Sebastian Junger's Near-Death Experience, and His Vision of an Afterlife

Summary

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Podcast Summary: All Of It — "Sebastian Junger’s Near-Death Experience, and His Vision of an Afterlife"

Host: Alison Stewart (WNYC)

Guest: Sebastian Junger, author/journalist

Aired: July 1, 2024

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Episode Overview

This episode features celebrated journalist, author, and documentarian Sebastian Junger discussing his new memoir, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife. Junger recounts his harrowing near-death experience resulting from a ruptured aneurysm, explores the profound vision of his deceased father he had while on the edge of death, and examines the broader topic of afterlife from a rational, atheist perspective. Host Alison Stewart, herself recovering from emergency brain surgery, brings a personal note to the conversation, delving into how brushes with mortality can provoke existential questioning, anxiety, and possibly, transformation.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Junger’s Relationship with Death Before His Illness

• Initially, Junger “tried not to have” a relationship with death, despite a career full of dangerous situations from war reporting to high-risk tree climbing.
• He viewed these risks as calculated—the metaphor of going to the “poker table” and hoping to come away with more than he lost (03:39).
• His attitude changed after witnessing the impact of death on loved ones, particularly after his friend and collaborator, Tim Hetherington, was killed in Libya (14:53).

2. The Medical Crisis and Its Origins

• Junger suffered from a rare congenital structural issue where a ligament compressed his celiac artery, forcing blood through smaller vessels. Over time, one vessel developed an aneurysm, which ultimately ruptured (03:17).
• He experienced pain but ignored it for months, reflecting on how people must choose between ignoring discomfort (living broadly) or paying close attention (living deeply) (08:22).

3. The Near-Death Experience & Vision

• During the medical emergency, Junger lost a catastrophic amount of blood and, while fading, experienced a “black pit” and a vision of his deceased father, who was “above me and slightly to my left” (05:45, 07:08).
• His father, a rationalist physicist, communicated wordlessly: “It’s okay, you don’t have to fight it. I’ll take care of you. You can come with me” (06:30).
• Despite being a lifelong atheist, Junger continues to grapple with interpreting this vision: “I wasn’t culturally predisposed towards any of these things...” (07:45).
• Junger described post-hospitalization dissociation and anxiety: “I had this fear that I could die any day now... a very common and extremely strange feeling that I wasn’t really there, that maybe I had died” (04:34).

4. Premonitions and the Mind-Body Connection

• Junger recounts a disturbing dream from days before the event, depicting himself as a spirit unable to communicate with his grieving family—a classic near-death motif (10:25).
• He wonders if this was a bodily premonition, but medical professionals are divided: "The body can communicate with the unconscious mind... It communicates among other ways through dreams" (12:20).

5. Aftermath and Seeking Answers

• Junger applied his reporter’s mindset to confirm and deconstruct his own memories. He interviewed all involved—his wife, medics, doctors—to corroborate what occurred (17:02).
• A notable ICU nurse encouraged him: “Try thinking about it like something sacred” rather than scary—a phrase that deeply impacted him, despite being himself a secularist (19:05).
• Curiously, he was later unable to find this nurse, a detail left unexplained (20:10).

6. The Science and Consistency of Near-Death Experiences

• Junger spoke to neuroscientists and reviewed research on near-death experiences (NDEs): some believe NDEs are proof of post-death consciousness, while others see them as brain-generated hallucinations (21:30).
• He is struck by the remarkable consistency of NDE narratives: “There is no drug that will give everyone the same hallucination. ... The dying see the dead” (23:30).

7. Rational vs. Spiritual Interpretations

• Junger draws a distinction between belief in a creator God and belief in post-mortem consciousness; he remains an atheist but is open to scientific mystery:
  “A creator God could create this universe and not give us an afterlife... Or you could have a mechanistic universe... but there is some kind of post-death quantum reality. ... They don’t require each other.” (26:19)
• On atheism, Junger asserts: “I’m as atheist as you can be. ... Believing in God, that’s an active practice... and I just don’t believe in a God” (28:20).

8. How Mortality Changes Life and Priorities

• Junger stresses the importance of presence and the “miracle” of existence: “I am sometimes painfully and sometimes ecstatically aware of the miracle that any of this ... exists” (29:31).
• He advocates living as though each day might be the last: “Why not try to live every day as if you knew you were going to die tomorrow?” (30:54).
• Critiques social media/technology for robbing people of meaningful attention: “They are taking your life and monetizing it to their benefit. ... Your attention is your life” (32:23).

