Near-death experiences

Will the real NDE please stand up

August 8, 2011 By Nan Bush 7 Comments

Thanks to RabbitDawg for initiating this post. See his comment under “Swedenborg’s hell” for a full explanation of his question. In brief, having just read Chris Carter’s Science and Near Death Experience, RabbitDawg notes, “[I]t seems like Chris Carter is saying that Bruce Greyson, Ken Ring and you conducted a study and concluded that your NDE was a fairly common ‘type’ of NDE that can be brought on by nitrous oxide, when given to women undergoing a difficult childbirth. In other words, the specifics of what is experienced during this type of NDE is governed by the anesthesia. It also seems to imply that this type of NDE is not a ‘true’ Near Death Experience, and is little more than ‘a bad trip.'”

Here’s my response:

First, I’m pleased to see that Chris Carter, in Science and Near Death Experience, lists three types of disturbing NDEs, as they are those that Bruce Greyson and I identified in 1992 in what is, so far as I am aware, the only actual attempt at a descriptive study specifically about these types of experience. We had numbered them differently, in order of their frequency in our study: 1) Inverted (Ken Ring’s term); 2) Meaningless Void; and 3) Hellish.

Bruce and I did the study, the collection of data for which took ten years; Ken Ring commented on it after its publication in the journal Psychiatry. In today’s terms, it can hardly be termed a “research” study, because of our minimal attention to statistical and even systematic demographic information. The enormous pressures of shame, fear, cultural prejudice, and psychological trauma kept most individuals with frightening experiences tightly closeted at that time (as many are still); they tended to disappear immediately and permanently after sharing an experience account, leaving data collection in considerable disarray (so many unreturned questionnaires and phone calls!) However, the study provides the only first-generation (after Moody) description and initial analysis of fifty disturbing NDEs.

The original article included four accounts related directly or indirectly to childbirth under anesthesia, assumedly nitrous oxide. One is a Type #1, inverted account, the others are Type #2, the Void; another Type #2 account quoted in the article occurred with no known drug involvement during an auto accident. From the original study’s sample and accounts gathered in the years since, it is safe to say that childbirth—especially childbirth under nitrous oxide—seems productive of NDEs. It is by no means the only precipitant.

Further, anesthesia is not the only factor, by any means, associated with experiences of the Void. As Ring himself first said, being close to death is a reliable trigger for NDEs; it does not constitute not the sole meaning or determinant. Ditto, I believe, for both childbirth and anesthesia.

Now, about the reductionist argument that “it’s only” the anesthesia and therefore not a “real NDE,” there are several points to be made.

Most centrally, is our interest in the experience or in its trigger? My interest, both personally and investigatively, continues to be in the experience and its effects on people’s lives, how they explain it and its meaning to themselves, how they learn to live with its residue in their lives. Whether it was precipitated by a particular drug, a smack upside the head, or being half devoured by a tiger is irrelevant; any near-death or similar experience and its meaning in an individual life are what that person has to live with. Anything else, whether exotic or commonplace, is storytelling background. (As is my mention of the tiger.)

We need to keep reminding ourselves that in terms of experience, we are like television sets: just as programs can’t reach our living rooms without coming through the hardware, every human experience has to come through our physiological system. For a neuroscientist or electrician, it may be the wiring that fascinates. For most of the rest of us, we don’t say about “American Idol,” oh, it’s only wires; it’s the program that matters, not how it gets to us. An experience, like a program, has its own existence independent of the transmitting components. My focus is on that independent existence.

There has been a strong and consistent general reluctance (material for any number of future posts) even to look at, much less accept as genuine, the distressing near-death experiences. In 1994, it was Ken Ring who put forward the argument about NDEs involving the Void that “such experiences—though highly real—are not true NDEs as such but are essentially emergence reactions to inadequate anesthesia…further intensified by initial resistance and fear.” However, he did not make a similar claim about blissful NDEs that occurred under identical circumstances. Childbirth itself has been associated with a great many pleasant, even blissful NDEs, as well as some that are deeply distressing. The question remains: If blissful NDEs under anesthesia are not doubted, why the other?

People tend not to make these same trivializing claims when the precipitating cause of an NDE “is only” a cardiac arrest or traumatic accident; the fact that anesthesia is involved with some NDEs does not preclude their being NDEs. In the early 1980s, when claims were floating around that “negative” NDEs weren’t “real NDEs,” I surreptitiously analyzed my own experience against Ring’s Weighted Core Experience Index, for which a score of 11 indicated a genuine NDE. Out-of-body experience, movement through darkness, intense emotion, light/darkness, encounter with entities, messages and sense of knowingness, I added it all up, not padding anything. My score, obtained conservatively, was 17. So, yes, I consider these experiences of the Void to be true NDEs, just as papillons and Irish wolfhounds are both dogs.

