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

by Sebastian Junger

Ketamine is an opioid that is also thought to occur naturally in the human body. When lab animals are subjected to a terrifying attack—an experiment that can’t be duplicated with people, obviously—their brains are flooded with dopamine and other opioids. Artificial ketamine is already known to protect cells destroyed by low blood oxygen in brain injury victims, and an endogenous version manufactured inside the body that accomplishes the same thing would make biological sense. The hallucinations and euphoria that accompany these compounds could provide an additional evolutionary benefit by helping calm and reassure the person whose survival is on the line.

The question isn’t whether such dreams represent objective reality—they obviously don’t—but why people keep having them. The world over, people believe in two realities: one we walk around in and the “other” that we go to from time to time. Drugs, dreams, religion, and death are the ways people are generally thought to cross over. My dream was indistinguishable from both an NDE and a “shamanic journey” of the sort that anthropologists have documented from tribal cultures across the globe. Shamanism is a paleolithic-era practice that survived long enough for ethnographers to document in places as varied as the Siberian tundra, the Amazon jungle, the arctic ice fields, the African rain forests, and the canyons and uplands of central Mexico. It is one of the few human universals. The shaman flies his body and becomes a spirit, traveling to the land of the dead and returning with knowledge that is needed by the community. Hallucinogens, drumming, fasting, and hours or even days of dancing help the shaman leave this reality and reach the next.

I asked if there could be a dimension where time does not exist, and my father could be both alive and dead—and therefore able to visit me. “Yes, there is. All you have to do is travel at the speed of light and time stops. A second becomes eons—but as perceived by somebody else. For you, a second is a second.” “The big bang is an issue,” Joel added. “But I don’t think Miguel would have gone there. You said you didn’t know you were in danger of dying, right?” “Right,” I answered.

Doctors approach near-death experiences very much like my father approached physics, and they have come up with prosaic explanations for just about everything. Tunnels, bright lights, life reviews, Godheads, out-of-body experiences, feelings of peace and unity, cosmic insight, and a disinterest in the corporeal world can all be induced in people fairly easily—and happen all the time. You don’t need to believe in an afterlife to explain the visions of a hypoxic brain or the out-of-body illusions of someone suffering a seizure. With one central exception: the dead.

Why do the dying—and only the dying—keep seeing the dead in their last days and hours? If there is any true mystery to all this, it’s that in mud huts and in hospital rooms, in car accidents and on battlefields, in darkened bedrooms and in screaming ambulances, deathly ill people are startled to see a loved one hovering over them. There are neurochemical explanations for why people hallucinate, but not for why they keep hallucinating the same thing. Some attempts have been made, though: the visions are said to be unconscious projections ginned up by terrified patients, or evolutionary adaptations that aid survival, or simply cultural expectations that are expressed in imaginary form. Those proposals fall well short of explaining the broad and powerful sweep of this phenomenon across the world.

Because of the prevalence of sedation, the dying are not always clear-minded, but occasionally someone makes it to their last breath without morphine.

The overwhelming likelihood is that our sense of another reality is just a comforting illusion that helps us live our lives. But what appears to be likely or unlikely is a terrible strategy for finding out what is true. Our understanding of reality might be as limited as a dog’s understanding of television.

There are more than thirty such parameters that must have almost the precise values that they do in order to permit a universe with life. The odds of that happening have been calculated to be ten to the negative 230—that is to say, one chance in a number that has 229 zeros after it. Randomly finding a specific grain of sand on the first try among all the grains on earth would be millions of millions of times more likely than the universe existing. And yet here we are.

As chemist Addy Pross points out, all human cells are replaced many times over but maintain a pattern—the human body—that persists as long as those cells can metabolize energy. And all those human bodies, in turn, constitute the species Homo sapiens sapiens that persists across generations even though the individuals that make up the human race keep dying. (Or, as Xana put it: “Daddy, I know why there is night. So other people can have day.”)

Throughout history and across societies, moral behavior usually boils down to not treating people as if they are disposable—perhaps because we intuitively know that entropy will make that clear soon enough. Any theory of an afterlife would have to explain how souls can survive an end-state universe of –459.67 degrees Fahrenheit, otherwise known as absolute zero.

It was a deeply counterintuitive reversal that got its start in 1900, when a moderately promising German physicist named Max Planck decided to solve an arcane but stubborn problem involving thermal radiation, the energy given off by hot bodies. In a single evening, Planck invented the “quantum of action.” A quantum is the smallest possible unit of energy that can be given off by an electron, and Planck showed that energy is radiated in units rather than waves. In the macroscopic world, when a pendulum swings, it does not “jump” from one position to another; it moves in a smooth and continuous way. At the subatomic level, however, electrons are either “here” or “there,” but never in between. They do not swing, in other words; they leap. The formula that predicts how electrons leap from one energy level to another is called Planck’s constant and is considered one of the basic laws of nature, along with gravity and the speed of light.

On some level, the central tenets of quantum mechanics had to be taken on faith, like a new kind of religion—the crucial difference being that science stands ready to be disproven by facts, whereas religion does not.

Nothing in the observable world could be in two places at once—it made no sense—and yet at the subatomic level, that’s exactly what seemed to be happening. It was as if you could prove a schizophrenic delusion with math. Then, over the course of one day and one night, while on vacation at a seaside resort, Werner Heisenberg discovered matrix quantum mechanics. He was twenty-three years old. Heisenberg’s theory proposed that an electron is not a particle that exists at one place at one time the way a person or a chair does; rather, it occupies all positions at once as a statistical probability. When you pin it down by observing it with a detector, the electron freezes in place, and you lose all information about its momentum. When you stop observing it, you regain information about its momentum but lose its location. There was no way to have both. That paradox famously came to be known as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and forced physicists to come to the impossible conclusion that the subatomic world was brought into existence by observation. The act of observing something created the very thing that was being observed—which, until then, had existed only as a set of probabilities called a wave function. Theoretically, Schrödinger’s cat was a massive wave function—both alive and dead—until the box was opened, at which point its wave function collapsed into one outcome or the other. That was happening to all matter all the time, creating the world we live in.

Physicists eventually proposed that the universe existed as a nearly infinite wave function containing all possible outcomes until conscious thought forced it to spring into existence in its current singular form. Oddly, the idea had a distant religious origin from the early 1600s, when a lapsed Polish Jesuit named Casimir Liszinski wrote a secret treatise proposing that it was humans who created God rather than the other way around. Unfortunately, Liszinki had lent a large sum of money to a neighbor named John Brzoska, and Brzoska came up with a plan to avoid paying back the debt. He stole Lisinski’s manuscript and turned it over to church authorities, who quickly stood Liszinski before a tribunal and condemned him to death. His treatise was destroyed but, ironically, its main points were preserved when they were read into the court records. They include the following (slightly edited for brevity): We beseech you… do you not extinguish the light of Reason, do you not oust the sun from this world, do you not pull down your God from the sky, when attributing to him the impossible. Man is the creator of God, and God is a concept and creation of Man. God is not existent. Piety was introduced by the impious. The fear of God was spread by the unafraid so that the people would be afraid of them in the end. Simple folk are cheated by the more cunning with the fabrication of God for their own oppression.