by Pim van Lommel

A Frightening NDE

Perhaps one to two percent of people with a near-death experience linger in a frightening dark space, unable to escape. To their horror, they sometimes find themselves pulled even deeper into the profound darkness. The NDE ends in this scary atmosphere, from where people reenter their body. The experience is devoid of positive emotions and later stirs profound feelings of guilt. In fact, such a terrifying NDE usually produces long-lasting emotional trauma. Not surprisingly, it is also known as a “hell experience.” The exact number of people who experience such a frightening NDE is unknown because they often keep quiet out of shame and guilt. Yet if people can accept and make sense of this negative experience, they too eventually exhibit positive change. Evans Bush’s study has shown that people who have a frightening experience are not necessarily bad people. One possible explanation is that everybody has some negative character traits and that during a frightening NDE one or more such negative aspects are magnified for later analysis. A person is not defined by such a negative character trait although this does not make the experience any less intense.

“Suddenly I stopped in this dark tunnel and began to fall at enormous speed, faster and faster and faster. Like I was literally hurled down, head-first, into this black hole. It was pitch-dark; I couldn’t see a thing. And as I was falling, I began to hear screams, shrieks, heartrending, dreadful, terrible laughter, and the most disgusting stench you can imagine, and then the blackness changed to fire… And there were all kinds of ghastly looking and terrifying creatures, some worse than others, who were snatching at me… I begged for God’s mercy… And suddenly I was woken up by the voices of female ER doctors who had resuscitated me…”

Next is the account of a visit to the netherworld during the comprehensive NDE of George Ritchie, who nearly died as a twenty-year-old medical student. The account shows a remarkable similarity with the description of hell in Dante’s The Divine Comedy.

We were moving again. We had left the Navy base with its circumference of seedy streets and bars, and were now standing, in this dimension where travel seemed to take no time at all, on the edge of a wide, flat plain… I could see no living man or woman. The plain was crowded, even jammed with hordes of ghostly discarnate beings… All of these thousands of people were apparently no more substantial than I myself. And they were the most frustrated, the angriest, the most completely miserable beings I had ever laid eyes on.

“Lord Jesus!” I cried. “Where are we?”…

Everywhere people were locked in what looked like fights to the death, writhing, punching, gouging…

Although they appeared to be literally on top of each other, it was as though each man was boxing the air; at last I realized that of course, having no substance, they could not actually touch one another…

If I suspected before that I was seeing hell, now I was sure of it. Up to this moment the misery I had watched consisted in being chained to a physical world of which we were no longer part. Now I saw that there were other kinds of chains… These creatures seemed to be locked into habits of mind and emotion, into hatred, lust, destructive thought patterns.

Even more hideous than the bites and kicks they exchanged were the sexual abuses many were performing in feverish pantomime… Whatever anyone thought, however fleetingly or unwillingly, was instantly apparent to all around him, more completely than words could have expressed it…

And the thoughts most frequently communicated had to do with the superior knowledge, or abilities, or background of the thinker…

What was it going to be like, I thought with sudden panic, to live forever where my most private thoughts were not private at all? No disguising them, no covering them up, no way to pretend I was anything but what I actually was. How unbearable… Perhaps in the course of eons or of seconds, each creature here had sought out the company of others as pride-and-hate-filled as himself, until together they formed this society of the damned… I didn’t know. All I clearly saw was that not one of these bickering beings on the plain had been abandoned. They were being attended, watched over, ministered to. And the equally observable fact was that not one of them knew it.

6. The Perception of an Unearthly Environment

People often find themselves in a dazzling landscape with gorgeous colors, remarkable flowers, and sometimes also incredibly beautiful music. Some see cities and splendid buildings.

“What I saw was too beautiful for words: I was looking at a magnificent landscape full of flowers and plants that I couldn’t actually name. It all looked hundreds of miles away. And yet I could see everything in detail—even without glasses, although in real life I have bad eyesight. It was both far away and close.”

“Exceptionally beautiful. The best way to describe it would be: a heavenly sight.”

“I arrived in a royal realm, or at least that’s what it smelled like. The atmosphere, insofar as you could call it that, was divine, a flowery, sweet-smelling environment, which was completely three dimensional and about a thousand times more beautiful than my favorite holiday destination in spring.”

