“Hellish” Near-Death Experiences
One of my correspondents wrote me: “In 1992 I had a brain aneurysm bleed, and was given very little chance to live. Unfortunately I didn’t have the wonderful experience of going to the light. I went to the darkness and it was an experience that was both terrifying and life altering. If this is a glimpse of hell it is not at all the fire and demons—it is total isolation. I often wondered if there are others who have had this experience and if they see it as a warning or as a prophetic experience. I have never discussed this with anyone as it seems to be outside the bounds of what we all desire. Thank God I don’t think it lasted long. But it is as clear today as if it happened this morning.”
It is tempting, given the overwhelmingly positive nature of the NDE portrayed in the bulk of both popular and scientific literature, to assume that, whatever is signified by this phenomenon, its main thrust is extremely good news about dying and death. However, there is another side to the story, one that has not yet been fully studied and assimilated by NDE researchers. That some people who come close to the gates of death experience a reality that is anything but reassuring was first fully discussed by Dr. Maurice Rawlings in his 1978 book, Beyond Death’s Door.8 Rawlings, an evangelical, fundamentalist Christian, argued from his medical experience that some people who have an NDE feel themselves to be in hell. Beyond Death’s Door is not a particularly good book in my opinion, as Rawlings only manages to adduce a very tiny number of such stories, and one has the feeling throughout that he had already decided on his conclusions before he began his research. But at least Rawlings has raised the issue that possibly all is not light and bliss during the near-death experience.
When George Gallup Jr. published his 1982 book, Adventures in Immortality: A Look Beyond the Threshold of Death, he too referred to respondents who said they had had a “hellish” experience while close to death. For the most recent and the most insightful look at this aspect of the NDE, though, one must look at Margot Grey’s Return From Death: An Exploration of the Near-Death Experience.9 Grey, a humanistic psychologist, based her research on interviews with thirty-eight people claiming near-death experiences and many more patients she later worked with in her practice. Grey herself had an NDE when she had a close brush with death while travelling in India. She reports she too had an encounter with light accompanied by a “feeling of being very close to the source of light and love, which seemed to be one.” Grey, who has no religious ties, states quite categorically that her studies have brought her to the conclusion that “conscious awareness survives physical death.”10
Her chapter on negative experiences breaks some new ground. She bases her remarks here on five of her own cases and nine negative cases from the general literature, together with information gleaned from interviews with cardiologists who have been on the lookout for NDE reports from their patients. Like Rawlings, these doctors stressed that negative NDEs are only made known very shortly after the episodes happen. In other words, such experiences tend to be quickly repressed. Grey found that those who experience this type of NDE feel a sense of guilt or shame at hellish experiences and would rather not admit to them. She also concludes that they may indeed have had some terrible deed in their background that they felt accounted for their sense of being in or going to hell. In his review of her book, Karlis Osis says that in this finding Grey “has put her finger on the right spot. We might need to rethink our methods. Maybe we have relied too much on the self-reports of the patients and have failed to ascertain observations made through the cooler eyes of doctors and nurses who were around when the patients started to talk about the NDEs that were still fresh in their memories.”11
Grey was able to come up with some quite significant similarities between the pattern of positive NDEs and that of the negative ones. In the negative NDE, instead of peace and a sense of well-being, there is a feeling of fear and panic. The sense of being out of the body is similar in both types. Instead of entering a tunnel, however, in the negative NDE one enters a black void. There is no light, but rather the sense of an evil force, and one enters what can only be described as a hell-like environment. In the negative cases, there are after-effects, too. “Like those respondents who had positive experiences, the people in this category returned from their encounters with an increased conviction that life continues after death. They also felt a strong urge radically to modify their former way of life.”12
In all, about one-eighth of Grey’s interviewees reported experiences that were hell-like. None of this, of course, means that such imagery has to be taken in a literal fashion or that there is such a place or state as a literal hell. But, it is clearly an area of research that still needs much more careful examination. As Osis remarks, “If this pattern is replicated and sound, it would require nothing less than considering the positive and negative NDEs as one integrated whole—a sweeping reorganization of our views.”
Problems with the Near-Death Experience
According to the International Association for Near-Death Studies, “An NDE may occur when a person is considered clinically dead, or even to one not close to death but who is under some biological and/or psychological stress. Somehow, the experience appears to be a biologically-based trigger for a spiritual event.” For me, one of the most exhaustive and fascinating attempts to understand just what is going on in this event is a book by Carol Zaleski, Other-world Journeys: Accounts of Near-Death Experience in Medieval and Modern Times. Zaleski, who wrote this work initially as her doctoral thesis in religious studies at Harvard, gives us a sparkling overview of the NDE and sets it in a more universal perspective by analyzing examples from sources as diverse as the epic of Gilgamesh, Plato, St. Paul and Dante’s Divine Comedy. Her main focus, however, as the title says, is a comparison of medieval otherworld journeys with those described in the NDE literature of today. In addition, she reviews the modern scientific debate between the advocates of the NDE as a real glimpse of eternity and the hard-nosed skeptics who pour cascades of cold water over such “imaginative flights of fancy.”
Zaleski finds amazing parallels between the experiences of medieval saints, mystics and ordinary folk, and those relayed on talk shows or in the books of the NDE researchers of today. But she also finds some remarkable differences: “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.”13 In other words, there is something very western about the terms in which the modern otherworld traveller conceptualizes his or her vision.
This brings us to one of the first observations I want to make about the NDE. The experience, though obviously universal in the sense that we can find examples of it at every time period and in every culture, is nevertheless culture specific. That is, it is expressed in forms of thought and language peculiar to its historical context. While those who have had the experience may all, or nearly all, see beings of light, these will be described variously as Jesus, Buddha or Krishna depending on who is doing the seeing and where. Zaleski points out, for example, that Dante’s heaven is much more hierarchical than any heaven in modern NDE experience. But the social order of Dante’s time was itself a hierarchical one: “For medieval audiences, the ranking of the blessed in a series of concentric but ascending heavens . . . derived its plausibility—or rather its imaginative power—from the fact that it reflected and affirmed the social order and provided an emblem for the structure of