Solitude. To me the word has always brought forth images of hiking alone through forested mountains that were filled with clear, bubbling streams and grassy meadows; a sense of detaching from my usual daily involvements with people and things, immersing and refreshing myself in the untainted world of nature; however, during the summer of 1973, these associations suddenly began to shift as the logical extension of the idea of solitude manifested itself in the form of a sensory isolation tank, inside of which there was, in effect, nothingness; over 99 percent attenuation of all external stimulus input; a black hole in psychophysical space; psychological free-fall.
Naturally I jumped right in and promptly left my body, owing perhaps to having just read Robert A. Monroe’s book, Journeys Out of the Body. Little unexpected things like this separation from my body, which I experienced, kept happening to me during my tank sessions, and I came to admire the instant-karmalike ability of a session to bring forth items lying around in the recesses of mind and body.
Entering an isolation tank is much easier than getting into most other spaceships. I would simply climb in, stretch out and float off on a buoyant solution of MgSO4 (7H2O) (Epsom salts) and water, kept at neutral temperature, neither warm nor cool. Inside the tank there is absolutely no light and virtually no sound (low-frequency vibrations from airplanes do come through and that can really flash you out—there you are suspended in embryonic silence one hundred million miles out in deep space, and suddenly the Logos, the Universal Vibration, begins to pervade the fabric of awareness, coming at once from inside and from all directions). Usually the first minutes of the session go to the monitoring of body sensations. In a very short time the minimal sensation of the water meniscus rising and falling with respiration will fall below the threshold of awareness. Initially in the rather corrosively yang medium of sodium chloride (NaCl), minor skin nicks and abrasions could delay this stage indefinitely, but with the substitution of MgSO4 the supporting fluid becomes very soft and yin. The skin actually feels slippery. With full relaxation of the body, the small waves produced in the liquid die away. Automatically the body assumes a position in which all sets of agonist/antagonist muscles are precisely balanced, with knees and elbows flexed. With the external forces and stimuli reduced to virtually zero, the only forces left are internal ones—those energies stored in the muscles, tendons and ligaments of the body, the physical record of our life in a gravity field—and those energies forming a continuously varying stream of awareness, quite detached from the outside stimuli to which we continuously and unconsciously orient ourselves. I learned a good deal about my habitual physical tension-patterns and tightness from old injuries from the asymmetry of my body in this relaxed state.
Here we have come to the brink of the experience and I will leave you there. There is quite a variety of possible experiences available to any given subject, and elsewhere in this manual you can read some firsthand reports from voyagers just freshly emerged from the tank. These reports were collected right from the beginning of operational capabilities at the Decker Canyon ranch, John and Toni Lilly’s home in Malibu, California. The facilities there began in 1973 and eventually included five tanks running simultaneously. For obvious reasons we soon began referring to the ranch as the Lilly Pond, although the official mailing name is Human Software Inc. These tanks were the result of collaboration between John, who had been tripping in a long and varied series of tanks since the 1950s, and Glenn Perry, a computer programmer and engineer who developed and is president of the Samadhi Tank Company (P. O. Box 2119, Nevada City, CA 95959, www.samadhitank.com). Steve Conger has developed tanks in the shape of rectangular boxes measuring about forty inches wide, ninety inches long and fifty inches high. They are constructed of plywood, lined with plastic sheeting (vinyl) and provided with large counterbalanced lids for ease of entry and exit. The support equipment included an air pump, water pump and bacterial filter, and a thermoregulatory system, which maintained the temperature in the tank water at about 93°F. A fourth tank was added, which was constructed of Fiberglas. It was larger, shaped like a symmetrical bivalve rectangular prism and affectionately dubbed the White Whale. Still later, a fifth tank was built of concrete blocks in a circular design, with an inside diameter of about seven and a half feet. This was the joint effort of John, Joe Hart and Will Curtis. Inside this round tank the water rotates counterclockwise at about one revolution per five minutes. I mention these different tank shapes because each had a definite influence on the nature of the experience; a good example of the unexpected preprogram. The round tank was especially far-out because although you had no sensory clues to that slow rotary motion—unless you touched the side or bottom—on some other level you still knew you were spinning very slowly at the air-liquid interface, in a roomy lotuslike container—a real, live Experiential Mandala—and this produced some uniquely cosmic experiences.
There were also some intriguing psychological phenomena that occurred among the daily users of the tanks, but I’ll leave those tales to others contributing to this manual.
