Dancing Past the Dark ~ distressing near-death experiences

UFO Narrative Belief System Shifts

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First, a Bit of Housekeeping

Please, as your first action now, go to Subscribe in the lower left column and enter your email address, even if you did receive a notice for this post. Next, if you know anyone who used to subscribe or would be interested, please invite them to join us. So many names have been dropped—and so many thanks to you who are still here!

The widening gap in our communication here has resulted not only from the pandemic. More than six months ago, I discovered a significant breakdown in system software, which has affected messaging for who-knows-how-long and has taken far more time than expected to rectify. We have had to find and install new software and are having to rebuild the entire mailing list. Deep appreciation to Susan Pomeroy of the  Web Geographer for the fix! And now, back to blogging!

UFO Narrative Belief System

“A big problem with all this over the years is that pilots and others have seen things which just don’t add up, but have been afraid to share that information for fear that they would be laughed out of the barracks. And, you know, finally, we’ve gotten to the point where we can have a conversation about this without people, you know, wondering if people need to talk to a therapist or something. And so that’s a big deal.” – Miles O’Brien, PBS NewsHour, June 27, 2021

It would be difficult, I think, for anyone in an NDE community not to blink with recognition of the sentiment in that statement. In more ways than one, we are not alone in this world!

The quote, from the July 8 issue of Religion Dispatches, follows a headline: “With Release of Pentagon Report, UFO Narrative Belief System is Suddenly Supported by Military Witness Testimonies.”

The occasion was the June 25, 2021 release of a report, under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, marking the first-ever acknowledgment by the U.S. government that the many sightings of UFOs in our airspace, witnessed and documented by pilots and military personnel over decades, were in fact real events. The sightings, never officially recognized but widely known to the public as rumors of spooky “unidentified flying objects” (UFOs) now had a new label, “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAPs). Journalist Diana Pasulka noted the observation of other journalists like Mike O’Brien, that the report “creates a safe space within which to discuss matters related to the sightings of UFOs and UAPs.”

How many near-death experiencers exclaim every day about having the “safe space” of an online NDE group, or a local IANDS gathering, or an ASCISTE forum—a safe place to speak freely, to be oneself, to share a common sense of reality! The individuals who first report experiences not sanctioned  by the wider culture are all too familiar with the need for such a space in which to feel free…and normal.

The importance of a protective environment continues, even with the explosion of public information about near-death and related experiences, and now as with UFOs and their kin. We are all familiar with the rolled eyes and snide comments which too often greet these topics in social situations. Ironically, Pasulka notes, the new report “reversed the multi-year—and quite successful—campaign to debunk all types of witness testimonies regarding UAP sightings. The campaign to debunk testimonies, called Project Bluebook, was also funded by the U.S. government.” Like NDE experiencers, the pilots and other citizens who for so long had been forced into hiding, have emerged into the paradox of a mixed acceptance.

What do their witness reports mean? Pasulka quickly nods to a potentially spiritual basis in the  UFO/UAP narrative:

Scholars of religion are among those who understand the importance of witness testimonies in the formation of religions. Raëlism [Ed.: one of the new religions] and The Nation of Islam, for example, were formed from the UFO/UAP testimonies of their founders. A cursory review of UAP literature, both primary sources by witnesses, as well as secondary literature by academics, reveals overt religious and often apocalyptic themes in UAP witness reports.

(More on these new religions in my next post.) Meanwhile, Pasulka continues:

Harvard researcher Dr. John Mack’s bestselling book Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994) featured the testimonies of people whose encounters with alleged extraterrestrials are best characterized as beneficial and spiritual, if frightening… Extraterrestrials are believed to be technologically advanced and are often thought to be supportive of humans’ best interests.

But,

Current UAP military narratives counter the testimonies found in books like Mack’s. They’re replaced with the specter of the reality of extraterrestrials and their danger to humans.

…The UFO/UAP narrative is a belief system that suddenly, with the release of the Pentagon Report, is supported by military witness testimonies. A new development in the vetting of witness testimonies includes internet algorithms related to search engines like Google. After the report was released, though ostensibly unrelated, Google reported a new process of vetting the credibility of user content; that is, videos and photographs uploaded by users of the internet. Coincidentally the video documenting Google’s new algorithm uses UAPs as an example.

