Dancing Past the Dark ~ distressing near-death experiences

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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.

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/

 

Could DMT cause a near-death experience?

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From Italy (hi, Valentino!) comes a question that is interesting on a couple of levels:

Have you ever read the book of Rick Strassman about the endogenous DMT’s role in producing NDEs? I think that a “bad trip” induced by DMT could be a possible explanation of negative NDEs. What do you think ?

Let’s start with what is “endogenous DMT”? DMT—full name dimethyltryptamine–is a naturally-occurring (endogenous) psychedelic compound, like the neurotransmitter serotonin, secreted in minute amounts by the brain. A Journal of Near-Death Studies review of Strassman’s book, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, describes DMT: “One of the constituents of snuffs and brews used by South American shamans for thousands of years (it is especially prevalent in South American plants), DMT was first isolated in 1946, and then briefly tested by Hungarian chemist and psychiatrist Stephen Szara in the 1950s. DMT gained a reputation as being a rather frightening substance, and lay scientifically fallow for several decades.”

In the early 1990s, however, psychiatrist Rick Strassman, a professor at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine was intrigued by the possibility that endogenous DMT plays a role in triggering mystical experience, and obtained permission from the U.S. government and University review boards to study the range of psychological experiences that result from ingesting DMT. Over the next five years, Strassman administered roughly 400 doses of DMT to sixty volunteer subjects.

The experiences they reported ranged from brief episodes that were like full-fledged psychotic episodes with paranoid fantasies to sessions that seemed to be mystical experiences—bliss, ineffability, timelessness. However, it was also evident that for individuals unprepared for the possible effects of DMT, the effects could be terrifying.  Almost half of Strassman’s sample encountered otherworldly beings, described as clowns, elves, robots, insects, E.T.-style humanoids, or “entities” that defied description. They were not always friendly. One of Strassman’s subjects claimed to have been eaten alive by insectoid creatures. In part out of concern about this negative experience, Strassman discontinued his research.

As the Journal article concluded, “Moreover, as the book goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that Dr. Strassman himself had come to the “undeniable realization that DMT was not inherently therapeutic,” and that ‘Risks were real, and long-term benefits vague,” and that despite the number of near-death and mystical sessions, there was an “ineffectiveness in effecting any real change.”

In partial response to Valentino’s question, notice how similar the images are, and note also how vastly different these effects are, compared to the effects of near-death experiences.  (Cue background music.)

A few years back, I came upon a quote that throws a curious and remarkable light on Strassman’s findings.

Shinzen Young is an American Buddhist teacher of mindfulness meditation, whose monthly day-long retreats I had been attending in Vermont. Before moving to North Carolina, I ordered his six-disk series of teaching sessions, The Science of Enlightenment. In one of them, he talks about the terrifying images that may appear in advanced meditation —insectoid, grotesquely otherworldly, demonic. (My italics.) Here is what Shinzen says about the images:

[T]hey are best interpreted as part of a natural process of release from the deep archetypal levels of the mind. Such upwelling visionary material is a natural function of human consciousness and should not be cause for the slightest concern:  You are not going crazy. You are not going to get weird. You are not going to be possessed by devils, assailed by Satanists, or devoured by monsters. You are not going to be sucked into another world. However, if you have a history of prior mental illness, you should discuss these phenomena both with your meditation teacher and a therapist.

From a naturalistic perspective, those are the images reported by  Strassman’s volunteers.  Unfortunately, Strassman had not heard Shinzen Young’s analysis, for it might have saved a worthwhile research project.

Over decades the work of Carl Jung and Stanislav Grof has demonstrated that something about the human psyche functions as a gigantic warehouse with the “deep archetypal levels” Shinzen mentions. The deepest levels are what Jung called the “collective unconscious,” the repository of  humanity’s symbols and icons and most moving images (and sometimes the most horrifying). But why? How? What do they mean? This blog exists because of questions like those. I hope we find answers as time goes on.

Does this mean that NDEs are only drug responses? No! The point is that DMT, like being close to death, and LSD, and deep prayer and meditation, and hyperventilation, and…and…and…can in some instances give access to those deep, shared archetypal levels of consciousness. A DMT experience is not exactly an NDE, as indicated by their effects; but they share images.

For starters, it seems quite enough that we all join hands and circle ’round—near-death experiencers, pray-ers and meditators, DMT and LSD experiencers, holotropic breathers—and see that we’re on a common dance floor, sharing the same basement storage, and hauling mutually-held images up to the light of ordinary day. It’s quite enough for today to take in the possibility that the images in distressing visionary experiences can be understood as more than punishments from some external source, whether divine or malevolent. Some may be like potholes in the universe (a metaphor, you literalists; see my post last month); others like code, trying to tell us something. But first we have to learn the language of do-si-do. Grab your partner.

Swedenborg’s hell

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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

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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]