Patients  visions of hell
By Robert Matthews, Science Correspondent





TERRIFYING accounts of gravely ill people who claim to have been dragged to the gates of hell by demons are to be studied scientifically for the first time by a British psychologist.

The existence of so-called Near Death Experiences (NDEs), in which dying people report having mystical sensations before being resuscitated, is now widely accepted by doctors and scientists. Their cause is unknown, but they typically involve a feeling of deep peace, followed by a sensation of floating up through a tunnel towards a bright light and into a beautiful kingdom.

But it is now becoming clear that for some people, NDEs are far from blissful. Instead of a feeling of floating upwards, they report being pulled downwards - towards a pit inhabited by demons.

The experiences of Evelyn Hazell, a London-based art historian, as she fought for life against meningitis, are typical. "I had reached a critical stage in the illness and was hovering between life and death - I was aware of being involved in an intense and very real struggle for my life," she told The Telegraph. "A three-legged being - rather like the Isle of Man symbol - was pulling both my legs down to infinite depths. I knew without doubt that if I relaxed and gave in I would be dead. I believe this struggle went on for some considerable time and I eventually managed to break away from whatever it was pulling me down."

Mrs Hazell went on to make a full recovery, but she has never forgotten her terrifying ordeal at the very threshold of death. "I do not believe it was a dream or hallucination. In every way I was lucid - I was just terribly ill. If nothing else, it did prove to me that in certain situations refusing to fight an illness will lead to death."

A similar experience continues to haunt Jane, a woman who fought for life after a miscarriage. "It was an awful feeling - like I was going down a big hole and I couldn't get up. I was going into this big pit. I was going further and further down, and trying to claw my way back up and kept slipping.".

Similar accounts are now being studied by a psychologist at Coventry University, who plans to use science to probe the nature of "negative NDEs". According to Tony Lawrence, lecturer in psychology at the university, research so far suggests that there are two basic types of negative NDEs.

"Some describe a kind of void - an absence of experience, a feeling that there really is nothing at all after life," said Mr Lawrence. "But there are also NDEs that are obviously very negative. They often involve a feeling of being dragged down into a pit, rather than a tunnel, and sometimes have demons involved. What little research has been done on them makes fairly clear that these 'hellish' experiences are very rare. What I am hoping to do is to find as many people as possible who have had negative NDEs and see if any consistent picture emerges which may explain their cause."

Over the years, various explanations have been put forward for the positive variety of NDEs, ranging from the effects of medication to the lack of oxygen reaching the brain in its final moments. Such explanations fail to explain, however, the consistency of the experience: hallucinations brought on by drugs or anoxia are typically completely random and senseless. Harder still to understand are reports of NDEs from hospital patients whose ECG traces became completely flat during resuscitation - showing that there was no activity in their brain.

The eerie parallels between the reports of NDEs and traditional views of heaven and hell also defy simple explanation, said Mr Lawrence. Attempts to dismiss the images as nothing more than cultural memories do not stand up. "In fact there seems to be a general lack of cultural factors determining the content of these experiences. People from many different cultures will describe meeting a figure of light. They don't meet Jesus or Vishnu or Buddha - although afterwards they may sometimes describe what they saw in that way. The cultural influences only seem to emerge in the interpretation of what was seen, not in the basic experience itself."

One comforting finding to emerge from the few cases Mr Lawrence has tracked down is a lack of any link between negative NDEs and a misspent life. He said: "There are no obvious reasons why these people have had their experiences - certainly they are not obvious sinners."

Alan.dont believe everything you see in on writen on paper.only your own experiences will set you free.Are you forgetting all the experiences the people have had on this form,website.You know that guy who said he will give us a million dolloers,if you can give prouf of the afterlive.He would not believe you even if you brought jesus christ with you for prouf.George

Greetings,

Lea's comment " When I did relax though and go through with it,
I was pulled through my body (down) was not lifted up and
what was on the other side waiting once I let go of the fear
was the greatest experience of my life"
points out that fear was a big factor.

Perhaps these people had something in their lives that caused them to greatly fear death before the experience. Then they used all the fearful images they could think of to express it to themselves.
I don't fear three legged beings because I've never heard of them. I think they'd be sort of cute, clamering around like little three-legged stepstools!    So it seems it was personal choices that account for the images they came up with. Just as for sailors of old it was Schylla and Charybidis (sic).

