This comes as a real breath of fresh air after some of the media coverage to which I drew attention here a few days ago.
Sunrise over Earth. (NASA public domain image)
Some of you will be familiar with the name of Sebastian Junger (born 1962), who is an American journalist, author, and filmmaker. And you should be familiar with his name, because I wrote about him here a week or two ago.
The documentary film Restrepo, based on Junger’s writing, received the Grand Jury Prize for best documentary at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. He reported from the war in Afghanistan for roughly a decade and has written for various “highbrow” magazines. He has also written several books, the most famous of which is almost certainly The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea (1997), which was adapted into a major motion picture, and which has given us an expression (“a perfect storm”) that has come to be quite commonly used since then.
Near the end of this past May, Junger, who was raised an atheist, published a new book entitled In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife. It’s a personal memoir that is based upon a severe, life-threatening medical emergency that he experienced not terribly long ago. I read the book a month or two back, and I want to share a little bit more from it.
[Dr. Sam] Parnia also tells a seminal story of a man whose heart stopped for almost an hour. Very sophisticated techniques allowed the man to survive without brain damage, and when he woke up four days later, he reported an extraordinary memory: he had been greeted by a “luminous, loving, compassionate being” that did not have “mass or a shape.” He woke up without any fear of death.
I was finding it impossible not to root for an afterlife, and one of the things that triggered a flicker of optimism was the medical paradox of lucidity during collapsing brain function. The brain uses 15 percent of the oxygenated blood in the body and around 20 percent of the glucose. When the heart stops, those huge needs suddenly go unmet, and electrical activity in the brain plummets. And yet awareness seems to increase.
“The occurrence of lucid, well-structured thought processes together with reasoning, attention and memory recall of specific events during cardiac arrest (NDE) raise a number of interesting and perplexing questions,” writes [Dr. Sam] Parnia in the medical journal Resuscitation. “From a clinical point of view any acute alteration in cerebral physiology . . . leads to disorganized and compromised cerebral function.” (101)
But . . .
Not only does the brain seem to continue functioning, it has experiences that are consistent across many, many cases. A study of near-death experiences around the world found some cultural variations—people from Anglo-European society were more likely to describe a journey through darkness as a “tunnel” rather than a “void”—but the basic contours of the experience were remarkably similar. The dying generally recall rising over their bodies, journeying to another realm, encountering dead relatives, and returning. A Māori woman named Nga, for example, recounted her brush with death to New Zealand author Michael King:
“I became seriously ill for the first time in my life,” Nga said. “I became so ill that my spirit actually passed out of my body. My family believed I was dead because my breathing stopped… I had hovered over my head and then left the room and traveled northwards, towards the Tail of the Fish. I passed over the Waikato River, across the Manukau, over Ngāti Whātua, Ngāpuhi, Te Rarawa, and Te Aupōuri until I came to Te Rerenga Wairua, the leaping-off place of souls.”
At that point, a voice told Nga to go back because it was not her time. She regained consciousness in her body, surrounded by family members. (102)
Junger continues:
In 1998, Dr. Greyson [of the medical school at the University of Virginia] and two colleagues, Emily Cooke and Ian Stevenson, published a series of extraordinary accounts of near-death experiences in the Journal of Scientific Exploration. As explained in the abstract, they wanted to examine fourteen cases that, in their opinion, gave credence to the idea that individual consciousness survives death. Some cases were drawn from popular accounts published in newspapers, and some were from their own files. The researchers attempted to track down people from the accounts—sometimes decades later—and were able to confirm the stories in only the most general sense. It goes without saying that these are self-reported stories that, by definition, are impossible to confirm. The core experiences in the stories are remarkably consistent, though, and as I read them, I found it hard to imagine that deliberate falsifications would converge in such dramatic ways.
He goes on:
In every case cited by Greyson and his colleagues, the dying person found themselves outside their body and often looking down from above as doctors or bystanders tried to save them. Many also claimed to have perceptions that were not constrained by ordinary human perspectives. “In my wanderings there was a strange consciousness that I could see through the walls of the building,” recorded a British army officer named Alexander Ogston, who almost died of typhoid fever at a military hospital around 1900. “I saw plainly, for instance, a poor Royal Army Medical surgeon, of whose existence I had not known, and who was in quite another part of the hospital, grow very ill and scream and die; I saw them cover his corpse and carry him softly out on shoeless feet, quietly and surreptitiously, lest we should know that he had died… Afterwards, when I told these happenings to the sisters [nurses], they informed me that all of this had happened.”
According to Greyson and his colleagues, a nurse named Jean Morrow contacted them in 1991 to give her experience of almost dying in childbirth decades earlier: “Due to blood loss, my blood pressure dropped. When I heard, ‘Oh my god, we’re losing her,’ I was out of body at once and on the ceiling of the operating room looking down—watching them work on a body.”
Her account is similar to one given to Greyson by Peggy Raso, who barely survived a pulmonary embolism after giving birth to a healthy baby: “I, the real me, was not on the bed, and I began to think about this… I looked down at the bed from my vantage point near the ceiling. I saw a girl there who looked to be in a great deal of pain . . . I felt sorry for her. Doctors and nurses were coming and going from the room. I saw one doctor hit her hard on the chest. I tried to tell them I was not there. I saw a doctor come to the station that I recognized. He was a family friend and I had been raised next door to him. The nurse told him [Peggy Raso] had just died. He replied he would call Margaret (my mother). My hearing was extremely acute. I heard and saw another patient on the floor complaining about the activity and noise coming from my room. It dawned on me they were talking about me. I tried to tell them I was not down there. It became obvious they were not hearing me.”
Another recurring theme in many near-death experiences is encountering dead loved ones and other spirits. Not only have researchers documented this from around the world, but virtually every society believes that when you die, you will be reunited with loved ones who have already passed. This belief exists in the entire spectrum of human society, from small-band hunter-gatherers to mass industrialists, and forms a core part of almost all religions, including Christianity. (102-104)
Plainly intrigued by such reports, Junger relates yet another account:
Around one quarter of near-death survivors report encountering the dead, as I did. Some were long-dead relatives, some were the recently dead, and some were not yet known to have died. One American soldier responded to an appeal in military publications for near-death experiences with this account of a helicopter crash in Vietnam: “It was peaceful and cool. I could see others like myself just sort of floating around only inches from the ground . . . dead [Viet Cong]. Our eyes meet, but there are no hard feelings between us, just something we have in common… people walk past you, and you know what they are thinking . . . we all have the same thing in common… we are dead.” (104-105)
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In