Sid: Hello, Sid Roth here with Paul Hegstrom and this is so phenomenal, but what happens when you are having surgery and you end up,
did you actually die on the operating table?
Paul: I had no white light experience or anything like that but yes, they did three bypasses on me, sewed me up and put me in ICU and then the heart stopped and they had to rip me open and pump the heart with a rubber glove to get me back on again and the machine…
Sid: What happened to your brain?
Paul: The brain, after they salvaged my life I was out doing seminars and I could see what I wanted to say in my head but I couldn’t say it. I went to the doctor and the doctor says well we were afraid that might happen, you were off, without oxygen for a period of time and you have lost 40% of our brain cells. And I said…
Sid: Your brain cells, they do not regenerate do they?
Paul: They do not regenerate, they will wire around the damage but they will not regenerate so I ended up going into intense research to see how to wire around quickly the damage, and out of that research I came up with things that, scripturally, and in the neurobiological standpoints of study that were just phenomenal, I learned things that are out of the box…
Sid: You learned how to rewire the brain.
Paul: To rewire the brain, and see that’s why when we have been wounded in childhood and we are struggling with, let’s say the DSM-4, the diagnostic standard used for mental health that we medicate and manage emotions but we don’t see rewiring of the brain.
Sid: Now your brain is obviously rewired by just hearing you talk to me right now.
Paul: Yeah, and I can even talk faster.
Sid: Praise God, you’re going just as fast as I love.
Paul: But I started to see how to rewire the brain to the point that I actually have pictures on my power point when I do seminars that show new axons coming out of the neuronal structure and developing and moving in and then attaching the synapse to the dendrites and how that works and you could actually see that as we fast forward the slides and so what I found out in research was that for lack of knowledge my people perish, Hosea 4:6, and so the program is set up so that it challenges the brain, we are having stroke victims that are responding, because if you will challenge the brain the brain will literally start it’s rewiring process and will wire around the damage and so it took me about three years and I had rewired totally around a 40% loss in the way the brain thinks and here we are having the time of our life to the point that we have major universities that are studying how we rewired according to the word of God, and see the thing that is so exciting about it, the renewal of the mind, it’s in the scripture.
Sid: But you told me something at dinner last night that I knew, but I needed to be reminded how important it is to not read the Bible, yes you heard me correct, not read the Bible, but meditate on the Bible, what does that mean? In the Hebrew the word meditate means to mumble, or say it out loud, why is it important to say the Bible words out loud?
Paul: Well I could do a whole show just on the thalamus, but that happens is the limbic system is where the software for what we need from our Creator to be whole, that’s where it lies, and anytime you think something, internally it is an option, you only move it from an option to a decision by speaking the word, because your thalamus will not obey anybody else, it will only obey your voice, and that is why there is scripture in Revelation that says we overcome by the blood of the lamb and the word of our testimony, so I have challenged people in the last two or three years if you are reading the scripture don’t read it internally to yourself, read it out loud because what is happening as you read scripture it is coming out of your mouth, you are the authority over your body, bringing down the strongholds, bringing into captivity the imagination and choosing upon what you think, and that is Paul’s writings, when you speak it your thalamus comes into submission to it and it will change, and when we speak our decisions and we read the word it rewires the brain.
Sid: Tell me how the brain responds to truth, or as Pontius Pilate said, “What is truth?”
Paul: You see the fun thing of it is that everybody that is watching, if they have a computer, they have spell check, that’s just kind of a natural thing, but God put in our brain a truth checker, and He says to know the truth, and truth will set you free. And the problem with even the body of Christ right now is they are not given the basic truth that people need to understand to be set free, yet when you hear something, I went to counseling and I knew that certain types of therapy were absolutely wrong, I mean it was just totally wrong, I knew it, but they were forcing me into trying this to manage my emotions, but when God started dealing with me I knew truth, and as we talked last night and there were several people around, I would say something and they, instantly they knew it was true, it just made sense, it all fit, and see one of the reasons we struggle so hard…
Sid: Listen one of my staff members read your book, Broken Children, Grown Up Pain, and she said a light bulb went on and literally she started changing once she saw truth.
Paul: Absolutely, and see that is why we wrote the book because the things we wrote in the Broken Children book are things that have never been written in mental health, and yet it is based on the word of God, God gave us the process, He never meant for us to be struggling, He never meant for us to lay on a psychiatrists couch for 14, 15 years, he never meant that, He meant for us to beable to understand what was going on and start a healing process which I call the process of sanctification, or growing up basically, and then we become effective in our process, and it becomes like somebody is hurting worse than me and I’ve been there so I grab their hand and pull them through and they start getting better and they grab somebody we are walking together.
Sid: What happens with someone that perhaps has problems with pornography, problems with perhaps wanting the wrong sex for a wife or for a husband, problems in these deep things, problems with attention deficit disorder, things like that, what happens when their brain gets rewired?
Paul: What happens is they start going through the program that our Creator put in there and so much of the time with what we do with life skills is we don’t even know that we are dealing with couples that are gravitating toward the same sex, we don’t know they have ADD, we don’t know some of these things, but as the program works and they allow the information to go into the software, and into the hard drive, the thalamus, the limbic system it starts that maturing process, it talks about growing up, and that is what Paul said in Ephesians four, we have been babies long enough, and he is talking to the adult church, we have been like ships without a rudder falling for everything, standing for nothing, we need to come to full stature, all it is, is a growing up process, and we have got to understand what it takes in the software to help us start the maturing process, and it is all in the word of God and …
Sid: And you know what is amazing to me Paul, is what you are telling me is that science is catching up with what we have in the Bible that Jesus said two thousand years ago.
Paul: Yes.
Sid: Science is just beginning to understand this.
Paul: That’s true, and we have, I don’t want to name it right now but we have a major university that got a huge grant to study what we do because they are doing brain scans on our people, the court ordered men who are arrested for domestic violence, they are doing brain scans on these men at the intake and then they go through Life Skills, they do a brain scan on the outside, a post brain scan and the brain has changed so drastically they can’t believe it, they say Hegstrom you are out of the box, you don’t think like we think. No, because I try to think like God thinks. And I don’t know how God thinks but He is showing me just little nuggets that are bringing healing to people beyond your wildest imaginations, I’m so excited, I have been in this 25 years and I can’t sit still.
Sid: I am excited oh what happened to that woman you divorced, what is going on now?
Paul: We remarried 23 years ago the first of December and we have not had any incidences of domestic violence in any way.
Sid: Listen, Paul tried to reenact what he is telling us right now for documentary of it, he couldn’t even act out an abusive husband, he wasn’t able to do it, his brain is rewired, or as God says, renewed. Get the Bible, it’s called the truth book, you are going to know the truth and the truth is going to set you free. This is your moment to make Jesus your Lord, go for the gold.