Like Lea, they would have risen to the heavens if they'd had time to 'give it up.'

Love, Bets

Hi, Don AND Others nice responses there1

Ahhh1 Don I am so glad you responded in the elequant way you did. I have had a Hell experience during an OBE that was so horrifying that I have not descibed it to the forum.

It convinced me that there is a real hell and we have eternal consequences for or eathly actions in the afterlife that go far beyond the idea of reincarnation and karma.

There is absolutely a judgement of some kind or the other especially for some power mad depraved monsters that have plagued the pathways of human history. I avoid the word evil as this seems a misnomer to so many. Maybe one should say those who have moved far from redemption, separated from god in abject blackness is hell, but this was not the hell I experienced, it was much more awful and typical of the biblical hell. I saw beings sufferring in this terrible place, yes place, it was not a figment of me imagination as this place did not exist hidden somewhere in the atic of my subconciousness, but was a hell beyond the abiliy of the human mind to peceive in reality.

alan

Good thread, folks:

I'm wondering, Don.....in your research of these experiences, has anyone looked into the different effects produced by the medicines many of these NDE people are on? I remember from my long ago druggie days that some drugs just weren't for me, since they'd produce an unpleasant "head" everytime. Others would produce a very pleasant experience. I simply learned which to avoid.

If I'm in an accident and the paramedics blast me full of pain killers, sedatives and such.........are these real "places" I'm experiencing or just the effect of the drug?

-Chuck-

  Good point Chuck, re: the drug issue. 

To me, this is similar to the issue of nightmares vs dreams to some extent.   A long time ago, Edgar Cayce's guidance talked about how nightmares were often the product of imbalanced body reactions, particularly in relation to bad digestion close to bedtime.  Yet, dreams and dreaming was given an almost exalted status in these readings, and seemed to most pertain to actual experiences in some other dimension or dimensions, which get a bit skewed in the remembering/translating into physical waking state.   

  I've talked to folks on different prescriptions, who report somewhat regular nightmares.    I haven't had one since i was little, and i believe that is because i've really cleaned up my diet since then (and almost never eat a heavy or hard to digest food or meal right near bedtime), and i don't take any drugs whatsoever, not even aspirin or the like. 

  However, at the same time, i would not be surprised if some or even most of these accounts are real, non body based accounts of temporary visits to the slowest vibrating hells. 

   

  I remember being a little kid, and being scared of the devil, because i would have nightmares about him coming after me.   At first i thought i had to fight the devil, spit in his eye so to speak, but later on i started to feel bad for "him" and started to think maybe i should try to help him somehow.

Hi, Don and others,-

Don Quoted

Quote:
(see "Heaven and Hell").

Yes Don this experience was not something caused by drugs  , altered states or nightmares as some would suggest. It was unspeakably horrifying real. Thank goodness I was not in this hell, but viewed it from the outside, like a person on a tour of a prison. This experience happened when I was wrestling with the enigma of evil existing together with a  supposed all powerful benign god. I personally think existence is a duality if we like it or not.

What I saw there supprised me. There where people there that I did not expect to be there and I clearly saw depraved beings of the like of Stalin, Nero, Hitler, Pol Pot, Hassien etc etc. I was somewhat supprised that people such as gays where not in this awful place as some fundamentals would hope. God appeared extremely merciful and said Hell was a place for the unspeakable depraved. Not only earth beings were in this place, but other sentient evil life forms confined there. Foever? I dont know as this was not revealed to me.

Quote:


Nothing to do with drugs although these can produce terrible nightmares , but these nightmares are a childrens picknick compared to what I saw.

alan

A provocative and interesting thread guys. I've no very negative experience to offer, but can share a view with some tough implications.

Observation tends to say that if we're to be honest even the lives of apparently quite caring and responsible people are in reality the result of a huge tension between heart and selfishness. One in which a moderately positive balance is just maintained. i.e. both 'tendencies' exist within them, what manifests is some aggregate. And that's before we think of the 'monsters' (the 'not me') of this world as we like to regard them.

At the universal level if one accepts the view that the total reality we with all the other beings of the cosmos inhabit is mind made ('with your minds you make the world'), and that this higher mind while not obviously so at our normal C1 level is actually at higher levels of awareness collective in nature (shared by all these beings) - then it seems inevitable that our higher mind must contain all the positive and negative potential that makes up the total cosmos.

