Making Sense with Sam Harris - #369 — Escaping Death

Episode Date: May 30, 2024

Sam Harris speaks with Sebastian Junger about danger and death. They discuss Sebastian's career as a journalist in war zones, the connection between danger and meaning, his experience of nearly dying from a burst aneurysm in his abdomen, his lingering trauma, the concept of "awe," psychedelics, near-death experiences, atheism, psychic phenomena, consciousness and the brain, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're hearing this, you're not currently on our subscriber feed, and will only be hearing the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll also find our scholarship program, where we offer free accounts to anyone who can't afford one. We don't run ads on the

podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today I'm speaking with Sebastian Younger. Sebastian is a New York Times bestselling author of several books, Tribe, War, Freedom, A Death in Belmont, Fire, and The Perfect Storm. He was also a co-director on the documentary film Restrepo, which was nominated for an Academy Award. He is the winner of a Peabody Award and the National Magazine Award for reporting.

And his most recent book is In My Time of Dying, How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife. And it is a wonderful book, which is the focus of our discussion. We talk about Sebastian's experience as a journalist in war zones, the connection between danger and meaning, Sebastian's experience of nearly dying from a burst aneurysm in his abdomen, and his lingering trauma, the concept of awe, psychedelics, near-death experiences, atheism, psychic phenomena, consciousness in the brain, and other topics. And I bring you Sebastian Younger. I am here with Sebastian Younger. Sebastian, thanks for joining me.

It's my pleasure. Thank you very much for having me. Well, I've been a huge fan of your work, I think, since The Perfect Storm, which I remember reading in hardcover. I don't know, when was that, like, 97 or something? When did that come out? Yeah, 97, like a million years ago, basically. Yeah, yeah. That was an amazing read, and I've really enjoyed several of your other books since.

And so we're mostly going to focus on your new book, which is In My Time of Dying, How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife, which recounts the time you almost died from a ruptured aneurysm in your pancreatic artery. And you make many excursions into history and physics that are really quite wonderful. But it is a, I mean, it's by turns a very funny, but also harrowing book. I actually listened to it as an audio book, and it's a fantastic audio book. You read it. And I was on a hike for most of it. And at one point, as you're recounting your unfolding medical emergency, which really does read like a thriller, I started to worry, like, wait a minute, this would be all too weird if I were to die from my own ruptured something

while listening to this far from a hospital or any potential rescue. And I actually, at one point, I just decided to head back to civilization. I'm too far from a hospital for this part of the book. I'm too far from a hospital for this part of the book. That's very funny because I had similar fears afterwards. I was very paranoid about being far from medical help. Yeah, you talk about that. So we'll get to that. I want to, let's just track through it systematically. But perhaps before we jump into the book, you have this history in many of your books and projects of courting danger.

There's a documentary on your time in Afghanistan called Restrepo that many people will have seen. You've been in war zones. Your books, Tribe and War, talk about the effect of war and the connection between danger and meaning. Perhaps just let's talk about your proximity to danger that you have sought out more than most people. Yeah, well, just to start off by saying within my population of foreign reporters, that's the norm. And I'm probably at the low end of risk-taking and the sort of aggregate of dangerous

experiences. So just to be clear, like I look like a risk taker to the general population, but not to my population. So I grew up in a very safe, pretty affluent Boston suburb in the 60s and 70s. And I had this sense, I don't know why, but I had the sense that as a teenager, And I had this sense, I don't know why, but I had the sense that as a teenager, that if I wasn't somehow tested in some sort of mortal way, that I would never mature into a man. I would just stay forever sort of juvenile. And I knew that in this suburb, nothing was really ever going to test me. There were no volcanoes. There were no hurricanes.

No rebels were going to come driving down the street and pick up trucks. There would be no way to sort of prove my worth to society, which throughout history, young men have felt compelled to do. And the society needed them to do that. And I don't know why I was aware of this, but I was. And, you know, eventually, my father was a refugee from two wars. He was born in Germany, but he grew up in Spain. And his family, Spain and his family, he and his family left Spain when the fascists came in in 1936 with Franco and they went to Paris. His father was Jewish. When the Nazis came in, they fled to the United States. And so war

was sort of in the background of my family's history. And in my early thirties, I'd worked for some years as a climber for tree companies, taking trees down. So way up in the air on a rope with a chainsaw. And I'd actually gotten hurt doing that. But in the early 90s, there was a civil war in Bosnia. And I just thought, I've got to, I'm 32. I need to test my, I mean, I need to do something that demonstrates something worthy about myself. And I flew, I went to Sarajevo. And I sort of turned myself into a war myself. And I went to Sarajevo and I sort of

