15 things we know about distressing NDEs

Tags

demographics, description, facts, interpretation, research, what we know

With all the points of view about near-death experiences, it can be difficult to sift out facts from opinions. Here, for the sake of convenience, is a brief listing of what the research has shown about NDEs.

1. Reports of experiences like NDEs, both splendid and harrowing, have come from around the world, going back to antiquity.

2. Although the great majority of NDE accounts describe pleasant, even glorious, experiences,  a study of research reports indicates that as many as one in five may be disturbing.

3. Both pleasant and distressing NDEs are likely to include: an out-of-body experience; movement, often with a sense of speed, to areas with special qualities of light or dark; a landscape; encountering one or more presences; intense emotion; sometimes transcendence; sometimes a specific message. Some experiences include more of these elements than others. Distressing NDE reports typically lack three elements that may appear in a pleasant NDE: a life review, positive emotional tone, and loss of the fear of death.

4. The primary effect of any NDE is usually a powerful and enduring awareness that there is more to reality than the physical world.

5. NDEs do not play favorites: they appear across demographic bases including age, race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual preference, education, occupation, socioeconomic status, religious background and beliefs, level of religious activity, expectations of afterlife. Despite limited demographic data about distressing NDEs, they appear to have the same universality.

6. At least three types of distressing NDE have been identified: 1) one with features common in pleasant NDEs, but interpreted negatively; 2) the Void; 3) features or landscape interpreted as hell. A suggested fourth type separates out an otherwise pleasant NDE with a guilt reaction to the life review (a type I generally include with #1).

7. NDEs are not always static but may switch from unpleasant to pleasant or, less commonly, pleasant to distressing.

8. A fear of social stigma has made many people reluctant to report distressing NDEs.

9. A distressing NDE may produce long-lasting trauma, especially for the unknown percentage of individuals who have great difficulty explaining and integrating the experience.

10. The strong emotional response reported to have been present during an NDE indicates that interpretation begins within the experience. A distressing NDE is upsetting during the experience, not only when thought about afterward.

11. The description of any NDE is dependent upon the pre-existing mental categories and vocabulary of the person doing the describing. For instance, encountered entities are not reported as wearing name tags but are described according to whatever identities are present in the person’s cognitive storehouse; people do not describe presences or other elements in terms that are unfamiliar to them. Any report identifying a presence as a particular individual is a perception that may or may not be factually true. Nevertheless, the identification is bound up with the content and ascribed meaning of the experience, though it cannot be confirmed as literal fact.

12. There isno evidencethat character, religious activity, or moral status determines the type of NDE a person will have. Saints have reported dreadful visionary experiences. Criminals have reported glorious NDEs. Some individuals have experienced both. This not to suggest that morality is irrelevant, but that we might do well to avoid snap judgments about who gets what and why.

13. After a distressing NDE, some people look for its meaning by “reforming” their life, possibly with a convincing religious affiliation. Some dismiss it as “it was only…” (reductionism). Others struggle to find resolution. Beyond that, there is little information about how people cope with a distressing NDE.

14. Pleasant NDEs tend to convey powerful messages that are common to all human experience, across religious and philosophical systems: a mandate to love, to have compassion, to keep learning,  and to be of service to others. Distressing NDEs have less focused messages but follow the ancient shamanic pattern of suffering/death/ resurrection, read as an invitation to profound self-examination, disarrangement of core beliefs, and rebuilding into a new way of understanding. (The new way commonly moves toward some aspect of the elements described by positive NDEs: love, compassion, learning, service.)

15. Because NDEs do not conform to the precise doctrines of any specific cultural, philosophical, or religious subset, they present a difficulty for groups tightly tied to particular teachings (which may be religious or secular). For example, unwavering materialists dismiss NDEs as impossible and therefore unbelievable, whereas strongly doctrinal religious groups may believe them to be satanic. Again, description is dependent upon individual interpretation.

If you have questions about any of these–or anything else–please feel free to ask. I’d love to have some guidance from readers of the blog about particular interests!

