Narcissistic Near-Death Experiences

The studio that brought us “Sound Of Freedom” is releasing a documentary on life-after-death for the Halloween season, “After Death”. There’s worse ideas, but it doesn’t help my suspicions that they’re intentionally acting as a relief valve for social angst.

Hmm, now that I think about the shared emotional states of a society… I was reading up on Narcissism today.

h ttps://www.britannica.com/science/narcissism

Clinical theories of narcissism, such as those of the Austrian psychoanalysts Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg, posit that adult narcissism has its roots in early childhood experiences. According to Kohut, the child’s self develops and gains maturity through interactions with others (primarily the mother) that provide the child with opportunities to gain approval and enhancement and to identify with perfect and omnipotent role models.

So, when a single mother blames the man she chose to divorce, the kid gets the message that everything bad is everybody else’s fault? Could be one of many reasons why single motherhood is bad.

Parents who are empathic contribute to the healthy development of the child’s self… parents reveal limitations in themselves that lead the child to internalize or assume an idealized image that is realistic and possible to attain.

Kids see that their parents are good but imperfect, so they’re willing to be realistic about themselves, too? Sounds right. There’s a bit of encouragement for parents.

According to Kohut, narcissism is in effect developmental arrest—a halt in the child’s development at what was a normal and necessary stage, with the result that the child’s self remains grandiose and unrealistic. At the same time, the child continues to idealize others to maintain self-esteem through association.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the Narcissist’s need for external validation, or even external identification. The way our schools are run… entitlement over merit, grievances are weapons, the naked power flexes of a police-state campus… the Cabal that runs our government, I do not think they screen for a specific ideology. They screen for a specific personality defect that makes the person controllable no matter what they claim to believe. Narcissism. Not all kids turn out narcissistic even with all the risk factors, but if our society encourages the trait then all the susceptible ones will fall.

You get more of what you subsidize, so what are those feel-good participation awards subsidizing?

Meanwhile, notice the increasing interest in life-after-death, hallucinogen experimentation and similar (induced) spiritual experiences. I think promoting narcissism is part of how the Cabal corrupted the Evangelical Church, too. The emphasis shifted from ideas to experiences, from objective standards to selective feelings, so people began attending church to feel something instead of think something.

What is life after death like? I can easily tell you the objective standard. Men are appointed once to die and then to face judgment. Dying is like falling asleep; that’s the New Testament’s description in, for example, Stephen’s Martyring.

Thus, I’m not excited about LAD. You fall asleep, God wakes you up and makes you into more of who you choose to be right now. It’s just consequences, really. Life will be better for the in-group, guaranteed, but Scripture says directly that what we’ll be has not been made known, so why be curious?

A possible answer from people excited about LAD, is because they consider the supernatural something to be experienced, not understood. The Christian who smokes mescaline and talks to spirit animals is a better Christian than the incel who refuses to hire a prostitute, because the former is LIVING the Christian life! The latter is choosing to live nothing at all.

It’s not just dumb. It’s dangerous. The Narcissist cannot accept a god who doesn’t show up, and God has not shown up to do miracles in the West for a long time. Chinese Christians report lots of miracles in the same time frame, however, so it may be that God hasn’t done miracles in the West because we haven’t needed them. Certainly, our material needs have usually been easily addressed by material methods.

So, I’m not interested in a “documentary” of near-death experiences. Dramatic experiences of the spirit world were rarely helpful or pleasant even in Biblical times. Daniel’s prophecies are of interest to me; less so, that talking with the angel left him bedridden for weeks. Elijah called down fireballs from Heaven and shortly afterward, wanted to give up and die. You don’t need a supernatural experience to be one of God’s favorites. All that Samson needed was a mullet.

My search for a review of “After Death” to fisk revealed that all is not forgiven about the studio spreading the idea that our government is infested with child molesters. This one is particularly funny in that regard! He’s still so butthurt about Christian opposition to pedo that… well, you know the type. These people can play 25-dimensional, underwater chess when it comes to usury and legalism, but if you punch them in the face then they lash out so clumsily that they spill the beans along with their dignity.

Where I come from, we call that a glass jaw.

