Dancing Past the Dark ~ distressing near-death experiences

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The “Are you afraid of death?” question, Part 2

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Tomas and some others asked me, “Are you afraid of death?”

The opening of my response (last week’s post, the one below this one): “Some yes.”

This week: “Most no”

What does that mean, “Most no?”

Bear with me, please, because I’m thinking on paper here. I think what “Most no” means is that I’m probably not afraid of what most people are afraid of when we think of death. At least in Western societies, most people are afraid of hell, or at least of punishment. That is what at least 1,700 years of theology have led to. [Read more…] about The “Are you afraid of death?” question, Part 2

The “Are you afraid of death?” question, Part 1

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One of the delights of blogging is the openness of readers’ questions. And because the questions here have been so good, to an astonishing extent (at least to me) I have responded by publically dissecting the deepest slam to my psyche, my NDE and the issues that came with it, both for me and for the field of near-death studies. Most recently it was Tomas, seconded by others, who came right out with the big question: Are you afraid of death?

I sent an immediate reply—“No, I don’t think so. For a more satisfactory answer, watch for a post in the next week or so.”

Hah. Wrong. Oh, so wrong!

Weeks have passed since Tomas’s inquiry and my blithe reply, and day after day I have sat at my computer with nothing happening except an alarming amount of Candy Crush. That can mean one of several things, none of which is that I actually enjoy Candy Crush. That kind of stupefaction means either that I actually have nothing to say and should make a quick and apologetic getaway; or that something is bubbling away in my subconscious, which will make itself known in due time; or that I really, really don’t want to go to wherever the topic is. This time, I suspect it’s a bit of all three.

[Read more…] about The “Are you afraid of death?” question, Part 1

Ghosts of the Tsunami

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In a quite literally haunting article in the London Review of Books, author Richard Lloyd Parry has written about one stunning emotional and psychic toll of the 2011 tsunami: an epidemic of ghostly presences. He begins:

I met a priest in the north of Japan who exorcised the spirits of people who had drowned in the tsunami. The ghosts did not appear in large numbers until later in the year, but Reverend Kaneda’s first case of possession came to him after less than a fortnight. He was chief priest at a Zen temple in the inland town of Kurihara. The earthquake on 11 March 2011 was the most violent that he, or anyone he knew, had ever experienced. The great wooden beams of the temple’s halls had flexed and groaned with the strain. Power, water and telephone lines were fractured for days; deprived of electricity, people in Kurihara, thirty miles from the coast, had a dimmer idea of what was going on there than television viewers on the other side of the world. But it became clear enough, when first a handful of families, and then a mass of them, began arriving at Kaneda’s temple with corpses to bury.

Nearly twenty thousand people had died at a stroke. In the space of a month, Kaneda performed funeral services for two hundred of them. More appalling than the scale of death was the spectacle of the bereaved survivors. ‘They didn’t cry,’ Kaneda said to me a year later. ‘There was no emotion at all. The loss was so profound and death had come so suddenly. They understood the facts of their situation individually – that they had lost their homes, lost their livelihoods and lost their families. They understood each piece, but they couldn’t see it as a whole, and they couldn’t understand what they should do, or sometimes even where they were. I couldn’t really talk to them, to be honest. All I could do was stay with them, and read the sutras and conduct the ceremonies. That was the thing I could do.’

I found the entire article mesmerizing. The address is http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n03/richard-lloydparry/ghosts-of-the-tsunami –which works if you copy the url into your search, but does not work as a link from here. My apologies. Another mystery.

Many thanks to Robert McLuhan, who blogs at Paranormalia, for his “Post-traumatic Post-mortem,” which led me to the LRB original. As always, McLuhan’s discussion is as compelling as its source. (Paranormalia is one of my standard reads.) You can find his post here; you might even like to subscribe. (And from his site the link seems to work. Odd, that.)

Review of Dancing Past the Dark, #2 and #3

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It’s all quite exciting–from the UK, Peter Hulme has posted parts #2 and #3 of his in-depth review of Dancing Past the Dark. As our good friend Rabbitdawg has commented, this is the first thorough review the book has had in its year-and-a-half of existence, so this feels almost as good as an Oscar.

#3: http://phulme.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/review-dancing-past-the-dark-33/

#2: http://phulme.wordpress.com/2014/03/24/review-dancing-past-the-dark-23/

#1: http://phulme.wordpress.com/2014/03/17/review-dancing-past-the-dark-15/

Enjoy! Your comments will be welcome (and they don’t have to be complimentary, just courteous).

The universe just got lots bigger, and a real review of Dancing Past the Dark

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This time I am sending you off to read other people–not that I have nothing to say, but they have really good posts on their blogs this week.

First, and self-explanatory, is a commentary on the dazzling news from the South Pole that the immensity of the universe seems just to have gotten moreso. Here is a wonderfully intelligent and readable-by-the-rest-of-us article by physicist and Episcopal Bishop of Rhode Island Nick Knisely. It is too good to miss. His blog, Entangled States, is a continuing marvel.
http://entangledstates.org/2014/03/18/whats-going-on-with-the-new-data-from-bicep/

Second, and of obvious personal interest to me, is an in-depth review of Dancing Past the Dark–the first that actually discusses the book’s content! For those of you interested in knowing what somebody else thinks about the book, I am passing this along.  The blog is Everybody Means Something, which I’ve just discovered, covering a wide range of interests. Fractals, anyone?
http://phulme.wordpress.com/

Happy reading!