In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea o...

In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

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he had the appearance of someone who would be completely at ease in the human world, but he often entered it like a scuba diver with forty-five minutes of air and a weight belt to keep himself down.

Sebastian Junger • In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

"Reality” may just be a boundary we can’t see past.

Sebastian Junger • In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

Helmholtz resonator

Sebastian Junger • In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

"a cavity with specific acoustical properties. When you blow across the top of a bottle and produce a whistling sound, you have just created a Helmholtz resonator." (p 114)

He was not so much a vision as a mass of energy configured in a deeply familiar way as my father.

Sebastian Junger • In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

some people become so bloated that their arms and legs look tiny in comparison to their bodies— "trauma toads"

Sebastian Junger • In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

the cosmos reaches back to trick us and fix a far greater outcome: that the ultimate truth must never be known, because once the knower understands that he is the entirety of all things, the universe becomes fatally self-referential and collapses back into a closed spacetime of zero radius with all values headed to zero and all history annihilated.