Happy New Year wishes to you all, and here we are, back again with Dancing Past the Dark. The long hiatus in posting resulted from my sense of having reached my limit with the original 100-some posts; in other words, I didn’t know what more to say.
I had not expected the persistence of some readers who declined to just walk away. They, plus the report of a new study out of the UK, have effected this reappearance; so let’s get to it!
* * * [Read more…] about Advanced Meditation and NDEs
NDE
The Yin Yang in an NDE of the Void
This mini-series of posts about reconciling my difficult experience of the Void[i] came about because of a reader’s question. It was he, Steve, who introduced me two years ago to a stunning article on the Void by experiencer El Collie, and it was he, not I, who noticed that although I had posted her article here immediately and enthusiastically, I had totally avoided responding to it.
His recent question: “I’d really like to know how you actually view the void now and how you feel you’ve ‘come to terms’” via this view.” (Do not trifle with blog readers; they are made of stern stuff.) [Read more…] about The Yin Yang in an NDE of the Void
Religion and Distressing NDEs, Part 2
Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
Wendell Berry, Manifesto
This is not a religious blog.
Or maybe it is.
That’s because it’s about numinous experiences. A numinous experience is any event that feels like a contact with a transcendent reality. A near-death experience is one kind of numinous experience. So is a spiritually transformative experience (STE). Or an “exceptional human experience” (EHE). Or a mystical experience (mystical experience). Sometimes an out-of-body experience (OBE) will have a transcendent quality. It’s like a religious conversion. All these are numinous events.
You will notice that all of these descriptive phrases take up far more time and space than simply the acronym. So, because of my specialty with distressing near-death experiences, I call them NDEs. Yes, I do recognize that this blurs lines many people consider important, and which I, too, sometimes consider vital. Unfortunately, more people understand “NDE” than know the meaning of “numinous.” “NDEs” is simply more efficient. NDE purists think I am indiscriminate. True. I have a difficult time with doctrine.
In any event, it is clear that questions concerning religion lie behind many difficulties with understanding near-death experiences and their close relatives. What is it about religion that causes so much confusion? Here are a few contenders:
- Religion has to do with an unseen and often inexpressible aspect of life, something beyond the physical. So do NDEs.
- Religion has to do with values, relationships, self-discovery. So do NDEs.
- Religion has to do with encountering a powerful force greater and more meaningful than anyone can describe. So do some NDEs.
- Religion, or its observance, can transform a person’s life. So do most NDEs.
- Religion, at its best, has more to do with life on earth than it does with an afterlife. So, I believe, do NDEs. My view.
As I see it, there are two major differences: [Read more…] about Religion and Distressing NDEs, Part 2
Where is the medical evidence that NDEs happen?
The blog Skeptico recently featured an interview with PMH Atwater, after which a couple of commenters kept asking about the medical evidence that her three NDEs happened. In fact, they wondered whether any NDE can be said to happen in the absence of corroboration. Where are the records? Or, to quote one comment, “An NDE-like experience without any witnesses or medical documentation to support it can be anything, including hallucinations.”
Those questioners are far from alone. The fact that this question keeps being asked is an indication that a great many people don’t get the idea of “experience.” Any experience is a private, personal happening in consciousness. It is not a public activity. By definition, a near-death or similar experience cannot be witnessed, although in rare instances it may be shared.
The best a medical record can do is track physiological events and record circumstances. Although a monitoring device may register a blip in some function being recorded, it cannot indicate the presence of an NDE during that blip. No one watching the monitor will see, or feel, or think what the patient is seeing and feeling and thinking. In short, the biological event may be witnessed, but the NDE itself is not open to observers.
It seems ironic that under the most tightly monitored circumstances, in cardiac arrest with stringent clinical recording, studies find the fewest reports of NDEs. Does this mean that near-death experiences in other circumstances are fraudulent? No, it means simply that the conditions surrounding cardiac arrest and resuscitation either do not promote having an NDE or affect a patient’s being physically and cognitively able to report it afterward. As for mistaking one type of experience for another, the differences between the sensations and effects of NDEs and hallucinations have been well documented for two decades; that is no longer an issue except for people who are unaware of the research.
