We’ve all heard stories of Near Death Experiences (NDEs). The ‘normal’ format for such a story involves the separation of the soul from the body and then the subject perceiving an tunnel of white light down which they proceed, eventually being met by departed family members or angels or suchlike. These experiences are normally peaceful and inspiring, and they have been known to lead neuroscientists to take abrupt heel turns towards Christianity. However, not all stories of NDEs are easy reading. Admittedly the pleasant ones are the more common of the bunch, and so if you ever happen to temporarily die you can hold out a reasonable degree of hope that you’ll see a happy and peaceful Other Side - but of course for every rule there has to be an exception. Some people see the Abrahamic Hell, burning with sulphurous flames and crammed with monstrous demons. Some just end up in what is called the Void - an endless empty space where only loneliness exists. Nancy Evans Bush, the subject of this article, was one such unfortunate experiencer.
Meeting the Simulators
Sometime during the mid-to-late 20th century (approximately 1962), Nancy Evans Bush was lying prone on a hospital bed - screaming in agony as she gave birth to her second child. Suddenly, something bizarre happened. Perhaps it was relaxing at first - if a little disquieting. She felt her soul separate from her body. Any curiosity about this experience she might’ve had quickly evaporated, however, and was replaced with utter horror as her consciousness was pulled up into an infinite blackness at tremendous speed...
Nancy’s soul flew ever higher - up and out of the roof until she could see over the hospital. She eventually ascended so high that she could see nothing around her, just a meaningless black void. Presumably still in a state of complete shock and horror, she soon became aware of a group of circular entities floating around her. They were constantly changing colour - 'clicking' from white to black and back again. Although they struck her as heartless and malicious, she was careful not to say that they were evil. They seemed 'authoritative'. It was clear to her that they were in control in the bizarre environment around her, and that they knew far more than she did. Despite her Christian faith as part of the Congregational United Church of Christ, it never occurred to her that what she was seeing could've been Hell - she just assumed automatically that this was what waited for her after death without assigning any religious meaning to it. The entities started to speak, and what they had to say was truly horrifying.
They told her that she had never existed. Her 17-month-old daughter had never existed. Her mother had never existed. The Earth wasn't real - it had all been a 'joke'. She was overcome with a sense that what the circular entities were telling her was incontrovertibly true, and that there would be no point in arguing. Utterly crushed, she listened in silence as the entities told her that 'none of that had ever been real; this is all there was'. Eventually the beings vanished and left her alone in the endless blackness around her. I cannot imagine how that must have felt.
She had no context whatsoever with which to understand this new revelation. Her father and her grandfather had been intellectual, liberal-minded Christians, and she had been taught that Jesus loved everyone and that if you did the right thing you would go to Heaven. This experience was eating away at that faith. In later research into Near-Death Experiences, she would come to the conclusion that bad things often happened to who she thought of as bad people - faithless, guilt-ridden, hostile people. She had been born again, and although she acknowledged that she was 'far from perfect' - there was nothing in her background that suggested to her that she might've deserved such a hellish fate. When she was revived, her soul returned to her body and the first thought she had was that Calvin had been right - predeterminism was real and she had been born to suffer. The truth about the virtual nature of the world weighed on her as a heavy burden. She felt it was too terrible to ever tell anyone about it.
Six months after the experience, she was on the road to recovery when she was having tea with a friend. Her friend handed her a book which they had just purchased that day - Jung's Man and his Symbols - and told her to have a look through it. This she did, but she soon dropped it and stumbled away from the table in abject horror. There, on the left side of one of the pages, was a large illustration of one of the discoid entities from her dream. Only later did she realise that she was looking at the well-known symbol of the yin-yang from ancient Chinese philosophy. She had previously had no exposure to this concept, seeing as she had grown up as a New England Congregationalist. It would be this bizarre realisation that would start her down the course to joining the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) and becoming an advocate for those who have suffered through unpleasant NDEs in the face of the overwhelmingly positive New Age view of the phenomenon. She has even written a book on it, which is listed in the sources below.
'Dancing Past the Dark' by Nancy Evans Bush
2009 Interview with Nancy Evans Bush for Vital Signs (IANDS Newsletter)
'Distressing Near-Death Experiences' by Nancy Evans Bush and Bruce Greyson
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