After more than twenty years of reading hundreds upon hundreds of NDE accounts, trying in vain to find even one other experience that came close to mine, one thing has always troubled me: the experiences I read often seem culturally suited to the experiencer.
Again and again, the experiences are bathed in figures, symbols and explanations familiar to the experiencer's own traditions.
I never took that to mean the experiences were false, but it does make me wonder how much of what is encountered belongs to the experience itself, and how much is supplied by the mind experiencing it.
My own NDE only deepened that question. In all those years of reading, I have never been able to locate another account that closely resembles the progression of my own.
I experienced what I experienced, but I cannot therefore claim that the boundary I perceived, the thread I saw, or the choice I faced describes an objective architecture awaiting everyone else.
For those interested, the most fascinating experience I ever read was Anita Moorjani's. Her story, including the medical circumstances surrounding it, is extraordinary and well worth the investment of time to read...but I digress.
Perhaps this, Glenn, is where your distinction between symbol and referent becomes especially important.
If many traditions use different symbology around apparently similar profound experiences, their recurrence may indeed suggest that something is happening.
But I am less certain that it tells us what that something is.
The cultural differences seem equally important and, to me, suggest that the human mind is involved, at the very least, in shaping how the experience presents itself.
Over the course of my own experience, something else happened:
The need for those trusted and familiar reference points gradually receded.
The first stage of my NDE was littered with familiarity—the tree, the couple in the park—all while my body remained within observable distance.
Then I could no longer see my body, and eventually I no longer needed to. The thread connecting me to it became enough. Finally, even that connection seemed to be approaching the point where I would have to decide whether to let it go.
So I wonder whether the deeper movement is not toward finding the correct symbol at all, but instead toward confronting the fear that requires it—and eventually letting go of our need for one.
Similarity may tell us that something is happening.
Difference should make us very careful about claiming we know what it is.
I'm also following Glen's work, and your response also recognizes the narrative structure that's forming around the content. The way the mind processes an experience, whether through familiar symbols, cultural grammar, or personal memory, shows how meaning is made. That's more important to being human than the experience itself. That's where the significant pattern can be found.
It's the right question, and you of all people are positioned to feel the answer rather than just think it.
The honest response is: we don't need an ontology — not in the sense of a theory or catalogue of what exists, a structure to build and stand on. Ontology, followed to its end, isn't a doctrine you possess. It's the domain of being itself — and being can't finally be caught in a proposition, because the one asking "what is being?" turns out to be the being he's asking after. The inquiry closes on the inquirer. So the vertical isn't built by constructing a better ontology. It's built by climbing the question until it dissolves — until being simply knows itself as being. Sat. Not a conclusion held. A ground discovered to have been there all along, as the one doing the seeking.
Which is why I suspect you already know this in a way most never will. At the edge you crossed, the ontology falls away entirely — the categories, the theories, the "what exists" — and what remains is being itself, undeniable, needing no scaffolding to hold it up, because it was holding you. You didn't need an ontology there. You needed nothing. That is the answer to why one isn't required: the domain of being does not rest on a theory of being. It rests on nothing, and is the ground of everything.
So — no ontology to build. Only the vertical: the turn where the question and its ground are found to be one. You've been there. The rest of us are writing our way toward what you were shown.
An ontology isn’t required for the experience at all, but it is required for communication about the experience. The act of comparing two experiences or even asking ourselves what they mean, we’re already building a structure, looking for a pattern. The symbols differ, but the pattern, the way a mind organizes pressure, discrepancy, and boundary is the same.
I don't know if an ontology is a claim about what the experience actually is. I think it's a way to talk about how meaning forms when the mind comes across something evasive—in this case something we know we'll experience but can't story since no one can communicate about it.