Felons and distressing death experiences

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bad people, distressing death experiences, evidence, evil, felons, good people, Marilyn Mendoza, Vital Signs

Is it true that bad people get bad experiences and good people get good ones? I have been arguing against this bit of conventional wisdom for quite a few years now, claiming that there is simply no evidence to support it.

The view  that good gets good and bad gets bad is an outgrowth of “what everybody knows,” or the conventional wisdom. Every known culture is loaded with these conclusions that people get what they deserve, the assumptions that have shaped human thinking for thousands of years: the dutiful person will be rewarded and the wicked punished, the diligent worker becomes rich and the idle is destined for poverty, prosperity is given to those who do right and catastrophe befalls the wrongdoer. If you routinely kill the biggest antelope or own the big house in the best neighborhood, it must be because you deserve it; the guy eating prairie dog or struggling along in the trailer park must live wrong.

Right? Well…wrong.

We all know of situations in which that simply doesn’t hold up. But the conviction remains. Ask a half-dozen people at the post office or supermarket what kind of people they think would have a distressing near-death experience. One recent comment is that “Some people seem to have hellish experiences for no apparent reason, but most have done evil things…The distressing NDEs I’ve seen have been by males who were bullies and a female who was atheist and an agnostic.” So, not only are they seen as people who do evil things, they are atheists and agnostics as well. No conscience and no God or spirituality. Wow.

Into this scene comes Marilyn Mendoza, a Louisiana woman with a PhD in counseling and a curiosity about what it is like to die in prison. She also wondered if the deathbed visions of dying felons might be especially difficult. So far as anyone knows, deathbed visions differ from near-death experiences only in the fact that their experiencers don’t come back afterwards. Otherwise, the descriptions are virtually identical. Mendoza’s findings are therefore applicable to the study of near-death experiences and are reported in the latest issue of the IANDS newsletter, Vital Signs. http://iands.org

Her study population is housed at Angola, one of the most notorious of U.S. prisons. In her words, “Angola is a maximum security prison that has been called the bloodiest prison in America. It houses 5,000+ men whose crimes range from murder, rape, and armed robbery to drug offenses. The majority of men who come to Angola die there. Prisoners, like many of us, not only have a fear of dying alone but have an even greater fear of dying in prison.”

This is a population almost guaranteed to produce distressing experiences of all types. Not only have they all “done evil things,” but they approach dying in great fear. And as Mendoza puts it, “What better population to explore the question of who is likely to have distressing [experiences] than a population of murderers and rapists?”

One humane quality that makes Angola exceptional is that it is one of seventeen U.S. prisons to have a hospice staffed by inmate volunteers. It was they who provided the information for Mendoza’s research. What she discovered was this:

“Twenty-nine inmate volunteers were interviewed with a range of experiences with the dying from five months to 13 years…Volunteers were asked, ‘Of the dying you have been with, have any of them talked about unusual experiences or seeing people, places, or things that you could not see?’ Twenty-six of the 29 volunteers said ‘yes’…not everyone had [one] that they were aware of, but the vast majority of the men did.”

I am adding the emphasis in this next paragraph:

“As is common with most people, the majority of the [experiences] the caretakers described were pleasant. The most frequently seen visions were of family members. Caretakers reported that the dying saw mothers, grandmothers, sons, fathers, and other family members. The dying spoke of people waiting for them and calling them to come home. They told the caretakers about waiting for a bus and walking through a gate. One even spoke of seeing family coming to get him in a Cadillac. The dying also spoke of angels, beautiful gardens, gates and the Light. The men stared at corners of the room, at the wall and the ceiling. They reached for and called out to the deceased they saw. In other words, the dying prisoners saw and experienced the same things as the general population.

“The inmate volunteers did talk about some patients who were bitter and angry until they took their last breath. They were angry at everyone and everything, but especially at death. Only one account was given for a distressing experience for a patient.

