How it all began for me

When I was about 4 years old, I was sitting on a little stool underneath the bathroom sink, you know, one of those that short people, like myself at the time, use in order to reach the faucet. I remember looking down at my arms when suddenly I had a strange sensation accompanied by the though: ”Oh, my God, I’m so close to this person all the time. What if I don’t know this person?!” Although I wouldn’t have known how to describe the experience at the time, I had for a brief moment become the observer of ”me, the physical person”, and I simply wasn’t sure if the observer really knew this person close enough to dare to be with them all the time. I concluded I was stuck with this particular person. Not that I would have wanted to be stuck with any other person, but I still couldn’t understand why I was in this particular body. It felt like a bit of a shock to me that there seemed to be somehow two entities, and one of them was observing the other.

As strange as this may sound to someone who hasn’t experienced this kind of thing, it wasn’t strange at all for me, as nothing is strange to a kid. In fact, as I child you think that everything you experience is normal and that everyone else is experiencing the same things.

The phenomenon I just described kept recurring throughout my childhood, sometimes involuntarily, and sometimes I would evoke it on purpose by looking at my arms or my hands and just being really still. It remained throughout my teenage years, and at some point I started calling it my ”out of body experience”, because that is what it felt like. I wasn’t actually looking at myself from the outside or anything, I just for a moment ceased being who I, and everyone else, thought I was. Sometimes, it would occur while I was speaking to someone, and then I would pause and say: ”Oh my God, I just had one of those out of body experiences – you know what I mean!” But noone seemed to know what I meant, and eventually I stopped mentioning it when it occurred, in order not to seem strange. Around this time, I went from thinking that this was a normal phenomenon that actually ”existed”, to thinking that I was alone in this and that perhaps I was a little crazy or something.

Cut to me as an adult, having had this out of body experience numerous times and sometimes found it scary as it erases everything you think you are and leaves you feeling like a blank page that could become someone totally new each moment, it wasn’t until after almost 10 years of reading books on spirituality and listening to different speakers on the subject, that I realized what this phenomenon really was (and this was only about 2 years ago!). I was stirring in my breakfast bowl and thought to myself: ”While I am stirring in my breakfast bowl, I will try to really be in the now, to really experience this moment, without any thoughts or anything”, and then I noticed I had the exact same ”out of body” experience as before! I finally understood what I had heard Eckhart Tolle say on several occations, and I might be paraphrasing: ”you are the now, you are this moment”. Being in the moment, in the now, felt exactly the same as having my ”out of body” experience, which to me meant that ”I = the observer” and ”this moment” must be the same thing.

I find it really hard to express this experience in words, and I’m sure that there are other people who can do it a lot better, but I wanted to share it in case someone else could be helped by it.

I haven’t even found out yet whether it will be possible to leave comments here, but if anyone else recognizes what I have just shared and has experienced something similar, I would love to hear about it! 🙂