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

by Sebastian Junger

Everyone has a relationship with death whether they want one or not; refusing to think about death is its own kind of relationship.

One of the core goals of life is survival; the other is meaning. In some ways, they are antithetical. Situations that have intense consequences are exceedingly meaningful—childbirth, combat, natural disasters—and safer situations are usually not. A round of golf is pleasant (or not) but has very little meaning because almost nothing is at stake. In that context, adrenaline junkies are actually “meaning junkies,” and danger seekers are actually “consequence seekers.” Because death is the ultimate consequence, it’s the ultimate reality that gives us meaning.

But the randomness that can kill you will also save you.

“The rain wouldn’t do that if it saw how beautiful they were,” Xana said. That’s the problem, I thought: we have no idea whether the universe even notices us, much less cares. Later, when I tried to understand why I ignored

If my mother had really pushed—which she never did—he would probably have answered that believing things you don’t understand is either obedience or desperation, and neither leads to the truth.

Because their work solved real-world problems, these scientists were considered “applied physicists.” They were the garage mechanics of the scientific world; they made things that could be used in everyday life.

It was as if an accident had shut down all three lanes of the Santa Monica Freeway, and drivers were filling residential streets on either side to bypass the blockage.

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.

During the thirty seconds before and after death, the patient’s brain experienced a surge of gamma waves associated with memory retrieval, intense concentration, dissociative states, and dreaming. Laboratory rats experience the same surge of gamma waves when they die. The flood of memories experienced by Tyler Carroll as he drifted in and out of consciousness at a forward operating base in Afghanistan may be a trait common to all mammals, and the evolutionary advantage may simply lie in providing one last, compelling motivation to stay alive.

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.

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.

The brain is by far the most complex structure in the known universe, with an estimated hundred trillion neural connections, and those connections give rise to an extremely mysterious phenomenon called consciousness.

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.

“Reality” may just be a boundary we can’t see past. The dead might be all around, flitting back and forth as the dying take their leave. Imagine their frantic efforts around floods and earthquakes. Around epidemics. Around Dachau.

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.

Will the universe—which elaborated and is elaborating the finite mind—let it perish?”

Einstein’s work allowed Niels Bohr to calculate the angular momentum of an electron, which helped Louis de Broglie demonstrate that electrons circling a nucleus behave like waves as well as little planets. This was named the wave-particle duality, and after Einstein studied it, he said that de Broglie had “lifted a corner of the veil that shrouds the Old One.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“One may consider our part of the universe as an extremely long-lived quantum fluctuation… Is it not possible that consciousness, like space-time, has its own intrinsic freedom and that neglecting these will lead to a description of the universe that is fundamentally incomplete?”

The secrets that physicists have been prying open made me feel like we were asking for trouble; like we were ungrateful and risking punishment.

The risk of human knowledge not only changes what will happen; it revises what did happen and produces a different outcome.

Our universe was created by unknowable forces, has no implicit reason to exist, and seems to violate its own basic laws.

My experience was sacred, I finally decided, because I couldn’t really know life until I knew death, and I couldn’t really know death until it came for me. Without death, life does not require focus or courage or choice. Without death, life is just an extraordinary stunt that won’t stop.

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.