One winter’s day in 1999 I decided to go for an evening run. Midway through a long run it began to snow heavily and I decided to head for home. On my way home I ran across a foot bridge over the Santa Fe River and halfway across the bridge I slipped on the snow and fell. I bounced once and fell backwards off the bridge down into the rocky riverbed. I hit on the back of my neck against a sharp rock and immediately knew I was paralyzed. My head was out of the water supported by the rock while the rest of my body was submerged in the icy water. I was paralyzed from the neck down and found it hard to breathe so I couldn’t call out for help and I couldn’t move to try to pull myself out of the river. It was evening and growing dark so I didn’t see how anyone would see me in the water. I felt the icy water sucking the heat out of my body and it occurred to me that I was going to die.
I felt an internal ironic chuckle and thought to myself “What a stupid way to go.” As the heat drained from my body I began to grow drowsy and recognized the symptoms of hypothermia. At one point I found myself dreaming I was lying in my bed with a river flowing through it and I thought how cold it was and that I should get out of bed but I couldn’t seem to move. At the last moments before I passed out I thought: “So this is what it is like to die.” I had a feeling that it wasn’t bad, in fact it felt very cozy and comfortable, and I realized that after I died I would just pass into this emptiness into which I was already sinking. So I passed out and as far as I knew I died.
The next thing I knew I was waking up on an operating table face-down as a neurosurgeon prepared to surgically fuse my spine. I later found out I had five smashed vertebrae including C2, C3, C5, C6 and T1 and was lucky I was not killed in the fall. Another near death. The surgeon told me I would probably be paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of my life. I was quickly put into a whole upper body cast and head brace that kept my head and neck immobilized with my chin sticking up in the air. The next thing I knew I had a raging case of pneumonia from which the doctors said I almost died. As soon as that pneumonia went away I had another case of pneumonia which was worse than the first. I remember having vivid hallucinations in which I thought I was going to die and that death was an infinite emptiness. There was comfort in that.
As I lay in bed week after week I thought my life was over. I would never walk again, never see my son again, never have sex again, in short I hit rock bottom. Plus I had to wear that damned brace for three months and the inability to move despite my pain was one of the worst experiences I’ve been through. I thought I’ve been through four or five near death experiences in just a few days and I tried to figure out if there was some cosmic meaning to that. I remembered the old biblical saying that to be born you must die and I thought that maybe I was unconsciously trying to die so that I could be born again into a new life. But at the time I had no idea what that might mean.
I was determined that I would move again and with much effort, I found I could move my fingers a little bit. I practiced that over and over and it gave me little hope. And then again with much effort I found I could move my foot. Slowly over a period of months I found I could move more and more and I was moved out of intensive care into the hospital rehabilitation ward. There were physical therapists there to help me learn to move more and more of my body. But then because of all the hospital and surgical bills my money ran out and I was forced to be moved out of the hospital into an inexpensive nursing home.
It was a dim, dark, dingy, and depressing old place that was essentially a warehouse for terminal Alzheimer’s patients and old people waiting to die. Many of them just lined the hallways sitting all day like vegetables in wheelchairs. Many others were constantly screaming and wandering up-and-down the hallways and sometimes would even wander into my room and climb in bed with me and at times urinate and defecate in my bed. This was frustrating to me since I couldn’t move enough to get them out of my bed or room. At first I thought all the constant screaming would drive me crazy. People were dying all the time and often they screamed right up to the time of their death. My roommate kept his TV on from the moment he awoke until the moment he went to sleep. This too was enough to drive me crazy with game shows and talk shows going on all the time.
During the first few months I was seriously depressed. I had never been depressed before and was surprised at how powerful and all-encompassing the experience was—I didn’t want to move, I didn’t want to get out of bed, I didn’t want to think, I was weighted down with an incredible sense of fatigue—as far as I was concerned my life was over. I think at that point I hit rock bottom and if I could have given up and just laid in bed like a vegetable I would have done so. However no matter how depressed I got I never considered suicide. I always had the belief that this accident was some horrible mistake and that somehow I was going to get better. And I always had the feeling that no matter how badly I was damaged I was still me. Because I was still me I often got the feeling that I could just get up and walk although I knew I couldn’t move.