Meaning that higher awareness must at least make possible access to what we might perceive from this level of form or C1 thought as some pretty nasty and negative aspects of this collective mind.

It seems highly unlikely to me that the afterlife (what happens after life) should be solely a 'happy happy' experience - that any such view must surely be more of the usual fear and ego driven denial we go on with in an effort to avoid facing reality.

It's fairly clear too that this universal mind must in this view contain absolutely the nastiest stuff we can imagine - if you can imagine it, it's by definition in there.

Quite under what circumstances we become aware the worst of this stuff I don't know. Tibetan Buddhism teaches that during the process of dissolution prior to rebirth in the afterlife we become aware of both the positive and then the negative aspects of our minds, and that depending on what karma we have generated in life this can be a pretty horrifying experience.

But on the other hand it seems to teach that this is largely personal mind and karma, meaning that we are not necessarily exposed in the afterlife (bardo) to the true depths of the nastiness of all that's potentially out there.

The good news I suppose is that it also teaches 'form is emptiness, emptiness is form'. Meaning that none of this stuff in the end has any ultimate existence or permanent reality, that it's just dualistic mind at play.

All of this talk of the negative must be getting to me. Last night for the first time I woke to find myself in my fairly typical velvety blackness, but with this sense of being menaced by something I couldn't see. Somehow I had the presence to head for the loving response, and after a few minutes it lifted and I fell asleep again...

Hi the previous post sent itself off before I could finish?

Nanna Quoted
Quote:





Nanna, I believe your father opened himself to dark negativity by the use of alchohol, but he was not a dark soul himself but a good kind man. I can see this in his offspring, namely you my beloved Nanna. His soul was being reabilitated in the afterlife.


I would like to emphasize again that my very lucid hell OBE had nothing to do with chemical or drug dellussion or getting into some sort of altered state of consciousness by deep protracted meditation. It just happened out of the blue, so to speak

Varga  Quoted
Quote:


Yes, Varga, after all we are all part of the universal mind are we not?

alan

Nanna

Excuse the appalling errors typographical and others in my latest posts.I have neglected proof reading before posting.


alan

[Albert:] "My experiences have shown me that spirits aren't forced to stay in lower realms.  They choose to do so."
______________________

That of course is my hope based on astral retrievals and my understanding of the Bible.
But a distinction must be drawn between levels of Hell in which souls can be retrieved and others whose evil character is so hardened by a lack of desire to change that the requisite transformation of energetic make-up is no longer practical.  The lower the hell, the less likely it is that retrieval efforts will be successful.  The evidence of astral exploration (especially Swedenborg) suggests that some souls are simply incorrigible.  The heart-rending nature of this issue makes it fertile ground for conjured experiences based on wishful thinking.  The retrieval of a few is no more justification for universalistic dogma than snatching a minnow from a brook is fuel for the claim that other fish like great white sharks must be harmless too.

[Albert:] "One time I hovered above a lower realm during an out of body experience. I clearly understood that beings could leave this realm when they asked for help from light beings.  After the experience ended the thought came to me that sometimes they find their way out through ouija boards."
_____________________________
This claim about Ouija boards seems so implausible that I would take it as a sign that this particular astral experience is bogus.  Also, remember that Dante's Inferno is pure fiction and is intended as a political satire. 

[Albert:] "I find it hard to believe that God would punish any spirit, not even the spirit of Adolph Hitler, for all of eternity...Plus imagine what it is like when a person such as Hitler finally gets around to admitting what he did. The amount of remorse and guilt he'll have to work through will be something else."
____________________________________

For me, the real question is whether someone like Hitler is capable of true remorse.  True remorse is more than sorrow for his sad predicamant; it implies a glimpse of a more loving state of consciousness and a longing to attain it.  I hope Hilter is capable of such transformation.  The best astral evidence calls into question whether this is a realistic hope.  That said, despite my pessimism, in the next life I would act on the assumption that any soul is retrievable until I was forced by repeated failure to abandon this hope.

[Albert:] "Atwater...found that people who have such experiences usually have them because of issues of guilt, anger and fear (or some combination)."
__________________________________________

I don't think she succeeds in establishing such a neat causal cannection.  Her wishful thinking causes her to seriously beg the question.  From my survey of such hellish NDEs, there seems to be inadequate justification for her premature generalization.  That said, I hope she is correct.

