After the Woo-Woo, Then What?

I am one of those people who reads books about near-death experiences and thinks woo-hoo for woo-woo. I love these stories (I should say accounts, because they're allegedly not made up) of people who enter incredible worlds.

Tunnels to adventure. Awesome gardens with singing plants. All-pervasive light. Woo-hoo!

While I consider myself to be very creative and a social visionary, I still haven't experienced much in-your-face woo-woo. To my knowledge, I have not stepped away from my body. I have not seen (or been) a "dead" person. I have not been invited aboard a UFO.

This isn't to say that I haven't experienced cool stuff. It's just that none of it seems beyond normal for a creative personality.

So I look at NDErs with awe. It's tempting for me to think that they're lucky, the ones fate picked to savor the adventure of a lifetime.

I think of them as I imagine people in the 19th Century thought of Mark Twain. That guy got around! As a young man he crossed the country by stagecoach. He explored Europe. He explored Hawaii. I imagine that his readers longed to walk in his shoes to see what he saw, to experience the exotic lands he wrote about.

So hearing about people who step out of their bodies and visit the wonders of the universe gets my creative juices gushing.

But not so fast.

I'm coming to learn that having a bona fide NDE is no trip to Disneyland. In the first place, there's pain involved. Lots and lots of physical pain. When you are electrocuted or smashed in a crash or suffer a massive coronary or [pick your method of dying by surprise], it's painful. And recovery is no picnic either.

So there's that. And then there's having to deal with another kind of pain--the disbelief of others. There are a whole bunch of people out in Realityland who are simply 99.9% invested in keeping the status quoa. They do not want to hear about woo-woo. So people who have these incredible experiences are told that their brains are making this stuff up.

While the realists are in their politicaly correct way telling these people they're bats, many NDErs are suffering a profound sense of disappointment that they are stuck back in their bodies. It's like wandering into the best party you've ever imagined only to be told, "Sorry, this is for invited guests only. You'll have to leave."

So there's a price for this experience, and it's essentially having to deal with this material world, all the while knowing that there's another world, another reality somewhere else.

There's a perception some people have that people who write books about NDEs are just out to make a quick buck; that they're looking to cash in on people's gullibility and intense desire to escape the horrors of this troubled world. Even if it were true that some authors of NDE books have made a good living sharing their experiences (I don't know for a fact if any have), thousands of other people have "been there, done that" and didn't write a book.

The experience is so profound for many of these people that they attend support groups, seminars, and conventions to deal with it. They come to find answers to the question, "After the woo-woo, then what?"