NEW AGE JOURNAL
EXCERPT FROM
NEW AGE JOURNAL
Letter from the Editor
September/October 1994
I HAVE A PASSION FOR STORIES OF
EXTRAORDINARY healings. They bring me solace and inspiration in times
of crisis. Twelve years ago, for example, when a close friend,
Australian musician
Hans
Poulsen, was diagnosed with an advanced, and
supposedly terminal case of cancer, the many remarkable cancer healing
stories I had read helped me keep a hopeful attitude, I don’t know
whether the positive support of his friends was the key element in his
eventual recovery, but I do know that Hans appreciated it.
I had no such healing
stories to draw on two years ago, however, when Hans once again became
critically ill, He had suffered a massive brainstem hemorrhage and was in a deep
coma, with only a 1 percent chance of survival. Neither I nor any of the
other friends gathered at his bedside knew anything about the healing of
this condition, and Hans's doctors did, nothing to encourage hope.
Maybe because we were in
denial, or maybe because our intuition told us that more was possible, we
refused to accept the prognosis and began doing the only thing we could do,
surround Hans with love. We made sure someone was always with him.
We prayed at his bedside. We played music and sang to him, and we
repeatedly told him that we wanted him to live but also that it was OK if he
chose to die.
About ten days into this
bedside vigil, a healer who had heard of Hans's case offered to fly in
from Colorado to see if he could help. As it turned out, Roger La
Borde has a remarkable ability to communicate with coma patients and was crucial
to Hans's recovery. Now, two years later, Hans still requires a
wheelchair, but he continues to improve, beating the odds for a second time.
We've since discovered that
Hans's healing was not a complete anomaly. With the help of healers and
family members, many other patients have also recovered from coma even after
doctors had given up hope. And yet the phenomenon has received little
notice. When writer Brad Lemley investigated the subject for the story
that appears on page 8o, he found numerous intriguing cases. We hope
they'll be helpful as well. I wish this kind of article had been available
two years ago, when I first sat at Hans's bedside wondering what consciousness
was left in that seeming shell of a body.
Back from Coma
REPORTS
FROM SURVIVORS-AND HEALERS
WHO WORK WITH THEM-ARE CHALLENGING
OLD ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT THIS ENIGMATIC
STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS.
By Brad Lemley
T0 ALL WHO WITNESSED it, Peter Peelgrane's
return from the brink of death was nothing short of Miraculous. A
helicopter pilot internationally renowned for his flying skill, Peelgrane was
working for a Denver Colorado, Television station on February12 , 1992, when his
chopper’s engine suddenly lost all power. Slowing the fall with his
free-spinning rotor, he was able to land the craft safely on an ice floe in the
middle of a local reservoir. But then the ice gave way and Peelgrane and two
friends, both freelance photographers, were cast into the thirty-four-degree
water. As Peelgrane looked on, first one then the other friend slipped beneath
the surface. When the rescuers finally fished Peelgrane from the frigid lake
forty minutes later, the pilot’s heart had stopped and his core temperature
had dropped to seventy-two degrees-- as low as has been recorded among
hypothermia survivors. Working on his stiff utterly lifeless form seemed
futile, but paramedics began resuscitation anyway. In such cold water cases they
have a saying. They’re not dead until they are warm and dead. By boat
and then aircraft, he was transported to a Fort Collins hospital, where doctors
opened his chest, revived his heart, and connected him to a ventilator so
he could breathe. Clinically dead for forty-five minutes, Peelgrane was once
again alive, but in a profound coma.
Peelgrane's rescue and resuscitation,
however, is not what friends and relatives remember as the miraculous part of
his story. Even more incredible is what came next, as Peelgrane lay
captive within the supposedly insensible sleep of coma. Indeed, his case would
soon challenge some very basic assumptions about the nature and significance of
this enigmatic state of consciousness--and, in turn, how the ethically difficult
question of removing life support should be decided.
As the days passed,
Peelgrane's prognosis worsened. "The doctors kept telling me that after
seven days in the coma, his chance of recovery was less than 2 percent,"
recalls Peelgrane's wife, Karen Quinn. "They suggested that I pull the life
support, that I was not being fair to Peter."
