Dreams of airplane crashes: Krohn excerpt #11

Elizabeth Krohn writes in her book entitled Changed in a Flash: The first plane crash nightmare I had was on July 16, 1996, about eight years after my near-death experience. It rocked me badly. In the nightmare I could see “WA” on the wreckage and thought it was a World Airways flight. I knew there were 230 people on board, none of whom survived. I knew it crashed in water, and I knew it was flight number 800. I called my mom and told her about my nightmare on the morning of July 17, 1996. The next morning, July 18, 1996, Mom called me to tell me to turn on the news, quickly. There it was: TWA Flight 800 had crashed in the Atlantic Ocean with 230 people on board. No survivors.  This particular nightmare really upset me because it was eerily accurate down to so many specific details.

I shared the information with Barry because I was so shaken, even though I knew it would be more than he could handle. He moved out of the house within ten days. Our divorce was final a year later. This particular nightmare did not cause the demise of our marriage, but it sure didn’t help. We divorced in 1997, almost nine years after my NDE.

I had not asked for any of this. The depth of my discomfort with this new precognitive ability cannot be overstated. The internet was not nearly as accessible as it is today, and I didn’t really have a good way to research what was happening to me. Local libraries were very limited in their material on subjects I needed to research, and with three young children at home, I had no time for research, anyway. The ingrained skeptic in me kept trying to diminish what I knew was actually happening, and the internal battle was fierce. I was struggling daily to remind myself that I was sane and that those nightmares were accurate.

I needed two things. I needed an answer to the lingering question of why this was happening to me, and I needed a way to document the veracity (or inaccuracy) of my dreams. Mostly, this was for my own sake—so I would have proof of my sanity to counter the voice of my old inner skeptic. It was not until 2008 that it dawned on me to email brief recounts of the nightmares to myself right after they occurred so that they were date and time stamped. I never imagined that anyone else would look at these. I wrote the emails to convince myself that my mental faculties were intact.

One of the earliest nightmare-documenting emails was in January 2009. My second husband Matt and I were vacationing in Jerusalem. We had spent the morning of January 15 walking up and down the cobbled streets of the Old City. I remember eating lunch that day in a restaurant right across the street from our hotel just off Ben Yehuda Street. There was a palpable energy I felt during lunch that I had come to recognize was a precursor to my precognitive nightmares.

After our lunch, we decided to go back to our hotel and take a nap. Matt immediately fell asleep. I was also tired, but the real reason I had wanted to go back to the hotel was that I felt a precognition might be coming on. I wanted to be near our laptop in case I was right. I stretched out on the bed and dozed off. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes before I was awake again and typing myself an email describing the vision I had just had. Awoken by the tapping on my keyboard, Matt asked me what I was doing. I explained that I had had a plane crash nightmare and emailed myself about it.

“OK. What did you see?” Matt asked.

“It’s really weird,” I said. “I saw this plane, and it was sitting, kind of floating, on water, and there were people standing on the wings of the plane.”

“The physics of that are impossible,” Matt assured me. “Planes float like a rock. Don’t worry about it, it can’t happen. I’m going back to sleep.” Matt rolled over and, true to his word, fell back asleep immediately.

I knew the scene I had envisioned was more than implausible...it was far-fetched. Yet, my inner conviction of the reality of this event carried more weight in my mind than my rational understanding and honest doubts. At 2:57 p.m. Israel Standard Time in Jerusalem, which was 7:57 a.m. Eastern Standard Time in New York, I sent myself the following email:

Mid-size commercial passenger jet (80-150 people) crashes in NYC. Maybe in river. Not Continental Airlines. Not American Airlines. It is an American carrier like Southwest or US Airways.

The following morning, Matt was facing the TV while we were eating breakfast at our hotel. “Oh my God!” he shouted. “Look!” I turned and saw my vision of the day before captured for the world to see: an airplane bobbing on the Hudson River, with people standing on the plane’s wings waiting to be rescued.

At 3:31 p.m. New York time, US Airways Flight 1549 piloted by Captain “Sully” Sullenberger had landed on the Hudson River after plowing into a flock of geese shortly after takeoff. This was about seven and a half hours after I sent myself the email. Miraculously, there were no fatalities among the 155 people onboard.

 

Elizabeth G. Krohn and Jeffrey J. Kripal of Changed in a Flash: One Woman's Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks It Empowers Us All (North Atlantic Books, 2018). Krohn received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “The Eternal Life of Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts from Changed in a Flash.  

Dreams of a stranger's death: Krohn excerpt #10

Elizabeth Krohn writes in her book entitled Changed in a Flash: "One of the first things that struck me within the near-death experience itself was the shift from black and white to an otherworldly vision of brilliant, vibrant, living colors. This was not just a visual change; it was also a symbolic one. The Garden was suffused with astonishing light and color. It was alive, and such a contrast to the grays and grease of the parking lot I had just seen.

