002. In the final editing, that time period was taken out because I realized that the book would not be published until March of 2001. So these dates were not included.

J: And this transition period would speed up events and move us into what you call the "illumination of the soul," an uplifting into higher consciousness?

N: Yes. The transition period was 1998 to 2002, and indeed, you can see the events taking place in that time period culminating in the World Trade Center attack. Now, the only other date that is very specific to my experience is the year 2034. All of the other events that I was shown would take place before and up to and including the year 2034. I was not shown events that would take place any farther in the future than the year 2034.

J: And presumably, the year 2034 will begin the prophesied one thousand years of peace? Or what will happen after 2034, after all these catastrophes?

N: I saw that all of these events would take place during this transitional period and would lead to the world of peace and love among humanity. It would involve us evolving interiorly and spiritually. It would involve the piercing of the veil between the spiritual reality and the human reality becoming more visible to us. It would result, certainly, in geographical changes to the Earth, geopolitical changes, much turmoil and disruption. But all of these events are leading humanity in the direction of what God planned for us here on Earth: a period of peace, love and understanding among humanity.

J: After your NDE, you saw the world in terms of energy-- the beauty of the world--and, I think, in one of your visions, you saw that the world would look different from how it is now.

N: Yes, more like heaven on earth. I came back from the experience, and even here when I was guided by my friend Dan back to this area, several blocks from where we are now, I saw the area where I had grown up, my grandmother’s house, and it seemed somewhat older and shabby. But all of a sudden, it metamorphosed into a bright and beautiful blue-sky day and I could see this glowing energy vibrating through all the plants, flowers, trees, through everything. I was seeing my neighborhood in a different light, through God’s eyes perhaps.

I saw the transition that had taken place and that not only do we become more connected with our true spiritual nature, but that everything down to the blades of grass would have this energy flowing through it. The grass was swaying and moving, and symphonic music was emanating from this gently undulating grass, back and forth: waves of song and energy and music flowing from the grass and flowers and trees, a soft breeze blowing around. It was heaven on Earth.

J: And this is how it will be after 2034?

N: I can’t say after 2034. But I can say that between this time period that we’re in now, and up until the year 2034, we will evolve to a place and time that I am describing now.

J: So we could be moving into this evolutionary higher consciousness right now?

N: We are moving into it.

J: By perceiving ourselves as spiritual beings of light. Now, I am surprised to hear you say the words Christ Consciousness. Several things come up for me. It is particularly my belief and Celtic Christianity holds this as well that there is a spark of divine light in each of us, and I believe, and the Gospel of Thomas says, this is Jesus's real message, which got pretty lost. In the Nag Hammadi texts and other ancient scrolls surfacing today, Jesus said that the way to know God is to go within to that spark of the divine, kindle it in meditation and bring this Light out to the world, ultimately as Christed ones.

But that’s not the message I got out of the film last night. And that’s not the message I heard in the Mass today. The message I heard in the Mass and in the film was that due to original sin and the things we have done through the ages, we are by nature not divine sparks of light with the potential to evolve Christ Consciousness within ourselves and move closer to God; rather, we are bad and Jesus came to redeem our sins and we need to see how bad we are.

So how do you reconcile this?

N: Well, I perceive more in terms of energies--positive and negative energies. I see the universe and our reality in this physical world in terms of energies. What has happened over time, through religions and philosophies, is that we began to parse words, impose meanings. But basically what we’re talking about here are universal laws. Universal laws give us a principle by which we live whether we are in the physical plane or the spiritual plane.

And that is the principle that we create energy by our activities, and our energies are either positive or negative. For example, when we listen to someone on TV speaking badly of "The Passion" and in a negative tone, that’s a spiritual frequency we’re connecting with. If it’s a complaint about the film that’s in a negative tone, we receive it negatively, if we’re open to receiving it that way, and a tightness builds up inside our chest.

Now by doing that we’ve already committed, in the Catholic or Christian sense, a sin, because we’ve allowed this negative energy to become part of our spirit. If we allow this tightness in our chest to fester and grow, and we release that negative energy to our neighbor and they consume it, they move on and allow it to fester and grow and so on.

When we reduce it (this dynamic) to an event like the Holocaust, we see that the Holocaust was not caused by Hitler, a man who had so much hate within him. It was caused by Hitler who saw a way that he could take all of that negative energy and create greater negative energy. So was the Holocaust the result of one man? Again, perhaps, we could discuss many times the nature of Hitler. Was he a man who was a trickster, who in his human negativity attacked Jews because he hated Jews? Was he Satan incarnate?

