near to death episodes: latest study (Endings)

by David Turell , Wednesday, December 11, 2019, 19:13 (1588 days ago) @ David Turell

With so many evidence mounts:

https://mindmatters.ai/2019/12/what-if-a-near-death-experience-is-a-vision-of-hell/

"Thanks to modern medical interventions, the experiences are not even rare:
Up to 25 per cent of people who almost die report a near-death experience. These usually involve sensations of zooming through a tunnel towards a light. Many also feature replays of the person’s life and reunions with dead loved ones.

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"We are told by the International Association for Near Death Studies, Inc. that most near-death experiences (NDEs) recorded in the literature are “dominated by pleasurable feelings such as peace, joy, and bliss.” The distressing ones, by contrast, have been described as “dominated by distressing, emotionally painful feelings such as fear, terror, horror, anger, loneliness, isolation, and/or guilt”. One researcher classifies as many as 15 percent of NDEs as hellish.

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"Bruce Greyson and Bush studied fifty reports of distressing NDEs, including “an acute awareness of nonexistence or of being completely alone forever in an absolute void. Sometimes the person received a totally convincing message that the real world including themselves never really existed.” A few such reported experiences have included hellish imagery. Some also included a sense of personal torment or negative judgment.

"These experiences can be mapped onto specific psychological or religious templates but here are some general observations from the literature:
Distressing NDEs are comparatively rare and individual examples may not necessarily form a pattern:
As a result, what we know about frightening NDEs must be considered less certain than virtually any other aspect of NDEs.

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"People who had a distressing experience may be proportionately less likely to report it than people who had a pleasurable experience.

"It is often difficult for NDErs who had a pleasant experience to share their NDEs. It is understandable how hesitant an NDEr might be to share an experience that was frightening, or even terrifying. NDErs experiencing hellish NDEs are likely aware that they risk inviting negative judgments from others due to the content of their NDEs.

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"Prior studies of frightening and hellish NDEs have established that it is wrong to assume that ‘good people’ have pleasant NDEs and ‘bad people’ have hellish NDEs. In spite of the findings of these prior studies, this erroneous stereotype persists. This stereotype could greatly limit the desire of those experiencing hellish NDEs to share them.

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"It’s remarkable that one single experience can have such a profound, long-lasting, transformational effect. This is illustrated by research showing that people who have near-death experiences following suicide attempts very rarely attempt suicide again. This is in stark contrast to the normal pattern—in fact, a previous suicide attempt is usually the strongest predictor of actual suicide.

"Survivors often believe they have been to another realm. They lose all fear of death and become convinced that some aspect of their consciousness will survive it – although they struggle to say what, falling back on vague notions such as spirit and soul. Even people who were convinced that death is final often come back from a brush with it as believers in an afterlife."

Comment: Still fascinating. Afterlife may be real and many of these episodes, like Eben Alexander's amazing book.