9. On Blessings and Wounds

• Junger discusses the etymology of “blessing” (from “bletsian,” or blood), recognizing that blessings and wounds are “forever tied at the waist... you get them both at the same time” (34:47).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the NDE vision:
  “This black pit opened up underneath me and I started to get pulled into it. ... And then suddenly my dead father appeared above me in this radiant, sort of—not radiant, but in this energy form. ... [He] communicated to me, ‘It’s okay, you don’t have to fight it. I’ll take care of you. You can come with me.’”
  —Sebastian Junger (05:45–06:30)

• On atheism and faith:
  “I should rush to say that I’m a lifelong atheist. I’m still an atheist. I’m a rationalist, which means I’m a skeptic... I wasn’t culturally predisposed towards any of these things.”
  —Sebastian Junger (07:55)

• On technology and attention:
  “They are taking your life and monetizing it to their benefit. ... Your attention is your life, right? And vice versa.”
  —Sebastian Junger (32:23)

• On the precariousness of life:
  “None of us know that this isn’t the last day of our lives, right? ... If you were somehow told, you know what? You’re going to be executed tomorrow at dawn. You have one day ... who would you want to be on that last day?”
  —Sebastian Junger (29:31–30:54)

• On blessing and curse:
  “There’s no blessing that doesn’t come without a wound... Blessing and a curse are twinned. They’re forever tied at the waist, and you get them both at the same time.”
  —Sebastian Junger (34:47)

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Key Timestamps

• [01:06] Host’s introduction and context for Junger’s experience
• [02:27] Junger’s former relationship with death
• [03:17] Explanation of the rare underlying condition
• [04:34] Psychological aftermath of near-death experience
• [05:45–07:08] Detailed recounting of the NDE vision
• [08:22] Ignoring pain and living styles: “ignoring vs. focusing”
• [10:25] The “premonition” dream and challenges to reality
• [12:20] Neuroscientific debate: body-mind communication
• [14:53] Reflection on war reporting and impact of Tim Hetherington’s death
• [17:02] Applying a journalist’s scrutiny to his own memories
• [19:05] “Try thinking about it like something sacred”—the ICU nurse moment
• [21:30] Neuroscientific takes on NDEs and their consistency
• [26:19] Junger’s philosophical grappling with afterlife vs. God
• [28:20] Where Junger stands on atheism post-incident
• [29:31] Changed approach to daily life; presence and attention
• [32:23] Social media, technology, and commodification of attention
• [34:47] Final reflections on blessings, wounds, and meaning

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Tone and Style

The conversation is candid, reflective, and unsentimental, filtered through the lens of experience by both guest and host. Junger brings the same skepticism and evidence-driven approach to his personal existential reckoning as to his investigative reporting, while remaining open to awe, mystery, and the transformation brought by proximity to death. The episode offers both intellectual rigor and emotional resonance, appealing to skeptics, spiritual seekers, and anyone wrestling with questions of mortality and meaning.

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Transcript

[Sebastian Younger]

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[Alison Stewart]

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[Sebastian Younger]

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[Alison Stewart]

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[Sebastian Younger]

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[Alison Stewart]

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[Sebastian Younger]

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[Alison Stewart]

This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Celebrated author, journalist, and documentarian, Sebastian Younger is no stranger to near death experiences. He's been shot at in war zones, threatened while covering conflict, and nearly drowned while surfing. But when a ruptured aneurysm in his 50s sent Sebastian to the emergency room, he had a brush with death that changed his life. While losing nearly a fatal amount of blood, Sebastian felt consciousness fading. And suddenly his father appeared. His dead father. His father, who as a physicist, believed in empirical evidence rather than religion. Sebastian survives the ordeal, but is left pondering this vision he had while dying and wondering whether it might point to something beyond life. He writes about all of this in his new memoir, In My Time of Dying, How I Came face to face with the idea of an afterlife and listeners. I am especially grateful to talk with Sebastian today for personal reasons. The day his book came out, it was May 16, right? Okay. It was day 79, after I had emergency brain surgery. It was touch and go for a while, and I'm still recovering. But as you can imagine, I read Sebastian's book with great interest. Sebastian, welcome to the show.

[Sebastian Younger]

Thank you so much.

[Alison Stewart]

So before this experience, how. How would you describe your relationship with death?

