Dancing Past the Dark ~ distressing near-death experiences

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Nan Bush

2012 and distressing NDEs…catching a viral!

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I had told myself along about June that if the book did not have a traditional publisher by the end of the year, I would consider going with an ebook. My concern was, would it be respectable?

Then, in early fall, one of my advisors, a highly experienced book editor and retired university professor, himself an author many times over, returned from a summer of lecturing in Europe and told me that his books are doing well there as ebooks. It’s the way to go, he said.

Hearing that from someone of his stature was all it took. Dancing Past the Dark: Distressing Near-Death Experiences will make its appearance as an ebook. What this means for you, as readers, is, first, that you will get it a good two years earlier than if it were coming out in paper. You will get it at half the cost. What it means to IANDS is that a portion of the purchase price will go to help support the Association. What this means for the book is that it will have to find its way to readers not by a publisher’s efforts but by word of mouth, blogs, and social media.

As I write this, it’s not quite four hours short of the New Year, and the project is right on schedule: I have just put the last touches on the PDF file that will go to the indexer the first business day of the New Year. Bruce Greyson is writing the foreword. By the end of January, the book will be ready for conversion to ebook language. By March or April, it should go public. So, fire up your Nook, your new Kindle, your iPad and other e-readers, or the app on your laptop, and start telling people. It’s coming!

If you know of a blog, an organization, or an online group that might want to know about the book or be interested in a guest blog post, please add a comment to let me know about them, or send them the blog URL (soon to be a website, also–www.dancingpastthedark.com). Who knew we would ever want to go viral!

I am so appreciative of your interest, your comments, your emails. You’ve made 2011 a good year, and my best wishes go to all of us for the year ahead. Just think what’s possible in 2012, whatever the Mayan calendar may mean!

The Hitchens departure for points unknown

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Today’s Baroque in Hackney post (see my blogroll) is a beautiful tribute to Christopher Hitchens, a man who could set my teeth on edge like almost no other. I come away from Katy’s post with two thoughts in particular. First, about his anti-religion tirade of a book, God is not Great, she says :

…polemically, he demonstrated his position by throwing loads and loads of facts at it, and I ruefully noted that there is not a sentence in the book that would lose meaning if you replaced the word ‘religion’ with ‘human nature’. But his convictions were true convictions and went through him like a stick of rock.

That “stick of rock”–or all of them together–is much of what made me grind my teeth. All that certainty, that immovable sense of rightness helped make Hitchens what he was. But is that always admirable?

Secondly, while going all thoughtful over that image of “a stick of rock,” I am admiring Katy’s observation that applies, I think, as well to people dealing with whatever distress, whether of near-death experience or any other of life’s challenges:

Do you remember, recently I mentioned the idea of occupying one’s own space …? Christopher Hitchens occupied himself utterly, and thus became fearsome. And fearless. Even the cancer that killed him he declared ‘banal’, saying, ‘It bores even me’. He is exemplar, and refused to be sentimentalised by illness.

The New York times quotes him on the possible regret he might feel for the unhealthy life that brought him cancer of the oesophogus:

“Writing is what’s important to me, and anything that helps me do that — or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation — is worth it to me,” he told Charlie Rose in a television interview in 2010, adding that it was “impossible for me to imagine having my life without going to those parties, without having those late nights, without that second bottle.”

The parties, the conversation, the necessity of good talk. Two essays he wrote about his cancer – one, about his diagnosis and admission to the Country of the Sick; and two, the final essay he wrote, about pain, life and dying  – demonstrate the power of this remark.

Outside, the rain is turning to snow; the day is cold, drear, forbidding. Seize it. I mean to try. If we learn one thing from the Hitch, it’s that.

New perspective on heaven and hell

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For any readers who are evangelical Christians, or progressive Christians, or recovering Christians, or even if you’re not Christian at all but are interested in people’s finding new ways of thinking about the subject of hell, here’s a great opportunity.

New Testament scholar and P.OST blogger Andrew Perriman has collected a series of his thoughtful posts into book form, Hell and Heaven in Narrative Perspective, which is now available for well under $4 on Kindle. (No Nook yet, though he’s looking into it; but Kindle can be read on any computer.) Definitely worth a look. Heck, at this price, just buy it and read at your leisure.

The only thing I am proselytizing for is openness to new ideas! See Perriman’s quote below.

Perriman says:

Being a collection of blog posts the book is academically lightweight, far from comprehensive, and suffers from many of the characteristic vices of the medium. Maybe that’s all to the good. In any case, I think it puts forward a pretty coherent case for reading the texts as interpretations of historical outcomes rather than as data for general theories about a personal afterlife.

Where is the medical evidence that NDEs happen?

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The blog Skeptico recently featured an interview with PMH Atwater, after which a couple of commenters kept asking about the medical evidence that her three NDEs happened. In fact, they wondered whether any NDE can be said to happen in the absence of corroboration. Where are the records? Or, to quote one comment, “An NDE-like experience without any witnesses or medical documentation to support it can be anything, including hallucinations.”

Those questioners are far from alone. The fact that this question keeps being asked is an indication that a great many people don’t get the idea of “experience.” Any experience is a private, personal happening in consciousness. It is not a public activity. By definition, a near-death or similar experience cannot be witnessed, although in rare instances it may be shared.

