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Schwarz, Jack - Beyond Biofeedback by Drs Elmer and Alyce Green – Walking with an ankle that was broken and mending the broken bones
Identifier
027358
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Beyond Biofeedback – Drs Elmer and Alyce Green
Jack had an occasional slight limp, which caught my attention. I noticed that, after a long day at the lab and an active evening lecturing to the Ashram Association in Topeka, Jack limped slightly when we returned home. I asked him about this, and he said that whenever he stood for several hours he had a tendency to limp, because his ankle had been damaged during World War II. He took off his shoe and sock and showed that his foot was displaced about a half inch to the side starting at the ankle joint.
During the war he had been a motorcycle courier for a period of time, he said, and was in an accident that smashed his ankle. Because there were no medical facilities immediately available and he was in a hurry and did not want to be incapacitated, he told his foot to stop paining, to heal, and to start walking. He got up and went on his way, pushing the machine ahead of him. He did not have his injury X-rayed for a long time. The doctors later found that the broken bones were so distributed that they could not understand how Jack could walk.
Later on, I spoke to Dr. Kurt Fantl about this. He said that, as part of the demonstration Jack had made before the medical association, he had ordered X-rays of the ankle. He showed them to the doctors present, without identifying the patient. The consensus was, he said, that this man should not be able to walk. Thereupon Dr. Fantl identified Jack as the man with the hopelessly smashed ankle.
Jack said that the most entertaining event involving medical opinions about his ankle happened when he was stationed with Dutch military forces in Indonesia. On the basis of X-rays done there, a doctor decided that an amputation was necessary. Jack had to prove he could walk. Jack's explanation of the imperfect "ankle repair" was that when he told the body to fix it so he could walk, he forgot to tell it to "put it back the way it was," and the body, lacking a complete instruction, complied only with his functional request.