[Sebastian Younger]

Well, I tried not to have one. I mean, you know, like. I mean, I was in a lot of war zones. I did work that was dangerous. I was a high climber for tree companies. I took trees down from the top down with a chainsaw on a line. And then I was a war reporter for a long time, and I had a lot of near misses. I was blown up by a roadside bomb. I had bullets hit literally inches from my head. And I was even seized by a rebel group in the Niger Delta. And one guy came up to me and said, when we kill you, I'll be the one to do it.

[Alison Stewart]

Okay.

[Sebastian Younger]

And so my relationship with death was mainly avoiding it, and I was very healthy, and I didn't have any reason to think that my body would fail me until it did.

[Alison Stewart]

What you had was. It was a congenital issue, sort of.

[Sebastian Younger]

I mean, the brief description is that I have a ligament that's in the wrong place. It's just a structural problem. It's very rare, but it's a known thing. And it crushed the celiac artery, which is this garden hose that runs down your torso and brings blood to your abdominal organs. And so the blood had to flow around through smaller blood vessels to get to where they had to go. And they weren't designed for that. And one of them, one of the small arteries that goes to the pancreas had a weak spot in it, and it ballooned outwards in an aneurysm. And aneurysms develop over your lifetime. Right. This isn't a sudden thing. This is years, decades. There's no symptoms, and they often go undetected and kill the person who has them. Because if you rupture an artery internally, you lose blood very, very quickly, and it's hard to find. I mean, if someone stabs you in the abdomen, they rush you to the er. The doctors know exactly where the problem is because blood's pouring out of you. Right. And that is. But with internal hemorrhage, they have no idea. And that's why it has such a terrible fatality rate.

[Alison Stewart]

What did the effect of knowing that you always had this, you knew that you had this after the fact, you've been carrying around a little tiny bomb.

[Sebastian Younger]

Inside of you, a little hand grenade? Yeah. Well, the effect was that I doubted everything. Like, I came back from the hospital, and it was a very common fear, but I had this fear that I could die any day now, any moment. I also had a very common and extremely strange feeling that I wasn't really there, that maybe I had died. I was having a hard time figuring out what was real and what wasn't. And I had this sort of real paranoia. It was basically an extreme anxiety disorder that. That everything from the hospital on was a kind of dying hallucination. And that I had left my family, I had left my two young daughters and my wife, and that I wasn't really here. And I can't tell you, as extreme and weird as that sounds, I can't tell you how deeply terrifying it was if you really are not sure about something that fundamental.

[Alison Stewart]

It's interesting. Your book is in two sections. The what and the if.

[Sebastian Younger]

Yes. So the what part is what happened to me, right? Including this extraordinary vision of my dead father as I was dying in the trauma bay. They were busy inserting a needle, like through my neck into my jugular to transfuse me. And I needed 10 units of blood. 10 people donated blood that saved my life. My blood pressure was 60 over 40 when I got finally, finally got to the ER. And while they were working on my neck, this black pit opened up underneath me and I started to get pulled into it. And I was very scared of. I had no idea I was dying, but I was very scared of the abyss. This black abyss and other people who have almost died describe the exact same thing. And then suddenly my dead father appeared above me in this radiant, sort of not radiant, but in this energy form. Right. English doesn't have quite the right words for how I experienced him, but there he was above me and slightly to my left. And what he communicated to me was, it's okay, you don't have to fight it. I'll take care of you. You can come with me. And I said to the doctor, because I'm still conscious at this point. I said to the doctor, you got to hurry, you're losing me right now. I'm going. I didn't know where I was going, but I was outbound and I knew it. And I knew that I would never come back.

[Alison Stewart]

Such an interesting detail that, you know that he was on your left.

[Sebastian Younger]

Oh, very much. The doctors were on my right. Everything that felt like life was on my right. Of course, the doctors were all over me, but in my perception, and, you know, I lost 2/3 of my blood, right. So it was like I was unbelievably drunk. I mean, my mind was not working correctly. Right. But they were there. They were. The doctors were on my right and then the pit and my dad were on the left. And I should rush to say that I'm a lifelong atheist. I'm still atheist. I'm a rationalist, which means I'm a skeptic, which means I wasn't culturally predisposed towards any of these things. And the great sort of the great challenge and journey of my life after that experience was trying to understand it in terms that I respect and can make useful.

