Perversions I had never dreamed of were being vainly attempted all around us. Ritchie would later write of this scary, foul scene:Įven more hideous than the bites and kicks they exchanged, were the sexual abuses many were performing in feverish pantomime. He next found himself in a barren wasteland where spirits of all shapes and sizes were engaged in vicious battle with each other, punching, biting, kicking, and slashing at each other with wrathful abandon. This vision of those who could not partake in vices or what they loved most was relatively mild compared to what was to follow. One was a bar where people desperately tried to drink, eat, or smoke cigarettes but could not no matter how hard they tried. He claimed that he had had an out of body experience where he wandered around town and met a mysterious figure who took him on a guided tour of various disturbing places. Ritchie described coming down with pneumonia and being brought to an Army hospital in Richmond, Virginia, where he was pronounced dead but finally revived 9 minutes later with a horrifying story to tell. One of the first widely circulated reports during these years of such a terrifying NDEs was an account from a George Ritchie from World War II, which was published in his 1978 book, Return From Tomorrow. Although a great many NDEs described out of body experiences or bright visions of something that might be called Heaven, these studies began to uncover a disturbing subset of the phenomenon that seemed to indicate that some of these experiences were far from pleasant, and pointed at people actually visiting Hell itself, or a realm akin to our understanding of it. From there the phenomenon captured the attention of psychiatrists, psychologists, and other scientific researchers, who studied these experiences in clinical settings. Indeed, it was in the 1975 smash hit book, Life After Life, that author Raymond Moody first coined the term “near death experience” to describe the mystical, transcendental, very often bizarre experiences that those brushing with death claimed they experienced. Near death experiences have long been reported by people throughout history, but it was not until the 1970s that it was ever really seriously studied or brought to the public consciousness. And then there are tales from those who were met not by a tunnel of light or love, but rather a peak into a terrifying place of suffering that can only really be described as Hell itself. Others see a pleasant tunnel of light leading off to some mystical realm or even Heaven itself, and many report actually visiting these realms and being met by long gone loved ones and relatives. Some frighteningly remember nothing, only a yawning black void as if they were in a deep, dreamless sleep. For some, they are ejected from their bodies to float above their corpse. Yet even with NDEs there are a plethora of different, very often conflicting accounts of what happens when we die. One of the only clues we have as to what might lie beyond our mortal coil is the phenomenon of near death experiences, commonly referred to as NDEs, wherein someone who has died or is at the edge of the precipitous ledge between life and death is somehow resuscitated and comes crashing back to the world of the living, often with a bizarre story to tell of their glimpse through a cracked window into the afterlife. In the end no one really knows, and for the most part the realm of death remains an impenetrable, vast sea of mysteries. There are no easy answers, and it sometimes seems that there are as many ideas of what happens when we pass on as there are religions and philosophies of those who do ranging being whisked off to some kind of heaven where loved ones await us, to the idea that we are reborn into new bodies, to the sobering thought that we merely blink out of existence into the chasm of oblivion. What happens after we die, and what becomes of us after we push through the mysterious boundary between life and death? This is a question which has enthralled, puzzled, and captured the imagination of mankind since time unremembered.
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