Quinn was spared making that
awful decision by the arrival of Roger La Borde, a forty-eight-year-old
healer who claims an unusual facility for communicating with the comatose. La
Borde, of Crestone, Colorado, says that one night in 1977, in the midst of an
excruciating divorce, he "gave up control" of his life, an
"emptying" process that he says opened him to a new reality. In the
following year, the former executive recruiter for Exxon says he had a series of
powerful psychokinetic and clairvoyant experiences and developed a healing
ability under the tutelage of Gerald Red Elk, a Sioux shaman. A brain wave test
on La Borde in 1989 revealed extremely high delta waves—exactly the EEG
profile of people in coma. In his report on the Test procedure, EEG researcher
Edgar S. Wilson, M.D. called La Borde’s results ‘profoundly unusual"
and said that he had "no explanation" for it. At the suggestion of a
friend who had filmed La Borde for a BBC documentary Quinn brought the healer
into Peelgrane's room on that seventh night. "I told the nurses that Roger
was another long lost cousin, because they had this stupid rule about relatives
only," she says. "When Roger walked into the room, he put his
hands on Peter's arm and I put my hands on Peter's other arm, and I got this,
like, electric jolt in my stomach.'" From ten o'clock that evening until
two the next morning, La Borde says he simply sat in a corner of
the room and tried to "connect" with Peelgrane. "It's a space I
can move into, and I know when I have connected with the other person," he
says.
After four hours, he says, he succeeded.
Then, in a low voice, he told Peelgrane that the time had come to decide
whether to live or move on. "I told him that if he were going to stay, I
needed a physical sign." La Borde told Peelgrane to imagine that he was
walking in a field of flowers. He described the colors and the smells, and then
said, "You know, Peter, when you are walking through a field of flowers,
you have to move your feet." Peelgrane immediately started moving his
feet under the sheets-the First sign of deliberate movement since the
accident. La Borde managed to get Peelgrane to repeat the performance for his
nurse and physical therapist, and he improved steadily, if slowly, from there.
La Borde continued working
with Peelgrane, sometimes stunning the staff of the Poudre Valley Hospital, in
Fort Collins, Colorado. "I've been a nurse for twenty
years, and I'd never seen anything like it," Joan Grant, a primary-care
nurse, told the Fort Collins Coloradoan newspaper at the time. She said
when Peelgrane had spells of agitation, La Borde would come and stand next to
him. "He didn’t physically touch him, but you could see the change in the
monitors blood pressure, pulse, respiration. It happened at least three times
that I saw. I was amazed by it."
As would be most medical professionals.
John J. Caronna, M.D., professor of clinical neurology at New York Hospital's
Cornell Medical Center, reflects the view of many in mainstream medicine when he
dismisses as "rubbish" such reports of communication ,psychic or
otherwise with anyone in a true coma. "By definition," he says,
"you cannot communicate with a person in a coma. That person is
unconscious." Still, interviews with doctors, nurses, nontraditional
healers, and, especially, the formerly comatose themselves suggest that this
unique state may be far more complex than current medical thinking allows.
Unusual, spiritual, meaningful things happen in coma, they say. And unusual,
spiritual, and meaningful measures are required to reach into these states and
help people return to consciousness or, if the patient wishes, to carry
out a decision to die I truly believe that a very significant percentage of
people in comas could be brought out, if you approach it with the
attitude,
Keys to Awakening
Advice from healers on communicating
with the comatose.
WHEN DAN CONNER WAS IN A
COMA AFTER brain surgery, doctors
trying to rouse him dug a sharp instrument into the exquisitely
sensitive skin just below his fingernails to see if he would respond to
pain. Due to his paralyzed condition he could not respond to or stop the
torment, but could feel that it "hurt really bad." Indeed most of the
formerly comatose people and their family members who were interviewed for this
story complained that the techniques used by doctors and nurses to establish
communication were crude, and even painful. What's more, techniques such as
shouting "Wake up
or
"Open your eyes!" never worked, they say.
Consider the case of Dan
Conner of Lafayette. Colorado, who in March of 1993, at age thirty-three,
underwent an eighteen hour operation to remove a massive tumor from the base of
his brain. He was lucid for ten hours after the surgery, but then lapsed into a
coma The doctors eventually told his wife it was up to her to decide when they
should turn off the life support. She turned to La Borde instead, and with his
help Dan has made a startling recovery Yet when asked For his memories of the
state, he laughs and says in a halting "I'm not too good at remembering
anymore" He is also plagued by poor balance, and
it remains to be seen whether he can return to his old avocation of renovating
classic BMW’s. And yet even those who have lost a great deal from
their comas can retrieve something valuable from the experience. "I
was close enough to death, and I know what it is," Conner says. -'It's not
horrible like people think. Death is placid." Though he lacks the specific
memory of a near death experience the whoosh through a tunnel, the
welcoming dead relatives, the loving light-he somehow earned the serenity that
commonly trails in the wake of that experience. Where once he had been
frightened of his mortality, he now has "no Fear
of death at all."
