Out of the Body Experiences - Part one - Magic Mushrooms.

 I had experienced being out of this body twice when I was intoxicated on a type of mushroom while I was in a little village called Esperanza high up in the Andes Mountains of Ecuador. The first episode happened just after I had eaten the upper half a piece what my friends with me had called the 'King Mushroom' , because of its size. The top part was as large as a saucer for a tea cup and thick. It looked very much like the edible mushroom I found in the corn fiedls behind my farm house in Green Bay, Wisconsin during the spring. but those had no side effects as these. I was warned by the Argentinian gentle through his Brazilian wife who spoke English not to consume the whole mushroom. I had met the wife traveling on the bus with her little girl from a Small town called Otavallo and found out later that the family were on their way to Europe to sell their leather products. The husband whose name was Rayo was a master leather craftsman who made designed bags and purses etc. out of leather.

I had found three mushroom growing together from a large cow dung hill. The largest was in between two others half its size, I had given the smaller two to the husband and wife and I ate the larger one. A soon as I had eaten the mushroom I went and sat at the edge of the floor of the broken down horse corral that the couple has chosen to stay in, while Rayo took my brown leather cowboy hat I was wearing and went to one corner of the building and sat tow work on my hat with a kind of chisel and hammer. The wife took my flute and sat at the opposite corner and started playing it. Soon there was a rhythm between the sound sound of the hammer and chisel to that of the flute and there was a music in the air; the Sound Andes. I sat with my sketchbook on my lap and stared at the blind white pages and after a while I noticed what looked like long white worms tarted crawling all over my pages. I was surprised and looked up straight at the skies above me. The Andes Mountain air was pure and clean and so the white clouds above me appeared like huge mountains of cotton against a pure blue sky.

It was at this moment that i found myself sitting high above in the air looking down at me with my sketch book on my lap and my small white towel hanging from my shoulder I had a long sleeve dark blues sweater and a dark brown corduroy and a pair of hiking boosts on. I was shocked by this occurrence and found myself back into my physical body sitting at the edge of the floor. The first thing i did was to turn my head to look at Rayo who had stopped tapping away with the hammer and chisel on to the brim of my hat and he was looking straight back at me and nodded his head with a smile and an understanding nod.  I turned to his wife and she was smiling at me and asked, "Are you Okay, Senor?"

Before i proceed to the second phase of the out of body experience I would like to explain why I am sharing this. I am fully aware that i am not the body nor am I the mind, I do not say this I heard it said or the Vedas and the rest of the Hindu scriptures said it or that the Buddha might have mentioned or Alan Watts or Krishnamurti or that I want to sound like I am in the know. No Know I am not this body or mind from experience and years of observation of how both works. I am not saying that it is an easy fact to follow on a day to day existence especially when one has to attend to myriads of interactions from without and within the body itself. However my consciousness accepts the fact, no, I am not this physical form nor am I this formless mind.  Thus one of those memorable experiences that had posed as a challenge to this acceptance was my out of this body experiences of which I an remember vividly had occurred four times in my life. I have related these experiences in the past in this Blog and so am not wasting my time repeating them. 

to be contd.