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.