Dancing Past the Dark ~ distressing near-death experiences

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The Yin Yang in an NDE of the Void

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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

Reconciliation #1: What the Void is not

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There it sat, the source of my latest existential crisis (yet again! yet again!)—a web page read no doubt by far more people than this blog and my book, linked to a website which should know better. The “it” was a lengthy rhetorical piece on the Void, At least, the piece said it was about the Void, though it was not, at least not in any sense in which people who actually know the Void use the term.  [Read more…] about Reconciliation #1: What the Void is not

The Void NDE, Part 2

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Last week’s post introduced the late El Collie’s extended commentary about her distressing NDE, an experience of the Void. Here is the conclusion of her article. I have edited paragraph lengths for better readability.

The One, Part III
by El Collie

The knowledge of the One God, One Consciousness—the primordial and eternal Intelligence which is the sustaining force and power of existence—is enshrined by every major religion. Alan Watts, “The records left by those who have known,” wrote Aldous Huxley, “make it abundantly clear that all of them, whether Hindu, Buddhist, Hebrew, Taoist, Christian or Mohammedan, were attempting to describe the same essentially indescribable Fact.” (from the Introduction to Song of God: Bhagavad-Gita).

The essence of awakening to the God/Self is the same for everyone, as evinced by countless firsthand spiritual accounts which uncannily overlap in their descriptions of this sacred territory. Yet the meaning individuals derive from their awakening is colored by their personal background and ability to understand what they have been shown.
[Read more…] about The Void NDE, Part 2

The Void NDE

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Thirteen years ago, a woman with a long history of paranormal consciousness and kundalini awakenings watched a TV show on The Learning Channel in which I described my NDE. She wrote about her reaction, “Awakening to the Self,” for a small newsletter about Kundalini risings.

The woman’s name was El Collie, and anyone familiar with Kundalini phenomena may know of her. I didn’t until very recently, when a new reader of this blog sent me a link to her article (and Steve, I’m forever in your debt for this).

Despite some variations in our circumstances and interpretations, this is the only commentary I have ever encountered about the Void which truly “gets it.” Here is a substantial excerpt from the first section of her article. Another segment will appear in my next post. A link to the full source is at the end. [Read more…] about The Void NDE

Follow-up on the Near-Death Experience Void and Space

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In the previous post, I waved a flag for Brian Greene’s book and PBS series, The Fabric of the Cosmos, especially the segment on space. I’m still waving. However, responding to some of your comments, here’s what may be a clarification.

(What follows is quoted from the book Dancing Past the Dark: Distressing Near-Death Experiences, which should be available online early in 2012.)

Suppose, says Greene in the video, suppose we took away everything in the physical universe—the buildings, people, objects, the planets and stars, down to the smallest atoms of gas and dust; what would be left? We would say “Nothing.” If we took its picture, it would be empty. And as Greene agrees, we would be right; but we would also be wrong. He asks, “How do you make sense of something that looks like nothing?” At this point, experiencers of the Void sit up and take notice.

“As it turns out,” he tells us, “empty space is not nothing; it’s something.”

 (Buddhists are nodding and smiling.)

“Empty space is not nothing; it’s something with hidden characteristics as real as all the stuff in our everyday lives. In fact, space is so real it can bend; it can twist; and it can ripple—so real that empty space itself helped shape everything in the world around us and forms the very fabric of the cosmos.”

In the book he summarizes (p. 32), “Space is unavoidably suffused with what are called quantum fields and possibly a diffuse uniform energy called a cosmological constant—modern echoes of the old and discredited notion of a space-filling aether.” There’s a lot going on, beyond our ability to see it with our own eyes.

I am not suggesting that Nirvana is outer space, nor that it is located in outer space, nor that an experience of the Void is an actual trip into outer space any more than a blissful NDE is a voyage to a physical heaven. However, there is this curious resemblance among space, the Void, the Godhead, and Nirvana, that what seems so empty may be full of everything there is, that it may be, in fact, the fabric of the cosmos.

In the play Our Town, the young people are fascinated to discover that a letter can be sent to them at an address beginning with their house number and ending with the Mind of God. I wonder if this conception of space doesn’t have a good deal in common with that idea.

There are no answers here, but intimations of likenesses suggesting that there may be more to this whole business of spirituality than confirmed skeptics admit.

The Void in near-death experience…and space?

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The new PBS series on NOVA comes from physicist Brian Green and his book The Fabric of the Cosmos. In the first of four programs, he looks at space.

For a sizable number of folks who report being badly shaken, even terrified, by an NDE, the cause of distress was the sense of being alone in a great, featureless emptiness, like being lost in the stars (only without stars).  Here are excerpts from three accounts:

“I found myself floating in a void and nobody was there, not even God. I was overwhelmed with loneliness and despair because I knew this was eternity.”

“As the hours went on with absolutely no sensation, there was no pain, but there was no hot, no cold, no light, no taste, no smell, no sensation whatsoever. None, other than the fact that I felt a slight sensation of traveling at an extremely fast speed. And I knew I was leaving the earth and everything else, all of the physical world. And at that point it became unbearable, it became horrific, as time goes on when you have no feeling, no sensation, no sense of light. I started to panic and struggle and pray and everything I could think of to struggle to get back…”

“I realized I was, at that very moment, floating in space. Almost simultaneously the deep Realization or Total Knowledge hit me that I had died and I was completely alone, never to be with any loved ones, or for that matter, no living thing again in any form. . . I was in a place or state of consciousness that I didn’t know. To me it was for all eternity. There is really no way to describe or explain what this experience felt like, except to say that if a person was to allow himself or herself to mentally conjure up a scenario that represented the greatest amount of fear and terror that individual could imagine and then multiply it by five billion, it still wouldn’t equal what I felt.”

This pretty much sums up the core of my own NDE. It took years before I was able to get close enough to the memory to begin to deal with it. A turning point came with the observation of a pastor friend that reaching the Void is, for a mystic, the ultimate spiritual experience; perhaps, he suggested, I simply wasn’t ready for the encounter when it happened?

“Perhaps,” indeed! It would take years before I could approach the memory closely enough to work it through. Eventually I could at least consider that the ultimate spiritual experience shared by mystics, like the Buddhist Nirvana, is not empty but is full of all potentialities. Objectless but full. Like most such things (as if they were things), potentialities are invisible; so the Void that looks like emptiness is actually a fullness. Like space, as it turns out.

Here is Brian Greene’s remarkable presentation on space:  http://video.pbs.org/video/2163057527/