According to coverage of the new algorithm, “Google will warn people when search results could be unreliable.” The example Google uses of unreliable information, shown as the result of a search on a phone, reads, “UFO filmed traveling 106 mph.”

This new algorithm will allow regulation of user generated witness testimonies. We’ve had witness testimonies for a long time. Is it really suddenly okay to talk about UAPs? Closer examination of this question reveals that it is only okay to talk about certain sightings—those ensconced within a military framework, and new algorithms will make it easier for internet search providers to vet civilian generated UAP reports.

So, does the new view envision a spiritual reality or a military threat? As Pasulka sums it up:

The consolidation of knowledge of UAPs to military witness testimonies, and the use of internet algorithms to monitor non-military testimonies represents a new development in this new religiosity of the UAP, what Carl Jung has termed “a new mythology.” For scholars and students of religion, this provides a rich opportunity to examine the formation of new systems of belief and practice coalescing around powerful cosmological questions, otherwise known as religions.

Next time: UFO religions.

More NDE Reckoning Than Expected

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Here’s a conversation about NDEs we haven’t had before—and doesn’t it seem odd there’s anything left we haven’t discussed? The topic comes once again from Nemo (Steve Weber), the source of so many interesting and worthwhile thoughts. Confusingly, there is another Steve Weber who also had an NDE, but that Steve lives in Florida and has a book about his NDE, titled The Place between Here and There. Nemo (Steve) lives in California and has a couple of walk-ins in my book.

It is Nemo (Steve) who writes to me introducing so many intriguing discoveries. Well into the pandemic, and more than a year after I had posted anything here, there were still bits of conversation happening occasionally online around the comments. In one of those lingering exchanges, he wrote:

One thing I’ve come to realize, regarding my current spiritual reality, on my path, is that it is virtually diametrically opposed to my “spiritual reality” of 50 years ago. I’ve wondered more than once what it would be like to time travel back to 1970 and present my current view to that new “Jesus Freak.” I wonder how the old “me” would respond to such apparent heresy. I mention this because I find it prudent to be mindful of this reality when conversing with others lest I become dogmatic and even find myself pontificating (Lord help us!). I’ve often despaired at attempting to convey my “truth”/reality to others, concluding that one’s truth/knowing isn’t transferable– after all, the “me” of much of the last 50 years likely couldn’t identify with it. The realizations that I’ve had regarding my Void NDE therefore have remained largely ineffable– I’ve attempted to convey them, but realize that one really can’t get it unless they’ve been there.

During the holed-up Year of Covid, I had spent my entire time, months on end of twelve-hour and fourteen-hour days, grappling with the story of my NDE and how I got from there to here. But oddly, it seems now, although the year was full of recollections about that earlier self, I had never thought to go back and have a conversation with her. What would we have to say to each other, with such different outlooks and understandings?

Time travel reckoning

In a preface to Beyond the Postmodern Mind, Huston Smith quotes Gai Eaton in The King of the Castle: “If, by some strange device, a man of our century could step backwards in time and mix with the people of a distant age, he would have good cause to doubt their sanity or his own.” The self of my today is a decade more than a half-century removed from the self of my NDE, which does not sound like “a distant age,” but the differences in thinking clearly mark the pivotal character of the years between. All of us who have memories from the 1960s and beyond have been living a sea change.

We surely knew there was chaos all around, but what most of us did not realize consciously was that so much of it was the crumbling of the Modern epoch. Our understanding of the world, and our certainties and expectations would go with it. Huston Smith continues:

[T]he stages peoples’ outlooks pass through on the temporal continuum have led the West to one that has come to be called “Postmodern” to distinguish it from the Modernity that began in the seventeenth century and ended around the middle of the last century. The Modern Mind took its cues from the new worldview that science introduced, but twenty-first century science has abandoned not just that worldview but worldviews generally. From Aristotle to Dante, the world was pictured as a series of concentric spheres. Newton replaced that with his clockwork universe, but quantum mechanics gives us, not a new picture of the world, but no picture at all. And philosophy has followed suit. Metaphysics died around the time that God died, Langton Gilkey has observed, tying its death to the “death of God” movement that Nietzsche announced, but which took a half-century to come to public notice.

