Out-of-Body, Bufo
Seeing All White
On Saturday, December 9th, 2023, me and my wife did something out of the ordinary. We had the opportunity to try Bufo Alvarius in a safe environment, and gave it a shot.
It was a wild, religious experience. I will write some more about it later. There was one really cool side-effect for me – since I have a map of altered states of consciousness in my mind, I was able to remember the path, despite never having been there before.
The days following the Bufo experience, I could quickly move myself towards the same mental state, but would get scared. My vision would become filled with small details, overlayed on top of whatever I was looking at. While the Bufo trip only lasted around 25 minutes, it lingered in my mind for about a week.
By the following Saturday, I could no longer pull up the location easily. However, I still know the direction it’s in.
Since then, I have been meditating regularly to try and get back to that same spot. I am curious if I can experience something similar to Bufo without having to smoke the substance – and if I can do it on my own, how would Bufo compare to a 100% natural trip?
Today I was able to reach a new step in the right direction.
They call the Bufo trip an “ego death”. I never knew what the ego was, exactly. I knew the definition, but language is so confusing – I thought ego was more like “egotistical,” so something like “ego death” meant we should try and not be so self-centered.
That’s a great quality, but that’s not what “ego death” means.
In the context of Bufo, and I suspect all meditation practices, the ego is the part of your mind that you think is you. But it isn’t you. Right now, I have an internal monologue going on in my brain, as I write this article. That is the ego, in this context.
Our egos are like little loops of thought. We compulsively create them, and they go round and round. We give them momentum to keep spinning. And over time, I imagine this becomes so ingrained in us, that we forget that we aren’t the ego.
So who are we, really?
We are our conscience. That little non-verbal voice inside, that guides us to do the right thing.
The meditation I’ve been practicing is to stop feeding my ego loop. Just like if you focus on your knee, you can move your awareness into your knee – we are so focused on our ego, our awareness is inside our ego most of the time. But we can move our awareness back into our conscience.
It’s been challenging for me, because I constantly verbalize what I am doing. I know that if I’m verbalizing, then I am using my ego. I stop all verbalizing.
I sink back into my mind.
I compulsively think and analyze about what is happening, but I slowly stop that too. That urge to think is spinning up the ego. That’s the compulsion.
It’s actually really scary to experience!
It feels like you are killing your own mind. And in some sense, that is true – but only temporarily. This is a large part of the reason why it’s taken me some time to move further down the path. It actually feels really dangerous!
But slowly, over the days, I have been sitting at each location along the path, calming myself down, showing myself that I am still here, and I can return whenever I want.
Today, I finally clicked into some sort of new state. My vision went completely white, and I was only aware of my breath. Everything else about my body – my legs, arms, face, eyes, etc, were all gone.
I hung out for a couple seconds, and was quite scared, but continued to focus on my breath. I am afraid that if I stay in this state, I will stop breathing, because it really does feel like I am completely unaware of my body, and on the verge of some sort of death. But that’s why I take it slow, one step at a time, and prove to myself that I am safe.
I felt my breathing, which was faster than normal, and just sat for a moment.
Then I came back – I see a flood of color come in, in interesting patterns. It’s not entirely visual, like a dream, or waking reality… it still feels like staring at the back of my eyelids. But there is a lot of color overlayed on the blackness of my eyelids.
I came back, and decided to get up and move around. No issues.
I think I’m on the right path! This is really exciting for me, because I have meditated and tranced out most of my life. I have had probably hundreds of out of body experiences at this point, and never came across this new mental state on my own.
Now that Bufo showed me where this new state is located, I think I can slowly work my way back there, if I keep practicing. It’s cool!