Atheists' reports of near-death experiences

[Stranger]

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


So far I've only read the one reported by Carl Jung, and it's fascinating:

In a hospital in Switzerland in 1944, the world-renowned psychiatrist Carl G. Jung, had a heart attack and then a near-death experience. His vivid encounter with the light, plus the intensely meaningful insights led Jung to conclude that his experience came from something real and eternal. Jung's experience is unique in that he saw the Earth from a vantage point of about a thousand miles above it. His incredibly accurate view of the Earth from outer space was described about two decades before astronauts in space first described it. Subsequently, as he reflected on life after death, Jung recalled the meditating Hindu from his near-death experience and read it as a parable of the archetypal Higher Self, the God-image within. Carl Jung, who founded analytical psychology, centered on the archetypes of the collective unconscious. The following is an excerpt from his autobiography entitled Memories, Dreams, Reflections describing his near-death experience. 

---

The beginning of 1944 I broke my foot, and this misadventure was followed by a heart attack. In a state of unconsciousness, I experienced deliriums and visions which must have begun when I hung on the edge of death and was being given oxygen and camphor injections. The images were so tremendous that I myself concluded that I was close to death. My nurse afterward told me:

[font=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]"It was as if you were surrounded by a bright glow."
[/font]

 That was a phenomenon she had sometimes observed in the dying, she added. I had reached the outermost limit, and do not know whether I was in a dream or an ecstasy. At any rate, extremely strange things began to happen to me.

 

It seemed to me that I was high up in space. Far below I saw the globe of the Earth, bathed in a gloriously blue light. I saw the deep blue sea and the continents.  Far below my feet lay Ceylon, and in the distance ahead of me the subcontinent of India. My field of vision did not include the whole Earth, but its global shape was plainly distinguishable and its outlines shone with a silvery gleam through that wonderful blue light. In many places the globe seemed colored, or spotted dark green like oxidized silver. Far away to the left lay a broad expanse - the reddish-yellow desert of Arabia; it was as though the silver of the Earth had there assumed a reddish-gold hue. Then came the Red Sea, and far, far back - as if in the upper left of a map - I could just make out a bit of the Mediterranean. My gaze was directed chiefly toward that. Everything else appeared indistinct. I could also see the snow-covered Himalayas, but in that direction it was foggy or cloudy. I did not look to the right at all. I knew that I was on the point of departing from the Earth.

 

Later I discovered how high in space one would have to be to have so extensive a view - approximately a thousand miles!  The sight of the Earth from this height was the most glorious thing I had ever seen.

 

After contemplating it for a while, I turned around. I had been standing with my back to the Indian Ocean, as it were, and my face to the north. Then it seemed to me that I made a turn to the south. Something new entered my field of vision. A short distance away I saw in space a tremendous dark block of stone, like a meteorite. It was about the size of my house, or even bigger. It was floating in space, and I myself was floating in space.

 

I had seen similar stones on the coast of the Gulf of Bengal. They were blocks of tawny granite, and some of them had been hollowed out into temples. My stone was one such gigantic dark block. An entrance led into a small antechamber. To the right of the entrance, a black Hindu sat silently in lotus posture upon a stone bench. He wore a white gown, and I knew that he expected me. Two steps led up to this antechamber, and inside, on the left, was the gate to the temple. Innumerable tiny niches, each with a saucer-like concavity filled with coconut oil and small burning wicks, surrounded the door with a wreath of bright flames. I had once actually seen this when I visited the Temple of the Holy Tooth at Kandy in Ceylon; the gate had been framed by several rows of burning oil lamps of this sort.

 

As I approached the steps leading up to the entrance into the rock, a strange thing happened: I had the feeling that everything was being sloughed away; everything I aimed at or wished for or thought, the whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence, fell away or was stripped from me - an extremely painful process. Nevertheless something remained; it was as if I now carried along with me everything I had ever experienced or done, everything that had happened around me. I might also say: it was with me, and I was it. I consisted of all that, so to speak. I consisted of my own history and I felt with great certainty: this is what I am. I am this bundle of what has been and what has been accomplished.

 

This experience gave me a feeling of extreme poverty, but at the same time of great fullness. There was no longer anything I wanted or desired. I existed in an objective form; I was what I had been and lived. At first the sense of annihilation predominated, of having been stripped or pillaged; but suddenly that became of no consequence.

 

Everything seemed to be past; what remained was a "fait accompli," without any reference back to what had been. There was no longer any regret that something had dropped away or been taken away. On the contrary: I had everything that I was, and that was everything.

 

Something else engaged my attention: as I approached the temple I had the certainty that I was about to enter an illuminated room and would meet there all those people to whom I belong in reality. There I would at last understand - this too was a certainty - what historical nexus I or my life fitted into. I would know what had been before me, why I had come into being, and where my life was flowing. My life as I lived it had often seemed to me like a story that has no beginning and end. I had the feeling that I was a historical fragment, an excerpt for which the preceding and succeeding text was missing. My life seemed to have been snipped out of a long chain of events, and many questions had remained unanswered. Why had it taken this course? Why had I brought these particular assumptions with me? What had I made of them? What will follow? I felt sure that I would receive an answer to all the questions as soon as I entered the rock temple. There I would meet the people who knew the answer to my question about what had been before and what would come after.

 

While I was thinking over these matters, something happened that caught my attention. From below, from the direction of Europe, an image floated up. It was my doctor, or rather, his likeness - framed by a golden chain or a golden laurel wreath. I knew at once:

"Aha, this is my doctor, of course, the one who has been treating me. But now he is coming in his primal form, as a "basileus of Kos." [1]  In life he was an avatar of this basileus, the temporal embodiment of the primal form, which has existed from the beginning. Now he is appearing in that primal form. 
[1] Basileus was the king (i.e. "basileus") of Kos - a small Greek island on the Aegean Sea. The island of Kos was famous in antiquity as the site of the temple of Asklepios, and was the birthplace of Hippocrates.

