Recall that in Gallup’s 1982 survey five percent of his sample or around 7.7 million in the total adult population reported having had an NDE. One percent of those described very negative or even hellish elements, quite different from anything that Moody and Ring experiencers had encountered,.
To be sure, Cardiologist Maurice Rawlings described such “negative” NDEs in his 1978 book “Beyond Death’s Door” finding them to be quite common. However, his objectivity as a researcher was seriously questioned. In subsequent years P.M.H. Atwater has estimated that 14% of the hundreds of people who have told her about their NDEs described them as “unpleasant or Hell-like.” Two substantial studies have reported the percentage of these negative NDEs as 17% and 18%, although smaller studies have found as many as 30%.
Dr. Bruce Greyson and Nancy Evans Bush in 1992 published a study of 50 frightening NDEs (February, Psychiatry) in which they identified three types. The most common type included the same general features as the pleasurable NDEs, such as an out-of-body experience and rapid movement through a tunnel or void toward a light, but the individual, usually because of feeling out of control of what was happening, experienced the features as frightening. The second type involved an acute awareness of nonexistence or of being completely alone forever in an absolute void. Sometimes the experiencers received a totally convincing message that the real world, including themselves, never really existed. The rarest type included hellish imagery such as an ugly or foreboding landscape; demonic beings; loud, annoying noises; frightening animals; and other beings in extreme distress. Only rarely have these individuals felt themselves personally tormented. (IANDS – “Distressing Near-Death Experiences”)
In her 2000 book” Blessings in Disguise” physician Barbara Rommer discussed her investigation of some 300 near-death experiencers, about 18 percent of which she described as “less than positive” NDEs (LTPs), as she termed them. What she discovered through detailed interviews with the 54 experiencers of LTPs was that these experiences occur instead of or in addition to a blissful light NDE for three basic reasons. First, they provide an impetus to reevaluate one’s previous choices, actions, reactions, thoughts, and belief systems. Second, LTPs may occur because the experiencer’s mindset immediately prior to the experience was less than loving. Third, they may occur because the experiencer was programmed during childhood to expect hell fire and brimstone upon dying. That is what they projected to the cosmos, and that is exactly what they may experience. (p. 196) It is the first that seems to be by far the most important. In fact, most LTPs end up being true learning experiences, and all of those experiencers she interviewed, with no exception, learned to change behavior that “doesn’t work” to that which does work.
Based on her study Rommer hypothesizes that who or what determines that which we see, hear, and feel in an NDE, whether it be less-than positive or a joyful one, is ourselves. We are the ones who determine this. It is our very consciousness, essence, soul, spirit, or life force, that projects what it is that we need to endure. If it is something that we need to shock us into change, then that is what we project and that is what we are shown. Remember, she points out, the cosmic forces, including a supreme entity, can certainly “read” our needs.
Rommer believes that once we are released from our physical shell and are on the “other plane,” we are pure thought or energy. Energy is information. Thus, in the initial portion of the LTP or NDE, we are the transmitters of our wants and needs, whether they are conscious or subconscious. The “cosmic forces, the One, the ultimate, the supreme being, our guardian angels, our guides, our deceased relatives, or whoever” are the initial receivers of this information. Later as the experience progresses, we become the receivers, and those entities become the transmitters.
What we need will far outweigh and take precedence over what we want. If we project the need for certain information or for a lesson to be learned, then that is what will be shown to us in the way that will best get our attention. This is why, Rommer believes, some experiences begin as positive and then change into less-than-positive and vice versa. Because, even while going through the experience, our thoughts continue to be projected as energy, what we are shown will be individual and congruent with our own model of the world, that is, primarily visual, auditory or kinesthetic. She thinks this may partially explain why some people see their deceased loved ones, some hear heavenly music, some smell their deceased loved one, and some come back having been told significant universal knowledge.
Our ultimate need, that which will make a significant difference in how we continue to live this present life more meaningfully, is ultimately what we are shown. But our wants as well can certainly be satisfied in an NDE. We receive what we ask for whether we realized we were asking or not. Rommer notes that nearly everyone who has had one of these experiences reports that “we are all connected, not only to each other, but to the supreme being.”
The title of her book, “Blessings in Disguise”, sums up Rommer’s conclusions about those near-death experiences that contain distressing elements. As Kenneth Ring said, “ the NDE is, indeed, a healing experience, where a benevolent healing force intrudes itself at the critical moment and provides soul-saving revelation.” To Rommer this can be particularly true with the LTP experience. “I regard the LTP as the most precious gift we could give ourselves, with the help of the cosmic forces, to set us on the path to healing.”
As we’ll see in a subsequent post Howard Storm’s NDE contained an intense encounter with demonic beings that preceded his even more intense experience with Jesus and the angels. George Ritchie was shown this dark hellish dimension in his experience 42 years earlier.