7. Meeting and Communicating with Deceased Persons

Hamlet: My father! Methinks I see my father. Horatio: Where, my lord? Hamlet: In my mind’s eye, Horatio. ~SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet

Some people are aware of the presence of deceased friends or family members whom they also clearly recognize. Sometimes these people look healthy again, even though the prevailing memory of them is as very sick and weak in the period before they died. If they died at a very young age, they may look like young adults now. Some NDErs see individuals whom they have never met before or of whose death they could not have been aware. They feel a strong connection with the thoughts and feelings of people who have died in the past.

“During my NDE following a cardiac arrest, I saw both my dead grandmother and a man who looked at me lovingly but whom I didn’t know. Over ten years later my mother confided on her deathbed that I’d been born from an extramarital affair; my biological father was a Jewish man who’d been deported and killed in World War II. My mother showed me a photograph. The unfamiliar man I’d seen more than ten years earlier during my NDE turned out to be my biological father.”

“At the age of sixteen I had a serious motorcycle accident. I was in a coma for nearly three weeks. During that coma I had an extremely powerful experience…and then I came to a kind of iron fence. Behind it stood Mr. Van der G., the father of my parents’ best friend. He told me that I couldn’t go any further. I had to go back because my time hadn’t come yet… When I told my parents after waking up, they said to me that Mr. Van der G. had died and been buried during my coma. I couldn’t have known that he was dead.”

“Suddenly I recognized all these relatives. They were all around thirty-five years old, including the little brother I’d never known, because he had died during the war when he was two years old, before I was born. He had grown a lot. My parents were there too, and they smiled at me, just like the others.”

8. The Perception of a Brilliant Light or a Being of Light

I have been in that Heaven that knows his light most, and have seen things, which whoever descends from there has neither power, nor knowledge, to relate. ~DANTE, The Divine Comedy: Paradiso

The light is described as an extremely bright, nonblinding light that permeates everything. People are ineluctably drawn to this light and are usually completely enveloped by it. Sometimes this light is experienced as a being, and some religious people identify it as Jesus, an angel, or a being of light. A person’s religious background is a significant determining factor in the naming of this being of light. People always report direct communication with this being, as if it reads their mind and responds through the mind. While enveloped by this light, people experience total acceptance and unconditional love and have access to a deep knowledge and wisdom.

The most profound questions are answered before they are even asked.

“In the distance I saw a light that I had never seen on earth. So pure, so intense, so perfect. I knew it was a being I had to go to. I don’t know how this happened. I didn’t have to think, I knew everything. I had no mobility problems anymore. I had no body anymore. This dead weight had gone… I passed through everything. At once I realized: there’s no time or space here. We’re always in the present here. This gave me a great sense of peace. I felt it as I experienced the Light. It’s the pinnacle of everything there is. Of energy, of love especially, of warmth, of beauty.”

“I was immersed in a feeling of total love. It was crystal clear to me why I’d had cancer. Why I had come into this world in the first place. What role each of my family members played in my life, where we all were within the grand scheme of things, and in general what life is all about. The clarity and insight I had in that state are simply indescribable. Words seem to diminish the experience—I was in a place where I understood that there’s so much more than we can fathom in our three-dimensional world. I realized that this was a great gift and that I was always surrounded by loving spiritual beings of light.”

“That very same moment, in a split second, I gained access to a wealth of knowledge, a complete knowing and understanding. All knowledge. Universal knowledge. I understood the origins of the cosmos, how the universe works, and why people do what they do. Their positive actions, but also why they hurt one another, deliberately or not. Wars and natural disasters, everything has a purpose, a reason. It all makes sense. I understood the past, the present, and the future. I saw evolution. Everything and everyone evolves and develops together. I saw and understood—without any judgment—the connection, the coherence, the logical and sometimes major consequences of every single act. I mean at every level and down to the smallest detail… The way all kinds of mechanical, electrical, and electronic equipment, gadgets, and engines work. Everything. I knew and understood all about mathematics, electronics, physics, DNA, atoms, quantum mechanics, and quantum physics… I also saw where evolution is headed, what its ultimate goal is. I realized that this grand scheme not only includes me, but everything and everybody, every human being, every soul, every animal, every cell, the earth and every other planet, the universe, the cosmos, the Light. Everything is connected and everything is one. ‘I see!’ I thought happily. ‘I get it. It’s all so simple. So obvious. It all makes sense…’ No, I wasn’t allowed to bring back the knowledge itself. Why, I don’t know… Perhaps we’re not supposed to have such universal knowledge in the here and now, in our physical form? Perhaps we’re here to learn? Perhaps there’s another reason?”