Either way, he saw that he could channel all of this negative energy. But what really caused the Holocaust? It started with one neighbor, envious of the other neighbor, building up negative energy inside them in a small neighborhood, perhaps in a small village, and passing on this negative energy. Now we’re fueling more negative energy and in the spiritual atmosphere all over Germany, then, you have a tornado of negative energy building up and building up. And all of a sudden there’s a Hitler who learns how to channel this energy, how to control and manipulate the population through his power and his greed. And to channel that energy in a direction that created the Holocaust.

But was it Hitler, or was it everyone in those neighborhoods who contributed to channeling that energy into a huge force, a volcano in the spiritual world?

Now let’s go back to the time of Jesus, 2000 years ago, coming to the Earth. Didn’t we have the same kind of negative energy by all of humanity at the time reacting to the Savior? We have called that sin, but Jesus was not crucified by the Romans or by the Jews. He was crucified by all of the negative energy of all humanity through all time, from the beginning to the end of our human reality. And it was his way, as the son of God, symbolically, to show us how to recognize our faults and walk away from them.

Two thousand years later he comes to us, perhaps in many different ways, but I see him coming to us through this film. And I truly believe that, because I’ve read about the mystical ways in which Mel Gibson was drawn to produce this film. Perhaps we could all find fault in his approach to this. Perhaps Biblical scholars find fault with some of his interpretations. Others who don’t believe in Christianity find faults for other reasons. But Mel Gibson is, as we all are, human and subject to error, and in his mission, perhaps he errs, perhaps he sees differently and through filters that he didn’t quite completely put aside.

He is subject to error, but in his humanity produces this great event. And if you look at the connection in how this film was made, the connection to Medjugorje (Marian apparition site in Yugoslavia), The Lady of Light, her involvement here, all of our individual involvement, you see lots of connections.

All day long today, on TV and radio, you were hearing anticipation about the opening of this film. This is not two hours of running celluloid, an ordinary film in Hollywood; it is an interior experience that we are each taking away from it, and it’s the beginning of a process like a near-death experience. Yes, some people walked away in anger. Some people were disturbed by the violence. I apologized on a TV interview, for example, for asking the interviewer what he thought about the film, because I don’t think it’s right to ask somebody to express themselves right after seeing it yet because, like a near-death experience, this film is an experience which results in growth and in a process.

I think we’re going to see the fruits of that, but unfortunately, we’re going to see it in a lot of different directions. Everything God gives to us is a gift. He raises the bar again, there’s another rung in Jacob’s ladder. We’re going to have to climb this one too.

J: So, some people will see this as the great sacrifice of God in suffering to redeem our sins through his only son. And some will see that this great master came to sacrifice his life to create a story that would capture the hearts of humankind?

N: And perhaps for us to more fully understand the universal laws.

J: What universal laws do you see at work here? Oh. You are saying that this film forces the doors open so that people awaken and start to receive the universal laws for themselves?

N: Exactly. This is the school of learning and growth. We are spirits. We are infused into our mother’s womb, connected to the physical body and we’re here to learn and grow.

J: How does your experience and your story and book fit in with the traditional Catholicism that we experienced today? I wonder if, in teaching about everlasting life, you are reviled by some?

N: That has happened since I began to speak about what I experienced. It’s happened continually since the book was published.

J: In what ways? People actually contact you and say that you’re dangerous?

N: Yes. From a lot of different disciplines. Many Christian fundamentalists believe that near-death experiences are the work of Satan. There’s a lot of negative energy going on there. But for me, it all comes down to positive and negative energy. What are we individually creating? Are we going through our lives creating positive or negative energy?

There’s a spiritual atmosphere that is beyond the veil of the physical atmosphere in which we live. We can tune in to the weather channel and see these graphic predictions and forecasts on the weather that is happening all over the world. Well, in the spiritual sense there is a spiritual atmosphere and it’s too bad that we don’t have a weather channel so that we can see the dark energy that is being created over the Middle East right now by these acts of terrorism, these acts of hatred...

J: By the U.S. war on Iraq?

N: ...and of simply, in silence, having hate. This sends out energy. The use of the ‘f’ word sends out a negative energy; a simple word adds to that negative energy just as condensation results in the formation of clouds and rain. We have negative energy resulting in spiritual volcanoes, spiritual megastorms.

Our physical and geophysical world are affected by the spiritual atmosphere and what we’re doing to the spiritual atmosphere. Effectively I came back from this experience describing what scientists label as global warming. The scientists are looking for all these scientific reasons why global warming is taking place in their scientific perception. Since my NDE, global warming has become a common household term. I’ve been watching how scientists are leaning in one particular direction in terms of global warming and they will continue to, unfortunately, not perceive that this global warming they can scientifically estimate has spiritual sources.

Why? Because of all the negative energy that we are creating.

