Otherworld - Episode 81: The Front Line

Episode Date: May 20, 2024

War reporter, author, and Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Sebastian Junger tells the story of his near-death-experience and reflects on how it changed his beliefs in the afterlife. Want more episodes? For bonus episodes and videos, sign up for the Otherworld Patreon Check out our Merch Follow us on: Instagram, TikTok, Twitter If you have experienced something paranormal or unexplained, email us your story at [e-mail] To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to Otherworld. I'm your host Jack Wagner. A while back, a friend of the show named Monica was really interested in near-death experiences, and she told me that there was an NDE event coming up in New York. So I told her, hey, why don't you go on behalf of Otherworld just to research? It'll be a good excuse. Let me know if you find anything cool. So she went, and during that event, she ended up befriending a guy that was sitting next to her, and they ended up having lunch. He told her all about an experience that he had,

an experience that brought him to this event. And the story is pretty wild. Even wilder than that was that this guy, it turns out, is pretty well known. His name is Sebastian Younger. He's a war reporter, a journalist, filmmaker, and author. He wrote some books you might have heard of before, including The Perfect Storm and also War.

He also co-directed the Oscar-nominated documentary Restrepo. I say all that to point out that he's lived a very interesting life, and he's experienced a lot of wild stuff, as you'll soon hear. But he ended up having a close call with death, and what happened to him during it really changed his outlook on life and consciousness. It also inspired him to begin researching this phenomena himself, which was why he was at that conference in the first place, and how he ended up on Otherworld.

I loved hearing about Sebastian's experience. I think he has an extremely unique perspective on this topic, and I think you're going to like hearing it as well. This is episode 81. The title is The Front Line, and you're listening to Otherworld. Is this Bobby? Yes, it is. At its core, the science, you can't argue.

It's not only, about all the science. It's almost frustrating that it's happening. I'm going to die. It's limbs were just like wrong. Everybody moves back. into the light, even if it takes them ahead. Hi, my name is Sebastian Younger. I'm an author and journalist

and documentary filmmaker. For many years, I was a war reporter, starting in Sarajevo in 1993 during the Siege of Sarajevo, and on up through what was called the War on Terror and the American efforts in Afghanistan, a country that I'd been covering since the mid-90s, and then finally covered as an embedded journalist with American forces. So I stopped doing that after.

my best friend and colleague, Tim Hetherington, was killed in combat in Misrata, Libya, in 2011. I stopped war reporting, and I got remarried, had two little girls, who are now seven and four. I came to fatherhood late, and they are the center of my life in every conceivable way. So that's where I am as a person right now.

I was brought up by a mother who fled Catholicism when she fled the Midwest as a young woman and came to Boston, a city of great enlightenment and learning, and met my father, who was a physicist who grew up in Europe and fled the Nazis. His father was Jewish. So I was raised in a completely secular, non-religious, and sort of religion-sceptical household. My father was a very sweet. and enlightened and open-minded man, but in his opinion, religion has done a huge amount of harm to people and damage human dignity in innumerable ways, and he really wanted nothing to do with it. My mother, you know, was a bit of a mystic, right? She was macrobiotic.

She was a yogi. Her friends had crystals, and, you know, one of her friends died, and then suddenly there was a crow sitting on a branch outside the window, and my mother thought that that was her friend visiting and stuff like that. And so I sort of grew up watching this dynamic, and I sort of went with my father. I mean, the crow on the branch, I saw no reason to think that that was her dead friend. Nice idea, but I didn't see an empirical reason to think it was her dead friend. So I went through my life sort of rejecting that way of thinking.

The problem with rationality is that things keep happening that you can't understand. I think they happen in all people's lives. One of them happened as my father was dying. He was dying very slowly of COPD over the course of many months. And I lived in New York during my first marriage, and my father and mother were in Boston. And they had a hospice nurse with them. They had enough money to get someone in the house to help with this process, which was going to go on for months. And one morning at about at 3.15 in the morning, as it turned out, I was well.

woke it up by my father screaming my name. And it was as if he was in the next room. And, you know, he wasn't particularly in dire circumstances. He was dying, but slowly. And it wasn't like he was in some kind of medical crisis near the end that we knew. But he was screaming my name from the other room. And I sat bolt upright in bed. Like, oh, my God.