9. The Panoramic Life Review

The life review is usually experienced in the presence of the light or a being of light. During a panoramic life review, people experience not just their every action or word but also every thought from their past life, and they realize that everything is an energy that affects both themselves and others. All of life, from birth up until the present moment, can be relived as a spectator and as an actor. This makes it much more than a speeded-up film. People know their own and others’ past thoughts and feelings because they have a connection with the memories and emotions of others. During a life review people experience the effects of their thoughts, words, and actions on other people when they originally occurred, and they also get a sense of whether love has been shared or withheld. Although this can be extremely confrontational, nobody feels judged: people understand how they lived their life and how this affected others. They realize that every single thought, word, or action has a lasting effect on themselves and others. They speak of a cosmic law in which everything they do to another person will ultimately have an effect on them as well, and this applies to both love and affection and violence and aggression.

A person’s whole life comes up for instantaneous review; time and distance appear to be nonexistent. People are instantly taken to whatever they focus their attention on. People can talk for hours or even days about their life review, even though the cardiac arrest lasted only a couple of minutes. Everything appears to exist and be open to experience at once. Everything and everybody appear to be connected in an eternal present.

“My whole life so far appeared to be placed before me in a kind of panoramic, three-dimensional review, and each event seemed to be accompanied by an awareness of good and evil or by an insight into its cause and effect. Throughout, I not only saw everything from my own point of view, but I also knew the thoughts of everybody who’d been involved in these events, as if their thoughts were lodged inside me. It meant that I saw not only what I had done or thought but even how this had affected others, as if I was seeing with all-knowing eyes. And so even your thoughts are apparently not wiped out. And throughout, the review stressed the importance of love. I can’t say how long this life review and insight into life lasted; it may have been quite long because it covered every single subject, but at the same time it felt like a split second because I saw everything at once. It seemed as if time and distance didn’t exist. I was everywhere at once, and sometimes my attention was focused on something and then I was there too.”

“To start with, I was shown images of my two previous lives. In the first one I died during a campaign in England during the Roman era. I was the chief of a cohort escorting a number of female prisoners to the coast, and along the way we were attacked by the natives of those parts. I also experienced a death in World War I. I was in a fighter plane in what must have been 1917 and became caught up in a battle with a German aircraft. I was shot down and crashed between the lines. I say 1917 because with the help of pictures taken that year I managed to identify the type of aircraft used by the English air force at the time. Why I also saw excerpts from these two lives, I don’t know. And I have no way of verifying any of this. What I remember much more vividly are images from my latest or, if you like, current life. First I witnessed my own birth. I was brought into this world by our family doctor, unlike my brothers and sisters, who were delivered by the midwife. The doctor held me in his arms and said the following memorable words to my mother: ‘This is a special child. He will either be a great genius or a great scoundrel.’ I turned out to be neither of the two. I saw my first few steps. I saw how my unreasonable behavior hurt my mother. I saw myself playing with the neighbors’ dog, Bello. It was a watchdog and watched over the farm. It was huge and obeyed only its masters. Strangely enough, I wasn’t scared of this dog at all, and it put up with everything I did. Every now and then I even crawled into its kennel for a nap. I wouldn’t even let Farmer Mast, its owner, anywhere near to try and get me out. I was on equally good terms with Bless, the big horse. When she was in the field and I slipped under the barbed-wire fence, she would come galloping and rear up right in front of me. Then she’d often drop to the ground, and I’d crawl between her legs and onto her belly. The spectacle used to terrify bystanders. I also saw my school years pass before my eyes, and the teachers I used to torment. The war years were quite prominent. I saw some people I’d known in the camp and whom I had, on occasion, robbed of the little food they had in a bid to survive. But some of my good deeds also flashed past. I saw the Indonesian girl whom I’d lived with for four years. I relived the intense love, but also that one time when I hurt her badly and I thought that she hadn’t realized. Looking back, I saw a lot of situations in which, as a serviceman, I’d been rather ruthless. But my NDE also brought back some memories of incidents in which, in defiance of orders, I’d let mercy take precedence over law. Among them were quite a few incidents I had long since erased from my memory. For instance, there were things in my life that I’d come to accept as bad but that were now suddenly deemed good. The same applied to things that I’d always considered to be good and that were now branded wrong. The next episode in which I was subjected to a thorough examination was the period of September 1944, the Battle of Arnhem. What struck me was that, despite the short time span, so many people passed before my mind’s eye. I saw many whom I had taken to the hospital or who died in my arms. Many of them assured me that they’d welcome me as soon as I arrived on the ‘other’ side. To my surprise, I only saw a single German. It was a German soldier who had fought an English soldier, and the two had wounded each other so badly that they both died, one after the other. He gave me his iron cross, which, astonishingly, I’ve managed to hold on to my entire life. He gave it to me because I let him have some drags on his English adversary’s last cigarette. They both died within a short time of each other. The fact that I gave him a smoke was labeled a good deed, which I don’t understand because I did it on the orders, or at the request, of the Englishman. I would have preferred to see the German stew in his own blood. What I mean to say by this is that up there they judge by different standards than down here.”

