NDE means "near-death experience".
As you know, such scientist as R.Moody has written popular books regarding NDEs (including very popular book "Life After Life").
Nancy E. Bush explores the same theme, but with a funereal twist, because she is interested in the so-called "NNDE" (negative near-death experiences).
The following is the excerpt from her 1992 year article from "Psychiatry" magazine.
The most funny part of the article is the encounters with Mayavada-preaching (or Buddhism-preaching) entities in NDE.
In the following excerpt 3 cases are described and the first one is the funniest of all.
Some scientists erroneously suppose that this life beliefs will determine NDE, but these cases prove otherwise, because two persons from stories were Presbyterian and Protestant, but their NDEs were scarily Buddhistic.
Nancy Evans Bush, excerpt from the article "Distressing NDEs" ("Psychiatry", Volume 55, February 1992)
Nonexistence or Eternal Void
The second type of distressing experience involves a paradoxical sensation of ceasing to exist entirely, or of being condemned to a featureless void for eternity.
Sometimes this type of experience includes a sense of despair that life as we know it not only no longer exists but in fact never did. that it was all a cruel joke.
Unlike the first type of distressing experience, these generally contain fewer features of the prototypical peaceful near-death experience and do not appear to convert to the peaceful kind with time.
Following are verbatim accounts of this type.
Example 01.
The first example was reported by an academic administrator, the daughter of Unitarian ministers, who had never heard of such experiences previously and believed she was the only person ever to have had one, unable to tell even her husband about it.
Her experience occurred during the delivery of her second child at age 28: the fetus had engaged and labor
had begun 3 weeks early, and she was sent to the hospital where three pitocin drips were started over the next 7 hours.
She described her mental state as fearful, depressed, ana panicky; finally she was given nitrous oxide:
I remember trying to fight the mask, but they grabbed my wrists and strapped them. First there was only unconsciousness, but at some point farther into delivery my blood pressure suddenly dropped.
I was aware, not of the flurry around me, but of moving rapidly upward into darkness. Although I don't recall turning to look. I knew the hospital and the worid were receding below me. very fast: to this day my mind holds a sharp picture of them down there, though I don't know how I could so clearly have seen some-
thing 1 didn't look at. I was rocketing through space like an astronaut without a capsule, with immense speed and great distance.
A small group of circles appeared ahead of me, some tending toward the left. To the right was just a dark space. The circles were black and white, and made a clicking sound as they snapped black to white, white to black.
They were jeering and tormenting—not evil, exactly, but more mocking and mechanistic. The message in their clicking was: Your life never existed. The world never existed. Your family never existed. You were allowed to imagine it. You were allowed to make it up. It was never there. There is nothing here. There was never anything there. That's the joke-it was all a joke. There was much laughter on their parts, malicious.
I remember brilliant argumentation on my part, trying to prove that
the world-and I-existed. I recall arguing that I knew details of my mother's life before my birth, things about her childhood in another part of the country; how could I have made that up?
And my first baby-I knew her. I knew I hadn't made her up. And childbirth—why would I ever have made up that? They just kept jeering.
This is eternity," they kept mocking. This is all there ever was, and ail there ever will be, just this despair. It was empty, except for me and them and dark.
Not like night dark, somehow, it was thinner—whatever that means. It was very dark and immense all around, but somehow I could see them: the voidness seemed to thin out somewhere off by the horizon, if there had been a horizon, but it wasn t lighter, just thinner.
It seemed to go on forever. I was debating and simultaneously grieving for my first baby
and this baby that was never going to get born, and for my mother. That utter emptiness just went on and on, and they kept on clicking.
I was trying to summon up some strong memory of my husband and the house, something tangible to argue
with, thinking I couldn't bear this for eternity. The grief was just wrenching; this worid gone, ana grass, and my first baby and all the other babies, and hills.
I knew no one could bear that much grief, but there didn't seem to be any end of it, and no way out. Everyone I loved was gone.
Time was forever, endless rather than all at once. The remembering of events had no sense of life review, but of trying to prove existence, that existence existed. Yes. it was more than real: absolute reality.
There's a cosmic terror we have never addressed. The despair was because of the absolute conviction that I had seen what the other side was — I never thought of it as Hell - and there was no way to tell anyone. I wouldn't matter how I died or when, damnation was out there, just waiting.
Six years later, I was ieafing through a book-it may have been Jung's Man and Symbols - and turned a page to discover a picture of one of the circles. The book landed across the room in one shudder. That was terror! It was corroboration: Somebody else knew about the circles. There would be no way I couid any
longer pretend they were imaginary. It would be several more years beiore I learned that the circles were the Yin/Yang of Eastern tradition: their sound had been the black and white sides clicking to the opposite and back again.
Example 02.
The second example was reported by a registered nurse, who had been raised Presbyterian and never heard of near-death experiences. She reported two identical experiences to have occurred during childbirth under anesthesia at ages 24 ana 26.
With her first delivery, her obstetrician induced labor by a series of three pitocin injections: in her second delivery, she suffered an inverted uterus and began to hemorrhage:
I was given ether in the delivery room. The last thing I saw before going 'under' was the monotony of the ceiling tiles in the delivery room, and two nuns, of course, dressed exactly alike. I passed through different stages of "torment.''
Voices were laughing at me, telling me all of life was a "dream," that there was no Heaven. Hell, or Earth, really, and that all I had experienced in life was actually an hallucination.
