Um – what is an isolation tank, you ask?

“An isolation tank is a lightless, soundproof tank in which subjects float in salty water at skin temperature. They were first used by John C. Lilly in 1954 in order to test the effects of sensory deprivation. Such tanks are now also used for meditation and relaxation and in alternative medicine. Isolation tanks were originally called sensory deprivation tanks. Other synonyms for isolation tank include float tank, floating tank, floater tank, flotation tank, REST tank, flotation baths, John Lilly tank and sensory attenuation tank.”

-Wikipedia Entry on Isolation Tanks

Ironically, the film Altered States is even (loosely) based on the work of John Lilly, although I don’t think in real life he de-evolved into an ape and went on a rampage attacking people and eating raw animal flesh. :)

A few days ago I happened to find a nugget of gold at my local used bookstore. Sitting on the shelf, almost offensively in the new age section, I saw John Lilly’s definitive book on his research into isolation tanks, titled The Deep Self: Profound Relaxation and the Tank Isolation Technique.

Published all the way back in 1977, this book is a bit of mixture of 2 things – scholarly research into sensory deprivation via the isolation tank & how it effects the brain, and the philosophical underpinnings of the experiences and what it means as far as reality/mind.

About half the chapters convey a very scholarly approach on the topic at hand, covering everything from how to build a tank, to problems, obstacles, issues you might have in using the tank, to what to expect in the tank, to how they conducted their research, and so on. This is based on 20 years of research.

The other chapters are somewhat strange and occasionally hard to follow  – these are the chapters with Lilly espousing his ideas on reality, but (for me) too often draped in very scientific and mathematical terms.

It’s more than that though – he has this unique angle of how he writes & even a separate vocabulary of words and concepts that now, in 2008, sound quite odd to me. For instance, he regularly uses words such “biocomputer” , “metabelief”, “cybernetic” and “inperience”. External reality becomes e.r, and internal reality becomes i.r. Lilly constantly jumps his words together using a bracket or hyphen to connect similar concepts, resulting in very odd sentences such as “most other minds are not prepared to hear-understand-grasp what it means to explore-experiment-be-immersed-in such states.”

But don’t get me wrong here – it sounds like I’m putting down Lilly, and I’m not. He’s become a sort of personal hero to me, as I feel drawn to his passion for wanting to understand and his bravery and dedication towards using himself as a research subject, even at the cost of his own personal life and professional life.

I truly think he was tortured by his search for understanding, and this passion was the guiding principle of all his actions, no matter what the cost.

On page 72, he writes:

“Many of my former colleagues disavowed me…I understand their belief systems and the power such system have over our minds. I do not recriminate them, nor do I blame formers friends for not maintaining contact with me.

In my search (for “What is Reality?”), I have driven myself (and hence, close associates-relative-friends) to the brink of the loss of all communicational contacts for months at a time…. I have explored and have voluntarily entered into domains forbidden by a large fraction of those in our culture who are not curious, are not explorative and are not mentually equipped to enter these domains.”

These chapters on reality contain some of the most fascinating pieces in the book, with Lilly mapping out stages and ranges of consciousness/experience and exploring the old mind / brain / body problem (but in a way that I felt he was adding to the argument, and not just rehashing the same old ideas).

Finally, at the end of the book, we get to read logs of peoples experiences in the tank!

This is maybe the best part of the book.

Really, I had no idea just how far out you can go through sensory deprivation inside one of these tanks.

Some of the experience reports are so far out there, I have to wonder if they were conducting the experiment in combination with a psychedelic substance. (Lilly and friends were no stranger to LSD and other drugs, by the way!)

I want to quote at length from these logs, because I think the reports of the actual experience make for a more immediate understanding of what isolation tanks are all about.

Take a look at these excerpts:

“Gradually I seemed to make a head-on 180 degree roll so that I was facing down into an impenetrable night. Dawn broke from the eastern horizon, illuminating a vast desert of glittering sand a hundred feet below me. The sand became transparent and directly below me was a polished black granite monolith……in the center…was encased a sculptor of Jill. The effigy was of monumental size… when her eyes met mine, two lines of graphite streaked across the desert, straight to the source of sunrise beyond the distant mountains.”