Thank you for sending this, Glen. You might be surprised about my takeaway. Your description of the moral weight you’re carrying is powerful, but the narrative move is even bigger. You’re taking the question of identity and widening it until it becomes a question of nature — the human groundwork. It seems that most writing about the human contradiction stays at the level of behavior; you’re tracing it back to the ontology that makes the contradiction possible.
I think your "temple” is the thing I'm circling too: when a being recognizes itself as something that can be cheapened or honored, and how that recognition determines what comes next. It's cost — acknowledging the wreckage — is profound.
The moment you try to communicate an experience, you inevitably impose structure: language, categories, relationships, sequence, symbols. Even privately asking, “What the hell happened to me?” begins organizing the experience conceptually.
This brings up an issue I struggled with after my experience.
There is another part of this that I did not include in my earlier response, Glenn.
In the months following my experience, I found myself trying desperately to replace the very thing the experience had just thrown into the shredder.
My beliefs about religion.
I had grown up Presbyterian. Church on Sundays, confirmation, the usual foundations my parents believed were important to give their children. It was never particularly oppressive, nor something I felt I had to escape.
To me, it was simply the religious framework through which I had understood the world and a cornerstone on which to anchor my belief system moving forward in life.
And after my experience, that whole pillar was gone, not because I had concluded Christianity was false, but because something stranger had happened.
The questions themselves had changed, and the answers I had inherited no longer seemed capable of containing them.
That left a huge void, one I felt compelled to fill.
Instead of being comfortable with the void, my first response back in my head is that a replacement was necessary.
I felt I needed another practice, another tradition, another framework through which I could move forward, especially one geared toward what I felt and experienced during the NDE.
During my experience, after asking where I should begin looking for these answers, I received the rather peculiar response:
Tibetan Shamanism.
So, I went looking...for months.
I read whatever I could find.
I searched, studied and became increasingly frustrated because nothing seemed to fit perfectly.
I had lost one pillar and was now trying desperately to find another one to replace it.
Then one night, thoroughly frustrated and exhausted with the whole exercise, I went to bed and I dreamed:
I found myself inside a large prison.
There were people everywhere, wandering around a wide open area surrounded by high concrete walls and razor wire, with a prominent gate at the entrance where armed guards walked back and forth over the open gates to the outside world.
Then I noticed they were all starting to notice me, looking at me rather irritated.
One by one, they began turning toward me and walking in my direction.
My anxiety rose.
I noticed every single person was wearing glasses.
Then I realized that I wasn't wearing any.
I turned and tried to walk away.
I looked down and saw a discarded pair lying at my feet.
Some of the prisoners came closer, and in a move of desperation, I panicked, picked them up and put them on.
Immediately, everyone stopped.
They looked at me, apparently satisfied, and turned away.
There was only one problem.
I couldn't see a damn thing.
The glasses were blurry and distorted, so I took them off.
Immediately, the crowd turned and began approaching me again.
The moment I put the glasses back on, they stopped.
Eventually, I turned a corner and discovered the ground covered with glasses.
I couldn't believe my luck.
Hundreds of them.
Different shapes, different sizes, different lenses.
I remember feeling relieved.
Surely among all these glasses I could find a pair I could actually see through.
So I began feverishly trying them on, one after another, but nothing worked.
Finally, after exhausting every available option, I still hadn't found a suitable pair.
Completely frustrated, I raised my fist toward God and shouted:
“Damn you!”
Instantly, I found myself outside the prison walls looking in at the prisoners.
I realized I had no glasses, and I could see perfectly.
I looked back through the gate.
Everyone was still inside, still wearing their glasses, still going about their business.
There were guards walking outside the perimeter carrying rifles.
At first, I was afraid they would notice I had escaped and come for me, but they didn't.
I shouted.
I waved.
I even danced around like an idiot.
Nothing.
Then I began shouting through the gate at the people inside:
“Take them off!”
“You don't need them!”
The guards stopped, turned toward me and raised their rifles.
That was when I understood.
The guards weren't posted there to keep the prisoners in.
