The NDE experience of grace

Kenneth Ring is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Connecticut, co-founder of the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS), and founding editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies. His other books about near-death experiences include Life at Death (2013), Heading toward Omega (2012), The Omega Project (2012) and Mindsight: Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind (2008), and Lessons from the Light: What We Can Learn from the Near-Death Experience.

Ring is an early NDE researcher who also taught a course about NDEs for many years at the University of Connecticut. In his course and in this book he argues that sharing NDEs with others may provide some of the emotional and spiritual benefits, and even personality changes, that have been verified as likely for NDE survivors. In other words, a person doesn’t have to have an NDE but may be influenced by hearing about NDEs to lose their fear of death, or to be convinced that death is not a time of divine judgment. I know pondering my father’s experience and reading about NDEs have affected me in these ways, and this is in large part why I am trying to share these experiences with my children and grandchildren.

Bruce Greyson, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Neuro-behavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia, writes in a Forward to the 1998 edition of Lessons from the Light: “If any one person can claim to be an authority on near-death experiences (NDEs) without having had one, that person must surely be Kenneth Ring. Ken dares to writes frankly in these pages about the meaning of NDEs, inferring teleological conclusions from his empirical studies. In violating the scientistic taboo against mentioning such concepts as meaning and purpose, Ken honestly confronts a topic most scientists pretend plays no role in their thinking. As the biologist Ernest William von Brück put it more than a hundred years ago, ‘Teleology is a lady without whom no biologist can live. Yet he is ashamed to show himself with her in public.’

Some theologians “have decried NDEs for holding out the false promise of what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called ‘cheap grace,’ the unconditional forgiveness of sins without any required contrition. ‘Cheap grace,’ wrote Bonhoeffer in The Cost of Discipleship, ‘is the deadly enemy of the Church.’ But is that in fact what NDEs promise, or is that a misreading of its message?
 

In reality the grace that is bestowed upon NDErs comes hand in hand with a very costly discipleship. The unconditional love NDErs report in their experience does not by any means gloss over their sins or excuse their future behavior. Quite to the contrary, NDErs experience firsthand in their NDEs the painful consequences of their sinful behavior, and return to earthly life as confirmed disciples, who understand from their own experience that their behavior does indeed matter, far more than they could have imagined."

Bruce Greyson, 1998 Forward in Lessons from the Light, xv-xix. The photo above is Greyson.

 

Greyson is a co-author of Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), a book that Eben Alexander highly recommends in Proof of Heaven, his NDE account.

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