Kai
New
Although I count myself more sympathetic to NDEs today than I was, say, a year ago, I must admit that this issue still troubles me quite a lot. It’s some years since I noticed it now, and introduced the idea on forums of the day. The first problem I encountered was getting people to see that there was a problem, and indeed that was one of the first reactions that I encountered: what are you talking about…black people MUST have NDEs…because, well, this just IS a universal human phenomenon…it, umm, HAS TO BE, and so this must be mistaken.
And I understood. And (now anyway) I do sympathize. Believe me.
Then some people assumed that I was some kind of closet racist. That I had some underlying gene or tendency for white supremacy or something because I dared to suggest that NDE incidence may not be racially equal. But the fact is, all kinds of things are not racially equal, both on the plus and the minus side of any given race, so this is no argument.
I’ve learned that a picture is worth a thousand words in this area, so here is a screenshot of a popular NDE channel. See if you can spot a problem. I just took this yesterday, so this is not old.
Unfortunately, the single black face you can see there is not even an NDE, it’s an “angel experience” at a gas station…which frankly, just sounds like another regular human being generous.
Here’s another channel. Perhaps two pictures are worth two thousand words.
But don’t take my word for it at this point. Check any popular NDE channel for yourselves and you will see the same pattern. White faces. I mean row after row after row of them. The hair on the back of your neck starts to go up. Or it should.
So anyway, that was all several years ago (that I first noticed this), and as I said at the opening (and I am SINCERE about this!) I am now more open to spiritual possibility than I was even a year ago on this very website. So Kai 2 like Web 2 has a different (or perhaps additional) problems to face with this conundrum.
So what IS the solution to this worrying thing?
At the time, even those who acknowledged (largely because they had checked for themselves) that I had a real point, were a little too quick to explanations they hoped for, but for which there was (and is, really) no *substantive* evidence.
Probably the most popular explanation was the idea that African American (AA) communities were having just as many NDEs as Eurasians, but they just weren’t sharing them. Now I can consider, to a degree at least, that this might be a factor. I emphasize; MIGHT be. It is NOT a “given” that it is, let alone that it is the major explanation of the problem. This idea would really need to be formally proved with a socio-anthropic study. It can’t just be assumed to be correct. IF it is correct, the reluctance of AAs to share NDEs must be culturally pervasive and deep. Even now, in 2015, the number of AA NDEs visible on social media can be counted easily on one person’s hands. Ponder that for a moment. The entire contiguous United States. What the hell?
Another popular explanation, and one that for a while I (sort of) favored myself…and to a degree may do so still…is that there is something about the cultural expression of spirituality, and particularly its gregarious, participatory, social element, that makes this *different enough* from the psycho-social baseline of caucasians with respect to spiritual behavior and ideation, that NDEs just aren’t “necessary” in the AA psycho-spiritual framework.
But even if true, that remains kind of “disturbing” does it not? A genuine other dimension or spiritual reality just “doesn’t bother” in the case of a whole race, simply because, well “they’re already kind of spiritual in other ways.” It sounds unnervingly psychological. Kind of akin to folks who are into porn not being interested in the bedroom anymore. That sort of thing.
So this problem, like its partner (which I also tried to get people to see as a real problem at the time…NDEs are “prime-of-life centric” and very rare in persons of advanced age) is a real problem.
But when it really comes down to it I can’t shake the nagging suspicion that there are less NDEs in AAs because…there simply ARE LESS in AAs. I’ve been through all the possible arguments, and while they are interesting, at present at least, I remain just not convinced that reporting and/or spiritual behaviors is enough to tackle the elephant of the problem. I mean the discrepancy is HUGE…there are tens of thousands of Eurasian NDEs and…a Handful of AA ones.
And of course this harms our instinct about NDEs. What would it mean that this is NOT in fact a “universal human” experience…but primarily a “Caucasian-European and Asian human experience”? I think it is because people assume from their own first principles that the experience just MUST be universal that they respond to the fact of the absence of AA cases with a kind of steep cognitive dissonance.
Of course (and now here I am adding some NEW thoughts, which reflect some further thinking on the issue, since I originally brought this up), nn another sense, this problem can simply be considered a subset of the problem of why most people experiencing a close-to-fatal trauma don’t have an NDE anyway. And underlying that problem is a key assumption that easily escapes attention…the notion that a spiritual reality or genuinely existing frame of reference beyond the mundane world is entirely “free” and “enabled” in terms of who it makes contact with, and who it is capable of making contact with.
But that strikes me as a precarious assumption. If there are individual differences in the degree to which each of us is “accessible” to a spiritual reality, why can there not be racial differences…or gender differences, or age differences, or differences wrought by upbringing and traumatic life experience?
What if the races are simply different with respect to their susceptibility to *trigger factors*? There is no need, and it is not helpful, to express this as inherently “positive” for one race and inherently negative for the other. That language is best avoided, I feel. Thus, we could either say that whites are triggered more easily, or else their systems are simply more unstable or fragile. But in some way, this point of access (be it opportunity or flaw) enables spiritual reality to “break through” into the minds and lives of certain people (and certain groups of people, even very large ethnic groups) more easily than others.
