Eaten By The Tiger by Emile Allen, M.D.

The book website is www.eatenbythetiger.com.

 

  

In 1998 while operating on a patient, Dr. Emile Allen was accidentally electrocuted and underwent what some would call a 'near-death experience.'  He was using the electrocautery unit (electrical scalpel) that he had used without incident thousands of times throughout his career when: "Suddenly, in a split second, a large popping sound and an arc of electricity shot out of the electrical scalpel."  After moments of excruciating pain, Dr. Allen experienced a brief and startling interlude before regaining consciousness.

I don't know how long I was out, perhaps seconds or minutes, but during that time in the darkness, I heard a voice say:

"I'm not ready for you yet.  You have more work to do."

This voice came from an amorphous figure, an ill-defined shape of a person's face that came out of the shadows and entered my right upper visual field.  I couldn't tell if the voice was a man or a woman.  

He heard the statements repeated before waking up to intense pain.  Dr. Allen would eventually learn the extent of his injuries and develop new perspectives of the health care industry as a patient himself.  In addition to his NDE, another consciousness expanding event chronicled in Eaten By The Tiger is an out of body experience that occurred to the author years later. 

Dr. Allen stayed with his father, who was also a urologist, and his mother, a retired nurse, while seeing specialists in Southern California.  At one point he was taking 36 pills a day from nine different prescriptions.  He declined narcotics because he had seen so many patients struggle with addiction, opting to use instead "biofeedback and meditation, along with various medications, to help control my chronic arm and hand pain, migraine headaches, PTSD, and clinical depression."  He realized:

I had lost my freedom and independence.  I had lost my career, my status in the community, and my patients.  I had lost my home, my lifestyle, and my significance as a man.  I had lost so many things — and all at the same time.  I soon realized I was grieving over the loss of my identity, which was manifesting as the signs and symptoms of clinical depression.

Dr. Allen commented about the diagnosis of depression: "If you ask the right questions, you will frequently find that people are not depressed.  Instead, they may be grieving over a loss that needs to be identified and processed."

After undergoing hyperbaric oxygen therapy and anesthesia nerve block treatments, Dr. Allen developed a severe infection and became extremely ill, requiring extensive antibiotic therapy and pain medications.  Once again, he was laid up at home for a week not knowing which way his health would turn.

While I was recovering and reflecting on life's change of events, I heard the same voice as I did while I was lying on the operating floor fighting for my life:

"I'm not ready for you yet.  You have more work to do."

The message played repeatedly in my head.  What did it mean?  I had no idea.  What could I possibly contribute when everything was collapsing within me and around me?

A clinical psychologist helped Dr. Allen to identify his struggles not as problems but as challenges or life lessons.  He appraised, "When I recognized this, my perspective changed, and I moved from being a victim of my circumstances to being the victor of my life."

Upon first learning about the likely prognosis of his father having lung cancer, Dr. Allen recalled dealing with thousands of cancer patients throughout his career: "I had rarely seen people die from the cancer itself; however, I had seen the majority of them die from the complications of the treatments.  Oftentimes, the treatments are far worse than the natural progression of the cancer."  After the father received the worst possible lung cancer diagnosis, his decision to continue smoking cigarettes soon resulted in a life threatening ordeal.  The father eventually decided his treatments would be chemotherapy and radiation to the brain.  There is a description of an incident that resulted with the diagnosis of steroid psychosis attributed in part to high dosages of steroids administered to decrease the risk of brain swelling caused by radiation.  The father had decided to burn family possessions after considering the ephemeral nature of material belongings.

In 2007 Dr. Allen was working as a medical consultant and still struggling with feelings of loss and failure.  He decided to attend a ten-day spiritual retreat in Fiji.  When his Dasaji, Rajesh, told him, "You have to let the tiger eat you in order for you to live," Dr. Allen could not figure out what this meant.  While meditating one afternoon, he was again greeted by the voice of the amorphous figure saying "I'm not ready for you yet.  You have more work to do."  This time after hearing the statement, there was another occurrence.

Suddenly, I saw my own body sitting on the ground while my spirit, as I defined it, was up at the one o'clock position, looking down.  I realized I was floating above the room and could see each and every person in all six rows as clear as day.  My awareness was so acute that I could even detect the subtle movements of some people readjusting their bodies to get more comfortable.

The OBE continued until he was bumped by someone leaving the room, disrupting his meditative state.  He then noticed his heart was beating at around half his normal rate.  Dr. Allen reported, "While I felt as if it had been only a few minutes, I was surprised when I found out we had actually been in meditation for an additional hour!"  Afterward, he experienced heightened sensory perceptions of the world around him. 

Explaining to the Dasaji that he felt the peace of another world, Rajesh explained the metaphor of letting the tiger eat him: "Emile, you have been in fear of the tiger for so many years.  You climbed a tree to get away from the tiger, but you grabbed a branch and would not let go . . . today you finally let go of the branch and had faith that God would catch you."