I continue to use the term ‘sensory deprivation’ even though Lilly made it clear that only certain people who had not done tank work themselves used this term.Technically, we are liberating ourselves from the distraction of physical senses. From ch.11 in “The Spiritual Notebook” (The Higher and Lower Powers) we read further confirmation of the power of Sensory “Deprivation”
“””
Consciousness is beyond the worlds of thought. It is the foundation of ECK, and the whole of ECK teachings. It is the explanation for the difference between the mental and Soul plane. It is the hardest dividing line to cross. … The secret of entering into the consciousness state is detaching one’s self from the outer, or sense world, and withdrawing one’s attention from all sensory objects. Then the chela begins to concentrate his attention on something inside. So far this is the general method of all systems. But the secret is that the mental world — which consists of the tools of thought — and every plane below it, comprise the negative worlds.
“””
Hmm, so after separating physical from emotional and emotional from thought, we must also separate thought from consciousness. Arunachala Ramana of AHAM.com said the same thing: “the only spiritual practice is separating thought from awareness. Anything else is not worthy of the title of spiritual practice.”
I had a friend who took an initiation. He wasnt happy with the system because he felt that nothing was happening when he did the meditation. I have two responses to this#1 – the tank always awaits a chance to loosen you
I just finished an hour in the tank. For the most part I was certain that “nothing was happening” and guess why? Because I was locking my body into place in the tank. The second I relaxed just a bit, the tank took the opportunity to loosen all sorts of muscle groups – across the spine, up and down the sides, the neck, you name it. Then I started pointing and flexing my toes and one toe would not flex back as fast as the rest – it had a mini Charley Horse. But then it worked its way out.
I was literally creating a limited tank experience by holding my body fixed. The tank destructured me and exposed my attempt to create a limited body-tank relation.
I’m so impressed with the ability of the tank to loosen up the physical body that “floating”, the secular term for what we do, is called “loosening” in the vocabulary of my religious organization devoted to floating [0]
#2 – expect the unexpected instead of filtering your environment
The instructions to John C. Lilly from E.C.C.O. [1] were: “Expect the unexpected every moment 24/7” – when you simply sit down and expect the unexpected, then your awareness expands and all sorts of trivial things you would never notice come to your attention – the refrigerator turning on, an ant walking across the rug, the wind rustling outside, a cabinet door creaking. You realize that “you” typically are a stick in a fast flowing river of phenomena.
But the ego is so focused on filtering the environment so that only stimuli which enhance/threaten survival come to your attention, that you actually dont even notice 1% of what is usually happening!
#3 Praise to Lilly
We results-oriented Westerners would not have ever had a crack at samadhi (samadhi being that crack between events which allows us to create and control as we learn to widen the GAP) because we are so fixated, locked down and focused. The whole lot of meditative experience has been gifted to the West thanks to the bold research efforts of John C. Lilly.
Chapter 3 in “The Spiritual Notebook” by Paul Twitchell (founder of ECKANKAR) provides more rationale for liberating oneself from the physical senses:
“… the inner universe cannot be realized unless we are able to separate Soul from mind and physical senses, and visualize Truth directly.”
later in the same chapter, Twitchell describes the 3 common states of deep sleep, dream, and waking. The he says:
“The next ascending step is the immortal state. Once we have taken this step we have consciousness of the higher planes where all things are subtle and Truth is the Ultimate Reality. At this stage the brain and the physical organs cease to operates … only by our spiritual senses do we function within these worlds.”
still later:
“The nine doors of the outer world are (list of orifices and sense organs… he omitted the skin)… all attention must be withdrawn from these lower doors and placed upon the spiritual eye.”
finally:
“When Soul passes through the spiritual window it enters into the astral world. We cannot see this world with physical eyes, but instead we view everything on this plane with astral senses. This is true of every higher plane we pass into.”
I tried focusing on the 3rd eye during my last float but I fell asleep. Maybe I should play HU in the float room to tune myself to the God worlds? Oh yeah, in ECKANKAR you need the help of the Living ECK Master to guide you to the Soul plane. You could only get to the mental plane by yourself – you would never cross the great void – http://santmat.livingcosmos.org
I finished my Bikram Yoga. I get home and my body is pleading with me: “get into the tank NOW”
So I put up my groceries and flop right in… oops! Let’s unplug those heaters first.
