2: The Other Shoe

Almost always, in the question period after a presentation, one brave person would venture the question, “All these experiences are so beautiful. Are there ever . . . you know . . . does anyone ever mention . . . well, the other kind?” And the auditorium would become even more utterly quiet. It was always difficult to know how to answer without bursting the bubble of hopefulness.

Raymond Moody had been quite explicit: “Although many people continue to ask me whether anyone with whom I have talked has reported a hell, it remains true that in the mass of material I have collected no one has ever described to me a state like the archetypal hell.”

Ring, like Moody, was firm: “Significantly, no person in our sample—including, of course, all our suicide attempt cases—recounted an experience that could be regarded as a ‘journey to hell.’ . . . Although some death experiences did include frightening aspects or moments of confusion and uncertainty, none was characterized by predominantly unpleasant feelings or imagery.”

In Sabom’s study, “In each case in which unpleasant emotions …were encountered …they were perceived to be but a momentary impression in an otherwise pleasant NDE. It is conceivable that this overall assessment might have been different (i.e., unenjoyable) if the experience had abruptly ended at the point at which the unpleasant emotion was perceived.”

Indeed, eight major studies between the years 1975 and 2005, including the biggest in-hospital investigations, reported finding no unpleasant reports in any of their 354 near-death experiences.

Dark Cloud overEden

But then…“In 1978,” Kenneth Ring would write years later, “a dark cloud of chilling testimony began to penetrate into the previously luminous sky of reports of near-death experiences.”

The “dark cloud” was a startling book published by a Chattanoogacardiologist. The physician was Maurice Rawlings, the book was Beyond Death’s Door, and in it Rawlings described in grim detail another kind of near-death experience which he encountered in some of his patients being resuscitated from cardiac arrest. “Doc! Doc! Don’t let me go under again—I’m in hell!” A chill went through just about everyone who read the book. An ancient and most unfriendly aspect of the universe had surfaced anew.

Beyond Death’s Door made a deep impression in evangelical Christian sections of the United States, but nothing like the nationwide reception given Life After Life. There were several reasons for this. Perhaps most obviously, the subject was unwelcome to readers who were happy to read about radiant, heaven-like experiences but not about cosmic terror and a vengeful God. Many, especially those who felt harmed by organized religion, considered the Rawlings conclusions distasteful, even assaultive. Mainstream Christians perhaps tended to think of them as gauche.

From the research perspective, there were other problems. While Rawlings’ work, like Moody’s, was anecdotal, most experiences in Beyond Death’s Door were presented, not in their own words, but as described by Rawlings, based on his recollection of what they had told him, sometimes years before. Further, too many reported “facts” were shaky, if not downright in error: names were wrong, researchers’ institutional affiliations were misstated, other research findings were inaccurately stated; if such easily verifiable facts were wrong, what could be trusted in the rest of his work? Most damaging of all, Rawlings was clearly less interested in objectivity than in his conviction, as a Christian fundamentalist, that terrifying near-death experiences are a foretaste of the fate awaiting anyone who does not live by evangelical Christian theological doctrine. From that perspective, he was writing to save souls. While this position enhanced his reputation within the conservative Christian community, it was not well received elsewhere and strengthened the suspicion that terrifying near-death experiences were most probably associated entirely with hell-fire-and-brimstone religious beliefs.[1] As a result, what Rawlings called “hellish experiences” were by the mainstream of near-death studies called “negative experiences” and considered to be a fringe matter.

However, Rawlings was not alone. Despite the optimistic findings of the major studies, there were hints, even in the early publications, that some experiences were not entirely blissful.

Psychologist Charles A. Garfield reported as early as 1979 on his interviews with 36 people, of whom eight (22%) described vivid demonic or nightmarish visions, while another four (11%) reported alternating blissful and terrifying features. Not long after, three researchers fromWashingtonStatedefined a “negative” NDE as “one that contains extreme fear, panic, or anger. It may also contain visions of demonic creatures that threaten or taunt the subject.” That study reported finding eleven (20%) out of 55 NDEs “partially negative or hellish.” They noted that “Most negative experiences begin with a rush of fear and panic or with a vision of wrathful or fearful creatures,” but are “usually transformed, at some point, into a positive experience in which all negativity vanishes and the first stage of death [peacefulness] is achieved.”

Michael Sabom had observed that “Momentary fright or bewilderment sometimes accompanied the initial passage into darkness.

“‘There was total blackness around me . . . all you see is blackness around you. If you move very fast, you can feel the sides moving in on you. . . . I felt lonely and a little frightened.’

