Rachel and I were talking about near death experiences (NDEs) some time ago when we came to the question: should these accounts be understood as what will actually happen after death? To be clear, many of the experiencers do seem to believe everyone will experience something substantially similar to their NDE. At the time, I said to Rachel that I can believe NDEs are “real” (i.e., not hallucinations or lies or delusions) while also not believing they are photorealistic depictions of the afterlife.
This is related to the rule I proposed in my post on speaking in tongues: never believe an experiencer’s explanation of their extraordinary experience.
I’m circling around a way to understand strange experiences that:
- Rejects materialism (obviously!)
- Resists psychologizing
- Holds them to be true
- While rejecting any absolute truth claims made by the experiencer
One way to do this might be through something like Amazonian perspectivism. Warning: my knowledge here is shaky. I first heard about it from Gordon White, who does have a lot of knowledge on the subject. But my personal reading is limited, so any mistakes in the next two paragraphs are my own.
Perspectivism is an anthropological theory developed by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro to understand the worldviews of various Amazonian peoples. It states that different beings inhabit differing perspectives, yet all experience themselves as persons. A human with a human perspective sees themselves living in a house in a village, engaged in hunting and social life. An anaconda with an anaconda perspective also sees themselves living in a house and engaging in hunting–it’s just that their house may be a hole in a river bank and their game might be the same animals hunted by humans. Personhood is distributed across species. At the same time, it is experienced differently by each species because of their perspective.
This is where shamans come in. Shamans are humans who can move between perspectives. Once they have inhabited those perspectives, they can bring back knowledge, properly translated. To use Viveiros de Castro’s famous example: for the jaguar, blood is beer. If a shaman watching (from afar!) a jaguar consuming its kill inhabited the jaguar’s perspective, they would see the jaguar enjoying a refreshing, intoxicating beverage. The shaman who comes back with this knowledge would be wrong to say “jaguars drink beer,” which is nonsense literally. Instead the shaman translates across the perspectives by saying, “for the jaguar, blood is something like what beer is for us.”
Here is where something like perspectivism could be helpful in understanding strange experiences. In these events, the experiencer undergoes something like a shamanic journey. They are experiencing the world through a different perspective.
When someone is speaking in tongues, they are experiencing the perspective of a spirit. From its perspective, the spirit experiences itself as a person, which includes speaking and language. Yet that language cannot be understood properly by someone standing next to the experiencer in a state of ordinary consciousness. It also cannot be carried back across the perspectives without translation. This is why those who trying to explain speaking in tongues by way of human languages are breaking the experience; they are failing as shamans.
NDEs are the experience of discorporated human beings. This is, needless to say, a perspective very different from that of an embodied human being. And, again, it would be a mistake to bring information from that perspective back to the waking world without translation. NDEs are not daylight truth, like GPS directions. They’re also not metaphors to be handled like some hack dream interpreter. They are reports of a strange country, and must be told slant.
These strange experiences must pass through the chest, not the head. The proper organ of translation for them is the heart; they must be felt into, not explained.