I began to think about all my near death experiences and wonder what the meaning of them was. Maybe, I thought, it was a sign that I was gripping onto my life too tightly—that my ego was struggling too hard to be in control—and it was time to let go, let go of my life and let go of my attempts to control my life. The only way I knew to give up the ego was through meditation of which I had some vague knowledge, accumulated over the years. I knew that spiritual masters spoke of becoming enlightened. In some of the books I read it said you didn’t have to be religious, worship a God, be the disciple of any particular spiritual master or guru or submit your self to any particular discipline. These books said it was a natural state and that ordinary normal people could become enlightened simply through realizing that they were always already enlightened. Until then I had thought it was only something attained by special, selfless, disciplined, very holy people. I realized that even a non-religious not particularly special person like me could attain enlightenment. I decided that that was the way out of my predicament, and I decided right then and there that I would attain enlightenment.
I had some books on meditation that I had been reading before the accident and I decided the only way to escape the external depressing craziness was to go deep inside myself. The meditation books often talked about having to die—or give up the ego—before you could be born or awakened into enlightenment and I began to think that maybe that was the point of all my near death experiences. Many of the meditation books talked about getting into a state of “no mind” in which you were fully alert and aware but without thoughts, emotions or mind. I would read a few paragraphs of the book and absorb the words, and then close my eyes and try to get into the state of no mind the author was writing about. This involved turning completely inward and ignoring the chaos around me. At first it seemed an impossible task.
But I was determined and practiced from morning until night every day. Soon I found myself having brief periods when there were no thoughts in my mind. Over time these periods lengthened until I found myself spending minutes at a time with no thoughts in my head just existing purely in the present with no thoughts of past or future. As I began to get more and more skilled at getting into a state of no mind I began to realize that it was a feeling I had often had before. The place where I had had that feeling most often was in the floatation tank.
I had floated hundreds of times during the months while I was writing “The Book of Floating” and in the years afterwards when I owned my own tank and spent literally thousands of hours floating. Often while I floated I would get to a state where I was so relaxed my body seemed to dissolve or melt away. At that point I would say to myself “All right, no more words, no more thoughts, no more images, no more mind.” Immediately my mind would go blank and I would find myself in a state I could only call “waking dreamless sleep.” I was in a state of total blankness and time would disappear. I know I wasn’t asleep because I still had a basic primordial awareness even though there were no words or thoughts or images. There was no time because there was no one there to be aware of time—all there was was a blank emptiness that seemed to stretch in all directions infinitely. This blank emptiness seemed to welcome me and there was always a sense that all was well. When I emerged from the blank emptiness in the float tank I always had a sense of enormous well-being, exhilaration and energy. Those floats when I got into the state of total blankness and there was no time were always the best floats of all. When I emerged from the tank I would always be surprised at the time because when I was in the state of blankness there was no time and I could have been there for 10 seconds or two hours. But when I got out of the tank I would be surprised that two or three hours had passed in what seemed like the blink of an eye or a single instant.
Now as I lay in the nursing home reading my books on meditation and going into a state of no mind I realized that what I had been doing in the floatation tank was going into a state of no mind. As I lay in my hospital bed or sat in my wheelchair, I pretended I was in a floatation tank. I shut out all the external noise, closed my eyes, turned my attention completely inward and told myself “no more words, no more thoughts, no more mind”. Almost automatically I went into a state of no mind. I was in a state of total silence—all the external screaming and chaos seemed to disappear. I began to spend much of my day in the state of no mind and surprisingly I found I could move more and had more energy and my depression was gone. After about a year of this I was able to get out of bed and walk up-and-down the hallways with a walker. My doctors told me it was a miracle—which is a term doctors don’t use very often. My main doctor even took to calling me The Miracle Man.