Right now I want to move to another perspective on this business of sensory isolation tanks and awareness and consider it from the point of view of my past training in Western technical science.
In the time since I graduated from medical school, my ideas of disease and its origins have undergone some drastic alterations. Living the past three years at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, and experiencing daily an incredible community of people interested in exploring consciousness have been profoundly enriching. For me a most important lesson of the past several years of my life has been the realization of the viewpoint that each one of us is totally responsible for whatever is going on in our lives. I don’t know how many times and in how many ways I have got this message, but each time I do it is like: “Oh, yeah, when am I going to remember that?“ For me and for many people it is a big message and I am content to go on nibbling at it until I really assimilate it. I’ll restate it for myself as much as anyone reading this. Wherever I am and whatever is occurring in my life, I am responsible for being there and I am responsible for changing it if it isn’t satisfactory. I have gone through a lot of changes with this, and one big change was in my old concepts of preventive medicine and how most people get sick—get “dis-eased.”
Much of Western medicine is symptom- and disease-oriented and it thus forever treats effects rather than keeping the whole organism balanced, tuned, functioning and high, or in other words, maintaining health in the first place. In areas amenable to technological methods, Western-style preventive medicine is fantastically effective—e.g., in the prevention of smallpox by vaccination or of cholera and typhoid by sewage disposal systems and chlorinated water, but of course the precursors, the predilections, the origins of “dis-ease” are not only external and objective but internal and subjective. IN THIS LATER AREA THE NAME OF THE GAME IS AWARENESS.
To illustrate: In the case of an alcoholic with accompanying liver disease we would concur that he is choosing the process that is occurring; at least we would feel that he is potentially capable of not injuring his health by ingesting so many molecules of ethyl alcohol. Without justifying or condemning, we can say that at some level he is totally responsible for his situation. This is a very clearcut example, but many disorders of health are not so clear-cut. There are many medical syndromes the causes of which are completely unknown or are only partially understood. Are disease entities such as cancer, schizophrenia, leukemia, multiple sclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis and the other collagen disorders, to name a few, simply examples of cosmic bad luck that just happens to befall the victims of these illnesses? Even if researchers discover some external culprit such as a virus that causes cancer, does it “cause” cancer any more than C2H5OH “causes” cirrhosis? For me it is a fascinating speculation to consider that the ultimate treatment is prevention and that the ultimate preventive medicine may be the development of the inner awareness of what allows these negative processes to develop. To restate it: How much hardware malfunction is the sequela of software bugs?
The successful surgical removal of an abdominal malignancy or a brain tumor is still pretty late-stage therapy; treatment of effect, not cause. (This is in no way a put-down, it is only the state-of-the-art. We need every recourse available.) “Early detection” is an excellent concept but must someday merge with the more encompassing one of primary prevention.
Is there some more ultimate cause of “dis-ease” than that which we hope to find at the small end of the microscope tube? What if we should peer in the other direction through the microscope, letting it become a telescope presenting us with a holistic rather than an atomistic or particulate picture?
Now we have reversed our perspective on this problem of what gets us sick. The problem is how we get ourselves sick (actively), or allow ourselves to become sick (passively). To what extent is disease a state of mind or a result of one’s attitudes… a breach not in the defense of the body mechanisms but beyond that some maladjustment in the relationship of ourselves to ourselves and to our environment? This is scarcely a new idea, but we Westerners have been slow to grasp it.
There is already a large and growing body of evidence that leads immediately to such a hypothesis, and conventional medicine already acknowledges the correlation between psychological states and hypertension and coronary artery disease, peptic ulcer disease, ulcerative colitis, asthma, various skin disorders, and a host of other illnesses. Even poison oak dermatitis can be viewed as a temporary but self-correcting lapse of awareness.
Gestalt, psychoanalysis, LSD work, yoga, meditation, dietetics and other techniques are mediums for process, leading to a more developed awareness. In all fairness to disease-oriented technical medicine, I wish to point out that in the long view it also leads to the same development of awareness. It begins with the manifested syndrome, the disease, and uncovers more and more detail about that disease, about the evolution of the disease process, gradually progressing from describing and isolating the condition (i.e., we learn to distinguish it) to defining its origin and ultimately how to avoid it. This may take decades, generations or centuries of combined observations, inductions and experiments.
