What is hell like? One way to answer this question is to ask people who have actually been there. People who have been clinically dead and brought back to life report having “hellish experiences” and very painful distressing life-reviews.

   In relation to our concept of ‘hell’ the negative or distressing life-review can be very deep and extremely painful whereby the review takes on its convincing function as a teaching tool. This we can understand if we go back to my finding in the second chapter, where I asked each person to compare the sensation in their Near Death Experience to the sensation of experience here in this dimension on earth.

   The result was that 78 percent said that the sensation was stronger than here on earth, with 26 percent saying 50 – 100 times stronger than in this dimension, and 53 percent saying a thousand times stronger or beyond description. In the category of thousand times stronger or beyond, we had statements such as “beyond my ability to describe,” or so powerful it “cannot be measured.”

   Now, if we take this power of the experience and add negative or distressing elements to it, then we can see how the life-review can be very painful. Due to the intensity of the experience alone, one can understand how the painful life-review can be equivalent to burning in a fire, if we speak metaphorically. 

   Therefore, if we add the fear or guilt of a person who becomes inverted when meeting this power, we can see how the “hell-like experience” can become extremely intense and scary through the projection of imagery.

   Most of us know how that in darkness, e.g. when walking through a dark forest, we are able to project fear that is not real and this would be something similar to an inverted hellish experience where our fear or guilt interacts with our experience.

   The life-review is not only intense because of the power of being in the other dimension, but also through its closeness and honesty as David here explains:

I was able to not only experience my life in review but also everyone I ever had an interaction with. There were multiple interactions and exchanges with everyone in the review. There were exchanges of energy, also cellular and molecular exchanges with everyone I interacted with in this physical life. Even when we focus our thoughts on one another these exchanges occur.

   Also Connie gives a testimony about how the Light knew everything about her: “It was a multi-colored brilliant swirling ball of Light that was thinking. It had consciousness. It knew me – everything about me.”

   In Peter Fenwick’s research, we find another NDEr that explains exactly how everything is revealed and that there is no escaping the truth of one’s actions:

There was no denying the facts because they were all there, including my innermost thoughts, emotions and motives. I knew that my life was over and whatever came next would be a direct consequence of not only what I had done in my life, but what I had thought and what had been my true feeling at the time.

   This testimony reveals the life-review as a “direct consequence” and it brings into conclusion the insight from the last two chapters that God is not angry in the NDE. Most people do not have the expected reward-punishment crisis that we would expect from a hell that is a punishment.

   If we go back to my findings on this, we will remember that where 80 percent used the words “truth” and “enlightenment” about this process, only 13 percent said “judgment” and even less, 6 percent, said “blame” or “guilt.” Besides experiencing the truth as enlightenment, I found that 60 percent said that the element of truth in the experience wanted to “teach” or “show me the way, and 73 percent said “teaching me with love and compassion.”

   This means that the life-review without punishment and judgment is more a deserting of our actions – a compassionate discrimination – to help us see the truth.

   Raymond Moody agrees with this in his original book Life After Life, where he explains that the review is more a kind of Socratic questioning to “provoke reflection,” with the intention “to help the person who is being asked to proceed along the path to the truth about himself.”

   This interpretation of the life-review fits with our definition of sin in the last chapter as getting lost and having false consciousness. If God is love then it would only be natural that ‘he’ would want to bring our false consciousness back towards the truth with love and compassion.