Next question?

Swedenborg’s hell

August 5, 2011 By Nan Bush 6 Comments

The comments from Jim and Laurie, arriving chronologically close together, got me thinking about similarities in the ideas of Emanuel Swedenborg (Swedish scientist and philosopher, 1688-1722) and Carl Jung (Swiss psychologist and philosopher, 1875-1961). Both were strongly influenced by their Christian upbringings, and Swedenborg’s visions and writings were directed toward interpreting the Bible in what he believed to be a more correct way than that offered by tradition. (It’s continually fascinating to me to realize how much one can discover in the process, not of throwing out one’s tradition, but of challenging it at more than the level of adolescent rebellion.)

I wholeheartedly agree with Jim that anyone with an interest in distressing near-death experiences—any NDEs, actually—really ought to read Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell. It is available in online versions, handily divided into paragraph-sized readings; a big plus is that many of today’s writers might wish to write so readably.

The similarities between Swedenborg’s many visions and NDEs are so strong that Raymond Moody devoted a section of Life After Life to them, saying in part:

“Each person…shapes their own eternity to correspond with their real inner nature. Some people become irrational, driven by fear and greed. Such people are in the spiritual condition which Swedenborg called hell…a psychological condition which corresponds to the suffering we experience on Earth when we allow ourselves to be driven by the blind greed of our own egos. There are no devils in hell to inflict punishments because in the hellish spiritual state each person acts out their own malice by tormenting others.”

If it seems that, without devils, Swedenborg’s describes a tame sort of hell, go look at any list of the 50 scariest movies. Or consider the work of any organization dealing with torture. Oh, the kinds of things our minds can generate entirely on their own, no devils required!

This ties neatly but perplexingly with Laurie’s comment about the Jungian Shadow: “It’s the duality of the good we think we are vs. the bad we believe we are NOT—opposites. But it could also go the other way—our Shadow can be something GOOD in us that we are not aware of… Maybe the painful, terrifying NDE is also showing something about us we are not aware of, but need to be. Maybe the positive NDE is too, in some way. Too simplistic or mechanistic a notion perhaps; nevertheless…this experience may not be punishment or reward, but simply a fact of nature.”

What is the function of a distressing NDE, 2

June 25, 2011 By Nan Bush 7 Comments

It finally dawned on me that I was going to have to say something intelligible in response to my own question, which caught me under-prepared, just when life itself got over-busy. Therefore, my apologies for the delay in posting part two of this topic. Excuses! Many thanks for your thoughtful and interesting comments. Feel free (as some of you surely will) to help me sort through my own thinking.

The question was/is: What is the function of a distressing near-death experience? The honest answer, of course, is rather like the answer to “Is there a God?” because none of us, now or ever, has had a provable reply. What is the function? I don’t know. However, that is not quite the same as saying, “I haven’t a clue”; and as four thousand years or so of theological debate have neither definitively answered the question about God nor exhausted the conversation, I figure we can at least take a crack at the NDE question.

It seems to me that even before approaching an answer, we have to recognize three preliminary factors: first, antiquity; second, conventional wisdom; third, the power of emotion;

Antiquity. I am convinced that it was experiences like the most deeply torment-filled NDEs that supported, ages ago, the development of doctrines of hell. The mistake that was made, and it is entirely understandable and is still made, is that, because the event is experienced as so phenomenally real, it was and is also interpreted as literally, materially real. Add to this the empirical reality of volcanoes, demonstrating to the ancients that there really is fire underground. The perceived reality of the story-told events, coupled with the empirical reality of molten fires, became and becomes a matter of geography rather than experience, which leaves us with the Hell of legend, which is how it wound up in Holy Writ. If that is the way you choose to interpret this whole question, you will recognize that I am about to take a road less traveled.

Whether one believes or dismisses the traditional idea, humanity is now by and large pinned against the wall of its own consciousness by the millennia-old and nearly universal conception that there is a more or less tangible place or condition of hideous torments waiting after death as punishment for whatever we have done wrong in life. Even when arguing rationally or even atheistically against the concept, the very existence of the argument acknowledges it as a living idea; believed or not, the concept sits like a scowling potential somewhere in our mental set.

The second preliminary observation is about the conventional wisdom, thoroughly entrenched in human consciousness by the time the story of Job was written. The conventional wisdom says that good people get good experiences, and bad people get bad ones. If you have fortune, health, people who love you, a good job, an iPad, you must be a deserving person; and if you’re broke, sick, alone, unemployed, and non-digitized, you must be a no-good, lazy bum. If you’re happy, you’re on the good side of the universe/God; if you’re suffering, you must deserve it. Right? Hah. That’s the problem with the conventional wisdom: that it’s wrong as often as it’s right. Maybe oftener. Having a distressing NDE says absolutely nothing in that sense about the person who has it. Oh, yes, it’s about the person, but not in the judgmental sense implied by reward-punishment thinking. More on this in the next post.