So I’m in and drifting off to sleep. Then I feel a sharp electric-like jolt in the neck. I think: “oh god, i left something plugged in”
But then I get a grip and realize that electrical shock is not that selective – the whole water body would’ve been electric.
So I settle back in and it happens again and again and again… about 4 times total.
I think some long-held tension was releasing.
I leave the tank fully recharged and ready for the day.
The ability of the tank to detect tension and release it is simply amazing: THANK YOU JOHN C. LILLY!
I’ve been having a lot of lucid dream experiences in and out of the tank recently.
Outside of the tank, listening to “The Dreaming Gate” by Inlakesh is quite effective. Another thing which is effective is to follow the instructions that Sri Siddharameshwar Maharaj gave to Nisagadatta Maharaj: “attend to the sense ‘I am’ and to give attention to nothing else.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nisargadatta_Maharaj) … a lot of times before I know it, I am swept into a situation where I am operating a subtle body outside the laws of Planet Earth. Now, astral journeys like this are not the goal of that technique, but it has been happening quite a bit because of it.
This morning, I finished my Bikram Hot Yoga class and came home eager to float. So I jumped in. The usual profound loosening of the physical body commenced… it’s simply amazing how the tank finds your tight spots and opens them up. Eventually, the subtle body was free of the physical and the following occurred:
I was browsing a web page. Some spiritual group was having spiritual seminars and I found their local ashram and went for a lesson. They were teaching some sort of breathing technique. A rather chubby girl in red exercise tights began to demonstrate how she could work the breath up her body. She would squeeze the breath into her body and moan in sexual ecstasy. She did this about 5 times.
That ended the instruction. Then a student next to her made a snide comment about Ashtanga Yoga. He said it was ridiculous to think that asanas had to be done in a certain order. Then an older lady who appeared to be the only teacher in the room started gently discussing the actions of both of the boy and the girl. Then a guy in sandals and Indian garb walked over and started sprinkling talcum powder over the floor.
I could see it was time to go, so I rose up to leave… and suddenly I felt as if I were suffocating. I had no idea how to get air. I was on my back. I knew if I flipped over I would not have enough air to make it. I dont exactly know what I did to get out of this situation. But I did notice that the amount of air in the tank was quite low so maybe the sensation of low air created an entire fear drama.
The containment tank is only 16 inches high. So trapped CO2 and no circulating oxygen could be an issue for long floats.
Pratyahara Tanks is the worlds first completely open source tank manufacturer. Our tank is constructed from 100% off-the-shelf parts. All construction details (tank plans) are publicly available.
A large number of parts listed in my amazon store. I also recommend Doctors Foster and Smith because of their excellent return policies, technical expertise, and low prices on next-day Saturday delivery.
7 pieces of plywood
2-inch thick styrofoam
2 inflexible rods – used to prop up the tank top while adding salt. pvc or hard wood dowels 4 1/2 feet long are good – picture … this is during your build phase. Ultimately you want to attach drawer guides (glides) between the bottom and top tank so you can slide it top as shown in this picture
The base of your tank is a tarp, some 2x4s and 2 inch thick styrofoam – picture
Then you put down one containment tank
Then place the 2 aquarium heaters in the back of the tank (towards the part where you plan for your feet to be). I would suggest that all electrical outlets be protected against ground fault.
Put the 2nd containment tank on top of the first – picture
Drill holes in both tanks and slide a cinch through the holes to make your hinged door – picture , picture 2
Fill the tank: start with just a few inches of water, enough to cover the heaters. Let that get up to 94 deg F, making use of an external thermometer as reference point. Then add more and more water. But never more than 250 gallons total. See the calculations for how to convert inches of water into total gallons as a function of the tank dimensions.
Salt the water. Slowly. 1 bag at a time, with advice from ask floattalk to help you.
Unplug all electricity and float
CONCEPTUAL TANK DISCUSSION
The Tank Room
A nice tank room that can be comfortably heated is wonderful. Here are other things to consider about the room itself.
electricity
Here is a formula:
watts / volts = amps
since most houses are 120 volts and 15 amps, this implies that you can pull at most 1800 watts of power. So buying 2 1000 watt aquarium heaters is not going to work with standard setups: I know, I threw my fuse breaker when I tried. I have 1 1k watt and another at 300 watts and so far that is fine.