I wonder, after so many thousands of NDE reports with no corroborating medical records but with objective evidence of life changes to indicate that something happened, what is it that people are looking for in demanding medical evidence?
By the numbers, #2
Maybe you have to be a numbers geek to be interested in the previous post, but I find the numbers fascinating. Not the numbers themselves, but what they suggest (and some seem to shout). That post was simply tables showing the incidence of distressing NDEs in studies published in responsible journals between 1975 and 2005. Questions nearly jump off the pages. For instance:
1. The early attention. Where were the distressing experiences in the early reports of near-death experience? Were the major researchers hiding something? Did the distressing NDEs only start later?
2. Hospital studies. How can it be that in the hospital-based studies, where participants are closer to death, the reports are of zero dNDEs and percentages of pleasant NDEs are typically 20% lower than in studies of the general population? Shouldn’t all those rates be higher, or are healthy people making up stories? These are the academic researchers who know how to do studies expertly; should we trust their data more?
3. Why that 1% rumor? With a thorough literature review showing that on average almost one in five reported NDEs has been distressing, why is it that for over two decades almost everyone has said that only 1% of NDEs are “negative”?
I’ll start with the first question now and deal with the second and third in the next two posts.
Where were distressing experiences in the early studies of near-death experience?
They were there but invisible. The reasons for the silence are relatively simple and understandable.
Researchers. Nowadays, we are pretty much used to NDEs. Although the great majority of them are still wonderful and life-shaping, and they bring comfort to millions of people who hear about them, today’s pleasure and reassurance seem pale compared to the stunning sense of hope and mystery when people were first hearing about them. Audiences and researchers alike were simply transfixed. Researchers are certainly not immune to the same hopes and anxieties as the rest of humanity, and what these researchers wanted to know about specifically were the glorious NDEs, the peaceful ones, the ones that sounded like heaven.
One answer, then, about why dNDEs were invisible comes from this: what questions did the researchers ask? Their eyes were so intently fixed on happily transformative experiences, it didn’t occur to them to ask about anything unpleasant; and if it did occur to them to wonder, it seemed they didn’t really want to know enough to add those inquiries. This can be considered humanly understandable or, less kindly, as researcher bias.
Further, it was still so early in the NDE research game, interviewers weren’t quite certain how far it was all right to probe. As many of the experiencers being interviewed were in fragile health, no responsible investigator wanted to go in like a SWAT team, asking challenging questions that might be harmful. What if tough questions precipitated another experience and this time the person actually died?
Experiencers themselves. In the years we’re talking about, roughly 1975 to 1982, NDEs were still considered “iffy” in terms of mental health. For psychotherapists and physicians, one big question was whether these were psychotic events. Experiencers often contacted the IANDS office anonymously, afraid of being too self-revealing. No matter what the method of communication, an experiencer’s most common opening statement was, “I hope you won’t think I’m crazy, but…”
The days of wide-open websites were far in the future; reporting an NDE was considered so intensely private that in setting up the first NDE account archive, IANDS promised three different levels of security to safeguard contributor confidentiality. And all these cautions were about the pleasurable experiences! If blissful experiences were considered so hush-hush, imagine the secrecy and anxiety, not to mention the shame, around a frightening experience!
Even today, put yourself in the experiencer’s place: Knowing what people speculate and wonder about dNDEs, would you want to go public with a terrifying near-death account? The reluctance of experiencers to describe their dNDEs is why, when psychiatrist Bruce Greyson and I began pulling together experience accounts for the first study of distressing NDEs, it took ten years to collect the 50 narratives that made up our study sample. Even the best -designed study will not bring out experience accounts until people are ready to talk about them.
The audience and media. In that first decade, the Big Four of researchers were Raymond Moody, Kenneth Ring, Michael Sabom, and George Gallup. Their books dominated the scene. Maurice Rawlings did well in conservative Christian circles with his books about hell, but they did not hit the mainstream as the others did. And the media, riding high on stories of blissful NDEs, were in no hurry to stop the torrent. The few other mentions of difficult NDEs were in journal articles, not books, and never claimed much in the way of public attention.
Overall, the result is what we have seen: mystery and invisibility surrounding distressing near-death experiences.
Next time: The hospital studies.
Coping with a difficult NDE
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?