Sebastian Junger — Death and the Search for Meaning in the Afterlife

The Michael Shermer Show Archives

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For years as an award-winning war reporter, Sebastian Junger traveled to many front lines and frequently put his life at risk. And yet the closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon at the New England home he shared with his wife and two young children. Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was visited by his dead father, inviting Junger to join him. “It’s okay,” his father said. “There’s nothing to be scared of. I’ll take care of you.” That was the last thing Junger remembered until he came to the next day when he was told he had suffered a ruptured aneurysm that he should not have survived.

This experience spurred Junger—a confirmed atheist raised by his physicist father to respect the empirical—to undertake a scientific, philosophical, and deeply personal examination of mortality and what happens after we die. How do we begin to process the brutal fact that any of us might perish unexpectedly on what begins as an ordinary day? How do we grapple with phenomena that science may be unable to explain? And what happens to a person, emotionally and spiritually, when forced to reckon with such existential questions?

In My Time of Dying is part medical drama, part searing autobiography, and part rational inquiry into the ultimate unknowable mystery.

Sebastian Junger is The New York Times bestselling author of Tribe, War, Freedom, A Death in Belmont, Fire, and The Perfect Storm, and codirector of the documentary film Restrepo, which was nominated for an Academy Award. He is also the winner of a Peabody Award and the National Magazine Award for Reporting. Here is how a Wall Street Journal reviewer described him:

Sebastian Junger has lived multiple lives and almost died in many of them. There was his accident while working for a tree-felling company that inspired him to research a book on dangerous jobs, which ultimately became The Perfect Storm (1997). There was the time he almost drowned while surfing. Then there was his work as an embedded journalist in Afghanistan, where machine-gun fire missed him by inches. Later, there was the assignment he did not take, to war-torn Libya, which claimed the life of his frequent collaborator and close friend, the British photographer Tim Hetherington.

His new book is In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face-to-Face with the Idea of an Afterlife, a book-length memento mori: remember, you are going to die.

Shermer and Junger discuss:

• how he became a professional writer and journalist
• his religious background and current beliefs even after his near-death experience
• what happened to him and how it changed his life
• NDEs and OBEs
• how the brain works under hallucinations
• consciousness and altered states of consciousness
• sensed presence effect
• sleep paralysis
• why there is no “proof” of an afterlife
• what it would be like to live forever
• what belief in life after death does for people
• empirical truths vs. mythic truths
• longevity and how to live longer.

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