Like, and I looked at the clock. It was 3.15 in the morning. I was like, oh, nightmare. You know, I went back to sleep. and then my mother called at 7 a.m. and said, get to Boston as fast as you can. Your father woke up, very agitated in the middle of the night, shouting, and he tried to escape. He tried to crawl out of bed. And my mother said that Teo, the hospice nurse, had told her when patients do that,

they're usually within their last 36 hours. It's a sign. We nurses know this is a sign of death is now very, very close. and so I jumped in the car, I drove to Boston. But on the phone, I said to my mother, wow, that's amazing. What time did that happen? I could hear her asking Teo,

what time did that happen? And Teo said, 3.15 in the morning. Right? So, you know, is there a possibility that the human brain can communicate in ways that we don't yet understand between, you know, communicate nonverbalely, across great distance, is that possible in a way that doctors and physicists have not yet discovered? Of course it is, right? Does that mean there's God in an afterlife? Not necessarily, right?

But that kind of thing opened my mind to, wow, we don't really understand, you know, for me, mysticism means mysticism is science we don't understand yet. Like, that's what the word mysticism means, mystical means. So I've been going to front lines. I've been risking my life in some calculated ways for many years as a war reporter. I was blown up by an IED. I've seen plenty of people who didn't make it, who were killed. Civilians, tragically, children. I covered the civil wars in West Africa.

Brutal, traumatizing things. And I had a bullet hit a sandbag a couple inches from my forehead. Fired from half a kilometer. The angle, the deviation that saved my life on that shot, is so small you almost can't calculate it. So I've encountered my own mortality in a sort of combat setting. But I'm a healthy, athletic, vigorous person, zero heart disease issues, zero vascular issues,

no stroke, no nothing, right? I mean, I'm in some ways a doctor's dream, right? Because I'm just a very healthy person. So it never crossed my mind that just on some normal day, I might drop dead. Like, why would I? The statistics are with me. So when I stopped war reporting, basically in my mind, I thought, okay, now, now I don't have to deal with mortality for decades because I'm a healthy man in my 50s.

And realistically, like, this isn't something I have to think about anymore. Not true, right? And as I realized, you know, you can leave the front lines. The front lines eventually will come to you. And so one day, in June of 2016, my family and I live in New York, my family and I live in New York. New York City and Manhattan, Lower East Side, tiny apartment. But we have a property in Massachusetts deep in the woods at the end of a dead-end dirt road at Old House from 1800.

And we moved there during COVID, which was amazing. My girls were three months old, six months old, and three years old at the time. And so we were there in this sort of beautiful place during COVID. And one morning at dawn, I have a terrible, terrible dream. Except I didn't know it was a dream while it was happening. I died. And I was floating above my family as a spirit. But I didn't understand that yet.

And my family were grieving. My little girls and my wife were grieving. They were sobbing. And I was like, it's okay. I'm right here. Like, I was waving my arms and shouting. Like, I'm here. It's okay.

You don't have to be upset. Here I am. And then I was made to understand that I died and that there was no going back. I was headed out into the universe and there was no going back to my family. This was final and irrevocable. And I was so anguished. I was so bereft. I was so filled with horror and a kind of shame that I woke up.

And suddenly I'm in my bed. We co-sleep as a family. and my eldest daughter, three years old at the time, is right next to me. I sort of clutched her as she slept. There's a point where parents always are reassuring their children. There's a point where your child will reassure you. And that first happened to me in the 58th year of my life, waking up from this terrible, terrible dream that I died.

The strange thing, the very strange thing that I really can't explain is that 36 hours later, I started to die. It was clearly a predictive dream about something I had no conscious understanding of, no knowledge of, and I still cannot explain how that could have worked. There's a family that lived down the road that we were very close to, the two teenage girls

would sometimes babysit for us. So we had a couple, we had a little bit of help one afternoon. I said to my wife, Barbara, like, let's just take a little time off. Like, let's just hang out for a while. We don't get this chance very often. And we walked out, a short ways out, through the woods, to a cabin that I built in the woods,

which has no plumbing or electricity. It's oil lamps, a wood stove. And just very beautiful. It's a very quiet, gorgeous place. And so we went out there to have a little relaxed time together. And I think every parent knows what I'm talking about, right? So in mid-sentence, mid-sentence, I felt a jolt of pain in my abdomen. More painful than indigestion, but not like kidney stone pain, right?

