An out of body experience by Madhuri
Poona, Nov. 21, 1987
Disillusioned with ‘love’ and romance, deeply exhausted from lack of sleep, having just written several letters, I was lying back feeling that I had given my energy outwards until I was utterly drained. I became aware of a strange tension in all my cells, but was aware too that my being within was detached and relaxed.
In this space, after much lying awake, I slept. Quite soon I was shaken awake almost violently by a strong force, and a strange roaring which was not quite sound surrounded me. Immediately I was sucked upwards above my body, at first as a sort of formless mass, and then right away coalesced into a vertical ‘shape’ of ‘me’ rising upwards.
‘Uh-oh’, I thought. ‘Here goes!’
How can I describe the feeling? — It is as though some utterly determined, impersonal intelligence has aligned with me or fixed on me and will draw me up. It pulled me then at enormous speed into some unknown blackness, towards some unknown destination. Wind roared and rushed past me, quite warm.
As I went my mind-energy tried hard to find something to focus on; as though it were free -floating and didn’t know what to do. So first, confusedly, I thought of Subuddha (my guy), but soon realized that felt all wrong, and then I thought, ‘Osho!’ In the first seconds of being drawn upwards I had felt that I might have the courage to allow it, as I am here with him. So I kept focusing on his name, but it seemed to be just a word, a word for my own aloneness, which was all that was real to me then.
I also kept relaxing each time the fear and amazement mounted, and on and on I rushed, into god-knows-what.
Then I thought longingly of being in my body, and remembered that Robert Monroe in his book Journeys Beyond the Body said that you always come back; and immediately I dipped downwards vertically and re-entered.
I then went into dream for a few seconds — that I staggered out in the dark and knocked on the door of Yatro, who lives across the hall, a Swedish psychic masseuse and a lovely friend – and told her. The next moment I woke up and did exactly that; she held me and told me of her experiences; then I sat back and felt that curious sensation all over my body that it had somehow come unglued from itself everywhere and then come back together — each cell vibrating.
Then I went back to bed and lay there and watched and pondered: ‘All my life’s small excitements seemed the utmost trivia compared with this.’
My thing with Subuddha seemed somehow infantile — this naked aloneness only was real.
I am so blessed to be visited with such an experience — Who brings it? Why sometimes and not others? Where does it want me to go, and why is it so urgent?
I had prevented nothing, had simply allowed — this felt great.
The feeling which had come so strongly during other experiences, of menace and danger, was much less — and this was because I am with him and have caught up with myself so much more. I have faced more dangers and become one with them.
Is there perhaps another dimension, simultaneous to ours and mirror-image, and when I enter it I am rushing, not outwards as I perceive, but inwards towards my center?
I feel like someone unknown has bought me a ticket to a carnival-ride — some monstrous ferris-wheel or roller-coaster — and it is for life, and I can be snatched from my bed at any wee hour to be shoved onto the thing and can only submit as gracefully as possible.
When I went to sleep again, I was not afraid that it might happen again, as I had been before; I welcomed the idea.
Before going to sleep again, I wrote to Osho — for the idea had come so strongly that there was something I should be remembering while airborne. Most likely it was just to be aware — to use that mind-energy to instead step aside and watch; but as usual, I forgot!
His reply to my letter:
You don’t have to remember anything, simply watch. Whatever has happened to you is beautiful but don’t make it a sweet memory and don’t give any juice to it — let it go and much more will happen.
March 10th, 1988
A strange half-hour the other morning. I was asleep, dreaming that I was flying around above a park like the ones in Australia – big and spacious and clean. I was beginning to get up a little too high and couldn’t easily come down again; I was becoming a bit scared. I thought, ‘Look, kid, you know it’s just trying to get out, why don’t you just relax and let it?’ I knew that I was asleep and dreaming. So I relaxed, and next thing I knew …whooooosh, I was out, and traveling with great speed somewhere. I felt detached and scientifically critical, trying to really see what was going on.
I was aware of my body being somewhere in the vicinity, breathing, but of myself not being of it. I thought that I was going inwards rather than outwards.
The intensity was growing. I came to a sort of level-change or gear-shift place where on all sides I could ‘see’ a certain pattern repeated in the blackness around me, of tiny stars with squares, or something. The velocity got more intense and I began to want to come back into my body. I was thinking constantly of Osho but could see with complete certainty that he was not something nicey-nice, with a name; he was this very nameless aloneness, naked and utterly vulnerable.
Something was intruding. Something was pulling me back. What?—a sound, harsh and penetrating—ah—the doorbell. I staggered up out of the mosquito net and made my way groggily down the corridor in my short nightshirt, to the door.
It was the dobhi, the laundryman, with his cherubic smile and halo of rum fumes, holding out the clothes I blearily remembered Kumud having given him the previous morning. I looked at her door and saw the bolt was shot; she was out.
“Kidna paise?” I asked; “how much?”
“Tree rupees,” said the dobhi, hesitating not at all.
I gave the money to him, took Kumud’s clothes, closed the door, and put her things on her bed. Five minutes later she came in.
“I got your things from the dobhi and gave him three rupees,” I said.
“You did? But I already paid him yesterday when I gave him the things, and it was only 1.50!” said Kumud.
I lay on my bed and bathed in that now-familiar feeling all over my body, of having gone out and come back in again. This time for some reason there was no exhilaration in it.
It was a strange few minutes.
Text and illustration by Madhuri
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