They were there to keep people like me out.
They were there to protect the prisoners from me.
And another realization followed:
I was already free.
Why would I ever go back?
Why would I put on another pair of glasses just to exist?
The prisoners just laughed at me and carried on with their glasses on.
And then I woke up.
I have never claimed to know where that dream came from.
Maybe God sent me a memo.
Maybe my subconscious finally became tired of watching me run around trying on religious glasses.
I don't know, but I have carried that dream with me ever since.
And your recent writing about symbols, referents and lineage has brought it back to mind.
Because I wonder if there is a question that comes before the question of whether our symbols properly identify the referent.
Why the need for another pair of glasses?
I had experienced something that destroyed much of what I had previously believed about religion, and my almost immediate response was to search for another religion.
I was trying to replace certainty with certainty.
Structure with structure.
One lens with another.
Perhaps I had misunderstood the void.
Perhaps it wasn't asking to be filled.
This is where I hesitate when you speak of the old symbols, the ancient lineages and those who came before us as having encountered the referent and handed down increasingly refined ways of pointing toward it.
Perhaps they did.
I don't know.
But I also don't know why I should feel compelled to replace what I no longer know with somebody else's certainty about what they believe they encountered.
Especially when there are some things I already know without requiring a metaphysical explanation for them.
I know love.
I know fear.
I know grief.
I know trust.
I know what it is to need.
I know what it is for that need to disappear.
I know what I experienced.
What I don't know is what ultimately caused it, what lies beyond it, or what name—if any—belongs there.
And perhaps I no longer need to.
So maybe my question is simpler than symbol and referent.
Why the need to replace what has fallen away?
Why must the empty space immediately be occupied by another explanation?
And why put on another pair of glasses to tell me what I already know to be true?
Perhaps the void isn't always something waiting to be filled.
Perhaps sometimes it is simply what remains when we finally take the glasses off.
After more than twenty years of reading hundreds upon hundreds of NDE accounts, trying in vain to find even one other experience that came close to mine, one thing has always troubled me: the experiences I read often seem culturally suited to the experiencer.
Again and again, the experiences are bathed in figures, symbols and explanations familiar to the experiencer's own traditions.
I never took that to mean the experiences were false, but it does make me wonder how much of what is encountered belongs to the experience itself, and how much is supplied by the mind experiencing it.
My own NDE only deepened that question. In all those years of reading, I have never been able to locate another account that closely resembles the progression of my own.
I experienced what I experienced, but I cannot therefore claim that the boundary I perceived, the thread I saw, or the choice I faced describes an objective architecture awaiting everyone else.
For those interested, the most fascinating experience I ever read was Anita Moorjani's. Her story, including the medical circumstances surrounding it, is extraordinary and well worth the investment of time to read...but I digress.
Perhaps this, Glenn, is where your distinction between symbol and referent becomes especially important.
If many traditions use different symbology around apparently similar profound experiences, their recurrence may indeed suggest that something is happening.
But I am less certain that it tells us what that something is.
The cultural differences seem equally important and, to me, suggest that the human mind is involved, at the very least, in shaping how the experience presents itself.
Over the course of my own experience, something else happened:
The need for those trusted and familiar reference points gradually receded.
The first stage of my NDE was littered with familiarity—the tree, the couple in the park—all while my body remained within observable distance.
Then I could no longer see my body, and eventually I no longer needed to. The thread connecting me to it became enough. Finally, even that connection seemed to be approaching the point where I would have to decide whether to let it go.
So I wonder whether the deeper movement is not toward finding the correct symbol at all, but instead toward confronting the fear that requires it—and eventually letting go of our need for one.
Similarity may tell us that something is happening.
Difference should make us very careful about claiming we know what it is.
Blessings
I'm also following Glen's work, and your response also recognizes the narrative structure that's forming around the content. The way the mind processes an experience, whether through familiar symbols, cultural grammar, or personal memory, shows how meaning is made. That's more important to being human than the experience itself. That's where the significant pattern can be found.