Somewhere in the middle, I was like, damn, what was that? Like, I tried to make it go away, and it wouldn't go away, and then I finally stood up to see if I could sort of walk it out. And I stood up, and the floor sort of went reeling away from me as if I was like on the deck of a ship. And I almost fell over it. I made it back to my seat. And I said, honey, I've never felt anything like this before. I think I need help. Words I never thought I would say outside of a battlefield, right? And, you know, I'm going through, I'm like heart attack, stroke, probably not. I mean, I don't have any of the warning. Like, I'm trying to go ticking

through the list of like what could be wrong. Meanwhile, I'm in and out of consciousness. I just didn't know it. So she sort of half dragged me out of the cabin. And, and out of the woods down the trail. You know, there's a very remote place where there's no cell phone signal. The phone line, the landlines don't work if it's been raining, which it had been because they're old lines and they get,

there's some sort of static feedback that ruins the signal. So we were really on our own out there. My wife said later, you know, you were not reassuring me. You were not reassuring me that you were going to be okay. To her, that meant I was in real danger. and because I wasn't saying,

because I always minimize everything. I mean, I cut my arm off and I'll be, I just, it'll stop bleeding in a minute. It's fine. You know, I mean, that's just my wiring as a husband, as a father, as a man, maybe as an idiot. Like, whatever, that's my wiring is to minimize everything. I said, I didn't do that with her.

And I said, and I remember saying, I'm going to need, you know, I'm going to need help. I don't understand what's happening to my body. And, you know, I was mumbling. I wasn't making sense. Anyway, she got me back to the, car. She can't call 911 because there's no cell phone signal. She runs into the house. And so the car is in the driveway, a long dirt driveway into the woods, right? So I'm there.

She runs into the house and tells the babysitters, these teenage girls, something's really wrong with Sebastian. Can one of you come out and try to get a cell phone signal because the landline doesn't work and call the ambulance? So she did that. The other girl took care of our kids. And the teenager finally got at like a one bar of signal and called 911. And she looked terrified. And I remember seeing the look of fear on her face and feeling really, really badly because I knew I was causing that.

And it's a very sweet girl. And I felt terrible. Meanwhile, so I'm in the passenger seat of the soup of our car. And now I start going blind. And the world, everything starts turning sort of electric white. And I said to my wife, I'm going blind now. And then at that point, I thought, I must be having a stroke. But why?

Like, I mean, I'm healthy. Like, what's going? I just didn't understand it. So my wife was sort of holding my hand saying, stay with me, stay with me, because I was going in and out of consciousness. And finally, the ambulance showed up. And so what was going on with me right then was I had an undiagnosed aneurism in my pancreatic artery. And aneurism is a structural thing.

It's not a health-related thing. It's purely a sort of structural matter in your body, and it was a weak spot in an artery wall that was ballooning. And arteries are made to dilate, but not to have one spot sort of balloon, right? That is really at risk of rupture. And if you rupture an artery in your abdomen, it's like getting stabbed in your artery. You will bleed out.

There won't be blood on the floor because you're bleeding into your abdominal cavity. But you will be bleeding out exactly as if someone stabbed you in the abdomen and severed an artery, the exact same thing. In fact, it's even more dangerous because if you're stabbed, at least people know it's sort of metaphorically where to stick their finger, right? Like where the leak is. If you're just bleeding internally, they have no idea. Your abdomen's basically a big bowl of spaghetti.

I mean, it's just, it's a big gross mess, right? And like finding a bleed in there is extremely hard. So this aneurism that had grown throughout my lifetime, right, had chosen that moment to rupture. And I was losing a pint of blood probably every 10 or 15 minutes. I mean, by the time I got to the hospital, 90 minutes later, I'd probably lost two-thirds of my blood. There's like 10 or 12 units of blood in a human body, and I'd probably lost two-thirds of my blood. So at any rate, I'm a human hourglass at this point. The transport time for the ambulance to the nearest hospital is about an hour.