You could re-wire the power from the breaker to the power supply with a different guage wire, or get dedicated wiring, but the purpose of this project is to make everything work with off-the-shelf standard parts and settings.
dimensions
3 feet longer and wider than the tank seems to be an absolute minimum
restroom
A restroom near/attached to the tank room is very convenient.
You need to get the tank off the floor with some 2x4s. And then put 2-inch styrofoam over that. A floattalk thread discusses this in detail.
Next, simply put the two containment tanks on top of each other like this:
Then drill holes in one side and cinch the top to the bottom on one side to create a hinge like this:
I actually think padlocks are better than plastic cinches because you will find yourself taking them off and on to situate the heaters and also when you drain the tank for cleaning you will need to take off the top. Finally, some people are claustrophobic and would prefer to float without a top.
In order to filter the water and warm it, you could get an electronic spa pack from a place like SpaGuts.com but you will need dedicated wiring for that. Instead, we have to go with a sealess mag drive pump and filter modules.
I’ve found 2 good choices (LifeGard Aquatics and Pondmaster) and I went with pondmaster
ultraviolet filtering is loved by some professionals. others think it is a waste of time
ozone in a closed space will kill a lot, but might also kill you. So let’s drop that also.
hydrogen peroxide will become a good friend of ours
weekly and monthly sanitization tips are forthcoming
Temperature Control & Monitoring
Water Thermometer
Submersible Aquarium Heater
In between floats, you need to keep the water warm or the epsom salt will precipitate. So you need a good aquarium heater for that. While 300W is just fine for 300 gallons when you speak of waterbed heaters, my experience is that it is not enough when dealing with aquarium heaters. You need 3-6 watts for every gallon of water you want to heat above 80 deg F. Let’s use 6 watts since we have salt water, whose specific heat capacity is lower than plain water. But on the other hand, you can only have about 1800 watts of total heating at the max. I suggest 1300 to 1600 watts of total heating power. So you’re going to need two 800 watt heaters, one 800 and one 500 or one 1000 and and 300/500 or some combination like that.
Now, there are 7.5 gallons of water in a cubic foot. And so we have the various gallons of water that we can deal with based on total wattage:
1300 watts => 216 gallons of water
1500 watts => 250 gallons
1600 watts => 266 gallons
Epsom Salt
Crop Production Services (sometimes aka Agricultural Garden Supply) is a good place for salt. Look for a place that sells lawn fertilizers. And be sure to check floattalk.
Then setup your spa pack for intake and discharge by adding some piping.
Then heat the water to 104F (the maximum the spa pack is legally allowed to do) and gradually add salt.
Testing for Salinity
You can get fancy and buy a salinity pen, but you can also get the job done for just 10 bucks with these two products:
First, start with about 3 inches of water. NO SALT. Then submerge your two heaters. Make sure you can get that up to 95 degrees.
Your maximum height is based on how many gallons of water you can heat. Let’s say you can heat 1500 gallons of water. Since there are 7.5 gallons of water in a cubic foot, we can use unit cancellation mathematics to see who many cubic feet of water we can heat:
(1 ft^3 / 7.5 gal) x 250 gal = 33 ft^3
Now the tank we have it quite wide, so the water will not be very high. Let’s convert cubic feet to inches and see how many cubic inches we can afford to heat. 33 cubic feet is 57,024 cubic inches. Now the tank slopes, but the given width and length are 93″ and 69″. So let’s multiply those together and divide that product by 57,024 to get the height available to us. The result is 8.8 inches. Most people recommend 10 inches, but I think we can get by.
Let’s do the 1300 watt calcs
216 gallons is covered by 28.8 ft^3
1 ft^3 = (12 inches)^3 = 1728 inches cubed
therefore 28.8 ft^3 is 49766 inches
So we have 7.75 inches of water available at 1300 watts. That’s not very high. I’ve done it, but dont recommend it.
General Comments
Vendors
Foster and Smith Aquatics has an excellent return policy and incredible rates for next-day delivery on Saturday (and boy do they deliver!). When you are experimenting, you want a company that doesnt make bones with you when returning/exchanging/returning things.