Hippocrates described the clinical syndrome of hypertension. In the past few decades, medicines have been developed to treat it and in the past few years some therapists are closing the circle at its source and using biofeedback methods to allow the patient to distinguish and avoid the psychophysical states that elevate his blood pressure, or alternately to choose those states of being in which his blood pressure remains normal. Incidentally, do you find it slightly humorous, as I do, that technically oriented Western man devises machines to help him get into himself? From Hippocrates to now is a long time coming, so in a way, technical medicine is like justice. It grinds slowly but exceedingly fine.
The scientific development of awareness of the external vehicles of the black death, syphilis, and tuberculosis has changed our beliefs of their origins from that of God-sent plagues to their being quite avoidable situations. What science, which is itself just a point of view, is beginning to acknowledge in the experiential wisdom of the East is that the entirety of the central nervous system, both “voluntary” and “involuntary,” is potentially under the direct influence of the conscious mind and vice versa, and furthermore, that mind and body are themselves a unitary whole and in total feedback relationship to the environment.
The tank is a tool for process, like meditation, like Gestalt, like psychosynthesis, like psychotherapy, like a hammer or a saw, and like any of the above tools I found tank work to be effective to the extent that I familiarized myself and practiced with it. I would say that it is Gestalt/psychosynthesis, except that there is no longer a middleman—you become your own therapist or guide or explorer or whatever. (Of course, a good middleman can be of enormous value: it depends on how you like to fly.) Here I wish to express special thanks to Shakespeare, for in the tank one is the playwright, the director, the stage, the actor, the background scenery, the script, the audience and the critics; the inner theater.
I don’t mean to imply that tank work is only problem-solving active process. It is as easily passive—a sort of ZaZen and Tai Chi of the inner world, in which one eliminates all distinctions of Self and other and merges with his own deeper Self.
The tank assists in a very simple function; it allows us to expand our awareness of our internal state of being, of our internal flow. This augmented sensitivity to the ranges and varieties of the inner world enriches not only that realm but of course the everyday world where we do most of our living. It is a chance to quite literally unplug from the karmic merry-go-round and recenter ourselves, or to begin the voyage to that center. In a way, tank work bears a relationship to the present-day proliferation of human potential trips as does the concept of a control group to modern scientific experimentation; it is useful in isolating the variables, in finding who is doing what to whom, that who and whom are the same person—yourself. In the tank there is nothing happening but what you are doing, or not doing.
In the terminology of Gestalt psychology I can describe my flow of consciousness as a continual interplay of foreground and background, or as G. Spencer Brown pointed out in Laws of Form, a fundamental operation of the psyche is that of the making and unmaking of distinctions. This is taking place continuously on all sorts of levels of consciousness and unconsciousness.
Living on the surface of this planet we are continuously immersed without interruption and throughout every second of our entire lives in a wide range of input stimuli through the receptors of our nervous system. There are literally millions of bits of information arriving every second at the central nervous system. Usually we respond to only a tiny percentage of the stimuli presented to us and our responses to many of these are unconscious, i.e., preprogrammed or habitual.
I remember an LSD trip once when I looked into the face of a three-month-old baby. He had no habit patterns filtering out input—everything was just going directly into his system like it was going directly into mine. He hadn’t yet learned to selectively choose and ignore any input and so he hadn’t learned any particular description of the world. It took don Juan almost fifteen years to undo Carlos Castaneda’s internalized descriptions, in Teachings of Don Juan; A Separate Reality; and Tales of Power. The world we live in we continually create by what we choose or allow ourselves to observe and in the way we respond to and experience it. In a way, we are all musical instruments, each with our own fundamental tone but the same underlying frequencies, infinitely interlocked in the orchestration of the Tao, free to vibrate on as many levels as we desire with one another and within ourselves, changing, exchanging and expanding, finding new and different rhythms and vibrations, resonating and learning to resonate more. In the midst of this a bit of free-fall in silent, dark solitude can be enlightening.
No promises, you understand. People in the tanks have experienced (their own) fear, love, exhilaration, profound peace, and assorted other spaces. Personally, I have had a lot of fun, met some fine people, and learned some things as well. It comes with something of a start for me to see my tank experiences, paradoxically, as actual interruptions of my patterns. I kept coming face to face with myself and found therein some of my habitual thought-feeling-movement programs. Some left and some remain, but all in all I did succeed in “stopping the world” from time to time and feel the more fluid for the experience.
One last thing: I also found that the “I” that “I” have used so liberally in this essay is only a construct, a program, a point of view, even though “I” still identify with it most of the time. “I” am “me” im-persona-ting mySelf. Do “you” see what “I” mean?