It's one of the longest transport times in Massachusetts. And the clock is ticking, right? I just don't know it. I have no idea that I'm dying. And so by the time the ambulance crew gets there, my body, your body is a marvelous thing. My body knows something's very wrong. It has gone into something called compensatory shock. It tightens down all the muscles.

and keeps blood out of your legs and your arms, even out of your intestines, everything you don't need to survive, loses its blood supply. And it all gets pooled in your chest and your brain. So I sort of reboot it. So now I'm like clear-minded again and I'm starting feeling okay

except for the pain of my abdomen. By the time the ambulance guys get there, I'm like, listen, I don't want to put you guys out. I think I'm doing better. And, you know, this is why the famous statistic that married men live longer. this is why. My wife says to them, don't listen to him. Ten minutes ago, he was going blind. He couldn't stand up. He is going to the ER. You guys are taking him to the ER. So they took me. And I got there right, right as my body went out of compensatory shock and started going into end stage hemorrhagic shock.

You know, at that point, I probably had 10 minutes left to live. I'm still conscious, but very, very messed up. and they wheel me in immediately the doctors know oh this guy is dangerously sick as one doctor said you were instantly the sickest person in the hospital and they rushed me into a trauma bay and all these people came in and in my mind I'm like who's the party for like what are you all you guys doing here why do you look so serious like I'm just in for belly belly pain like what's going what is going on right and you know of course they don't answer anything and so they or they don't answer any questions like that. So the doctor said, I need your consent to put a needle through your neck into your jugular to transfuse you, which isn't as much fun as it sounds, right? So I said,

I was like, you mean, I didn't want to do it. I was like, you mean, in case there's an emergency? And he said, this is the emergency right now. I was shocked, right? I said, okay, yeah, absolutely, whatever you got to do, right? But like, why is everyone looking so serious? Like, I really couldn't figure it out. So I'm lying there, and he's working on my neck. They use an ultrasound probe, and they guide a needle through ultrasound visuals. Straight into your jugular. It's a big, big old needle, right?

And it didn't hurt at all. But it takes a while to hook that up. And so while he's doing that, I notice that there's this, suddenly there's this black pit, this infinite black hole, has opened up underneath me and a little bit to my left. And in my memory, all the medical people are on my right and death is on my left. I didn't know it was death at the time,

but that's the sense I later made of it. So the pit is on my left below me, and I start getting pulled into it. And I don't know I'm dying. Thank God, or I would have been terrified. But I was terrified anyway. I mean, no one in their right mind wants to go into an infinitely black enormous pit, right?

Like, I kind of knew, my animal sense knew, if you go into the pit, you're not coming back out. Like, I kind of knew that intuitively, and I didn't want to go. It was below me on my left, sort of where the floor would be, and it was just, it was the purest black, and it was clearly a portal into the infinite, right? It wasn't like a well or something.

Like, okay, there's a well. It goes pretty far down. You know, no, no, this is a well. This was just, it wasn't a hole, right? It wasn't a pit. It was an opening to something else. And if you go through, you're not coming back. Right?

I was getting sort of pulled into this thing, and I didn't want to go. And I knew it was unarguable. Like, you're not going to argue with this thing. You're not going to prevent it. It's happening. This is happening now, right? And I was very scared. And suddenly I sensed, I don't want to quite say saw,

but it was. was a kind of vision. It was like his energy was there. His energy was, sort of as I remember him, like not at age 89 when he died, but, you know, in mid-life, benevolent, loving. Now, I got to pause for a moment and say, I am a stone-cold atheist, right? Not only am I not mystical. I'm active anti-mystic, right? I'm a total rationalist. I believe in empiricism and science, and I don't believe in anything else. And my father was a physicist and exactly like me, right? So imagine my surprise when my dead father, eight years dead at that point, shows up above me. And he's like, it's okay, you don't have to fight it. And he wasn't using words, but he communicated in some fashion.

you don't have to fight it, I'll take care of you, you can come with me. Very beautiful and benevolent and comforting. But I was horrified, right? I'm like, go with you, you're dead. I'm not, I'm not going anywhere with you. Like, dad, get out of here. What are you doing? What are you even doing here?

Like, this isn't the moment, right? I was absolutely horrified and almost kind of offended that he would think I would want to go with him, right? And that's the other place, right? Like, I'm nothing to do with that. Like, this is not. And I said to that, so I looked up at the doctor, because I'm still conscious, and I said to the doctor, you got to hurry, you're losing me right now. I'm going. He got the needle in. They put me on a rapid transfuser. They put three units into me. In the end, I needed 10 units of blood. My blood pressure was 60 over 40, which is, you know, running on fusion. basically.

