Elizabeth Krohn was on her way into her local Reform synagogue to hear Kaddish said for her beloved grandfather, who had died a year previously, when, in the parking lot, she was struck by lightning. She finds 'herself' outside herself - her body lying on the tarmac, and after assuring 'herself' that her two young children are being cared for, thinking herself dead, she follows a golden light upwards and will spend 'two weeks' in heaven before deciding to return to her body, and as a transformed person, pick up the strands of a very different life, some of whose outlines she has seen in her altered state.
She returns confident that death is simply a gateway to another modality of life, that we are accompanied in our life by a 'celestial double' and slowly through a cycle of reincarnated lives will reach a transformed state where we become the celestial companion of another soul. This unfolds from our perspective in a linear progression but from an eternal perspective in unfolds 'now' which is why sometimes we here can forsee the 'future'.
One feature of Elizabeth's transformed life is that she receives 'precognitive nightmares' of serious accidents - train or airplane crashes - that she records by time-stamped email to initially prove to herself she is not crazy, and then for others to be likewise convinced. These nightmares are genuinely distressing until an equally, if differently, haunted person suggests that possibly these visions come to her so that she, in some way, will be able to help the victims on their journey across the threshold of death - though how this might be achieved is left unexplained.
Anyone familiar with the literature on Near-Death Experiences will by now be nodding their heads, seeing the familiar patterns, and pondering what is new here? It is undoubtedly a particularly vivid example with especially dramatic consequences but no doubt these could be multiplied.
What is different is that Elizabeth's account has emerged in dialogue with the historian of religion, Jeff Kripal, and rather than being concerned with 'proving' whether Elizabeth was clinically dead and/or responding to skeptical criticism as to mechanisms but asking what, taking Elizabeth's account with due seriousness, adopting the approach of comparative religion might bring to our understanding of human potential (and destination).
The second part of the book, following Elizabeth's account, is Kripal's reading forward of Elizabeth's experience into an exploration into what is possible, and indeed making the apparent impossibility - from our current scientific materialism's perspective, vividly real.
What does a comparative reading add?
First, it reminds us that there is no such thing as an independent fact, facts sit within frameworks, and every event is already an interpretation, and widening the framework can help us see deeper dimensions in any particular event. Being struck by lightning, for example, comes with a whole range of associations from, within monotheistic traditions, God's punishment but within indigenous traditions divine selection to a shamanic role (not necessarily a welcomed one, a necessary burden as was felt in Elizabeth's case).
Second, it can show how a profoundly transformative experience does and does not fit within a person's frame of reference including their prior religious framing (if any). Traveling to heaven, meeting your divine double and a subsequent belief in reincarnation are not the staples of your average, suburban Reform synagogue; and, yet, they are all there in the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition (of which it is safe to say Elizabeth knew nothing before her NDE).
Third, even if there is a pattern of likeness betwixt available religious framing and a person's experience - this is not a given - and personal experience remains creative, able to step beyond the bounds of any containing explanation, and may well conflict with commonly held patterns of religious (or other) belief.
Fourthly, it suggests that the world we inhabit and tend to think of as more or less fixed in its behaviors is, in fact, more fluid than we ever expected - rather than a model to be studied, it is a text to be imagined. Our framings are multiple not because one is right, and all the rest wrong, or because we are simply confused, though we might be ignorant. It is because the world is multiple and fluidly creative, and, still in the making, exploring its potential as creative evolution (at least when seen from our time-bound perspective).
Elizabeth's NDE suggested that when we arrive in heaven, it is always ''a" heaven (her's was a meticulous garden) that is most deeply appropriate to both our expectations and our needs (as Swedenborg too suggested), so we should be careful what we imagine because the world/the divine will respond appropriately, and possibly trickly. It is not for nothing that the god's messenger, Hermes, is also seen as a trickster - perhaps the reality that God likes to play is the most unsettling of images, especially for those schooled in more strait-laced monotheism.
Fifthly, the more you look outside our current culturally acceptable straitjacket, the more strange the world becomes - more like science fiction than fact - and this is to be welcomed because there is, at its heart, a lesson in humility. Why would we imagine that the world would 'fit inside our heads' and that we would abolish all mystery, and yet the mysterious and the impossible invite us to continue the exploration - what Elizabeth describes as the peeling of the onion of knowledge - and Kripal describes as the ongoing act of interpreting anew, recognizing that interpretation itself is a creative act; we are as much bringing a world into being as we are discovering its contours - and there is a dance betwixt these two whose steps we are barely beginning to learn,
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