Total cost
two containment tanks: 655 + 190 S&H = 850
spa pack with mechanical filter, no ozone: 400 + 50 S&H = 450
submersible aquarium heaters – 360 + 9 S&H = 370
water thermometer – 8.00 + 7 S&H = 15
The total cost is 1700.00. Most tanks will run you 2000-3500 used. Then we can add in epsom salt for 300 bucks for a clean 2 grand for the whole deal!
Optional Products
You might want a shockbuster, although you will probably opt to float with all heater power off:
JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. Today we are going to explore the province of the mind. With me is Dr. John C. Lilly, a noted pioneer of mystical states, of states of consciousness, and also interspecies communication. Dr. Lilly is a former researcher with the National Institutes of Health and the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. He is the author of some five books on human-dolphin communication, including Lilly on Dolphins, Man and Dolphin, The Mind of the Dolphin, Communication between Man and Dolphin. He has written many books on deep inner exploration, including The Deep Self, The Center of the Cyclone, The Dyadic Cyclone, and The Scientist, and he is particularly known for Programming and Metaprogramming the Human Biocomputer. In fact he introduced that term, the biocomputer, into our language. Welcome, John.
JOHN C. LILLY, M.D.: Thank you.
MISHLOVE: It’s a real pleasure to be with you. I think it would be good to start with your famous maxim about what is true in the province of the mind. Could you begin by repeating that?
LILLY: In the province of the mind what one believes to be true, either is true or becomes true within certain limits. These limits are to be found experimentally and experientially. When so found these limits turn out to be further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind there are no limits. However, in the province of the body there are definite limits not to be transcended.
MISHLOVE: You’ve probably devoted your whole life, and certainly many decades recently, to pushing to see what really were the limits — by going into new realities, taking on the belief systems of those realities, and then coming back to your basic working reality and challenging those beliefs, integrating those beliefs with your own. In your writings you’ve explored almost every state of consciousness I could imagine — the various mystical levels of satori, communication with extraterrestrials, communication with other species. You’ve established probably a more significant mapping of inner space than almost any other modern person, and I think we all owe a great debt to you for that.
LILLY: But don’t get stuck with those. I’ve abandoned all of them. It’s impossible, because there are infinities within the mind.
MISHLOVE: I think that’s the beauty of your work, is that you keep moving further and further out. In The Center of the Cyclone you described a state — you had a whole system, virtually a quantitative system, for mapping states of consciousness, and you talked about one that I found most fascinating, which you call +3, Mega Samadhi. In that state you describe going so far out of your body, even out of the physical universe, to the point of being at the level of essence, in which the physical universe is created.
LILLY: Right.
MISHLOVE: That almost seemed to me, in reading that book, like an ultimate state of consciousness, but I know you wrote about it some fifteen years ago. How does it look to you now?
LILLY: Well, there’s one state beyond +3. That’s +1, but you’re not allowed to remember that once you go into it. It’s union with God. That’s the true yoga, and so you’re nonhuman, so there’s no way you can recount what happened. You have no way of saying it, because it’s beyond language. Well, all those states are beyond language. Language is a very poor instrument to express it.
MISHLOVE: In some of your other writings you’ve described language as being a thin film that separates us from reality. Much as we try to use language to describe what we mean, it really puts barriers up.
LILLY: Well, there’s one use of language that’s valid. That’s the injunctive use — telling you how to do things. The descriptive one’s very poor, and William James said that the other realities are separated from this one by the filmiest of screens. I found that this screen is language, so you have to abandon it when you’re going to these other realities.
MISHLOVE: In addition to +1 and +3, you’ve mapped out +6. That’s a state of consciousness, as I recall, in which the mind can travel to any point in physical or nonphysical space.
LILLY: Right. But you maintain your individuality.
MISHLOVE: That must be a basic mode of the psychic explorer. I gather from reading much of your work that you spent a great deal of time in +6.
LILLY: Right, and in +12. Plus 12 is the blissful idiot. You’re in your body; you’re right here and now, but everything is happy. There’s gold dust particles in the air, and everything is good.
MISHLOVE: You can feel energy moving in and out of the different psychic centers of the body.
