What happens when we die?
I’ve always been a cold, hard materialist about this: the brain shuts down, consciousness dims, and lights go out. And what else is there to say? I had no experience of life before I was born and I hope to have no experience of life after death.
As best as I can tell, this is the most reasonable assumption we can make about death. But “most reasonable” does not mean “definitely true”. The question of life-after-death is one of the oldest we have and there are all sorts of theories about how consciousness can survive the death of the body in some form or another. While these possibilities may be unlikely (and I think they are unlikely), they are not impossible. So how seriously should we take them?
Sebastian Junger is a former war reporter, a documentarian and the author of several books, including his most recent In My Time of Dying. A few years ago, Junger came as close to death as possible. As his doctors struggle to revive him, he experiences something that upsets his understanding of reality and that leaves him with deep questions and unexpected revelations.
So I invited Junger gray area to talk about what it’s like to almost die and what he believes about life and death. As always, there’s more in the full podcast, so take a listen and follow along gray area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Sean Ealing
What happened the day you almost died?
Sebastian Junger
I was 58 years old. Four years ago. I have been a lifelong athlete. I am in very good health, so it never occurred to me that I would have a sudden medical problem that would send me to the ER or kill me. I had no such thoughts about myself.
One afternoon, during Covid, my family and I were living in a house in the woods in Massachusetts with no cellphone coverage. It’s at the end of a dead-end dirt road. A cabin on the property, no electricity or anything like that.
We went there to spend a few hours and in the middle of the sentence I felt this pain in my stomach and I couldn’t put it away. I sort of twist and turn. I thought it was indigestion, and I stood up and almost fell. So I sat back and I said to my wife, “I’m going to need help. I don’t know what’s wrong. I’ve never felt anything like it.”
What was happening, I later found out was that I had an undiagnosed aneurysm in my pancreatic artery, one of the few arteries that go to the pancreas, and a bulge in it from a weak spot in one of them. And aneurysms are widow-makers. I mean, they’re really, really deadly, especially in the abdomen, because it’s hard for doctors to find them.
If you get stabbed in the stomach and an artery is severed, doctors know where to put their finger, as it were, to plug the leak, but if it’s just internal bleeding, your stomach is basically a big bowl of spaghetti. . It is very, very hard to find.
So I was probably losing a pint of blood every 10 or 15 minutes, and the human body has like 10 pints, 10 or 12 pints, so you can do the math. And I am an hour away from the nearest hospital. I was basically an hourglass of a man.
Sean Ealing
What was the survival rate for your condition that day?
Sebastian Junger
The survival rate is as low as 30 percent, but I guess that’s for a reasonable transport time to the hospital. It took me 90 minutes to get to the doctor. My chances of survival were slim.
Sean Ealing
So you’re in the hospital and there’s a moment when surgeons and nurses are working on you and they’re on your right side, and then on your left side is this hole of black and your father, who I think has been dead for eight years at this point, suddenly appears. What happens next?
Sebastian Junger
The doctor was busy trying to insert a large-gauge needle through my neck into my jugular vein. They numb you with lidocaine, so actually I didn’t feel much except pressure. But whatever, they were working on it and it seemed like a long time and suddenly this black hole opened up below me and it felt like I was being pulled into it.
You may think of me as extremely drunk. I’m like, “Oh, what is it?” It didn’t occur to me that it didn’t make sense for a black hole to suddenly appear. I was just like, “Oh, there’s the hole. “Why am I dragging it?”
I didn’t know I was going to die, but I had this animal idea that you don’t want to go into the endless black hole that opened up below you, it was a bad idea. And if you get sucked in there, you’re probably not coming back. I had the feeling that it was about.
I started to panic and that’s when my dead father appeared above me in this energy form. It’s hard to describe. I cannot describe what it was like. I just realized him. It’s not like his poster board is floating above me. It wasn’t quite that real. He was talking about this incredible generosity and love. He said, “Listen, you don’t have to fight this. You can come with me. i will take care of you It’s going to be okay.”
I was terrified. I said, “Go with you? You’re dead. I’m not going anywhere with you. What are you talking about? Get out of here!” I mean, I was scared. And I said to the doctor, because I was familiar, “You’ve got to hurry. You’re losing me. I’m going now.” And I didn’t know where I was going, but it was very clear that I was out, and I didn’t want to go.
Sean Ealing
When you say communication, what does it actually mean?
