Dancing Past the Dark ~ distressing near-death experiences

Will the real NDE please stand up

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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

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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, #3

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Over-commitment is not a wise choice when beginning a conversation that requires focus and time. That said by way of an apology, let me get back to my question about the function of distressing near-death experience.

Two emails have arrived in my in-box almost simultaneously, both bearing on this question. In one of them, a friend says:

“Some of the gold that has settled to the bottom of the pan for me, is the idea that faith is simultaneously a duality of two very strongly opposed forces that tear at our existence in exactly the same way it does in nature. And it is this duality that creates the tragic, joyful, soul-saving tension that is both our salvation and our damnation.

“It is critically important to understand that this duality is not, in totality, a blessing or a curse. In physics, light has the duality of being simultaneous both wave and particle. In the cat in the box example, the cat may be considered to be simultaneously alive and dead. Since in both cases, the duality is simultaneous and co-existent, it is indeterminate; it cannot be thought of as one state vs. another. The two states are not only coexistent, they are mutually dependent and mutually exclusive. Each state exists only because the other exists and at the same time, it exists in concert and opposition to its other. Every decision we make, no matter how large or how small is our own. And no matter which side of the duality we choose, there is immediate tension and conflict from the other side.”

The other email is from another friend, NDE researcher Jim McCartney. From a context quite different than that of my friend quoted above, he comments on “an intimately entangled universe pointing toward consciousness as the basis of all, a picture increasingly shared by scientists and mystics.”

He points to the well documented fact that, in contrast to the assumptions of conventional thinking, “Some people who have NDEs or undergo extreme trauma, over time exhibit not only resiliency, but significant growth, even though they may remain physically, mentally or circumstantially compromised. In fact, people transforming their life through crisis can be readily identified:

  • “Greater compassion and empathy for others
  • “New and greater strength (psychological toughness/resilience)
  • “Greater psychological/emotional maturity
  • “A recognition of vulnerability and struggle, and a deeper appreciation of life
  • “New values and life priorities (less materialistic, heightened intimacy in relationships)
  • “Greater existential or spiritual clarity”

Notice that he does not say whether the trigger will be pleasant or negative; in fact, it may be either. The key element in this is crisis. The precipitating event could be any revolutionizing situation—NDE, divorce, terrible medical procedure (especially in children), combat incident, spontaneous spiritual experience, natural disaster—any event that is presents as a crisis, a point of disjuncture. In NDE terms, crisis is the situation itself, whether it involves a blasting away of previous assumptions by way of a trip to what might be heaven or the destruction of assumptions about the reality of existence by way of a distressing NDE.

The crisis, which may be either joyful or anguished, precipitates movement toward the integration that  is described in my other friend’s comments —“the tragic, joyful, soul-saving tension that is both our salvation and our damnation.” It is, indeed, the “intimately entangled universe.”

My friend concludes:

“But do not be deceived about one thing. This shadow thru which we must pass is not a twilight, it is an absolute darkness, a total lack of light. And what is more significant, once one has entered this darkness, and we all must, it is impossible to go back out the way you came in. Either you wander forever in perfect perpetual darkness, that has the dualistic appearance of light, or you move toward the inevitable reality. It is inevitable because, in the end of all things, it will be resolved. You cannot see where you are going, yet you must try to go. You must ask questions that you do not understand and accept answers that are an enigma. In a metaphysical sense, we must render unto Cesar the things that are Cesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.
“As Rabbi Gellman wrote, the only resolution will come when our souls stand before God in judgment after death. Only then will we understand. Only then will the materialistic physical be melted away, the darkness abolished, and the only reality left will be true, eternal light. The duality will be gone.”
I couldn’t have said it as well. In the meantime, there is the tension, and the work of integrating it.

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]

What is the function of a distressing NDE?

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What is the function of a distressing near-death experience? The function of a distressing near-death experience is to deliver:

A)   A foretaste of punishment after death

B)    (related to A) An external judgment on the quality of one’s life

C)    A subconscious judgment by oneself on the quality of one’s life

D)   Neither a prediction nor judgment but a symbolically coded message about something of importance to one’s life

E)    [Other. Your suggestion]

Think about this a bit; please feel free to comment with your ideas. Within a few days I’ll post more about the question. It would be good to have your thoughts in the mix.

Please note: In the interest of not wasting anyone’s time, “A meaningless hallucination” is not included in that list.