I say it again, with renewed confidence:

There is not a shred of evidence that good people get good experiences and bad people get bad experiences. The conviction that types of NDEs and deathbed visions are tied to moral qualities and behaviors simply does not hold up. If it’s true at Angola, it’s true enough for me.

Distressing—even hellish—NDEs coming into their own?

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@nancyevansbush, Bruce Greyson, Dalai Lama, Dancing Past the Dark, discussion, distressing NDE, e-reader, ebook, forums, hellish NDE, www.near-death-forums.com

There’s an amazing, dam-busting conversation going on in the forums at the near-death.com site: http://ow.ly/8vfXj

Titled “The case for distressing/hellish NDE study,” the thread has grown to 104 posts in a week’s time. And they’re substantive, interesting (sometimes downright fascinating), mostly respectful posts. I called the thread “dam-busting” because of both its size and the richness of its content.

All sorts of sub-topics are emerging: questions of what constitutes “reality,” the nature of being, whether distressing NDEs are morally contingent, the role of personality and behavioral history. In short, it’s the kind of conversation we haven’t heard in the past three decades.

Even if you want simply to lurk, it’s worth sitting in. Read through the comments and see the range of discussion. It’s just great! Huge thanks go to RabbitDawg (yes, our own RabbitDawg) for opening the conversation. He really started something! And as always, thanks to Kevin Williams for the near-death.com site and its wealth of forums. See you there!

In local news, Bruce Greyson has returned from presenting an invited paper at a conference with the Dalai Lama at his compound in Dharmasala, India, and has sent the foreword for Dancing Past the Dark. The book’s index is almost finished, and it and the cover are expected by week’s end. Its appearance for Nooks, Kindles, and other e-readers is definitely coming closer! And because of that, I am awash in the major task of today’s authors, preparation for marketing the book. (If you Tweet, look for me at @nancyevansbush, or from your browser, type http://twitter.com/nancyevansbush ). It’s a whole new world out there!  There is no end to learning curves.

An Expanded Consciousness Model in Psychology: Systemic Constellations

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cellular memory, consciousness, Craig Weiler, psychology

We hear a lot about the importance of being an individual. What about the importance of our being part of something larger than ourselves? I think you’ll find this repost from Craig Weiler’s blog, The Weiler Psi, a really good start to 2012. Consider it a New Year’s present.

The Weiler Psi

What happens when the treatment method that works best makes no sense in traditional psychology?  That is the dilemma of Systemic Constellations.  It’s an interesting alternate treatment method based on the idea that consciousness can and should be treated at the group level.  That is to say, individuals can be traumatized by events within their group even if they were not directly involved.  Not only does this occur in real time, but it goes back into history.  A person can even be personally affected by events that their ancestors experienced.  From a practical standpoint, this means that individual and group stresses can be approached by looking at what happened within the group.

From a materialist viewpoint, where the brain creates the mind, this makes no sense of course, but if we look at consciousness as being a fundamental property of the universe then there is a real possibility that…

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2012 and distressing NDEs…catching a viral!

I had told myself along about June that if the book did not have a traditional publisher by the end of the year, I would consider going with an ebook. My concern was, would it be respectable?

Then, in early fall, one of my advisors, a highly experienced book editor and retired university professor, himself an author many times over, returned from a summer of lecturing in Europe and told me that his books are doing well there as ebooks. It’s the way to go, he said.

Hearing that from someone of his stature was all it took. Dancing Past the Dark: Distressing Near-Death Experiences will make its appearance as an ebook. What this means for you, as readers, is, first, that you will get it a good two years earlier than if it were coming out in paper. You will get it at half the cost. What it means to IANDS is that a portion of the purchase price will go to help support the Association. What this means for the book is that it will have to find its way to readers not by a publisher’s efforts but by word of mouth, blogs, and social media.

As I write this, it’s not quite four hours short of the New Year, and the project is right on schedule: I have just put the last touches on the PDF file that will go to the indexer the first business day of the New Year. Bruce Greyson is writing the foreword. By the end of January, the book will be ready for conversion to ebook language. By March or April, it should go public. So, fire up your Nook, your new Kindle, your iPad and other e-readers, or the app on your laptop, and start telling people. It’s coming!

