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.

Death and our purpose: Mishlove excerpt #16

Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove ends his award winning paper, “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death," with these two conclusions. Footnotes in Mishlove's essay and videos he includeshave been removed in this presentation of his essay but are available and may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.

Terminal Lucidity

This well-documented phenomenon occurs among individuals who have Alzheimer’s disease or who are otherwise brain damaged. Bedridden patients can sometimes sit up, bright-eyed and alert. They can carry on conversations beyond their earlier abilities. Since a severely compromised brain cannot regenerate suddenly like this while a patient is on their deathbed, the most reasonable interpretation is that consciousness can function independently of the brain. One might even say the brain has deteriorated so much it can no longer act as a filter keeping the larger consciousness (or self or soul) from awareness.

Terminal lucidity usually occurs between two-weeks and shortly before death. Philosopher Stafford Betty describes a typical case of terminal lucidity in the video segment below. The dying person, who may even be in a vegetative state, can suddenly “erupt” into their old personality with full memory. It happens in 5-10% of Alzheimer’s cases.

My wife, Janelle Barlow, witnessed terminal lucidity with my mother who was suffering from both Alzheimer’s and a stroke. The episode lasted for about two hours and occurred within a week of her final passing. It included a heartfelt conversation about life, marriage, children, and the progress of my mother’s disease. 

Postmortem survival is natural

Since 1972, when Uncle Harry came to me in a dream at the time of his death, I have spent my professional life exploring parapsychology and its implications for our understanding of postmortem survival and consciousness. Having a solid theoretical and practical knowledge of the field, I have over the decades been able to engage in persistent inquiries through the interview process – and have created video conversations with both experts and experiencers, going back thirty-five years.

Science has yet to show that consciousness is a product of neurological functioning. Alternative viewpoints have a lengthy history, going back more than a century. There is empirical support for the filtration theory of William James. We can also integrate postmortem survival into science by developing hypotheses entailing hyperspace mathematics. Pure logic favors metaphysical idealism as an explanatory model of reality, as Max Planck, quantum mechanics’ founder, explicitly said. From this perspective, consciousness survival is natural and expected.

The great Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung addressed what he considers civilization’s primary ailment in his book, Modern Man in Search of a Soul.

“As a physician I am convinced that it is hygienic – if I may use the word – to discover in death a goal towards which one can strive; and that shrinking away from it is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.”

We hide from our own deepest identity when we postulate that consciousness is extinguished with the death of the body – resulting in a severe gap in our capacity for self-knowledge.

 

Jeffrey Mishlove’s essay, “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” received first prize in the 2021 Bigelow Institute’s challenge to provide proof for the survival of human consciousness after death. Footnotes in Mishlove’s essay and videos he refers to have been removed in this presentation but are available in his essay, which may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Mishlove is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, and host on YouTube of “New Thinking Allowed.” 

The parsimony principle: Mishlove excerpt #15

Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove in “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” argues that consciousness is fundamental.

For centuries, scholars have recognized Occam’s Razor as the fundamental rule of explanation itself. The preferred explanation is always the one with the fewest assumptions that can account for all the relevant facts. There is almost universal consensus concerning this principle. In scientism’s dark age, we have deviated from this important principle by presuming dead matter is the foundation of reality. That’s why we say when something is important to us, it matters. In this dark age, we give precedence to external sensations over intuitions and feelings. That’s also why, when we agree with some statement, we say it makes sense. These ideas, elevating the importance of materiality and sensation, are so deeply ingrained we don’t normally even consider whether or not they are valid.

Paradoxically, all philosophy begins in the mind – and not in matter. Descartes made this explicit with his simple statement in Latin: Cogito ergo sum. I think, therefore, I am.

We each have direct knowledge of our mind. Nothing is more immediate and intimate. We lack direct access to anything else but mind. The great twentieth-century physicists, such as Erwin Schrödinger and Max Planck, understood this. Planck, the founder of quantum physics, famously said:

"I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness."

Planck’s position – an explicit statement of idealist metaphysics – is neither a fringe, nor outdated, viewpoint. Richard Conn Henry, Academy Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Johns Hopkins University, published a similar perspective in Nature in 2005. He wrote:

"Physicists shy from the truth because the truth is so alien to everyday physics... The universe is immaterial – mental and spiritual."

Unfortunately for the subject matter at hand, for many people, “immaterial” means irrelevant! This is yet another example of scientism’s distorting influence.

If Max Planck was correct and pure mind-at-large, as the fundamental category of reality, suffices to explain all knowledge – then there is no need to postulate dead matter as an extra category of existence! Idealism, the position the universe is essentially mindlike, satisfies the parsimony requirement in the metaphysical domain. Metaphysical idealism is a worldview where postmortem survival is both natural and expected. 

 

Note by Robert Traer: For scientific arguments in support of a post-materialist science, see https://rtraer.com/post-materialist-science.html.

 

Jeffrey Mishlove’s essay, “Beyond the Brain: The Survival of Human Consciousness After Permanent Bodily Death,” received first prize in the 2021 Bigelow Institute’s challenge to provide proof for the survival of human consciousness after death. Footnotes in Mishlove’s essay and videos he refers have been removed in this presentation but are available in his essay, which may be downloaded at https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php. Mishlove is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, and host on YouTube of “New Thinking Allowed.”