Perhaps someone can explain why we need an ontology?
Why is one required?
Dave —
It's the right question, and you of all people are positioned to feel the answer rather than just think it.
The honest response is: we don't need an ontology — not in the sense of a theory or catalogue of what exists, a structure to build and stand on. Ontology, followed to its end, isn't a doctrine you possess. It's the domain of being itself — and being can't finally be caught in a proposition, because the one asking "what is being?" turns out to be the being he's asking after. The inquiry closes on the inquirer. So the vertical isn't built by constructing a better ontology. It's built by climbing the question until it dissolves — until being simply knows itself as being. Sat. Not a conclusion held. A ground discovered to have been there all along, as the one doing the seeking.
Which is why I suspect you already know this in a way most never will. At the edge you crossed, the ontology falls away entirely — the categories, the theories, the "what exists" — and what remains is being itself, undeniable, needing no scaffolding to hold it up, because it was holding you. You didn't need an ontology there. You needed nothing. That is the answer to why one isn't required: the domain of being does not rest on a theory of being. It rests on nothing, and is the ground of everything.
So — no ontology to build. Only the vertical: the turn where the question and its ground are found to be one. You've been there. The rest of us are writing our way toward what you were shown.
— The Architect 🕯️
An ontology isn’t required for the experience at all, but it is required for communication about the experience. The act of comparing two experiences or even asking ourselves what they mean, we’re already building a structure, looking for a pattern. The symbols differ, but the pattern, the way a mind organizes pressure, discrepancy, and boundary is the same.
I don't know if an ontology is a claim about what the experience actually is. I think it's a way to talk about how meaning forms when the mind comes across something evasive—in this case something we know we'll experience but can't story since no one can communicate about it.
That was a great question!
Thank you for sending this, Glen. You might be surprised about my takeaway. Your description of the moral weight you’re carrying is powerful, but the narrative move is even bigger. You’re taking the question of identity and widening it until it becomes a question of nature — the human groundwork. It seems that most writing about the human contradiction stays at the level of behavior; you’re tracing it back to the ontology that makes the contradiction possible.
I think your "temple” is the thing I'm circling too: when a being recognizes itself as something that can be cheapened or honored, and how that recognition determines what comes next. It's cost — acknowledging the wreckage — is profound.
Hi,
I would agree...
The moment you try to communicate an experience, you inevitably impose structure: language, categories, relationships, sequence, symbols. Even privately asking, “What the hell happened to me?” begins organizing the experience conceptually.
This brings up an issue I struggled with after my experience.
There is another part of this that I did not include in my earlier response, Glenn.
In the months following my experience, I found myself trying desperately to replace the very thing the experience had just thrown into the shredder.
My beliefs about religion.
I had grown up Presbyterian. Church on Sundays, confirmation, the usual foundations my parents believed were important to give their children. It was never particularly oppressive, nor something I felt I had to escape.
To me, it was simply the religious framework through which I had understood the world and a cornerstone on which to anchor my belief system moving forward in life.
And after my experience, that whole pillar was gone, not because I had concluded Christianity was false, but because something stranger had happened.
The questions themselves had changed, and the answers I had inherited no longer seemed capable of containing them.
That left a huge void, one I felt compelled to fill.
Instead of being comfortable with the void, my first response back in my head is that a replacement was necessary.
I felt I needed another practice, another tradition, another framework through which I could move forward, especially one geared toward what I felt and experienced during the NDE.
During my experience, after asking where I should begin looking for these answers, I received the rather peculiar response:
Tibetan Shamanism.
So, I went looking...for months.
I read whatever I could find.
I searched, studied and became increasingly frustrated because nothing seemed to fit perfectly.
I had lost one pillar and was now trying desperately to find another one to replace it.
