Dancing Past the Dark ~ distressing near-death experiences

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Nan Bush

Shameless promotion of good NDE news

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Dancing Past the Dark: Distressing Near-Death Experiences is (at last!) available in paperback. You or your bookstore can order it directly from the publisher, Parson’s Porch Books.  If you’re attending the IANDS conference, the bookstore will have copies at a discount. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and other outlets around the world will also have it, but there may be a wait.

We want laypeople and professionals who need this information to hear about Dancing.  With no hired marketing agent or publicity team, publicizing the book takes a word-of-mouth campaign. How you can help:

      • Ask your local library to order a copy.
      • Let other readers know what you think by writing a brief review at the book’s page on Amazon or Barnes and Noble.
      • Tell anyone who might have an interest–friends, relatives, nurses, physicians, chaplains and other clergy, psychologists, social workers, therapists, bereavement counselors, hospice volunteers–that at last there is a comprehensive, non-scary book about “the other NDEs.”
      • If you’re in a nonfiction book club, ask them to consider reading it. (If they do, I’ll provide a simple study guide.)
      • If you subscribe to a professional journal or newsletter, suggest that they review the book; if you’re equipped, offer to write it.

Why I hope you’ll help Dancing succeed:

      • It is the only source we know of where people can find, in one place, such a trove of information and discussion about disturbing spiritual events.
      • IANDS will receive half of the royalties from this groundbreaking paperback.
      • Beyond that, Parson’s Porch Book profits “turn books into bread” for hungry people.
      • You can feel confident in recommending the book. Its endorsements are strong. Steve Volk, author of Fringe-ology, has called Dancing

…absolutely enthralling—literary, adventurous, incisive, informative and smart… one of the strongest, most thought-provoking books on the paranormal I’ve ever seen.

Wow! And just think, it’s helping  good causes, and you don’t have to carry a sign!

Heaven, hell, and your home security system

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An intriguing new study suggests how religious belief can have measurable effect on secular society.

In recent years, research findings have indicated that individuals with strong religious faith are happier, have better health outcomes, and show greater flexibility during times of crisis than people without religious practice. But beyond individuals, on a broader social scale, how does religious belief matter?

Well, it turns out there’s a clear indication that the type of belief does make a difference beyond the individual. As reported in the June 2012 issue of PLoS ONE, the online journal of the Public Library of Science, there is a direct relationship between crime rates and the degree to which citizens believe in hell.

Small-scale laboratory testing has shown that people who believe in hell cheat less than those who believe in heaven. At the University of Oregon, psychologist Azim F. Shariff wondered if those beliefs might carry over to influence society at large, and with statistician Mijke Rhemtulla at the University of Kansas he went looking for an answer.

The two analyzed large datasets from 67 countries, with a total of 143,197 people, regarding belief in hell, belief in heaven, belief in God, and religious attendance. The data about belief were analyzed relative to those for the ten crimes for which the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime had reliable statistics: homicide, robbery, rape, kidnapping, assault, theft, drug crime, auto theft, burglary, and human trafficking. Shariff reports,

As predicted, rates of belief in heaven and hell had significant, unique, and opposing effects on crime rates.

Whereas belief in hell predicted lower crime rates, belief in heaven predicted higher crime rates, both at the same level of significance, p<.001.

The report continues: “Controlling for the effect of belief in heaven, a 1 SD [standard deviation, a measure of confidence] increase in belief in hell resulted in an almost 2 SD decrease in national crime rate; conversely, controlling for the effect of hell, a 1 SD increase in belief in heaven resulted in an almost 2 SD increase in national crime rate. Analyzing each crime individually revealed the same significant pattern of effects for 8 of the 10 individual crimes (kidnapping and human trafficking excepted).”

You can read the entire article here, with its detailed description of methodology and statistical findings.