[Alison Stewart]

My guest is Sebastian Younger. In My Time of Dying, How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife. It's a memoir about his near death experience from a ruptured aneurysm and how it shaped his life. Today. Just rolling back a little bit, you had some Pain in your abdomen off and on. Looking back, do you think you avoided going to a doctor about it?

[Sebastian Younger]

Yes, I definitely avoided going to a doctor. I mean, I'll put it this way. I've ignored a lot of pain in my life, as many people have, and I have this idea that you can live two ways you can live ignoring things you can live and you'll live a broader life. You won't be scared to go to Mongolia, whatever. You'll ignore your feelings, you'll ignore inputs and therefore have experiences you wouldn't otherwise have. Or you can just spend your life focusing on things, which means you probably have a less varied life, but a deeper one. And I spent a lot of my life ignoring things so that I could go off and do things. And what I ignored was this periodic pain in my abdomen, which was not debilitating, but it really got my attention enough to make me sit down for a while. And it sort of came and went for about six months and it was probably the aneurysm starting to dissect and leak a little blood and then it would repair itself, which apparently arteries can do. And let me just, if I may jump in with an extremely strange, maybe the strangest of all of the things that happened to me around then was that on some level my body, in quotation marks, knew something was fatally wrong. Right? But my conscious mind obviously didn't or I would have gone to the doctor. And I ignored and ignored and ignored and 36 hours before, I almost died before I should have died. In some senses like my, the fatality rate is enormous for what I had two nights prior at dawn, I had this terrible, terrible dream, the worst dream I've ever had and that I've ever heard of, which was that I was above my family. I had a three year old girl and a six month old girl and my wife and I was above them and they were crying and I was trying to get their attention. I was waving my arms and I was shouting and they couldn't hear me, they couldn't see me. And I was made to understand that I died and that I was a spirit, I was a ghost. And I died through just carelessness and oversight like I didn't need to have died and I did die. And now it's too late and sorry, you're headed out. And I was so anguished. I was so anguished that it woke me up and there I was in the sort of gray light of dawn in my family and we all sleep together. I was in bed with my family I thought, oh my God, thank God that was just a dream because it felt completely real. And, you know, basically hours later I was dying. And so one of the problems I had with reality when I came back from the hospital was that I thought maybe because what I had, the dream I had was a classic nde, a classic near death experience. You're above your family, you can't communicate with them. I knew nothing about any of this. And I. So I thought maybe the dream was actually my experience of dying in my sleep and everything that followed. Going to the hospital, coming back, everything is now just a dying hallucination. And I don't know it the way we suspect that people in deep comas actually have an inner life that includes something that might feel like they're living their life, right? I thought, oh my God, how do I know? And at one point, I mean, I really got crazy, right? I mean, I really sort of descended a little bit into madness. And my poor wife, right, who had been through enough already. And at one point I went to her and I was like, can you just, honey, tell me I'm here? Like that I made it that I'm here. And she said, of course you're here. You survived, you're right here. I love you, et cetera, et cetera. And in my mind I was like, that's exactly what a hallucination would say.

[Alison Stewart]

Try again. When you. I'm wondering if you thought to yourself, if you ever thought to yourself that that was a premonition, that that was your body saying to you, hey, there's something wrong here.

[Sebastian Younger]

Absolutely. And you know, I've asked many doctors and they're like, no, no, no, the body can't, you don't know. There's no predictive dreams. It's just, you know, et cetera, et cetera. But there are a few who are either more open minded or less rational about it, one or the other. And I found one who's a palliative care doctor at Harvard who said, he said, you know, the body can communicate with the unconscious mind and it communicates among other ways through dreams. And your body, clearly, you know, you were, you were, you were discharging blood into your abdominal cavity. It was, it's an extreme irritant. I mean, it really, it's like extremely painful when that happens. And the body's, you know, fire alarms are going to be going off and it, the body communicated with you as best it could. And bas. I think of it as like, all right, we've tried signaling to him for six Months with pain, and the idiot, like, won't listen. So we'll try one last attempt to keep him out of the hospital. Like, we'll give him a dream about what's coming. And that didn't even work. And so my body was like, all right, we tried, we tried.

[Alison Stewart]

You know, it's interesting, given your history as a war reporter and in the book, you detail almost dying while you're surfing, yet I get the impression this is. My impression is that this was somehow different.

