Bestselling author Sebastian Junger opens up about 'horrifying' but inspiring potential 'post-death experience'

Virgin Radio

5 Jun 2024, 12:47

Author Sebastian Junger visited the Virgin Radio studios to discuss near-death experiences and the fragility of life on Wednesday (5th June).

The bestselling author and former war reporter opened up about his recent “horrifying” but inspiring close brush with death while discussing his new book, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife, on The Chris Evans Breakfast Show with webuyanycar.

A self-described former "danger-hunter" who had been caught up in several near-death experiences over the years, Junger learnt that life on the front line can be brought to you when in 2020 he suffered a sudden rupturing of an diagnosed aneurysm in his pancreatic artery.

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Junger was lucky, as although he believes he came “probably 10 minutes” away from his heart stopping, he survived the bleed. But the experience left him with a memory which made him reconsider his view of life and the afterlife, leading to him deciding on the subject of his latest book.

“I’m an atheist, a lifelong atheist, and I’m still an atheist,” the writer prefaced his story by stressing. But he continued by telling the story of how his recent brush with death led him to experience something seemingly unexplainable. “They brought me into the trauma bay, and I was going off a cliff. I was going into end stage, hemorrhagic shock. I was convulsing,” Junger described.

Ahead of being given a potentially life-saving procedure, Junger’s doctor asked him for permission to insert a large needle in his neck to create a transfusion. “I didn’t know I was dying, and it sounded horrifying,” he recalled.

“He said ‘This is an emergency” and I was shocked… So I’m lying there, he’s sort of getting my neck prepped for this procedure, and suddenly this black void opens up underneath me, this black pit, and I start getting pulled into it and it’s terrifying.”

The author continued: “I didn’t know I was dying but I had this animal sense that you don’t want to go into the infinitely black abyss, like, that’s not a good idea, right? As I was getting more and more scared and getting drawn into this thing, my dead father appeared above me… and he was in this weird sort of essence, it was like his essence in this energy form - it’s very hard to describe.”

Again stressing his lack of belief, Junger explained to Chris how seeing his father - who told him everything would be okay and that he could come with him - left him “absolutely horrified,” as it led him to realise the fragility of his situation.

“I mean I love my Dad, but I was like ‘I’m not going with you. You’re dead, I’m alive. Get out of here!’... And then I said to the doctor ‘You have to hurry, I’m going right now.’ And I didn’t know where I was going, but it was very clear I was headed, I was outbound.”

Looking back on his experience now, Junger’s book explores how the author is still trying “to figure out in rational terms" what he saw. As his book details further, “the jury’s out;" however, there are “interesting conversations” surrounding the potential of “post-death existence at a kind of quantum level”.

For more on Junger’s explorations into life and the afterlife, his book In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife is out now.

For more great interviews listen to The Chris Evans Breakfast Show with webuyanycar weekdays from 6:30am on Virgin Radio, or catch up on-demand here.