What are we to make of this uncomfortable information? Should it surprise us? Clearly, although this is likely not to be a popular finding except in conservative religious settings, the psychological and moral implications need thought. Will our personal security be at risk as more and more people claim to be “spiritual but not religious”? Is a higher crime rate merely the inconvenient price of a more compassionate spirituality? And just what is the intersection between psychology, sociology, and theology among post-moderns who prefer to focus on individuation as central?

Plenty to think about.

SKEPTIKO and near-death experience hell

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Over at the Skeptiko blog (“Science at the tipping point”), host Alex Tsakiris has just posted the podcast and transcript of an interview he did with me last month. A bit different than most NDE interviews, with a couple of turns I think neither of us expected.

I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. Hope you enjoy reading or hearing it. You could even send the link to anyone who’d be interested!

You can find it all here

 

 

Hymns to an Unknown God

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Here is a wonderful quote from philosopher Sam Keen, being moved up front from the comments; it’s from Keen’s 1994 book, Hymns to an Unknown God. Thanks to Sandy Renner for the reference:

“I don’t know the ultimate destiny of all things faithful, vulnerable or fragile…..But I refuse the hidden pretension of omnipotence, of either the religious or secular variety. My mind cannot plumb the limits of the possible.  Therefore, I choose to trust the mystery from which all blessing flows….If I am to trust the source from which I came–this unique Sam Keen……I must also trust the the dark destiny into which I disappear at death.    I am enfolded in a Being-becoming-itself, a God for whom perpetual dying is a way of creating……..It is both the agony and the beauty of the human condition to be ignorant of our ultimate origin and destiny.   In the luminous darkness through which we travel on our human journey, we are often lonely but never alone.  Road-weary, overwhelmed by the magnitude of the  difficulties we face during our brief days, we are tempted to despair or to settle for cheap optimism.  But in the deep place of the spirit, we are moved and called forth  to this ongoing adventure, by the yearning, restless and creative One who-though called by the ten thousand names of God-is still clothed in marvelous silence.”

Why did Maurice Rawlings report so many hellish NDEs?

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“There’s this doctor who’s written books about all these hellish NDEs. How come he has so many people in hell and other researchers don’t hardly at all?”

The doctor was cardiologist Maurice Rawlings, in Chattanooga, who did indeed write almost a half-dozen books about hellish near-death experiences between 1978 and 2008 (he died at 87 in 2010). Here’s what I can say with any certainty about why he reported encountering so many distressing experiences.

Rawlings told the story of his patient who collapsed during a stress test, and “before we could stop the machine, he dropped dead.”

Well, apparently not completely dead, because in the patient’s own words,

“When I came to, Dr. Rawlings was giving me CPR, and he asked me what was the matter, because I was looking so scared. I told him that I had been to hell and I need help! He said to me, ‘keep your hell to yourself, I’m a doctor and I’m trying to save your life, you need a minister for that.’ … And I would fade out every so often, so then he would focus CPR again and bring me back…Whenever I would come back to my body, I kept asking, “Please help me, please help me, I don’t want to go back to hell.” Soon a nurse named Pam said, “He needs help, do something!” At that time, Dr. Rawlings told me to repeat this short prayer. “I believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God. Jesus, save my soul. Keep me alive. If I die, please keep me out of hell!”

The experience of the patient, Charles McKaig, then became pleasant, and he reported seeing his deceased mother and stepmother and being surrounded and comforted by the Holy Spirit. Upon awakening, he was an immediate evangelical Christian.

In Rawlings words, “After this was all over, I realized what really happened. It was a double conversion. Not only had this make-believe prayer converted this atheist … it had also converted this atheist doctor that was working on him”

Years later, Rawlings told his audiences,

“If you can catch people before they die and give them the option of accepting Jesus Christ as their personal savior, then they can’t loose [sic] whether they live or die. That is with them forever. And when they die like this, we don’t have to question where they went. And the preacher will be right when he says they are in Heaven. She went to heaven to be with God.

