#315 ‒ Life after near-death: a new perspective on living, dying, and the afterlife | Sebastian Junger

Sebastian Junger is an award-winning journalist, bestselling author, and previous guest on The Drive. In this episode, Sebastian returns to discuss his latest book, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife. This episode delves into Sebastian’s profound near-death experience and how it became the catalyst for his exploration of mortality, the afterlife, and the mysteries of the universe. They discuss the secular meaning of what it means to be sacred, the intersection of physics and philosophy, and how our beliefs shape our approach to life and death. He also shares how this experience has profoundly changed him, giving him a renewed perspective on life—one filled with awe, gratitude, deeper emotional awareness, and a more engaged approach to living.

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We discuss:

• How Sebastian’s near-death experience shaped his thinking about mortality and gave him a reverence for life [3:00];
• The aneurysm that led to Sebastian’s near-death experience [6:30];
• Emergency room response, his subsequent reflections on the event, and the critical decisions made by the medical team [16:30];
• Sebastian’s reaction to first learning he nearly died, and the extraordinary skill of the medical team that save his life [26:00];
• Sebastian’s near-death experience [37:00];
• The psychological impact of surviving against overwhelming odds [48:00];
• Ignored warning signs: abdominal pain and a foreshadowing dream before the aneurysm rupture [54:30];
• Sebastian’s recovery, his exploration of near-death experiences, and the psychological turmoil he faced as he questioned the reality of his survival [58:15];
• A transformative encounter with a nurse who encouraged Sebastian to view his near-death experience as sacred [1:03:30];
• How Sebastian has changed: a journey toward emotional awareness and fully engaging with life [1:08:45];
• The possibility of an afterlife, and how quantum mechanics challenges our understanding of existence [1:15:15];
• Quantum paradoxes leading to philosophical questions about the nature of reality, existence after death, and whether complete knowledge could be destructive [1:26:00];
• The sweet spot of uncertainty: exploring belief in God, post-death existence, and meaning in life [1:37:00];
• The transformative power of experiencing life with awe and gratitude [1:53:00]; and
• More.

How Sebastian’s near-death experience shaped his thinking about mortality and gave him a reverence for life [3:00]

Peter found Sebastian’s latest book to be really a fantastic book 

• It’s hard to describe the experience of reading it
  • It’s so beautiful it can almost bring you to tears in certain sections because there are the stories within it that sort of tell us about our mortality
• Peter is curious if others have explained their reaction to Sebastian
  • Which is you can feel so incredibly insignificant reading this, which is actually a nice thing
  • It makes this whole thing (death) seem a little less scary
• Our insignificance in the cosmos does take the pressure off
  • We don’t mean anything and that’s both terrifying and liberating
• One of the things Sebastian talks about in the book is a kind of reverence for life
• It’s quite hard to find one’s way to that reverence in the busyness of daily life in our modern society without having been terrified

After effects of Sebastian’s near-death experience 

• Once Sebastian was terrified by almost dying, the flip side of that terror was reverence  
  • And he has found it quite easily after that
• At one point after his near death experience, he had a lot of psychological struggles, and his wife asked, “Sebastian, do you feel lucky or unlucky that you almost died? I mean, not that you survived (of course you’re lucky), but that it happened at all. If you could go back and push a button, have it not happen, would you push that button?”
  • He honestly didn’t know how to answer
• The psychological consequences of almost dying and what he saw (remembered) on the threshold was so devastating that he absolutely felt cursed
• In struggling to answer, he tracked down the origin of the word blessing

Sebastian is an atheist, but he feels that there are secular meanings to beautiful words like blessing or sacred 

The origin of the word blessing comes from the Anglo-Saxon word meaning blood 

• The idea being that there is no blessing without a wounding, without a sacrifice
  • And maybe there’s no wounding without a blessing
• And that battlefields are sacred because blood has been shed
• Childbirth is sacred because blood has been shed
• In pre-Christian Europe, often animals were sacrificed on holy days to bless fields, to bless buildings, to bless people

The twinning of blessing and wounding, they’re aspects of the same thing  

• “When I realized that, it allowed me to make an important psychological step where I stopped feeling cursed by too much knowledge”
  • That I’d somehow gotten too much knowledge on the threshold of death and couldn’t continue daily life with that knowledge
  • It was too burdensome, it was too scary, it was too true
  • And once I read the origin of the word blessing, I was like, “Oh, I’m free.” 
    • It’s both; how wonderful

The aneurysm that led to Sebastian’s near-death experience [6:30]

Recount the story of what happened in June of 2020 and how much luck played a role in Sebastian sitting here today 

{end of show notes preview}

Sebastian Junger

Sebastian Junger is the #1 New York Times Bestselling author of The Perfect Storm, Fire, A Death in Belmont, War, Tribe, Freedom, and most recently, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife. As an award-winning journalist, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, and a special correspondent at ABC News, he has covered major international news stories around the world, and has received both a National Magazine Award and a Peabody Award. Junger has also written for magazines including Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic Adventure, Outside and Men’s Journal. His reporting on Afghanistan in 2000, profiling Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was assassinated just days before 9/11, became the subject of the National Geographic documentary Into the Forbidden Zone, and introduced America to the Afghan resistance fighting the Taliban. 

Junger is also a documentary filmmaker whose debut film Restrepo, a feature-length documentary (co-directed with Tim Hetherington), was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Junger has since produced and directed three additional documentaries about war and its aftermath. [sebastianjunger.com]