"The living colors were just the beginning. The new convictions and new capacities I had acquired in the Garden began to show themselves in other ways, ways that frankly shocked me. Indeed, it was so strange at first that I honestly believed I was losing my mind.

 

"Three months after my near-death experience, I had a dream that a woman whom I knew of, but had never personally met, had just died. I simply knew that this soul had transitioned out of this world and into the next. I awoke with a single question for which I had no answer. I had no connection to this person. 'Why tell me?' I asked the Universe. The answer came quickly. The point of knowing was not the content of the knowledge. The point of knowing was to show me that I could know. But there was more. The point of knowing was also to show me that I could know such things before they happened. My engrained stubborn skepticism forced the Universe to amplify its efforts to see to it that I believed in my new abilities and remembered the lessons of the Garden.

 

"The morning after the dream, I had to find out if it was accurate. A strong feeling led me for some unknown reason to go see a pharmacist acquaintance where he worked. I just knew that he was connected to the woman from my dream. I drove over to the pharmacy but hesitated before I went in. I was torn. I wanted my precognition to be accurate because I wanted to prove to myself that I actually had this ability. Yet I also wanted it to be a fluke; I wanted some way to justify going back to my much simpler existence. I wanted to pretend that nothing had really happened and that I was the same person I had always been.

 

"I walked up to the pharmacy counter where this acquaintance was filling a prescription. He looked up and, after a few brief pleasantries, told me that a longtime customer of his had died early that morning. He always cared about his customers and took it to heart if anything happened to them. I heard the emotion in his voice as he spoke. I was deeply shaken, too, if for different reasons. I expressed my sympathies and rushed back to my car. Somehow I had been shown knowledge of this woman’s passing that turned out to be true, and this despite the fact that I had never even met her. I was not just confused, I was frightened.

 

"The dream of the woman’s passing was just the beginning. My burned feet had kept me in bed for long spells over the previous few months, but they were now healed, and I was able to get around. I had slept a lot. My sleeping had been filled with dreams and nightmares, some of which I remembered when I awoke. This already was a bit strange because, up until this point in my life, I had never had any great ability to recall a dream, even if I had just awakened from it. I would wake up, and the dream would slip away like sand through my fingers. Now, suddenly, I could remember some of them.

 

"At this early stage in my new life, it had not yet occurred to me to document the timing of my dreams or the incidences they appeared to relay. Occasionally, I would tell Barry or my mom about them when I had these dreams or nightmares. It made Barry uncomfortable to hear the tales of my nightmares that appeared to predict tragic events, so I didn’t tell him about all of them. My mom, on the other hand, was interested, and we would discuss it. It was after my first plane crash nightmare that I realized I needed to find some way to document these precognitions. And yet I still didn’t know how to do that."

 

Elizabeth G. Krohn and Jeffrey J. Kripal of Changed in a Flash: One Woman's Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks It Empowers Us All (North Atlantic Books, 2018). Krohn received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “The Eternal Life of Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts from Changed in a Flash.

Seeing visions and auras: Krohn excerpt #9

Elizabeth Krohn writes in her book entitled Changed in a Flash: "I had just had two traumas befall me. The first was the actual lightning strike itself, a physical trauma to my body that came with the bonus of spending time in the Garden at the side of God. The second trauma was finding myself back in my body with knowledge and insight that made me a woman whom neither I nor my family knew any longer.

The experience of being struck by lightning and the immediate effects that it had on me both in the Garden and afterwards—the differences in perceiving color and sound, the new knowledge, and the new understanding of time—were just precursors of the ways in which I was about to change. Something in me had opened. I now thought differently. I was much more comfortable now with ambiguity and complexity, less infatuated with black-and-white judging. It was clear to me that the definite separations and the clear either-or thinking that had defined so much of my life were simply not the way things really are. I had not been living in the actual world prior to my NDE. I had been living in an illusory world of my own judgments and learned responses. I had been wrong, and I felt no shame in admitting that to myself throughout the near- death experience, or since.

Shortly after my NDE, I began being bombarded with new abilities that varied in intensity. The one thing they all had in common was how foreign and new they were to me. I had no prior conception of precognition or reincarnation. I don’t remember having ever even thought about those topics. However, since my NDE, I found that I would sometimes dream about events before they happened. I would have precognitive nightmares about plane crashes or earthquakes. I received a phone call from a dead person. I became aware of a spirit living in my house. I realized that a necklace I owned was haunted. I could see auras around people, plants, and animals. I had all sorts of effects on anything electrical. And I developed something called synesthesia.

Who exactly had I become?

 

Elizabeth G. Krohn and Jeffrey J. Kripal of Changed in a Flash: One Woman's Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks It Empowers Us All (North Atlantic Books, 2018). Krohn received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “The Eternal Life of Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts from Changed in a Flash.

