Distressing doesn’t equal hellish.
The topic of distressing experiences, be it NDEs or other conscious “anomalies”, comes up consistently and I’d like to share my thoughts today as well as hear yours.
For disclosure, I’m agnostic about most things but had my own share of weird happenings in the past. I’m mostly sure of what I don’t believe or consider likely, I don’t have fixed beliefs. Only ideas, lol.
To get to the point, I think it really matters how we talk about things and what terms we use to describe events and feelings, which brings me to the title of my post.
Many people seem to conflate distressing with “hellish” imaginary, although both words have quite different meanings.
This seems to inspire a lot of fear I have noticed, especially for people who grew up christian or muslim I guess. There are a lot of posts where people want to talk about hellish experiences when they actually mean distressing or negative. The way we speak or think of things actually actively constructs our conception of them. That has nothing to do with spirituality btw, I’m talking from a sociological and psychological standpoint here.
So if you’re one of the people who hears distressing and thinks hellish, I don’t think there are reasons to worry.
I do want to emphasize that distressing experiences absolutely happen and are perhaps even underreported. I found this paper from Bruce Greyson and Nancy Evans Bush ( who’s very knowledgeable on the topic) about distressing NDEs where they tried to categorize the variety of negative experiences. It’s worth noting that experiences that feature imaginary that could be interpreted as explicitly “hellish” are the absolute minority within the minority of distressing NDEs.
They came up with three types of negative NDEs ( just for categorization purposes, the contents of negative NDEs are probably as diverse as the nice ones), one of them being what they call an “inverse” NDE with the others being void-types and the very rare “hellish” types.
I found it intriguing , because the account they cite as one of the examples reads like a “typical” western NDE account. The difference lies in the perception of the experiencer himself. Here’s the account:
“In some NDEs, features usually reported in other NDEs as pleasurable are perceived as hostile or threatening. A man thrown from his horse found himself floating at treetop height, watching emergency medical technicians working over a his body. “No! No! This isn’t right!” He screamed, “Put me back!” but they did not hear him. Next he was shooting through darkness toward a bright light, flashing past shadowy people who seemed to be deceased family members waiting. He was panic-stricken by the bizarre scenario and his inability to affect what was happening.”
As you can see, this guy did not have a good time despite his run-of-the-mill NDE. The contents that seem to be comforting to so many others were distressing to him in the moment. I think experiences like these really show the subjective nature of all things anomalous. Like many I suppose that our own perspective is crucial in determining whether the experience feels safe or distressing. Perhaps more subconsciously than consciously but I don’t really know. I do think that the majority of negative NDEs could be of this inverse type. Where the distressing part isn’t necessarily the content, but the experiencer’s reaction.
Generally speaking, there is no obvious reason to explain why some people have blissful NDEs and others have negative ones. At this point, I don’t even remember what compelled me to write this novel. I guess I had something brewing for a while because the frequency of hell related and fearful questions has increased in my opinion? I might be wrong, but I could swear that I people weren’t as concerned about hell a few years ago.
Lastly, I liked how the paper mentioned how NDEs, and really any other type of afterlife related phenomena imo, can be troubling for both materialist reductionists and overly religious people.
It’s also interesting how neither reductionism nor spiritual or religious dogma appear to be helpful for integrating the experience.