‘After Death’ Review: Studio Behind ‘Sound of Freedom’ Returns with Brain-Dead Documentary About Near-Death Experiences

h ttps://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/death-review-studio-behind-sound-170000999.html

By David Ehrlich for IndieWire, 25 October 2023

Watching Stephen Gray and Chris Radtke’s “After Death,” a faith-based documentary about near-death experiences that was produced by the same company behind “Sound of Freedom” (last summer’s most popular movie among people who might accuse you of being a pedophile on Twitter)…

It’s not faith-based if it’s true, dude. I don’t know how long God will tolerate your people’s moral inversions… but you’ve got to know how this story ends. Why do you insist on opposing God? You aren’t going to win this spiritual war. You won’t escape justice. God has sworn His Own Name to that.

Perhaps to the Narcissist, justice doesn’t exist unless he experiences it. No problem, we can accommodate this special need. Behold the whipping post! It gives wisdom to the simple, just like the Bible!

…I was reminded of something that Lou Reed famously never said: “Only a few chosen people have been lucky enough to bask in the light of Jesus Christ during the kind of disembodied episode that might accompany a terrible car accident or a life-saving operation, but every one of them has apparently turned it into a full-fledged career.”

I understand the sentiment, even though I know of a few counterexamples. The prophets of Scripture didn’t monetize their divine revelations… although several of them did write books.

Which isn’t to suggest that Dr. Mary Neal is lying about the heart-to-heart she had with the son of God after drowning in a kayak, or that ordained minister and “90 Minutes in Heaven” author Don Piper doesn’t sincerely believe in the story that sold more than six million books and got adapted into a movie where he was played by Hayden Christensen, it’s only to observe that nearly dying seems to make for a decent living. The overwhelming majority of the interview subjects in “After Death” are professional “I saw Heaven and it bore an uncanny similarity to how it’s described in Christian theology” people. That’s even true of obligatory “skeptic” Michael Sabom, a former cardiologist who draws from his increasingly religious output about the physiology of near-death experiences (or NDEs) to help disguise this movie’s “700 Club”-level hokum behind a cheap veil of pseudoscience.

He has a point, and my sarcasm muscles appreciate the burden being carried by somebody else for a minute, but the reason there’s a market for this stuff is because people want to experience the supernatural, even if only by proxy. Even if it cannot possibly do them any good.

Audiences who swear by the gospel of Colton Burpo probably won’t see the problem here, but those of us who are less inclined to believe — like, for example, an agnostic Jewish film critic who came face-to-face with God at a Radiohead concert in 2003 and returned from Giants Stadium with the ticket stub to prove it — might struggle to accept a handful of teary anecdotes and bizarre medical anomalies as compelling evidence that Christianity got everything right about life after death. On the contrary, such viewers are liable to be left with more questions than answers.

Most atheists take years to go from “there is no God” to “we must kill God again”. Ehrlich made the trip as quickly as you can say “agnostic Jewish”.

Questions such as: If no two NDEs are alike, then why do Gray and Radtke illustrate all of them with the same screensaver-esque imagery of starry mountains, fire-lit eyeballs, and streams of white light ejaculating out of the Earth towards the sky?

Answer, NDEs do share similarities. So do acid trips. Foremost among them, that supernatural experiences usually happen with the physical body is impaired. As if our bodies shelter us from a reality that we aren’t yet ready for.

Is Terrence Malick getting residuals for all the shit this movie strip-mines from “The Tree of Life,” or will the “pay it forward” scheme that made “Sound of Freedom” seem like such an enormous success make it too difficult for people to account for the profits? After Dr. Neal relates her story about “being held by Christ” as she went under the rapids and insists that “it’s just something that’s outside our language,” why do people then continue to talk at us — in “our language” — for another hour?

I like you better when you’re like this, Ehrlich… throwing unlit firebrands with a comical desperation born of a glass-jawed, guilty conscience… but isn’t your job to critique the movie, not the motivations of the people who made it? If Don Piper wrote his book in order to cash in on a good story he made up, well, then what’s the problem? Don’t you Hollywood types do that every single day? “Based on a true story!”

Which brings us to the only important question that “After Death” actually bothers to ask, if only by accident: Why is it so important to both the filmmakers and their interview subjects alike that audiences share their faith in the great beyond? The people onscreen bemoan the fact that no one takes them seriously, and I was fascinated by the realness of their frustration in the face of such fanciful visions, and how it sometimes curdles into measured fits of rage.

