When I was 10, I was at summer camp and had this one counselor who told us the story of her descent into Hell after an attempted suicide (pills + alcohol). She descended into a cold darkness where she couldn’t see anything at all and just the sensation of suffocating pressure on her and despair all around. She kept having the sensation that someone was nearby. She finally spoke out to the “being” and I can’t remember the whole story, but it was basically that this being/angel? was there waiting for her to ask for help. The second she did, she was brought up and out and back into her body, where a friend had found her and called paramedics who were resuscitating her. I still remember that conversation (although I’ve lost parts of it) and it was over 40 years ago.
[[She descended into a cold darkness where she couldn’t see anything at all and just the sensation of suffocating pressure on her and despair all around]]
That was my 3xperience too- only it wasn’t cold, but unbearably hot (due to the fever I had no doubt). I too spoke out, after I failed a test God gave me (which proves that the nde wasn’t biblical at all), and the voice told me not to worry, that I didn’t exist, and that is when I felt a deep deep despondency as I was cast into the outer darkness where I didn’t exist in body, but where I knew I was all alone forever- it was more frightening than the “hell” I had descended to.
Mind you, I never knew anything about outer darkness, hell, or anything at that point- it was an experience that frightened me so badly that I grabbed ahold of the doctor who had revived me and told him he needed to accept christ so that he didn’t experience what I had just gone through.
I know now that the ‘experience’ was very likely misfiring synapses because what happened was not biblical (ie the test by God to see if I would remain in hell or not), knowing ehat I onow now, it’s pretty clear that Satan tried to discourage me by making me believe I had gone to hell despite. Being born again. And he really did cause me some really awful doubt for a long time after that.
I do beleive that nde’s, whether an actual event or one that is conjured up in the mind because of misfiring synapses, that Satan can and likely does use them to keep people blind to God and his word- the unsaved person who “sees the light, and their loved ones in heaven” are very likely to convince themselves that they must be a Christian, and never seek salvation because of it because they wrongly feel that they had a “special message from God” when in fact it was the opposite.