I remember trying to tell the nuns, who were smiling m happy anticipation of the impending birth. "How
can you smile, when you've given your lives for religion, and there is no religion, no Heaven or Hell?"
I passed through the stage of terrible thirst and the voices kept laughing and telling me. "You think this is bad? Wait till the next stage!" I found myself hurling towards the final torment: I was to be suspended in a total vacuum with nothing to see or do for eternity. I was naked and I was sad about that because I thought,
"If only I had clothing I could puil the threads and knot them or reweave them for something to do!" And, "If only 1 were sitting in a chair I couid splinter it and try to make something of the splinters."
And then the overwhelming realization that eternity was forever and ever, time without end! What to do in a vacuum forever? The thing that brought me around were the words "You have a girl," and for a while I thought the tormenting voices were again giving me another stage of torment, teasing me into thinking I didn't
have to stay in that vacuum!
Two years later, I was again giving birth, and this time things went badly. I had a retained placenta and in endeavoring to get the placenta I had an inverted uterus. During the delivery I was given ether and I had the same horrible "dream": the same stages of torment, the feeling of hurtling towards the vacuum.
The thing that brought me around were the words. "You have a boy!" I reasoned that since they said "boy," not "giri" as they had during my first experience, it must be true and the nightmare I was experiencing was only a nightmare.
After ail these years, the nightmare remains vivid in my mind. I assure you the worst form of Hell, in my mind, at least, would be myself suspended, naked, in a vacuum!
Example 03.
The third example was reported by an artist, with no religious upbringing, to have occurred in an automobile accident at age 18. He had lost control of his car on a snowy winter evening and slid off the road and down an embankment.
The
car came to an abrupt stop as it slid into a brook, and he hit his head on the windshield and lost consciousness. He described leaving his physical body and watching as the icy water filled the car:
I saw the ambulance coming, and I saw the people trying to help me. get me out of the car and into the hospitaL And at that time I was no longer in my body. I held left my body. I was probably a hundred or two hundred feet up and to the south of the accident, and I felt the warmth and the kindness of the people
trying to help me.
I felt their compassion and all the good feeling that was emanating from these people. And I also felt the
source of all that kind of kindness or whatever, and it was very, very powerful and I was afraid of it. and so I didn't accept it. I just said. "No." I was very uncertain about it and I didn't feel comfortable, and so I rejected it.
And it was at that moment that I left the planet. I could feel myself and see myself going away, way up into the air, then beyond the soiar system beyond the gaiaxy, and out beyond anything physical. And at first I thought I'd just go with it. see where it went, and I stayed as calm as I could, just kind of went with the whole thing.
And that part of it was all right for a while. But then 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 travelling 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, and I communicated with a sister of mine who passed away. And at that moment, I went back into my body, and
my body at that point had been moved to the hospital.
Though our sample is still small, the majority of our cases of "eternal nothingness" experiences were reported to have occurred during childbirth under anesthesia. As already noted, this kind of distressing experience includes few features pro to typically reported in peaceful near-death experiences.
Instead, the common themes include eternal emptiness, an experience of being mocked, and a sense of
all of life being an illusion. Individuals tend to react to these threats with logical arguments against them, a tactic not seen in response to the first type of distressing experience.
This kind of experience also tends to leave the individual with a pervasive sense of emptiness and fatalistic despair after the event, a further contrast to the first kind of distressing near-death experience.
An office manager raised as a Protestant, who reported she had never heard of near-death experiences at that
time in her life, described this type of experience during childbirth at age 24.
She had been in labor with her second child for 3 days and was extremely exhausted and in severe pain. Her account of her experience includes a continuing sense of despair after her return to normal consciousness:
I remember being in extreme pain and I remember thinking this is as far as pain can go, and then I lost consciousness. I then found myself floating in a narrow river toward a beautiful arched bridge.
The bridge was made of large stones. I could see the shadow of the bridge getting closer and closer, and I was looking forward to getting in the shadow because I knew I would then be dead, and I wanted to die. I was floating with my body all down in the water, except my head was floating above it and bobbing
up and down. I was very peaceful, but I wanted to get in the shadow.
After I reached the shadow I was in the heavens, but it was no longer a peaceful feeling; it had become pure helL I had become a light out in the heavens and I was screaming, but no sound was going forth.
It was worse than my nightmare. I was spinning around and around and screaming. I realized that this was eternity for all mankind. I had become all mankind and this was what forever was going to be. You cannot put into words the emotions that I felt. I felt the quietness, except for the screaming within my own
body, which was no longer a body but a smail ball of light. I felt the aloneness, except the awareness that I was ail mankind. I felt the emptiness of space, the vastness of the universe except for me, a mere ball of light screaming.
On returning home, I found myself not wanting to talk to anyone. I felt that no one existed except me. I continued my duties as wife and mother, but I would wonder why. I would watch TV and think that I crcated all that was shown on it.
Then I would wonder why 1 didn't know the outcome of a movie, and then I would rationalize that I was creating as I watched, so naturally I had not created an ending until the end.
It was very realistic to me and an experience I will never forget for the rest of my life. I wrote this poem a few weeks later:
I have been to Hell
It is not as you say:
There is no fire nor brimstone.
People screaming for another day.
There is only darkness - everywhere.