"She also found that people tend to have NDEs that they need to have."
________________________

Again, I think she is being too selective in the cases she cites.  Many of Rawlings' patients seem to be devastated by hellish experiences with no evident positive function.   One can always decide to read the most likely silver lining into a negative astral experience and then beg the question by making a premature assertion about its purpose.

Don

Don:

Regarding the Ouija board reference, this thought occurred to me "after" my out of body experience was over. There was no doubt about what was revealed when the OBE took place. Things were known automatically.  The ouija board message meant that sometimes spirits find their way out of a lower realm not by choosing to ascend to the light, but because people mess around with ouija boards. My guess is that other things such as messing around with black magic will do the same. In fact, if a person becomes really negative in some way, they might make an energetic connection to such a spirit.

Regarding the Dante's inferno message, it wasn't intended as a joke. This is clear when I consider how the message related to what was going on for me at the time. The point was that as long as I choose to move in the direction of God's will, nothing can force me to be in a lower realm or to do what unloving people/spirits do. I suppose the same is true for others.

I acknowledge that there might be some spirits who get so lost, they never come to the point where they want to move towards God. If I was such a spirit, I would hope that somebody would have mercy on my soul and bring my meaningless and dark experience to an end. For who would want to live in a state that is lacking in love and full of darkness for all of eternity?


Blink:

Thank you.

Berserk2 wrote on Feb 5^th, 2008 at 9:13pm:


That, my dear friend, is BS.

God can choose to elevate whomever God chooses.

It has absolutely nothing to do with our own concept of justice.

love, blink

    I may be wrong, but it's probably this statement below made by Don that Blink was referring to as "B.S."

Don wrote, "The parents' awareness that the criminal has been brought to justice brings a profound sense of satisfaction, though nothing can totally make up for the loss of their child."


   I also greatly disagree with the above.  One cannot experience true happiness from another's suffering in that sense, no matter what that person did or didn't do.   For someone to look for such to begin with, can only be a revenge, and lacking in love type reaction. 

   To know that a person who has erred, may learn or eventually grow into a more loving awareness, because of the things that they have suffered by attracting like to themselves, is a totally different story though.   
  One could find a true happiness in that, and i imagine that the Elders and our Councils look upon our human drama's with those feelings and thoughts in their melded heart minds, a kind of detached concern and compassion and realizing that while suffering does hurt, its for most a necessary catalyst.   They don't take joy in the suffering part, but in the end result realizing that the Fire of challenge and testing is what helped extract the pure Gold from the dross and all that hinders from being pure Gold. 

Absolutely, Alan, I was terribly rude to speak to Don this way and I apologize to him and to you. I considered removing my comment almost immediately after writing it, but I thought it would be better to be corrected by you. If not you, I was sure someone would do it.

This is a subject close to my heart. Don's example is one which I have experienced directly, although no "crime" was committed. I'm not going to go into it.  

People can be very quick to blame in this world, and can be very quick and overly sure who should bear responsibility. Very often we are wrong. Very often, our actions to produce "justice" create only more misery.

I don't really have much sympathy for someone's sense of "closure" regarding murderers. Murderers are also human beings.

But, if in the afterlife, this is justice, so be it.

From my point of view, I don't think I get to "choose" who hitches a ride when I do a "retrieval" if that, indeed, has occurred. Purely from my own experience, it seems to me that there is a greater authority who decides what will occur. I have no idea how this happens, but it is not me who is making this decision, as far as I can tell.

I am willing to consider that it might be "beautiful" for each spirit to rise to his/her own level of experience and float happily or unhappily among those of their own kind. But that concept still annoys something in me. It is a feeling that something is missing from this picture.

Think about the word murderer. That is a label. Who is behind the label? There is a human being behind the label. When we attach labels to human beings we end up with prisons and other places which are palaces of pain which treat human beings like dirt. I don't care what anyone has done in their past. I've said it before and I'll say it again.

Today is the day we live in. Now is the moment we live in. Love is the reality we strive to reach.

Say the word "murderer" again. Do you feel any closer to Love?

love, blink

Hi alan Theres no such place as hell hence" thrown in the fire of hell for eternity"Hell is a manmade word according to spirit,there is a lower plain in the spiritworld where all the crap that lived on the earth plain go but even they can rise higher ,when they realised what b******ds they were and change there ways,so there is hope for the crap of this world.God loves us all and gives each and everyone a chance to love and not give out hate towards there brother or sister as we are all brothers and sisters in this world.

Love and God bless    love juditha