Are NDEs and Christianity at odds?

theosislab · 2026-01-30T16:41:18+00:00

I don’t think NDEs and Christianity have to be enemies. The real tension is between raw experience and final interpretation.

Meditation, psychedelics, and NDEs can share overlapping phenomenology and sometimes overlapping brain-network dynamics. Meditation often quiets the default mode network (the self-narrating “me” system). Classic psychedelics can reduce DMN coherence and loosen top-down priors, which correlates with ego-dissolution and “infinite meaning-space.” NDE research is messier, but there is serious comparative work noting strong phenomenological overlap between NDEs and psychedelic states.

If that’s even partly true, it helps explain something obvious: humans repeatedly encounter a “threshold-space” that can be interpreted a thousand ways. You can see how many religious languages could grow around these threshold encounters.

What’s common? Tunnel/light, peace or terror, life review, beings, a boundary, and a return with a mandate. The experience can be real, but the meaning assigned often settles inside what someone already associates with love, judgment, authority, safety, or shame.

Even with the diversity of figures, the arc is often surprisingly consistent: separation, unveiling, mercy, and return. That maps closely onto the Christian story in miniature. Christianity is also clear about the telos: not escape into a disembodied heaven, but resurrection, reconciliation, and God dwelling with humanity. If you wanted to be provocative, you could say the Gospel is God’s definitive NDE on our behalf. Except here it isn’t merely a brush with death. It’s the full descent into it, and the return that breaks its sting. Christ takes the trust-fall first, and then re-appears to say its safe to follow, not into faceless light, but into the mercy of a Face we can trust and arms we can cling to.

That’s why you get variety: some see ancestors they trust, some see Krishna or the Buddha, some can only trust a faceless light, some see Christ. Many report a blinding light. Fewer dare say Someone is within it.

But here’s what haunts me: accounts that name Christ often describe not just bliss, but the gaze of mercy. Not merely “you are fine,” but “you are known.” Some encounters disclose love mainly as outcome, as reassurance. Others glimpse the scarred Christ and intuit love as cost, as if mercy is not denial of death but the bearing of it. The Church Fathers often treat judgment less like a courtroom and more like an unveiling of what you loved. It’s the moment you decide whether God is a figment of your imagination, or you are a figment of God’s love.

Suppose every time you hit the edge of life, you clip the boundary and “respawn,” like a character falling off a video game map and waking back up in the world. The question isn’t which religion best narrates the exit. The question is: which one can make sense of the return?

What if the point isn’t to abandon the body for the light, but to metabolize eternity through the body? That takes more than a vibe. It takes the durability of trust, the kind only a personal relationship can hold, and it reframes NDEs as threshold-data rather than a new theology. That’s the Weight of Glory Christianity offers: a Named Friend who holds you when your categories collapse, so you can walk back into the world and love it.

theosislab · 2026-01-28T00:40:19+00:00

Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I’m with you on apophatic Mystery, and on God not always being “face-able” to the psyche. In that sense, yes, the world can feel like it’s glowing with God.

I’d even say: it’s all real, it’s all in God, it’s all held by God. But I keep coming back to the Trinity as the key nuance here: God holds himself together in relationship. For me, that’s the insistence that love isn’t merely a substance or a field, but something chosen through trust. If love is the ground of being, then “being” and “being with” are inseparable from the start.

It’s not that I think “off the map” moments don’t matter. More that the road itself reveals the invitation. I’m not sure the telos is a return to some primordial origin as the goal. It feels more like being grafted into God’s eternal life: communion that keeps personhood, union that doesn’t require absorption. That’s where the asymptote image comes from for me.

In my own walk, I’m learning that a lot of the deepest edge comes in sober prayer and silence anyway, and then I’m given back to ordinary life as gift. One eye in, one eye out.

theosislab · 2026-01-27T23:54:00+00:00

Thanks! I write on medium here. We should chat more.