So then my memory is very, I'm in and out of consciousness, and they can't sedate me because my vitals are too low, but they have me on a little bit of fentanyl and verset, I think. But I'm still talking to, you know, I mean, I'm talking to people,

I've gone into convulsive shock. When they put me through the CAT scan, my body was just, you know, rattling on the shuttle board. I mean, awful, awful feeling. You sink into hypothermia, if you die of blood loss, the last thing that happens is you go into hypothermia,

you never come out. And I was at that stage. And then they get me into the interventional radiology suite, which is basically they use a fluorescope, which is like an x-ray, but that gives doctors video, like real-time video, by x-ray. So they can in real-time see what's going on inside your body

so that if they insert a catheter, which they did in my groin, into my vascular system, they can watch the progress of the catheter through my vascular system and try to guide it to where the bleed is. Because at this point, they figured out it's an abdominal hemorrhage,

they just don't know where. Because there's blood all over the place at this point, basically. And so I'm conscious for this, and in a huge amount of pain, blood outside of the vascular system is extremely painful. You know, when it touches your organs,

it's an insult to the organs. is extremely painful. And I was really in agony, and the nurse was sort of holding my hand, getting me to do breathing exercises, I think sort of Lamaz-type breathing exercises. And at one point, she said, Mr. Younger, try to keep your eyes open.

And I said, why? And she said, so that we know you're still with us. And that was the first time that I had this idea, oh, are they worried I'm going to die? Like, is that what the stakes are? Like, I couldn't believe it. I was, again, almost sort of offended. And then a little bit later, you know, the doctors tried and tried and just could not get the thing to the place, right?

They couldn't get the catheter to the side of the bleed for various sort of anatomical reasons, which meant that they were going to have to open me up. And once you, if you do an emergency labrotomy, it's sort of battlefield surgery, right? It's the last resort. Your odds of surviving can be extremely low. It really is the last roll of the dice. and that's what they were looking at. Neither of them wanted to do it because the outcomes are often very poor, meaning you die.

So at one point I sort of saw one of the doctors look at the other doctor and sort of shrug like this, like, oh, well, we did everything we could. And the other one was like, yeah. And, you know, I wasn't meant to see that look and I'm aware that my memory is not perfect and, you know, I can't swear for sure that that happened, but that's my memory of it.

And then I realized, like, oh, my God, you guys don't have this? I just assumed that there's a medical answer for virtually every problem, right? Like, you don't, you've reached the end of the road with me? Are you kidding? Like, I couldn't believe it. And then I really got quite scared. And then I started seeing faces in the machinery. I mean, really evil, scary, angry faces in the fluoroscope itself, which called to mind some

things I'd seen in West Africa. And some of the tribal fighters, the EJA tribal fighters in the Niger Delta, I was seized by them for a little while and threatened with execution. And when they're painted for battle, they paint their faces in this very, very intense way that is absolutely terrifying. And I was basically seeing some form of those faces on the front of the florescope. And I was like, This is death time. I mean, this is the bottom of the pit. It was extremely frightening. All right.

We'll be right back after this quick break. So eventually, they actually, one of the other doctor said, why don't we try going through his left wrist? They were in my groin, my right groin. Why don't we try going through his left wrist? And the first doctor said, I like the way you think. I was like, are you kidding? This is where we're at.

Like, oh, maybe we'll try, let's try a Hail Mary. Yeah, I like that idea. Like, oh, like, I didn't realize, right? And how bad it was. And they went through my left wrist, and that allowed some different kind of access. And they got the embolism coil, an embolism is to intentionally block an artery. And so they got the embolism coil to the ruptured artery. and they popped it, they plugged it, problem over.

Now I just had to recover, which, you know, I'm not out of the woods yet. All kinds of nasty things can happen when you get 10 units of blood and your chest is filled with fluid and your abdomen's filled with blood. And, you know, like, you can still die easily, right? But at least I wasn't dying then on the table. And they wheeled me into the ICU and I think put me under with some sedative because then the next thing I remember I'm waking up in the morning, I woke up in the ICU and utterly confused.