The “no picture at all” of our quantumized Now is the “You are not real” of my NDE,  My earlier self was securely Modern; the current version is recognizably Postmodern, though in contention with the aggressively “woke.” No wonder it has taken such struggle to integrate that hard-edged NDE, which was forcing a leap to a sociological, philosophical, and spiritual developmental stage for which I was not ready. And how interesting that, looking at it from this perspective, it sounds so obvious and not all that hard!

About that conversation with my younger self: it occurs to me that my best option would be simply to give her a copy of Reckoning and get an earlier start on unraveling this reality-shaking NDE.

* * *

Asking a favor:

If you have read Reckoning—and especially if you enjoyed it (or at least found it interesting)—please add your Like to whatever review page you use. The book has been out more than a month and still has only three Likes and a single comment on Amazon. It is reassuring that all three have five stars and the comment is beyond gratifying, but in publishing, having only three people leave a rating is a body blow to the book’s reputation!

Your participation will make a difference. Readers with a distressing NDE need these books! I suspect that some readers may find the changes outlined in this one a bit hard to take in, simply because they are different from the usual NDE pattern and mainstream thinking  That bewilderment is familiar to all of us when first encountering quantum realities!  Your comments can help others make their way through. If you can’t bring yourself to write even a quick review, at least give Reckoning some stars! Five would be lovely, but honesty is important.

Thank you for helping!

Bruce Greyson, MD’s long-awaited book on his NDE research

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Asked by the editor of the magazine Vital Signs to write a book review of Bruce Greyson’s After, I decided to share it here also, as a piece of glad tidings. On the personal level, my Reckoning: Discoveries after a Traumatic Near-Death Experience is now generally available in both paperback and ebook format. (If you hear that a bookstore does not have the ebook, there’s been a lag, but it is coming!) The next post here will be within two weeks.
And now, heeere’s After!

After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond

Bruce Greyson’s long-awaited book is out. Ken Ring calls it a “humdinger.” He’s right. I call it unparalleled, a book as foundational for the next generations of near-death studies as Raymond Moody’s Life After Life was to the first. It is certainly unparalleled as a basic read for anyone wanting reliable information about near-death experiences.

Greyson is personally an engaging man, and this book is a thoroughly engaging read. Conversational and full of personal experience, it moves right along, offering, for the first time, glimpses into his family life and growing up. The voice is thoroughly his own, warm and approachable yet always following his carefully restrained objectivity in the cause of balance. In a field occupied on one hand by strictly skeptical materialists and on the other by spiritual enthusiasts, others may speculate and theorize; he is occupied by a search for evidence.

Among the personal glimpses illuminating his distinctive contribution is a wonderful anecdote about Bruce and his father, whom he describes as  a skeptic, “a chemist whose perception of reality was defined by the periodic table of the elements.” The anecdote describes a conversation during a visit home as a third-year med student.

I surprised my father with the news that I was thinking of becoming a psychiatrist. I told my father that I was fascinated by the effects our unconscious thoughts and feelings had on our behavior. Sitting in his easy chair with his legs crossed, my father slowly pulled a corncob pipe and tobacco pouch out of his jacket pocket. He meticulously filled the bowl of the pipe and tamped down the tobacco, then added some more and tamped it down again. Then he struck a wooden match and carefully waved it over the bowl as he drew gently on the pipestem. Finally, he looked up and, to my surprise, he asked, “What makes you think we have unconscious thoughts and feelings?”

I was shocked by this blunt challenge. But  my father wasn’t saying that the unconscious didn’t exist. He was just asking for the evidence—as any skeptical scientist should…As surprised as I was…I realized that he had a point. I should look into the evidence of the unconscious before accepting it.

We see here the makings of a lifetime achievement. In fact, it is to a great extent Greyson’s unflappable quest for evidence which enabled IANDS–with which he has been so faithfully associated–to realistically describe itself as “the most reliable source of information” about NDEs.

A prime source of that reliability has been the evidence-based research of Bruce Greyson and his co-investigators, asking not only big questions but the myriad of small ones which matter, and which are the substance of After. There has been no shortage of  writers contributing to the notion that near-death experiences are anything from weird to divine intrusion. Greyson is unquestionably a star among those who have made near-death experience credible.