“‘The next thing I remember, I was in complete total darkness. . . . It was a very dark place and I didn’t know where I was, what I was doing there or what was happening, and I started getting scared.”

With George Gallup’s Adventures in Immortality came an entire chapter entitled “Descent into the Abyss.” In it, he reported, “. . . [O]ur major national poll of those who had a close brush with death showed that only one percent said that they ‘had a sense of hell or torment.’” Other investigators quickly adopted that one percent figure as the total percentage of distressing near-death experiences, neatly overlooking the conclusion of Gallup’s paragraph: “But … the picture is more complex than that …[I]t does seem clear that many of these people…were reluctant to interpret their experience in positive terms.”

“. . . [T]he negative near-death experiences in our study,” Gallup summarized, “include some of the following features: featureless, sometimes forbidding faces; beings who are often merely present, but aren’t at all comforting; a sense of discomfort—especially emotional or mental unrest; feelings of confusion about the experience; a sense of being tricked or duped into ultimate destruction; and fear about what the finality of death may involve.”

Said a 30-year-old, “I felt I was being tricked into death. In my mind, I was fighting with faces unknown to me, and I felt I had to have all my wits about me, to keep from dying.”

A middle-agedIllinoishousewife: “I would [see] huge things coming toward me, like animals with baseball bats. Then, I’d be in this blue-green water, and out in front of me was this huge white, marblelike rock. At the top of the rock was this bright light, and as I got closer to the rock, I saw an image of a person standing on top of it in white clothing—like a robe. But I couldn’t tell if it was male or female—I couldn’t see the face at all.”

A pre-law student in his twenties told of his experience in an automobile accident: “My first thought was, ‘I must be dead. This is what death must be.’ But it certainly wasn’t blissful. Just nothingness. I felt like a piece of protoplasm floating out on the sea. I thought, ‘Maybe I’m lost, maybe I’m not going to heaven.’”

In a more mechanistic vein, the experience of a 35-year-old Methodist man included this: “I felt like I was in a great black vacuum. All I could see was my arms hanging onto a set of parallel bars. I knew if I relaxed, my grip on life would cease. It was a complete sense of knowing that life had to be clung to. I knew without any question if I let go, I would die. The feeling of agony, of hanging on only lasted a brief while.”

From Charles P. Flynn, a sociologist atMiamiUniversityinOxford,Ohio, came the account of a woman who reported having seen “a realm of ‘troubled spirits’:

“It’s a dusky, dark, dreary area, and you realize that the area is filled with a lot of lost souls, or beings that could go the same way I’m going [to the Light] if they would just look up. The feeling I got was that they were all looking downward, and they were kind of shuffling, and there was a kind of moaning. There were hundreds of them, looking very dejected. The amount of confusion I felt coming off of it was tremendous. When I went through this, I felt there was a lot of pain, a lot of confusion, a lot of fear, all meshed into one. It was a very heavy feeling. . .”

The Greyson/Bush Study

Despite these occasional observations, by 1987 there was so little evidence of recent unpleasant NDEs that in Otherworld Journeys, Carol Zaleski’s remarkable comparison of medieval and modern near-death experiences, she could make the often-quoted observation, “Gone are the bad deaths, harsh judgment scenes, purgatorial torments, and infernal terrors of medieval visions; by comparison, the modern other world is a congenial place, a democracy, a school for continuing education, and a garden of unearthly delights.”

The absence of distressing and hellish NDEs in the materials available to her then is, in retrospect, not because distress does not exist in the modern near-death repertoire but because experiencers were not ready to come forward with them. However slowly, that was about to change

While radiant near-death experiences were flooding publishing houses and other media, at the University of Connecticut offices of the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS), an occasional letter or phone call hinted at fear or distress during an experience—almost never an outright statement, but a hint. I knew from my own experience that the picture of NDEs as exclusively blissful was incomplete; so it was easy enough to begin asking those people if they would say more, explaining the reason for my personal interest. Further, psychiatrist Bruce Greyson, MD, university-based head of the research division of IANDS and editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies, had professional reasons for wanting more information; so he had also begun a small collection of these anomalous NDEs. From our shared interest came the first study of frightening near-death experiences.