I mean, I had no idea what had happened, none. And the nurse came in and said, congratulations, Mr. Younger. Like, you survived. No one thought you were going to make it. It's kind of a miracle. We almost lost you last night. You almost died.

I mean, imagine if you blacked out for a moment and then someone said to you, you almost, you just, we barely saved you. You would be shocked, right? Like anyone, would be so I was shocked. I was like, are you kidding? I almost died last night from belly pain?

Like what? And she explained what had happened and then walked out of the room. And, you know, I'm physically, I'm a mess. I'm throwing up blood. I mean, totally incapacitated. I got tubes coming in out of me everywhere. I mean, I'm just like a hurting puppy. And she came back a little bit later and said, how are you doing, this younger?

and I said, well, I'm okay, but frankly, what you told me is terrifying. Like, I had no idea. I almost died. I can't stop thinking about it. And she said, all right, try this. Instead of thinking about it like something scary, try thinking about it like something sacred. And she walked out of the room. Now, as an atheist, I'm perfectly happy to use the word sacred. It's a fine word.

And I repurpose it from its religious meaning. to a more secular meaning, which is a sacred task, a sacred calling is anything that helps all of us, helps others, live lives with more dignity. Like, that's what sacredness is. Sometimes ministers manage to do that, not all for sure, but some do. Sometimes doctors, sometimes shrinks, sometimes kindergarten teachers, right? So sometimes journalists, right? So immediately in my mind, I'm like, okay, sacred.

That means maybe I learned something that will be helpful to myself and others to lead lives with more dignity and meaning. What is that thing? I've gone to front lines my whole life. I finally went to the ultimate front line, which is my own death. I was allowed to look over the edge of the precipice into the beyond, as it were, and allowed to come back. What did I see? What am I coming back with that's useful and helpful? That's sacred.

Did I come back with any kind of sacred knowledge? And I had a lot of psychological troubles afterwards, which we can get to. I wound up in this very weird place in my head. After I came back from the hospital, I got very paranoid because I started to wonder if maybe I did die. And I just didn't know it. and that I was a ghost, and that my family couldn't see me, as in my dream. And I started researching NDE's near-death experiences, and one of the very common elements of them is exactly what I dream,

that you're sort of hovering above your family or above the ambulance crew or the doctors or whatever, and you can't communicate with them because they can't hear you because you're already in another place, right? And because of the dream, I had this paranoid thought, oh my God, maybe that wasn't just a nightmare. Maybe that was an actual, maybe I had the experience of actually dying. And that's what dying actually feels like. And that I did die and that everything that ensued,

waking up next to my daughter and the aneurysm and the hospital and then coming home, and now here I am, maybe all of that is one long, elaborate death hallucination as I'm on my way out. Prove me wrong, right? Like, prove that's not possible. You can't, of course, right? I mean, it's like, there's no way to prove it.

And I just, and so I had these twin fears that, A, that I'd actually died and I wasn't really here, and that B, you know, more prosaically, that I had one aneurysm, I could have another, and I could drop that at any other moment on any other beautiful spring day and how do I, you know, like, I'm going to have to live next to a hospital, right? I mean, I got super neurotic, right?

Super neurotic. And, but I, you know, I said to my wife at one point, I said, am I here? Like, just tell me I'm really here, because I'm worried that I'm a ghost. I'm not really here. Just tell me you see me, you hear me that I'm here. And she said, yeah, of course you are, honey. Like, you're fine. You're safe.

Here you are. And in my mind, I'm like, that's exactly. what a hallucination would say if it wanted to convince you of something, right? And it took a very long time. And honestly, a certain amount of therapy, I was basically having a massive anxiety disorder, right? A massive panic disorder. And I went into a, you know, a somewhat dangerous depression.

I mean, I had a classic post-trauma reaction and almost dying medically is a huge trauma. It's way more traumatic than anything that happened to me in combat. And I was having a really classic reaction to it. And I resolved it pretty effectively later in therapy. But it took a while, and believe me, I was loath to go to therapy, right? I mean, I'm just like, oh, that is so lame that, you know. But I want to make sure that people understand if you need therapy, there is nothing lame about it.

And you really do need therapy. And there's no dishonored there. And you really must, at least for the people around you who love you. And that allowed me to sort of climb back out of the hole. but it was quite a hole. So after surviving the ruptured aneurism and surviving the psychological aftermath of it, I decided to write a book about it. I'm a journalist.

