Dancing Past the Dark ~ distressing near-death experiences

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Walter Brueggemann

Distressing NDEs as Scary Rites of Passage #4

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Can we accept dNDEs as true spiritual experience?

Is there evidence that only light experiences can be spiritual? That only positive experience is spiritually acceptable? No. The altered states of a shamanic initiation may often be psychotic, but there is little argument about their potential for being deeply spiritual. The betrayed and battered Jesus, dying forsaken on his cross, was clearly in profound spiritual crisis. The archetype of suffering/death/ and resurrection is universal as a spiritual reality.

Here is what four contemporary mystics of differing faith backgrounds say about suffering and its relation to spiritual truth:

Caroline Myss

What is true is, light attracts darkness, and darkness attracts light. It attracts it because they contain each other. They contain each other; you have to understand this.

This is why good people often attract such difficult experiences. This is why people like Gandhi or Mandela attracted dark experiences, but in fact it was contained so light could burst through. It was light and darkness at its fullest being held by these men. This is how a huge light/darkness soul works. If you see clearly, they have to contain both. They have to… how it manifests comes in the shape of the human society as it is.

…The darkness has to humble the light. The light has to temper the darkness. Darkness bats the light into submission, so it does not become arrogant. They require each other, as a force. The light pulls the cruelty out of the darkness. The darkness pulls the arrogance and abuse out of the light. They talk to each other. They need each other; together they evolve, they evolve, they evolve.

Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart, p 14

Reaching our limit is not some kind of punishment. It’s actually a sign of health that, when we meet the place where we are about to die, we feel fear and trembling. A further sign of health is that we don’t become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it’s time to stop struggling and look directly at what’s threatening us…messengers telling us that we’re about to go into unknown territory.

Connie Zweig

I had believed, with a kind of spiritual hubris, that a deep and committed inner life would protect me from human suffering, that I could somehow deflate the power of the shadow with my metaphysical practices and beliefs. I had assumed, in effect, that it was managed, as I managed my moods and my diet, with the discipline of self-control… Seekers are often led to believe that, with the right teacher or the right practice, they can transcend to higher levels of awareness without dealing with their more petty vices or ugly emotional attachments. It doesn’t work.

Walter Brueggemann

It is my judgment that this [insistence on positive attitudes] is less defiance guided by faith, and much more a frightened, numb denial and deception that does not want to acknowledge or experience the disorientation of life. The reason for such relentless affirmation of orientation seems to me, not from faith, but from the wishful optimism of our culture.

How much did their views make us want to argue back?

Wherever we resist most strongly, that’s where we need to look at our thinking.

Shadow

Jung and depth psychology have given us the concept of Shadow, the concept that all our unacceptable parts are deeply buried so we can avoid looking at them. It is our immature ego which operates solely on the pleasure principle, keeping us mired in what we think is self-interest but which is really our fragmentation. But our deeper Self knows that we must directly confront and reintegrate the repressed contents of our unconscious before we can achieve wholeness.

Of all groups, we had better be paying attention to this, because distressing NDEs are the Shadow of near-death studies.

When we insist on banishing our existential fears and painful ideas, thinking that will keep us safe, they become, ironically, our monsters. The shortsighted attempt at self-preservation turns on us as psychopathologies or other growth-inhibiting mechanisms. We wind up believing that a natural ordeal is really a mythological Fall, totally misunderstanding the function of  psychological ordeals and distressing NDEs.

Dealing with nightmares, Shadow, dNDE

Distressing NDEs are not dreams, but they come from the same imaginal core of our deep unconscious. Jung taught that nightmares may arise as a symptom of failed integration, an unhealthy split of the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind. This is why his approach to nightmares was to encourage the dreamer to accept the frightening elements as parts of themselves. Jung said to his students, “A persecutory dream always means: This wants to come to me… You would like to split it off, you experience it as something alien – but it just becomes all the more dangerous.”