Back but no longer me: Krohn excerpt #8

Elizabeth Krohn writes in her book entitled Changed in a Flash: "I woke up in the rain on the wet asphalt of the synagogue parking lot. I gasped for air. (How long had I gone without it?) It filled my lungs and revived every cell in my body, though “revive” is sort of a funny word for it, because I felt groggy and was in pain. I was badly burned, terribly sore from hitting the concrete, and my left arm and hand were immobile—frozen, paralyzed into the same posture and grip as when I had been holding the umbrella. 

"My body had not moved at all from the position it was in when I was struck and fell into a heap on the pavement. My once beautiful new suit, enjoyed in its glory for barely a few fateful moments, was now permanently gray, and the soles of my beloved new pumps, still on my feet, were gone. They had taken the force of the electrical current as it grounded out through me and then through them.

"As I opened my eyes, I saw people moving toward me from the synagogue. Initially, I was confused as it dawned on me that while I had been somewhere else for what I experienced as two weeks, here on the parking lot pavement it was likely not more than a couple of minutes. I couldn’t understand how I had received so much information and had been so completely transformed in such a short time. It was jarring and bewildering.

"Serendipitously, one of the many physicians at services that night had extensive experience treating victims of lightning strikes and electrocution. He was a white-water rafter hobbyist and had helped several people who had been struck by lightning while rafting. Apparently, this is not an uncommon experience for white-water rafters. And, it is not uncommon for the Universe to provide exactly the person you need, with exactly the skills you need that person to have, exactly where and when your need arises.

"Doctors concluded that the relatively modest injuries from my lightning encounter were probably due to how I was struck and the nature of lightning itself. Lightning transmits its force downward, as it seeks the earth to ground out. From the top of my umbrella, the electricity flowed through the frame of the umbrella to the place on the metal shaft above the wooden handle where my wedding ring had been in contact with it. Had the lightning hit directly on my body, say, on my head, or if more of my hand had been in direct contact with the metal of the umbrella when it took the jolt, my experience would likely have been a permanent death experience rather than a near-death experience.

"When I awoke, it was still raining, but not storming as it had been minutes earlier. I have vague memories of being helped into the synagogue and onto the couch in the rabbi’s study. I was in and out of awareness, and really very tired. Several people were there, including the doctor who was a specialist in electrocution. I recall him telling me repeatedly to open my eyes. I was able to open them, but I could keep them open for only a few seconds, maybe up to a minute at a time. I was so tired, exhausted really. After examining me, the doctor concluded that I had a mild lightning injury, an MLI. He felt that I didn’t need to be hospitalized at that point.

"The doctor listened to my heart with his stethoscope and said it sounded fine. I was concerned that I couldn’t move my left arm and hand, but he explained that I had keraunoparalysis (lightning paralysis) that would be temporary. He said I would be able to move my hand and arm when the paralysis wore off in several hours. The paralysis lasted for about six hours before it subsided. He also encouraged me to have the burns on my feet and left hand checked and treated the next day. He explained that I’d have to stay off my feet, which meant bed rest, until the burns on my feet healed enough to be able to get around.

"So, I was back to my world. But I was soon to discover that I was no longer me."

Elizabeth G. Krohn and Jeffrey J. Kripal of Changed in a Flash: One Woman's Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks It Empowers Us All (North Atlantic Books, 2018). Krohn received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “The Eternal Life of Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts from Changed in a Flash.

Chooses unknown new life: Krohn excerpt #7

Elizabeth Krohn writes in her book entitled Changed in a Flash of her conversation in Heaven about her choice to stay or return to her family. "The thought that I would no longer physically be with my children if I chose to stay in Heaven was heartbreaking. I felt that one of my purposes in this life was to raise these three children and nurture their souls. And while I knew that I could choose to stay in Heaven, I also knew that this was something I would have to come back and repeat in another life if I didn’t do it now. 

"Plus, my children didn’t deserve to lose their mother if it was preventable, and I was being given the gift of the ability to keep that from happening. Some don’t get that option. Then again, I reasoned, perhaps my children had come into this current life with the knowledge that they would one day lose their mother. However, I also felt that if I was being given a choice to return, then losing their mother was not a given, and not something they should have to suffer as children in this lifetime. 

The missing wedding ring on my smooth hand when I looked at it in the Garden might have been a harbinger of all of this. Still, I had a hard time believing that we would get divorced. Barry and I were perfectly happy with each other and our growing family. 

"What I did not yet realize was that the Elizabeth who returned from the Garden was not the same Elizabeth who had been struck by lightning in the synagogue parking lot. I was simply no longer the person Barry had married. 

