The Null And Near-Death Experiences

"This horror was the afterlife, and it was waiting not just for the evil ones among us but for all."

--Jamie Morton, Revival

There have been many afterlives in the universe/multiverse of Stephen King's stories, ranging from those of the ghosts in the Overlook Hotel of The Shining to the hub in Afterlife from which people can choose to relive their exact lives or descend into nonexistence.  In other stories of his, as with many general stories across mediums, the afterlife is unaddressed altogether.  Characters die without any direct attention going to whether they have consciousness after death in any form.  King's Revival, if it was the only book in the interconnected stories to touch upon an afterlife, has its main character Jamie Morton receive what appears to be a premature sighting of the Null, a dimension where hundreds upon hundreds of dead humans are said to be marched across a decaying city, naked and terrified, by ant-like creatures that sometimes crawl and sometimes stand upright.  The black sky has holes through which great howls and lights come, manifestations of or companions to a great universal power.  Moreover, enormous, malevolent beings the eldritch entity Mother calls the Great Ones hover above this mirage of a sky, perhaps waiting to consume the humans they seem to observe, or perhaps intent on enslaving them without the hope for a second death.

Seized by fear, Jamie assumes that this is the afterlife for everyone, not just the wicked (as if it could be justice for even the collective wicked of humanity to be tormented eternally as Mother is implied to do to all people for non-moral reasons).  Mother insists that there is no death, no light, and no rest here in the Null, though she was either lying about at least the lights since Jamie sees powerful lights and "living" colors that transcend earthly luminosity or meant light in a metaphorical sense.  She might have lied with her words and sensory projections about the very existence of the Null or other details.  In fact, she has to have only made it seem as if everyone's fate is the Null, although Jamie is irrational to have made any assumptions at all based on the number of people he sees, as the aforementioned afterlives from The Shining and Afterlife and others I have not listed do not involve hellish slavery, physical torment, or a supernaturally sustained eternal life in agony.  Jamie does not have access to this fortunate evidence, doomed as he might be to this afterlife anyway for having previously come into contact with the "secret electricity" tied to a grand energy that is itself connected to the Null, according to his traumatic, supposed look behind the veil.

He has therapy sessions in which he tries to cope with the severity of his vision and the seeming evidence that Mother's domain really is awaiting him once he dies.  Because the ghosts of The Shining or Doctor Sleep have not appeared to him, and he would be unable to prove if they are real if he was to see them, he does not even have any experiences with the afterlives that are more directly presented in other stories in the same universe, making contrary assumptions based on incomplete, perception-based evidence.  Jamie is not the only one that makes assumptions about the afterlife; the therapist mentions how many people, including the apostle John in Revelation, have claimed to see an afterlife that does not feature a ruined city or ant monsters or any of the other sights of the Null, and when Jamie pushes back, his therapist is content to assume that all near-death experiences are false if he also dismisses the genuine possibility of what Jamie describes being true (and this or something like it could be true or could have been true in reality, as it does not contradict the necessary truths of logical axioms).  Jamie says that a child who allegedly saw inside heaven saw only one miscarried sister he had not heard of before his experience, but that there were numerous murder-suicides linked with the dangers of the secret electricity on Earth.

Both of these characters in actuality made assumptions based upon potentially illusory perceptions or hearsay.  It is possible for all near-death experiences to be accurate if everyone has a vastly different afterlife in different realms and different mental states, though the correspondence of them to anything other than the hallucinations of a dying person (in cases where someone is not yet actually dead) is epistemologically uncertain, as is whether a multitude of sensory perceptions in this life match with anything beyond mere subjective experiences within the mind.  However, it does not follow from one near-death experience being illusory that others are, especially given how diverse some of them can be despite the reported mass similarities in accounts from people living on our Earth outside of Stephen King's literary mythos.  The therapist disputing the veracity of Jamie's glimpse of the Null--not his experience of the perceptions, but whether the perceptions are anything but hallucinations of a kind--are idiotic since he thinks that if the child who claimed to visit heaven was seeing an illusion, Jamie probably did too.

While the truth about a matter is the truth regardless of if humans can know it, and it is logically possible for an afterlife like the one presented as supposedly real in Revival to exist, the reasons why most people either accept or reject the possibility of at least certain near-death experiences being true are wholly irrational.  It does not logically follow from seeing a chair or a fellow person that they are actually there, the same being true of the details in a real or imagined afterlife where one is not omniscient--or at a minimum free from select epistemological limitations.  It also does not follow from there being evidence against the veracity of a particular kind of near-death experience that the afterlife envisioned is ultimately false.  The only afterlife with anything more than subjective perceptions in its probabilistic favor is eternal life in the Biblical paradise of New Jerusalem or a second death in the lake of fire, the latter of which brings true, permanent nonexistence (2 Peter 2:6).  Jamie's therapist does not realize or care about any of this.  Jamie himself has only assumed that everyone must go to the Null since he saw so many people inside.  This is demonstrably untrue in light of the other Stephen King stories that tell of far less oppressive afterlives, and the evidence of real life points to a very different duality of afterlives.  Near-death experiences are in either case not proof of a specific afterlife, although some of them have significant evidence in their favor (to be addressed in other posts), any more than seeing a smile on a person's face means they are happy.