Dancing Past the Dark ~ distressing near-death experiences

You are here: Home / Archives for NDE

NDE

UFO Narrative Belief System Shifts

By 5 Comments

First, a Bit of Housekeeping

Please, as your first action now, go to Subscribe in the lower left column and enter your email address, even if you did receive a notice for this post. Next, if you know anyone who used to subscribe or would be interested, please invite them to join us. So many names have been dropped—and so many thanks to you who are still here!

The widening gap in our communication here has resulted not only from the pandemic. More than six months ago, I discovered a significant breakdown in system software, which has affected messaging for who-knows-how-long and has taken far more time than expected to rectify. We have had to find and install new software and are having to rebuild the entire mailing list. Deep appreciation to Susan Pomeroy of the  Web Geographer for the fix! And now, back to blogging!

UFO Narrative Belief System

“A big problem with all this over the years is that pilots and others have seen things which just don’t add up, but have been afraid to share that information for fear that they would be laughed out of the barracks. And, you know, finally, we’ve gotten to the point where we can have a conversation about this without people, you know, wondering if people need to talk to a therapist or something. And so that’s a big deal.” – Miles O’Brien, PBS NewsHour, June 27, 2021

It would be difficult, I think, for anyone in an NDE community not to blink with recognition of the sentiment in that statement. In more ways than one, we are not alone in this world!

The quote, from the July 8 issue of Religion Dispatches, follows a headline: “With Release of Pentagon Report, UFO Narrative Belief System is Suddenly Supported by Military Witness Testimonies.”

The occasion was the June 25, 2021 release of a report, under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, marking the first-ever acknowledgment by the U.S. government that the many sightings of UFOs in our airspace, witnessed and documented by pilots and military personnel over decades, were in fact real events. The sightings, never officially recognized but widely known to the public as rumors of spooky “unidentified flying objects” (UFOs) now had a new label, “unidentified aerial phenomena” (UAPs). Journalist Diana Pasulka noted the observation of other journalists like Mike O’Brien, that the report “creates a safe space within which to discuss matters related to the sightings of UFOs and UAPs.”

How many near-death experiencers exclaim every day about having the “safe space” of an online NDE group, or a local IANDS gathering, or an ASCISTE forum—a safe place to speak freely, to be oneself, to share a common sense of reality! The individuals who first report experiences not sanctioned  by the wider culture are all too familiar with the need for such a space in which to feel free…and normal.

The importance of a protective environment continues, even with the explosion of public information about near-death and related experiences, and now as with UFOs and their kin. We are all familiar with the rolled eyes and snide comments which too often greet these topics in social situations. Ironically, Pasulka notes, the new report “reversed the multi-year—and quite successful—campaign to debunk all types of witness testimonies regarding UAP sightings. The campaign to debunk testimonies, called Project Bluebook, was also funded by the U.S. government.” Like NDE experiencers, the pilots and other citizens who for so long had been forced into hiding, have emerged into the paradox of a mixed acceptance.

What do their witness reports mean? Pasulka quickly nods to a potentially spiritual basis in the  UFO/UAP narrative:

Scholars of religion are among those who understand the importance of witness testimonies in the formation of religions. Raëlism [Ed.: one of the new religions] and The Nation of Islam, for example, were formed from the UFO/UAP testimonies of their founders. A cursory review of UAP literature, both primary sources by witnesses, as well as secondary literature by academics, reveals overt religious and often apocalyptic themes in UAP witness reports.

(More on these new religions in my next post.) Meanwhile, Pasulka continues:

Harvard researcher Dr. John Mack’s bestselling book Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (1994) featured the testimonies of people whose encounters with alleged extraterrestrials are best characterized as beneficial and spiritual, if frightening… Extraterrestrials are believed to be technologically advanced and are often thought to be supportive of humans’ best interests.

But,

Current UAP military narratives counter the testimonies found in books like Mack’s. They’re replaced with the specter of the reality of extraterrestrials and their danger to humans.

…The UFO/UAP narrative is a belief system that suddenly, with the release of the Pentagon Report, is supported by military witness testimonies. A new development in the vetting of witness testimonies includes internet algorithms related to search engines like Google. After the report was released, though ostensibly unrelated, Google reported a new process of vetting the credibility of user content; that is, videos and photographs uploaded by users of the internet. Coincidentally the video documenting Google’s new algorithm uses UAPs as an example.

According to coverage of the new algorithm, “Google will warn people when search results could be unreliable.” The example Google uses of unreliable information, shown as the result of a search on a phone, reads, “UFO filmed traveling 106 mph.”

This new algorithm will allow regulation of user generated witness testimonies. We’ve had witness testimonies for a long time. Is it really suddenly okay to talk about UAPs? Closer examination of this question reveals that it is only okay to talk about certain sightings—those ensconced within a military framework, and new algorithms will make it easier for internet search providers to vet civilian generated UAP reports.

