Changed in a Flash: One Woman's Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks It Empowers Us All

When Elizabeth Greenfield Krohn got out of her car with her two young sons in the parking lot of her synagogue on a rainy night 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 out-of-body to a garden and engaging in a revelatory conversation with a spiritual being. When she recovered, her most fundamental understandings of the what the world is and how it works had been completely transformed. She was "changed in a flash." She was able to interact with those who had died and had prescient dreams predicting news events. She came to believe that even some early traumatic and abusive experiences had been part of preparing her for her near death experience. Told in matter-of-fact, calm language, the first half of this book is the story of Elizabeth's journey, while the second half is an interpretation and analysis by respected professor of religion at Rice University, Jeffrey J. Kripal. He places Elizabeth'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 these 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 the phenomenon of near death experience.