Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Latter-day Saint
History and Religion
“We all have the same thing in common . . . we are dead.”

“We all have the same thing in common . . . we are dead.”

Last updated on: January 5, 2025 at 10:47 am by Dan Peterson

0 Comments

“We all have the same thing in common . . . we are dead.” 2025-01-05T10:47:14-07:00 Dan Peterson

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Anna Sahlstén, “Passage” (1894) (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

I was out of the house for a substantial part of Saturday, and the power at our house was out for an even longer part of the day, and then it went out again, and then again, and then yet again — and, finally, I lost count, and I don’t know whether there were any further power outages throughout the night nor how many of them there might have been. All of that cut into my productivity just a bit. So I think that I’ll content myself for the moment by sharing a selection from the notes that I marked during my reading, quite a while back now, of Sebastian Junger’s In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife (2024).

Junger is a respected war correspondent as well as the best-selling author of such books as The Perfect Storm. For most of his life, he was a confirmed atheist. (He had been raised by his father, a physicist, to trust only what he counted, rather naïvely in my view, as “empirical facts.”) I’m not exactly sure whether he’s still an atheist or not — I think that he probably is — but, in this book, he tells about what happened to him on a quiet afternoon in the summer of 2020 while he was at home in New England with his wife and his two young children.

Suddenly, he was assaulted by acute abdominal pain. As it later turned out, he had suffered a ruptured aneurysm that, in most instances, would have proved fatal. (In his case, obviously, it didn’t. After all, he returned and wrote his book.) Despite being rushed to the hospital, he began to fade and, as blackness gathered, Junger’s dead father visited him. His father invited Junger to join him. “It’s okay,” his father told him. “There’s nothing to be scared of. I’ll take care of you.” Until Junger returned to consciousness the next day, that was the last thing that he could remember.

Anyway, here are a few of the passages that I marked during my reading of In My Time of Dying:

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.” (105)

Junger cites the arguments of Christof Koch, a German-American cognitive scientist, neurophysiologist, and computational neuroscientist and a formerly a professor at the California Institute of Technology, who contends against the objective reality of near-death experiences and the idea of an immortal soul. Junger seems, I think, to sympathize with Koch’s position, but he does survey some of the counterarguments. He specifically mentions a case that I myself find remarkable and persuasive:

For NDE believers, the ultimate refutation of Koch’s gentle skepticism is the case of a thirty-five-year-old musician named Pam Reynolds. In 1991, Reynolds was diagnosed with a basilar artery aneurysm so deep in her brain that surgeons could not access it with conventional means. It was a death sentence, so surgeons resorted to a rare and high-risk procedure called hypothermic cardiac arrest. The plan was to lower her body temperature to 50 degrees Fahrenheit to prevent tissue decay, stop her heartbeat and breathing, drain the blood from her head, saw open her skull, excavate her brain to the depth of the aneurysm, repair the artery so that it would not rupture, and then reverse the process until Reynold’s heart could be jump-started with a defibrillator. Reynolds was given general anesthesia, her eyes were taped shut, and Dr. Robert Spetzler started his bone saw and cut a section out of her skull. A surgical microscope was inserted deep into her brain, to the site of the aneurysm. Her heart was stopped, her body was chilled, and the blood was drained from her head by gravity. At that point, all brain waves ceased, and her EEG went flat. The operation was a success, but after Reynolds woke up in the ICU, she had the strangest things to report. She said that despite the general anesthesia, she was brought back to awareness by the sound of the cranial saw, and that she had then slipped out the top of her head and looked down from the surgeon’s shoulder. At some point she overheard a conversation between doctors about trying to establish a vascular entry point in her groin, which surprised her, because she knew that the surgery was nowhere near that area. Later she encountered dead relatives, including her uncle, who urged her to slip back into her mangled body. She saw her body “jump” twice—supposedly the two defibrillator shocks—and later found herself returning to consciousness in the recovery room. (106-107)

This is just one of many accounts of the Pam Reynolds case. It has been written about a great deal, and many critics have sought to dismantle it as evidence for genuine out-of-body experiences or the survival of consciousness after death. I will eventually be writing about it myself. (I do not find the counterarguments against it convincing.) But here is a counterargument that Junger himself mentions:

According to Reynolds’s anesthesiologist, however, there is no way to know at what point Reynolds had her experiences. If her brain had zero blood perfusion and her EEG was flat, it is medically impossible for her to have any thoughts or memories. Far more likely, in their view, is the possibility that her memories came from a period of semiconsciousness before and after anesthesia, during which she might have overheard the surgical team discussing the details of her surgery. (106-107)

History and Religion

Travel and Religion

Uncategorized

NDE

near-death experience

OBE

out of body experience

Pam Reynolds

Sebastian Junger

Previous Post

January 3, 2025

"Looking Again at the Anthon Transcript(s)"

Next Post

January 5, 2025 Two discoveries in biblical archaeology from 2024

Recent Comments

0 | Leave a Comment

"Sutherland's lecture sounds interesting. He seems to restate the Washington consensus that trade brings peace ..."

B. Wilson

Learning more about a region of ..."

"In a meeting today, I learned another important reason why accurate (or at least as ..."

the PROBLEM

From Serbia’s “White City,” Belgrade

"I've been watching a lot of video interviews of NDErs and researchers. I think in ..."

brotheroflogan

Accounts of Premortality?

"PL: "Let's hope he doesn't have your address..."I have to frankly confess that a few ..."

DanielPeterson

From Serbia’s “White City,” Belgrade

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category Uncategorized

Select a Month October 2026 September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 March 2014 August 2013 February 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

In this Gospel, Jesus' first miracle is not recorded, and the narrative begins with a voice crying in the wilderness. Which Gospel starts with John the Baptist's ministry?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Luke John Matthew Mark