This account of an NDE by a woman who almost died during childbirth was relayed to me third-hand, but I'm personally acquainted with the experiencer, and I consider her account to be true. To my knowledge, she's not a paranormalist. For many years, she belonged to a fundamentalist Christian denomination, and as far as I know, fundamentalism is the main filter through which she views the "supernatural."
Her NDE happened in the 1990s in a hospital, following a very difficult pregnancy. She said that a man appeared beside her bedside and said, simply, "It's your time," and indicated that she should follow him. She was an unwed single mother, and she said, "I can't leave; there's no one to take care of my son." The man the looked up, then back down at the mother, and said, "You're right." The man then left. After he was gone, demonic-appearing forms rose up from the floor and tried to persuade her that what she had just experienced was an illusion.
I regard this as a genuine NDE... Unlike most of the published NDEs, this individual was supposed to die. In most classic NDEs, the experiencers are near death but are told, "It's not your time." I think that this is an important distinction.
Why the consistent references in these accounts to "your time"? This phrase runs throughout NDE accounts, but as far as I know, no researcher has wondered why. To me, it implies that while our lives are governed by free will choices and consequences, karma, life plans followed or not followed, our "time" is less negotiable. It is an absolute, in most cases. (Some NDEers are given a choice whether to "stay" or not, but I suspect these accounts are rare.)
The arrival of demonic-seeming entities at the end of the experience is also a feature that's common to many supra-physical experiences. Be it contemporary men-in-black who lecture experiencers that they did not actually see a UFO, to the various historical devils that have tried to persuade the righteous to abandon monotheism, these dark beings seem to know just when to show up--immediately after the transcendent encounter. Never before, never during--but immediately after. Perhaps they are not so much evil as they are necessary. Perhaps our physical world must have this dichotomy to function in any useful way.
I'll be very, very pissed off if existence is run along the lines of karma and payback. Same goes for any good/evil binary simplicity.
ReplyDeleteFor either system to work would require administrators. Yep - bean-counters! It would also involve some absolute values and rules or would be open to relativism, equivocation and subjective opinion.
Taken further, on whose authority would such agents exert their judgements? Would there be an appeal process? Would there be an oversight committee? If a miscarriage of judgement would occur, how would it be rectified?
I wonder if we're supposed to exit one unfair world and enter another? Wouldn't that be depressing scenario?
Intriguingly, few of the NDEs on record are suggestive of such a banal hereafter. Religious simplicity isn't a feature and experiencers across the world tend to record details that are culturally neutral. That hyperreality of interconnected, colourful wonder sounds much better than some deskjockey with a spreadsheet of my deeds.