J. Balance
J. Balance from Happy Drummers on Vimeo.
An experimental animation project inspired by a poem.
This is a personal technique combining 3d animation and an old printer.
Music: Batwings (A Limnal Hymn) – Coil
R.I.P John Balance
J. Balance from Happy Drummers on Vimeo.
An experimental animation project inspired by a poem.
This is a personal technique combining 3d animation and an old printer.
Music: Batwings (A Limnal Hymn) – Coil
R.I.P John Balance
http://www.archive.org/
This piece is the very definition of Deep Space Music. I was near the end of
a 1-hour float and felt my body was opening up quite nicely… even laterally
as opposed to the normal head-to-neck elongation, then, this piece kicked in
on the speakers.
Instantly I was cast into expanded awareness. GNOSIS. Silent ecstasy. And the
first hit of this piece was just the beginning. Inner space is unlimited as
“Galactic Drift” reveals. Deeper, deeper, ever expanding into realms
beyond description.
Jim Hodgkinson is a student of EJ Gold. EJ is the primary founder of IDHHB – the institute for the development of the harmonious human being. His poetry below is a perfect echo of the sentiments of my own Gnostic Isolation Temple, a religious order which uses the isolation tank so that the self can find The Self as opposed to relying a church of group to find the self.
EJ is a polyglot. Master-level artist, musician, author and more. He has written many mind-shattering texts and Jim’s poem was written to a facebook group devoted to studying and actualizing his EJ Gold’s text “Practical Work on Self”:
What does “exile” or “separation” mean?
What feelings does this evoke, if any?
The feelings come first as the
Memories begin to form from
That place you thought you
Had safely buried them.Six years old I wake up
To the sun shining on the fields
And streams beyond our front gate
The purple mystery of Bluebell Wood
Its dark and musty secrets
My solitary quest for the day.Different than the rest
Of the kids playing in
The Lane I pause
Enviously looking at
The rowdy swirls of boys and girls,
That I want to join but strangely can’t.How can attraction and repulsion
Co-exist causing perfect stasis
Wanting to belong
Yet knowing even then
That I don’t
However much the longing.It never went away
This feeling of being alien to this culture
Of having no connection to my family
Or country or planet
And left with the unanswered
Why?So here we are.
Loneliness transmuted to
Being alone
A lesson gradually learned
So that the Absolute
May suffer a little less in this small way.
“getting things done” is a classic productivity book. I read it. I must say the concept of having somewhere to dump all your ideas before sorting them and acting is a great thing — get it out of your head and into your organizing system.
There are 2 “problems” with the GTD approach:
It is well-known that water can be imprinted with positive or negative thought patterns. So since a tank has 200 gallons of water, it is high-time that this water be imprinted with the thought patterns we want to manifest, no?
Some consider the isolation tank on instance of R.E.S.T – restricted environmental stimulus. One of my favorite REST techniques is yoga nidra, but that’s another blog post for another time. My recent research on inedia has led me to this incredible video by Jasmuheen, who for over a decade has taught a path of pranic nourishment. In this video she says:
In darkroom we have no external light for 9 days, we have no physical foods, .. it’s about meditation, it’s about silence, it’s about stillness, it’s about solitude, it’s about going beyond the body to be the fullness that you are… opening to experience THAT YOU ARE FORMLESSNESS FLOWING THROUGH FORM
Wow! Sign me up!!!
OK, so my life mission is to form a retreat center where the primary religious practice is floating in an isolation tank. Why is this? It is because floatation has had much progress in science and business but has no recognized organization in spirituality. I want extended floatation to be affordable – an entire month of unlimited floating for $1600 or less.
Alright, I’ve had this retreat center idea for a few months now. Now, for a longer period of time, I’ve been aware that a standard diet of 3 solid meals leads to constant brain excitation – the breakdown of food all day and all night is constantly stimulating your brain. However, until you have mono-dieted or water-fasted for 10 days or more, the amount of mental stimulation due to food breakdown will not be apparent.