[Sebastian Younger]

It was very different. So the war reporting that I did, I mean, I started in Bosnia and Sarajevo in the early 90s. I was in Afghanistan in 1996 and again in 2000 with Massoud, 2001 with American soldiers. Later, in later years, I was in the civil wars in West Africa, et cetera, et cetera. And. But I thought it was all. There were chosen risks, right? I mean, to me, it was like, okay, I'm going to go to the poker table. I got some chips. I'm going to make some play some bets, and I'm hoping I leave the table with more chips than I got there with and that I don't get my clock cleaned. And that's what we all do in war zones, right? We're going to get something out of this. We're willing to wager our life, right? And if we're smart and play our hand right, the risks are minimal. And we'll come back having gained something and gained something and having given something, like, the world needs these tragedies to be reported on, and we gained something professionally. That was the poker table I kept going to. And after my friend Tim Hetherington was killed in Libya, Tim was the guy I made Restrepo with. We were out in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, off and on for a year together. He was killed in combat in Libya. He was hit by fragments from a mortar in the city of Misrata on an assignment I was supposed to be on with him.

[Alison Stewart]

I was actually with a friend of his when we got news of it, and she just crumpled. And we had to, like, take her in a room, and she was just like. She couldn't speak. I mean, it was such a shocking thing.

[Sebastian Younger]

He crumpled a lot of people when that happened.

[Alison Stewart]

I'm sorry, continue.

[Sebastian Younger]

Yeah, no, not at all. And, you know, I was supposed to be on assignment with him, and the last minute, I couldn't go. And so after I got the terrible news, he bled out in the back of a rebel pickup truck racing for the Misrata hospital. And it occurred to me later, I always wondered what it was like for him. And then I realized, oh, I found out because I bled out too. So after he died, I just decided I didn't want to wreck the lives of everyone who loved me like I watched Tim do. Right. And so I stopped war reporting. My first marriage fell apart. I was. Had a lot of struggles, a lot of problems, and. And finally, you know, I sort of got myself together and remarried and had this wonderful family. And I thought, okay, now I'm done taking risks. So I'm good. I'm healthy. I'm not a walking heart attack. Right. I'm good. And. And I can run 10 miles if I need to. Like, what's, you know, like. Like prove me wrong. Like, I'm fine. I'm fine for the next 20 years at least. So I stopped thinking about mortality. And we were living in a house that was very remote during COVID The end of a dead end dirt road in Massachusetts on Cape Cod. And there's no cell phone service when it rains, the phone lines go out, the landlines go out, so there isn't even phone service sometimes. And when my aneurysm ruptured, that's where we were. And it took an hour and a half to get to the hospital, which. That alone could have killed me.

[Alison Stewart]

Yeah. My guest is Sebastian Younger. The name of the book is In My Time of how I came Face to face with the idea of an afterlife. So you're a reporter. You decided to put your reporter's hat on. Who did you want to talk to for this book? Who did you want answers from? Or at least their best guess?

[Sebastian Younger]

Well, the first thing I had to do was confirm my memories because I was skeptical of. Of the accuracy of my memories, which, you know, we all are as journalists. We all must be all the time, even with all your blood in your veins, much less, you know, a third of your blood. Right. So. So I interviewed my wife, and I got her, you know, I was in and out of consciousness. She. I was. We were in a cabin in the woods. She had to drag me down a trail. Wow. To get to the dirt driveway, where we got one signal, cell phone, you know, bar signal, you know, she had to drag me out of there. I was in and out of consciousness. And then I started going blind and. Right. So I got to interview her about what it was like dealing with me. And then I interviewed the guy who was in the ambulance, within the back of the ambulance with me. And then I interviewed the doctors in the ER who immediately realized Catastrophic blood loss, internal hemorrhage. This guy's probably going to die. You know, I mean, they didn't say this, but my sense is that they were all like, well, oh, well, like, we'll do what we can. And so I just wanted to interview everyone who was part of this drama to confirm that what I remembered was accurate. And one of the people I wanted to interview and never was able to was a nurse in the icu. So I woke up the next morning and, you know, I had no idea that I'd almost died. None. And, you know, I'd been. I'd spent six hours in the interventional radiology suite unsedated, while they threaded a catheter through my venous system, trying to get this little flexible tube through the kinks and turns of my vascular system to the area that was bleeding. And it took them like five hours. And they almost gave up and sent me into surgery, which I probably wouldn't have survived, right? And I watched them deliberate what to do. It's terrifying. But then, you know, they managed to do it. They saved me, right? An almost impossible thing that they did. And. And then I woke up in the ICU the next morning and the nurse said, Congratulations, Mr. Younger, you survived. Like, you almost died last night. No one can believe you made it. It's kind of a miracle. I was shocked. I was absolutely shocked. I had no idea. And then she left and she came back a while later and said, how are you doing? And I was throwing up blood. I was a total mess, right? But I said, well, what you told me is terrifying. And I keep thinking about it. And she said, try this instead of thinking about it like something scary, try thinking about it like something sacred. Now, I don't know how she meant it. She's talking to an atheist. And, you know, I have a very good understanding of the word sacred. That's. It's a secular meaning, right? I mean, I use that word in a secular sense, but it's a very powerful word. And I really took her advice to heart. And. And as soon as she said what she said, I remembered the black pit and I remembered my father. So it makes me think that I didn't somehow later, like, cook this up or something, right? It makes me. It makes me trust that I really did have that experience. But then I tried to find her later at the hospital and not to add a kind of like, woo, mystery thing to this at all, but I couldn't find her. And no one even knew who I was talking about. There was just no nurse by that description in the hospital in the ICU that day. And so I never found her and I never got to ask her, like, wow, your words helped me incredibly. What did you mean by them?

