Radio receiver to the cosmos: Krohn except #12

Elizabeth Krohn writes in her book entitled Changed in a Flash: "One particular precognitive plane crash nightmare is different from my usual ones. I have never published this story because I feel it infringes on the privacy of those involved. For that reason, in the following recounting of this nightmare, I have changed identifying information, such as names, dates, physical characteristics, and locations, to protect the identities of the victims’ family members.

"Matt and I went out to dinner with friends on June 29, 2011. The following day, June 30, I was feeling sick nearly all day, I thought maybe from food poisoning. By early evening, though I was feeling better, I was still weak and exhausted and went to bed early.

"At a point during my sleep, I was in one of my plane crash nightmares. As usual, I was completely aware of the fact that I was dreaming. This one was different, however. Before this incident, my vision of what was to happen had always appeared to me like a photograph that I was viewing as an outsider. That snapshot is what would appear on the news after the event. So it was all the more startling in my dream that night when I was on the plane that was destined to crash.

"Another element that set this nightmare apart from the others is that I found out the following day that the events had been happening as I was dreaming about them. This crash didn’t happen a day or two after my nightmare—it happened during the nightmare, which was unusually long. It just kept going on for far longer than I was comfortable. In the other nightmares, as soon as I saw whatever image depicted the given event, I was released to wake up by whatever force was holding me there. This however, was not a single image. It was a movie, and I was in it, bound to endure every minute until the plot ended. It was about to become very unpleasant.

"It was nighttime on the flight, dark and quiet, and many of the passengers were sleeping. I could hear some flight attendants speaking in a foreign language nearby in the galley. I looked at a paper napkin that was embossed with the name of a major foreign airline whose nationality matched the language the flight attendants were speaking.

"I was seated on the tray table (not a seat with a tray table—on the tray table itself) of a woman who was buckled into her seat. We were very close to each other, face to face. In the seat next to her was a little boy playing with an electronic toy.

"The young woman, who was remarkably pretty with shoulder-length dark hair, could see me and was talking to me. She told me her name was Monique Frankel. It was as if we were at some kind of social function, introducing ourselves and making small talk.

"She introduced me to her son Thomas and told me that he was seven years old. Thomas spoke to me, too, but not in English. Monique was speaking to me in accented English. I don't remember asking her anything. I just remember her telling me things about herself and her family. She told me that she also had a daughter, and that her daughter was with her husband on a different flight because they thought it was a bad idea to all fly together. I somehow knew that this was a flight from Buenos Aires to Barcelona, and that they were going home from vacation.

"Without warning or a hint of turbulence, the plane banked sharply to the left. It began rocking violently back and forth, and I was being thrust toward Monique’s seat as if the nose of the plane were up. There was a terrible sensation of falling. People were now awake and screaming. Monique had a panicked look in her eyes. She and I both knew that I could leave the plane before it crashed. All I had to do was open my eyes and the nightmare would end. But I could not open them. Monique had grabbed on to my forearms and was screaming in my face. Screaming, in a panicked and primal way. Everyone else on the plane was screaming, too, and the passenger cabin was bedlam. Amid all the noise, items were flying through the cabin, including people who had not been belted into their seats. At the top of her lungs, Monique was pleading with me to take Thomas with me when I left the plane. She was begging, wailing, “I know you can leave! Take Thomas! His father is George Frankel! Find him and get Thomas to him! Take Thomas! Please!”

"I knew I couldn’t take Thomas or anyone else off that plane with me. I also knew opening my eyes and waking up were becoming more and more urgent. But as long as Monique had a grip on my arms, I was stuck on that plane. Finally, mercifully, there was a jolt, and she let go. My eyes ripped open, and I was safe in my bed. Crying, gasping, but safe. Immediately I sent myself an email with the details of what had just happened.

