Many years ago on a late night in May, I was shot with 47 shotgun pellets while walking across Duke University campus. I experienced phenomena the annihilationists can’t explain.

In the seconds after impact, I felt my awareness expand beyond my body. I was simultaneously in my body, feeling the shocking assault, and outside it, observing with strange calm the branching futures spinning out from this moment.

This wasn't hallucination caused by trauma. Or rather, even if we were to classify it that way physiologically, the experience itself was undeniable: "I" was not identical with this suffering flesh, even as I remained deeply incarnated within it.

In the months of recovery that followed, I had repeated experiences of consciousness being more expansive, more aware, more connected than the materialist model allows. I could sense the emotional quality of other people's presence in ways I hadn't before.

I experienced vivid presences of beings who were not physically present, including deceased relatives who came to comfort and guide me. My Polish grandfather Dziadzio was the most frequent visitor, and my great-great-great-grandfather Edward a close second.

I know the annihilationist objection: trauma-induced delusion, hallucination, the brain's defensive response to extreme stress.

But here's what that explanation misses: I was never more lucid, never more clear-seeing, and never more lucidly aware of reality's multilayered nature.

My consciousness had partially detached from my body during the trauma, and I experienced directly what I had only believed conceptually before: that I am not just my flesh, though I love it and am thoroughly embedded within it.

This recognition didn't make me value physical life less. It made me cherish it more, knowing that this particular embodied existence is both temporary and eternally significant, both limited and portaled into something vaster.