What does ‘Satan' look like? A good place to start is to ask people who might actually know; people who have been clinically dead and gone to the other side through so-called Near Death Experiences. These people testify about having so-called “hellish experiences” that are indeed hell-like in nature. While these are very real to the experiencer, the research of thousands of cased of near death tell us that the nature of hell is far more complex than most of us are able or willing to understand.

  If we look at a couple of Western experiences of hell we can see how the content fits with a classical Western view of hell. The first person explains that, “I felt I was in Hell. There was a big pit with vapour coming out and there were arms and hands coming out trying to grab me.”

   Also in Fenwick’s book The Truth in the Light, another person gives this longer testimony:

            It was really like all the images I had ever had of Hell. I was being barbecued. I was wrapped in tinfoil, basted and roasted. Occassionally I was basted by devils sticking their basting syringe with great needles into my flesh and injecting my flesh with the red-hot fat. I was also rolled from side to side with the long forks that the devils used to make sure that I was being well and truly roasted.

   In both testimonies of hell we have the classical content of a Western hell and while the first person tells us she felt she was in hell the last person even explains that it was like all the images he had ever had of hell. 

   If we look at non-Western experiences of hell we will quickly see that the content is different. Todd Murphy published a study of Buddhist NDEs in 1999 where he looked at 11 Thai cases. While there was a higher frequency of distressing elements in these NDEs, it is very clear that they have specific cultural content as in ten cases people met Yama, the Buddhist Lord of Death or his servants that are called Yamatoots.

   One account reveals that, “Yamatoot told him that he had to be judged. He then found himself in front of Yama, the lord of the underworld.” Another person explains that, 

I looked and saw that they were Yamatoots. One of them spoke to me saying "we've come to take you to hell". I said "I'm not going", and I tried to escape. I turned and repeated that I was not going to go to the house of Yama.

   Secondly, besides specific cultural content we also find that fact and perception can be very different. Not only cultural conditioning, but also the perception of each individual can play a major factor in how the NDE is experienced. Atwater explains that, “Invariably an attack of some kind would take place in hellish scenarios or a shunning, and pain would be felt or surges of anxiety and fear.” But; “Amazing as it may seem, I noticed that the same scene that one individual considers wonderfully positive another may declare negative or horrific.”

   It is of course noteworthy that hell looks different depending on which culture the experience happens and this is the reason that NDE research concludes that each individual integrate their pre-existing belief system into the experience.     

   In my research into this area, I found that to the statement: “The visual images I saw were projections,” only 40 percent disagreed and 50 percent said that they were “not sure.” Also to the statement: “The visual images interacted with my mind,” I found that seven out of ten, 70 percent, agreed with having a sense of interaction between their mind and what they saw.

   This fits with the conclusion in NDE research mentioned before, that people who are in a distressing state of mind at the time of their experience of near death, such as NDEs caused by suicide attempts, have a higher frequency of distressing experiences. People who have been raised to expect distress at the moment of death may also be more prone to have a negative experience during their NDE. 

   In her book Return from Death, Margot Grey explains that, “The hell-like experience is defined as being one which includes all the elements comprehended in the negative phase, only more so in that feelings are encountered with a far greater intensity.”

   In a painful experience of the NDE where a person experiences fear, anger, horror, isolation, or guilt, this person may become more negatively inverted, and thus, experience the unpleasant elements of the NDE with greater intensity.

   Relating to this intensity of the experience, NDE research generally identifies three types of the unpleasant or negative experience. These types can also be seen as levels of intensity of the negative or distressing experience within the NDE.

  The first level has all the common elements of a pleasant experience, only these are experienced as frightening. This is the inverted experience mentioned before. At the second level this inverted experience continues and all sense of meaning disappears where the person feels a sense of void. At the final level, people have hellish experiences that include hellish imagery, demonic beings and personal torment.