[Alison Stewart]

You're listening to my conversation with Sebastian Younger, author of the new memoir In My Time of How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife. We'll have more with Sebastian after a quick break. This is all of it. You're listening to all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. We continue my conversation with author and journalist Sebastian Younger, who nearly died a few years ago from a ruptured aneurysm in his abdomen. He writes about that experience in his new memoir, In My Time of How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife. Let's get back into my interview with Sebastian Younger. When you talk to neuroscientists, what did they explain about a phenomenon like yours?

[Sebastian Younger]

Well, there's two camps, of course, there's the camp and some of them are neuroscientists who say that the thousands of cases of near death experiences that involve visions of dead one, you know, dead loved ones coming to escort, yeah, escort the dying across the threshold and hovering above your own body watching the doctors trying to restart your heart and your, and you know, like that. So the, the, the between the dream that I had and the experience that I had, these NDEs were very, very familiar and there's thousands of them and they occur in societies all around the world in quite similar forms and have throughout the ages, it seems. And so some doctors and researchers feel that that amounts to real evidence that there's, I hate the word afterlife, but some post death existence of the individual, we'll put it that way. Right. Afterlife just conjures up something too much like us reclined on a hammock with a daiquiri floating through eternity. Right. But some kind of post death existence and a meaningful post death existence. And then there's a lot of neuroscientists, et cetera, who are like, nonsense. Like we can produce hallucinations in the brain, no problem. Here, have some lsd, right? Like we can, we can spin you in a centrifuge like they do with fighter pilots and to the experience 4 or 5 GS and to see at what point they pass out and they will have visions on and on. This is the dying brain and we know that there's a flood of gamma waves when the brain dies. And gamma waves are associated with memory and yeah, it just all makes sense. Neurochemically and so as I was doing this research, you know, at first, frankly, I mean, I was in such a sort of anxious place, even though I'm an atheist, I found myself rooting for an afterlife. I was like, wow, that's pretty convincing. Like, oh, maybe we don't have to worry after all. But I found myself doing that, right? And then I read the Rationalists, or people like my father, who was a physicist and completely by the book, down the line, skeptic, right? And I was like, oh, well, you know, it was nice while it lasted, but I guess there's nothing to this. And then it was sort of with, with one exception. And what I didn't understand, like, we know, we know that if you give a room full of people lsd, they'll all hallucinate, right? The, the neurochemistry of that is not a mystery, right? But they won't all hallucinate the same thing. There is no drug that will give everyone the same hallucination. And what's weird about the dying is that, I mean, those who make it back to us is that their experiences, they're not all identical, but they fall into just three or four sort of basic buckets, right? And one of them is a dead loved one comes to receive you, like my father did when my mother was dying, her brother came, right? When my father was dying, his sister came, who had killed herself when she was 16, you know, decades earlier, right? And these people aren't even clinically dead, right? They're on the way out. They're in their last days and hours. I wasn't dead either. I was definitely on my way out, but my heart was still beating. And so what I don't understand, the thing that gives me pause is the consistency of those visions that only the dying see the dead.

[Alison Stewart]

Did faith ever creep into your mind? Was it something you sat and thought about or just. No.

[Sebastian Younger]

Faith in God, in religion?

[Alison Stewart]

Faith in a post life doesn't have religion. It has nothing to do with God. But just a post life.