Methodology

The plan seemed simple enough. The study was unfunded and would have to be carried out as information became available. Its methodology was necessarily rudimentary. Only first-person accounts would be considered for inclusion. As either of us heard a hint of a distressing experience, we would write or call the person, sound out their situation, describe our interest in developing helpful information about these experiences, and invite the person to take part in a study. A coding system would guarantee their anonymity. Participants would agree to write the account of their NDE in as much detail as possible, or to tape-record it if that would be easier for them. They would sign a consent form for the anonymous use of the material and fill out a brief questionnaire asking for demographic information and the circumstances under which the NDE had occurred. For additional information, we would personally contact the experiencer. The result would be the first descriptive, anecdotal study of these hidden experiences.  Easier said than done.

Medical social worker Kimberly Clark Sharp was the first to observe that this is a population that vanishes. For many people with a painful NDE, simply admitting they have had such an experience is as much as they can do; telling it can seem impossible. Or they break through their fear just long enough to give an abbreviated account, after which they promptly disappear. We found her observation to be frustratingly true.

A person would hang far back after a program, sidle up to the speaker when the rest of the audience was out of earshot, and stammer, “I…I had an experience, but it was … I can’t say. How come everybody else gets heaven and I got . . . that?” Was the person willing to say more about “that”? No.

A letter-writer wrote, “My experience was, I went to hell. Why don’t you tell people the truth?” Would the person discuss it on the phone or write more in another letter? No.

Buried in an otherwise radiant NDE description one could sometimes find a terse comment: “One part of my experience was too frightening to talk about. I prayed to God, and it turned out all right.” Would the person elaborate? No.

It took nine years to find fifty people who were able to give enough detail to create a coherent sense of what constitutes such an experience. Despite our being able to draw on all the resources of IANDS, and despite contacts with several thousand experiencers overall, the “closeting” of these individuals at that time was so intense that even when they could bring themselves to write their accounts, few were willing or able to complete the questionnaire, answer questions, or agree to an interview. (As example of that intensity, one participant, at the urging of her psychotherapist, agreed to a personal meeting with one of the investigators [NEB] nine years later.)

To say the response was a slow trickle is to suggest substantially more speed than was the case, but occasional responses began to come in, though with frustratingly little detail. Follow-up provided consent forms but not much else. Demographic information about the participants is therefore extremely limited. What is known is that their age at the time of the experience ranged from nine years old upwards; their levels of education are from high school dropout to completion of graduate work. They were laborers, professionals, unemployed, and students, Christian, Jewish, without religious preference, and secular. Other studies have shown near-death experiencers to represent a broad cross-section of the population at large (Ring, Sabom, Gallup, van Lommel), and there is no demonstrable reason to believe this sample to be otherwise. As a whole, experiencers appear no more likely than any other random segment of the population to have emotional or psychological problems or outright mental illness. From what we know about these fifty individuals, they are a representative group of ordinary people who have had an extraordinary experience.

The basic finding of the study was quickly apparent: there is no single “Distressing Experience.” In fact, there was more variety of specifics within these experience accounts than among even larger groups of radiant accounts. Overall, however, they tend to follow the basic pattern of NDEs as described by Ring  and Greyson, provided that pattern is worded more broadly rather than specifically for pleasant emotions.

Ring’s “Weighted Core Experience Index” includes, as measures of radiant NDEs: a subjective sense of being dead; intense feeling of peace, painlessness, etc. (the core affective cluster); sense of bodily separation; sense of entering a dark region; encountering a presence or hearing a voice; taking stock of one’s life; seeing or being enveloped in light; seeing beautiful colors; entering into the light; and encountering visible ‘spirits.’ The Index applies as well to frightening experiences when the qualitative terms are worded neutrally rather than positively: for example, defining the core affective cluster as “intense emotions” rather than “feeling of peace, etc.” and “vivid sense impressions” in place of “seeing beautiful colors.”

The Patterns

Within the group of fifty accounts, three distinct types of experience emerged. The most common is almost identical in features to the classic radiant NDE but was experienced as terrifying. The second type involves an experience of nothingness, of being without sensation and/or of existing in a limitless, featureless void. The third type, by far the least common in this sample, includes outright “hellish” images and corresponds more closely to the hell of the popular imagination. The study findings, first published in the journal Psychiatry in 1993, form the basis of the next chapter.

[To be continued.]

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[1]             In 1995, Dr. Rawlings was invited to present a session at the IANDS North American conference. From his presentation it was clear even to those who disagreed with his theology that his position is taken from an attitude of great caring and regard for the well-being of those who, he believes, are destined for an inevitable (and dreadful) fate. His sympathetic attitude did not preclude several people from walking out of the lecture hall.