As I explored the feeling of no mind, or emptiness, I began to discover it had certain qualities. It was infinite in all directions and no matter how deeply into it you went you could always go deeper. It had no inside and no outside—it just “was”—and terms like inside and outside didn’t apply because it was everything. It had no center and no edge—of course not, because it was infinite in all directions, it was everything there is. Most importantly this infinite emptiness was totally peaceful—it was ultimate peace and you could stay there forever and never get tired of it, because of course you had no mind to get tired of things and there was no sense of time—it was always just Now with no before and no after.
Then one day something surprising happened. They had come to take me down the hallway in a wheelchair to take a shower. They showered me off and as far as I know I was not in a state of no mind—I was fully involved in taking a shower. Then when they were wheeling me back down the hallway I felt an amazing radiance welling up inside my chest like a spring welling up out of the ground. It seemed to emanate from the center of my chest as if there were a sun inside my chest radiating intensely bright light although there was no light involved—just this powerful invisible radiation welling up. “What is this?” I wondered and by the time I got back to my room I realized that what I was feeling was bliss. I was filled with a sense of excitement and wonder. My life seemed like a miracle.
Sitting there in my wheelchair feeling this extreme bliss I suddenly realized that it wasn’t confined to my chest but spread out through my entire body and then throughout the entire room. Everywhere I looked this radiant bliss seem to permeate and interpenetrate everything. In fact it seemed to be like atoms except that it wasn’t a material substance—it was invisible like air except it permeated everything including solid objects like it was the secret matrix or substratum of which the entire universe was made. It filled everything and was everywhere and I felt that we humans were like fish swimming in water and wondering “what is this thing called water that everyone talks about?” It was everywhere, all pervasive and so essential and invisible that we couldn’t see it and had no idea that it even existed.
I meditated on this and read books looking for similar experiences and decided that what I was perceiving was pure Being, or Consciousness. As I looked around over the next few days seeing this “stuff” that made up everything, it slowly became clear to me that everything was pure Being or Consciousness—everything is Consciousness, Consciousness is all there is, there is only Consciousness. And the blankness and infinite emptiness you go into when you go into the state of no mind is pure Being or Consciousness or primordial Awareness.
As I began more and more to experience Consciousness as everything, my view of life underwent a radical change. I experienced with increasing clarity that if everything is Consciousness, this Consciousness can only be one single unified thing and one thing only. In fact, I realized, Reality is one thing only—Consciousness or pure Being. And if reality is one thing only then ordinary everyday life as we know it is essentially an illusion emerging out of this single unified Being or Reality. This illusion arises out of Consciousness. It’s like a movie projected on a screen—we see the actions happening on the screen, tragedy, comedy, drama, and we get involved in the actions and accept the characters as almost real, but in fact they are just projections cast by a single bright light from the projector through the film. The film may run out but the light still shines. That light is Consciousness. It projects everything in the universe and the entire universe is pure illusion. Except of course the metaphor is flawed because Consciousness is everything, even the illusions that it creates or projects to entertain itself.
And since Consciousness is everything and we are all illusions then we are not the doers of our actions. Consciousness lives through us. I began to realize as I walked the hallways of the nursing home that it wasn’t me who was doing the walking—Consciousness was walking through me. When I sat in my wheelchair and raised my arm it wasn’t me who was raising my arm, it was Consciousness raising my arm. As I realized this, everything became effortless—there was no effort for me to expend since everything I was doing was being done through me by Consciousness. We are not the doers—Consciousness is all there is, there is only Consciousness.