Third preliminary observation: What keeps the concept, like the events themselves, pinned so strongly in us is the same aspect of consciousness that keeps any near-death experience stable and lifelong in memory—the power of the emotional charge. A genuine, transcendent, full-blown spiritual and/or near-death experience carries an earthquake’s worth of emotional charge. When distressing NDEs are the topic, the sheer dread (terror, fear, angst, whatever) of our death anxiety, which is the terror of annihilation of our personal self, is augmented by the awe-full guilt we felt when our parents caught us in the wrong, when we think (if we do) of Original Sin, when we were called to the principal’s office, when our boss calls us on the carpet, when our superego growls to us, “I’ve been telling you, bad, bad, bad.”

When this powerful charge is joined with preliminary observations #1 and #2, the stage is set for a catastrophic interpretation, an identification of hell, that spans cultures. Like looking at a tree limb overhead on a wilderness trail and seeing a mountain lion poised to spring, civilization itself can be held motionless by contemplation of the traditional hell. We are paralyzed by an ontological fear, unable to think straight.

Lousy. Terror and guilt are a toxic combination; yet this is so wired into our systems, it is almost impossible to escape. It is crippling. The remedy, I believe, is to learn that there actually are other ways of thinking—and then to think them. [To be continued]

Coping with a difficult NDE

May 12, 2011 By Nan Bush 7 Comments

In a book I was reading today, the author was saying that the effects of a traumatic NDE can be dealt with by a long series of therapeutic exercises. I believe he’s right. I also believe that most experiencers do not have the time, the interest in reliving their torment, nor the financial means to undergo years of therapy in order to integrate the experience.

What are your thoughts? Would it be worth getting past the questions, the anxiety, the emotional and spiritual torment, to be “fixed”? Would you do that?

If you’ve had a near-death experience

May 2, 2011 By Nan Bush 21 Comments

Almost always, a person who’s had an NDE wonders, “Why me?”

If you’ve had a great NDE, you wonder if you’re special, if you’re supposed to do something remarkable with your life, be famous, be another Mother Teresa. You may have discovered the secret of the universe, and it may be true–and you may wonder if you’re expected to go out and sell tickets so you can talk about it all the time. The safe answer to all of those is, “Probably not.” Just be a kinder, more aware version of who you are. Be the most of who you are.

But if your NDE was frightening, or terrible, or convinced you that you’re going to hell when you die, or left you feeling guilty, you’re probably wondering what’s wrong with you. Does this mean you’re damned? Kicked out of heaven? A wicked, horrible person? Are your sins that terrible–or was that a psychotic episode? Again, the safe answer is, “Probably not.” The bad news is that you’re going to have to work harder than if you’d had a beautiful NDE to figure out the real meaning of the experience in your life.

Here is a most important fact: There is NO evidence that good people get good NDEs and bad people get bad ones. Yes, what is called the “conventional wisdom”–the folklore of just about everybody–tells us that people get what they deserve. But a quick look around tells us that the real world doesn’t work that way. Babies and little children and kindly, helping, delightful people were just as likely to be killed in the recent string of tornadoes as were the drug dealers and child abusers.

What 30 years of study tell us is that nobody knows why people get the NDEs they do. Saints have had terrible experiences, hellish experiences, glimpses of nightmarish scenarios. But they were still saints. People who are generally disapproved of–whoever is on your list of “mustn’ts”–have reported NDEs full of light and love and wisdom.

So what’s the point of being good if it doesn’t make a difference in whether you get punished? And why would you be treated that way if you’re not a bad person? For one thing, because maybe it’s not about punishment. Maybe it’s about learning something you wouldn’t have otherwise. And maybe the point of being “good” is because it’s a happier, more satisfying way to live.

If you choose to, you can believe that a terrible NDE means hell. That’s not the choice I would recommend, because it means you’ll be living in fear your whole life. What I recommend is that you keep coming back here while the site fills up with information and ideas, and hopefully with sharing by other people in your situation who have found ways to get through to a better way of feeling about themselves, the world, and–if you’re religious–probably God. Stay tuned.

How deep can an experience be?

April 26, 2011 By Nan Bush 6 Comments

Events of the deep psyche can involve “the destruction of traditional and habitual patterns of perception and understanding, including religious belief structures and socially accepted concepts of the nature of human existence and behavior.”

Then you wake up the next morning and . . . what?

The words are from psychotherapist Alex Lukeman, in his review of Edward F. Edinger’s book Encounter with the Self. It does not surprise me that Lukeman is himself a near-death experiencer.