Hans Poulsen, a talented
singer and songwriter, also paid a price for his brain injury coma. A sudden
brain-stem hemorrhage (of the kind that, doctors told him, give a victim only a
1 percent chance of surviving) has left him confined to a hospital, unable to
sing or play instruments. Yet, even more than Conner, Poulsen feels that his
disabled condition is a small roll for the necessary knowledge he gained.
"I was in space, and I
came to a net of love," says Poulsen, forty-nine, who like Peelgrane and
Conner was treated by Roger La Borde. "I was captured by it. The net was
the prayers and good wishes of all of the friends who knew that I was in a coma.
That net definitely helped to bring me back to consciousness.
"B efore
the coma, it seems to me that my life was a dream. Since the coma, I have been
forced to wake up."
As part of his recuperation
process Poulsen has taken up Siddha Yoga, which he
says puts him into a peaceful state similar to what he recalls from his coma.
"Like the coma, it forces you into consciousness. It takes you away from
the game." The game, he explains, is the everyday world of consensus
reality with its pressing but ultimately trivial demands.
"When people go
through these experiences," notes La Borde, "many of them definitely
remember something unusual, something they would describe as very
spiritual." But he adds that "it comes in its own, distinct
package." No two experiences are alike.
……Similarly, Peter Peelgrane
has persistently stated that he recalls nothing about his coma. His wife says
she "had a sense that he was with his two friends, that they were all
together someplace, and that he was trying to decide whether to
go with them or come back." But, about five months after the accident
she adds, her husband seems to have visited another mysterious realm. "He
started yelling and grabbing his chest and saying, "I’m shot! I’m
shot!" she says. " A close friend there with him asked him what he
meant, and he said he was in a B-52 . He was a tail gunner and he was going
down, and he was shot in the chest. The friend asked Peter if he was OK and he
said, 'No, I died.' It's Interesting, because Peter was born in 1945."
A month later, he was
scheduled for a magnetic resonance imaging procedure. Because it involves
powerful magnetic forces, technicians routinely ask patients if they have any
metal objects in their bodies, such as shrapnel. Peelgrane, who at that point
had recovered most of his mental faculties, said he did, in his chest. Asked if
it had been taken out, he replied, "No, it killed me."
If, as Hans Poulsen and others have
indicated, the deep peace of meditation can be similar to the deep peace of a
coma, there remains an important difference: The trick is getting into the
former state, and out of the latter one. In this regard, say the survivor,
interviewed for this story, modern medical science aside from addressing the
physical problem that sent them spiraling into coma in the first place had
little to offer them. Many shared uncannily similar tales of mainstream
medicine's wrong headed approach to coma of family members who were barred from
their bedsides in intensive care units, and of doctors and nurses whose only
attempt at establishing communication was to shout, "Open your eyes!"
In at least three of the cases reported here Conner’s, Poulsen’s, and
Peelgrane's family members and friends say doctors urged them to withdraw life
supporting machinery, although their instincts told them there was still hope.
……..Though their
techniques differ, La Borde and Mindell agree completely on two points: No one
is so deeply comatose that he or she cannot be reached, and the agonizing
decision of whether to live or die should be made by the comatose person alone.
"Everyone in a coma can communicate,
but you have to be there all the time," says La Borde. "You must talk
to the person, hold their hand, and watch them constantly, because the first
movement can be just a subtle squeeze of the hand or a
movement of the eye." Because this can 'be such a long vigil, busy doctors
and nurses can't do it. Only love can sustain it which is why families and
friends are often the difference between life and death for a comatose person.
La Borde and Mindell
believe that some comatose people will choose to die, and must be supported in
that decision. But they also feel that many comatose people will decide to live,
if someone is willing to exert him or herself to listen. Poulsen, for example,
recalls how La Borde "came to me while I was in coma and told me that
medical technology was doing its best." As a result, he says, "Roger
was crucial in bringing me back."
Adds Mindell: "The
family means well, as it wrestles with this decision of whether or not to pull
the plug, but my message is, It's not their decision. All of the energy that is
expended in making this wrenching choice should be devoted to learning how to
communicate with the individual, so that he or she can decide."
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