And since there is only Consciousness, and everything that happens is Consciousness, nothing can go wrong. Everything is just the way it is because it is the action of Consciousness. When it comes right down to it we have no choice—all our actions and what we believe to be our decisions are actually the actions of Consciousness. We have no responsibility for what we do or what happens to us—it is all the action of Consciousness. Everything is going to happen just the way it is so why worry about it, just sit back and let it happen because it’s going to anyway—there’s nothing you can do about it. And when you think you are making choices, that is Consciousness acting through you making you believe that you are making choices when actually it is Consciousness that is acting through you. Seen from this point of view, everything is perfect. Everything is happening perfectly because that is the way Consciousness wants it to happen. And so I came to the conclusion that everything that had happened to me including my accident and my paralysis was perfect just as it was—it was the result of the actions of Consciousness moving through my life. The facts that I had no choice and that everything was perfect just the way it was was a tremendous relief to me and lifted from me a great burden of responsibility and regret.
After two years in the nursing home and over a year of almost constant meditation I was able to walk well enough to be released from the nursing home and go to live in my own apartment which was provided for me by public housing. There I continued meditating and the feeling of bliss continued to well up inside me. My hands were still paralyzed and the rest of my body was still partially paralyzed. So people were paid by the state to come by for a few hours in the morning to get me out of bed and get dressed and make me breakfast, then someone came by later in the evening to make me dinner and get me into bed. All the rest of the day I’m blissfully by myself and I spend much of my time in a state of no mind. I have joined a gym, and my helper takes me out and helps me get onto the Nautilus machines and pump iron. I have come a long way from when the doctors were telling me I would never move again from the neck down. I am living in poverty but it is blissful poverty. And I realize that everything is perfect just the way it is.
As soon as I was able I made a trip down to Albuquerque to a float center where I took a float. As I got into the tank the voice in my head said, “ah, home again!” As I relaxed back into the tank I felt all the contractions—contractions of the body, of the emotions and of the mind—release and let go completely and my body dissolved into delicious and blissful state of comfort and peace. This is one thing I had forgotten about floating. All my meditation had been done lying in bed or sitting in my wheelchair. There, no matter how relaxed you get you still feel the pressure of the bed or the chair against the back of your body. Now, back in the tank again I floated freely on top of the Epsom salts solution and it was as if gravity had disappeared and I was floating in space with no pressure against my back or any part of my body. I was able to let go completely of all contractions and all sense of pressure. After a few minutes of releasing all contractions and tensions, my body had let go completely and dissolved into pure relaxation.
I said to myself what I usually had said whenever I floated before the accident. I said “No more words, no more thoughts, no more images, no more mind.” Almost immediately all words in my head ceased, there were no more thoughts, since thoughts require words, all images disappeared into the vast infinite emptiness, and I found myself in the state of no mind. As I had suspected it would be, It was the same state I had discovered in my meditations in the long years in the nursing home. No mind is no mind no matter where it happens but it was clear that the floatation tank facilitated the process and speeded it up enormously.
As I lay there in timeless pure Being, black empty space extended infinitely in all directions and my body ceased to exist. It was clear to me that everything was Consciousness—pure primordial Consciousness with no content whatsoever, just emptiness and silence and total stillness. How could anything move because it was pure emptiness and was a totally solid field which was everything. There was no more me, I had disappeared, and all that was left was what is eternally present and never changes.
It became clear to me that I had been in this state hundreds of times in the decade and a half before the accident when I had been in the floatation tank. But because I had read no spiritual literature and had no experience with spiritual reality I had no idea that that was what was happening to me. I simply assumed that I had become so relaxed in the tank that I went into a blank state on the verge of sleep where I had no thoughts and no memories and no sense of time. It just seemed to be a normal part of what I would call a “good float.” It didn’t happen every float but when it did I always emerged from the tank with an extraordinary sense of being deeply rested and filled with energy and exhilaration.