"The email I sent myself was time-stamped at 11:38 p.m., and the plane crashed at 4:40 a.m. in a time zone that was five hours ahead of mine. I was dreaming about the crash as it was happening. Matt was surprised when I showed him the email, particularly because it had people’s names in it. So far, that has been the only time I have received such detailed information.

"As it was a jumbo jet crash with hundreds of people on board, no survivors, the tragedy was major news all over the world. Three days after the crash, the passenger manifest was printed in the local newspaper, along with the ages and nationalities of everyone on board. There I saw it:

"Monique Frankel, age 38, Netherlands
Thomas Frankel, age 7, Netherlands, son of Monique Frankel

"I did a little research over the next few weeks and found a human interest piece from a Dutch newspaper. The article was about victims of the plane crash, and it highlighted Monique and Thomas. It said that Monique’s husband George and their daughter had been on another flight. They had interviewed George, who explained that the family never flew together in case something like this were to happen, just as Monique had explained it to me on the doomed plane. The article also had photos of the family from their recent vacation in Buenos Aires. The photos clearly depicted the woman and child whom I had met in my dream. Seeing the photos took my breath away.

"Years later, as Jeff Kripal and I were working on Changed in a Flash, I decided to try to find George Frankel. I wanted this story to be in the book, but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to upset anyone by publishing it. After all, he and his daughter are also victims.

"I found George on Facebook. He was about to get remarried and looked very happy. His daughter is beautiful, and she seemed happy and loved. I did not disturb his contentment by contacting him. I figured it was best to just let him move forward with his life. For that reason, Jeff and I did not put this story in the book.

"So, why am I telling it now?

"Shortly after finding George on Facebook, I was fortunate to be invited to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. It was there that I was introduced to Whitley Strieber. Whitley has written numerous books and hosts several podcasts, my favorite being Dreamland, on the topic of UFOs and similar phenomena. He and I became friends while we were at Esalen, and I told him about this particular nightmare because it upset me more than any of the others. Whitley responded with something that changed my entire attitude toward how I can approach nightmares such as this one.

"Whitley said, 'Elizabeth, you told me you learned in your NDE that time is simultaneous, right?'

“'Yes. Time is not linear,' I replied.

“'Well,' Whitley said, 'If that is the case, then that plane crash happened, but it will happen again, and again. Right?'

“'Yes. That’s awful. So?' I asked.

“'So, learn how to go back there, he suggested. 'Go there again, and perhaps you can offer some comfort to Monique. Comfort her with the knowledge that death is not the end of her life. Give her comfort that some part of her lives on.'

"It was like a light bulb going on. Of course, Whitley is correct. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to get back to that crash. But if I could, it might possibly bring some reassurance to Monique, or other such people I might meet in similar future encounters.

"A mom to two young boys when all this started, I was busy all day every day. I didn’t approach any of this curious change as some kind of scientific experiment or academic case study. It was not intellectual for me, but rather emotional, and the emotion I most felt was anger. I had no desire to become some radio receiver to the cosmos. I didn’t want the moral burden of any of this. But the premonitions continued to plague me, every one of them made of the same stuff—that undeniable knowledge that these tragedies were perfectly true. I had no idea what to do with this unsolicited information. I was frustrated, angry, and determined to get answers. And while I have learned a great deal since these visions of the future started, there is still so much I don’t understand.

"It has never stopped. Thirty-three years after the lightning strike, these incidents continue, occasionally even when I am wide awake. One day in February of 2003, Matt and I were driving to meet some friends for dinner. I turned to him, grabbed his arm, and said: 'Earthquake, an area in western China.' That was on a Sunday evening in Houston. In the early morning hours on Monday, the earthquake hit China. It happened too late for the Monday papers in the United States and was in too distant a rural area to attract media attention, at least as far as we knew. But in the Tuesday paper, there was a brief on the international page about a severe earthquake that had taken place in western China at approximately the same time that I had grabbed Matt’s arm and told him it was happening. 

 

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 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.