"The Garden Next Door: How One Woman Was Struck by Lightning, Talked to God, and Came Back to Dream the Future.” In this lecture, Rice University’s Prof. Jeffrey Kripal discusses his co-writing with Elizabeth Krohn, a woman who was struck by lightning in the parking lot of her Houston synagogue while attending the first anniversary of her grandfather’s death. An elaborate near-death experience and numerous precognitive nightmares and paranormal phenomena followed. Prof. Kripal describes some of Elizabeth’s most striking experiences and reflects on their possible meanings in the light of his work on the historical, semiotic and technological dimensions of the paranormal and a particular philosophy of mind sometimes called the “filter” or “transmission” thesis.
Prof. Jeffrey Kripal is the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University.
The Paranormal Working Group is a part of the Humanities Futures initiative at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University. Humanities Futures is a multi-year exploration of the futures of the humanities, in the wake of the interdisciplinary developments of recent decades.