Episode 23 of Paranormal Stories. This week the books are 'Changed in a Flash: One Woman's Near-Death Experience and Why a Scholar Thinks It Empowers Us All' by Elizabeth Krohn and Jeffrey Kripal and 'An End to Upside Down Contact: UFOs, Aliens, and Spirits—and Why Their Ongoing Interaction with Human Civilization Matters' By Mark Gober.Mark GoberAre we alone? The answer, according to Mark Gober's An End to Upside Down Contact, is a resounding NO. Humans exist among a variety of advanced species, sometimes identified as aliens, spirits, beings of light, and beyond. In fact, our civilization seems to be regularly influenced by such nonhuman intelligences, even if we’re not always aware of it. Near-death experiences and other phenomena of consciousness reveal that some species exist in other dimensions that our eyes cannot ordinarily see. Similarly, UFOs and alien abductions—which were examined by the former head of psychiatry at Harvard—provide additional evidence that we are not alone. As strange as it might sound, none of this is new: contact with nonhuman intelligence is likely a part of humanity's ancient history. This isn’t just some “fringe” phenomenon, either. We seem to exist within a multispecies, multidimensional battle between Good and Evil, and our future as a civilization is at stake. Buckle up for a wild—and paradigm-shifting—ride.BioMark Gober is the author of "An End to Upside Down Thinking" (2018), which was awarded the IPPY award for best science book of 2019. He is also the author of "An End to Upside Down Living" (2020), "An End to Upside Down Liberty" (2021), and "An End to Upside Down Contact" (2022); and he is the host of the podcast "Where Is My Mind?" (2019). Additionally, he serves on the board of Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s Institute of Noetic Sciences and the School of Wholeness and Enlightenment.Previously, Gober was a partner at Sherpa Technology Group in Silicon Valley and worked as an investment banking analyst with UBS in New York. He has been named one of IAM’s Strategy 300: The World’s Leading Intellectual Property Strategists.Gober graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University, where he wrote an award-winning thesis on Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel Prize–winning “Prospect Theory” and was elected a captain of Princeton’s Division I tennis team.https://www.amazon.com/End-Upside-Down-Contact-Spirits-ebook/dp/B0B43TH5JZ/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1657892123&sr=8-1https://markgober.com/Elizabeth KrohnA fascinating first-hand account of an awakening into a psychic consciousness, paired with a revolutionary analysis by a respected professor of religion. When Elizabeth Greenfield Krohn got out of her car with her two young sons in the parking lot of her synagogue on a late afternoon 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 to a garden and engaging in a revelatory conversation with a spiritual being. When she recovered, her most fundamental understandings of what the world is and how it works had been completely transformed. She was “changed in a flash,” suddenly able to interact with those who had died and have prescient dreams predicting news events. She came to believe that some early traumatic and abusive experiences had played a part in preparing her for this experience. Told in matter-of-fact language, the first half of this book is the story of Krohn’s journey, and the second is an interpretation and analysis by respected professor of religion Jeffrey J. Kripal. He places Krohn'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 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 this phenomenon.https://www.amazon.com/Changed-Flash-Near-Death-Experience-Emp