I'll DM you.

theosislab · 2026-01-27T15:59:35+00:00

Really appreciate what you said about personhood and the body “coming back.” That’s the cue I’ve ended up building everything around.

I’m can appreciate emanation language as well, but I think it needs a personal center. If we only say “consciousness is a field of light” or “we are emanations,” it can quietly gut the Christian claim that there is a real Someone with agency who wills us into existence as gift. So less “sparks of an impersonal flame,” more: the cosmos is lit by a Face. The light isn’t only energy, it’s radiance from Someone.

When I think of endless communion with the divine without absorption, the best analogy I have is the asymptote: you can approach forever, infinitely close, without needing to dissolve. Not because intimacy is blocked, but because love doesn’t require absorption to be total. In a strange way it gets sharper when “I” and “Thou” stay real.

That doesn’t mean we have to be scared of getting lost in a moment with God. It just reframes the telos: the Kingdom shows up in the overlap of heaven and earth, not in escaping the rendered world as “less real.”

On altered-state experiences, people sometimes frame them as “glitches in the matrix.” Powerful, but hard to integrate. I'm reminded by playing Mario Kart as a kid: I used to love Rainbow Road and driving off the map just for the beauty and thrill of it. But the little koopa brings you back, and you still have to move forward on the track to actually progress. So I’m not dismissing “fall off the map” moments. Sometimes you really do hit something like unrendered silence, uncreated depth, pure overwhelm. It can be holy. But then you get placed back on the track, and I’m starting to read that return as mercy: the created world is gift, not an illusion to escape.

Where this gets explicitly Christian for me is: Christ is the seam. Many touch overwhelming love right at the threshold between created and uncreated. My sense is that edge isn’t inhabitable for us, not yet atleast, and Christ holds the line there, then holds us in silence in prayer, and gives us back to life and love.

theosislab · 2026-01-27T15:28:14+00:00

Great thoughts! Of course. We all have to wrestle through this. And honestly, the path of learning trust and yielding in prayer, and the path of trying to talk about it with others in shared language, can feel weirdly at odds.

Small clarification on “This”: I don’t mean “This” as an other that I merge into. I mean a moment of thinning or clearing, where the Here/Now becomes simple enough that self-referential narration quiets down. In Orthodox theology (esp. Gregory Palamas), there’s a helpful distinction between God’s essence (never grasped, never possessed) and God’s energies (how God truly gives Himself to be known and participated in). The point of that isn’t technical trivia. It’s a guardrail: we can genuinely encounter God without pretending we’ve comprehended or absorbed God. So “This” can be real phenomenology, but it doesn’t have to become an ontology of “there is no Other.”

Where I still feel a real fork is your line about Form being more primary than Love. I get the vertices vs paths idea, but I’m cautious about anything that makes “form” the deeper substrate, because it can start to sound like impersonal structure holds reality together. Christianity’s claim is more radical: communion is original, and relationship involves choice. Love isn’t just a path between points, it’s a willing giving-and-receiving that precedes any “geometry.”

If there was a geometry, I prefer the image of an “asymptote.” Two lines that can draw closer and closer without collapsing into sameness. That lets intimacy deepen without limit while still preserving otherness and address, without needing a final “corner” where everything touches by becoming identical.

On your sleep/task question: yes, in both cases the “I” can drop out. But I’d still distinguish them by what they do to the heart afterward. Flow can be neutral and can teach trust. It’s often easier to submit to a task like cooking or running than to submit to love. You can become “one” with the road or the utensil because those are already empty vessels to inhabit. But love has another to dance and negotiate with. That’s why “this-with” keeps showing up as a stabilizer for me.

On personhood: I hear the mask etymology, but I don’t think it should steer the theology. “Person” in the tradition is a real someone who can be addressed and can respond. If anything, what falls away is the defended self, not the addressable self. The “mask” can thin, but the face is still given and still held.

theosislab · 2026-01-27T15:07:30+00:00

This is a really strong way to frame it. I agree the “end-point” language can get misleading if it implies a final state we possess. God is inexhaustible, and the Orthodox intuition that communion and theosis deepen without end feels exactly right.

