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Sebastian Junger’s Near Death Experience — Sebastian Junger (In My Time of Dying)
What’s going to happen to you after you die?
Is death something you ignore or something you use to enjoy your days more?
And are near death experiences proof of an after life or just the brain going apeshit because it’s losing oxygen?
Sebastian Junger is no stranger to death. As a war correspondent he survived an IED attack on his vehicle and spent a grueling stint in the treacherous Korengal Valley of Afghanistan.
But in 2020 he came face to face with his own mortality in a very different setting. At home. With his family. And this brush with death shook him much, much deeper because of what — and who — he saw at the threshold into the unknown.
In this discussion, Sebastian shares his amazing story and most importantly how his near death experience has shaped the man he is today.
In this interview:
- Seeing war as a poker game
- The illusion of safety, certainty, and control
- The dream foreshadowing his death
- Is there room for the unexplainable in your life?
- Can quantum physics explain an afterlife?
Plus:
- The mysterious nurse story
- What if death wasn’t scary but sacred?
- What is it like to see into the abyss of death?
- The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker
- Tripp’s disgusting bull shark story
- The (very dark) Casimir Lizinsky story
About 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 IN MY TIME OF DYING. 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 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.
“Restrepo,” which chronicled the deployment of a platoon of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley, is widely considered to have broken new ground in war reporting. Junger has since produced and directed three additional documentaries about war and its aftermath. “Which Way Is The Front Line From Here?”, which premiered on HBO, chronicles the life and career of his friend and colleague, photojournalist Tim Hetherington, who was killed while covering the civil war in Libya in 2011. “Korengal” returns to the subject of combat and tries to answer the eternal question of why young men miss war. “The Last Patrol”, which also premiered on HBO, examines the complexities of returning from war by following Junger and three friends–all of whom had experienced combat, either as soldiers or reporters–as they travel up the East Coast railroad lines on foot as “high-speed vagrants.”
(Sebastian Junger author photo by Christopher Anderson)