“But for those who die on the street, where do they go? It is the minister’s fault, your fault and mine because we did not approach them with the Gospel which is the free gift to anyone that wants it.”

You can read the entire account here:  http://www.freeevangelism.com/testimony/hellandback.htm 

Essentially, that is the backstory of why Maurice Rawlings reported so many hellish experiences: He wanted to get people’s attention in order to save them from the hell he believed in; he wanted to give them a chance to accept a faith he trusted completely, and telling heavenly NDE accounts was not going to achieve that. He was being steadfastly and thoroughly evangelical.

Despite his faith, a great many people object strenuously to that point of view and discount his work because of it. The real problem underlying the Rawlings material, however, is not theological. The problem is, as his fellow cardiologist (and fellow evangelical Christian) Michael Sabom pointed out repeatedly, a distortion of data.

A reading of any of Rawlings’ books will immediately give the impression that he resuscitated countless near-death experiencers—he himself said that his first book summarized “several hundred” cases—and heard their testimonies immediately, roughly half of them “hellish.” Sabom’s painstaking investigation of Rawlings’ data turned up quite a different picture.

Despite what was reported in Beyond Death’s Door, those “several hundred” cases “were represented by only 21 cases of ‘heavenly NDEs and 12 ‘hellish’ NDEs. Many of these were clearly not from Rawlings’ own practice, having been excerpted from other published sources. Others were simply left unidentified.”

The same situation presented with To Hell and Back, Rawlings’ second book. In a 1996 review in the Journal of Near-Death Studies, Sabom noted that of the 32 cases Rawlings claimed, twenty “were clearly lifted and referenced from other sources, and six were personally acquired examples used in his previous books. The remaining six NDEs appear to be new, previously unpublished accounts obtained from his own experience. However, two of these six cases were mentioned only in passing and never described.”

In other words, by reusing previous accounts and padding from other sources, Rawlings was able to give the impression of a greater number of distressing NDEs than he actually had. Further, his books leave one with the impression that many, many more distressing NDEs would be revealed if only people were interviewed immediately upon resuscitation. Sabom’s research indicated that conclusion also not to be supported by the data.

“In fact,” Sabom wrote, “the cases he presents actually seem to favor the opposite conclusion: out of 15 ‘hellish’ cases, ten (67 percent) were clearly shown to have been brought to Rawlings’ attention long after the golden ‘first few minutes’ after resuscitation, four were elicited at an unspecified time, and one 7 percent) was clearly noted as immediate.”

There are too many other problems to detail here. The gist of them all is that Rawlings, who was without question a lovely man, sincere in his beliefs and genuine in his concern for people, was working from a highly personal agenda more than from a desire for unbiased information.

What Michael Sabom reported after years of carefully reviewing Rawlings’ work was this:

[Rawlings] establishes himself before his audience as a cardiologist with impeccable credentials, a near-death researcher, and a committed Christian. Using these medical, scientific, and religious qualifications, he then presents the NDE as a glimpse of an afterlife and directly applies the Christian doctrine of heaven and hell to these experiences. This gridlike approach, however, poses problems to Rawlings in his interpretation of his and others’ research when the type of person (for example, non-Christian) or type of near-death event (for example, suicide attempt) does not jibe with the expected afterlife destination (for example, hell). Rawlings confronts the data of others with authoritative statements substantiated with little or no data of his own and illustrated with anecdotal accounts that, over time, appear to have been altered to fit his own designs…”

Sabom concluded, “I am a Christian and believe in heaven and hell. Based on current knowledge, however, we have much to learn about the NDE, both distressing and pleasant, before we can say confidently just what the experience means and how it fits into our spiritual beliefs.”

What this says to us is that before believing any claim about “ultimate truth,” or any researcher’s sincere pronouncement of having a final explanation about NDEs, it is wise, as Dorothy discovered about the Wizard of Oz, to look behind the curtain to find out who is providing the answers, where they are getting their facts, and what other people of substance are saying about them. This is not cynicism but discernment.

