A Near Death Experience on Cape Cod
Sebastian Junger on the Afterlife
This past weekend, Chelsea and I flew from California out to Cape Cod for a wedding. Chelsea was officiating, and I was excited to support her, as well as to celebrate our friends’ marriage, and to see a part of America that, as a Californian, I’d only heard people talk about.
Whenever I travel to a new place, the first thing on my agenda is to find a good coffee shop and an independent bookstore. (For this trip, I had an assist from fellow Substack writer
). Stopping by Eight Cousins in Falmouth, my attention was caught by a slim hardcover copy of In My Time of Dying by Sebastian Junger. (It turned out to be a signed copy, which is always cool—and as I was to discover, Junger is a Cape Cod local).Junger is a great prose writer, known for his career as a war reporter as well as hard-hitting narrative nonfiction books like The Perfect Storm. In his latest book, he delves deep into an experience most of us avoid thinking or talking about too much: death.
Almost exactly 5 years ago, a few days before the summer solstice at his home in Truro, Mass., Junger suffered a sudden aneurysm of his pancreatic artery and was rushed to Cape Cod Hospital. The book narrates Junger’s close brush with death, as well as the research he undertook afterward to make sense of his experiences.
Before his close call, Junger was a hard-headed atheist, with no belief in any form of afterlife. Like many scientific-minded individuals (Junger’s father was a physicist), he assumed that when our body dies, our consciousness simply blinks out, and we are no more. But when Junger was approaching death in the ER, he had an experience shared by many individuals in their last moments: he saw his father hovering near him in the room, telling him “it’s okay, there’s nothing to be afraid of. I’ll take care of you.”
As documented by Bruce Greyson, MD and other researchers, seeing dead ancestors is only one of the many phenomena commonly experienced by those in their last hours or minutes. People who medically die and are later resuscitated report still more mystical reaches of experience, including traveling through a tunnel of light, meeting God or other spiritual beings, and experiencing a sense of deep inner peace (see the excellent
channel for more on Near Death Experiences).While some of the gruesome details were hard to read (I learned more than I ever wanted to about blood loss), the book really took off for me when Junger turned from the gritty medical realities of dying in a hospital to his research into NDEs and quantum physics.
While summarizing the research of Greyson and others, Junger also manages to give a pretty good introduction to quantum physics, not in a New Age way, but with reference to Einstein, Schrödinger, and actual experiments (including a particularly intriguing one carried out in the Canary Islands, in which firing an entangled photon through a slot appeared to actually change the outcome of firing its paired photon in the past).
As Junger notes, a key question is the relationship between consciousness and our observed reality. If consciousness is a mere epiphenomenon of brain activity, we probably die with our brains. But if the physical universe somehow arises from consciousness (as researchers like Donald Hoffman, as well as ancient scriptures argue), then there’s no reason why consciousness can’t survive death.
Ultimately, Junger doesn’t come to any firm conclusions, only raises questions and explores possibilities. But I believe that’s exactly what we need in our contemporary moment. As I wrote back in January, NDEs are one of several possible vectors for the emergence of a new worldview, one that goes beyond scientific materialism and allows for a re-enchanted relationship with reality.
“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.”
—Sebastian Junger, In My Time of Dying
While not exactly light beach reading, it’s a short and gripping narrative that I was able to finish on the flight back from Boston to SFO. I recommend it to Mind, Meaning, and Magic readers interested in what happens when we die, perhaps paired with the Bruce Greyson interview linked above, as well as the
channel.That’s all for this week. As always, I appreciate your feedback on Mind, Meaning, and Magic. What do you think about Near Death Experiences? What do you believe happens when we die? Let me know in the comments.
Thanks for reading,
Chris Cordry, LMFT
“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 essence of Japanese tea ceremony, which itself is a form of Zen Buddhism when practiced as such, is precisely this.
Glad you found Eight Cousins, Chris. I hope you had a good time in Falmouth.
The idea that the world arises from consciousness has never resonated or made much sense to me, but then existence itself doesn't make much sense, does it? 😊
My wife and I have see Junger speak on Cape about The Perfect Storm. My wife read In My Time of Dying while grieving for her dying mother but didn't really enjoy all the medical research reporting. I think she was looking for some hope, some belief in life after death.
My personal take is that we can never know if there is more to "us" than this body, some spiritual element. Likely, whatever Truth is, is well beyond our capacity to conceive or perceive. I have made the decision once and for all to stop searching for answers. I realize fully that by searching, I'm making a lot of assumptions that there is something to find, while narrowing those possible findings to only what I can conceive. In other words, the search itself is causing me to have tunnel vision. Only by leaving the unknowable alone can I have any chance of leading a meaningful life in the here and now.