turned myself into a war reporter. And I kept doing it despite having to occasionally write books. Yeah. So I forgot about that in your history. So were you on camera for CNN or anything like that, or were you just writing? No, God, if only. So I was like plankton in the food chain of foreign reporters in Sarajevo, right? I mean, I was like an occasional freelance radio correspondent. I would basically phone in 30-second, 40-second voice spots into ABC radio and what have you, Deutsche Welle. And, you know, it was very much just a sort of initiatory process. I mean, I learned how to do that work, but I didn't come close to earning anything close to a living doing it. But it was like going to journalism school. And I was in a war, and I was with other freelancers. And I learned something really, really valuable about war, about humans, about myself. feeling very, very different and really sort of in love with the idea of a job that had enormous

meaning. I was reporting on world, even at my tiny level, I was reporting on world events, on things that were happening in front of me, tragic things, important things, and communicating that back to a population in the United States. And that to me, the sort of role of the messenger in society, that to me was like just absolutely intoxicating. Hmm. What is it that you think connects the experience of danger and meaning? Well, for me, consequences create meaning. So if you're in a situation where you could get killed, there's an enormous amount of meaning around the idea of not making a mistake, of making the right decisions, of relying on other people and they rely on you

and you all come out of it okay. There's an enormous amount of meaning that comes with that danger. And the problem with things that are free of danger, and listen, we're blessed if we have those things, right? I mean, many people in the world don't. But the problem with, say, a round of golf is that it might be fun, it might be pleasurable, it might be relaxing, but it actually has very little sort of meaning. And what I found in the safe little suburb

that I was growing up in was I was sort of desperate for meaning. And sometimes war reporters are called sort of adrenaline junkies or whatever. And for me, what I think was going on more for me and for most of the other people that I knew, men and women both in those situations, is that there was more like they were meaning junkies. Like they wanted to be living lives where things had huge consequences, enormous amount of meaning. And that's actually the thing you sort of get addicted to.

It's not, you know, frankly, sprinting across the street while a sniper's trying to shoot you is not particularly addictive. So is it the social component to it that you're, because it's something you emphasize in Tribe, that the bonding that occurs between soldiers and people in conflict zones, or is it, can you imagine, or have you experienced the same kind of ramping up of consequences, but in solitude delivering the same sort of meaning?

Well, I imagine Alex Hanold, the free soloist, who, if I said his name correctly anyway, I think we know who I'm talking about. Yeah, his amygdala is malfunctioning and he can free solo El Cap without apparently breaking his sweat. No, that's definitely a solo activity. And there's definitely a huge amount of meaning to it for him and for anyone understanding what he's doing. So it doesn't have to be with other people, but consequences sort of sharpen the contours of reality. And he's obviously dealing with enormous consequences when he does his work on those cliffs. But for most humans, I don't know

if he's human or not, but for most human beings- He's barely human. I've never met him, but judging from what I've seen, he is a far, far outlier of something. Yeah. Yeah. And it seems to be an extraordinarily nice guy. I mean, like, I mean, anyway, for most humans, hardship and risk and danger and trauma are generally faced in a group. And that's been true for hundreds of thousands of years. And, you know, war is no different. And even if you're a war reporter and you're in, say, Sierra Leone in the late 90s, like I was, or Liberia in 2003, or Bosnia in the early 90s, whatever it may be, an American platoon in combat in eastern Afghanistan, as I was in 07, 08, you end up inevitably in sort of these social groups, sort of survival groups, as it were. And the relationship between the individual and the group that they find themselves dependent on for survival is very, very intense. And the deal seems to be that if you are willing to be sort of selfless and altruistic on behalf of the welfare of the group, the group then takes you in and you're welcomed into it and you're sort of honored in some way. And you're welcomed into it and you're sort of honored in some way.

