Living Beyond: Making Sense of Near Death Experiences

The NDEs of Suicides

People who have attempted suicide and who have had NDEs report them to have been unpleasant in the main. Here are a couple of typical examples.

Cardiologist Maurice Rawlings  4 quoted a despondent fourteen-year-old girl who had swallowed a bottle of aspirin:

At the time she kept saying, ‘Mama, help me! Make them let go of me! They’re trying to hurt me!’

The doctors tried to apologise for hurting her, but she said it wasn’t the doctors, but ‘Them! Those demons in Hell, they wouldn’t let go of me, they wanted me. I couldn’t get back. It was just awful…’

After the various tubes were removed, I asked her to recall what had happened. She remembered taking the aspirin, but absolutely nothing else! Somewhere in her mind the events may still be suppressed…

She subsequently became a missionary several years later. No despondency. I am told that everywhere she goes she brings exuberance – a contagious feeling.

A medical associate of Dr Maurice Rawlings 4 provides another ‘standard’ account.

At the height of his success no one could have known he was so despondent.

He told me he was searching for more than life had to offer. I didn’t understand him myself. I should have listened because that night I was called to his home in Beverly Hills and found him on the floor with a bullet wound through his mouth.

He revived to consciousness and responded to resuscitation for a while before he died. I asked him if he hurt. He shook his head – No. I told him we were going to try to save him. He nodded in agreement. His last words were, ‘I’m scared! Don’t let me go back to Hell! I can see it now.’

I don’t know what he saw.

Why are the NDEs of suicides generally unpleasant? Only God knows – but we can conjecture.

A possible reason is that the majority of suicides will have been in a traumatised emotional and psychological state when trying to kill themselves, and this state alone may have led them into the Void or some other appropriate section of the Prison for a season of reflection.

There may also be a spiritual explanation for unpleasant NDEs. Thomas Aquinas  5 argued that life is a gift from God, and that it is not man’s prerogative to take it back, but God’s alone. Scripture supports his thoughts by indicating that there is an allotted time to die:

There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under Heaven – a time to give birth and a time to die (Ecclesiastes 3:1,2).

All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be (Psalm 139:16).

While mankind does not have the capacity to increase a lifespan at will, by a free will choice to commit suicide he can shorten it. Consequently, suicide goes against God’s allotted purposes. Moving outside the natural order like this may consign a spirit into a ‘holding’ situation in the Prison.