Instead of fighting against unconscious energies, Jung advocated accepting them. He did not mean acting them out or surrendering to their control, but rather acknowledging their reality within us and respecting their role in the healthy functioning of our minds. The same can be true of NDEs.

Hell lives inside us, burning as the fires and torments of our shadow and the deepest archetypal contents of our psyche.. That is what we meet in a distressing NDE.  We have to be brave enough to confront our shadow, our demons, our darkness, and move through it. It is not punishment; it is an invitation to growth, to wholeness.

Conclusions

Any NDE is a rite of passage – it is a temporary state. It has a before and an after. It is not a blanket measure of character. Beautiful NDEs happen to flawed and sometimes mean and horrible people, and painful NDEs happen to wonderful people. We have to stop accepting and perpetrating automatically negative judgments about people who have a difficult NDE—sometimes it’s just that emotional/spiritual bad hair day.

The event does not allow us to go back, we have to go forward. So we have to learn enough bravery to walk into the questions we fear the most. As individuals and as IANDS, we are being called to look deeply at our resistance to the disturbing NDEs.

Rather than looking from the filter of our terror, we must learn to see ordeal as a challenge, as a gateway to other realms, as a source of potential pride of survival and deep achievement .

What does such an NDE mean? There is no global answer in specific. The question is, what is the message of the experience to the person who has it? Always a personal question. The gift at the innermost core of the hero’s journey is not always the same old apple. It is not enough to go on YouTube and cry only, “Oh oh, it was so scary!” What is its gift? What is it telling you about yourself? Ask: What do you want? Why are you coming to me? What is your message? What is your question of me?

Like those people of the late Renaissance, hearing that their earth had come unmoored and with it the institution which had been their rock for a thousand years—we have to be brave enough to admit that our comfort zone has to stretch way wider than we are ready for.

What do we get with this approach? We get to let go of the infantile belief that every difficult experience means we are being punished; we let go of hell. We get to learn courage and look at whatever is our challenge, our monster, our dread. We drop knee-jerk judgments about people who have scary rites of passage and discover new depths of empathy and compassion. We take on more of truth and of strength, which can then be passed around. We discover more about the paradigm of the new cosmology which says there are no separations—that every kind of experience is our own.. And as we let go of the old patterns, we move farther toward our own wholeness.

It is simply time to be brave. If this goes out of here with us today…we can work wonders.

[Ed. note: My sincere apologies to you all, and great thanks to Marion Dixon, who wrote to say, in the most pleasant possible way–‘Please wake up and post Part #4.’  We do get by with a little help from our friends! Thank you, Marion. And for what it’s worth, the reason for my distraction was completing the final draft of book #2, expected to be out by early spring.] 

Two Families of God, continued, and an NDE ball is thrown out to readers

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Those of you with memories that go a couple of posts back may recall that I had embarked on a discussion of what William James called the “healthy minded” and “sick soul” approaches to religion and life. My blog post was based on an article by experimental psychologist Richard Beck, “The Two Families of God,” and I confidently promised to come back and lay out my own views on the subject.

James, you remember, described healthy-mindedness as producing happiness that rests on an optimistic ignoring of evil and the dark side of existence.” The approach, James said, manifests a “blindness and insensibility to opposing facts given as its instinctive weapon for self-protection against disturbance.” In Beck’s words, “This protection is accomplished through repression and denial. It is an intentional form of blindness in the face of life to produce positive affect and existential equanimity.”

In other words, the sunny, happy results of healthy mindedness depend on denial of evil and suffering.

By contrast, what James called “sick souls” remain existentially aware, individuals “who cannot so swiftly throw off the burden of the consciousness of evil…and are fated to suffer from its presence.” As Beck puts it, “James describes the sick soul as more profound than healthy-mindedness; the sick soul experience is ‘a more complicated key’ to the meaning of pain, fear and human helplessness.”

