Hi jfish,
Your comments reminded me of research I have done in the past on the issue of who has distressing NDEs. I had a personal motivation for wanting to know about this. Here is a synopsis of what I have mainly found to date, taken from the IANDS web site.
Who Has Distressing NDEs?
As with the pleasurable NDE, distressing NDEs seem to occur about equally to people of both genders and of all ages, educational levels, socioeconomic levels, sexual orientations, spiritual beliefs, religious affiliations, and life experiences. Although people have sometimes wondered whether good people have pleasurable experiences and bad people have distressing ones, research has shown no such relationship between apparent life deeds and type of NDE (Rommer, 2000). In addition, some people's NDEs have contained both pleasurable and distressing elements, and among people who have had multiple NDEs, some have had a pleasurable experience one time and a distressing experience another, in no definite order.
The way one dies may be a factor in the type of NDE one has. Rommer found that dNDErs who had self-induced their deaths made up 55% of people in her research who reported a Type II Eternal Void experience, 18% who reported a Type III Hellish experience, and most of those who reported a Type IV Negative Judgment experience. Although it may be tempting to conclude that people who attempt suicide are being punished for trying to induce their own deaths, we must avoid this temptation, as the following paragraph will explain.
People who are in a distressed frame of mind at the time of their near-death episode and those who were raised to expect distress during death may be more prone to distressing NDEs. People who attempt suicide are almost always in a distressed frame of mind. Usually they are attempting suicide because they feel themselves to be in unendurable and unending emotional or physical pain. In addition, they are almost certainly aware of the widely held belief that suicide is cowardly and/or the wrong way to escape the pain of life. Although they hope for relief from their pain, they may also consciously or unconsciously fear punishment. In a heightened state of pain, as well as of fear and/or guilt, they are highly distressed and, consequently, may be somewhat more prone to having a dNDE.
However, the facts remain that
•The overall majority of distressing NDEs did not occur in the context of attempted suicide,
•Many pleasurable NDEs were the result of attempted suicide, and
•Many people who were in a distressed frame of mind and/or who expected judgement and punishment during death had a pleasurable NDE.
Bush (2002) examined the mystical literature of major religions such as Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism; the research on other non-ordinary states of consciousness probably related to NDEs; and the data on distressing NDEs themselves. She came to the same conclusion as Rommer: Everyone has the potential to have a distressing near-death experience.
In summary, it is not known conclusively why most people report pleasurable NDEs and some report distressing ones. Whether this question can ever be answered, and what that answer might be, awaits further research
From
http://www.iands.org/about-ndes/distressing-ndes.html
I have a close friend who had a distressing NDE. He was also in a great deal of physical pain and fear at the time of his experience. Not fear of what happens after death fear, but fear related to fearing for his life. He believes his experience was an afterlife encounter. He believes he deserved his distressing NDE because he'd been an awful person, but research like the above would tend to discredit this.
I was a spiritual person on a spiritual path for many years. I can only say, on my own behalf, that I had dedicated myself to a Buddhist-type path of loving-kindness for many years, I had disciplined myself through meditation and visualization to never judge, to think positively, and to help wherever I could. I worked closely with my dreams and believed them to be a source of spiritual guidance, and yet in 2005 I began to have horrible, vivid, demonic OBEs/lucid dreams that seemed incredibly real to me. I even converted to Christianity based on the advice of a well-meaning Christian friend. After I started back on seizure medications, the lucid dreams/OBEs stopped. Just like that.
So for me, amazingly, this was the product of a misfiring brain. I know firsthand what the brain is capable of creating, how real it seems, how frightening it can be, and how demonic experiences can in fact happen to someone who is living a pretty decent, unselfish life.
As a person who no longer believes that these experiences happen outside of one's own brain, it now upsets me to see how other experiencers tend to assume someone who has had a distressing NDE must have secretly been, at the very least, a negative person. Not you, jfish; I don't mean to imply that you would do that. I'm talking in general this is something I've seen.
It is really no different to me from the New Age you-create-your-own-reality belief, which I also used to hold, too, a belief that leads to cruel assumptions such as if you have cancer, you must have created it. Though at the time I didn't see that as cruel, I saw it as empowering.
This did not happen to me, in case it sounds like maybe I just have an axe to grind. No, most of the family and friends who witnessed my 3 years of dealing with these frequent demonic experiences were as baffled as I was, having known me and the kind of person I was.
The liberating aspect of you-create-your-own-reality is that you have the power to change your life with a change in thought. The dark, terribly harmful side to this belief is that if you get a profoundly negative experience, that is your creation too. You can live a good life and create a good afterlife experience, but if you have a distressing experience, you must have done something wrong.
Just my 2 cents.
BTW, I am totally in favor of experimenting with these things for yourself. Find out on your own, definitely. Test your experiences over a period of time. Be your own worst critic. Insist on not just one seemingly psychic experience, but several. Factor in any failures honestly.
I did this myself. During the years I was having the OBEs/lucid dreams, I immediately, as soon as I was "out," would attempt to ask a spiritual question or go somewhere or do something spiritual; I always had a spiritual focus, as to me being "out" was an incredible opportunity to explore what seemed to me the world of spirit, to test things, to learn. At the time I was completely convinced these were real spiritual experiences. Mostly mine began or ended in a frightening way, but sometimes they were neutral. I have my own theories now on why that was, based on Michael's Persinger's research out of Canada, but that's a whole different subject.
I found, as I've said many times before, to my increasing frustration, that I could never "learn" anything that I didn't already know. Now, of course, I think I understand why. But I am glad I experienced this for myself. If someone else had tried to tell it to me, I doubt it would have had the same impact. I might have thought they may have just been doing something wrong, or they weren't really "out," or they weren't really spiritual... I don't know.
At any rate, I wish you luck! I personally am curious about your experiences along these lines (the BigM, too, and anyone else seriously trying to explore along these lines in a rational way), and if you decide to share them here, I will enjoy reading them.