In one sense, people will find it very difficult to understand how a tidal wave would have anything to do with the world of spirit. But let’s take specifically the situation of this massive tidal wave that may someday descend on America.

In the Eastern Atlantic, there is a fault line running along the Canary Islands. We all know about the San Andreas fault in California and that not if but when it goes, it’s going to result in massive destruction. Very little is said about the fault line in the Eastern Atlantic and what will happen when it goes. When not if this happens, it will result in a great tidal wave that will take eight to nine hours to hit the Atlantic Coast. Which means that we will have a time of warning before it actually hits. Which is consistent with what I was shown as to when and how this would take place. Because I saw that there is a period of warning that allows us to go to a safe place.

Several years ago, all up and down the East Coast, particularly on Long Island where I was at the time, signs just popped up out of nowhere saying Coastal Evacuation Route. There were even articles in the papers asking when did these signs come up, where did the funding come from and why are they here?

Well, they’re there because the U.S. government knows, through the various agencies, that this catastrophic event is imminent, that it’s not a question of if, but when the fault goes. And they are preparing rather quietly for this event’s taking place.

Why are they preparing for this quietly? Well, imagine what it would do to real estate values and to the populations living in coastal areas if, all of a sudden, we began to panic and move to the mountains? Chaos and confusion. You don’t want to cause chaos and confusion among the populace. So you quietly go about providing the measures for the inevitable destruction and loss of life and place.

J: Okay. But The Lady of Light tells you, as have all the Marian apparitions and Edgar Cayce also, that this is the way it looks right now, but that prayer can temper and change anything. The storms can dissipate. Everything can completely change. So are you saying that this end-time, this time of spiritual awakening, is our wake-up call, as 9/11 was a wake-up call?

N: Well, just think about what you’re saying here. Doesn’t that sound like a ridiculous proposition? The Lady of Light told me that 20 people praying in a group could stop a war from happening. Doesn’t that sound ridiculous?

If we buy the concept of positive energy versus negative energy, we know that 20 people in prayer can create tremendous positive energy. But do you think it would be enough energy to stop a war from happening?

Think about it in this context. We go back to the spiritual atmosphere. We have a great negative vortex building in the Middle East right now, right? We have people praying all over the world. When they’re praying, they’re sending out beams of light. They’re sending positive energy into that same spiritual atmosphere. That positive energy from people in prayer, singly and in groups and churches and temples and synagogues and open fields all over the world, they’re sending these beams of light.

I was shown these radiant beams of light going out in the atmosphere in the spiritual world, and what happens to all this energy? It interacts with the negative energy, to put the negative energy down.

Now how can a group of 20 people in prayer make a difference?

Well, think about this tremendous positive energy and tremendous negative energy on a scale going back and forth, back and forth, until all of a sudden one side of the scale is going to win and the other is going to lose. What does it take? Just a little more, a little bit more prayer on the positive side, and the positive side wins out and the war is stopped.

And in the geophysical sense this can happen too. The prayer of one hermetic monk can change the future of the world. Just a little bit. That’s all it takes for that monk to upset the balance. A madman living in the woods who’s full of hate and anger and can’t bestow it on anyone: He doesn’t do a crime, he sits in a cabin by himself full of hate and anger, and that little bit of negative energy goes out into the spiritual atmosphere.

Who has greater importance in the results of what happens: the president of the United States, or the monk or the madman? The president of the United States has great powers, he has armies that he can unleash, he has great fortunes, he has global corporations that can control and manipulate other countries. He has tremendous power over the world.

But the monk, the madman who nobody knows, can alter the equation, can change the balance in the right direction or the wrong direction. What that ultimately comes down to is that we all are equally important in this world. There’s not one on any level of humanity whose role is more important than anyone else. We are all equal in the eyes of God, and our roles here are all equal, no matter what we think of our position here.

And that’s what universal laws really address.

J: So your viewpoint is that "The Passion of the Christ" can move more people to prayer, which is what the Marian apparitions say over and over again and in the most incredibly boring messages. They never say anything else. But there’s really nothing else to be said, is there?

N: Well it’s a very simple equation. It’s positive energy. It’s negative energy. How do you create the positive? How do you create the negative?

How do you create the positive? Prayer. Prayer. Prayer. Prayer. Love of God, love of self, love of neighbor and to be of service to mankind. Simple equation.

J: End of story.

N: Last line, end of story.

	Ned Dougherty is an author, lecturer and spiritual teacher living on Long Island, New York. He is active in writing articles about the possibility of an East Coast tsunami and recently sponsored viewings of the movie, "St Theresa of Liseaux." Information on his tours to Zaitoon and The Mission of Angels foundation is available on his website, www.fastlanetoheaven.com. His book, Fast Lane to Heaven: Celestial Encounters that Changed My Life, is available in bookstores.