   Level one and two are very similar to pleasant experiences, only the response seems to be that of fear or abandonment rather than a positive state of mind. However, when we get to the last level where we talking about a hell-like experience with hellish imagery there is some evidence to suggest that these are illusionary.

   In an interview with Dr. Peter Fenwick, he concluded for me that by looking at the number of hell-like experiences he has had in his research, “It’s quite clear to see that they are illusionary and that they fall very much into the category of the paranoid psychosis of intensive care.”

   One of the cases where this was very clear in Fenwick’s research was one of the first testimonies of ‘hell’ we looked at before. Here the person explained that he was being “barbecued” and “basted by devils sticking their basting syringe with great needles” into him, and that he was “rolled from side to side with the long forks that the devils used” to make sure he was being well roasted.

   This person had a very natural explanation for his experience of hell and tells us that, “Hell has an easy explanation – I was wrapped in a tinfoil blanket, an electric heat cage was put over me and during that time I was turned several times and innumerable injections were given.”

      Fenwick explains about this kind of experience of ‘hell’ that:

At that level one was dealing with not a straight forward near death experience, one was dealing with a sort of semi-confusional state that you see in intensive care psychosis. Is there a relationship between the mental state of the individual, or psychological state of the individual, and the near death experience? The answer to that is that there has to be. I can’t see any objection to arguing that some people because of their personality structure or because of the various situations they are in, that there shouldn’t be a wash-over of that into the experience, which is interpreted by them as negative. I think this is reasonable.

This fits with the conclusion in NDE research mentioned before, that people who are in a distressing state of mind at the time of their experience of near death, such as NDEs caused by suicide attempts, have a higher frequency of distressing experiences. People who have been raised to expect distress at the moment of death may also be more prone to have a negative experience during their NDE. 

   However, while we do find that people’s state of mind affects their experience and examples of people projecting illusionary content into their negative experience, there is still another element of the negative or hellish experience that does make sense. This is the involuntary event of examining one’s past through the life-review, where people go through episodes of their lives and this part of the unpleasant or hellish experience is real.

   Atwater explains about the final level that hell-like experiences often contain forms of “hauntings from one’s own past,” and that these are usually experienced by people who have deeply suppressed fear or guilt, and even by people who expect punishment after death.  

   Other researchers have concluded that the hellish experiences are “unfinished business,” and if we relate the suppressed fear and guilt to a form of haunting from the past, then we can start to make some sense out of the hell-like experience.

   If we conclude that the hellish experience is a more inverted and fearful perception of the life-review, then we can begin to make some sense of the experience of hell in the NDE.

It was an experience thrown upon me in the situation of near drowning. Not something I asked for, and the events that took place; the flashback of my life with commentary from some other being, followed by a light I was just starting to enter, were all involuntary experiences. I was simply along for the ride, but it was 100% real to me.

   What Chris S. here tells us is that the life-review is both involuntary and 100 percent real. Life-reviews can be both negative and/or positive in content and they happen to about 30 percent of people who have NDEs. While NDE researchers tend not to support the dogmatic interpretation of hellish experiences, almost all accept the reality of the life-review as a standard element of the NDE.

   The life-review is considered a basic element on most researchers’ NDE scale, which is used to analyze the NDE, and thereby most researchers take the review as a factual element of the NDE. Kenneth Ring calls the life-review the “ultimate teaching tool” and explains that it is a basic “principle of life” that leads us to conclude the existence of the Golden Rule.

   Another researcher, Dr. Bruce Greyson, explains that the NDE is evidence that the Golden Rule is not a simple figure of speech that we are taught to obey, but that it’s an “indisputable law of nature.”

   From over 30 years of research, Greyson concludes that:

            The bulk of the evidence points towards that after you leave the body, the soul becomes much less individualized and starts to emerge with something larger then itself – that we are all potentially a part of; we are all part of the same thing, that we are all interconnected, that as Jesus said: “what you are doing to me, you are doing to yourself.”