The best a medical record can do is track physiological events and record circumstances. Although a monitoring device may register a blip in some function being recorded, it cannot indicate the presence of an NDE during that blip. No one watching the monitor will see, or feel, or think what the patient is seeing and feeling and thinking. In short, the biological event may be witnessed, but the NDE itself is not open to observers.

It seems ironic that under the most tightly monitored circumstances, in cardiac arrest with stringent clinical recording, studies find the fewest reports of NDEs. Does this mean that near-death experiences in other circumstances are fraudulent? No, it means simply that the conditions surrounding cardiac arrest and resuscitation either do not promote having an NDE or affect a patient’s being physically and cognitively able to report it afterward. As for mistaking one type of experience for another, the differences between the sensations and effects of NDEs and hallucinations have been well documented for two decades; that is no longer an issue except for people who are unaware of the research.

I wonder, after so many thousands of NDE reports with no corroborating medical records but with objective evidence of life changes to indicate that something happened, what is it that people are looking for in demanding medical evidence?

Follow-up on the Near-Death Experience Void and Space

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In the previous post, I waved a flag for Brian Greene’s book and PBS series, The Fabric of the Cosmos, especially the segment on space. I’m still waving. However, responding to some of your comments, here’s what may be a clarification.

(What follows is quoted from the book Dancing Past the Dark: Distressing Near-Death Experiences, which should be available online early in 2012.)

Suppose, says Greene in the video, suppose we took away everything in the physical universe—the buildings, people, objects, the planets and stars, down to the smallest atoms of gas and dust; what would be left? We would say “Nothing.” If we took its picture, it would be empty. And as Greene agrees, we would be right; but we would also be wrong. He asks, “How do you make sense of something that looks like nothing?” At this point, experiencers of the Void sit up and take notice.

“As it turns out,” he tells us, “empty space is not nothing; it’s something.”

 (Buddhists are nodding and smiling.)

“Empty space is not nothing; it’s something with hidden characteristics as real as all the stuff in our everyday lives. In fact, space is so real it can bend; it can twist; and it can ripple—so real that empty space itself helped shape everything in the world around us and forms the very fabric of the cosmos.”

In the book he summarizes (p. 32), “Space is unavoidably suffused with what are called quantum fields and possibly a diffuse uniform energy called a cosmological constant—modern echoes of the old and discredited notion of a space-filling aether.” There’s a lot going on, beyond our ability to see it with our own eyes.

I am not suggesting that Nirvana is outer space, nor that it is located in outer space, nor that an experience of the Void is an actual trip into outer space any more than a blissful NDE is a voyage to a physical heaven. However, there is this curious resemblance among space, the Void, the Godhead, and Nirvana, that what seems so empty may be full of everything there is, that it may be, in fact, the fabric of the cosmos.

In the play Our Town, the young people are fascinated to discover that a letter can be sent to them at an address beginning with their house number and ending with the Mind of God. I wonder if this conception of space doesn’t have a good deal in common with that idea.

There are no answers here, but intimations of likenesses suggesting that there may be more to this whole business of spirituality than confirmed skeptics admit.

The Void in near-death experience…and space?

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The new PBS series on NOVA comes from physicist Brian Green and his book The Fabric of the Cosmos. In the first of four programs, he looks at space.

For a sizable number of folks who report being badly shaken, even terrified, by an NDE, the cause of distress was the sense of being alone in a great, featureless emptiness, like being lost in the stars (only without stars).  Here are excerpts from three accounts:

“I found myself floating in a void and nobody was there, not even God. I was overwhelmed with loneliness and despair because I knew this was eternity.”

“As the hours went on with absolutely no sensation, there was no pain, but there was no hot, no cold, no light, no taste, no smell, no sensation whatsoever. None, other than the fact that I felt a slight sensation of traveling at an extremely fast speed. And I knew I was leaving the earth and everything else, all of the physical world. And at that point it became unbearable, it became horrific, as time goes on when you have no feeling, no sensation, no sense of light. I started to panic and struggle and pray and everything I could think of to struggle to get back…”

“I realized I was, at that very moment, floating in space. Almost simultaneously the deep Realization or Total Knowledge hit me that I had died and I was completely alone, never to be with any loved ones, or for that matter, no living thing again in any form. . . I was in a place or state of consciousness that I didn’t know. To me it was for all eternity. There is really no way to describe or explain what this experience felt like, except to say that if a person was to allow himself or herself to mentally conjure up a scenario that represented the greatest amount of fear and terror that individual could imagine and then multiply it by five billion, it still wouldn’t equal what I felt.”

This pretty much sums up the core of my own NDE. It took years before I was able to get close enough to the memory to begin to deal with it. A turning point came with the observation of a pastor friend that reaching the Void is, for a mystic, the ultimate spiritual experience; perhaps, he suggested, I simply wasn’t ready for the encounter when it happened?

“Perhaps,” indeed! It would take years before I could approach the memory closely enough to work it through. Eventually I could at least consider that the ultimate spiritual experience shared by mystics, like the Buddhist Nirvana, is not empty but is full of all potentialities. Objectless but full. Like most such things (as if they were things), potentialities are invisible; so the Void that looks like emptiness is actually a fullness. Like space, as it turns out.

Here is Brian Greene’s remarkable presentation on space:  http://video.pbs.org/video/2163057527/