James said of the existential resiliency of the two types:

“The method of averting one’s attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. . . . But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; as even though one be quite free from melancholy one’s self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.”

It will probably come as no surprise that what struck me so sharply about Beck’s article is the apparent similarity of James’s healthy-mindedness to the principles of the Law of Attraction, which has overflowed its original New Thought banks, spilled into Norman Vincent Peale’s “Power of Positive Thinking” and Joel Osteen’s Prosperity Gospel, to become an immensely popular new parallel to contemporary religion.

And that is where I—or more specifically this blog post–got bogged down. The more I have tried to analyze the response of Law of Attraction thinking to distressing near-death experiences, the more difficult I have found it to talk about it all coherently. Maybe I’m simply too close to the subject. Maybe I’m just bored by the ideology.

I am certainly  aware of the aura of disapproval and fear, along with a kind of moral condescension, projected by Law of Attraction followers toward the whole subject of these types of experience and the people who report them. Ironically, I do not for a moment deny the utility of much LoA psychology nor the possibility that some of its scientific claims are plausible. (I have in fact bent a couple of spoons without physical force; I have a cellular memory of that “action at a distance.”)

What bogs me down is akin to theologian Walter Brueggemann’s claim that “we have thought that acknowledgement of negativity was somehow an act of unfaith.” It is the same model, says Beck, “that creates the sense that James’s sick soul or the experience of Mother Teresa is paradoxical. In the bipolar model, faith and complaint exist at the expense of the other. They cannot occupy the same experiential space. However, as we have seen in the psalms and in the empirical psychological literature regarding relationship with God, it appears that high complaint can coexist with faith.”

Similarly, I contend, acceptance of the existential burden of recognizing the dark side of existence, whether physical or spiritual, is not necessarily negativity as the Law of Attraction would have it. It can coexist with joy and success, and with a deep spirituality.

So, I am throwing this discussion out to you all. You’ve had some great comments about the former post. Do you think distressing NDEs can be accommodated within Law of Attraction thought? What are your thoughts about LoA thinking and human suffering on a global scale? (But please do not tell me that very young children attract their leukemias and blastomas to themselves, nor that the millions of individuals who died in the Holocaust invited the experience; that would be ideology talking, not common sense.) Is LoA simply a different kind of fundamentalism, brooking no disagreement?

Two voices for existential truth

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Much of contemporary talk about spirituality is taken up with the importance–even the essentialness–of positive thinking, of accepting only the light and believing we can refuse pain and difficulty. It is easy to forget that there may be something to be said for a more existentially open view. In the weekend marking the Christian observance of the brutal death of Jesus, here are the great psychologist William James and Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann:

William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, casts his lot with existential honesty:

“The method of averting one’s attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work…But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes. [T]here is no doubt that healthy mindedness is inadequate…because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.”


Walter Brueggemann, in his book The Message of the Psalms, sees purpose in those that are cries of anguish (emphasis in original):

It is a curious fact that the church has, by and large, continued to sing songs of orientation in a world increasingly experienced as disoriented…It is my judgment that this action of the church is less an evangelical defiance guided by faith, and much more a frightened, numb denial and deception that does not want to acknowledge or experience the disorientation of life. The reason for such relentless affirmation of orientation seems to me, not from faith, but from the wishful optimism of our culture. Such a denial and cover-up, which I take it to be, is an odd inclination for passionate Bible users, given the larger number of psalms that are songs of lament, protest, and complaint about an incoherence that is experienced in the world…I believe that serous religious use of the lament psalms has been minimal because we have believed that faith does not mean to acknowledge and embrace negativity. We have thought that acknowledgement of negativity was somehow an act of unfaith, as though the very speech about it conceded too much about God’s “loss of control”…The point to be urged here is this: The use of these “psalms of darkness” may be judged by the world to be acts of unfaith and failure, but for the trusting community, their use is an act of bold faith…