So, floating in a tank is powerful. Harry Palmer showed what 8 weeks of floating can do. For 8 weeks, there was one line to the kitchen and one line to the bathroom and he became enlightened in 8 weeks.
let’s get rid of the line to the kitchen, by doing a water fast instead of eating during the 8-week intensive. Your stomach will go to sleep. You will feel rest in your stomach and digestive system unlike no other. Now, pair that with the stillness of floating for extended periods of time.
now, let’s reduce the amount of bathroom time. How? Because urine is medicine. The only time to head to the bathroom should be for fecal elimination. Because urine is not waste. I hope you get my picture.
OK, a retreat center. Although there are many retreat centers for sale, I would recommend just buying a house near an urban area where everyone can still keep working. It takes time and dedication to build up to long periods of combined floating and fasting.
So to get the down payment for the house we take the profits from selling tanks and make the down payment. And that’s where you come in.
If I could give one suggestion for what to “do” while floating it would be:
Let the water support you.
This seems like a funny thing to say, but try it. You will realize that you are actually holding yourself up instead of letting go into the water. I found that I was holding my head up and most of my body.
Once I offered myself up to be drowed in the salts, things got real good.
So, I’m in my zen float tent and I feel the tension in my forearms. Lots of tension from so much computer use. I figure: “oh well, this is going to a physical float and it will be that way until I float enough to get rid of this tension. probably weeks of daily floating is going to be necessary.”
But then I noticed big holes in my arms where the tension was. Then I noticed the pelvis was tight. I figured: “wow, the tank is great at finding and releasing tension.”
So then it felt like my arms were being zapped with low voltage. I got worried and figured I was being electrocuted. This is the 2nd time this has happened and in all my years of floating, it never happened. I figure that Orgasmic Medtation was the reason that I had that electricity. But I notice my heart is just fine, so I ignore it. Then the electricity is so powerful it is humming. and it seems like I do a forward flip out of the bottom of the tank through a vortex.
And suddenly I’m walking through a college food plaza. I realize that I left the house naked and say – “Oh my god, i will never do this again, let me fly back secretly.”
So I try to fly back and fly low but I keep not being able to choose y direction. I get blown backwards again and again. and i’m flying backwards fast and I worry that instead of going through buildings I will crash.
I have done many things on this earth.
Floating always takes me home.
I was fooling around with EJ Gold and he brought up the float tank in his teachings. This was in 1996 or so. I tried it in Southern California in the hills. With a relative of the Perry’s … or maybe a relative of the Lillys. I think it was the perrys. He was a latin guy. I forgot his name. Getting in the tank was like – “oh, so this is how easy it is to be my original self.”
Floating always takes me home.
I tried it at one other home center after that. That guy was cool too. Over in the Redondo Beach area. A bit of noise, but no biggie. And it wasnt until 2007-2008 that I had been practicing Falun Dafa – a very demanding chinese yoga. Putting myself through serious pain, etc. I packed my bag and drove 6 hours from Columbus, OH to Chicago, IL to float at Spacetime Tanks, the longest running float center in the USA – 26 years. I got there, booked a hotel and the float showed me how knotted up my back was with tension. I was literally hunched forward in a knot – the antigravity warm salt water showed me and fixed me. No human intervention needed.
Floating always takes me home.
And then I was in Florida. Doing brain machines for happiness. Receiving scientology auditing. Trying out Buddhist meditation. The 5 tibetans, you name it. I bought a mobile home and built a float tank and I didnt have a job or clear path to income, but I did it anyway. And once again, floating knocked blocks of tension out of me. and did all sorts of wild things.
Floating always takes me home.
So now, here I am in Boston. I do some yoga. I do some TongRen. I do some dancing. I watch TV. I dont have to work because I built a big residual income in Karatbars. So here I am aimless. Yoga NIDRA is cool. Reflexology is GREAT.
But only floating takes me home.
And Boston needs a float center yesterday. A place like Boston is the first place a float center belongs.