Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.
—Benjamin Franklin
There is no particular order to the things I have come to know since I was in the Garden. I have, however, come to understand that the general direction that much of this knowledge takes me is along paths that are remarkably parallel to places described in texts of the Asian religions, especially in their more mystically oriented expressions.
I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of or believer in any structured religious doctrine, except for the pallid brand of Reform Judaism in which I was raised. The only remotely religious texts I have ever read are parts of the Torah (the first five books of the Bible), in English, and so long ago that I can scarcely remember anything but some of the stories.
When I write, then, that I have come to recognize some similarities between what I learned in the Garden and what some of the Asian religions teach, it is only because people who are well versed on the subject of religion have told me so. My coauthor of this book, the inestimable Jeffrey Kripal, has said that a part of what was given to me in the Garden is very close not only to Asian religious traditions, but also and especially to Kabbalah, the mystical tradition of Judaism. I find this all comforting, to be honest. These similarities are for me further testimony to the fact that I am sane. As I have come to learn, I am not the only person on the planet who has attained, or in my case, been shocked into receiving this knowledge.
Jeff has also told me that thousands of years of human effort—by people too numerous to count—have been expended in the search for the knowledge that popped into me, seemingly effortlessly and immediately, during and following my near-death experience. If it seems that I gloss over such effort in describing some of my experiences, like the ease with which I can see the auras surrounding people, it is because that ability is so natural to me. I don’t mean to diminish these abilities in any way. I am only a conduit for them. I can make no claims about their exceptional nature, and I certainly can’t take credit for them. This would be like the radio taking credit for the song playing over it. I am not the song. I am the radio transmitting it.
Over the course of our conversations, Jeff has encouraged me to clarify my understanding of the relationship between the lightning strike, the Garden, and the new capacities. He has also asked me to be more specific about exactly how I received the new understandings about things like the nature of time and reincarnation. Was I told these things in the Garden by my spirit guide there? Did I think these things out afterward as conclusions of the Garden experience, or of my precognitive nightmares? Do I simply believe these things but am claiming them as things I actually know? Or what?
These are difficult questions, as the kind of knowledge that I am trying to express here is extraordinary. It did not come to me like other forms of knowledge. I did not learn it like I have learned other things. I just knew it. In my near-death experience, I did not receive what I know now as one revelation at a time, like individual droplets of water. Rather, everything came at the same time. Somehow, being on the receiving end of one of nature’s most powerful emanations of energy, a lightning bolt, gave me the ability to comprehend everything all at once.
My experience was a single process, but I think we can tease out three different components, all of which together made me who I am today. There is the lightning strike itself, that is, the voltage. There is the knowledge that I received as a visitor in the Garden, that is, the visitation. And there are the ways I use that knowledge now, that is, the vision. Certainly there would be no visitation or vision without the voltage, but I do not think these are simple by-products of the voltage.
I do believe, however, that my becoming a receiver of knowledge of things previously unknown to me is somehow related to the voltage. I have read accounts of lightning strikes on others who have had similar experiences. I am thinking in particular of Dannion Brinkley.10 The details of our strike experiences are different, of course: where we were at the time, how we were struck, and so on. It is in the changes that took place within us afterward that I find so many parallels. Compare what you read in my account with others like Brinkley’s. You may be surprised to learn, as I was, that the appearance of strange abilities is not at all uncommon after a lightning strike.
The lightning strike had other physical effects on me—literally electric or electronic ones. I cannot wear a battery-powered watch, for example, as watches do not work for long when I wear them. Matt gifted me with a beautiful wristwatch shortly after we met and was miffed when I didn’t wear it. This was before I felt comfortable enough with him to share the story of my lightning strike and subsequent tales. I had some fancy footwork to do to help him understand why I cannot wear a watch. I still have it, of course. It sits in our safe-deposit box waiting for the wrist of some young lady who is not electrically or electronically challenged.
I have also been through four Fitbits (wrist-worn activity monitors), each of which fritzed out shortly after I put it on. Additionally, I cannot tolerate a TENS (transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) unit, a device that sends electrical impulses into areas of the body to relieve muscle aches, because the current causes unbearable pain throughout my entire body. It’s also not uncommon for light bulbs to burn out as I walk past them.
