[Guest editorial].Is there a hell? Surprising observations about the near-death experience.

Abstract

The percentage of hell-like near-death experiences (NDEs) is probably much larger than has been previously claimed. In this article, I discuss current research into what are now termed "distressing" or "unpleas ant" NDEs, and my own findings from interviews of over a hundred such cases. I compare this information with earlier reports from Maurice Rawlings (1978, 1980), mythological traditions about the concept of hell, and renderings from The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Evans-Wentz, 1957). Finally, I detail four types of NDEs-initial, hell-like, heaven-like, and transcendental-and what seems to be an attitudinal profile characteristic of each type. My plane was late. That meant I had to run lengthy corridors at Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C., to catch my next flight. As I ran, another woman scurrying in the opposite direction yelled, "I know who you are; you're the woman I just saw on television. You're the gutsy one who talks about negative near-death experiences. Keep doing it. Don't stop." I was so startled by her comment, I momentarily slowed my pace and yelled back, "Who are you? What do you mean by that?" P.M.H. Atwater is a free-lance author, lecturer, and workshop facilitator, whose principal interest is near-death experiences and spiritual transformations. Reprint re quests should be addressed to Ms. Atwater at P.O. Box 7691, Charlottesville, VA 22906. Journal of Near-Death Studies, 10(3) Spring 1992 1992 Human Sciences Press, Inc. 149 JOURNAL OF NEAR-DEATH STUDIES Her answer surprised me. "I'm a surgical nurse at a hospital in Phoenix, Arizona. We have lots of near-death cases there, and almost all of them are the negative kind. You know what I mean-people who wind up in hell!" Before I could respond further, she was out of sight. I wanted to go after her and ask more questions-what hospital? how many cases? how long has this been happening? why haven't you reported it?-but my pressing need to hurry convinced me otherwise. I barely made my connection. This incident happened in 1989, a year when I was nearly over whelmed by reports from people who experienced a hellish environ ment at the brink of death, rather than a heavenly one. Most researchers of the near-death experience (NDE) report that unpleasant cases are quite rare, numbering less than one percent of the thousands thus far investigated and of the eight million tallied by a Gallup Poll during a survey on the subject published in 1982 (Gallup and Proctor, 1982). Yet my experiences interviewing near-death sur vivors since 1978 have consistently shown me otherwise, suggesting an abundance of such cases: 105 out of the more than 700 I have queried. At the 1990 Washington, D.C., conference of the International Asso ciation for Near-Death Studies (LANDS), Bruce Greyson, a psychiatrist noted for his long-term commitment to near-death research, admitted that people like himself had not been asking the right questions to identify those who might have undergone "dark" or distressing epi sodes. He confessed: "We didn't try to find them because we didn't want to know." His comment underscored the fact that, for the most part, published reports of near-death studies have side-stepped "negative" accounts. Greyson and Nancy Evans Bush, President of LANDS, have recently completed a descriptive study of 50 terrifying cases they have collected over the past 9 years (Greyson and Bush, 1992). Others whose work has acknowledged the existence of such experiences include British re searcher Margot Grey (1985) and sociologist Charles Flynn (1986). Cardiologist Maurice Rawlings and myself, however, have actively pursued near-death reports of a hellish nature since the very begin ning of our involvement in the field. Beyond Death's Door, Rawlings' first book (1978), focused on his observations of people in the process of being resuscitated after clinical death. In it, he recounted story after story of near-death experiencers describing unpleasant or threatening scenarios: being surrounded by grotesque human and animal forms, hearing other people moaning 150