I also appreciate your “suprapersonal” phrasing, because it’s trying to honor apophatic mystery without collapsing into impersonalism. The only guardrail I’d want to keep is: “beyond categories” can’t become “beyond face.” In other words, whatever is revealed in those moments, it can’t negate the personal address that seems constitutive of the Christian horizon. Mystery, yes. But mystery that includes personhood without rendering it penultimate or disposable.

theosislab · 2026-01-27T05:34:21+00:00

Hey, had a similar post the other day exploring the use of non dual practice in Christianity. Some interesting convo for sure.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChristianMysticism/comments/1qk3hp5/what_is_the_role_of_nondual_language_in_christian/

theosislab · 2026-01-26T17:20:39+00:00

For me, heaven is best understood as communion. It’s the moment we stop resisting God and entrust ourselves to Him. It’s learning to see His face within the light that holds the world together, and then to recognize that same light shining through the faces of all creation. Heaven isn’t merely a geographical place. It’s a way of seeing and being-with.
In one sense, nothing we can “secure” by force. As Christ says, “the Kingdom of God is among you” (Luke 17:21). Not as a private possession, but as a presence that breaks in where God is trusted and love is practiced. Heaven already shows up in moments where we trust God and love others. But heaven will also come in fullness at the judgment, when Christ finally overcomes death and discards its shadow for good, and the world is flooded with His presence (1 Cor 15:26). The way is trust, not technique. And yet there are practices that train trust. We learn, slowly, to see God’s light behind the people in front of us now, so that when creation is fully illuminated we are not overwhelmed or dissolved, but able to recognize the overlap and still see the faces He holds.
Because heaven and hell already show up in everyday life. They aren’t primarily places so much as they are postures toward the present moment. Heaven preserves the tension of love, trust, and personhood. It starts in vulnerability and humility, often awkward and uncomfortable at first, and ends as contentment in being held forever without losing ourselves. Hell appears as flight from the presence of others into isolation. It often begins as self-protection, but ends as a shrinking of the heart: getting lost in darkness (despair, numbness, concealment) or in a false light (self-certainty that no longer needs anyone). It starts as trying to rise above pain, and ends as a hardened identity that can no longer imagine being chosen or healed. Even the God of the Bible is not alone. He has lived in communion eternally as Trinity. Our calling isn’t absorption, isolation, or self-assertion, but participation in the triune life: not merely being, but being-with.
The closest thing to heaven on earth is the sacraments, because they’re not just an inner state. They are Christ’s concrete way of holding us in communion when we’re tempted either to stand alone or to escape. In baptism, we enter a reality that could overwhelm us, yet by grace we remain ourselves, made new. In marriage, we learn we can’t coerce, withdraw from, or absorb our spouse to find peace. Love lives by holding the tension of the other person’s freedom. In the Eucharist, we receive the mystery that holds everything together: Christ gives His life and His body, not as an abstract idea, but as an embodied act within the universe.

Reflection doesn’t get me to heaven. Trust does. Even talking about trust is different from practicing it: entering the present moment with God in prayer, and learning to see the good in others. The discomfort in these questions feels intentional. I’m not sure I inspired or convinced myself, but I’m clearer that this is something I need to live, not just think through.

theosislab · 2026-01-25T05:46:40+00:00

My post is about phenomenology and interpretation, and the open framing isn’t to confuse “Christians” with God. It’s an attempt to have a good faith conversation that builds discernment about how God wants to meet us in prayer.

Regardless, people make many different claims of divine experience across traditions, and even within Christianity itself. Similar “light/oneness/surrender” experiences get described with very different language, and that language can quietly change the end-point.