"So I agreed to return to my life to raise Jeremy, Andy, and our daughter-to-be, whom I had a burning curiosity to meet and raise, and whom I already loved. I also knew that the changes in me were going to make me a different type of parent than I had been previously. I understood that while I would be different, Barry would still be the same as he had always been. I wanted very much to share my new knowledge with my children as I raised them. I didn’t want them to be saddled with my old black-and-white, rigid way of thinking. I wanted them to understand the nuances of varying shades of gray. 

My companion in the Garden cautioned me that going back would be physically very painful. My burns and burst eardrums were physical injuries to my body that I had not felt yet because I had not been in my body to suffer them. By reclaiming my physical self, I was also agreeing to accept whatever pain was there to bear. I understood that I would have to spend time off my burned feet. My companion reiterated that I needed to remember the overwhelming feeling of unconditional love. Since I was returning to my life as a different person than I had been when I left, that loving feeling would be tremendously comforting and reinforcing as I tried to fit back into society as a dramatically changed person and continue my life. 

"He also told me about another kind of pain I would feel as I returned to my body. He said he would have to “help” me back into my body by hugging me tightly, so tightly, in fact, that it would feel as if my bones were being crushed. He explained that this was necessary because my soul was now much larger than my body, and it needed to be squeezed back into my physical frame. Apparently, a physical body is merely a vessel that houses and contains one’s soul. Once the soul is freed from the constraints of the body, it no longer has to be a particular size. It can expand and fill as much space as is needed or desired. 

 

"My understanding of the unconditional love, my knowledge of the afterlife, and all the information I had absorbed there were now part of who I was, and this had expanded the size of my soul. As promised, the hugging was bone- crushingly painful and suffocating as he lovingly squeezed me back into my burned body.

"I woke up in the rain on the wet asphalt of the synagogue parking lot."

Elizabeth G. Krohn and Jeffrey J. Kripal of Changed in a Flash: One Woman's Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks It Empowers Us All (North Atlantic Books, 2018). Krohn received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “The Eternal Life of Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts from Changed in a Flash.

 

Choice to return to her body: Krohn excerpt #6

"My guide in the Garden shared knowledge with me and instantly answered my questions for the entire two-week period I was there. There were three richly colored moon bodies or planets orbiting and revolving above us. I understood the passage of time in the Garden realm by observing the movement of these three celestial bodies. These orbs were vividly bright and appeared, as best I can describe them, to be what we would call violet, although the violet here on Earth does not approach the vibrancy of the violet in the Garden. By instinctively reading this calendar of sorts by the movement of the orbs, an ability I found I already possessed without any effort, I came to know that my visit to the Garden lasted two weeks. I instinctively knew how time worked and passed in a nonlinear fashion in the Garden, just as I know how it works (or at least how we perceive it to work) linearly here on Earth. 

 

"I know that the concept of a calendar that marks the passage of time appears to contradict the simultaneity of time in the Garden that I alluded to earlier. I learned that, even in the Garden where time felt simultaneous, there was still a way to ascertain the seeming passage of time taking place on Earth. And though initially in the Garden everything seemed to be happening all at once, once I began to converse with my companion and receive information from him, time seemed to become linear again for the duration of my visit. 

 

"I now understand that this happened not because time actually became linear for two weeks, but because I would have no other way of decoding the information I received in the Garden once I was back here in this world. The only way I can understand here what was told to me there is to remember it in linear terms. I do not know if the near-death experience itself was linear, or if I just have to remember it in those terms in order to decipher, understand, and communicate it. My gut feeling is that time there was not linear, but that linear time is my only frame of reference here. 

 

"My companion told me that I was welcome to stay there in the Garden, or I could choose to return to my Earthly body. The choice was mine, and his job was to tell me everything I wanted and needed to know to help me make the decision. He also explained that, if I decided to stay, he would escort me from the Garden along a path and over the mountains to where the living glow still patiently awaited my arrival. 

 

My companion told me two things that clinched my decision to leave the Garden and return to my still unfinished life. Both involved my children. First, he told me that if I returned to my life, I would have a third child, a daughter. He explained that she had already selected Barry and me as her parents. As he told me this, I understood that if my daughter was already a soul that had made a conscious decision to come to this life as a new baby, then she had possibly been here before. And if she had been here before, we all have possibly been here before. This idea of reincarnation really resonated and made sense to me. I now knew that reincarnation was a fact. When Jeremy and Andy had been born, and I held them for the first time, I already recognized them. It was a different feeling from the overwhelming love I felt for them. It was a familiarity. I had known them before. 

