Sebastian Junger is a journalist who has covered the war in Afghanistan. He's also the author of many books, including "The Perfect Storm," which later became a major motion picture. His latest book is titled, "In My Time of Dying, How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife."
LPM News' Bill Burton spoke with Junger ahead of his speaking appearance next week in Louisville.
Bill Burton: Let's start with the medical condition that led to your consideration of an afterlife. What exactly happened?
Sebastian Junger: I had an undiagnosed and asymptomatic aneurysm in my pancreatic artery, and an aneurysm is an unnatural sort of ballooning of the artery wall. And if it balloons too far, it can rupture. And if it ruptures, it, it, it's often deadly. You sort of, I started bleeding out into my own abdomen and I was losing. A pint of blood every 10 or 15 minutes, you know, you can lose about half your blood before you die. And that's just about what I lost by the time they got me to the hospital.
BB: So you're on the operating table and as you wrote in your book, you were actually very close to death, and suddenly now you have this concept of an afterlife. It's not something that comes naturally to you. You've said on, on many occasions that you're an atheist. So what did you experience that made you willing to consider the possibility of an afterlife?
SJ: Yeah, I mean, let me just be clear, the idea of whether there's a God or not in the universe and whether there's some kind of post-death existence for the individual are completely separate questions, but they're, they're really different issues. So for me, I've always been an atheist and am still an atheist. What this experience opened my mind to was, do we really understand the true nature of reality and life and death? So what happened was I, you know, I lost half my, at least half my blood. I had no idea I was dying. We were, I was in the in the trauma bay, and the doctor was working to insert, a large gauge needle through my neck into my jugular to transfuse me. I needed 10 units of blood. And while he was doing that, to my puzzlement, this black pit, a portal to infinity, like opened up underneath me and started pulling me in. And I was terrified of it. I didn't know I was dying, but I knew if I went into the pit, I wasn't coming back, and I was very scared of it. And then my dead father appeared above me and sort of communicated with me, "It's OK, you don't have to fight it, you can come with me, I'll take care of you." And I was absolutely shocked. I was horrified. I was like, go with you, you're dead. Why, why would I go with you? And I turned to the doctor and I said, you gotta hurry. I'm going. I didn't know where I was going, but I was, I was clear in my mind. I was being taken somewhere against my will, and I was not gonna be able to come back. I love my life, my wife, my children, you know, I, I didn't want to go anywhere. And it was mortifying to me that I was being taken.
BB: So after you go through this, you contemplate it for a while and you apply your journalistic and analytical mind to. What conclusions did you reach or or is conclusion the wrong word?
SJ: It depends. I mean, I, I concluded that we cannot reach an empirical conclusion. So I had accepted the idea that we are biological beings, and then when we die, our individuality is extinguished just like our bodies are either turned to ash or decomposed and returned to the soil. And I, I didn't really think any more about it and until this odd experience. I started researching it and and NDEs, near death experiences, as they're called, are very, very common. And not only that, they're common, but they have generally great commonalities around the world in different cultures. And I just started to sort of wonder like why is this this phenomenon when people are dying? Why is it so common? Like why do people have generally the same experience and why did dying see the dead and no one else does. There are rational explanations for all kinds of You know, what are thought to be hallucinations when we die, right? The the bright lighted the tunnel, you know, all this floating above your body. You can reproduce those experiences in a human centrifuge or with drugs, but what's very odd about near death experiences is that the dying see the dead, the dead.
Seem to show up to receive them, and that defies, in my mind, defies a quote rational explanation.
BB: Sebastian Junger is the author of, "In My Time of Dying. How I Came face to face with the Idea of an afterlife." Sebastian, thank you so much for your time.
SJ: My pleasure. I really enjoyed talking to you.
This transcript was edited for clarity.