And, you know, what I saw in Sarajevo was really interesting. And I immediately wanted to sort of be part of it. I almost had the totally self-indulgent thought, wow, those people are lucky that they get this. And what I was seeing was that every neighborhood had its sort a local defense group. And these were like young men, typically, that were using an assortment of, you know, hunting rifles and AK-47s and what have you. And they dug trenches and they were defending the city of Sarajevo neighborhood by neighborhood in very, very local groups. And they were living a kind of communal life on a frontline. And it looked so tribal. And these young people and the women as well, because they had a very important role as well. These young people were such a totally

necessary, vital part of their own community and its survival. I just thought like, that's life. Like, that's what life's supposed to be. Something like that. And again, a self-indulgent thought, because there was a huge amount of suffering. One out of five civilians was wounded or killed in that city over the three years of the siege by the besieging Bosnian Serb forces. I mean, just absolutely grotesque. they had a core human experience that's typified human life for a very, very long time. And the pity, along with the huge blessings and benefits of modern, safe, affluent modern society, the pity of it is that we, particularly young people, get sort of deprived of being in a role of importance and urgency like that. Well, how do you make sense of the fact that these experiences which seem objectively bad and worth avoiding, I mean, the chaos of war, right, can deliver to those who

survive and, you know, scathed or unscathed, I would imagine, some of the most meaningful experiences, perhaps the most meaningful experiences they've ever had in life. And we know from, again, this is something you focus on more in your books, I think it might be both tribe and war, but this experience that, you know, it's very common for soldiers to return from a war and find, you know, normal life and the safety therein really denuded of meaning. And on some level, you could write this off as that they're essentially adrenaline junkies. I mean, they've just played the highest stakes video game ever and nothing else compares. But there are probably deeper layers to it than that. But what seems paradoxical about it is

that the kind of lives that we put a tremendous amount of energy and attention in seeking to maintain, which is to say lives that are quite protected from danger and chaos, and these are the kinds of lives we wish upon those we love and our children, you know, especially. And yet you keep noticing that it's in extremis that so many people find the juicy goodness of actually being slammed into a full encounter with their own existence. Well, I think there's two things going on. First of all, survival is meaningful. I mean, just in basic Darwinian terms, right? Like if we didn't value survival, we wouldn't be here. And the behaviors that help our survival,

the evolutionary process has made gratifying or pleasurable. So if you're hungry, eating is an important thing to do and it feels good. Sex feels good, right? Archery feels good. If you hit the bullseye, I mean, you get a little bump of dopamine, right? Archery feels good if you hit the bullseye and you get a little bump of dopamine, right? So all of these behaviors that help us survive and master our circumstances are rewarded with some kind of good feeling. And one of the good feelings that we have is topping out on the top of El Capitan or whatever. It's like winning, succeeding, overcoming the monster, the beast, vanquishing. And the other one, and they're very tied together, is human connection. That's also, along with survival, is the other exceedingly meaningful thing that we do.

And after my book Tribe came out, there was some, I can't remember where it was, a comment. It might've been on Amazon or something. I can't quite remember, but it was a young woman whose sister tragically had died of cancer, I think. And she talked about how during those last days of her sister's life while her sister was dying, that she missed those days because everyone came in, the cousins and the friends and the family. And it was just this gathering of forces. And there was something, as she said, as tragic as it was, she missed it because it felt real. And she was connected to so many people in this vital way. And if you look at history, you know, the tragedies, the catastrophes that hit human society, the Blitz in London, all right? The German Air Force bombed London and other English cities

night after night for six months. They killed 30,000 civilians, right? There were civilians digging civilians out of the rubble and injecting the ones they couldn't save with morphine so they could, you know, die painlessly. And everyone was sleeping and, you know, in the subways and rationing food. And I mean, just a nightmare, right? And what happened afterwards? Londoners said that they missed it. And the class, the ghastly class system in England sort of broke down during those days. I mean, if you're sleeping shoulder to shoulder with other people in a tube station, it doesn't really matter if you're, quote, upper class or, quote, lower class, right? And not only that, but the catastrophe, the crisis

seemed to promote sort of psychological well-being. The government was prepared for mass psychiatric casualties during the bombings, right? Of course they were. And it turns out that admissions to psych wards went down during the bombings and then back up after the bombings stopped. And after Hurricane Katrina, there was a similar thing along the Mississippi coast. I have friends who live down there. He said people really missed the time of sort of community effort and bonding that happened in the wake of that terrible hurricane. So yes, it seems sort of

odd that these catastrophes elicit such fond feelings, but they give people a purpose, a meaning that is survival, and they bring people together. And those are the things that make humans happy. We're social primates. We're adapted for that. Is there anything you have done differently in your life born of having understood this, again, somewhat paradoxical lesson of how attention and bonding gets sharpened up in extremis in this way? I mean, can you graft this on in a more orderly, less death-defying way than perhaps Alex Honnold is managing it? Right. less death-defying way than perhaps Alex Honnold is managing it. And again, we'll get to your encounter with the actual abyss pretty soon. But prior to that, did you consciously change your life in response to what you were learning when you were researching tribe and war? Yes. So after I came back from a year off and on with a platoon in combat, with American forces in combat in eastern Afghanistan, I made a documentary called Brastrepo with my buddy, Tim Hetherington. And I came back from there and the guys that I'd been with were, I was quite surprised.