It's what I do. I take notes when things happen around me, and then I use those notes to write a book. And so that was my decision. That's how I came to write in my time of dying, how I came face to face with the idea of an afterlife. You know, I'm always sort of rooting for the rationalist team, right? Like the sort of Christopher Hitchens of the world.

I'm reading this stuff and, you know, I'm reading some pretty persuasive cases. Like, whoa, that's really weird that the, you know, the person saw their dead father and then this and that and that they knew what their mother was doing in the waiting room, even though they were in the surgery bay. And like, you know, and I started like, um, I started like, um, I. started actually kind of rooting for the idea that there was an afterlife. I was like, wow, this is just incontrovertible. Like, how do you explain all this stuff? Clearly, there's something going on. And, wow, maybe, I mean, you know, understand this is an atheist saying, like, wow, maybe there is something cool. Like, we don't have to be terrified of death anymore. What's not to like? Right. And, and then I read the other side, right? So then there's a lot of rebuttals,

you know, within the literature of NDE. there's a lot of people that are a lot of researchers who are doctors and researchers who clearly, in my mind, have a sort of an agenda to prove there is a quote afterlife, right? Like, you know, I detected, you know, a fairly identifiable bias. And, you know, of course there is. Like, if you publish a book that there's an afterlife, it's going to sell pretty well. If you publish a book that there's no proving there's no afterlife, probably not going to sell that well. So I sort of get the self-selection in some of the research.

totally understandable and I fell for it too, right? I mean, I sort of know where they're coming from. And then I read the sort of like hard-boiled rationalist counters to these theories, and they are also pretty persuasive. And they go into all kinds of things of neurochemicals and low blood oxygen and what happens to fighter pilots when you subject them to like five times the force of gravity and human centrifuges, you know, they black out. But not only do they black out, they have tunnels and lights,

and visions and they see God and they see, you know, whatever, all this sort of crazy stuff, that's very similar to NDE's. And so basically the rationalists, the doctors are like, we're going to explain all of these things through neurochemistry, right, through physiology. There's no mystery here. It's the dying brain shutting down. And, you know, they have all kinds of very fancy explanations, which make a huge amount of sense, right? And I was like, damn, I thought we had a chance there, but the rationalist came in and basically ruined the party. Right. Right. So, but there. Then I realized that there was one exception and I'll sort of lay it out like this.

If you give a room full of people LSD or DMT or ayahuasca or mushrooms or whatever you want, you don't need to call in God or an afterlife or ghosts and spirits or any funky stuff to explain the fact that they'll all have hallucinations. Like we know how this works neurochemically. We know exactly how it works, right? 100% of the people in the room who took the LSD are going to see stuff, right? What the neurochemists, what the doctors, what the rationalists cannot explain, however. I mean, a room full of people who took LSD will all have visions,

but they won't all hallucinate the same thing, right? When people die in the dying process, and we know this because some people are dying, or even their heart stops and they're resuscitated and they sort of come back, as it were. An enormous percentage of them all hallucinate the same thing, which is, among other things, that they are greeted by the dead, like I was. They meet their dead loved ones,

are there, like I experienced, to see them across, right? Across the river sticks, across the threshold, like into the black pit. Like, you know, it's not like I somehow instinctively knew I was dying and was projecting a comforting image. I was horrified to see my father, right? Like, this wasn't some wishful thinking on my part. When my mother died, she saw her dead brother.

When my father died, he was talking to his dead sister. Hospice nurses, and I interviewed a number of them, will tell you that dying people see the dead all the time. And no one else in the room can say that. Right. All of a sudden, you know, Aunt Betty's chatting with this, you know, the corner of the room. and there's someone there for her, and no one else see, they're invariably dead people,

and there are verified incidents where there are dead people who died recently, and the dying person doesn't know that, right? So some very mysterious things. So for me, that's the part of this that the rationalists, which, again, that's the team

I'm always rooting for, right? The rationalists actually can't quite explain, right? They do a heroic job explaining most of this stuff through neurochemistry, and physiology, but the fact that there's a uniformity of experience, a great uniformity of experience, particularly seeing dead people, is in my mind sort of hard to explain. And that is where I get into, again, my father was a physicist, and I get into some of the theories around quantum physics that may help explain some post-death reality that we simply do not understand. And maybe

are not capable of understanding. As I say in my book, our understanding of reality might be equivalent to a dog's understanding of a television screen, right? Like, just does not understand the wider context. They're like, what's on the screen? Oh, yeah, that's what's happening, right? And we may be that way with reality.