“Immediately experienced floating out of body shell. Roamed and sauntered through a kind of cosmic park, full of density but infinite boundaries. People’s images occasionally came in and out of this…. Then as wondered on this, sudden enlightenment  – there is no such things as separate consciousness.”

“Although nothing happened in the first two sessions, hallucinations were experienced nearly every time thereafter…. They would continue for hours. I was always aware that I was hallucinating and part of my mind was nearly always making observations. There were the usual out of body…hallucinations…. When I moved my hands (actually in the water) I would see them move and sky appear between the fingers. I have later had imaginary flights over scenery. “

“I lost boundaries and time sense, immediately disappeared and I experience total peace and a feeling of unity…. What I experienced was a continuous void that was not boring, yet empty, not engaging, yet full.”

“Moving into an absolute void (experienced as consciousness of the interstellar space.) Timelessness. No difference between minutes and millions of years. Ending up the experience with feelings of regeneration, purification, refreshment, clarify.”

(This last quote is from Stan Grof. You may recognize his name. Interesting, I also saw Andrew Weil in the name of tank loggers, along with Richard Feynman (Yes, the Richard Feynman of quantum physicists fame. He spent something like 35 hours in the tank for Lilly’s research), and Ralph Metzner. )

…..

I really cannot believe how “far out” these logs read though. Many times over, I get the impression that floating in the tank, consciousness becomes like that of a dream. Sometimes people can direct the hallucinations, creating a sort of waking life lucid dream hallucination. This just blows my mind!

Why don’t more people know about this?

Why isn’t the use of these tanks more common?

I am now on the hunt for a tank in my area, as I really want to try out the experience* for myself!

*or as John Lilly would say, inperience.

Next Dimension by H. Hoppdelaney

A friend casually asked me the other day:

“Why do I want to have Lucid Dreams?”

“What’s the point?”

I had the hardest time trying to answer her in a way that would convince her. It got me thinking about it and so this post is my own answer to these two questions…

My Gut-level response:

“What do you mean? The feeling of becoming consciously aware that you are dreaming, while you are dreaming, is fucking awesome!!”

My elegant response:

Imagine whatever it is you’re doing right now – look around at the people near you, the walls surrounding you, your hands – and think of what it would mean to you right now if this was a dream. What would you do?

Knowing our minds are capable of creating such an experience is of infinite intrigue to me. The immediate coolness of just experimenting in the dream world – flying, moving through objects, moving things with your mind, exploring the dreamscape, talking with dream characters – this is all awesome and why I’m interested in lucid dreaming, but it’s only half the equation.

The other half is this:

I want to use lucid dreaming as a means of understanding consciousness, the mind, and how our brain/mind works to process experiences into reality.

If we can become conscious within a dream and experience this world just like we experience waking life, what does it mean then about who we are and our source of awareness? What can the dreaming mind teach us about how we process and understand experiences? What do dreams tell us about reality?

Beyond this philosophical approach to lucid dreaming, there are a few specific reasons I do want to have lucid dreams. Here, I present to you my lucid dream to-do list.

Meditation and Mystical Experiences. I’ve read that people who meditate in waking life have had intense experience become lucid and then meditating in the dream. They report seeing fantastic colors and a sense of ballooning awareness, ego loss, and other mystical sensations. I want to experience this.

Tripping. I’ve had dreams where I took acid, been drunk, and been stoned. In each instance I was not lucid – it was just part of the dream. Each time, the resulting experience was much of what it would have been in waking life had it happened for real. Being able to have a realistic and mind-blowing psychedelic experience in a lucid dream has been confirmed to me by numerous people; somehow, our mind can recreate these experiences if we simply dream it up, consciously. This is amazing and I want to experience it.

Moving my sense of awareness beyond my body. I would very much like to attempt to ‘deconstruct’ my sense of awareness within the dream, becoming less and less of my body, and seeing what happens. I’ve heard about 360 vision – is this possible? This sounds morbid, but I wonder what would happen if I plucked one of my eyeballs out and tried looking around with it? What if I ripped my head off and held it with my own hand? It’s funny, because I know it’s all an illusion that my sense of awareness is coming from my dream head – how can I get past this? Could I project my awareness onto an object in a dream? Another character? Could I merge with another person? If I’m having a lucid dream, I understand that everything I’m experiencing is a projection of and contained within my own mind; how can I take my sense of awareness and expand it accordingly?