Sebastian Junger
I couldn’t hear the sound, but I guess you would have to classify the communication as telepathic, and it was very specific. It was, “You don’t have to fight it. I am here. i will take care of you You can come with me.” Again, I’m a rationalist, but I’m a rationalist with questions. I wanted to know what it was. Was it just neurochemistry?
When I woke up the next morning in the ICU, I was in so much pain and the nurse came in and said, “Wow, congratulations, Mr. Junger, you made it. We almost lost you last night. You almost died.” And when he said that, that’s when I remembered my dad. I was like, “Oh my God, I saw my dad, and I saw the hole,” and it all came back to me.
Sean Ealing
The experience you had is not unusual. This kind of thing gets stuck under the umbrella of “near-death experiences.” At this point, does science have a firm grasp on what’s going on here?
Sebastian Junger
Yes and no. I mean, there was a case where a man was dying. I think he had a stroke and had electrodes attached to his skull to signal different brain activity to know how to treat him. And he passed the time without coming back and the doctor said, “Okay, you can turn off the machines,” basically, but the sensors were still in place in his skull. So there was an opportunity to see what was happening in real time with their brain waves as a person died.
What they found was that in the 30 seconds before and after the moment of death — and of course death is not limited to one moment, it’s a spectrum — there was a surge in dreaming and memory and all kinds of related brain activity. of other things.
So one of the things that can happen when people die is that they experience this flood of sensations from their lives. Why would they? Who knows? Darwin’s reasoning is hard to come by as to why this might be adaptive at the time of an individual’s death. It is not a question of survival and reproduction, and Darwinism is not concerned with emotional comfort. It doesn’t matter in Darwinian arithmetic, so it’s hard to know what to make of it.
Sean Ealing
One of the medical paradoxes here is that people who are dying experience an almost complete breakdown of brain function, and yet their consciousness seems to have crystallized, which seems impossible on its face. Do scientists have an explanation for this? Is it a paradox at all, or does it just seem that way?
Sebastian Junger
I don’t think anyone knows. Ultimately, no one knows whether what we perceive in life is true. I mean, at the quantum level it is known that observing a particle, a subatomic particle, changes its behavior. And of course, when you observe something, it’s a completely passive act. You’re not bombarding it with anything. You are just watching.
If a photon is sent through two slits and an impassable barrier, and it is not observed by a conscious mind, it will pass through both slits simultaneously. And once you observe, it’s bound to pick up a notch. So as the early physicists said, observation creates the reality that is being observed and then the snake starts swallowing its tail.
Sean Ealing
Science is great and we can map neurochemical changes and I’m sure we can give a purely materialistic explanation for them, but do you think it’s wise to leave it there or do you think there’s something inherently mysterious about it that we do? Don’t quite understand?
Sebastian Junger
At one point someone said to me, “You cannot rationalize what happened to you. Why didn’t you go back to the mystical term?” And I said, “Because the rational term is an explanation.” The alternative is a story, and people use stories to comfort themselves with things they can’t explain. I like to use God stories or afterlife stories. Not to comfort myself about the inexplicable, which is what will happen when I die.
But there is one thing that really stands out to me. I bought all the neurochemical explanations. I bought the hard-boiled rationalist explanation that when we die we’re purely biological beings and that’s it, and the jolt of the dying human experience is just the dead brain bombarding us with signals, “What’s going on? Stop. Stop, stop, stop!” Except one thing I don’t understand.
If you give a lot of people LSD, we know that 100 percent of the people will have hallucinations. We know why. We know how that works. There is no mystery. You don’t need God to explain this, but they will all hallucinate different things. And what is strange about dying is that only the dead can see the dead. They do so in societies around the world and have for ages. And those who are not dying cannot see the dead. And often, the dead are unwanted and a shock. It’s not some reassuring view of Aunt Betty.
It’s more like, “Dad, what are you doing here?” Or my mother, as she died she saw her dead brother, whom she was not talking to. He was scared to see her. He was like, “What’s he doing here?” And I said, “Mother, this is your brother, George. You must treat him well. He has come a long way to see you.” He just frowned and said, “We’ll see about that.” He died a day later.
So it’s not like these are comforting visions, and the fact that only the dead see the dead is something that science can’t fully explain. This is one thing that really makes me wonder if we don’t understand everything in scientific terms. Maybe there is something missing here that is very significant about how reality works, how life and death work, what consciousness is, and ultimately what the universe is.
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