LILLY: And if a bird calls, you hear it echoing through the galaxy. But that’s not much use, unless you can find another bliss being in the same space.
MISHLOVE: Many of the mystical teachings warn against getting stuck in some of these realities.
LILLY: Right. I haven’t been in any of them since that time.
MISHLOVE: You also refer, in your mapping of states, to +48, which is sort of a perfectly neutral state.
LILLY: Right. Plus 24 is the professional state of any discipline that you’re involved in, where you’re lost in the discipline. Forty-eight is where you’re communicating with everybody else. Then there are the minus states, but I don’t go into those.
MISHLOVE: No, but at one point you wrote about the importance of going into the minus states and remaining perfectly aware, being conscious in those negative states, not trying to block out the negativity. You described that, as I recall, as burning karma.
LILLY: Yes. In The Center of the Cyclone there’s a chapter called “A Guided Tour of Hell,” which is -6. That was awful. So I never had to go back to that. And I was never frightened again. I was totally terrified in that one.
MISHLOVE: I suppose it’s what the Christian mystics sometimes refer to as the dark night of the soul.
LILLY: Well, it was the dark night of my soul.
MISHLOVE: Perhaps this is a necessary part of everybody’s journey, is to go through the epitome of terror.
LILLY: Right. For instance, there’s an Iranian psychiatrist, an American psychiatrist, that put a hundred patients in a mental hospital in Iran through what they feared most, on Ketamine, and they all left the hospital. Now, I tried the same thing, after I read that. That evening I took 150 milligrams of Ketamine, and suddenly the Earth Coincidence Control Office removed my penis and handed it to me. I screamed in terror. My wife Toni came running in from the bedroom, and she said, “It’s still attached.” So I shouted at the ceiling, “Who’s in charge up there? A bunch of crazy kids?” The answer came back, “Well, you had an unconscious fear, so we put you through it, just the way the Iranian psychiatrist did.”
MISHLOVE: In the realm of the mind, the province of the mind, we can face all our fears.
LILLY: Well, you may not be able to live with it, but you should try it.
MISHLOVE: I often find in dreams that the things that would destroy the body, in the realm of the mind, don’t.
LILLY: That’s right. The survival programs, as I found out earlier from doing neurophysiology, are built into the brain. The rewarding systems, euphoric systems, and the sexual systems, and the painful, punishing, anger systems are all built in. And then you realize that the cerebral cortex has many, many paths to these systems and from these systems, so you don’t have to go through these states.
Part Two
MISHLOVE: Let’s focus a little bit on some of the terms you mentioned a moment ago. You mentioned Ketamine. What is Ketamine?
LILLY: Ketamine is the most commonly used anesthetic for very young children and old people. In the literature there are emergence symptoms that are described, emergence being coming out of the anesthetic. Some doctors don’t like those emergence symptoms, so they won’t use it. Others know what they are, so they just hold the hand of the patient and help him come out. It was the most commonly used anesthetic in Vietnam. Some places won’t use it at all, but are frightened of it.
MISHLOVE: Basically, what a strong dose of Ketamine will do is make you unaware of your body.
LILLY: Yes, it can. I don’t like it anymore.
MISHLOVE: But it creates a state where one can enter into inner realities free from the attachments of the body.
LILLY: ECCO told me to stop using it, and get back here and learn how to be human.
MISHLOVE: In your book The Scientist you describe going through a period of very intensive explorations with Vitamin K, as you described it at that point — to the extent that people thought you were — and it’s not clear to me whether you were or not — addicted to the substance.
LILLY: Well, when one is doing research on a substance, one takes it so frequently that outside observers can say you’re addicted, but that’s a very bad definition of addiction.
MISHLOVE: I think in many ways whether you were or weren’t, one has to admire your willingness to always push the frontiers of our knowledge further, and it’s clear that that was your motivation for the work that you did.
LILLY: Any good research is obsessive and compulsive.
MISHLOVE: You also mentioned the term ECCO. What is ECCO?
LILLY: E-C-C-O. In Italian it means, “This is it.” But it means to me the Earth Coincidence Control Office, which is one of God’s field offices. ECCO runs our lives, though we won’t admit it. If you’re an ECCO agent, you can be very, very careful to use your best intelligence in ECCO’s service, and you realize there are no discoveries, there are only revelations. That was a come-down for me as a scientist.
