Conversations with Avant-garde Sages - The Wizard LLC

Conversations with Avant-garde Sages
EM BE: No, I was born in Lebanon in Beirut, Lebanon, and
emigrated from Lebanon to the States. The French background
that I have is the French education system that existed in
Lebanon, and I went through French schools in Lebanon. So we
came, my brothers and I, with my mother, to the States in 1968 to
New York.
TRIP: You immediately enrolled in college, and then shortly
thereafter you had a startling experience there, what was that all
about?
EM BE: Yeah. It's very interesting. I came with my brothers and
my mother, and I was living in that asleep-ness. Now it's like a
dream world, but at the time there was really just that, just
attending to whatever I was meant to attend to in terms of what I
was taught that I needed to be, and to do.
I was a very serious student, I studied and applied myself, I
wanted to succeed and wanted to please my mother, and become
successful in order to better take care of her and make her happy.
I was in upstate New York, and one evening I was walking home, I
think it must have been in 1971 or so, maybe '72. I was walking
down the hill in Troy, New York, upstate New York, somewhere
around campus, or away from campus, I don't remember the exact
location. And it was in the evening, and suddenly I was out in
space looking down on myself walking. So I was out there looking
at me, this young man walking down the hill, and it startled me,
because it wasn't just a thought. I was two people [Laughs]. I was
like, oh, what is that? And so it was confusing that there was the
possibility that there is another experience of me than the
experience that I knew.
So it opened this possibility that what this experience seemed to be
was not all there was to it, meaning the experience of being this
student, this son, this brother, whatever it was. There was more to
it than that. And that experience, yes, you mention sometimes an
out of body experience, it's just a term. It was unsettling, but then
again I was busy with my work, and my studies. But it laid there
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