Patients Draw Near-Death Experiences
Descriptions of near-death experiences (NDEs to those in the know) date back to Plato's ‘Republic,’ and though the gods have changed, the experiences have often been religious. Hieronymus Bosch (El Bosco) painted the pathway to death as a tunnel in "The Ascent of the Blessed," (right) depicting souls drifting skyward, carried by winged beings to an illuminated rapture. His painting captured the notion that heaven could set tortured souls at peace. In modernity, the art world is less interested in the road between this life and the next, but many people who claim to have experienced NDEs have drawn their experiences. These drawings and others have been published in P.M.H. Atwater's "The Big Book of Near-Death Experiences."
Painting: Hieronymus Bosch, "The Ascent of the Blessed" / Web Gallery of Art
Tannis Prouten, depressed and severely underweight at age 20, drew this diagram of her extrabody experience. She described a wave of warm lovingness that moved up her body from her toes, propelling her toward a corner in the living room. "I felt like ducking, as the ceiling was only an inch from me," she recalls. But Prouten says she passed through the wall and into darkness, where glowing spheres that "seemed like ... spiritual presences" watched her follow an unwavering path towards an unknown destination. Eventually dark faded to light and Prouten recalls experiencing complete euphoria. "I fell madly in love with the SPIRIT OF TRUTH!" she writes in Atwater’s book.
Tonya was a young adult when she nearly drowned in a backyard swimming pool. While she was unconscious, Tonya says an ethereal, radiant woman reached lovingly toward her. She says the same woman reappeared to her years later when her daughter was attacked by a dog and needed facial surgery. Tonya calls the woman her guardian angel.
At 6, Scott was hit by a car and knocked unconscious for several hours. During those hours, Scott recalls recalls an out-of-body experience where he fruitlessly swiped at his father with a phantom's arm and yelled at his older brother to play with him (his brother told his parents he could hear Scott's voice at the time of the accident). Then he says he was whisked down a dark ‘wind tunnel’ that took him to a monstrous mass of rotting flesh he calls the Devil. The Devil (at left, drawn by Scott shortly after the accident, and at right, redrawn five years later) accused him of being bad and threatened to keep him forever. Scott says he was comforted by his dead uncle, still shrouded in the hospital sheet that covered him on his death bed, and then found himself enclosed in a 'dungeon' that eventually opened up to consciousness.
Gracie Sprouse of Keene, Va., recalls an NDE when she nearly drowned at age 11. In this drawing, she shows how an angel presented her with a slideshow of her life. As Sprouse watched, she says, "I judged and convicted myself" for bad things she had done to her sisters.
Arthur Yensen of Parma, Idaho, is so certain he saw heaven after being injured in a 1932 car accident that he wrote a book about it (aptly titled "I Saw Heaven"). He says heaven was entirely translucent but filled with joyous people and stunning natural scenery. Yensen remembers ethereal beings telling him he had to return to Earth. "There will come a time of great confusion and the people will need your stabilizing influence," he quoted them as saying. Yensen died in his 90s, after years of service to his community (including playing Santa in his local mall). In his picture, he depicts the women who came to his rescue after his car crash and the hilly heaven that greeted him.
Celeste Weitz of Yuma, Ariz., says she died while she slept in her father’s arms as an infant. She says she awoke to realize she was looking over her father's shoulder, accompanied by invisible "others," and witnessing her father's anguish. "Upon realizing his distress was due to my not being in the body, I became somewhat upset that I was responsible for the state he was in. This is the point I believe I chose to go back to the body."
Chris Brown says he recalls witnessing the emergency response to his angina attack in 1962. He claims to remember watching from outside his body the ambulance ride, the doctor and nurse who cared for him and the nearly fatal mistake the nurse made, preparing to inject him with the wrong medication. While the doctor injected him with the proper drug and began massaging his heart, Brown says he thought up a laundry list of his debts and responsibilities and concluded he was square with the earth and was ready to go. But a "grayish and somewhat cloudy group of men" begged to differ, sending him back to his body.
She was beaten unconscious at age 4, but Tina Sweeney of Laval, Quebec, didn't recollect her NDE until years later, with the help of a psychiatrist. When the experience came back to her, she first recalled a period of total blackness, made comforting by the steady, warm pulsing of "creation breathing." Then she saw herself--as a child--"standing in front of a wall of light." In this drawing, Sweeney sees herself as a tree in front of the light.
Richard Borutta of Hopewell, N.J., was an alcoholic with a failing liver when he ‘died’ during a medical procedure at age 42. Surgeons were operating on his liver when Borutta says he slipped over to the "other side" and demanded that he remain there. He recalls feathery spirits convincing him that he would have to earn his way back by making amends with his family.
[ via Newsweek ]
