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

by Sebastian Junger

As an intern, Greyson rushed to the ER to assess a young woman who had nearly died of a drug overdose. As it so happened, he had just splattered spaghetti sauce on his tie while eating lunch, so he buttoned up his lab coat to cover it. The young woman’s name was Holly. She was in a coma when Greyson arrived, but he was able to talk to Holly’s roommate in the waiting room. The next day, after Holly woke up, she told Greyson two puzzling things: that she had “watched” his conversation with Susan and that he had a stain on his striped tie. “The hair rose on the back of my neck, and I felt goose bumps,” Greyson wrote. “For the past half century, I’ve been trying to understand how Holly could have known about the spaghetti stain.”

In every case cited by Greyson and his colleagues, the dying person found themselves outside their body and often looking down from above as doctors or bystanders tried to save them. Many also claimed to have perceptions that were not constrained by ordinary human perspectives. “In my wanderings there was a strange consciousness that I could see through the walls of the building,” recorded a British army officer named Alexander Ogston, who almost died of typhoid fever at a military hospital around 1900. “I saw plainly, for instance, a poor Royal Army Medical surgeon, of whose existence I had not known, and who was in quite another part of the hospital, grow very ill and scream and die; I saw them cover his corpse and carry him softly out on shoeless feet, quietly and surreptitiously, lest we should know that he had died… Afterwards, when I told these happenings to the sisters [nurses], they informed me that all of this had happened.”

Around one quarter of near-death survivors report encountering the dead, as I did. Some were long-dead relatives, some were the recently dead, and some were not yet known to have died. One American soldier responded to an appeal in military publications for near-death experiences with this account of a helicopter crash in Vietnam: “It was peaceful and cool. I could see others like myself just sort of floating around only inches from the ground… dead [Viet Cong]. Our eyes meet, but there are no hard feelings between us, just something we have in common… people walk past you, and you know what they are thinking… we all have the same thing in common… we are dead.”

In an era of slow communication, it was entirely possible to not know that a close friend or even family member had died, and Barrett considered visits by the recently dead to be exceptionally strong evidence of an afterlife. A Frenchman named Paul Durocq died of yellow fever while traveling with his family in Venezuela, in 1894. In his last hours, he seemed to be visited by the spirit of a close friend who had died while the Durocqs were away—although they didn’t know that. The Durocqs found his funeral announcement in the mail when they got home.

It’s not remotely likely, but then neither is anything. If the force of gravity were even slightly weaker, stars wouldn’t be dense enough to cross the Coulomb barrier and start thermonuclear fusion. It would be a completely dark universe. If gravity were slightly stronger, stars would burn too hot and fast, and there would be no life. If the attractive force between electrons and atomic nuclei were too weak, electrons couldn’t orbit; if it were too strong, atoms couldn’t bond with each other. Either way, there would be no molecules. 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. Given that existence itself is almost infinitely unlikely, what if there were some kind of post-death existence? What if the dead were not entirely gone, in the sense that we understand that word, and the living were not entirely bound by time and space? What if the great mysteries of the world—the spirits and ghosts and coincidences and telepathy and predictive dreams and everything else that humans have always noticed but couldn’t quite make sense of—actually had a rational expl...

Liszinski’s plea was that not only do you deprive God of dignity by insisting He be something He can’t—self-creating—but you also strip society of the benefits of reason. There is a point at which reason fails, however. The entire universe can be understood mathematically to the subatomic level, but only religion claims to know how it came to exist in the first place. Math and reason fail utterly in this regard. Without God, either existence is inevitable—a state for which there are no mathematics—or it is almost infinitely unlikely but came into existence during an infinity of time.

We assume that life is the most real thing we will ever experience, but it might turn out to be the least real, the least meaningful. The idea that you will appreciate life more after almost dying is a cheap bit of wisdom easily asserted by people who have never been near death. When you drill down into it—which you must—we are really talking about an appreciation of death rather than of life. Eventually you will be all alone with doctors shrugging because they’ve run out of things to do, and the person you really are thumping frantically in your chest: the successes and catastrophes and affairs and hangovers and genuine loves and small betrayals and flashes of courage and the river of fear running beneath it all, and of course the vast stretches of wasted time that are part of even the most amazing life. You will know yourself best at that moment; you will be at your most real, your most honest, your most uncalculated. If you could travel back in time to make use of such knowledge during your life, you would become exactly the person you’d always hoped to be—but none of us do that. We don’t get that knowledge until it’s too late because then it can’t be tainted by vanity or pride or desire.

That is to say, on one island, researchers shot a particle at the double slits, and it passed through both of them as an unobserved wave function. Eighty-eight miles away, via fiber optics cable, they then shot its entangled twin at double slits while observing it with a photon detector; as expected, its wave function collapsed, and it passed through only one slit. But now the universe had a problem: Entangled particles have to do the exact same thing, but the delayed choice had tricked them into acting differently. That was impossible. When researchers checked the strike plate of the first test, though, they found that the wave function had been retroactively collapsed by the second test and forced through a single slit. Quantum information had been erased.