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

by Sebastian Junger

I can’t believe I almost died last night. It’s terrifying.” She considered me for a moment. “Instead of thinking of it as something scary,” she said, “try thinking of it as something sacred.”

“It doesn’t surprise me that you saw the dead. Not because I have strong beliefs about it, but because I have zero disbelief.”

One could say that it’s the small ambitions of life that shred our souls, and that if we’re lucky enough to glimpse the gargoyles of our final descent and make it back alive, we are truly saved. Every object is a miracle compared to nothingness and every moment an infinity when correctly understood to be all we’ll ever get. Religion does its best to impart this through a lifetime of devotion, but one good look at death might be all you need.

Finding yourself alive after almost dying is not, as it turns out, the kind of party one might expect. You realize that you weren’t returned to life, you were just introduced to death.

Medical portals became thresholds to the great void. Do you want to know if you’re going to live or die? Just log onto the hospital website and find out. Everything you ever wanted to know is waiting for you there. Waiting for us all.

If the ultimate proof of God is existence itself—which many claim to be the case—then a true state of grace may mean dwelling so fully and completely in her present moment that you are still reading your books and singing your songs when the guards come for you at dawn. The past and the future have no tangible reality in our universe; God’s creation exists moment by moment or not at all, and our only chance at immortality might lie in experiencing each of those moments as the stunning extravagance they actually are.

Combat had never been this scary because it had never been this personal; there was just a lot of metal flying around, and you tried not to get in front of it. But now I was carrying my own destruction around with me like a live hand grenade.

Religious people understand life is a miracle, but you don’t need to sub it out to God to be rendered almost mute with wonder; just stand on a street corner and look around for a while.

Death is a huge distance to travel from a state of health and vigor, but if you’re actually dying—and I have a distinct memory of this—you are already so compromised that it can just feel like a half step to the left.

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.

Eventually the universe will cool to a temperature so close to absolute zero that there will be no light, no thermal energy, no atomic movement and therefore no time. The cosmos does not go howling on forever, in other words; it is born, ages, and dies like we do. When people hope for eternal life, they are hoping for something that even the universe, fourteen billion years old and about ninety-three billion light years across, cannot be granted.

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.

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.

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.

“With the expansion of science, it becomes more and more complicated to talk about God in simplistic terms,” writes Stanford physicist Andrei Linde. “Apparently, the laws of the universe work so precisely that we do not need any hypothesis of a divine intervention in order to describe the behavior of the universe as we know it. There remained one point which was hidden from us and which remained unexplained: the moment of creation of the universe as a whole. The mystery of creation of everything from nothing could seem too great to be considered scientifically.”

“The mind-body problem is… the problem of getting consciousness to arise from biology,” writes Donald Hoffman of the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. “So far, no one can build a scientific theory of how this might happen. This failure is so striking that it leads some to wonder if Homo sapiens lacks the necessary conceptual apparatus… If you want to solve the mind-body problem, you can take the physical as a given and explain the genesis of the conscious experience, or take conscious experience as a given and explain the genesis of the physical.” But you can’t do both.

Sometimes I have to grip my head with my hands and tell myself not to start down that path. Sometimes it takes an effort to believe that I didn’t die, and that what I’m experiencing now is real.

The word apocalypse comes from the Greek, apokalupsis, to “uncover,” because all knowledge is said to be revealed in the final collapse.

We’re all on the side of a mountain shocked by how fast it’s gotten dark; the only question is whether we’re with people we love or not. There is no other thing—no belief or religion or faith—there is just that. Just the knowledge that when we finally close our eyes, someone will be there to watch over us as we head out into that great, soaring night.