Dancing Past the Dark: Distressing Near-Death Experiences by Nancy Evans Bush

Author:Nancy Evans Bush [Bush, Nancy Evans]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nancy Evans Bush
Published: 2012-04-08T22:00:00+00:00

Spirit

Individuals who find themselves in distressing NDEs that involve a sense of transcendence with feelings of awe and terror may be encountering what the German scholar Rudolf Otto (1958, 12) termed the “numinosum,” the Holy. Such an encounter may be interpreted from within a religious tradition or as a generalized spirituality; it occurs across all traditions. This is not the tamed “walking in the garden with God” kind of holy but the original holy terror, “the fear of God” so expertly captured by Old Testament writers as a sense of overpowering awe. Otto describes the forms and responses of such meetings with the overpowering sacred in the encounter he calls the mysterium tremendum:

“It may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy. It has its wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering. It has its crude, barbaric antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of—whom or what? In the presence of that which is a mystery inexpressible and above all creatures.”

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