The subject of hell realm near death experiences is fascinating, disturbing, and makes us ask many, many questions. They happen to good people and are immensely disturbing. I went to a talk by Shambhala Publisher Samuel Bercholz and read his book, A Guided Tour of Hell. It is an amazing story coming from an unlikely source.
What to make of it? That is what Nancy Evans Bush tries to do, concerning a near death experience that has gained tons of attention and discussion: a Buddhist monk in Burma had a near death experience in which he went to a hell realm in which he saw a fiery lake containing buddhist monks including his own teacher and the Buddha, himself, Siddhārtha Gautama. He was told they had gone to hell because they did not believe in Jesus Christ.
Nancy makes about 10 concise well-thought of rational reactions to this story contained in this talk. Questions are also asked about the English translation and its accuracy and/or biases in reporting the story.
This Burmese monk did change his life afterwards, giving up his monastic Buddhist practice and he spoke about his experience to audiences every chance he got.
From a previous IANDS talk, about seven percent of NDE’s involve meeting Christ, and many of those persons were not acquainted with Christ beforehand.
Nancy Evans Bush – The Buddha in Hell: When ‘Spiritually Transformative’ is Confounding (NDEs).
Transformational near-death experiences, like other spiritual epiphanies and ‘great dreams,’ sometimes present with bizarre, difficult-to-interpret imagery. In this hour-long introduction to the topic, Nancy Evans Bush works with two distressing NDEs to illustrate the limitation of literal understandings and discuss useful approaches to unraveling meaning even in bizarre and terrifying-sounding situations.
Lee Witting’s NDE Radio has been doing a series questioning unpleasant NDE messages and discussing Plato’s writings and the Bardo lately. Included in this discussion, he interviewed Nancy Evans Bush. She has had many years to study and contemplate the meaning of hell realm experiences since having her own. Since people don’t like to talk about hell realm experiences, it is possible that the percentage of people experiencing them is far higher than we know. These topics are mysteries to us all and it seems we cannot know the answer in human form.
One Seeker's Story 