ISBN-13: 9780985191719 / Angielski / Miękka / 2016 / 214 str.
"The Buddha in Hell What kind of sense is that?" Behind all the joyful personal stories of being close to death and going to heaven, there is a rarely discussed fact: that a significant minority of near-death experiences (NDEs) are unpleasant. They may be frightening, alienating, guilt-producing, and/or hellish, and they pack the same voltage of emotional and spiritual power as the beautiful ones. The images in those experiences are as old as myths and as recent as the nearest emergency room. Their interpretations shape religions and philosophies, New Testament doctrines and New Age ideas, video games and movies. For centuries, theyhave been understood as proof of the hell described by medieval Christianity. Is that hell the only explanation? Most of those interpretations assume the experiences exist as punishment. What if evidence shows that's not entirely true? Over more than forty years, Nancy Evans Bush has emerged as a leading voice in the search for answers to these questions. Her first book, Dancing Past the Dark, was a research-based description of distressing near-death experiences and their place in the cultural scene. Now The Buddha in Hell and Other Alarms draws on questions from her blog, conference audiences, and correspondence over the years to build a framework for a more personal discussion of perspectives not often seen in the literature. Her material is presented in three sections:
“The Buddha in Hell! What kind of sense is that?” Behind all the joyful personal stories of being close to death and going to heaven, there is a rarely discussed fact: that a significant minority of near-death experiences (NDEs) are unpleasant. They may be frightening, alienating, guilt-producing, and/or hellish, and they pack the same voltage of emotional and spiritual power as the beautiful ones. The images in those experiences are as old as myths and as recent as the nearest emergency room. Their interpretations shape religions and philosophies, New Testament doctrines and New Age ideas, video games and movies. For centuries,theyhave been understood as proof of the hell described by medieval Christianity.Is that hell the only explanation? Most of those interpretations assume the experiences exist as punishment. What if evidence shows that's not entirely true?Over more than forty years, Nancy Evans Bush has emerged as a leading voice in the search for answers to these questions. Her first book, Dancing Past the Dark, was a research-based description of distressing near-death experiences and their place in the cultural scene. Now The Buddha in Hell and Other Alarms draws on questions from her blog, conference audiences, and correspondence over the years to build a framework for a more personal discussion of perspectives not often seen in the literature. Her material is presented in three sections: