Late in the summer of 1988, Elizabeth Balkin (now Krohn), a wife and mother of two young boys, was struck by lightning in the parking lot of a Houston synagogue.
She did not die.
While the odds of getting struck by lightning (about one in a million in any single year) are significantly better than winning the lottery, surviving a lightning strike is not all that unusual. The survival rate from such an event is somewhere around ninety percent, which means that roughly nine out of ten people who are struck by lightning live to tell the harrowing tale. The energy of such an event boggles the imagination. A lightning bolt can carry as much as 200 million volts and travel at speeds that can approach nearly one-third the speed of light. Luckily, most of the energy travels over or around the human body in a “flashover effect.” This can also take the form of an eerie bubble of light within which time seems to stand still. Oddly, severe burns are not common for a variety of conductivity reasons, but many survivors often suffer significant changes to their biology. Limbs, muscles, nerves, even neurological patterns are often altered forever. And that’s just the beginning. Some survivors report that they can now sense storms well before they appear; others that their computers malfunction, or that batteries drain away in their presence.1
Things sometimes get stranger still. Elizabeth’s most fundamental understandings of what the world is and how it works were completely transformed. She was one person before the lightning strike. She was another after it. She was changed in a flash.
And in a garden. Elizabeth experienced herself visiting a heavenly landscape, in her case a garden paradise of unspeakable beauty, for two weeks, even though only minutes or seconds passed here. Such a near-death experience (NDE), of course, is not uncommon either. But Elizabeth came back with something else still: a rich body of messages or revelations about the nature and future of the human soul and a whole spectrum of new supersenses, including a troubling ability to dream the details of future disasters. Preposterous? Certainly to our ordinary, everyday experience of the world. Impossible? Well, we will have to wait and see.
I am a full professor at an elite research university. It is my job to push against all comfortable boundaries, to question any religious or secular assumption about who we are, to imagine the impossible as possible. That’s what tenure is for, and I take its privileges and responsibilities very, very seriously. This same professional position also affords me the honor and pleasure of teaching and thinking with some of the finest minds on the planet, from fields as diverse as the study of literature to computer science. I can thus easily understand how and why many of us might be tempted to call the following story “bullshit.” But here is the thing: over the last two decades, I have encountered hundreds of individuals like Elizabeth, and I am sure there are millions more. I understand the bullshit charge, as I once held it myself, but I am not so sure anymore. Anomalous superhumans like Elizabeth give me significant pause.
This is a book about one such long pause. It chronicles and then interprets a series of events that could not have possibly happened, but did. I am Elizabeth’s friend, cowriter, interpreter, and, at the very end of the book, one of the subjects of her paranormal dreaming. I write about Elizabeth’s otherworldly visions and precognitive dreams. She responds by dreaming my life, my family, and my Midwestern hometown. Not exactly your typical book. But this is how it came into focus as we completed the manuscript in the final months of 2017.
The project began in October of 2015, when I was asked to comment on Elizabeth’s near-death experience at a public event organized by a young man named Anyang Anyang and entitled “Changed in the Blink of an Eye” at the Institute for Spirituality and Health in the Houston Medical Center. From those initial introductions and conversations, the two of us decided to try to write a book together. We met on a regular basis from early 2016 through the fall of 2017. We also met with family members: Elizabeth’s former husband, Barry; her husband, Matt; her three children, Jeremy, Andy, and Mallory; and her parents, Marianne and Larry. With these individuals, I corroborated many of the details of Elizabeth’s story, including the event of the original lightning strike at the synagogue, which, of course, was too quick and sudden for anyone to see (although, according to Elizabeth, one person, now deceased, did tell her that he saw the actual strike).
I do not wish to hide anything, including how we wrote this book. I want the reader to know that the book possesses both oral and written dimensions and is “two” all the way through, even when it looks like only one of us is talking or writing. Elizabeth and I recorded our conversations, whose content and direction she generally determined and led but that I also occasionally guided with questions borne from previous conversations with my academic colleagues and other extreme experiencers. Elizabeth then transcribed the recordings, and I worked from them to put together the early base text out of Elizabeth’s own words. Elizabeth then took up this base text and completely rewrote it, adding much new material in the process. This is what you get in Part One as “Elizabeth’s Story.” The next part is different. It is certainly informed by my conversations with Elizabeth, and occasionally I quote these (indeed, each chapter begins with something Elizabeth said to me), but at the end of the day it is a commentary, not a conversation. It is a subjective interpretation, not an objective description. Elizabeth provided feedback and criticism on it at various stages, but these are my views, not hers. This is what you get in Part Two, “How We Are Changing the Afterlife.”