One night recently there was a bad rainstorm in Houston with a lot of lightning. As I walked through the kitchen, two light bulbs blew out with a pop as I walked under them. I left the kitchen to get some new bulbs from the laundry room where we store them. As I entered the laundry room, another bulb popped. I suspect that the lightning from the rainstorm somehow supercharged my already overcharged body. Many times when I try to change a light bulb the new bulb will pop just as I screw it into the socket. Similarly, I cannot touch the sheetrock on the walls in my own house without shocking myself with an audible pop, and usually with a visible spark. The use of earbuds with my iPad or iPhone is physically painful. I have been through numerous pairs. I dislike using microwave ovens—I don’t know why that makes me nervous. And the thought of ever needing a pacemaker for medical reasons simply terrifies me.
None of these are pleasant experiences. And yet, without the high-voltage strike that occasioned my near-death experience, I would not have made it to the Garden. Without that bolt of electricity, I don’t believe that I would have had the expanded circuitry needed to absorb and process the knowledge of the Garden. I wouldn’t have been able to tune in to the frequency of the channel that was to impart that same knowledge to me during my visit. I know these are metaphors, but they are getting at something very important. Somehow, the voltage was necessary for both the visitation and the vision that it produced in me.
I think that the knowledge gained through the visitation is responsible for my comprehension of many things now. The visitation resulted in a vision. In particular, the way that this knowledge came to me, stacked on top of the intense stimuli I experienced in the Garden, helped redefine my sense of time. This is the “all at once” aspect of my experience that is so important, and so unusual.
As I explained earlier, I continue to question whether my vision (my abilities and knowledge) comes from the voltage (lightning strike) or the visitation (my near-death trip to the Garden). Does my ability to see auras arise from the fact that I was electrocuted? Was my brain somehow rewired or fused? Or does this ability to see auras come from the fact that I have visited heaven? How about my ability to sense that an inanimate object is haunted? Or to dream the future? It is difficult, really impossible, to say which of the events activated the “on” switch in me. But does it ultimately matter? I understand that others might ask different questions and want to know different things, but what my visit filled me with was not scientific knowledge or anything that can be learned here on this plane through the usual senses. What the visitation finally gave me was vision.
I know I am groping for words here (Jeff asks hard questions). All I can say is that I have encountered forces that were beyond me, that were not part of my thinking before I was struck by the lightning. What struck my umbrella and traveled through me was a shocking welcome to a place I had no idea existed and for which I had no real context. The Garden was, and is, a place where the energy that struck me with such force is mediated but does not dissipate. Nor is it subject to any lessening or entropy. Big words and seemingly scientific jargon aside, I know no other way to say it: this energy is alive and eternal.
Another lesson I received in the Garden is that knowledge, like energy, can neither be created nor destroyed. All the knowledge that there is already is. Knowledge, however, must be discovered. It is like an onion with an infinite number of layers. One revealed bit of information uncovers the next. While there is no end to it, it is already complete.
The most significant discoveries that have advanced the human condition are but a scratch on the depth of knowledge that exists. My understanding of the depth of knowledge and our need to discover it is that this process is something like mining, and that this mining is the purpose or meaning of our existence in this world—what we are meant to do. If everything known were accessible in this middle layer of the present, there would be no momentum for human progress, no reason to live. The point of our existence is to learn, to gain this knowledge, which, again, already exists, like the rich ore or diamond deposits in the ground. Through the process of mining for knowledge, the soul learns and can progress. This process of mining or seeking knowledge is the key. It is the teacher from which we learn to peel back the next layer of the infinite onion.
One of the main lessons I learned through my conversations with God, or what I believe to be God, is that the kernel of every being is a spark of eternal light, a spark that derives its existence from an energy that permeates our universe, that is, from God the eternal light. Despite the many connotations that the word “soul” conjures, calling this spark the soul gives it a meaning to which most people can relate. In the Garden I learned that this soul-spark is a flourishing, evolving force. It seeks its own course and is programmed to persist like a plant that grows in the direction of the sunlight. Like a plant, the soul also requires nourishment in its cultivation and evolution. Each person must nourish his or her soul if it is to progress. Each human being is an incarnation of this eternal spark.