Flying & Soaring through the universe. Flying is a fantastic experience. What more is there to say?

Calling myself on the phone. Could I have a conversation with myself? What about other people?

Out of Body Experiences. While I am skeptical of OBE, there is an obvious connection to lucids and the OBE. I want to explore this connection and experience what is known as an OBE, even if it’s just taking place in my mind.

I’d like to know what you think.

Are my reasons similar to most? What’s the point of lucid dreaming for you personally? Why do you bother?

Photo by H. Hoppdelaney.

To this end, he has invented a technique to stimulate the temporal lobes of the brain via magnetic pulses. The resulting device is known as the “God Helmet”, and in his lab people wearing it have experienced all sorts of wild and paranormal sensations - invisible presences, alien abductions, meeting the devil, out of body experiences and so on.

Since no one else in the room sees or experiences these things, this certainly lends evidence to the idea that the experiences are taking place in the brain and not in physical reality.

Personally, I have little problem accepting that out of body experiences (and associated phenomenon) take place within the brain. I’m open to the idea that I’m wrong – in fact I would LOVE to be proven wrong – but I’ve just not seen any solid evidence that points to the OBE as actually being a physically real experience.

Either way, I would love to be a subject in one of these tests and I fully support research into understanding what’s happening in the brain when we have mystical, out of body, and near-death experiences.

Question:

If we know how to physically manipulate the brain in order to experience out of body sensations, near-death experiences, the presence of (invisible) beings, aliens, demons, and angels, etc – does this mean that there is no value to these experiences?

Note: Meetup allows you to organize events based around a common interest. Anyone can start or attend a meetup. There’s topics for everything, everywhere. Check it out.

….

I was disheartened by the discussion on reincarnation when it was referred to as a bottleneck to get through to progress through Buddhist principles.

Despite what someone might think by visiting this blog and seeing the subjects I focus on, I am a hardcore skeptic and the concept of reincarnation is something I have a very hard time with.

It’s easy enough to accept what I what call “materialistic reincarnation.” All the atoms that make up my entire being were once part of stars a billions of years ago, and surely existed before that too. And all they will continue to exist beyond this body of mine. They will certainly become part of a larger whole that is alive, whether plant or animal, and that includes becoming part of other sentient beings.

But a continuance of consciousness? A transference of consciousness? That’s a brick-wall for me. I can’t find any good reason to believe in it – and that’s part of the struggle here. I don’t want to believe in something. I want it to stand up to reason.

Admittedly, I’ve only skimmed the scientific literature on reincarnation and people remembering past lives. It’s worth taking a look at whatever body of evidence currently exists.

As I’m just now skimming the surface with Buddhism, maybe what I’ll find is that I’m actually more interested in some sort of “Secular Meditation” combined with the Buddhist ideas and concepts that I can liberally apply to my life?

….

I think I am so attracted to entheogens like DMT because the experience potentially can provide proof –admittedly, subjective proof – of concepts and ideas that I otherwise struggle to grasp or find evidence for objectively. And the experience wouldn’t be a wishy washy faith-based type of exercise; it would hit me like a brick in the face.

And I guess that’s what I want – something tangible, real, applicable.

….

We did a 15 minute guided meditation at the meetup tonight.

I’ve still hardly meditated at all – I’m not even sure I know how, really.

But tonight we did a 15 minute meditation and the minutes just soared by! It felt more like 7 minutes.

Knowing I can actually sit still and meditate like this is really exciting!

He’s not simply having a subjective journey inside his mind; DXM actually takes him to an objective realm with other beings – some of which are the souls of recently departed friends and associates!

Yes – he’s talking about meeting the dead!

Along the way, he has out of body experiences, witnesses the seat of dreaming and memory, interacts with strange beings, lost souls, and other characters, and of course, has some seriously ego-crushing experiences, forever messing with the idea of the “I”.

Dan writes that DXM takes him to the Hive Mind.