10. The Preview or Flash Forward

People feel like they can see part of the life that is yet to come. At this stage of the experience too there appears to be no time or distance. The reports of the verifiable future events inevitably raise questions about free will and the extent to which people can determine their own future.

“And in a flash I saw the rest of my life. I could see a large part of my future life: taking care of my children; my wife’s illness; everything that would happen to me, both in and out of the workplace. I could see it all. I foresaw my wife’s death and my mother’s passing. One day I wrote down all the things I saw back then; over the years I’ve been able to tick them all off. For instance, I saw my wife on her deathbed, wrapped in a white shawl, just like the one she was given by a friend of hers shortly before she died…”

11. The Perception of a Border

People see a thick fog, a wall, a valley, a river, a bridge, or a gate and are aware that once they cross this border they will not be able to return to their bodies and resume their lives. At this stage there may be some communication with a deceased relative or with a being of light. People hear that they are not welcome because their time has not yet come. They must return to their body because they have a purpose in life. This purpose may be to care for a newborn baby, a child, or a relative. Sometimes people cannot quite remember why they were sent back. They either feel that the decision to return was theirs or that it was imposed by others.

First up is the account of a boy who was born deaf and almost drowned at the age of ten:

“Then I reached a border. Even at the age of ten I needed no further explanation. I simply understood that I’d never be able to return if I crossed this border. But some of my ancestors were on the other side, and they caught my attention because they were communicating through a kind of telepathy. I was born profoundly deaf. All my relatives can hear, and they always communicate with me through sign language. Now I had direct communication with about twenty ancestors via some kind of telepathy. An overwhelming experience…”

“He showed me a gate behind which I saw the same landscape. But now, with this gate in front, it suddenly looked extremely familiar. I came to the startling conclusion: I’ve been here before. It felt like a homecoming after an arduous journey. A state that led to complete peace of mind, a peace of mind I hadn’t known for a long time. For me this was the highlight of the experience. Without a word the figure encouraged me to decide whether I wanted to remain in this state or whether I wanted to return to earthly life. I could either enter the gate or return to the lifeless body, which I immediately sensed below me. I had the impression that entry through this gate meant definitive physical death. Aware that this was my chance to go back knowing that this state of being is a reality that feels more real than what we call reality and thinking of my young wife and our three small children, I opted to return…”

12. The Conscious Return to the Body

The return to the body is usually quite abrupt. Sometimes people feel a great force sucking them back through the tunnel. Some people describe how they were pushed back into their body via the head, after seeing a nurse or doctor place the resuscitation equipment on their body. The conscious return to the body is an extremely unpleasant experience for most people. Back in the sick, damaged, and aching body, they are upset at having been denied something so beautiful. Some patients react with indignation, disappointment, or rebellion as soon as they regain consciousness after resuscitation or wake from a coma. Their attempts at talking to doctors, nursing staff, or family about the powerful experience often come to nothing, which only adds to the disappointment. In fact, some people remain silent on the subject for fifty years or more.

“When I came to in my body it was dreadful, so dreadful… The experience had been so beautiful that I didn’t want to come back. I had wanted to stay there…and yet I came back. From that moment it was a real struggle to live my life inside my body, with all the limitations I experienced at the time… But later I realized that this experience was in fact a blessing, for now I know that the mind and body are separate and that there’s life after death.”

“Before I get a chance to turn around and dive into that heavenly light, I notice a slender hand on my back, from my right shoulder down to my waist. This large hand pushes me very firmly yet lovingly back into my body. For a moment I feel like I’m doing a couple of somersaults in the air. Then I realize that I’ve landed back in my body. Back to the pain and to the doctor’s deafening screams and slaps. I’m furious, incredibly furious! I don’t know if I actually uttered all the insults that came to mind… I think I did, because I felt a sense of relief afterward. I’ve never felt a fury like this rage…”

Excerpt from Consciousness Beyond Life

See Part I here.