Like they, a lot of them wanted, I mean, this was a hellish hilltop, right? There were like, it was all men. They were, they were getting, we were getting shot at just about every day. There was no communication with the outside world. There was no internet. There was no way to call your girlfriend. There was no, for the first three months, there wasn't even electricity. They didn't even have a generator, right? They were sleeping in the dirt with the tarantulas and the scorpions and et cetera. And, and they spent 15 months up there. And so they finally got brought back to Italy and all theions and et cetera. And, and they spent 15 months up there. And so they

finally got brought back to Italy and all the pleasures and delights of civilization. And you can imagine what that looked like for a while, but then the party sort of died down. And a lot of them said they wanted to go back. They couldn't deal. They wanted to go back to Restrepo. A lot of them said that. And I remember I had a, um, I was very fortunate to have a surrogate uncle named Ellis who I've written about, and he was part Apache, part Sioux, I believe. At any rate, he was Native American. He was born out West in the late 1920s and an incredibly learned man and extraordinary man.

And I remember him, sorry, I'm going to have to be a little improper here, but this is his language. But I remember him saying to me, Sebastian, all throughout the history of the United States from the earliest days on, he said, you white people were always running off to join us Indians, to join the tribes. And he said, we Indians never ran off to join white society, to plow fields and go to church on Sundays and all that stuff. It was always towards the tribal.

And in my mind, I'm like, all right, yeah, okay, right. I didn't know if Ellis was sort of selling me a bill of goods or whatever. And then when I was trying to understand the soldiers, I thought, oh my God, maybe Ellis was right. Maybe that's true. Maybe what these guys miss is that tribal component of like, we're all equal, we're all together, we need each other, we're in the fight together. Like maybe that's actually what's intoxicating. And you come back to safe America and yeah, of course, it's great to not get shot at anymore, et cetera, et cetera. And again, we're blessed to live in those circumstances, but there is a real human loss. I mean, the more affluent and safe you are, the less you need other people to survive. And then you end up without human connection, which is the ultimate, I mean, the more affluent and safe you are, the less you need other people to survive. And then you end up without human connection, which is the ultimate, I mean, human connection

is the ultimate drug, right? I mean, the ultimate thing that makes you feel good. Again, we're social primates. Humans don't survive by themselves in the wilderness. They die almost immediately. We survive in groups. And we have a lot of sort of neurochemical reinforcement of those oxytocin and all these other hormones that make us feel good when we're collaborating in a group. books and indeed along the frontier, the Pennsylvania frontier where my ancestors settled in the 1780s, all the way on up through the Midwest and the West and the Southwest, young men and sometimes young women would run off and join the native culture or even if they're

native society and even if they'd been kidnapped during raids, if often they didn't want to go home, they didn't want to go back, right? They wanted to stay, quote, Indian. And so that to me suddenly made sense of this thing. So how do you live your life in a, I live in America. It's a modern affluent country, right? It's a highly mechanized, industrialized country. How do you live in such a place? And to your question, keep some, what decisions can you make to keep some sort of tribal feeling? And so, you know, what I would say, first of all, is, I mean, I grew up in a

pretty affluent suburb and I've just made it a point in my life. They're extremely alienating places. And I've just made it a point in my life to never, to never do that. And so I live in a very much a mixed income, mixed race Lower East Side in the New York's Lower East Side community, which is sort of small enough and human enough that, you know, people recognize each other. We need each other. There's all kinds of sort of street level collaboration. And it feels very, very communal and good. that I live in with my wife and two little girls, before I was in there during Hurricane Sandy, there was an extraordinary example of this sort of communality that you would get in a poor neighborhood, and I think not in a rich one. Hurricane Sandy shut off the lights in New York

City, 34th Street and below. So at nighttime, it was quite frightening in Manhattan, actually, gangs of young men roaming around and all kinds of sort of quasi-apocalyptic feeling scenes, right? So in this particular building, it's a tenement building and mostly Spanish speaking and a lot of interrelatedness between the apartments, cousins and uncles and what have you. One of the mothers, Dominican or Puerto Rican, I'm not sure which, got a machete because they were worried about a break-ins because a lot of the people who had children had to leave the building because there was no water. There was no running water. So the people with young children left the building. So there's empty apartments. They're worried about break-ins, right? So- You had your own Restrepo on 34th Street. You could just add some tarantulas and scorpions and you're good to go. That's right. So she got a machete and she got a bunch of teenage boys and young men and gave them a sort of guard roster.

