In My Time of Dying
Written by:
Paul Tipton
If you’ve ever taken an extreme risk or have been in a “life-or-death” situation, then imagine being someone who has spent most of their life chasing the biggest wave, hanging from ropes in trees with a chainsaw, and covering wars as a correspondent, embedded with troops in terrifying situations in Afghanistan and other countries. That was the “normal” life of Sebastian Junger for many years, the life that he chose to live.
Junger says, “Everyone has a relationship with death whether they want one or not; refusing to think about death is its own kind of relationship. When we hear about another person’s death … the pity we feel is rooted in the hope that that kind of thing could never happen to us. It’s an enormously helpful illusion. Some people take the illusion even further by deliberately taking risks, as if beating the odds over and over gives them a kind of agency” (p.16). And Junger does take risks.
I have read Junger’s books, War and Tribe, which deep dive into war and its effects, both negative and, ironically, positive, with respect to the tribal feelings of closeness and loyalty generated by being with others in risky situations. As a veteran, I know that he has “been there,” that he gained his knowledge the tough way.
But curiously, it was after most of the dangerous parts of his life and after PTSD had caused his first marriage to fail, that, at age 58, having finally settled into a normal life with his soulmate and their two young children, things came crashing down. That’s when he experienced a medical emergency that was extremely difficult to diagnose and nearly fatal. The experience took Junger to the threshold of, and perhaps through, death’s door.
That is what this very well-researched book is about: exploring the possibility or likelihood that even when our physical bodies fail and we “die,” there may be a consciousness that is attached to our identity that does not “die.” Is there possibly a portal through which that consciousness can pass back and forth? Junger says, “Our understanding of reality might be as limited as a dog’s understanding of television. So, abandoning likelihood for a moment, one might try out the idea that death is simply where the veil of belief gets rent to reveal a greater system beyond. ‘Reality’ may just be a boundary that we can’t see past” (p.172).
In his search for explanations, Junger takes us along on his mind’s journey through Einstein’s relativity; Higgs’s boson, photons, and monads; Heisenberg’s uncertainty; and all the way back to the lapsed Jesuit Casimir Liszinski, who in the 1600s was tortured to death for considering the possibility that man created God, rather than the reverse. But when Occam’s razor splits that last thin hair, the author says, “A last, terrifying, theory proposes that it is cosmically prohibited to have that knowledge beforehand because consciousness cannot survive a complete understanding of itself” and “the ultimate truth must never be known, because [the knower’s understanding] that he is the entirety of all things” would lead to the collapse of the universe and the annihilation of all history (p.198). Try to wrap your head around that!
This is a fascinating book that will keep you thinking about its ideas for a long time after reading it.
Paul Tipton