So, does the new view envision a spiritual reality or a military threat? As Pasulka sums it up:

The consolidation of knowledge of UAPs to military witness testimonies, and the use of internet algorithms to monitor non-military testimonies represents a new development in this new religiosity of the UAP, what Carl Jung has termed “a new mythology.” For scholars and students of religion, this provides a rich opportunity to examine the formation of new systems of belief and practice coalescing around powerful cosmological questions, otherwise known as religions.

Next time: UFO religions.

More NDE Reckoning Than Expected

By 15 Comments

Here’s a conversation about NDEs we haven’t had before—and doesn’t it seem odd there’s anything left we haven’t discussed? The topic comes once again from Nemo (Steve Weber), the source of so many interesting and worthwhile thoughts. Confusingly, there is another Steve Weber who also had an NDE, but that Steve lives in Florida and has a book about his NDE, titled The Place between Here and There. Nemo (Steve) lives in California and has a couple of walk-ins in my book.

It is Nemo (Steve) who writes to me introducing so many intriguing discoveries. Well into the pandemic, and more than a year after I had posted anything here, there were still bits of conversation happening occasionally online around the comments. In one of those lingering exchanges, he wrote:

One thing I’ve come to realize, regarding my current spiritual reality, on my path, is that it is virtually diametrically opposed to my “spiritual reality” of 50 years ago. I’ve wondered more than once what it would be like to time travel back to 1970 and present my current view to that new “Jesus Freak.” I wonder how the old “me” would respond to such apparent heresy. I mention this because I find it prudent to be mindful of this reality when conversing with others lest I become dogmatic and even find myself pontificating (Lord help us!). I’ve often despaired at attempting to convey my “truth”/reality to others, concluding that one’s truth/knowing isn’t transferable– after all, the “me” of much of the last 50 years likely couldn’t identify with it. The realizations that I’ve had regarding my Void NDE therefore have remained largely ineffable– I’ve attempted to convey them, but realize that one really can’t get it unless they’ve been there.

During the holed-up Year of Covid, I had spent my entire time, months on end of twelve-hour and fourteen-hour days, grappling with the story of my NDE and how I got from there to here. But oddly, it seems now, although the year was full of recollections about that earlier self, I had never thought to go back and have a conversation with her. What would we have to say to each other, with such different outlooks and understandings?

Time travel reckoning

In a preface to Beyond the Postmodern Mind, Huston Smith quotes Gai Eaton in The King of the Castle: “If, by some strange device, a man of our century could step backwards in time and mix with the people of a distant age, he would have good cause to doubt their sanity or his own.” The self of my today is a decade more than a half-century removed from the self of my NDE, which does not sound like “a distant age,” but the differences in thinking clearly mark the pivotal character of the years between. All of us who have memories from the 1960s and beyond have been living a sea change.

We surely knew there was chaos all around, but what most of us did not realize consciously was that so much of it was the crumbling of the Modern epoch. Our understanding of the world, and our certainties and expectations would go with it. Huston Smith continues:

[T]he stages peoples’ outlooks pass through on the temporal continuum have led the West to one that has come to be called “Postmodern” to distinguish it from the Modernity that began in the seventeenth century and ended around the middle of the last century. The Modern Mind took its cues from the new worldview that science introduced, but twenty-first century science has abandoned not just that worldview but worldviews generally. From Aristotle to Dante, the world was pictured as a series of concentric spheres. Newton replaced that with his clockwork universe, but quantum mechanics gives us, not a new picture of the world, but no picture at all. And philosophy has followed suit. Metaphysics died around the time that God died, Langton Gilkey has observed, tying its death to the “death of God” movement that Nietzsche announced, but which took a half-century to come to public notice.

The “no picture at all” of our quantumized Now is the “You are not real” of my NDE,  My earlier self was securely Modern; the current version is recognizably Postmodern, though in contention with the aggressively “woke.” No wonder it has taken such struggle to integrate that hard-edged NDE, which was forcing a leap to a sociological, philosophical, and spiritual developmental stage for which I was not ready. And how interesting that, looking at it from this perspective, it sounds so obvious and not all that hard!

About that conversation with my younger self: it occurs to me that my best option would be simply to give her a copy of Reckoning and get an earlier start on unraveling this reality-shaking NDE.

* * *

Asking a favor:

If you have read Reckoning—and especially if you enjoyed it (or at least found it interesting)—please add your Like to whatever review page you use. The book has been out more than a month and still has only three Likes and a single comment on Amazon. It is reassuring that all three have five stars and the comment is beyond gratifying, but in publishing, having only three people leave a rating is a body blow to the book’s reputation!

Your participation will make a difference. Readers with a distressing NDE need these books! I suspect that some readers may find the changes outlined in this one a bit hard to take in, simply because they are different from the usual NDE pattern and mainstream thinking  That bewilderment is familiar to all of us when first encountering quantum realities!  Your comments can help others make their way through. If you can’t bring yourself to write even a quick review, at least give Reckoning some stars! Five would be lovely, but honesty is important.

Thank you for helping!

Advanced Meditation and NDEs

By 39 Comments

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

The Yin Yang in an NDE of the Void

By 20 Comments

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

By 12 Comments

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?

By 5 Comments

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?