Presumably I too was in my primal form, though this was something I did not observe but simply took for granted. As he stood before me, a mute exchange of thought took place between us. The doctor had been delegated by the Earth to deliver a message to me, to tell me that there was a protest against my going away. I had no right to leave the Earth and must return. The moment I heard that, the vision ceased.

 

I was profoundly disappointed, for now it all seemed to have been for nothing. The painful process of defoliation had been in vain, and I was not to be allowed to enter the temple, to join the people in whose company I belonged.

 

In reality, a good three weeks were still to pass before I could truly make up my mind to live again. I could not eat because all food repelled me. The view of city and mountains from my sickbed seemed to me like a painted curtain with black holes in it, or a tattered sheet of newspaper full of photographs that meant nothing. Disappointed, I thought:

"Now I must return to 'the box system' again." 

 For it seemed to me as if behind the horizon of the cosmos a three-dimensional world had been artificially built up, in which each person sat by himself in a little box. And now I should have to convince myself all over again that this was important! Life and the whole world struck me as a prison, and it bothered me beyond measure that I should again be finding all that quite in order. I had been so glad to shed it all, and now it had come about that I -  along with everyone else - would again be hung up in a box by a thread.

 

While I floated in space, I had been weightless, and there had been nothing tugging at me. And now all that was to be a thing of the past! 

I felt violent resistance to my doctor because he had brought me back to life. At the same time, I was worried about him.

"His life is in danger, for heaven’s sake! He has appeared to me in his primal form! When anybody attains this form it means he is going to die, for already he belongs to the 'greater company'!"

Suddenly the terrifying thought came to me that Dr. H. would have to die in my stead. I tried my best to talk to him about it, but he did not understand me. Then I became angry with him:

"Why does he always pretend he doesn’t know he is a basileus of Kos? And that he has already assumed his primal form? He wants to make me believe that he doesn’t know!"

That irritated me. My wife reproved me for being so unfriendly to him. She was right; but at the time I was angry with him for stubbornly refusing to speak of all that had passed between us in my vision:

"Damn it all, he ought to watch his step. He has no right to be so reckless! I want to tell him to take care of himself."

I was firmly convinced that his life was in jeopardy. In actual fact I was his last patient. On April 4, 1944, I still remember the exact date I was allowed to sit up on the edge of my bed for the first time since the beginning of my illness, and on this same day Dr. H. took to his bed and did not leave it again. I heard that he was having intermittent attacks of fever. Soon afterward he died of septicemia. He was a good doctor; there was something of the
genius about him. Otherwise he would not have appeared to me as a prince of Kos.

[isis]

It is fascinating. I love this part:

...there was a protest against my going away. I had no right to leave the Earth and must return.

[Bluebell]

i don't think the earth wants a screw up like me at least.

scientists claim NDEs r produced by the brain... silly ducks. i wonder wut causes atheism.

[Spaced]

Carl Jung was an atheist? News to me.

Here's a quote:

A young female student accused Jung of being an atheist. Jung was confused and asked the student where she had gotten that idea. The student paraphrased a quote she had read in which Jung said he didn't believe God existed. Jung smiled and said "Dear girl, rest easy, When we have a relationship to a particular thing or experience with it - belief/faith ceases to be a factor. The truth is this, I have had the experience of being gripped by something that is stronger than myself, something that people call God. So, I will never say that I believe that God exists. I must say I know God exists!"

[outerheaven]

Thanks for sharing, that was great.

As I approached the steps leading up to the entrance into the rock, a strange thing happened: I had the feeling that everything was being sloughed away; everything I aimed at or wished for or thought, the whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence, fell away or was stripped from me - an extremely painful process. Nevertheless something remained; it was as if I now carried along with me everything I had ever experienced or done, everything that had happened around me. I might also say: it was with me, and I was it. I consisted of all that, so to speak. I consisted of my own history and I felt with great certainty: this is what I am. I am this bundle of what has been and what has been accomplished.

Interesting ... I'm a bit surprised he found this process painful. I guess he meant more on a mental level than physical pain; it's painful because of the realization that his earthly-self is fading out of existence.

I know exactly what he's talking about though. In meditation a couple years ago, I had a revelation about a childhood trauma. The closest thing I can think of describing is what the scientologists call an "implant." Basically I had experienced something that left an energetic cord that ran through me, that was actually quite painful, and numerous thought patterns were built on top of it that defined and limited who I was. I had always recalled this event as no big deal, and something that was actually quite humorous to me.

But in this meditation, I was able to view it from a different perspective, and see the pain it had caused and realized it wasn't a laughing matter, it was an actual trauma. This realization was followed by an incredibly painful feeling as if something was being forcibly removed from my brain; I saw it in my mind's eye as a giant metal staple the size of a horse-shoe. This, in turn, had the effect of my spine buzzing like a guitar string being tightened to the point it might break.

That was immediately proceeded by a series of visions that spontaneously came to me at once -- they were the last living moments of several different people. Accidents, gun shots, stabbings, clubbings, etc. Just a variety of deaths, viewed one after another in the first person. I saw and "felt" the impact of each death.

And after each death I "remembered" what it is to die; how all your definitions and names and desires and short-comings and insecurities etc. all slough away like Jung said, and you are left only with the quintessential self. Those aspects of you that get left behind are all literally (IMO) the "distortions" Ra speaks of so often, and I could feel their energetic weight dropping from my being and it was tremendous.

That was the day that I knew I had died before; I had remembered the process of dying and how the only scary part is the moment before it occurs, but then it is at once a tremendous healing process. That was also the day I stopped fearing death.