Living Beyond: Making Sense of Near Death Experiences

Changing Venues

Some suicides begin with an unpleasant NDE that changes venues as lessons are learnt within it. Tamara Laroux’s  13 NDE illustrates this process.

Tamara, as a troubled 15-year-old, shot herself. She called out ‘God forgive me!’ just before pulling the trigger.

She went first to the Prison section of Hades and experienced the torment there, becoming a ‘being of fear and pain’. She felt total isolation despite being amongst a sea of thousands of others, because she perceived that they were all experiencing feelings similar to her own. Just by looking at someone, she could sense his or her thoughts, feelings of hopelessness, and details of earlier sins and behaviours. Then a giant hand scooped her out of that place and carried her over a yawning gulf separating Prison from Paradise.

Why had she been rescued from the Prison? She supposes because of her desperate cry to God as she pulled the trigger.

Other suicides may be moved from one section of the Prison to another. A number describe beginning in the Void before moving on to a section apparently designed specifically for suicides. We find both venues described by Annabel Chaplin  14. She states that suicides are in the Void for a very long time, before moving on to a ‘Land of Despair’. She describes this as an alien and strange place enveloped by a dull, heavy foreboding.

Victims resided in the still air, completely bent over with their heads buried in mud and covered with dark shrouds. There was no communication with the victims immersed in their own bleak world of gloom and who were unaware of anything but their self-imposed misery – perhaps this was ‘his own place’ to which Judas was consigned (Acts 1:25). New arrivals were powerless to reverse their descent to this awful place, even as they recognized their fate and struggled against it.

Annabel hoped that the souls who had repented ‘long enough’ would fulfil their need for repentance and could eventually find their way back to the light. We would all join her in that hope.