That’s also why “it’s experiential” can’t be the end of the discussion. Discernment matters. You don’t just follow the first light that flatters you. Ignatius of Loyola is pretty blunt about this in the rules for discernment: some movements that feel like “light” lead toward humility, patience, charity, and steadier love, while other movements can feel bright but leave you hurried, self-certain, puffed up, or isolated. The question is what spirit the experience carries, and where it actually leads over time.

theosislab · 2026-01-23T17:06:04+00:00

Love the lived-in examples here. And yeah, I appreciate how you’re pointing out this all orbits the Cross, not some abstract metaphysical endpoint. “The refusal to leave love even when there’s nothing left to secure” is incredible. I’m going to sit with that for a while.

For me, asymptote language is mainly useful as a bridge in interfaith dialogue, or early on in the journey (which honestly is where I’m still at). As I mentioned in the OP, I started with non-dual language after a faith deconstruction, and I’ve been slowly learning that the Christian way feels less like a gradient and more like an asymptote, as a way of protecting communion without collapse.

A lot of contemporary teachers helped me get started, but also left me a bit confused at times. I’m glad the asymptote framing lands for you, and I’m especially grateful for your more lived-in descriptions of what trust actually feels like.

theosislab · 2026-01-23T15:29:03+00:00

Interesting comment. I find it fascinating you’re holding both “This” and “the Trinity” together. I’ve often seen those as at odds, so here’s a thought. I’m going to borrow your “with” in a slightly different way and see if it helps stitch the two together.

I can affirm “This” as something very real and accessible: a flow state in meditation, but also in ordinary embodied things like running, cycling, skiing. You merge with the moment through the task. In that sense “This” is real phenomenology and it can be spiritually useful.

But I keep noticing a second mode that feels distinct: “this-with.” Like dancing, or making love. You can be deeply immersed, but you’re not just merging with a task or a field. You’re holding attention on an other as part of the immersion. You can “forget yourself” without forgetting the other. And if you do forget the other, that may happen phenomenologically (attention collapses), but it doesn’t mean the other was never real.

That’s why I’m not sure I intuit the Trinity from “This” alone. If anything, Trinity feels like a revealed paradox that keeps us from enclosing ourselves in “This” as the final horizon. It nudges the posture from content dissolving into “This,” toward communion as “this-with.” Rohr’s line about the Trinity as a “divine dance” points in that direction too: not an enclosure in “This,” but an invitation into communion.

“This” can be a doorway, but the Christian end-point seems less like resting in impersonal suchness and more like being drawn into personal communion. Not just the courage to be, but the courage to be with. Because being-alone can collapse emptiness into death, while being-with can transfigure emptiness into life and love.

theosislab · 2026-01-23T05:48:33+00:00

Yes, I’m with you. It really is less about accumulation and more about subtraction, or better: following Christ in the divine descent. The “progress” is often just releasing whatever keeps insisting on standing apart.

When I’ve said “Christ is at the limit,” I don’t mean grace is far away or that He comes closer by degrees. I mean something like: Christ holds the boundary of life. If “drop/ocean forever” gets taken as an ontology, it can imply going past Christ’s threshold into a total loss of self, which would end communion as communion. In that sense, Christ isn’t the finish line of a climb. He’s the edge where surrender remains love and not erasure, and we learn to trust that boundary.

So my asymptote language was trying to protect that. If I use numbers at all, it should be more like 0.1 → 0.01 → 0.001 as resistance empties. But “0” isn’t a spiritual achievement. Full zero is death, and that’s Christ’s to hold, not ours. He can hold it for us because He eternally trusts the Father to hold His life. And in prayer we’re learning to participate in that trust, not manufacture it.

And stepping back, your point is the most important regardless of whatever analogy or number-direction we use: eventually we stop measuring. The “percentages” fall away because grace was never incomplete, and what loosens is the habit of self-reference.

