Insights From A Pioneer Near-Death Researcher

Insights From A Pioneer Near-Death Researcher

Michael Grosso

Kenneth Ring’s latest book Blogging to Infinity reminds me of an early love I had: the art of the essay.  As Ring himself notes, blogging is essay writing.  The essay (in French, an “attempt,”) is a personal, free-wheeling literary form. It can be light and witty or profound and probing.  Ring, one of the pioneers of near-death research, has produced a book of essays that are personal and profound.  He touches on so many ideas and persons, I must be selective in my comments.

So, suppose you recall beating up and mocking a smaller, weaker boy in your life review.  You not only become aware of what you did; you also become aware of what it felt like to be beaten and mocked by a bully.  Telepathy becomes empathy, enabling you to feel exactly what the other person is feeling. That’s bound to be instructive, and transformative, and Ring underscores this with stories and commentary.  This feature of the NDE is special because it points to the possibility of human beings evolving their consciousness in a way that would lead to a more harmonious planetary life.  The question is: can we design experimental procedures in which we induce these transformative states of mind?

What is the content of the prophetic visions that researchers find among experiencers?  It turns out to be easy to summarize the invariable theme of these visions of the future.  Near-death visions of the future, reported by researchers since the 1970s, uniformly describe environmental and economic catastrophe, in short, what is happening right now. Ring regards these prophetic visions as warnings, not forecasts of what must be.  They are conditional scenarios that depend on our  human response.  Throughout history mystics and prophets have been foretelling a day of reckoning, a time of total convulsion and transformation into a new earth, heaven, and humanity.  The archetype has shown up in the NDE and in the alien contact and abduction experiences studied by the psychiatrist John Mack and other investigators. The archetype in its fullness is about death and rebirth; it speaks to human individuation and evolution.  To get the full story of this strange adventure that is human life and death, I strongly recommend that you look into the pages of Ken Ring’s Blogging to Infinity.   (Get a copy from Amazon.)