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Dancing Past the Dark ~ distressing near-death experiences

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You are here: Home / Archives for Near-death experiences

Near-death experiences

More NDE Reckoning Than Expected

May 11, 2021 By Nan Bush 15 Comments

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!

Tagged With: NDE, near death experience, reckoning

Advanced Meditation and NDEs

January 4, 2019 By Nan Bush 39 Comments

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

Tagged With: bardos, Buddhist practices near death, Buddhist texts, meditation, meditation and dying, NDE, near death experience, Tibetan Book of the Dead, what happens at death

Distressing NDEs as Scary Rites of Passage, #2

October 5, 2015 By Nan Bush 11 Comments

This post continues the slightly amplified transcription of my presentation at the 2015 IANDS conference in San Antonio. If you missed the previous post, you might want to read that first and then come pick up here with Part #2.

Comparative valuations

The purpose of traditional initiation rituals was understood not only as being the source of  a “basic change in existential condition,” as Mircea Eliade claimed, but as an entry point to maturity and competence. The rite of passage would be a formal challenge, a test of the newcomer’s fitness for an advanced social role. In spiritual terms, it was expected that the ordeal might give access to altered states of consciousness that could provide a glimpse of other realms, a bit of secret wisdom. In some cultures, obtaining such a vision was (and sometimes is) an essential aspect of the trial. [Read more…] about Distressing NDEs as Scary Rites of Passage, #2

Tagged With: 2015 conference, afterlife, Cosmos and Psyche, distressing near-death experience, Enlightenment, Fall, hell, initiation, Mircea Eliade, Progress, Richard Tarnas, rite of passage, San Antonio, scary rite of passage

Distressing NDEs as Scary Rites of Passage

September 20, 2015 By Nan Bush 12 Comments

No, we are not dead, nor even really gone. The blog and I simply got overscheduled, overdue, and overtired and had to take a time out.

It’s not that I’ve been doing nothing, mind you. There’ve been substantial family matters to deal with, and facilitating two groups at church, and a stupefyingly advanced college class reunion back in New York State. And then came the IANDS conference, which went so well it has occurred to me that you might like to know what I said in my presentation, which provides this post. Furthermore, over its three-year history, this blog has accumulated 117 posts, most of them articles not published anywhere else, so  I am working on revising and restructuring the best of them into book form. (Please stay tuned, as I’m going to be asking your help finding a title.)

The conference presentation was an hour long, far too much for a single blog post, so you will find it distributed over the next four weeks (and, if you wait a bit, as a chapter in the new book). As always, your comments will be welcome.

It feels good to be back.

Scary Rites of Passage:

Accepting Distressing NDEs as Spiritual Experiences

Part 1

[Read more…] about Distressing NDEs as Scary Rites of Passage

Tagged With: change, cosmology, initiation, Mircea Eliade, rite of passage, shamanism, transformation

Two reviews: Glimpsing Heaven

November 24, 2014 By Nan Bush 1 Comment

Glimpsing Heaven: The Stories and Science of Life After Death

by Judy Bachrach
National Geographic Society

The first word: Review by Nancy Evans Bush

It takes a gifted author to produce a fresh, interesting look at NDEs at this stage in the game. Fortunately for readers, Judy Bachrach brings years of experience as a top-flight journalist to the assignment, and in Glimpses of Heaven: The Stories and Science of  Life After Death she has done just that. Some paths she follows are well-worn, but in her hands they take on new and absorbing perspectives. [Read more…] about Two reviews: Glimpsing Heaven

Tagged With: Glimpsing Heaven, Judy Bachrach, life after death, National Geographic, near death experience, Paranormalia, Robert McLuhan

Two Families of God, continued, and an NDE ball is thrown out to readers

June 10, 2012 By Nan Bush 8 Comments

Those of you with memories that go a couple of posts back may recall that I had embarked on a discussion of what William James called the “healthy minded” and “sick soul” approaches to religion and life. My blog post was based on an article by experimental psychologist Richard Beck, “The Two Families of God,” and I confidently promised to come back and lay out my own views on the subject.

James, you remember, described healthy-mindedness as producing happiness that rests on an optimistic ignoring of evil and the dark side of existence.” The approach, James said, manifests a “blindness and insensibility to opposing facts given as its instinctive weapon for self-protection against disturbance.” In Beck’s words, “This protection is accomplished through repression and denial. It is an intentional form of blindness in the face of life to produce positive affect and existential equanimity.”

In other words, the sunny, happy results of healthy mindedness depend on denial of evil and suffering.

By contrast, what James called “sick souls” remain existentially aware, individuals “who cannot so swiftly throw off the burden of the consciousness of evil…and are fated to suffer from its presence.” As Beck puts it, “James describes the sick soul as more profound than healthy-mindedness; the sick soul experience is ‘a more complicated key’ to the meaning of pain, fear and human helplessness.”

James said of the existential resiliency of the two types:

“The method of averting one’s attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. . . . But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; as even though one be quite free from melancholy one’s self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.”

It will probably come as no surprise that what struck me so sharply about Beck’s article is the apparent similarity of James’s healthy-mindedness to the principles of the Law of Attraction, which has overflowed its original New Thought banks, spilled into Norman Vincent Peale’s “Power of Positive Thinking” and Joel Osteen’s Prosperity Gospel, to become an immensely popular new parallel to contemporary religion.

And that is where I—or more specifically this blog post–got bogged down. The more I have tried to analyze the response of Law of Attraction thinking to distressing near-death experiences, the more difficult I have found it to talk about it all coherently. Maybe I’m simply too close to the subject. Maybe I’m just bored by the ideology.

I am certainly  aware of the aura of disapproval and fear, along with a kind of moral condescension, projected by Law of Attraction followers toward the whole subject of these types of experience and the people who report them. Ironically, I do not for a moment deny the utility of much LoA psychology nor the possibility that some of its scientific claims are plausible. (I have in fact bent a couple of spoons without physical force; I have a cellular memory of that “action at a distance.”)

What bogs me down is akin to theologian Walter Brueggemann’s claim that “we have thought that acknowledgement of negativity was somehow an act of unfaith.” It is the same model, says Beck, “that creates the sense that James’s sick soul or the experience of Mother Teresa is paradoxical. In the bipolar model, faith and complaint exist at the expense of the other. They cannot occupy the same experiential space. However, as we have seen in the psalms and in the empirical psychological literature regarding relationship with God, it appears that high complaint can coexist with faith.”

Similarly, I contend, acceptance of the existential burden of recognizing the dark side of existence, whether physical or spiritual, is not necessarily negativity as the Law of Attraction would have it. It can coexist with joy and success, and with a deep spirituality.

So, I am throwing this discussion out to you all. You’ve had some great comments about the former post. Do you think distressing NDEs can be accommodated within Law of Attraction thought? What are your thoughts about LoA thinking and human suffering on a global scale? (But please do not tell me that very young children attract their leukemias and blastomas to themselves, nor that the millions of individuals who died in the Holocaust invited the experience; that would be ideology talking, not common sense.) Is LoA simply a different kind of fundamentalism, brooking no disagreement?

Tagged With: existential recognition, healthy mindedness, Law of Attraction, positive thinking, Richard Beck, sick souls, Walter Brueggemann, William James

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