And so there was a young man with a machete in front of the, you know, in front of the door 24-7 until the lights went back on. Now that's community, right? Like that's, that's the, that's the fabric of human society. And so, you know, one of the decisions I made was just, just not, not live in, in affluence and not live in suburbia. It's just not living in affluence and not living in suburbia. Okay, so let's talk about how you can't quite escape death or near death, even in the pristine surroundings. You weren't in the city when this went down. You were outside of it. So walk me through your medical emergency, and then we'll get into the more ethereal topics that surface for you. Yeah, so if I could, I'll start.

I'll back up a few years. After being a war reporter for many years and having had many close calls, I was blown up by an IED. I had a bullet hit next to my forehead into a sandbag, et cetera. My colleague, my brother, my friend Tim Hetherington, who I made Restrepo with, was killed in Libya. He caught a mortar fragment in his groin and he bled out in the back of a rebel pickup truck looking at the blue Libyan sky as he raced to the Misrata Hospital. He got there a few minutes too late. And so I got out of the war business at that point. I didn't want to devastate all of the people who loved me

like I had just watched Tim do to everyone who loved him. Did you have your daughters at that point? No, I didn't. I didn't. I was in my first marriage and that I had a lot of psychological struggles after Estrepo and after Tim was killed and among other things,

it contributed to costing me my marriage. But, you know, then I, you know, I sort of, things got better again. I, and I got together with Barbara, my wife, and we had a family and everything was amazing. Right. And I, I did, I never looked back. I stopped war reporting. I never looked back. Now at this point, I have a family and I definitely, they're, they're my absolute priority. And so, and then COVID hits. And so when COVID hits, we have a newborn and a three-year-old, almost three-year-old. And COVID hits.

And we're lucky, again, you know, I'm an extremely lucky person. And we had the choice of leaving New York, this little apartment. We live in a tiny apartment and we co-sleep. It's like 500 square feet. And it's like we're camping in an apartment, right? I mean, it's really small. The idea of going through COVID and that with two young kids just seemed really tough. And we own property in Massachusetts in the woods, an old, old house in the woods at the end of a dead end dirt road. And it was a no-brainer, right? So we moved in there. And it was in June of 2020. I don't think in terms of medical emergency, because I'm, I'm a lifelong

athlete. I was a really good distance runner when I was young. I've got an athlete's heart. I'm not a walking, you know, I'm not, my heart's not a, you know, ticking time bomb. I'm not going to have a stroke. I mean, all these things that drop middle-aged men in their tracks, I'm just, I just don't have those worries. Right.

So I just never thought I would have to rush to the hospital for anything. And so in this house, there's no cell phone service. It's a long dirt road through the woods to get there and sometimes impassable. And the phone lines don't, the landline doesn't work when it rains because the lines are old and they short out. So that's the context for what's about to happen now. So it's June 16th, 2020. And we had a little bit of babysitting from some teenage girls who live down the road.

And they came in to take care of our six-month-old and our three-year-old. And I had built a cabin sort of even deeper in the woods, just like oil lamps and wood stove, like a really primitive place. And my wife and I went out, Barbara and I went out there to just chill out for a little bit. And very beautiful spot. And in mid-sentence, in mid-sentence, I felt this jolt of pain in my abdomen. And I was like, oh, what is that? You know, it was sort of, it was like incredibly bad indigestion, right? I didn't know what it was. It was burning. And I just stood up to try to walk it out. And, and I almost fell over. And I mean, the floor just went reeling away from me. And I sat back down and I said words I never thought I'd ever say.

