Interesting story about a person's SOUL

I'm taking a class at the local college titled Perspectives on Death and Dying.   The textbook has some very interesting, thought-provoking items in it.  This one was particularly so.  Thought I'd share it here.

Knowing What a Human Being Is  

Rollling Thunder often repeated, ‘We do so many unnatural things, we don’t know what’s natural anymore.’  One day he and I were sitting on the ground out in the desert.  He was describing a young Indian apprentice from another tribe and making designs in the sand with a stick.  Suddenly he said, ‘You people don’t even know what a human being is!’   I did not see the connection between the subject at hand and that sudden exclamation, but I had learned to understand what he meant by ‘you people.’  It was not a judgmental finger-pointing to be taken personally, but a sort of generalized identification to be applied wherever it fit.  ‘You can look right at someone’s empty body and take it down the highway at eighty miles an hour, leaving the person miles behind, not knowing what the heck is going on!” 

As an example, he then described to me an episode in which he went into the hospital to assist a young lady-a friend of a friends-who had been in a head-on collision and was a long time in a coma. ‘But the moment I took a good look at the body, I could see she wasn’t even there.  I had to find her-go get her-and she was way out in the field where the car’d flipped over the cliff, and she was sittin’ on a rock.  Her friend who was driving was killed.  And this one sittin’ on the rock, she didn’t even know where she was.  But, boy, she was determined to stay there.  She was totally disoriented.  I had to pull her, nearly force her back.  Only time we can do that is when we know their own will isn’t working—otherwise we always leave it up to their own choice. 

‘Well, in the early days, most everyone could tell when a person wasn’t in their body.  That was just natural to see that.  That’s been lost mostly.  Only thing I can say is, until you learn to understand these things, you should never, never move an unconscious body.  Unconscious means the person is not there.  So treat the body on the scene and never, never move it.  Not until you learn how.   People can’t find their own way back to the body—not when they’ve been pulled loose that way by some accident or something.  Time and time again, traumatized people get abandoned that way.  Time and time again, people die in a coma because of that.’
Quote in Doug Boyd’s, Mystic, Magicians and Medicine People:  Tales of a Wanderer*

*DeSpelder, Lynne Ann, and Albert Lee. Strickland. "Chapter 4, Death Systems: Mortality and Society." 2011. The Last Dance: Encountering Death and Dying New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011. 150. Print.

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