I recently completed the book, Irreducible Mind, and am almost a third of the way into their follow up book, Beyond Physicalism. I am starting to lean more heavily towards the filter theory of mind, but one issue keeps coming up that I have been thinking about... If this "transcendent realm" exists objectively and independent of ourselves, in a sense, yet which we r intricately connected to, and when our brains , for various reasons, allow us to see beyond the veil to our true nature, what of those experiences that r less than pleasant. In other words, the books make mention of various mystical states and that most likely being our true birthright, but not all "out of the ordinary or trancendent" experiences r positive. What about people who are mentally ill and experience dark realms or spirits, Devils etc.. If I give positive mystical states authenticity , objectively speaking, than so must I when it comes to the "negative" experiences..
What is everyone's thoughts regarding this?? If mystical states are "real" then so to must be "hellish ones"... Right?
I don't think frightening NDE's have been given the attention they deserve. There has always been a tendency to focus on the pleasant experiences, and quickly move over the frightening ones.
Yet these frightening experiences need understanding too. Particularly because some people have them, and have difficulty dealing with them.
In a general environment where the NDE is either thought to be some sort of hallucination, or a glimpse of an afterlife, these people are left rather isolated and struggling to digest their very real and frightening experience They don't even fit on the NDE type scales properly.
If you look at these distressing NDE's it's clear their is some vague subjective interpretation going on... For instance some people have experiences which they interpret as frightening, that would not be interpreted as frightening by others.
The more I delved, the more I became convinced that the NDE in general exposed some vague relationship between the experiencers state of mind/beliefs, and the external groups state of mind/beliefs.
When i get to know more about the background of the person, and the situation in which their NDE took place, I can begin to see things that make sense, things that provide an explanation as to why they had such an experience.
That's some of the reasoning why I came up with the suggestion that the NDE may be an attempt to reconcile external field patterns which were laid down on the persons brain when it became exposed.
I suggest that there is something to be understood about these experiences, and there is a better way of understanding them, which does not leave those who have frightening experiences sidelined, and unable to make sense of their experiences using either of the two main ways people currently understand them (hallucination or an after-life).