It's Hell Down There

[Guest guest]

by John Casey, a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge

 

ACCORDING to yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph, “negative” Near Death Experiences are increasingly being reported. They are much less comforting than the “positive” Near Death Experiences we are used to hearing about.

 

One woman who was ill from meningitis writes: “I had reached a critical stage of the illness, and was hovering between life and death. A three-legged being – rather like the Isle of Man symbol – was pulling my legs down to infinite depths.” Others have also reported the sensation of being dragged down into a dark pit by beings which strongly resembled our traditional picture of demons.

 

This is all very interesting. The earlier reports about light and peace seemed to fit our current prejudices against punishment. Whatever might happen in the next life, it would somehow have to be – well, nice. Now people are telling us how they felt they were being dragged into a pit. We remember the words of Isaiah: “Yet thou shalt be brought down to Hell, to the sides of the pit.”

 

Alexander Pope has some sour lines about churchmen softening Christian doctrine: “To rest, the Cushion and soft Dean invite/ Who never mentions Hell to ears polite.” It is curious that in our own time a majority of people hold on to a faith in some sort of Heaven, but reject the once-universal belief in Hell.

 

And even though the bishops of the Church of England last year reaffirmed the doctrine of possible future punishment, several hastened to reassure us that they were not thinking of anything so primitive as flames and devils.

 

Yet it seems that some people still do have those very ideas at the back of their minds, and that these come to the surface in moments of extreme danger. This is not surprising. Some belief in a hell is found among the ancient Egyptians, in Buddhism and in late Judaism.

 

But it is Christianity which has produced the subtlest and strongest philosophy about Hell. This is because Christianity has expended immense intellectual energy in trying to work out why moral evil is of infinitely greater significance than physical evil.

 

For Christians, sin is a turning away of the human will from God. The most obdurate and serious sin is the choice of oneself rather than God, through pride.

 

Christians have seen this as a choice of nothingness rather than the fullness of being which is God, and they have often thought of Hell as a state of unrelieved egoism. Contrary to Sartre, Hell is self -ishness rather than “other people”.

 

Heaven, accordingly, is loss of self in the contemplation of God. The truth is, that traditional Christian beliefs in Original Sin, the fallen nature of man, the need for redemption and the contrasting perfection of God, necessitate a doctrine of Hell.

 

So these experiences involving the Isle of Man symbol and such like suggest that the pendulum may be swinging back towards the ancient orthodoxies.

[Guest guest]

Nonsense. Dr. Casey is quite quite easily fooled.

[theist]

http://www.near-death.com/storm.html

[Avinash]

There was a great center of brilliance. In the center there was an enormously bright concentration. Outside the center countless millions of spheres of light were flying about entering and leaving what was a great being-ness at the center.

 

Could it be Goloka or Vaikuntha or some other spiritual planet?

 

I observed to them that the Bible wasn’t clear to me. It didn’t make sense. They told me that it contained spiritual truth, and that I had to read it spiritually in order to understand it. It should be read prayerfully. My friends informed me that it was not like other books. They also told me, and I later found out this was true, that when you read it prayerfully, it talks to you. It reveals itself to you. And you don’t have to work at it anymore.

 

Is this true with Puranas also?

 

I asked them, for example, which was the best religion. I was looking for an answer which was like, "Presbyterians." I figured these guys were all Christians.

 

The answer I got was, "The best religion is the religion that brings you closest to God."

 

There cannot be a better answer.

 

Asking them if there was life on other planets, their surprising answer was that the universe was full of life.

 

It is just that we have not been able to observe them.

 

I then asked them how come there had been so many wars. They said that they allowed those few to happen, out of all the wars that humanity tried to start. Out of all the wars that humans tried to create, they allowed a few, to bring people to their senses and to stop them.

 

I wonder what would have been the fate of the world if all the wars had been allowed to happen.

 

They want everyone to love everyone else, completely; more, even, than they love themselves. If someone, someplace else in the world hurts, than we should hurt – we should feel their pain. And we should help them.

 

I wish I could be like that, but am not. In majority of the cases when I have helped others, it is less of love and more of ego and hypocrisy.

 

My friends explained, quite clearly, that all it takes to make a change was one person.

 

Strange though it may sound, I believe in this completely.

 

[Guest guest]

Haribol. Been there, done that. There are three doors. Light is suicide, and to go there means that you choose to never have existed.

 

another door has all these ancestors, and that just makes you do it all over again, like the Martin Landau Twilight Zone (remember that one, hey lets do a twilight zone topic. eh)

 

The good choice may seem like the worst one, the guide. He may be brilliant, but he may seem like a fool living drunk in the gutter. But he (or she) is the one to take you to first see death, then to Yama, then to where ya can progress next time around.

 

DONT GO TO THE LIGHT, IT IS A VERY SAD TRICK. ERASURE IS NOT WHAT YA WANT (or maybe ya do).

 

haribol, mahak (of three separate NDEs)

[theist]

Mahak,they don't describe becoming absorbed in the light. The Light is just their first glimpse of that dimension, the atmosphere. At that level the Brahman effulgence is still distant.

 

Anyway at the time of death we don't want to be picking and choosing which way we want to go. Simnply chanting Hare Krsna....idealy. /images/graemlins/smirk.gif

[Kulapavana]

NDE (near death experiences) may not be all that indicative of what happens to you when you actually die. even if we assume they are real, and not just the ramblings of our confused mind (and that is a big IF), they would represent only the first steps of our journey.

 

and to think that somehow you can chose where you go from there seems quite absurd.