One quality making this book stand out so satisfyingly is its breadth. Greyson is not, of course, the only significant NDE researcher and author, though he was among the first in this era. Other respected authors have routinely acknowledged research findings across the field and perhaps presented their own. The difference is that in reading After, a realization dawns, as question after question is answered across twenty chapter topics, that the findings are all emerging not from others but from the author’s own work; he is himself, sometimes in partnership but often singly, the source of so much of what we know. And this is key—that he does not flaunt that fact; it simply is.

Quantitatively, his output has been stunning: his cv tells the tale: Peer-reviewed professional journals have published more than one hundred of his near-death related articles and book reviews. (The public rarely hears of them because they are behind high pay walls of academic exclusivity). Another seventy are published letters and book chapters. He has presented at sixty-seven conferences around the world, including at the United Nations and the compound of the Dalai Lama.

Through it all, there is his sense of humor and his humanity. In Reckoning, I have recently told the story of the very early meeting of the IANDS Board of Directors, back when most academics were still at the very beginning of discovering how normal and paranormal co-exist. There was a good deal of “Can we believe this?” The high point of the three-day meeting was a demonstration of spoon-bending. The demonstration, using a large, heavy stainless steel serving spoon, was a resounding success, leaving Board members stupefied by what they had just seen with their own eyes. One outcome of the meeting could have been witnessed on a United Airline flight from Connecticut to D.C. There sat a man whom Ken Ring would forty years later describe as “the most distinguished and important authority of near-death experiences in the field,” patiently practicing spoon-bending with the airline’s plastic flatware. Bruce Greyson, pursuing evidence!

I predict you will be glad to read After. It’s a wonderful book.

(Further) Patience Rewarded

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Pre-introducing … book #3!

A question frequently asked but unanswered for dedades has been, how have I made sense of my own NDE? How many years has it taken even to have such a sense of what a distressing NDE might mean! And then, how to go deeply enough inside and in the literature to shape the mountains of information, how to get thoughts on paper in spite of the disruptions of daily life? Trying to write the book took insane amounts of time. It went on for years. There was never enough quiet, enough emptiness for concentrated thinking, enough time for the kind of focus it required.

And then came Covid-19. The isolation which has been a horror for so many has also, sometimes, been pure gift. Suddenly to have no meetings, no appointments, no lunch dates, no plans, no trips, no ventures beyond the mail box! The vast sweep of unencumbered time and purpose created a unique, almost biblical circumstance, like a long labor enabling  a hard-to-write book to be delivered into being. Now it is almost time for the new arrival’s public appearance.

The paperback edition of Reckoning is in the IngramSparks pipeline and will be published internationally in early spring, or as soon as Ingram completes its part with Covid-depleted staff. As with the first two books, I am self-publishing because the size of the readership niche does not entice a commercial publisher. The ebook version is also moving toward production. Soon!  You’ll see–I wasn’t just doing nothing all that while!

If you like, bring some questions or discussion and we’lldance another round of blog life. Would love to hear from you.

 

Advanced Meditation and NDEs

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Happy New Year wishes to you all, and here we are, back again with Dancing Past the Dark. The long hiatus in posting resulted from my sense of having reached my limit with the original 100-some posts; in other words, I didn’t know what more to say.
I had not expected the persistence of some readers who declined to just walk away. They, plus the report of a new study out of the UK, have effected this reappearance; so let’s get to it!
* * * [Read more…] about Advanced Meditation and NDEs

Patience rewarded–The Buddha in Hell is on Amazon!

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buddhainhell-cvr-1-final2

You thought I was kidding! Well, the hot news is that the Kindle version of The Buddha in Hell and Other Alarms has just gone up on Amazon in the U.S.

Whereas I think of Dancing Past the Dark as a comprehensive overview of distressing NDEs, this second book is more evaluative. Its tone is more conversational and personal, as befits a creation built from rewritten blog posts of the past four years, unpublished writings, conference presentations, and articles from guest authors.  If Dancing is a roast, The Buddha is a casserole. You can check it out at Amazon, even read a sample.

Within the next two to four weeks–as soon as the distributor gets word out to to major international retail outlets–the non-Kindle ebooks will be available pretty much wherever digital books are sold, followed by the paperback version, due out also within the next month. List price of the ebook is $9.99 USD and paperback $16.95, but if you wait for discounting to take place the price will go down.

Once you’ve read it, please do leave a review! With no budget for marketing, the book will get by with a little word-of-mouth help from its friends. As always, you can also feel free (please!) to come here to ask question or make comments.