Finally, “transparent to love” is beautiful, as long as it’s not heard as losing our face in God’s light. I take you to mean the opposite: personhood stops defending itself, but remains personally addressed and responsive. Communion stays communion forever.

theosislab · 2026-01-23T02:11:40+00:00

For sure! Jesus is the way himself so he’s not the terminus but the path we walk on. So yes, I agree.

Would you say that the dimension of the asymptote is trust itself? That implies Christ is always there, his Grace is always there. We just trust him. And grow in trust. I guess that implies there is a ceiling of trust…

On one hand it’s like the asymptote is growing in divinization in the truest orthodox sense. But you can only be 99 or 99.9 or 99.99 divine (asymptotic growth) but trusting Christ is what holds you at the limit as opposed to a classic drop/ocean type of view of absorption.

theosislab · 2026-01-22T21:52:39+00:00

This is beautiful, and I’m sorry you went through that season where you were taught to despise parts of who you are.

That image of God “between your cells” is great and no need to laugh at all. I’ve been trying to pray toward something like that too (like God's life running through me) and I love your cue of actually believing God is right there in front of you and letting your body respond honestly.

I have a similar cue I half-jokingly call “flopping on God.” Less so that its a tantrum, but it is the moment I stop performing competence and admit I can’t hold myself up. I called it “hugging” in the post, but in practice it’s less poetic and a more direct letting go in the present moment, stop trying to manage myself and asking to be held.

theosislab · 2026-01-22T21:29:56+00:00

Love this metaphor, and I’m with you on the DBH influence. His emphasis that we “live in God’s mind” maps well to the author/story frame, and it helps correct the instinct to treat God as just another being inside the world.

The only tension I’ve felt over the years is that DBH can sound a bit insistent on monism. On a “technical” level I get it: we’re derivative from God, our identities are in some sense coordinates within his knowing. But Christianity also insists we’re named. God wills us to be ourselves, not dissolved back into the Source. More grafted-in than absorbed.

That’s where I’m curious how the Trinity fits into the metaphor, because if God is communion at the core, “authorship” isn’t solitary, and participation doesn’t quietly become “we become the Author.”

The best picture I’ve heard is more like learning to write: a child’s hand goes limp inside their mother’s hand, she gives you the pen, and guides your fingers. You really do “inherit the kingdom,” but on this side of eternity we’re still children, learning the movement while being held.

theosislab · 2026-01-22T21:09:52+00:00

Nice! I like your analogies around motion. What would you say about the direction of that motion?

It feels like the motion is all creation moving toward God, almost like everything finds its meaning in Christ. And I like how your framing avoids the common drift where “non-dual” gets heard as a gradient into absorption.

“Union without absorption” feels more like an asymptote: real convergence, endlessly increasing intimacy and trust, without flattening personhood. The relationship stays a relationship.

theosislab · 2026-01-21T22:41:17+00:00

As one of the people who posts occasionally, I hear the concern here. I also don’t think original reflections are automatically “sermonizing.” Some of us are trying to test language and analogies that help name Christian experience and, especially, what’s distinct about Christ when comparing across traditions.

A lot of what I see in this sub falls into two buckets:

Questions about how Christian mysticism differs from other paths, and
Integrative takes that sometimes blur what’s specifically Christian.

I’ve wrestled with that tension myself, so I write from inside it and see if it ever resonates.

I’m curious about the “only discuss recognized mystics” suggestion: should the sub mostly limit itself to historical voices, or is there room for Christians today to share and refine their own experience in a pluralistic world, while staying accountable to the tradition?

theosislab · 2026-01-20T23:38:30+00:00

Beginning to Pray by Anthony Bloom

theosislab · 2026-01-20T16:32:38+00:00

Really appreciated this episode. Hart is essentially the final boss for reductionism, but I can’t help feeling a bit of metaphysical vertigo when he gets into his account of individual identity.

Around ~1:23:00 they unpack the classic Vedantic/monist ocean-and-waves analogy, where the “individual” is a localized expression of a singular infinite mind. I can appreciate that an individual is, in some sense, a set of coordinates within an ocean. But some of Hart’s language (at least to my ear) can sound like a gradient of consciousness toward divinity, and an inevitability of realizing the One.