What is this place? Who is there? What’s going on in here?

Dan likens the term Hive Mind to Terrence McKenna’s idea of the OverMind, which is a living Super Mind created through pooling the consciousness of the dead into one group mind. (I find it interesting that he does not see the Hive Mind as an omnipotent God, stating that although it is self-aware, it has problems, learns, grows and changes.)

Once inside, he met with a friend who had recently died. He also saw a friends father who had died in “real life” – yet this fact was unknown to Dan while he was tripping. He sees this as proof to the idea that he is visiting the same realm of the dead.

Within the Hive Mind, he also met Buddhist Monks, who he believes were dead or possibly alive and meditating (!!), and Native Americans. He met people who seemed confused, trapped, unable to move or grown on – hinting at the idea of purgatory.

And he also met the infamous “elves” that also pop up in other psychedelic literature.

….

It’s a bit hard to pin down the more abstract run-ins he had in the hive mind, but Dan describes an amazing encounters with dreams, or, a he describes it, the seat of dreaming.

After seeing what he calls The Dream Chamber, Dan recorded the following into a tape recorder:

“I’m flying over a scene that looks like an elaborate model train set. Amazing… what it is is a dream landscape. It’s a three-dimensional scene of every dream I’ve ever had. I can at this point remember/see every dream I’ve ever had. Now I’m drifting down into it. People, animals, archetypes, childhood monsters…they’re all here! And this is not a memory, but a place! Everything still happening – alive – a living hologram.”

Reflecting on this, he later writes: “It seems I was looking at a sentient world of thought – my thoughts! – being the dreams “thought up” by me over a lifetime. I must emphasize: everything in this place was ALIVE still…moving, happening.” What would it mean if our dreams actually existed in some place? And more than that, they permanently existed, living in three dimensions and existing forever?

The only way I could take in something like this would be with the perspective of parallel universes and a holographic universe.

And even then, the idea is baffling and far out.

Psychedelics are known for the ego-crushing properties, and Dan’s experiences with DXM are no exception. He discusses this at various points in the book, trip by trip, stating such things as:

“Initially, my personality was revealed to be not an “I” but an orchestra of “I’s” working in unison to create a sense of one “I.”

I find this interesting because, from what I understand, this notion of multiple selves working together to create the illusion of a single “I” is understood to be true by mainstream neuroscientists and others who study consciousness.

His descriptions of the self get creepy, reminding me of what others write about DMT, when he says things like:“The psychedelic had held a door open into one “me,” allowing another “me” to see in…and “I” was a squirming electric flesh-chemical ant colony.”

And later, almost reassuringly, he writes about what part of him moves on after death, saying that witnessing “these tiny knowing bits of me, by deduction, the “I” in the Anti-Ego state doing the watching, must be incomplete.” Therefore, he concludes that the state he is currently in feels stripped down “because it is existing as a partial self.” This essence, the part that’s left over after everything else is stripped down…”must be the “real” me – the me that crosses into death.”

This brings up the questions I wrote about in this post on reincarnation and what it is that actually carries on after death. Unfortunately, it doesn’t answer them.

……

A Psychonaut’s Guide to the Invisible Landscape

All the questions brought up in this book answer to a bigger question, perhaps the biggest question of all:

Can we trust our own subjective experiences?

This innocent-sounding question is one of enormous implication.

At times when I read his words I thought to myself that if I accept what he says, than by the same standards, I should accept the words and experiences of those who profess many other subjective experience, many of which contradict each other. (For instance, the prophets of various religions all claiming that theirs is the only truth and everyone else is wrong.)

On the flipside, if we can’t trust our own experiences, than what the hell are we to do?

Hard-nosed scientists would say that all we can trust is objectively measured data i.e. then science, and only science, in the strictest sense of the word, is the only path towards knowledge and truth.

I agree that a scientific approach yields literally awe-some results but this approach falls short in explaining our everyday experience of the world and that which we know most intimately: the conscious experience, the spiritual impulse, the subjective, inner self… the “I” that we all experience.

So the question is how do we reconcile the subjective experience with the objective measure of science?