 

Reincarnation was a topic to which I had previously not given much thought, if any at all. Had I thought about it prior to my NDE, I would have laughed it off as impossible. But hearing that my child chose me as her mother, somehow made the process of reincarnation not only real, but deliberate and planned. It also made sense of the familiarity I felt with my children as newborns. I understand now that each life is pre-planned and of our own choosing. I asked why anyone would choose a harsh life. Immediately, I was answered. Every life is fraught with difficulties, and the level and specifics of the difficulties depend on the lessons and growth the soul wishes to achieve in any given life. Once a soul achieves the highest level of advancement, they “graduate” and no longer have to come back to this dimension. This dimension, where we all currently reside, is very harsh, and we all should be commended for agreeing to return for more hard-won lessons! 

 

Still, my companion told me not to let the knowledge of a future third child color my decision too much. If I decided to stay in the Garden, my future daughter would simply select other parents. In other words, she was returning regardless of my decision. 

 

The second thing he told me that helped me decide to return to my life here was that my marriage to Barry would not withstand the changes in me that this whole experience would create. I was told that if I chose to return, Barry and I would be facing a divorce. This was a clincher for me, as I knew that I wanted, and needed, to be the parent to raise our children. I first had to be there, of course, to do this, which meant coming back.

 

 

Elizabeth G. Krohn and Jeffrey J. Kripal of Changed in a Flash: One Woman's Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks It Empowers Us All (North Atlantic Books, 2018). Krohn received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “The Eternal Life of Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts from Changed in a Flash.

Elizabeth's heavenly experience: Krohn excerpt #5

My grandfather’s soft familiar voice, complete with the French accent that made it so distinct during his life, was a soothing presence. He said that audible speech would disrupt my absorption of the surroundings, so he was going to give me information, knowledge, and answers to my questions silently. I believe that this voice was actually not my grandfather speaking to me, but was God using my grandfather’s voice to put me at ease. This was a strange reckoning for me, given that in life I had been such a non-religious and non-spiritual person who gave very little, if any, thought to the existence of God. And yet, here I was, sitting on a bench with someone I thought was God in a place that I knew was Heaven. 

The calming voice shared things with me about our family that only my grandfather, and of course God, would know. This presence gave me information that showed a total knowledge of where I was and what choices I would need to make if I chose to go back to my life on Earth. He relayed the clear impression that the choice to remain in the Garden or to reoccupy my burned body was mine to make. I understood that I could take as long as I needed to make the decision to either stay in the Garden or return to my life on Earth, and that I would be given information that would help me make that decision. 

I was dead, but I was more alive, conscious, and aware than when I had been that twenty-eight year old woman with the children and the umbrella in the synagogue parking lot a mere second earlier. I was surrounded by and suffused with an unutterable feeling of unconditional love. The love was all-encompassing and embraced me in every possible way. Everything in the Garden emanated love. The lull of a gently babbling brook, the cadence of the soothing otherworldly music surrounding me, and the resplendent, fragrant visual feast of constantly blooming flowers and hypnotic colors I had never seen before, all reinforced the knowledge that I now had: that I was safe, protected, and unconditionally loved by God. I was home. 

The glow that I had followed into the Garden initially had moved away from me. It seemed to be a living energy, a conscious entity that moved with purpose. It was still to my upper right, but it had now shifted behind a mountain range, whose outline in the distance was backlit with the glow’s shimmering light from behind the mountains. I resisted the impulse to follow the living glow to the mountains, since the peace, comfort, beauty, and ineffable love that surrounded me where I was sitting were all that I could ever want. The sound of the brook nearby, the music in the air, the sweet scents of the otherworldly vegetative oasis, and the vivid backdrop of the sky and mountains lulled me to depths that I had never known my soul to possess.

Regardless of whether my companion on the ornate bench was actually my grandfather or, as I suspected, God, I knew that I was not alone in the Garden, and I knew that the feeling of abundant unconditional love that this presence communicated to me would never leave me. Still today, I can draw on that memory of unwavering acceptance and love when I need to do so. I could have gratefully and willingly remained there for eternity. That love, that place, that afterlife was a gift, tailored to me, from a higher being that loved me unconditionally.

The landscape was clearly meant to comfort me and put me at ease. The sound of flowing water, be it a gentle brook or crashing ocean waves, is something I have always found to be soothing. A view of any landscape has always been enhanced for me if there is a body of water in the scenery. I think that is why it was so prominent and noticeable to me among the other sweet sounds that permeated the Garden. What I understood is that all who arrive in this place encounter and perceive whatever is most comforting and beautiful to them. My source of comfort was the all-embracing feeling of unconditional perpetual love and the unmatched beauty of my surroundings all captured in the Garden. This was my personal Heaven.

I understood that all who come to this wondrous place are soothed and welcomed by whatever they find soothing, comforting, and pleasurable in life. Therefore, it made sense that my Heaven looked like a perfectly manicured garden. I love gardens and find peace and joy in spending time in a well tended garden. During my time in my heavenly Garden, I saw people in the distance. I instinctively knew that those people perhaps had visions of something other than a garden as their perfect Heaven. People I saw in the distance may have expected their Heaven to be a thickly wooded forest. Others may have seen a boundless field of wildflowers, or a quiet beach with gently rolling waves. Yet we were all in exactly the same place. We were each in a Heaven tailored specifically for each individual soul there. Understanding this loving kindness added to my ease during my visit to the Garden.