[Sebastian Younger]

Well, I mean, it did. When I read about the mysteries of quantum mechanics, I was like, so there might be a post death existence at a quantum level that we interface with sometimes in ways that are really puzzling and mysterious, like I did with my father. And it might be, you know, we might be looking at reality like a dog is looking at a television screen. Like we have no idea of the, of the colossal context around the screen that we take to be reality. There's this enormous context that's creating the images that we see like a dog can't understand the context that creates the images on the television screen. So if you mean faith in that sense, yes, I had faith in the sort of rational process that came up with these unbelievable mysteries of quantum physics, But I didn't turn to faith in a monotheistic, Judeo Christian God like that. I did not do.

[Alison Stewart]

Why?

[Sebastian Younger]

I mean, I saw my father, not God. Like if I'd seen God in the trauma bay where we'd be having a different conversation, right? And my book would be a different book and probably selling a lot better. Right. You know, but because there's two issues. A creator God could create this universe and not give us an afterlife. Right. I mean, the universe went from nothing to hundreds of millions of light years across in an amount of time too small to measure. Now, it might have been a creator God that set that in motion and decided, all right, we're going to have biological beings in this universe. We're going to have kangaroos and turtles and worms and humans and birds, blah, blah, blah, and when they die, they decompose and they go back and there's nothing else. Right. Or you could have a universe that started through purely mechanistic means, a completely physical universe, no God. But in that mechanistic universe, there is some kind of post death quantum reality. Like you could have either you don't need a God to have a post death reality, or vice versa, you could have either. You could have both. So they don't require, they don't. They're not twinned, they don't require. Require each other. And as far as God goes, I've just never seen any evidence. I mean, like I believe in gravity, which you can't see, or I don't understand how it works. It's a great mystery, right? Why should things fall? I mean, I have no idea and I don't think you do either. Right. But I do know that if you throw a rock out the window, it will fall to the ground and it might hit someone. So don't do it. I've just never seen the equivalent evidence for God other than the existence of the universe in the first place. But that's a very tenuous argument that that means there is a God. Like that's pretty easy to refute.

[Alison Stewart]

Do you consider yourself a small A atheist after this has happened rather than a capital A atheist?

[Sebastian Younger]

I'm not sure what the difference would be. I'm as atheist as you can be.

[Alison Stewart]

Okay, then you're capital A. You still hold an atheist.

[Sebastian Younger]

I mean, believing in God, that's an active practice. It's not passive, it's active. And I don't go through my day or my life actively believing in a God. That is part of how I make decisions, how I understand reality. Like, I'm not doing that. And it's an active thing, right? And so it's like, you can't choose to fall in love with someone. You may fall in love with them, and you can even marry them and not be in love with them. You can go to church and not believe in God, and I've done that many times. Right. But to really believe in God, you're making an active choice. And it's one that I can't will in myself. And I just don't believe in a God. And I have no reason to think that one exists which returns the value of life to its natural place, which is as we experience it, like, not in the hereafter and not in heaven and hell and the original sin that we may or may not have been born with, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, but in the right here, right now, and how we act with other people.

[Alison Stewart]

How has your life changed? What do you do that's different?

[Sebastian Younger]

Well, I mean, pursuant to that, I am sometimes painfully and sometimes ecstatically aware of the miracle that any of this, including you, including me, this table, the universe and everything else exists. Like it. Sometimes it's so overwhelming, it's almost like a kind of drug trip. And I don't do drugs, but the way that that's been described to me, I'm like, oh, my God, this is almost hallucinatory. It's so intense, right? And so I have moments like that, and they were so intense for a while that they really actually got in the way of me functioning for, for some time after, after this happened to me. And so I, you know, I know it's a sort of trite and cliche, but I try to be present because that's all we have. That is all we have. That's all we know that we have is the present moment with the people that we're at, that we're with. And I had this idea, like, none of us know that this isn't the last day of our lives, right? You know this all too well, right? You wake up, wake up in the morning, you don't know, right? Nobody knows. And so if you were somehow told, you know what? You're going to be executed tomorrow at dawn. You have one day, one day to wrap things up. Right? Horrible thing, right? Who would you want to be on that last day, you know, what kind of values would you, Would you present to the world? Who would you want to. Who would you want to be? I'm guessing you wouldn't be on TikTok a whole lot, right? I'm guessing you would be. Want to be very close to the people you love and treat them with kindness and reverence. Right. And that you probably wouldn't indulge in the sort of petty resentments that can overcome us with some people that we don't love. And you might stop and stare in amazement at a tree and think, wow, I'm going to miss trees, and et cetera, right? And so it just occurred to me, and I know this is impossible, and I'm not meaning you should sit in the lotus position in the woods all day long, but why not try to live every day as if you knew you were going to die tomorrow, Right? I mean, it was just with that state of mind. And there's my flip phone on the table, right. One of the ways I do that is I don't have a smartphone because I watch smartphones. I've never had a smartphone. And I watch the algorithms, which are fiendishly well designed, suck people into a non reality. It's not reality. Right. It's a non reality.

