Can I be sure that my personal vision of heaven is what actually lies ahead for me?  Absolutely not.
 
For starters, how do I know the admission requirements aren’t pretty much the same as I’ve heard them described for most of my life?  

For example, what if the vocabulary I choose to apply when addressing the, uh, less gracious and adroit of my fellow drivers (within the confines of my own vehicle, of course) is enough on its own to immediately disqualify from further consideration?

Also, if I’m lucky enough to get in, I strongly suspect I’ll find my dogs already there—and they’ll rightfully subject me to a lot of good-natured teasing about all the stupid things I did with them, or failed to understand about them.

As for the thought-provoking experiences I’ve described here, I’m under no illusions that my beliefs about them could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt before a court of law.
 
Nor do I presume that if I were to submit them to, say, Scientific American or the journal Science, the editors would be so taken with the clarity of my reasoning that they’d skip the normal peer review, devote a whole issue to me, and prudently advise me to book lodging in Stockholm early for the inevitable Nobel prize.

On the other hand, neither do I believe that advanced degrees, a tenured professorship at a major university, or a lifetime spent poring over dusty tomes in the dim and cavernous bowels of a major research library are necessary to notice things about our world which the academic establishment hasn’t had time to bother with, and then use simple logic (plus a bit of common sense) to tease out some possible origins and implications of these under-examined phenomena.

Of course, to some, such endeavors might seem too New Age, and well…a bit flaky.
 
But to experience things that might have significant implications for our understanding of the spiritual as well as physical realms we inhabit—ones of a kind that hardly anyone ever talks about today (outside of maybe rural snake handlers and “speakers in tongues,” neither of which I know anything about)—and to simply dismiss them out of hand because they don’t sound like the kinds of things that are currently considered sophisticated enough to say wouldn't exactly be commendable behavior.  It would be on a par with having inadvertently captured cellphone video of an old lady getting mugged at an ATM, and then not taking the trouble to share it with the police.  To me, this would the height of not only irresponsibility, but also a profound flakiness.