MISHLOVE: Well, I’ve found in my own work in the media and parapsychology, that I’m very much guided by coincidences.
LILLY: Right.
MISHLOVE: And I guess it’s looking to coincidences as signs along the way that defines this relationship with what you’ve defined as ECCO.
LILLY: Right, the Earth Coincidence Control. It’s coincidence control that they do, and they say, “We control the long-term coincidences; you control the short-term ones. And when you find out how we do the long-term ones, you no longer have to remain on earth; you don’t have to return there.”
MISHLOVE: It seems to me as if your concept of ECCO is a way of modeling a mechanism behind what Jung has defined as synchronocity.
LILLY: That’s right. Jung defined synchronicity only in a good fashion in his introduction to the I Ching, and he uses the term coincidences.
MISHLOVE: Meaningful coincidences.
LILLY: But of course the coincidences are in your own construction, your own language construction of the events. So that’s all a fake too. As I say at the beginning of my workshops, “Everything I say here is a lie — bullshit, in other words — because anything that you put in words is not experience, is not the experiment. It’s a representation — a misrepresentation.”
MISHLOVE: And here we are misrepresenting to each other in order that we can learn from these lies.
LILLY: Right. Now if you use language injunctively, as a set of directions, then it’s not as bad as it is otherwise.
MISHLOVE: So in other words, for example, when you talk about ECCO, when you talk about perhaps going into an inner reality using sensory isolation, which is one of the other technologies in which you pioneered —
LILLY: In 1954, I invented it.
MISHLOVE: Or using a number of different molecules which can be used for this purpose, or mystical disciplines — when one enters into these realities, each set of instructions carries with it usually a belief system.
LILLY: Right.
MISHLOVE: And basically what you’re saying is that all of these belief systems are wrong, but one needs to entertain or to hold the belief system in order to follow through the instructions.
LILLY: That’s right. Our brains are so small we have to do this.
MISHLOVE: So the belief system itself becomes a tool that we work with, and then eventually we have to let go of.
LILLY: Right.
MISHLOVE: And using these belief systems, you’ve been able to in effect map out the inner terrain of inner space in a manner which has as rich and varied flora and fauna and geography as one would find on any continent, perhaps richer.
LILLY: But if you take the same kinds of trips, you’ll find a different flora and fauna at different times.
MISHLOVE: Each time.
LILLY: So in the province of the mind there aren’t any limits.
MISHLOVE: And yet if one pushes that very, very far, I guess no limits almost means nothing. There’s nothing there. Limits is what defines things, it’s what creates form.
LILLY: I hadn’t thought of it that way. Well, there are no limits that you put on it previously, and new limits may appear, which define it in an entirely new way, which is much larger. That’s all that means.
MISHLOVE: I almost have the sense, though, that if there are no limits in the province of the mind, that we humans and other beings create limits of our own to make it interesting, to make the game worth playing.
LILLY: Well, you can’t live as a human without limits, and that’s your body. They’re built into your brain. The pattern recognition system is in your brain, for instance. If one hallucinates, say, on cocaine, one sees a bush over there as an old lady crying with a shawl over her head. You walk over and it’s a bush. Now if somebody else is on cocaine and they look at that same bush, they’ll see the old lady crying. So this apparently is pattern recognition systems that are built into our brains, and are given at birth probably.
MISHLOVE: In other words, in certain altered states of consciousness, there is an ability, I suppose, to be telepathic, to cognize the thoughts directly of another person.
LILLY: I think it’s more than that. It’s a particularly noisy pattern of the bush, in striking your brain, is reorganized, personified by the brain. All brains do the same thing, even if you’re not in telepathic communication. So you have an alternate there. Do you know about alternity?
MISHLOVE: Alternity, that’s a wonderful word. No.
LILLY: I experienced alternity very dramatically when I came back from Chile. I sat in Elizabeth Campbell’s living room in Los Angeles, in what I call the prophet meditation
— sitting on the floor, my spine ramrod straight. Suddenly a line of light comes down through my spine, and there are leaves of different realities all around me. I can look into the future, and the present is here in each of those as it goes on out to many years from now, and goes to infinity upwards. There’s a tremendous amount of power going through this. Well, the next morning I was thrown out of bed by the Sylmar earthquake, and I thought, “Gee, did I cause that? Or was it caused by the same energy that went through me?” And then I realized that this was hubris — he whom the gods would destroy, he has hubris.