I also understood that one’s own appearance there projects the best of each person’s soul in their most recent Earthly life. The type of person you are here on Earth colors the experience you will have in the afterlife. What we do with our time here on Earth matters. A lot. Learning this was surprising to me as I never thought that my actions or thought processes during life would have any bearing at all on my death. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I learned in the Garden that not only the acts I performed during my life but even my very thoughts and feelings had woven together to create the tapestry that was my afterlife—my Garden. The fact that I had been a good person in life mattered in the Garden. The fact that I had not been religious did not.

I feel so inadequate in my attempt to convey the overwhelming totality of the Garden. Time there is perpetual. Its events and sensations all occur at once. This idea of simultaneous time, the physics of it, is something I understood while I was in the Garden but have difficulty explaining, or even understanding, now. I do understand, however, that it is possible to return from another realm or dimension and be completely unable to help those who have not seen it to understand that it even exists at all. Something can be perfectly true yet completely unbelievable and impossible to scientifically prove.

This knowledge that I was absorbing while on the ornate bench in the presence of the loving being who spoke in the voice of my beloved grandfather was also shared with the other humans (or souls) whose forms I saw in the distance. Everyone was in pairs, and no one was alone. Everyone was dressed in what I knew as street clothes. And they were all perfectly beautiful, youthful, and healthy. I wondered: If they were all so perfect, was I?

I looked at my left hand, curious as to how the burn from the lightning strike had affected it. My hand looked as if it belonged to a younger woman. There were no chipped nails or imperfections on the skin, and certainly no burn from the lightning. I noticed that there was also no wedding ring. All I saw was the pristine skin of myself at eighteen or so. The skin on my hand was flawless.

As soon as I thought of questions, I had the answers. I saw people in the distance, although no one approached me. Why were they all paired up? Did I appear to them to be alone? My companion explained that I was also part of a pair, and that he was the other half of the pair. We must have appeared to the distant human forms as they did to me—as a pair, and as beautiful as I ever was at my best.

As quickly as I was receiving answers to my seemingly unlimited stream of questions, I had more questions. There was only one question for which I never received an answer: What did my companion in the Garden look like? Did this partner of mine look like my grandfather at age ninety when he died, or did he look as he did at age eighteen, as everyone else there seemed to? Or did he have an entirely different appearance? I don’t know because I never looked at him. I now think I was not supposed to see him because I would have been overwhelmed at the sight of my beloved grandfather.

Or by the beauty of God himself.

Elizabeth G. Krohn and Jeffrey J. Kripal of Changed in a Flash: One Woman's Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks It Empowers Us All (North Atlantic Books, 2018). Krohn received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “The Eternal Life of Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts from Changed in a Flash.

Experience outside "dead" body: Krohn excerpt #4

After Elizabeth Krohn realized that her consciousness was outside her body, which was lying inert on the pavement of the parking lot of her synagogue due to the lightning bolt that had hit her, she began to accept her continuing conscious experience happening after her death. She writes her book, Changed in a Flash: One Woman's Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks It Empowers Us All (North Atlantic Books, 2018), "I was connecting all these dots, a warm, inviting golden glow appeared to my upper right. It was not a fixed light but more of a moving beacon that I knew I needed to follow. There was no defined form to the glow. It was more like the diffused light that shimmers around the sun, a flame, or a light bulb. In any case, I understood that I was dead and that my children were safe with my family and the community at the synagogue, so I gave in to the temptation and followed the warmth that beckoned me. 

"Things immediately became even more foreign to me than they already were. I was suddenly jolted by the understanding that time is not linear. Things were happening in my field of vision, and new capacities were awakening within me, but they were all taking place at the same time. My movement was no longer encumbered by my physical body. Whatever it was that I had become flew without resistance or exertion toward the warm glow.

"As I followed it, I was led to what I came to call the Garden, although it was unlike any garden here on Earth. Many things about my visit to the Garden I struggle to describe. The words I need to accurately report what I saw just don’t exist. We simply can’t perceive the Garden 'where' (in space) and 'when' (in time) we are now.

"I have a theory that there is a reason the ability to sufficiently describe my surroundings doesn’t exist: perhaps it isn’t supposed to exist. One of the things I learned in the afterlife is that no two souls have identical afterlife experiences. Each experience in the afterlife is tailored to each individual soul, their expectations, and their needs. Each soul perceives the afterlife, and everything about it, differently. The idea that one particular vision of the afterlife is the only one would be untrue. Therefore, if the words to describe what someone perceives after death don’t even exist, then no one can be misled or have any preconceived notions of how their personal afterlife will appear. My theory of 'nonexistent adjectives' is perhaps the Universe’s way of protecting us from inaccurate expectations of the afterlife.

