In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

by Sebastian Junger

Some researchers point to similarities between so-called near-death experiences and religion as evidence of an afterlife, but it’s equally possible that religions have those traits precisely because that’s how people experience dying. For hundreds of thousands of years, presumably, people have returned from the twilight world of hemorrhagic shock and low blood oxygen to report meeting the dead, hovering over their own bodies, and experiencing universal consciousness. Those experiences could be entirely the result of neurochemical changes in the dying brain but still mistaken for actual trips into the afterlife. A worldwide belief in spirits could then develop that involved a special caste of shamans, priests, and sorcerers who ferried messages back and forth between the tiny, beautiful world of the living and the vast tracts of the dead.