After the floats when I went into the state of no mind as I went out into the world my senses were extremely—almost unbelievably—sharp and keen. Everything I saw seemed beautiful and miraculous and the colors of everything were extraordinarily rich and beautiful. I saw everything clearly as if objects had sharp edges around them. It was as if you normally have to wear glasses because without them everything is fuzzy, and then you put on your glasses and suddenly everything comes into sharp clarity. But I didn’t wear glasses and everything became much more sharp and clear than it normally was. My sense of smell was fantastically keen and walking through the streets became an exhilarating experience of being bombarded by hundreds of different smells. I could smell the perfume on women as much as a block away and the smell of trees and flowers was rich and delightful. My sense of hearing had increased sharply and as I walked through the streets I could overhear and listen fully to scores of different conversations at the same time, some of them as far as a block away. Everything seemed delightful and I had a powerful sense that all was well. The world itself seemed miraculous and I was totally and intensely in the present moment without thinking of past or future. Everything I did seemed to come effortlessly and easily.
At the time I just assumed that this was the result of a good float. But now in the years since my accident I have read many spiritual books, done much meditation, spoken with many spiritual masters, and have had what you might call an experience of awakening, and it has become clear to me that this sense of awakening is not the necessary or inevitable result of floating, but the result of something that can happen to you while you are floating. The float tank is like a gateway to infinite being. It doesn’t necessarily put you into a state of no mind or make you aware of pure Being, or open your eyes to the fact that Consciousness is all there is, that everything is Consciousness, that there is only Consciousness. These realizations come from the repeated experience of no mind and learning to abide in no mind or pure Being for long periods of time. Experiences in the float tank makes this possible and the float tank is the most effective tool I am aware of for having these experiences.
Ordinarily this takes an enormous amount of practice. You must learn to abide intensely in the present moment with no before and no after. Thoughts arise but if you apply yourself to discovering the source of your thoughts you find they arise out of emptiness, pure Consciousness without content. In ordinary life this usually takes a relatively long period of practice. But the float tank is an ideal tool for accelerating the process. It is a perfect environment for releasing all contractions, letting go of the distractions of the body and mind, and becoming so profoundly relaxed that it becomes easier to let go of all thoughts, emotions, images, and the mind itself and abide in a state of no mind.
It’s wonderful to be able to go quickly into a state of no mind, for which the floatation tank is an ideal tool. However unless you have a sense of the spiritual reality to which no mind is the doorway, you may miss the experience completely and think you’ve just had a momentary lapse of Consciousness or brief period of blankness or sleep. My recommendation is that in addition to floating you do some reading of spiritual literature that will give you a context for the experiences you are having in the tank. In fact reading spiritual literature will speed up and facilitate the process of spiritual awakening in the tank.
Let me briefly mention a few of the books that were particularly helpful during my years in the nursing home in teaching me to enter a state of no mind. One powerful little book is The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, by Eckhart Tolle. This book is a clear and straightforward description of how to live fully in the Now, and shows you how you can enter pure Being through feeling the inner body and passing through the inner body into the infinite emptiness of primordial awareness. I Am That, a series of dialogues with the Indian sage Sri Nisargadatta is an endless series of awakening lessons by a fully enlightened master. The books The Open Secret and As It Is by the British teacher Tony Parsons present a series of exceptional dialogues and essays that emphasize the pure simplicity of waking Consciousness, which is eternally present and constitutes all there is. The dialogues of Ramana Maharshi, who is surely the greatest sage of recent centuries, are astonishing in their clarity and their insistence that we are always already enlightened; we just need to become aware of it. I recommend the recently published Talks with Ramana Maharshi. His words carry a special power and charisma that are able to put you immediately into a state of no mind. Some of the books of Poonjaji, also known as Papaji, such as Wake Up and Roar are dialogues from a completely awakened man that have the power to awaken the reader.
Papaji was for many years a disciple of Ramana Maharshi. Then beginning in the late 80s many Westerners went to India to study with Papaji and he had the power to bring hundreds of them into a state of awakening. These disciples of Papaji are now in the West writing their own books and traveling from town to town giving talks and meditations. Perhaps the most well-known of Papaji’s disciples is a woman named Gangaji, who has written several powerful books and travels the world giving talks and meditations.