I’m sorry, but that’s the way it seems to me. And if there were not a “breaking through” component necessary, why on earth would so many people almost need to die of a heart attack or cancer in the first place, or a hellish accident with long months or years of rehabilitation…before they even have one of these uplifting experiences?
And I understood. And (now anyway) I do sympathize. Believe me.
Then some people assumed that I was some kind of closet racist. That I had some underlying gene or tendency for white supremacy or something because I dared to suggest that NDE incidence may not be racially equal. But the fact is, all kinds of things are not racially equal, both on the plus and the minus side of any given race, so this is no argument.
I’ve learned that a picture is worth a thousand words in this area, so here is a screenshot of a popular NDE channel. See if you can spot a problem. I just took this yesterday, so this is not old.
Unfortunately, the single black face you can see there is not even an NDE, it’s an “angel experience” at a gas station…which frankly, just sounds like another regular human being generous.
Here’s another channel. Perhaps two pictures are worth two thousand words.
But don’t take my word for it at this point. Check any popular NDE channel for yourselves and you will see the same pattern. White faces. I mean row after row after row of them. The hair on the back of your neck starts to go up. Or it should.
So anyway, that was all several years ago (that I first noticed this), and as I said at the opening (and I am SINCERE about this!) I am now more open to spiritual possibility than I was even a year ago on this very website. So Kai 2 like Web 2 has a different (or perhaps additional) problems to face with this conundrum.
So what IS the solution to this worrying thing?
At the time, even those who acknowledged (largely because they had checked for themselves) that I had a real point, were a little too quick to explanations they hoped for, but for which there was (and is, really) no *substantive* evidence.
Probably the most popular explanation was the idea that African American (AA) communities were having just as many NDEs as Eurasians, but they just weren’t sharing them. Now I can consider, to a degree at least, that this might be a factor. I emphasize; MIGHT be. It is NOT a “given” that it is, let alone that it is the major explanation of the problem. This idea would really need to be formally proved with a socio-anthropic study. It can’t just be assumed to be correct. IF it is correct, the reluctance of AAs to share NDEs must be culturally pervasive and deep. Even now, in 2015, the number of AA NDEs visible on social media can be counted easily on one person’s hands. Ponder that for a moment. The entire contiguous United States. What the hell?
Another popular explanation, and one that for a while I (sort of) favored myself…and to a degree may do so still…is that there is something about the cultural expression of spirituality, and particularly its gregarious, participatory, social element, that makes this *different enough* from the psycho-social baseline of caucasians with respect to spiritual behavior and ideation, that NDEs just aren’t “necessary” in the AA psycho-spiritual framework.
But even if true, that remains kind of “disturbing” does it not? A genuine other dimension or spiritual reality just “doesn’t bother” in the case of a whole race, simply because, well “they’re already kind of spiritual in other ways.” It sounds unnervingly psychological. Kind of akin to folks who are into porn not being interested in the bedroom anymore. That sort of thing.
So this problem, like its partner (which I also tried to get people to see as a real problem at the time…NDEs are “prime-of-life centric” and very rare in persons of advanced age) is a real problem.
But when it really comes down to it I can’t shake the nagging suspicion that there are less NDEs in AAs because…there simply ARE LESS in AAs. I’ve been through all the possible arguments, and while they are interesting, at present at least, I remain just not convinced that reporting and/or spiritual behaviors is enough to tackle the elephant of the problem. I mean the discrepancy is HUGE…there are tens of thousands of Eurasian NDEs and…a Handful of AA ones.
And of course this harms our instinct about NDEs. What would it mean that this is NOT in fact a “universal human” experience…but primarily a “Caucasian-European and Asian human experience”? I think it is because people assume from their own first principles that the experience just MUST be universal that they respond to the fact of the absence of AA cases with a kind of steep cognitive dissonance.
Of course (and now here I am adding some NEW thoughts, which reflect some further thinking on the issue, since I originally brought this up), nn another sense, this problem can simply be considered a subset of the problem of why most people experiencing a close-to-fatal trauma don’t have an NDE anyway. And underlying that problem is a key assumption that easily escapes attention…the notion that a spiritual reality or genuinely existing frame of reference beyond the mundane world is entirely “free” and “enabled” in terms of who it makes contact with, and who it is capable of making contact with.
But that strikes me as a precarious assumption. If there are individual differences in the degree to which each of us is “accessible” to a spiritual reality, why can there not be racial differences…or gender differences, or age differences, or differences wrought by upbringing and traumatic life experience?
What if the races are simply different with respect to their susceptibility to *trigger factors*? There is no need, and it is not helpful, to express this as inherently “positive” for one race and inherently negative for the other. That language is best avoided, I feel. Thus, we could either say that whites are triggered more easily, or else their systems are simply more unstable or fragile. But in some way, this point of access (be it opportunity or flaw) enables spiritual reality to “break through” into the minds and lives of certain people (and certain groups of people, even very large ethnic groups) more easily than others.
I’m sorry, but that’s the way it seems to me. And if there were not a “breaking through” component necessary, why on earth would so many people almost need to die of a heart attack or cancer in the first place, or a hellish accident with long months or years of rehabilitation…before they even have one of these uplifting experiences?
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