Sebastian Jünger’s Encounter with Death: A Secular Investigation of the Sacred

If you want to write a bestseller, author Sebastian Junger said in a recent interview, “then you have to come to the conclusion that there is life after death and that near-death experiences (NDEs) prove this.”

Jünger did not write this book.

Instead, he wrote a book that applies a journalist’s rigor and independence to his own time of vacillating between life and death, and the adventure of living on after a near-death, an experience that left him “wondering what this new part of my life should actually be called.”

In my time of dying: How I was confronted with the idea of ​​life after death documents what happened to Junger when a bulge in his pancreatic artery burst and eventually most of his body’s blood flowed to his abdominal area.

Junger, a former war correspondent who also wrote the book that became the movie “The Tempest,” is a lifelong athlete who, at age 58, was unexpectedly struck with extreme abdominal pain on a Tuesday afternoon in June 2020. He and his wife were in a cabin in the woods, with no cell reception, a long walk from the road. They were more than an hour from the nearest hospital.

As the ambulance took him to the hospital, doctors hurriedly placed a large catheter in his carotid artery. Their mission was life and death: They had to start replacing the blood the patient was losing as quickly as possible. At this point, Junger remembers:

I noticed a dark pit below me on my left. The pit was pitch black and so infinitely deep that it had no real depth at all… There was nothing on my left but the blackness into which I was drawn. It exerted a pull that was slow but irresistible and I knew that if I fell into the hole I would never get out again.

While work on his carotid artery continued, the doctor later described this period as a time when Junger was “preparing to buy the farm,” as Junger reports:

“I felt myself being drawn deeper and deeper into the darkness. And just when it seemed inevitable, I became aware of something else: my father. He had been dead for eight years, but there he was, not so much floating, but simply existing above me and slightly to my left.”

At that moment, Junger came across what would become the core of this book:

“My father radiated confidence and seemed to invite me to go with him. ‘It’s okay, you don’t have to be afraid,’ he seemed to say. ‘Don’t fight back. I’ll take care of you.'”

His search for medical and scientific explanations for his apparition brought numerous, but ultimately inconclusive, reasons to believe that his apparition was just a hallucination. He says he knows this much about his experience with his father in the room:

“He showed up when I needed him most. It was probably his greatest act of love for me. He was an unfocused and distant father, a germaphobe who hesitated to pick up his own children and could spend hours lost in thought – and yet he was there.”

Junger’s book devotes a little too much to the medical details of his crisis and the quantum theory that may or may not shed light on his experiences. I like to do the occasional Google search when reading a book, but these sections made me feel like I was slogging through a medical journal overlaid with a physics textbook.

At the end of his slim volume, Junger includes a detailed list of sources for readers interested in further exploring three areas: medical research on death and dying, near-death experiences, and subatomic physics, cosmology, and consciousness. Not listed, but relevant to all of these dimensions: Hans Küng’s 1985 treatise: Eternal life? Life after death as a medical, philosophical and technological problem.

A strength of this book is Junger’s instinct not to read too much into any single development, whether medical, emotional, scientific or spiritual. Instead, he delves deeply into the subject to see what he can discover in the evidence and details of his experience.

Junger describes himself as a lifelong atheist whose disbelief was not destroyed by the near-death experience, but was nevertheless shaped in some ways.

He recounts the following conversation with a nurse the morning after he had not died: “She asked how I was. ‘I’m fine,’ I lied. ‘But I can’t believe I almost died last night. It’s awful.’ She looked at me for a moment. ‘Instead of thinking of it as something scary,’ she said, ‘try thinking of it as something sacred.'”

When Junger later returned to the hospital, he tried to find the nurse, but no one there had any idea who it could have been.

“It occurred to me that she didn’t exist,” Junger writes. “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.”

So, given all this, where does he land on the faith scale?

“I’m still an atheist,” he told the Daily Show host, “but my mind has been opened to the possibility that there is some kind of afterlife reality, perhaps at the quantum level.” Perhaps a reunion with our individual consciousness. Perhaps a universal consciousness.

Junger argues that the existence of an afterlife (or, as he calls it, a “reality after death”) does not necessarily imply the existence of God, thereby acknowledging the limits of human intelligence. The reporter does not drive past his headlights.

He points out that our understanding of reality “may be as limited as a dog’s understanding of television” and encourages us to “try out the idea that death is merely the point at which the veil of belief is torn and a larger system behind it emerges.”

Not necessarily the gates of heaven. But perhaps something bigger.