"Even so, I will try to describe what I saw, felt, and learned using our limited existing language and vocabulary. But any attempt to articulate the captivating beauty, knowledge, and all-encompassing unconditional love falls short when I attempt to describe such a place. The glow led me to a beautiful bench made of what appeared to be hand-carved wooden scrollwork, which had been sanded and polished until the wood was glossy. The wood itself was much more gorgeous and richly colored than any wood I have seen on Earth. The graceful curves and swirls of the deeply carved wood almost looked fluid and felt like a creamy silk or satin to my touch. It was incredibly beautiful and elaborately ornate and looked like an elegant baroque throne built for two. The unique beauty of this bench was only surpassed by the otherworldly comfort I felt when a familiar voice welcomed me and told me to sit on the bench. The voice was that of my beloved grandfather, whose death the previous year was the reason I had been at services that fateful day, when I was struck by the lightning.

"When you find yourself dead, in a place of otherworldly love and beauty, with a sudden understanding of everything, and you hear your beloved deceased grandfather tell you to sit on the most elaborately crafted bench you have ever seen, you sit. I took a seat on the ornately carved bench and found that it conformed to whatever my individual 'body' had become as soon as I sat down. The bench morphed around me. As I sat, cradled in the most comfortable seat imaginable, I began to look around. I saw that I was surrounded by a Garden of foreign plants, the likes of which I had never seen before, or even imagined. The plants continuously blossomed into magnificent flowers that seemed to explode with colors from another spectrum inaccessible here."

Elizabeth G. Krohn and Jeffrey J. Kripal of Changed in a Flash: One Woman's Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks It Empowers Us All (North Atlantic Books, 2018). Krohn received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “The Eternal Life of Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included.

After-death communication: Krohn excerpt #3

After-death communications (ADCs) come in numerous forms but always involve a deceased soul communicating with a living person. Thus, the implication is that the deceased person has a consciousness that is still functional, has survived the death of the physical body, and is contacting (or attempting to contact) a living person. There are sometimes verifiable eyewitnesses, such as those who have experienced an after-death communication, and those who have been with someone who has received an ADC when it happened. This type of witness testimony can be difficult to scientifically prove since, like NDEs, it is based on experiencer testimony. The data cannot be directly observed by the researcher but can only be culled from the narrative of the person who received the communication.

There are numerous ways in which the surviving consciousness of deceased people will attempt to bridge the dimensional gap and contact the living. According to Marilyn Mendoza, PhD in Psychology Today, there are twelve main categories of ADCs, including sensing a presence, hearing a voice, feeling a touch, smelling a fragrance, visual experiences, and visions. Other categories include twilight experiences that happen just as a person is dozing off to sleep, just waking up, or meditating/praying. ADCs can sometimes be out-of-body experiences, where the living person leaves their body and visits the deceased person wherever they are. This can include physical phenomena such as flashing lights, objects falling off shelves, or appliances turning on.

The ADC category Mendoza discusses that happened to me is telephone calls. Mendoza states, “These are said to be among the more frequently occurring signs. Calls may occur while awake or asleep. People have reported their phones ringing and hearing messages from the deceased.” In my case, my landline phone rang, waking two people, and I had a full conversation with my deceased grandfather.

As someone who has experienced both an NDE and an ADC, providing this best evidence is what I will attempt to do in layman’s language in the following pages. It is not an academic or scientific dissertation on proof of an afterlife, not only because I am not a scholar or a scientific researcher, but also, and most importantly, because absolute proof doesn’t exist. What does exist is credible eyewitness testimonial evidence.

Elizabeth G. Krohn and Jeffrey J. Kripal of Changed in a Flash: One Woman's Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks It Empowers Us All (North Atlantic Books, 2018). Krohn received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “The Eternal Life of Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts from Changed in a Flash.

Knowledge death isn't the end: Krohn excerpt #2

While typical scientific research sorely lacks necessary observation, observation is exactly what credible eyewitness testimony provides.

Though there is plenty of evidence, none of it can prove with certainty that consciousness survives permanent bodily death. No eyewitness has survived permanent bodily death. The next best witness is someone who has survived temporary bodily death, remembers remaining conscious during the event, and is able to recall and recount specific details from the event. This is an experiencer, someone who has actually experienced death (or near-death), remained conscious throughout the process, and witnessed the afterlife for themselves.2 There is an abundance of experiencer eyewitness testimony that serves as credible evidence in both the public and private domains—experiencers of near-death experiences (NDEs).