Like, oh, well, that's what's happening, right? Except there's a wider context that we just are not capable of understanding. So, and that's where my book lands. It's a very short book, and some of these really profound and mysterious phenomena in quantum physics. And again, phenomena pioneered discovered by, you know, the world's history's ultimate rationalists, right? These guys, these physicists that pioneered that stuff were not mystical thinkers, really.

They were scientists, and they were in search of the truth. And they found a truth which is so beguiling and confounding and mysterious and contradictory that even they didn't know what to do with it. I mean, there's a lot of stuff about bright lights and a tunnel and all that stuff. And I think that stuff is fairly easily explained, even visions of God or a supreme being. I mean, I think that stuff is quite easily explained through physiology, neurochemistry, epileptic seizures within their brain as their brain shuts down. But the other thing that's sort of hard to explain is this sort of universal knowledge where the dying person knows later will tell the surgeon or tell someone, in detail what happened three rooms over in the hospitals

while they were unconscious, like things they couldn't possibly have known. And is it probative? No, not quite. But there's enough incidents like this to make one wonder. Like, is there a kind of universal consciousness that when you die, you start to rejoin, gain access to, that contains all knowledge?

You know, is that possible? It's hard to at least not wonder about whether it's possible. Again, no one has. proven anything, but it's a legitimate and rational question. Well, people always ask me, so, are you still an atheist? I mean, I think religious people love to have atheists sort of confronted with, like, quote, the truth, and then they convert, and they, you know, like everyone feels better.

And so I am definitely still an atheist. You know, my sort of somewhat flip answer is, look, I didn't see God, I saw my father. Right? If I didn't God, we might have a conversation, but I saw my dad, right? But I'm entirely open to the idea that the universe at the quantum level may work in ways that we don't understand. And the ways in which it works may involve some kind of universal consciousness, some kind of post-death existence at the quantum level, where some of our lived experience continues on in some way. Like, I mean, I can imagine that it's possible, right? And there are some very coherent, very cogent arguments around the idea that consciousness is a part of the physical fabric of the universe the way gravity is.

And that the universe wouldn't exist in the physical form that it does without consciousness, exactly like it wouldn't without the force of gravity. And so, you know, if that's true, then virtually anything's possible. And so that's where I landed. So at one point my wife said, all right, you survive something terrible. Do you feel lucky or unlucky that all this happened to you? In other words, do you feel blessed or cursed? If you could push a button and make it not happen at all, would you push that button? And I couldn't answer the question.

And then later on, when I was doing research from my book, I looked up the origin of the word blessing. And the origin is Anglo-Saxon, Bledzian. And Bledzian means blood. And the idea is that there is no blessing without a sacrifice. You don't just get a blessing without some kind of wound. And I think the corollary we might say is that with every wound, you may have to look for it for quite a while, but with every wound, there is some blessing as well.

They are completely dependent on each other and connected. And I guess that's how I feel about what happened to me. All right. Thank you so much to Sebastian Younger for sharing his experiences. Also, thank you to Monica Maraboli for introducing us after going to that NDE conference. Thank you so much, Monica. I have to say, I'm always impressed when an atheist, like Sebastian, stays true to their ways after experiencing something like that. You know, like regardless of your beliefs, you have to admit, that's real dedication. I really enjoyed hearing Sebastian's perspective on all this.

I'm also excited to check out his upcoming book. The title of that, by the way, is In My Time of Dying, How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an afterlife. All right. Thank you so much once again to Sebastian. This has been episode 81. The title is The Frontline, and you've been listening to Otherworld.

Otherworld is executive produced and hosted by myself, Jack Wagner. Our theme song is by Cobra Man. The soundtrack of this episode is by North Americans. The song you're hearing right now is So Destroyed by Prince Rama. This episode was edited by Theo Krantz and engineered by Theo Schaefer. Our artwork is by Coltisack Studios. Production help by Nikki Kate Delgado and Haley Pearson. Please show us your support by subscribing, leaving a five-star review,

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