Hints of an Unknown Reality
Sebastian Junger was in seemingly good health. For those who have read Junger’s books or are familiar with his work as a war reporter, this would only confirm one’s impressions: Junger has always been a man of action, interested in the heroic and adventurous. His breakthrough book, The Perfect Storm (made into the film with George Clooney), perfectly illustrates this point, as does his war reporting in Afghanistan, where he co-directed the award-winning documentary Restrepo. He is the kind of guy who needs to be in shape. Thus, Junger was surprised when a long undetected aneurysm in a pancreatic artery suddenly burst, nearly resulting in his death. His new book, In My Time of Dying, is an intense account of this experience and his consequent investigation into the possibility of an afterlife. It wrestles with the contradiction between the seeming randomness of the universe and the curious hints of illumination and order that attend one’s life.
Junger’s book is a mixture of vivid external description, scientific speculation, and introspection. His experience as a journalist and war reporter has clearly made him a master of marshalling external details to create a compelling narrative. Combined with his more personal reflections, this makes In My Time of Dying’s 142 pages feel particularly multi-dimensional and full. His narration of his state of mind as he is rushed to the hospital in an ambulance, suffering from yet undetected internal bleeding, is distinctly gripping. Junger likely lost around two thirds of his body’s total blood, requiring the transfusion of over ten units of blood to keep him alive.
Occasionally, he’ll cut away from the central narrative to discuss the science underlying blood-loss or digress entertainingly on the history of cardiac catheterization. (The doctor who invented cardiac catheterization couldn’t get permission to test it on a patient, since medical authorities believed it would prove fatal; hence, he tested it on himself, running a small tube through an artery all the way to the chambers of his heart). The narrative also comes with a rich array of anecdotes, ranging from harrowing war reportage to the Junger family’s curious connection to one of the founding fathers of quantum physics: Erwin Schrodinger tutored and then impregnated Junger’s great aunt. The book is a beguiling mixture of the personal and the scientific.
But the narrative is ultimately leading towards a metaphysical challenge to Junger’s long-held skepticism about the possibility of life after death. While the doctors are attempting to save him, Junger at one point sees the left side of the hospital room transformed into an abyss. Then, he senses the presence of his dead father hovering over the hospital bed and inviting him to journey into the void. Junger is shocked. His father, also a committed skeptic, is the last person he would have expected to appear in a near-death experience, especially one that seemed so real and compelling. Yet, there he was. Adding a further layer of strangeness to Junger’s experience, he had had a premonitory dream about dying shortly before he almost died, in which he was floating above his family, trying to communicate with them but unable to do so.
Of course, there are numerous methods of explaining these phenomena away—but whether those explanations fit the facts is another question. As Junger points out, it is hard for scientists to explain why 25% of near-death experiences involve seeing dead relatives. If the brain is simply malfunctioning as it prepares to shut down for good, one would simply expect mental chaos, rather than the orderly and widespread phenomenon of encountering the dead. Furthermore, the belief that we unite with loved ones after death seems to be universal or nearly universal and is present in communities ranging from hunter gatherers to advanced industrial societies. Another unusually common form of near-death experience is the “life review,” in which your life “flashes before your eyes.” Junger recounts the story of an American soldier, Tyler Carroll, who experienced a classic life review after he was injured while fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. It is curious that this kind of “summing up” of a life should frequently attend a brush with death, as opposed to something more chaotic.
Junger’s near death experience seems particularly significant to him, given that it is the first thing that he mentions to his wife as he begins recovering from the ordeal. While interested in entertaining rational and material explanations for his experience, Junger’s skepticism has clearly been rattled. At the same time, specific religiosity and the question of God’s existence are not particularly near the core of the book. Although Junger mentions mystical experience and its relation to near death experiences, he is drawn more to the scientific account of the world than to that provided by religious tradition. In this respect, he is the son of his physicist father. His story is somewhat similar to that of the skeptical philosopher, A.J. Ayer, whose own near-death experience made him question his prior certainty about the unlikelihood of an afterlife, while still retaining a strongly secular orientation.
