Newsgroups: alt.out-of-body
Subject: Re: Near Death Experiences
From: gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us (Gary S. Trujillo)
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1992 07:07:24 GMT

In <1992Oct13.222749.11552@m.cs.uiuc.edu> mcgrath@cs.uiuc.edu
	(Robert McGrath) writes:

> In these cases, it is possible that the ND person could have picked up
> information from their senses, even though they were in a coma...

> ...

> All I'm driving at is that there are PLENTY of hypotheses besides
> the ones you consider.

I don't think we can use this example meaningfully unless we have a good
account of the story involving the tennis shoe.  Such an account appears
in the Proceedings of the Symposium on Consciousness and Survival held at
Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. 26-27 October 1985, printed in
a volume edited by John S. Spong, Bishop (Episcopal) Diocese of Newark
(ISBN 0-943951-00-3).  In that volume, Stanislav Grof, M.D. writes:

  The following example is a remarkable out-of-body experience with
  accurate perception of a remote location reported by Kimberly Clark
  who works as a social worker in Seattle.  The circumstances of this
  case were so extraordinary and convincing that the event instigated
  in her a lasting interest in OOBEs.

    My first encounter with a near-death experiencer involved a
    patient named Maria, a migrant worker who was visiting friends in
    Seattle and had a severe heart attack.  She was brought into the
    hospital by rescue squad one night and admitted to the coronary
    care unit.  I got involved in her case as a result of her social
    and financial problems.  A few days after her admission, she had a
    cardiac arrest.  Because she was so closely monitored and was
    otherwise in good health, she was brought back quickly, intubated
    for a couple of hours to make sure that her oxygenation was
    adequate, and then extubated.

    Later in the day I went to see her, thinking that she might have
    some anxiety about the fact that her heart had stopped.  In fact,
    she was anxious, but not for that reason.  She was in a state of
    relative agitation, in contrast to her usual calmness.  She wanted
    to talk to me about something.  She said: "The strangest thing
    happened when the doctors and nurses were working on me: I found
    myself looking down from the ceiling at them working on my body."

    I was not impressed at first.  I thought that she might know what
    had been going on in the room, what people were wearing, and who
    would be there, since she had seen them all prior to her cardiac
    arrest.  Certainly she was familiar with the equipment by that
    time.  Since hearing is the last sense to go, I reasoned that she
    could hear everything that was going on, and while I did not think
    she was consciously making this up, I thought it might have been a
    confabulation.

    She then told me that she had been distracted by something over
    the emergency room driveway and found herself outside, as if she
    had 'thought herself' over the emergency room driveway and, in
    just that instant, she was out there.  At this point, I was a
    little more impressed, since she had arrived at night inside an
    ambulance and would not have known what the emergency room area
    looked like.  However, I reasoned that perhaps at some point in
    time her bed had been by the window, she had looked outside, and
    this had been incorporated into the confabulation.

    But then Maria proceeded to describe being further distracted by
    an object on the third floor ledge on the north end of the
    building.  She 'thought her way' up there and found herself
    'eyeball to shoelace' with a tennis shoe, which she asked me to
    try to find for her.  She needed someone else to know that the
    tennis shoe was really there to validate her out-of-body
    experience.

    With mixed emotions, I went outside and looked up at the ledges
    but could not see much at all.  I went up to the third floor and
    began going in and out of patients' rooms and looking out their
    windows, which were so narrow that I had to press my face to the
    screen just to see the ledge at all.  Finally, I found a room
    where I pressed my face to the glass and looked down and saw the
    tennis shoe!

    My vantage point was very different from what Maria's had to have
    been for her to notice that the little toe had worn a place in the
    shoe and that the lace was stuck under the heel and other details
    about the side of the shoe not visible to me.  The only way she
    would have had such a perspective was if she had been floating
    right outside and at very close range to the tennis shoe.  I
    retrieved the shoe and brought it back to Maria; it was very
    concrete evidence for me.

Yes, the story is still apocryphal, but it's nice to have a bit more
detail, I think.  There are other cases written about by authors such
as Kenneth Ring, PhD, who is a psychology professor at the University
of Maine.  Perhaps I can give more exact references later.  I know he
cites some cases in this book _Life at Death_, written nearly ten
years ago, as I recall.

Gary
--
    Gary S. Trujillo                            gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us
Somerville, Massachusetts              {wjh12,bu.edu,spdcc,ima,cdp}!gnosys!gst