The Postscript is in some ways also the conclusion, for me anyway. It recounts an exchange I had with Elizabeth toward the end of the writing process, when she dreamed the thesis that I was trying to express in Part Two. It took her just a few seconds and a few scenes—while she slept no less—to express in image and story what I had just spent a year and a half working through. Typical. Finally, one more thing on how this book came to be, and perhaps why it came to be. The book possesses a particular “local flavor,” if I may put it in that Texan of a way. The synagogue in whose parking lot Elizabeth was struck is Congregation Emanu El, which sits directly across Sunset Boulevard from Rice University, where I work and teach. I drive by the synagogue all the time. The parking lot is all of three blocks from where I sit in my office in Rice’s Department of Religion. There is something there. I don’t know what. But there is something there.
This book is not just a fantastic Texas story. It is also a collection of communications, direct knowings, or revelations about the nature and future of the human soul. These form the beating heart of the book. They can be summarized as a series of seven “flash cards,” which go like this:
The latter flash of truth is represented in Elizabeth’s visions as a Light that glows “beyond the mountains” of the heavenly Garden in which she finds herself and from which she chooses to return to this world instead of journeying into the mountains toward the Light. In other words, Elizabeth’s visionary landscape draws a very important distinction between what an individual sees and experiences in a NDE event immediately after death, in her case “in the Garden,” and who God ultimately is beyond any and all near-death experiences, in her case “beyond the mountains.” This key distinction can be carried in two simple visionary, and very biblical, metaphors: that between the heavenly Garden and the transcendent mountains.
I recognize that many of these messages need to be explained. That’s probably an understatement. We will do that in due time, and in two different ways—in Elizabeth’s way, and in my way. Again, these are different ways, but they are in deep conversation, and they are friends.
If my previous experience lecturing on Elizabeth’s life and others like hers is any measure, different readers will invoke one or two simple strategies within an extremely limited range of responses. Three of these responses are essentially defense mechanisms, designed, I assume, to protect against the vast implications that these stories encode and potentially release upon their readers and listeners. Even these defense mechanisms are useful, however, as long as we are aware of what we are doing. I have encountered only four. They go like this:
Finally, before we begin, I ask you to be careful with this book, not for the sake of the book, Elizabeth, or myself, but for your own sake. Reading this book, I warn you, will not be an ordinary, banal activity such as, say, reading a cereal box, a newspaper, or a novel. I think of books like this much like the writer Aldous Huxley saw his own library during his first psychedelic revelations on mescaline as reported in his now classic The Doors of Perception. According to Huxley, some of the books on his shelves glowed with a special energy or living power. They were alive, and they were beautiful. That is how I think of Changed in a Flash. Had this book sat on Huxley’s shelf, it would have been one of the glowing ones. I imagine sparks.
In all truth, I think of books like this as glowing “radioactive” catalysts capable of awakening potential superpowers and real secret identities in all of us, but especially in you, the reader. You might think that I am exaggerating. I am not.
You might think that I have seen too many superhero movies. I have. Regardless, I am perfectly serious about such convictions, in whatever mythical frame we want to express them. If our press’s financial resources were limitless, I would have asked them to produce a book with a tiny battery embedded in its spine that would gently but literally shock each reader who picks up the book.
Okay, maybe that is not such a good idea. Still, this is how I think of this book: as an electrical living thing capable of zapping and rewiring anyone who ventures too close to its truths. If we can speak of “lightning in a bottle,” perhaps we can also speak of “lightning in a book.” That anyway is how I imagine the true nature of this book—as living lightning zigzagging through the words on the page and into the eyes, brain, and soul of the reader.
If I were you, then, I would pick it up with care. You will see. Or, better, you will be shocked. I was.
Jeff
December 31, 2017
Houston, Texas