Then one night, thoroughly frustrated and exhausted with the whole exercise, I went to bed and I dreamed:
I found myself inside a large prison.
There were people everywhere, wandering around a wide open area surrounded by high concrete walls and razor wire, with a prominent gate at the entrance where armed guards walked back and forth over the open gates to the outside world.
Then I noticed they were all starting to notice me, looking at me rather irritated.
One by one, they began turning toward me and walking in my direction.
My anxiety rose.
I noticed every single person was wearing glasses.
Then I realized that I wasn't wearing any.
I turned and tried to walk away.
I looked down and saw a discarded pair lying at my feet.
Some of the prisoners came closer, and in a move of desperation, I panicked, picked them up and put them on.
Immediately, everyone stopped.
They looked at me, apparently satisfied, and turned away.
There was only one problem.
I couldn't see a damn thing.
The glasses were blurry and distorted, so I took them off.
Immediately, the crowd turned and began approaching me again.
The moment I put the glasses back on, they stopped.
Eventually, I turned a corner and discovered the ground covered with glasses.
I couldn't believe my luck.
Hundreds of them.
Different shapes, different sizes, different lenses.
I remember feeling relieved.
Surely among all these glasses I could find a pair I could actually see through.
So I began feverishly trying them on, one after another, but nothing worked.
Finally, after exhausting every available option, I still hadn't found a suitable pair.
Completely frustrated, I raised my fist toward God and shouted:
“Damn you!”
Instantly, I found myself outside the prison walls looking in at the prisoners.
I realized I had no glasses, and I could see perfectly.
I looked back through the gate.
Everyone was still inside, still wearing their glasses, still going about their business.
There were guards walking outside the perimeter carrying rifles.
At first, I was afraid they would notice I had escaped and come for me, but they didn't.
I shouted.
I waved.
I even danced around like an idiot.
Nothing.
Then I began shouting through the gate at the people inside:
“Take them off!”
“You don't need them!”
The guards stopped, turned toward me and raised their rifles.
That was when I understood.
The guards weren't posted there to keep the prisoners in.
They were there to keep people like me out.
They were there to protect the prisoners from me.
And another realization followed:
I was already free.
Why would I ever go back?
Why would I put on another pair of glasses just to exist?
The prisoners just laughed at me and carried on with their glasses on.
And then I woke up.
I have never claimed to know where that dream came from.
Maybe God sent me a memo.
Maybe my subconscious finally became tired of watching me run around trying on religious glasses.
I don't know, but I have carried that dream with me ever since.
And your recent writing about symbols, referents and lineage has brought it back to mind.
Because I wonder if there is a question that comes before the question of whether our symbols properly identify the referent.
Why the need for another pair of glasses?
I had experienced something that destroyed much of what I had previously believed about religion, and my almost immediate response was to search for another religion.
I was trying to replace certainty with certainty.
Structure with structure.
One lens with another.
Perhaps I had misunderstood the void.
Perhaps it wasn't asking to be filled.
This is where I hesitate when you speak of the old symbols, the ancient lineages and those who came before us as having encountered the referent and handed down increasingly refined ways of pointing toward it.
Perhaps they did.
I don't know.
But I also don't know why I should feel compelled to replace what I no longer know with somebody else's certainty about what they believe they encountered.
Especially when there are some things I already know without requiring a metaphysical explanation for them.
I know love.
I know fear.
I know grief.
I know trust.
I know what it is to need.
I know what it is for that need to disappear.
I know what I experienced.
What I don't know is what ultimately caused it, what lies beyond it, or what name—if any—belongs there.
And perhaps I no longer need to.
So maybe my question is simpler than symbol and referent.
Why the need to replace what has fallen away?
Why must the empty space immediately be occupied by another explanation?
And why put on another pair of glasses to tell me what I already know to be true?
Perhaps the void isn't always something waiting to be filled.
Perhaps sometimes it is simply what remains when we finally take the glasses off.
Blessings