I also gained much insight from reading Zen literature, for the Zen experience of Satori or Kensho is exactly the same as waking up to the experience of no mind and the realization that everything is Consciousness. I particularly recommend some of the ancient Zen masters such as Bankei, Dogen and many others. They spent many hours in meditation cutting off all thoughts and I can’t help but think that their experiences in solitude have much in common with spending time in the floatation tank. Solitude, I believe, is definitely a necessity for entering a state of no mind.
I remember that when I was in my early 20s I spent several years living in isolation and solitude in a crude lean-to way up the side of the mountain in the wilderness miles from the nearest road. There was no electricity or running water of course, and I took my drinking water out of the stream that ran past my lean-to. I would often go for weeks at a time without speaking to anyone or seeing anyone. After several months I noticed that my mind would often go completely blank and I seemed to be existing in a timeless state. When the winter came the mountains and trees were covered with snow and the sky would be a whitish shade of gray so that I was totally surrounded by whiteness. This increased the feeling of sensory deprivation. My senses became extremely sharp and I noticed that for long periods my mind was a total blank and I lost all sense of time—there was no time. I was in a state of absolute peace. I felt I was on the verge of discovering something important.
A friend of mine had given me a book by John Lilly about the floatation tank. As I read it I became more and more amazed because the experiences that John Lilly described having in the floatation tank were in many ways identical to the experiences I was having in my own state of sensory deprivation on the mountainside. I immediately wanted to go out and find a floatation tank. I vowed that as soon as I could find a floatation tank I would have the experience. Because it seemed like John Lilly was able to have the same experiences in the float tank in just a few minutes that it had taken me months to achieve in my mountaintop isolation.
In the end it took me over ten years before I got a magazine assignment to write about the floatation tank and I began floating regularly in the float center near my apartment in New York City. Out of that magazine article, with the addition of about a year of scientific research, emerged The Book of Floating. The book had chapters based on scientific evidence about the various psychobiological changes and experiences that happened in the float tank. But it had no chapter on the spiritual aspects of floating, simply because I wasn’t aware of them. With all my experiences of timelessness and periods of no thoughts you would have thought I might have become aware that I was going through spiritual experiences. But to me they were just blank periods and I didn’t consider them anything special. In fact they are absolutely not special—they are just the emergence of primordial awareness and emptiness which is eternally present and is the substratum of all existence—it never comes and never goes, is never born and never dies, is one solid Reality which is everything that exists. It is always there and once you become aware of it you realize it has always been present in your life and is nothing extraordinary.
It wasn’t until I had my near death experiences and realized that this Reality which was present in life continued to be present in death, that I began to get the feeling that this was pure Being and was eternally present. In the nursing home as I meditated until I could get myself into a state of no mind I finally began to realize that this was the spiritual experience written about by the sages and spiritual masters. That was the point when I understood that this experience was nothing new to me but that I had been into it hundreds of times during my periods of “wakeful deep sleep” or Consciousness with no content in the floatation tank.
It can happen naturally in the float tank if you allow yourself to sink into deep relaxation. First you let go of all contractions and constrictions and let your body seem to dissolve until you reach what seems like the bottom of all relaxation—the deepest you can go. Then if you rest there a while you’ll find that you can relax even more as if all your body is melting away. Then you continue going deeper and come to rest at the ultimate state of relaxation. At that point you may find your thoughts and feelings and emotions disappearing. If you let that happen fully and give up all resistance you may find yourself sinking into a state of no mind. For me the quickest way is after I have reached the state of deepest relaxation I simply say to myself in my mind, “no more words, no more thoughts, no more images, no more mind.” Amazingly as soon as I say this to myself my mind becomes empty of words thoughts and images and I am in the blankness of no mind where there is no time because it is always exactly that moment that never changes and has no before and no after.
—Michael Hutchison
mhutchisonmn@aol.com