I also came to understand that souls tend to cycle back and reincarnate with souls they have been with before in other life cycles. Their reasons for recycling back with the same souls vary. Perhaps they are soul mates. Perhaps they have some unfinished business. One thing I know as certain as I know my name is that the first time I held each of my children in my arms and looked into their eyes, two things crystallized for me. First, I knew there was a God. After all, who or what else could have created such perfection? And second, each baby seemed familiar to me, as if I had known him or her in a different place and time. As I gazed at each of my newborn children, I wanted to say, “Oh, it’s you.”
As it seeks its evolutionary path, each soul will journey through many manifestations or lifetimes. With each incarnation, it has the opportunity to grow and progress, or not. The evolutionary path is not straight. At times, it even makes sharp turns that render the soul’s progress stagnant. As the soul evolves and experiences more lives, it also gains additional opportunities for growth, progress, and learning.
Life in this present realm is like school. We are here to learn, to acquire knowledge. Through these means, our souls ultimately progress to the point where their evolution is complete and it is no longer necessary to return to this place where we all currently find ourselves. The primary mechanism or process through which the soul advances is reincarnation, which is what gives our souls infinite opportunities to advance. Without the numerous and various lives we are afforded the ability to live, we would not have the means to learn the lessons and make the advancements that are necessary. This remains one of the clearest and most profound lessons I received in the Garden.
Events initiated by the lightning strike and the near-death experience that followed have made a much more direct path for my soul toward whatever destination it has in mind for me. I think that the speed of its evolution has been accelerated through these means. I believe this to be the case because, prior to that fateful day in 1988, I was a different person. Something in my soul clearly changed … or evolved. However we understand these things, the fact that I survived my near-death experience allows me to know things that I will not encounter or feel again until the death of my body frees my soul.
The strike, the going to and returning from an otherworldly beautiful Garden, the burns on my feet, and these troubling precognitions—none of this was my idea. The likelihood of a person being struck by lightning is about one in a million in any given year. If the bolt is what initiated or catalyzed all of this for me, the odds of my soul doing this on its own are miniscule to none. Each year, only about 310 people in the United States, out of a total population of about 318 million, get such an “opportunity.”11 And most of those struck, of course, do not have an experience like mine. And many do not survive. So the odds are even smaller.
The understanding that was given in the Garden does not make me faster, smarter, richer, or better in any way than someone who does not comprehend the place of his or her soul along the evolutionary spectrum. What I believe is simply the result of my experience. It is not anything I earned or deserved. Moreover, even with the distance my soul appears to have traveled, I still don’t know how often I’ll have to loop back around and inhabit this realm again.
Each soul advances at its own specific pace. Each possesses the inherent capacity for advancement, but the speed of progress varies. The deployment of paranormal capacities like precognition, clairvoyance, and the ability to read another soul might catalyze the progress of a particular soul. But none of this is automatic, and such powers do not guarantee moral maturity or spiritual wisdom. In other words, one can manifest such abilities and not be at all spiritually evolved. We all have these abilities, after all, and we are all in school learning how to use them. But I do believe that it is possible to make great strides in short order through a near-death experience.
I have written above about incarnations. By this I mean that your incarnation today is the tangible human form that you see in the mirror. The soul within you and the soul within me have been in bodily form before. Those previous bodily forms died, after which our souls took on new bodies in new incarnations. When dates on these particular incarnations expire, we will move on to the next. Again, this was one of the most emphatic lessons I received while in the Garden. I was told that the decision to reincarnate or not is not fully that of the soul to make. The soul does have a say in its reincarnation, though. I was helped to understand that it is God, who spoke to me in the Garden, who situates the soul in the starting gate. In other words, God makes the decision about whether a soul reincarnates again or not. What the soul can decide is what the next life will be like and when it will take place. What the soul needs to learn in order to advance itself will be the strongest determinant as to where and when it settles in its next bodily incarnation.
So did I choose to return and get struck by lightning? I asked this question in the Garden. The answer I received was, “Yes.” I knew that I was to be struck by lightning before I arrived in this body. I did not know when it would happen, but I knew it would. I knew, and I chose to run with it. I also asked whether I knew about the physical and sexual abuse I would endure as a young child at the hands of the teenage babysitter. The answer I received was again, “Yes.” It was explained to me that I was aware these things were going to happen to me, and yet I chose to return because this was all going to help me get to where I needed to be.