If you know of a blog, an organization, or an online group that might want to know about the book or be interested in a guest blog post, please add a comment to let me know about them, or send them the blog URL (soon to be a website, also–www.dancingpastthedark.com). Who knew we would ever want to go viral!

I am so appreciative of your interest, your comments, your emails. You’ve made 2011 a good year, and my best wishes go to all of us for the year ahead. Just think what’s possible in 2012, whatever the Mayan calendar may mean!

The Hitchens departure for points unknown

Today’s Baroque in Hackney post (see my blogroll) is a beautiful tribute to Christopher Hitchens, a man who could set my teeth on edge like almost no other. I come away from Katy’s post with two thoughts in particular. First, about his anti-religion tirade of a book, God is not Great, she says :

…polemically, he demonstrated his position by throwing loads and loads of facts at it, and I ruefully noted that there is not a sentence in the book that would lose meaning if you replaced the word ‘religion’ with ‘human nature’. But his convictions were true convictions and went through him like a stick of rock.

That “stick of rock”–or all of them together–is much of what made me grind my teeth. All that certainty, that immovable sense of rightness helped make Hitchens what he was. But is that always admirable?

Secondly, while going all thoughtful over that image of “a stick of rock,” I am admiring Katy’s observation that applies, I think, as well to people dealing with whatever distress, whether of near-death experience or any other of life’s challenges:

Do you remember, recently I mentioned the idea of occupying one’s own space …? Christopher Hitchens occupied himself utterly, and thus became fearsome. And fearless. Even the cancer that killed him he declared ‘banal’, saying, ‘It bores even me’. He is exemplar, and refused to be sentimentalised by illness.

The New York times quotes him on the possible regret he might feel for the unhealthy life that brought him cancer of the oesophogus:

“Writing is what’s important to me, and anything that helps me do that — or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation — is worth it to me,” he told Charlie Rose in a television interview in 2010, adding that it was “impossible for me to imagine having my life without going to those parties, without having those late nights, without that second bottle.”

The parties, the conversation, the necessity of good talk. Two essays he wrote about his cancer – one, about his diagnosis and admission to the Country of the Sick; and two, the final essay he wrote, about pain, life and dying  – demonstrate the power of this remark.

Outside, the rain is turning to snow; the day is cold, drear, forbidding. Seize it. I mean to try. If we learn one thing from the Hitch, it’s that.

New perspective on heaven and hell

Tags

afterlife, Bible, heaven, hell, narrative/historical

For any readers who are evangelical Christians, or progressive Christians, or recovering Christians, or even if you’re not Christian at all but are interested in people’s finding new ways of thinking about the subject of hell, here’s a great opportunity.

New Testament scholar and P.OST blogger Andrew Perriman has collected a series of his thoughtful posts into book form, Hell and Heaven in Narrative Perspective, which is now available for well under $4 on Kindle. (No Nook yet, though he’s looking into it; but Kindle can be read on any computer.) Definitely worth a look. Heck, at this price, just buy it and read at your leisure.

The only thing I am proselytizing for is openness to new ideas! See Perriman’s quote below.

Perriman says:

Being a collection of blog posts the book is academically lightweight, far from comprehensive, and suffers from many of the characteristic vices of the medium. Maybe that’s all to the good. In any case, I think it puts forward a pretty coherent case for reading the texts as interpretations of historical outcomes rather than as data for general theories about a personal afterlife.

Where is the medical evidence that NDEs happen?

Tags

consciousness, doubt, evidence, Experience, hallucination, medical records, NDE, near death experience, proof

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?

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

Tags

Brian Greene, cosmological constant, emptiness, Fabric of the Cosmos, fullness, Godhead, meaning, Nirvana, potential, space, Void

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?

Tags

cosmos, despair, reframing, space, Void

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/