About seven years ago, I went to bed one night after an ordinary day, only to wake up two hours later with ten pounds less on my body. This represented 5.4% of my initial weight. I did not urinate, defecate or vomit during that two hour sleep period. Perspiration was normal. So where did the ten pounds of flesh go?

Science has no explanation for it. In some extreme cases, the flesh-eating bacteria may cause such a loss in such a small period of time. The flesh-eating bacteria simply transform the flesh into scrap. But I didn’t have these bacteria; there was no scrap, my body was intact. I simply lost ten pounds of weight, while sleeping, in less than two hours. Where did it vanish? Go wonder…

The next day, just to play it safe, I went for a medical exam, knowing my life was not in danger (at that point in the morning). Except for the ten missing pounds, and this look of death I had on my face, all was OK, according the generalist doctor.

From a more subjective point of view, here is a bit more of what led up the ten pounds weight loss. During that period I was exploring, and pushing, for fun, the programming done in deep sleep, mostly in REM (Rapid Eye Movement) states. In those two hours of sleep, the elephant of my waking consciousness was going to walk on the so-subtle world of the ants. My waking consciousness was going to try to have a dialogue with the unconscious life of my individual cells. (Still laughing at myself here.)

During that same period, I had been exploring ways to merge with others on the body level from a distance–mostly with my beloved of that period, with whom the “tuning” was deeper than our consciousness was aware. And there was the remaining influence felt from Wing Chun Kung Fu, which worked deeply with the power of attention and the body on many levels.

So that night I went to bed, allowing, as I had been doing for a year then, for all the cells of my body to resonate with those of another person, living on the other side of the continent. I got more and more attuned to that person, knowing when she was sad, happy, healthy, or less healthy, etc. Not just knowing—literally feeling.

The problem, that night, was that the person with whom I got attuned had gone into a focused meditation with someone else. I did not know this would happen so I did not retract my attention from merging with someone else, before going to sleep.

My body was not as well-attuned on a cell level to that of the third person involved. It’s then that what happened, happened. I woke up in a dream inside the REM state, my body completely paralyzed. And from that state of consciousness, I could watch the conflict occur on the DNA vibration level, meeting another one with which I was not in tune. I lost ten pounds–pfffff!—it simply vanished into thin air. Not in a few hours, but in a few seconds. The act of my day-to-day consciousness looking at the DNA vibration of the cells brought this on almost instantly. On the objective side, I know I weighed ten pounds more before going to sleep than when I woke up. My scales were there to testify to it. But on the subjective level, I am sure they were lost just in the few seconds of waking up.

With a great inner struggle, I was able to come out of the paralyzed state in Rapid Eye Movement, which stopped the process of ‘disintegration’ (I never could think of a Name for that experience). To give an image, I felt as if I was caught in a completely sealed room, with the energy inside equivalent to a nuclear reaction. Each cell of the body felt as if it wanted to burst open, liberating all its energy.

Waking up, I had to go deep within to stop this process of disintegration. I had to find a deep calm within, behind the cells, behind the atomic structure, behind my body-mind, to show it the peace of a night sky, with no super nova in it.

Maybe this process of body ‘disintegration’ is tied to the process used in the story of Jesus or Milarepa after their death, when they dissolve their body in thin air. I don’t really know. And I don’t seek to understand it, really. Maybe it’s tied to Shri Aurobindo saying someplace, something like, “the ego of humankind is opening faster and faster, but gradually and integrally. Yet just open the ego of a cell and it will explode.”

It took me two months to regain my normal weight. Since then, I stopped merging with others over distance. I learned to respect the ego-body of each. I also learned, from experimenting with it, that the body is just a projection of the mind. A nice one, I might say, a divine temple, but a projection nonetheless.

Humbly,

Antoine

Text edited by Jill Eggers.

Mazie Lane responds…Hey, Where’d I Go?

Dearest Antoine,

This strange and unbelievable phenomenon happened to me and my body, too, back in the mid-eighties. I was at a get-together of the Self-Realization Fellowship devotees, disciples and students of Paramahansa Yogananda, my Gurudeva.

I was about twenty or more pounds over-weight at the time, that being about 142 pounds. The day was normal-I ate normally, acted normally; in other words, nothing un-normal happened that would lead me to suspect something like this was about to happen.

Of course, there were the deep meditations, the kirtans and the lectures, and the also the films preserved of Yoganandaji in them, but that was not unusual for me.

I went to bed that night in the hotel room, a room I shared with a friend from France, Enid Moine who lived at the time in Poitiers. When I awoke, something “felt” different, I felt, well, lighter. I could not believe my eyes nor my hands touching and exploring and saying, “Hey, where’d I go?”

Where I did go was to the floor with the gym and I weighed in. What astonishment, even after realizing that something was entirely different… seeing by the numbers right before my eyeballs bugging out – I had lost overnight while sleeping, over twenty pounds. I am seriously telling you that this is exactly what happened.

Thanks, Antoine, for bringing this up and recalling back to my mind, the same kind of weird and wonderful experience with body/mind bringing out the stops and somehow, wow, just dissolving it.

Love,

Mazie