I have thought a great deal about this. I now believe that through the horrors of my abuse I learned how to leave and return to my body, first in the dissociative states I came to use in the sexually abusive situations, then in the out-of-body flight of the near-death experience. Basically, I learned in the abuse what I would later use and optimize in order to survive the lightning experience. This skill, I believe, is precisely what made it a near-death experience and not a death experience. It was as if my childhood trauma was a kind of training ground for the moment I would be struck by lightning, go to heaven, and then decide to return to my earthly body. At least I had practiced leaving and returning. I already knew how to do it.
What I have recently learned is that in many forms of Hinduism, Buddhism, and other Asian religions, the goal of the reincarnation process is to attain a state where one no longer has to reincarnate and can “jump out of the system” of birth and death. This end or purpose is variously described in these traditions as the goal of “liberation,” “release,” or “enlightenment.” This is not exactly what I was taught in the Garden. In a metaphor that is easier for me to absorb, I was told that the point of reincarnation is to graduate, but that this “graduation” comes with a duty or calling. More specifically, I was told that one’s soul, having slipped into a stream of frictionless movement in concert with the force that permeates everything, “graduates” and becomes a beacon and companion for others on the path.
If you’ll recall, in the Garden I saw new arrivals, always accompanied by another presence or spirit. I understand now that these beings who were welcoming the newly departed were individual facets of the same gem, that is, the Source, or God. My understanding is that each of these companions is a graduate, a soul containing a spark of God, a soul who does not need to return to this realm. I believe that my understanding was accelerated because of the lightning strike. I also believe that this helped me to realize that my companion in the Garden was a part of God, the Source. All of the companions are to be considered as parts or pieces of God, as they all contain his spark, just as our souls do here on Earth.
What happens to a soul once it has “graduated”? The reward, to the best of my knowledge and understanding, is that after so many incarnations, the accomplished soul becomes a spirit greeter and guide for those souls that have been released from their corporeal selves. Such greeters or guides are no longer among the living. This was just something I understood instantly when I was in the Garden.
I believe that my experience of the Garden has uniquely positioned me to understand and now communicate these lessons. I am not dead, and I still have much to learn. Therefore, I do not qualify as a spirit guide. However, my return from the Garden and the abilities with which I am endowed as a result of my brief visit there make me a woman who is not quite of this realm either. I share in both worlds. I am here, but I was also there.
This was not always the case, to put it mildly. The woman who crossed the parking lot in the rain did not care about anything having to do with “soul,” unless the term applied to food or music. That woman was deaf and blind to everything I am trying to communicate here. I am no longer that woman. Without seeking it, I received the knowledge in an electrifying instant that many people spend years trying to obtain, and yet never find. I was infused with the understanding instantly upon my arrival in the Garden that the goal for the perfected soul is to become a guide to those who have recently touched down in their own personal Gardens or heavens. There is great comfort for me in knowing that my own sliver of the eternal source of energy will live on in this new life and form, as a spirit guide one day, I hope.
That speck of the eternal that I perceived in the people I met with in Seattle knew I was there. There was interaction between us, between the two eternal sparks, but not, please note, on a personal or conscious level. The conveyance of the information was extracted from that person and passed to me by, for want of a better term, his or her own spirit guide.
Spirit guides are the greeters at the gate for the recently departed. They become active participants in service to the Source. They also often intervene for a soul in this life. It was with these spirit guides that I spoke in my Seattle sessions. When one of the people I met with eventually dies, the same spirit guide who spoke to me will greet and escort the person’s soul to whatever version of the Garden serves best as their unique heaven. I believe that my ability to get in touch with a person’s spirit guide is due to my near-death experience.
I should add that in my own experience there was no “near” to the event. My near-death experience was real. I understand that there is no way to know whether or not I was clinically dead, whatever that means in a situation like that. But in my own experience I died. I saw what I saw. I learned. I returned. Obviously, I did not stay dead. And when I made the choice to come back from the Garden, I had just enough information in me both to confound those who would doubt and to provide a source of humor for the mockers. But I also had the peace of mind that comes from knowing that what I believe to be true is, in fact, true. There is nothing anyone can say that would convince me that what I experienced was a twist of nature, an odd blip. I am convinced that it was an intentional, preordained event designed to help me understand the ways in which time, space, and energy interact. This is what matters to me now: not what other people think but what I know to be true.