What do you think of NDE's (Near Death Experiences)?

[Bob_Crowley]

Bob, your reference to your father’s hideous scream gave me a fright! It sounds like you’ve learned more about this phenonema than I have, perhaps thanks to a Catholic priest. You seem to have seen a real ghost and if the priest is right, perhaps en transit to hell!

I am now wondering if my situation was an out of body experience rather than an NDE. No one saw me (that I could tell) and I didn’t try to communicate but rather observed.

I go to a Catholic psychiatrist in Wickham Terrace a couple of times a year. He believes I saw my father that night. I haven’t discusses it much with priests, although I’ve mentioned it. The problem, as I stated to one of our parish priests, is “what do you do with it?”.

The psychiatrist himself is quite a spiritual man. I told him of two occasions when a voice cut right across my mind, very clearly, in response to a couple of things I was mentally complaining about. To my surprise, he replied, “Did I tell you about my experience?”

He’d been sitting in his office just typing on his computer when a voice said out of nowhere, “Go to Maclean!” No reason was given, no justification, no time frame, nothing. So he just noted it, and kept going.

Now he gets involved in family healing masses, due to his dual experience in both spiritual and psychological areas. About 2 months after the office voice, he was involved in such a mass at Lismore just over the NSW border. Afterwards, an aboriginal woman came up to him and said, “I don’t want to be a nuisance, or make trouble, but I seem to be getting told you should go to Maclean”. As you’re probably aware, Maclean is not very far from Lismore. Since he’d been primed by the voice in the office, he went. He ended up on some river island where they used to lock-up aborigines in the early days of settlement.

It seems there was some unfinished spiritual business. Now that was my psychiatrist’s experience.

Frankly I don’t see any conflict between my father’s hideous scream and the clear indications, particularly by Christ himself, that we will be judged, and that Hell will be the outcome for many. My father was, in his own words, “a real mongrel” to me, and he wasn’t much better to his family. I think there were a few other things he did too. He’d been baptised Catholic, but if he was counting on that to save him,when he had long lost any faith in God and hadn’t been in a Catholic Church for years, he was badly mistaken.

The only difference is that it’s unusual. Even my father said, on the night he appeared in my room, “It wasn’t easy for me either, you know! And I never had a chance to see anything like this!” Word for word.

But I don’t see a conflict. Christ warned us we’d be judged, and in fact the first and most vivid indications of Hell come from His own words. As far as I’m concerned, all I saw was my father’s reaction to it’s first approach. The children at Fatima gave us a pretty good description, and I suspect that if I saw something like that coming, I’d be screaming too.