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.