My Library

maintain the phase by grabbing the sage's beard. I ended up in my body, but with my hand still holding his beard, which I strongly clutched in my hand in order to amplify the flow of sensations as much as possible. Rubbing my hand with the beard, I was able to almost effortlessly get out of bed. After palpating the nearby space with my free hand and realizing that the state was stable enough, I began trying to scrutinize the hand with the beard, holding it close to my eyes. My vision started to return, and within several seconds I was already able to see the space and my hand itself quite clearly. In it lay a thick clump of gray hair. This made me laugh. I tried not to get distracted, and was able to contain myself. Then, I began to study the connection between the body that is visible on the bed from the phase, and the real physical one. Perhaps the phase space itself came to my aid, because it was precisely at that time that I saw my body indeed lying on the bed. I had been enjoying this sight less and less frequently, though at the beginning of my practice I experienced it with nearly every exit from the body. Watching myself from the outside was once again not very pleasant, something jostled me inside and aroused mixed feelings. This was perhaps because the person I was looking at did not exactly correspond to how I experience myself to be. I began to touch his feet, stomach, and head. Contrary to old wives' tales, this did not cause any getting pulled into a stencil - this process deepened and maintained my phase, as it was a type of sensory amplification. At some point, touching and examining the face, I all too clearly realized that it was me. Everything faded for a moment, and I even felt someone's hands on my face. But I was then able to go back to what I was doing, and continued on with the same clarity of purpose. I wrapped up the experiment. Here it dawned on me that I could not remember what else I had wanted to do. Quite disappointed, I now had to go on with doing the first thing that popped into my head, so as not to waste the rest of the phase as a result of my poor memory… March 2009 An Unexpectedly Long Phase