The Dalai Lama says it best in his book The Universe in A Single Atom, when he asks:

“Given that one of the primary characteristics of consciousness is its subjective and experiential nature, any systematic study of it must adopt a method that will give access to the dimensions of subjectivity and experience.

A comprehensive scientific study of consciousness must therefore embrace both third-person and first-person methods: it cannot ignore the phenomenological reality of subjective experience but must observe all the rules of scientific rigor. So the critical question is this: Can we envision a scientific methodology for the study of consciousness whereby a robust first-person method, which does full justice to the phenomenology of experience, can be combined with the objectivist perspective of the study of the brain?”

….

A Psychonaut’s Guide to the Invisible Landscape

While he does get into this a bit, occasionally using quantum physics to help makes sense of the experience, unfortunately this book is more of a collection of trip reports, like those found on Erowid, rather than a full book about what he learned.

Near the end, he boldly writes that “exploration with psychedelics must be the exploration of death in the final outcome,” and tops it off by saying that “my approach has been absolutely spiritual despite its appearance to some.”

Later, in reflection on the totality of his experience, Dan – displaying the top notch writing he is capable of – writes:

“I estimate that I have spent about one hundred hours in the Hive by now. And I always find the same things…rooms, appliances, beings – the Dead!

All of these descriptions of things seen in the closed-eye trance are maddeningly hard to pin down. As in the area of say: What’s brain? And What’s Other?

In the early days all was new, and I wasn’t sure that anything I was seeing was “outside” of me. Inner space, outer space, was there even a difference? Well, no; it was beginning to seem to me that despite the glaring problem of not knowing how or why we humans got here, I had seen much to enforce this growing idea of some It Behind – a blind groping hand of “God” reaching from Behind the soup of atoms and up the DNA strands to feel its created self in the Here.

…….

Stephen LaBerge, interview, captured in DVD series titled “Consciousness
“

Rob was kind enough to chat with me via email and answer some questions I had after reading the book and that’s what I’m here to bring you today.

Table of Contents

watch the video
Watch Part 1 of 2 of the video clip “Imagining the Tenth Dimension”
Watch Part 2 of 2 of the video clip “Imagining the Tenth Dimension”

read the interview
part 1 – on the book itself and the animation
part 2 – what the bleep style thinking & the bicameral mind
part 3 – ghosts & science fiction
part 4 – drugs and the ten dimensions
part 5 – ten dimensions and a lot of dreams

go exploring
Imagining the 10th Dimension – main page
Tenth Dimension forum – Rob is often here chatting with visitors
Rob’s Blog – Lots of additional writing here by Rob on a variety of subjects

buy the book

We create reality through conscious observation. What we choose to think, decide, and observe has a literal input into the creation of the reality around us.

You write on page 64 that “we are doing more than just “throwing the dice” as quantum observers, and in fact each of us are actively influencing the outcome through the choices we make.”

To what extent can this idea be taken that we create our own reality? Is this a meaningful perspective to have over how we live our lives or is it an idea that only applies at the quantum level and not in our day to day living?

With the popularity of “The Secret” now, the whole “thoughts become things” movement (which has been around for many years) appears to have gathered new steam. I would describe the Secret as being a very simple and direct version of the What the Bleep ideas.

For me, this boils down to the difference between consensual reality and personal reality, and the fact that both can easily co-exist. So, our consensual reality has been locked in within our universe, and people can’t walk through walls no matter what actions they take as quantum observers: and the book I push off the table will fall towards the floor, not up to the sky, no matter how much I believe in The Secret. Within the framework I’m proposing, the laws of the consensual reality universe we live in are locked in by the specific point in the seventh dimension that our universe and all its possible timelines occupies. This point implies that no matter where we enter the dimensions below, we will all look back in time to see a big bang, and look into the future to see the ultimate end of the universe, creating a long rope of the many many threads that could get us from one end to the other. And I should really put “time” in quotes here, since I am saying that what we experience as time is really an illusion, a very limited view of the reality that is out there in the timeless multiverse.

This is a big picture / small picture question then: is what I have for breakfast going to influence the end of the universe? No. Is my attitude towards life going to affect my health, my way of dealing with other people, and hence the life that I end up having, out of all of the possible futures that I might have been able to experience from this moment forward? Of course it does! Any physician will tell you how important attitude is to health and recovery from illness. Lots of us know people who were “too busy to get a cold”, so they didn’t.