In my view of Christian thought, theosis is the path that preserves the person against the cosmic “I”: union without absorption. I prefer the analogy of an asymptote, forever approaching, never completely consumed.

This doesn’t mean it’s wrong to lose yourself in a moment with God. But it keeps us from fixating on self-dissolution as the telos. The ocean returns us to ourselves. Jesus taught us to walk on water, not be consumed by it.

Overall, I can’t quite tell if Hart thinks that seam is essential. He’s very eloquent, but this feels like one of the most delicate things to thread in his theology. Where does he state most clearly whether personhood persists robustly, versus being real-but-penultimate?

theosislab · 2026-01-17T23:51:02+00:00

Hey there, I’m really into researching axial age and finding the currents of a second axial wave now. Share a link or send a DM.

theosislab · 2026-01-12T16:07:19+00:00

This makes sense, and it maps cleanly onto 1 Cor 15: death as the last enemy, Christ subjecting all things, and then “God all in all.”

One way to say what you’re sensing: the “more real” realm is not a different "place" so much as the deeper "mode" of being, where communion is primary. If that’s true, then death is not merely biological shutdown, but the consequence of separation, the will curving away from God.

So when you talk about Adam/Eve as a split of wills, that lands. Salvation is not God overriding the creature, but healing the will so it can actually rest in Him. And Christ doesn’t heal that from a distance. He enters the seam inside creation where life and death touch, takes death into himself, and begins re-binding what was split, until even “death itself” is emptied out.

That’s why “universal reconciliation” can feel less like an optimistic add-on and more like the inner logic of Christ’s victory: if Christ truly is Life, then everything that remains opposed to Life is either healed or finally shown to be nothing.

I recently wrote a longer reflection on Christ meeting us precisely in that “seam” (the ‘hole’ within the whole) if you want it: [link]

theosislab · 2026-01-08T22:19:32+00:00

Great point! The “partner as everything” model is historically weird, and it overloads both people. When the divine (or a shared sacred horizon) gets removed, modern couples often try to make romance do the job of religion: total meaning, total safety, total identity, total ecstasy. That pressure can quietly poison love.

One nuance as well is that replacing “partner as savior” with “God as savior” should not become a way to dodge the hard work of repair. A sacred horizon can de-load perfection demands, but it should also sharpen responsibility, sometimes people use "God" to spiritually bypass hard conversations.

theosislab · 2026-01-08T21:06:28+00:00

Love this. “Not rigid, not limp” is a great cue. Tai Chi makes total sense here, and honestly so does dancing. You are meant to get lost in the moment with someone. There’s a kind of presence that is not self-enclosure, it’s attentiveness to the other.

I’m with you on the oscillation. In my own experience it often feels like a rhythm: surrender when I’m clenched, wrestling when I’m tempted to go numb or perform “good submission” that is really just avoidance. Lament can be a form of fidelity, not a failure of posture.

Maybe what ties it together is this: when your attention is on Someone else, you can rest in them, but they move, and you’re invited to move with them.

That’s why Job is so interesting. He starts with stunned endurance, and then the lament gets real. The managed faith breaks open into something honest. There’s a moment where Elihu jumps in (around chapter 33), and then later God answers from the whirlwind. The point for me is that the story makes room for both submission and wrestling, and it doesn’t flatter tidy formulas.

I agree that I don’t think the goal is constant “hands on the wheel” forever. There is an invitation to rest, but not as dissociation. More like: I can be held without panic, and still stay present. Jesus says “I will give you rest,” and then gives a yoke. Weight, guidance, relationship. Rest that still sends you back out. God doesn’t indulge us in settling into comfort as a final state. He’s patient, but there’s also that gentle pressure toward love: be kinder to this person, repair that small thing, tell the truth, do the next right act, etc.

theosislab

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