Dancing Past the Dark ~ distressing near-death experiences

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.

 

 

Is Atheism the New Normal?

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Is Atheism the New Normal?.

Mind you, I am not claiming this, merely sharing an intriguing post that I just stumbled upon in another blog. (Click the link above to go there.) Developmental psychologists, take note. Also interesting, of course, relative to the interpretation of near-death experiences, whether glorious or horrendous. How much of our interpretation of NDEs is rooted in assumptions about divine reward and punishment, and what different understandings might arise from an atheistic perspective? What would be gained? What lost?  And for those of us who are not atheist, what is our response to this prospect of, say, 5,000 years of humanity without God?

A take on life school

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Dave has sent a comment to the post about Osama Bin Laden’s death, saying in part:

…Therefor, why not take it that this [life and death] is an intended process that we, and all other living things are subjected to. If this truly is the case, stop judging this process that forges on ahead whether we like it, agree with it, or not. Instead, accept it as it is, study it, and learn from it. This means dump all the religious dogma that we’ve been hampered with, albeit that some truth is contained within. However, real truth cannot be fully convayed by mere words, it’s something you feel, and enables you to act accordingly.

The real truth we seek is found through sensing the creative force within us (God), and from that perspective, experiencing this process (school) that we’re all involved in…

Every one of the enduring religious traditions has originated not in the intellectualized rules of a religious dogma but in the personal experiences of a single individual. Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Confucianism–all began with an individual who so powerfully felt and studied his own encounters with that creative force that other people were drawn to hear and then follow, from which sprang teachings–which, because human beings love to keep memorabilia so they won’t forget, became formalized into dogma.

Always, at the center, is the clear spring of encounter. It is our task to remember that doctrine is simply the clothing of direct and intensely personal experience, and to apply to our own experiences the same careful study and discernment  that will prove them worth keeping. Really knowing a religious tradition and understanding deeply how it works can be a big help with this. (It’s more than being bossed around!)

Did Osama Bin Laden have a hellish death experience?

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There’s been such a mix of responses to the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death, and now a couple of people have asked me whether I think he had a hellish NDE.

First,  belief in “God-as-karma,” otherwise known as “People get what they deserve,” points to our looking for a sense of justice. Where does it come from? It seems to be part of the intrinsic human makeup, at least after a rudimentary developmental level. In individual terms, developmental psychology indicates that somewhere between the ages of 3 and 8, kids just naturally develop a sense of fairness, whether in cookie distribution, levels of discipline, or a myriad of other situations. In species developmental terms, the first known, written legal code (Hammurabi, c. 1750 BCE), defined an elemental sense of justice almost 4,000 years ago. It shows up in the Torah (Ten Commandments and assorted elements of law in Deuteronomy and Leviticus), and in worldwide oral traditions.

In fact, the instinct for justice is universal, even across some species. Interestingly enough, I read a review recently of the book Wild Justice, a study showing that mammals have a moral sense. One study has shown that laboratory animals also react negatively to unfairness in the distribution of rewards. So, a sense of justice clearly seems to be part of our wiring and no doubt serves a vital role in the survival of relationships in social groups. On the larger scale, then, in order to maintain civilization, we need there to be fairness, justice. People should get what they have coming, good or bad.

But does wanting the world to be just make it so? No. What works well in building social relationships breaks down in the reality of circumstances in the physical world. Here, Joplin, Missouri and Tuscaloosa, Alabama are torn apart, babies and all. Some people spend decades imprisoned for acts they did not commit. Innocent people suffer anguish at the whim of Osama Bin Laden, who winds up in a million-dollar villa. Considering everything he’s done to other people, shouldn’t we want him to suffer, even to suffer forever?

It seems to me helpful to hear what so many people who have had an affirmative near-death experience say about judgment. What they report defies easy description. Tens of thousands of accounts have been reported in the past three decades, many of them including portrayal of a life-review, a nearly instantaneous run-through and evaluation of everything they had done in their life that had hurt or benefitted other living beings. The key is that in the life review they not only witnessed their actions but experienced their effects. In short, the pain and joy a person had given over the years was the cumulative pain and joy experienced in the review—what goes around, comes around. God-as-karma? And if the experience of review/judgment can be that powerful for ordinary people, what would it be for a Bin Laden? Think of all that pain, that grief and torment! Yeah, he gets hell.

But…

Although the experiencers report how vividly they felt the pain they had inflicted, and their regret for it, rarely do they explain it as punishment; rather, it was more a balancing. The most common response over the years has been a feeling of being overwhelmed by understanding—a life-changing “Oh, now I get it,” “I see how it all works, how I could have done things differently.” Yes, they feel the pain and their own guilt, but it is less significant than the enormity of the revelation of what life could be—could have been—when lived out of compassion and love.

I have never heard one of these life-review accounts described in terms of a place of fearful judgment, nor of a time sequence of punitively imposed eternal suffering (and in a timeless afterlife, what would be “everlasting,” anyway?) What matters is that shattering understanding, far from vengeance, that is typically a stunning experience of comprehension—pain, regret, “getting it,” and an understanding turned on its head.

To my mind, this can certainly be understood as both the wrath and the love of God, as psychologist Richard Beck keeps pointing out in his blog Experimental Theology.  To quote his “Wrath of God” post last week, “[T]he accounting books of justice are not ‘balanced’ through a just world, God-as-karma mechanism. Rather, the ‘balancing’ comes through God absorbing the wound of sin, dissipating it in the Divine love… The residual of evil isn’t balanced out via karma and just deserts. Rather, it is soaked up in the love of God.”

Overwhelmingly, the great majority of near-death experiencers have maintained that what they discovered in their NDE was a compassion beyond our understanding and a love that can transform all hatreds. Of course it exceeds our human comprehension, and our egos’ greedy passion for retribution, and our insistence that God share our characteristics; but surely the Mind of God must have room for more than vindictiveness. More and more, it seems to me that we are asked not for vengeance but for transformation.

Maybe Bin Laden had a punitively hellish experience, not the life review described by so many NDErs, though I am unsure what of value that would achieve. But I am left wondering, what could be more terrible than to revisit himself and discover so directly the results of his misunderstanding?