The jump from that idea to “you got cancer because you wanted to punish yourself, or because that was the sad lesson you chose for yourself as you selected your current reincarnation” is not one I buy into. Bad stuff happens to people because of chance, the actions of others, and actions which are difficult to see the outcome from. While there may be some smokers out there who very well have a secret death-wish that eventually gets fulfilled, the mom who dies from cancer because of some additive that was put in the food she served to her family almost certainly will tell you this is not the path she chose for herself.

In my song “Everything Fits Together” I talk about the uplifting feeling of seeing where you are in the big picture. That big picture, though, includes the fact that there are often reasons why your life is not the way you would want it, because of the parts that are beyond your control. The starving child in Africa is not going to become a millionaire just because you give them The Secret. In fact, that may be the dirty little secret of The Secret: that there are people who have used their power to allow/cause the current world we live in to exist – a powerful who have manipulated the machinery of possible futures to ensure their own wealth and success at the expense of others.

Ultimately, though, this shouldn’t be about money, this should be about happiness. We don’t all need to be millionaires, but somebody who lives their life unhappy because they feel there is no way out should look to Imagining the Tenth Dimension and understand that there the version of their life where they make the best of their current situation already exists in the fifth dimension, and they just have to find their way there.

I’m thrilled at the nice article about my project that has just come out in “What Is Enlightenment?” magazine – Senior Associate Editor Tom Huston has some excellent thoughts on just how much my way of imagining the dimensions seems to neatly tie together concepts from a wide variety of belief systems.

You mention Julian Jayne’s theory on the evolution of human consciousness as written in his book “The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.” He posited that perhaps just a few thousand years ago, humans operated together as a sort of group consciousness, and that there was no division between our conscious and subconscious mind, meaning there was no one inside us actively observing and “talking” about what it saw.

Flash forward to the present day and evolution has integrated these two aspects of the mind in modern humans.

This got me mind rolling on to other thoughts, like this one:

In meditating the goal is to clear away the mental clutter of the mind and simply be. One could say that enlightenment is the embodiment of this state of mind on a moment to moment basis.

To me, this sounds a whole lot like the way our minds operated before there was an evolution of and integration between the subconscious and conscious mind. Could our desire to “calm the mind” be the desire to move back to this pre-integrated state? Do we have a subconscious memory of experiencing the world in this manner? If we view the spectrum of consciousness with species like fish on one end and present humans on the other, it would make sense to imagine that in most of the other conscious species of the world, there is not an integration of the conscious and subconscious. Perhaps there is only a subconscious, and that is why we are drawn to meditation and enlightenment because it is a return to a pre-conscious state that we evolved from. What are your thoughts on this?

I think Jaynes got it right – that our minds used to be integrated, and that what we now think of as a conscious minds and a subconscious mind is caused by the breakdown of that integration. In the integrated state, it is very much like meditation, absolutely, and it is also like the trance state that repetitive physical action or ritualized movement or even dance can help us to achieve.

But modern society has taught us to be suspicious of the times when we realize our narrator voice had switched off – like when you realize you’ve been driving your car, for instance, without consciously thinking about what you’re doing. The fact is, many complicated activities are performed better when we switch off the narrator voice – any accomplished athlete or musician will tell you there’s no way they could do what they do if their narrator voice was constantly saying “now I should look here, now I should move this, now I should think about that”.

I believe you can watch any intelligent animal and see what it is like to exist in that integrated state. But the other part of Jaynes’s theory was that prior to the development of that narrator voice as the voice of consciousness, any memory or intuition was viewed by the integrated mind as being the voice of a god, or forefathers, or other aspects of the spirit world. Does my dog, operating in an integrated mental state, have a voice in his head that he thinks of as his guardian angel, telling him “don’t stick your head in there because last time you almost got stuck”, or some such thing? This is what Jaynes proposes – and that civilizations from even a few thousand years ago were still built by human beings who acted in that integrated mindset, reporting any important decisions for action that were actually based upon memory or intuition to be advice from the gods.
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