NDE as cosmo-drama

I see a number of threads with some anxious questions about whether this or that element of NDEs can be real. I would like to suggest an approach that can take some of the sting out of the tail of this EOCD (existential obsessive compulsive disorder).

Instead of trying to see NDEs as literal descriptions or outpaintings of Platonic cosmologies, or social structures, or biology, read them as cosmo-dramas drawn from the collective unconscious, and those dramas will differ somewhat with each individual. There is never going to be a 100% overlap, and different cultures have larger differences in themes rolling in the collective unconscious.

Did you meet a faithful representation of your deceased mother who told you that you had to go back? Yes, but she is also a "second chance" archetypal pattern taking up the shape of your deceased mother. In Indian cases, this "second chance" archetype takes an entirely different (outpainted) form....henchmen of the god of the dead Yama or Yamraj, called Yamatoots, who escort you, or actually drag you, into the afterlife, where Yama (or another official) consults a big book and realises that a mistake has been made and you have to go back. It's the same archetype, the second chance thing, but painted a little more aggressively. Are the henchmen of Yama real? There aren't many loving relatives in the Indian cases, so are the loving relatives of the western NDE real? But it's the wrong question. They are real as divine play and cosmo-drama. You simply give yourself existential angst by obsessing over whether they are LITERALLY real. And it gives fuel to debunkers, who have a non-nuanced approach to this subject. An example is NDEr Elizabeth Krohn. She met her grandfather on a bench in the afterlife. This being had her grandfather's tone of voice and mannerisms down to a T, yet she also somehow knew that it wasn't so much her literal grandfather as the divine presence taking up the form of her grandfather. And if that is true there, I see it as all the more likely that in some sense it is always true. This really applies to anything visual or content-like in NDES. The meeting with your estranged mother is that, but it is also a "reconciliation and healing archetype" taking the shape of your mother. The clear blue streams and fields of living flowers that send you love as you walk through them are an archetype of an idealised pastoral life.

Again, this is REAL as cosmo-drama. It's probably only the expansion of consciousness, the divine ground itself, and feeling-states, which are unconditionally real regardless of archetype.

So this rescues you from having to worry whether an NDE involving grey aliens was a "real" nde. That material is also in the collective unconscious. If it serves the reorientation and psychdrama of that individual experiencer, then it serves, and it has done its purpose.

If we take these things as literal cosmologies, then we are setting ourselves up for troubles, first of all because they will change, sometimes radically, with different culture and alterations in our own culture, and second we will never be able to "locate" them because they aren't real world geographies and populations. They are healing visions drawn from the collective unconscious and illuminated by the divine ground. IMO, of course.