[Alison Stewart]

I had such. That's so interesting you should say that, because when I could concentrate, when I knew right from left, even though I couldn't tell anybody my right from left, somehow I managed to take the. I managed to take my email off my phone, don't know how, everything only. And I logged on, finally logged on to Instagram and I said, what is this? Why am I spending so much time on this? Yeah, it all struck me as silly.

[Sebastian Younger]

You know, they, meaning the technology companies that develop this stuff, they are taking your attention, they're taking your attention away, which means they're taking your life away. Your attention is your life, right? And vice versa. And they're basically. They're taking your life and monetizing it to their benefit. That is what they're doing. And you know, I know that there are people that need smartphones because they have certain jobs, et cetera, et cetera. I totally get it. But more broadly, like, what have we done to ourselves? Right? And. And even if you have to have a smartphone, you don't have to have social media on it, you don't have to go on Instagram, you don't have to do any of that garbage, right? It's not your life. It's the opposite of your life. And we've somehow been conned into thinking it's the essence of our life, and it's not. And that, to me, is just a grotesque sin.

[Alison Stewart]

When they told me I was going to have brain surgery when they thought it was a cancerous tumor, it was our last time to eat. It's like, what are we gonna eat? What are you gonna have for your last dinner? Right. And so my sister, my niece and I, we shared an ice cream sundae. It's my last thing, so I thought, wouldn't that be great just to share ice cream sundae with your. With your sister and your niece?

[Sebastian Younger]

Yeah. How terrifying. I can't imagine what you went through. I didn't.

[Alison Stewart]

Oh, five days of. Five days of. What is it?

[Sebastian Younger]

Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, I didn't have anything to dread. Right. I mean, I woke up with the knowledge that I had survived. And even. And that was enough to make me half crazy, I can't imagine. My wife said something really interesting to me as I struggled with this. She said, sebastian, do you feel lucky or unlucky that it happened? Right. And in other words, not that you survived that I survived, of course, but if I could push a button and make it not have happened, would I push that button? Right. I didn't know how to answer her. Right. She's many times asked me questions I couldn't answer. This is one of them. I thought about it and thought about it, and I finally. I sort of tracked down the meaning of the word. It's basically, are you blessed or are you cursed? Essentially, what she was saying. Right. And I tracked down the word blessing and the etymology of it. And it's derived from the Anglo Saxon word bletsian, which means blood. And the idea was that there is no blessing that doesn't come without a wound, that it's blood that sanctifies things, that makes battlefields sacred, that makes childbirth sacred. Right. It's blood. And that there's no blessing without a wound. And maybe in my mind, maybe there's no wound without a blessing. And so my wife's question, which was wonderful, was also a false choice, because it's not either one. They're twinned. Blessing and a curse are twinned. They're forever tied at the waist, and you get them both at the same time. And when I saw it like that, it released me on some level, released me from some of my sort of torment. About this.

[Alison Stewart]

Yeah. The book is in my time of how I came face to face with the idea of an afterlife. It's by Sebastian Younger. Sebastian, thank you for joining us.

[Sebastian Younger]

Such a pleasure to talk to you. I'mma put you on, nephew. All right, unc.

[Alison Stewart]

Welcome to McDonald's. Can I take your order, miss?

[Sebastian Younger]

I've been hitting up McDonald's for years. Now it's back. We need snack wrap. What's a snack wrap? It's the return of something great. Snack wrap is back. NYC now delivers the most up to date local news from WNYC and Gothamist every morning, midday and evening with three updates a day. Listeners get breaking news, top headlines and in depth coverage from across New York City by sponsoring programming like NYC now. You'll reach our community of dedicated listeners with premium messaging and an uncluttered audio experience.

[Alison Stewart]

Visit sponsorship wnyc.org to get in touch.

[Sebastian Younger]

And find out more.