I said, I'm going to need help. I've never felt anything like this. And, um, so Barbara sort of dragged me, half dragged me out of the woods and um sort of keeping me upright and my arm around her shoulders and got me to the driveway and put me in the passenger seat of the car and then ran in and told the girls like whispered to the babysitters you know sebastian's sebastian has to go to the hospital something's really wrong so one of the phone lines weren't working nothing was working one of the girls managed to get one one of the phone lines weren't working, nothing was working. One of the girls managed to get one bar of cell phone connection on her cell phone and called 911. And so I didn't know this, but I had an undiagnosed aneurysm, a sort of ballooning of the blood vessel in one of my

pancreatic arteries. It's extremely rare. And it's not, you know, it's a random defect, right? It's not high cholesterol or what have you, clogged arteries. It really is sort of a random freakish thing. And aneurysms are deadly because they have no symptoms. And if they rupture, the mortality rate is incredibly high. It's very hard to fix that. And people just bleed out into their own abdomen, which is what I was doing. I was losing a pint of blood every 10 or 15 minutes. And so my blood pressure was just tanking. So I'm in the car and I'm in and out of consciousness and I start going blind. All symptoms of blood loss, extreme blood loss. And I'm basically a human hourglass. And the hospital is an hour drive away. And I would have, the odds would have been long if the hospital had been five minutes away, right? And it's an hour. And I hung on.

They put me in the ambulance. They didn't know what was wrong. They didn't think it was particularly serious, but we went to the hospital. And right when we, I sort of kept it together, something called compensatory shock, where your body shuts down all unnecessary blood flow to your limbs, et cetera, to your skin, and pools it where it's needed in your chest and your brain. Your body can do that for like an hour or so, and then it can't do it anymore. And that's what happened as soon as we pulled up to the ER. I went from compensatory shock into end-stage hemorrhagic shock. I was convulsing and totally disoriented. And the doctors knew immediately what was happening. And they rushed me into the trauma bay. And a doctor started getting ready to insert a large gauge needle through my neck straight

into my jugular to transfuse me, which is actually, I mean, it sounds horrifying, but it didn't hurt at all. I don't know why. This might've been the point where I turned around on my hike, so. Well, and you know, I didn't know, I had no idea I was dying, right? And the doctor said to me, do I have permission to do this procedure? And I, you know, it didn't sound very fun. I said, you mean in case there's an emergency? And he said, sir, this is the emergency right now. So you're pretty much in the middle of the emergency. Yeah. And I had no, you know, I had no idea. And so, you know, I should say right now, so people don't get the wrong idea. I'm an atheist. I'm a stone cold atheist. My father

was a physicist. He was an atheist. I'm not a mystic. I'm not spiritual. I don't think coincidences mean anything. I don't think things are meant to be or not meant to be. Like, I just, I don't believe in anything, right? And so while the doctor is working on my neck, trying to get the needle in there, which takes a little while, I suddenly become aware of this black pit that has opened up underneath me,

slightly to my left, and I'm getting pulled into it. And it's sort of infinitely, infinitely black and infinitely deep and it's eternity. When you say, so the description that you're now giving suggests a visual experience, but is this, is it more just, how are you, how are you locating it in space if it's not something you're seeing with your open eyes? You know, good question. And I don't know. I sensed it.

I just became aware that there was a pit to my left below me, and that I was getting pulled into this darkness. And it was a final darkness. And again, I didn't know I was dying, but I had the sense like you go in there, you are not coming back out. And I was panicking. And then my dead father appeared above me, above me and to my left.

And when you say everyone, do you think your eyes were closed at this point or your eyes open? I, they were open. I mean, I was still talking to the doctors, but I was also, you know, in a, it was like I was incredibly drunk. Like my mind was not working right. And I was in and out of consciousness. And I, you know, I mean, I wouldn't say, it's not like I saw him on the ceiling like a cardboard cutout of my father.

I mean, it wasn't that tangible. But he was there in a sort of energy form. I mean, I don't, there aren't even really words to precisely say what it was I was seeing or feeling. But I was startled. I was startled to see him. I mean, I don't, there aren't even really words to precisely say what it was I was seeing or feeling, but I was startled. I was startled to see him. I'm like, my dad? Like, what are you doing up there? He'd been dead eight years and he was a physicist. He was definitely, I found out, you know, realized later in my life on the spectrum, a very sweet man, but not hard to be close to, emotionally close to. That was my relationship with him. And suddenly there he was. And he was communicating to me, it's okay. You

don't have to fight it. Like, I'll take care of you. You can come with me. And my reaction was horror. I mean, I didn't know I was dying. So when he said, come with you, I'm like, you're dead. I'm not going anywhere with you. We have nothing in common. The suggestion was grotesque. And I said to the doctor... The podcast is available to everyone through our scholarship program. So if you can't afford a subscription, please request a free account on the website. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.