Near-death experiences

Distressing—even hellish—NDEs coming into their own?

January 16, 2012 By Nan Bush 3 Comments

There’s an amazing, dam-busting conversation going on in the forums at the near-death.com site: http://ow.ly/8vfXj

Titled “The case for distressing/hellish NDE study,” the thread has grown to 104 posts in a week’s time. And they’re substantive, interesting (sometimes downright fascinating), mostly respectful posts. I called the thread “dam-busting” because of both its size and the richness of its content.

All sorts of sub-topics are emerging: questions of what constitutes “reality,” the nature of being, whether distressing NDEs are morally contingent, the role of personality and behavioral history. In short, it’s the kind of conversation we haven’t heard in the past three decades.

Even if you want simply to lurk, it’s worth sitting in. Read through the comments and see the range of discussion. It’s just great! Huge thanks go to RabbitDawg (yes, our own RabbitDawg) for opening the conversation. He really started something! And as always, thanks to Kevin Williams for the near-death.com site and its wealth of forums. See you there!

In local news, Bruce Greyson has returned from presenting an invited paper at a conference with the Dalai Lama at his compound in Dharmasala, India, and has sent the foreword for Dancing Past the Dark. The book’s index is almost finished, and it and the cover are expected by week’s end. Its appearance for Nooks, Kindles, and other e-readers is definitely coming closer! And because of that, I am awash in the major task of today’s authors, preparation for marketing the book. (If you Tweet, look for me at @nancyevansbush, or from your browser, type http://twitter.com/nancyevansbush ). It’s a whole new world out there! There is no end to learning curves.

New perspective on heaven and hell

December 13, 2011 By Nan Bush 9 Comments

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.

Hell and Heaven in Narrative Perspective

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?

December 8, 2011 By Nan Bush 5 Comments

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

November 30, 2011 By Nan Bush 6 Comments

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?

November 19, 2011 By Nan Bush 31 Comments

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/

The realness of NDEs

October 13, 2011 By Nan Bush 2 Comments

Over at the Paranormalia blog, a couple of days ago (October 10, 2011) Robert McLuhan linked to a question from Robert Perry about the grounds on which we can believe the testimony of near-death experiencers.

Two sentences in Perry’s article jumped out at me:

“We clearly need to look to hard evidence, and not just trust the subjective impression of the experiencers themselves… They are overwhelmingly convinced that their experience was real. If we can gain some genuine understanding of why, then perhaps that will help us decide how much we can believe them.”