The uses of distress (NDE and otherwise)

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Here are two more fabulous shares for you. These arrived in my inbox this morning, coming from opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean but obviously a matched set meant to be sent along.

CHANGED

by Bob Leckridge

boblethbridge photoThe long marks on this tree were caused by a lightning strike.

Although struck by lightning, this tree didn’t die, it survived. But it survives changed. The marks of the strike become part of the beauty and uniqueness of its bark.

Illness is like that.

Stuff happens. Bacteria are inhaled or swallowed, bones are broken, hearts are broken. Often we blame these external events or stimuli for our illnesses. We say we have an infection when our bodies develop a fever, pain, inflammation in response to bacteria or viruses. In fact we give the infection the name of the bacteria or virus – we say the patient has “E Coli”, or “TB”, or “measles”, despite the fact that most people who inhale or swallow that particular “bug” might not actually develop any fever, pain or inflammation. Thinking this way externalises the illness. It’s something that happens to us and we are the victims.

But it’s more complicated than that. The particulars of our illnesses are the results of our responses, our adaptive responses, to these events, or, more commonly in chronic illnesses, to multiple, often long distant factors/events. Not everyone with the same diagnosis will have the same symptoms, and certainly no two people with the same diagnose will narrate an identical story of their experience of this illness.

Understanding that illness emerges from within our lives changes the power balance. We reject the victim mindset and open up the possibility that this experience of illness presents us with an opportunity to learn something about who we are, what’s important to us, and how we adapt to the changes in our lives.

We are changed as a result of these responses. Kat Duff, in “The Alchemy of Illness”, puts it beautifully –

Our bodies remember it all: our births, the delights and terrors of a lifetime, the journeys of our ancestors, the very evolution of life on earth………in fact, every experience, from the sight of a field of daisies to the sudden shock of cold water, leaves a chemical footprint in the body, shimmering across the folds of the cortex like a wave across water, altering our attitudes, expectations, memories, and moods ever so slightly in a continual process of biological learning.

bobleckridge photo #2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

~from Heroes Not Zombies, http://heroesnotzombies.com/2012/06/20/changed/

Bob Leckridge is a medical doctor in Scotland. He is also a highly skilled photographer, as the photos here and on his blog posts demonstrate.

 

END

Reflection by Molly Baskette
When I was diagnosed with cancer a couple of years ago, the movie “2012” had just come out on DVD. Being someone who can’t look away from train wrecks—vomit on the street, B action movies advertising Armageddon, etc. – I had to watch it. Of course, it freaked me out a little. I’m surprisingly superstitious for someone who claims to be a person of faith.

Then my mind did an interesting reframe. “What if,” I said to my husband, “God gave me and a bunch of other people cancer right now so that we would live our lives to the fullest, here in these last 18 months? What if cancer is a reward and not a punishment?”

I don’t really believe in the God Who Giveth Cancer, but I do believe in the God Who Lures Us Toward the Good with Whatever Comes Our Way.

That said, the world is going to end sooner or later, at God’s hands or at our own. When I think about the end of the world, because I do – perhaps now more than ever, and more personally – I think: “Well, either I’m a) dying and going Home, b) dying and going On, c) dying and going nowhere, in which case I won’t be there to feel foolish for having believed in an afterlife, or d) surviving the catastrophe that will kill most of Creation, in which case I hope I turn out to be brave and relatively selfless and care more for my fellow creatures than I do for holing up in a bunker with lots of Dinty Moore Beef Stew.”

What were you doing last year when the end of the world was predicted, twice (unsuccessfully, it would seem)? Did it change what you’re doing today?

Prayer

God of Beginnings and Endings and Beginnings Again, Help us to live every day as if it were our last, because one of these days, we’re going to be right. Amen.

~ From Still Speaking, http://is.gd/ZvuvGv

Molly Baskette is Senior Minister at First Church Somerville UCC (United Church of Christ), in Somerville, Massachusetts.