They crave a validation that they aren’t getting, obviously. It could be Narcissism, but it could also be the normal desire for socialization. It’s hard to hang out with people who think you’re lying about a traumatic event. Just don’t bring it up? Sure, but sometimes easier said than done.

One of the interviewees — a humble prophet — even goes so far as to insist that Jesus instructed her to tell the people of Earth what she had seen during her NDE, which would make this documentary an indirect message from Christ himself.

Okay, that one’s Narcissism. Had she really encountered Jesus, He would probably have said something along the lines of, “obey your husband, attention whore!”

Being content with self-belief is obviously anathema to the evangelical spirit that keeps Angel Studios in business…

If your beliefs are only true for you, then you don’t have any beliefs. You have fashionable accessories. In your brain. Like microchips.

…but that doesn’t make it any less disturbing that “After Death” — a repetitive slog that’s only shape or narrative momentum comes from its slow unmasking as religious propaganda — ends with someone lamenting the fact that so few people believe in heaven anymore, even now that medical technology has made NDEs more common than ever (naturally, that message isn’t actually the end, but rather the start of something new: The closing credits are interrupted by a “special message” in which the directors implore moviegoers to buy tickets for other people through the pay it forward program).

They had a near-marketing experience!

There may not be anything particularly insidious to the common religious notion that life is just a prelude to the glory or horror of what comes next (and yes, “After Death” boasts an iffy chapter about a drug addict whose NDE took him to the gates of hell), but in the context of such flimsy charlatanism it can’t help but feel a bit sad — even perverse — to watch a film co-opt documentary language to make such unfounded promises about the next world to the people still living in this one.

One hopes that Ehrlich isn’t narcissistic himself, because if so… well, he experienced this movie, so he briefly loved Jesus, right? I don’t wonder why he’s unable to separate a rather silly documentary for the holidays, from the idea that the people he shared emotions with are loathsome Christians.

Sabom goes so far as to describe this mortal coil as “being lived on a flat black-and-white wall,” and likens the emergence into the afterlife as being “lifted off that 2D painting and brought into a 3D room of color all around you.” If only this movie had been designed for the Sphere…

Segue

He’s referring to the Baby Boomer Mausoleum, aka the Las Vegas Sphere that recently opened with a thirty-six-show U2 concert. Heh, talk about a near-death experience. Some of those guys are still alive? Is there a necromancer in the house?

Imagine a football stadium. Next, imagine wrapping it in a ginormous flatscreen TV so completely that it needs air holes. Next, imagine paying $1,000 and a day of your life to sit in that architectural abomination instead of your merely hundred-inch flatscreen TV at home. Move over, Fahrenheit 451.

I started a post on the Sphere but lost interest. It’s just a football stadium wrapped in a television, and so big that it can’t possibly be profitable. It doesn’t have to be, Las Vegas is a reality unto itself, but still, how many events need a 20,000-person venue? 20,000 people and 304 parking spaces, per wikipedia.

Although, come to think of it… that could be an amazingly good tool for programming narcissistic personalities with a shared self-identity.

End segue

…perhaps the filmmakers might have been able to convey that such beauty and vividness is possible right here on Earth. Alas, the fact that “After Death” was made by and for people who essentially think of life on our planet as the parking lot outside the universe’s sickest light show is all the explanation you’d need to understand why this movie is such a braindead bore. “Be skeptical,” Sabom implores, and while it’s hard to ignore the clear implication that we’re meant to to be skeptical of everyone else, few documentaries have ever made it easier to question what’s on screen.

Yes, television is the wrong medium for a documentary that by choice of subject matter, has nothing to display except people who are not dead. TV is the wrong medium for much of the content on TV, which has long baffled me. It’s why I’m excited to research the idea that the Cabal has been deliberately fostering the growth of narcissistic personality disorders for decades. TV is the most immersive of existing media and therefore, could be most naturally appealing to people unable to describe who they are without a shared experience or induced emotional state. Favorite books are not the same thing because nobody experiences a book. A book’s stimulation is neither audio nor visual.

Most immersive, that is, with the possible exception of social media. Its long-term consequences aren’t in yet, but its short-term consequences are dopamine tolerance, attention deficit disorder and sudden urges to speak with the manager. (Which proves Narcissistic Karen is important, if the manager is paying attention to her.)

Now please stick around for a very special message about how you can Venmo me lots of money so that other people might be able to experience the eye-opening wisdom of my film criticism.