From reading or listening to individual NDE testimonies, an inference can be made that consciousness does survive permanent bodily death from the extrapolation that consciousness survives temporary bodily death in NDEs. And the best existing experience that comes closest to permanent death is near death. I am not a scientist, a scholar, or a faith leader. What qualifies me to address the question is my own near-death experience, which turned me from an adamant skeptic to—not just a believer—a knower. I now know that our souls continue on after bodily death.

More than that, the NDE changed me in ways I never could have imagined. On September 1, 1988 I was a skeptic. Nothing could have dissuaded me from believing that when a person dies, that’s the end—that they are gone and nothing of them remains. But a bolt of lightning literally jolted me into reality.

On September 2, 1988, that lightning bolt bestowed upon me a gift, the power and profundity of which remain unmatched more than three decades later. That gift was knowledge that death isn’t the end; knowledge that where we are now is a temporary place, and where we go when we die is home; knowledge that what we do with our time here matters and affects our afterlife; knowledge that our souls, the vessels that carry our consciousness, continue on after bodily death and actually become keenly aware, awake, and all-knowing once unencumbered by our bodies.

It’s this element of my NDE, the knowing, that qualifies me to answer the question of what the best available evidence is for the survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. Unless they have had an NDE, no researcher, scholar, faith leader, or scientist can know without any doubt that consciousness survives permanent bodily death. I can testify to that, and I do so without reservation. The certainty and penetrating knowledge resulting from my experience and the experiences communicated by many who have had NDEs are the best and strongest evidence available.

 

Elizabeth G. Krohn and Jeffrey J. Kripal of Changed in a Flash: One Woman's Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks It Empowers Us All (North Atlantic Books, 2018). Krohn received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “The Eternal Life of Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts from Changed in a Flash.

NDE due to lightning strike: Krohn excerpt #1

Elizabeth Krohn

Elizabeth G. Krohn is the author with Jeffrey J. Kripal of Changed in a Flash: One Woman's Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks It Empowers Us All (North Atlantic Books, 2018). Krohn received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “The Eternal Life of Consciousness.” Her complete essay is available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

When Elizabeth Greenfield Krohn got out of her car with her two young sons in the parking lot of her synagogue on a late afternoon in September 1988, she couldn't have anticipated she would within seconds be struck by lightning and have a near-death experience. She felt herself transported to a garden and engaging in a revelatory conversation with a spiritual being. When she recovered, her most fundamental understandings of what the world is and how it works had been completely transformed. She was “changed in a flash,” suddenly able to interact with those who had died and have prescient dreams predicting news events. She came to believe that some early traumatic and abusive experiences had played a part in preparing her for this experience.
 
Told in matter-of-fact language, the first half of this book is the story of Krohn’s journey, and the second is an interpretation and analysis by Jeffrey J. Kripal, Associate Dean of the School of Humanities at Rice University who holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought. Kirpal is also Associate Director of the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California and served as the Editor in Chief of the Macmillan Handbook Series on Religion. He places Krohn's experience in the context of religious traditions and proposes the groundbreaking idea that we are shaping our own experiences in the future by how we engage with near-death experiences in the present. Changed in a Flash is not about proving a story, but about carving out space for serious discussion of this phenomenon.

Elizabeth G. Krohn writes:

 

What is the best available evidence for the survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death? While numerous scientific practitioners have attempted to conclusively answer this question, none so far have succeeded.

Why not?

Despite the advances it has attained for humanity, the scientific method is inadequate to conclusively answer the above question. Strong innate curiosity has compelled many brilliant minds to pursue science, usually using methods that overlay data with the rigidity of the scientific method. However, some of these same researchers find that there are times that this method does not—cannot—yield accurate answers.

An integral and inextricable component to the scientific method is observation. Observation is a cripplingly missing element when it comes to what researchers call “scientific” studies. It is not possible to effectively employ the scientific method in studies on this subject because the researchers cannot personally observe the data. They can only assemble the testimony of experiencers into groupings and make some assumptions that may or may not be what the individual narratives intended. Those studies, while good tools, are not the best evidence. The best evidence must come from individual near-death experiencers telling their individual stories.

Part of what makes science so dependable is the fact that it is an iterative process. In order for a theory to be scientifically accepted, it must be repeatable on demand. Therefore, to say definitively that human consciousness survives permanent bodily death from a purely scientific standpoint, one would be required to repeatedly run the experiment on demand and get the same results each time. Since this would involve intentionally causing permanent bodily death to humans, and then somehow communicating with the deceased in a documented and verifiable manner, it cannot currently be done in a legal or humane setting.

 

Elizabeth G. Krohn and Jeffrey J. Kripal of Changed in a Flash: One Woman's Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks It Empowers Us All (North Atlantic Books, 2018). Krohn received an award from the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies for her essay “The Eternal Life of Consciousness,” available at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Footnotes in the essay are not included in these excerpts from Changed in a Flash.