While near-death experiences are typically recounted as pleasant and uplifting: visions of pure light, verdant landscapes and dazzlingly clear skies, accompanied by an overwhelming sense of bliss — not everyone has a pleasant or loving near-death episode. Less reported are the accounts of nightmarish and painfully hellish experiences: terrifying deities, gruesome apparitions, and painful torture. These accounts may include a life-review process, judgment or a disembodied state, followed by rebirth into this or other realms for further growth and learning.
During my own near-death experience, my first stop in the other realm was Hell. Since going public with my NDE, I have been asked several times, “Why did you go straight to Hell? If God is all unconditional love, should you not have gone to Heaven straight away?”
Unpleasant or hell-like NDEs can be perceived as a wake-up call, a learning experience. And I was in dire need of a wakeup call, I just didn’t know it. I like to think that a negative NDE can be viewed as positive when it results in significant constructive changes in a person’s life, as it has in mine.
I consider my NDE a gift in the sense that it has inspired me to see things differently and consider other points of view. While every near-death experience carries with it a message of growth, understanding, and the willingness to see “beyond the view” – it is only by reflecting on my own experience and what it can teach me about myself, that I benefit by embracing, forgiving, and loving what it illuminates for me.
Acknowledging that you have a dark side is the key to personal growth.
By living in complete alignment with who you really are and what you deeply believe is an alignment of your outer personality and actions with your inner being — your soul.
By accepting that you have a dark side and that it is part of you, all the energy you spent in stifling it will suddenly be available for other purposes. Just by accepting that you are who you are, you will have access to a new source of personal power.
When you totally accept yourself, you make a big step toward inner completion. By shining a light into the darkness, you invite that which has been hiding to come out. With self-inquiry, you start unlocking long-hidden parts of yourself, creating a life of balance, inner-peace and harmony.
-Rajiv Parti, M.D.