To make sense of his experience, Junger turns to quantum physics and to contemporary philosophy. Quantum physics is notoriously a realm of total weirdness, understood by few. Even many of the physicists who study quantum physics admit that they don’t really understand it at its deepest level. Its implications are supremely counter-intuitive, breaking down our most basic sense of the world as a stable, concrete domain consisting of existing objects. Whereas biology tends to make people more skeptical of the reality of the soul or spirit by reducing consciousness to a product of the brain, quantum physics calls this into question, strongly indicating that the physical world is itself determined by consciousness.
As Werner Heisenberg, one of the most important pioneers of quantum physics and the discoverer of the famous “uncertainty principle,” stated, “The atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.” Apparently, things only exist in this uncertain state of possibility until they are observed. The act of observation somehow makes them settle into fact. This gives consciousness the central role in reality; it is the determining factor.
Although some skeptics scoff at “quantum mysticism,” it seems like a mystical interpretation of quantum physics is fairly mainstream and was supported by many of quantum physics’ own founders. Two of the most significant figures in quantum physics, Schrodinger and Heisenberg, certainly held to it: Schrodinger turned to the Hindu tradition of Vedanta as an explanatory framework, while Heisenberg endorsed the book The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra, which discusses parallels between Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist mystical traditions and quantum physics. Wolfgang Pauli also held a mystical view of the quantum universe and supported Carl Jung’s idea that synchronicities revealed some underlying aspect of this reality.
If consciousness is central to reality, the possibility of consciousness surviving death is thus wide open. This leads Junger to investigate ideas from contemporary philosophy, like “biocentrism,” which argues that life itself is the actual center of reality. Physical reality is dependent on it, geared towards it. Similarly, the notion of “panpsychism” holds that consciousness, like the laws of physics, is a fundamental property of the universe. For some reason we don’t understand, consciousness is just part of the way things are. Panpsychists argue that even a rock must be conscious on some level (if a very low one). This view appeals to Junger, who writes, “[A] universe where consciousness is woven into the very nature of matter would seem to explain both the greatest quantum puzzles as well as our subjective experience of life.”
The struggle between randomness and order is at the core of Junger’s book. He is trying to reconcile the seeming nonsense and pointless tragedies of ordinary life with the hint of a greater cosmic order, represented by the quantum picture of reality. After all, there was a veritable galaxy of little things that had to go right for Junger to not die that day. For example, he asked for another IV bag in the ambulance, and the paramedic said he probably didn’t need it. The paramedic was right but didn’t know why. Giving Junger another IV bag at that point could have easily stopped his blood from coagulating, initiating what’s known as coagulopathy. This would have almost certainly resulted in his death.
Junger confessed how badly his near-rendezvous with death had scared him to an ICU nurse, who advised him to see his experience as being sacred instead of scary. This proved to be a key moment in Junger’s search for meaning. He writes, “My experience was sacred, I finally decided, because I couldn’t really know life until I knew death, and I couldn’t know death until it came for me. Without death, life does not require focus or courage or choice. Without death, life is just an extraordinary stunt that won’t stop.” When he tried to find the ICU nurse in the hospital, no one seemed to know who she was.
He earlier observes, “One of the core goals of life is survival; the other is meaning. In some ways, they are antithetical.” In other words, if life were an endless and pleasurable experience, it would be devoid of any deeper import. Death begets meaning, ensuring that we don’t become purely complacent and mindless seekers of enjoyment. It is the ultimate spur to “Why?”
Junger’s book may disappoint some readers who were hoping for a full-on religious conversion, but the book details a story that, if not religious, is at least directly adjacent to religious concerns. Science is flirting with the borders of a reality that transcends it. Both the anecdotes of near-death experience survivors and the interpretations of quantum physicists dance towards the edge of this unknown “X.” Ultimately, the trajectory of Junger’s understanding of reality recalls a poem by Juan Rimon Jimenez. Jimenez imagines feeling his boat strike, at the depths, “against a great thing.” And then… nothing happens. But Jimenez wonders, “Nothing happens? Or has everything happened, and are we standing now, quietly, in the new life?”
Sam Buntz writes from Chicago. He is the author of The Great American Cougar Hunt and The God of Smoke and Mirrors, both available on Amazon. You can find him on Twitter @SamBuntz.