MISHLOVE: Filled with pride.
LILLY: And so I lost my pride, and I realized that I couldn’t explain either of them.
MISHLOVE: Alternity, as you’ve described it, then, would seem to be a space in which you’re in touch with many alternate realities, all simultaneously.
LILLY: Yes, and then you get caught with one, as I did.
Part Three
MISHLOVE: It seems very similar in a way to what physicists are describing when they talk about the multiple-universe interpretation of quantum physics.
LILLY: That’s right. Francis Jeffreys is writing my biography, and he describes alternity from the wave function of quantum mechanics, and when you collapse it you’ve chosen one alternate in future.
MISHLOVE: You’ve referred several times now to the fact that in the province of the body there are limits, and you yourself have thrown yourself up against those limits on many occasions and have written about it. In your writing you seem to be warning people maybe not to do everything that you’ve done.
LILLY: That’s right. They don’t have to. See this hand? I have to keep it in ointment, because on 11-11-87 I drove my car up a slight bank, turned it over, and totaled it. The battery acid burned this hand, and these knuckles were broken, and that’s all. If I’d had my seat belt on I would have been decapitated. But ECCO was showing me something, that I wasn’t exploring alternates properly. I was caught with one.
MISHLOVE: There’s a wonderful section in your book The Scientist, in which you describe a conversation amongst different beings in an altered state, who are describing how carefully they worked to create all the coincidences so that you could have an accident in which you nearly died, and were resuscitated by your wife Toni who had just learned mouth-to-mouth resuscitation three days earlier.
LILLY: Right. Then the other accident, the one that closed off Vitamin K for me, where I was on a ten-speed bicycle going down Decker Canyon Road, and the chain caught, and I hit the road and nine bones were broken. But I didn’t say in The Scientist that I was on PCP at the time, forty-two milligrams injected. So I was out in the hospital for five days and five nights, and was taken by ECCO to planets that were being destroyed by supernova waves, by atomic warfare, and so on. It was incredible. When I’d try to come back here, I’d come back and Toni would be there and I’d grab on for six or seven hours, then they’d take me back out. I hadn’t finished the lessons.
MISHLOVE: What do you think the lesson is?
LILLY: Well, the lesson in that case was, “Look up the dose for PCP before you take any.” It’s two milligrams, not forty-two. And the other lessons, of course, were that I came back and wanted to put on radiation suits. This planet is not very stable. It can be destroyed at any time.
MISHLOVE: There’s a sense in the way in which you live your life, right out on the very edge of what would be called not just normalcy, or the edge of what is conventionally safe to do, but the very edge of what is physically possible for a human being to do —
LILLY: Going to the limits of the body.
MISHLOVE: And in so doing — well, of course you’ve discovered, like the Fool in the Tarot deck, you put yourself into this position of nascent wisdom, in which you’re bound to make mistakes. One can’t explore the way you have without making mistakes, and yet those very mistakes seem to propel you even deeper.
LILLY: I have a saying, “There are no mistakes, there are only correctable errors. There are no errors, there are only alternate programs.” They just get the guilt.
MISHLOVE: There is a sense in which you have lived your life on the internal reality, that I almost feel like your being with me here in a TV studio is like you’ve come up for air a little bit to breathe together with us, and to share what it’s like in these vast, vast realms, light years away from planetside reality.
LILLY: I call that in-sanity, and when we’re talking together we’re in out-sanity. And you should never try to express all of your in-sanity in the out-sanity, or they’ll lock you up.
MISHLOVE: But in a way you’ve expressed more of your in-sanity than most people would ever dare to.
LILLY: Well, a lot of people take my books as permission to go further with that.
MISHLOVE: One would almost think an entire generation, perhaps several generations of people, now feel much freer to describe their own inner experiences because of people like you doing it at a time when it was much riskier.
LILLY: I’m always surprised at how many people have read my books and been influenced by them.
MISHLOVE: Well, I can certainly say that that’s the case for me.
LILLY: I think you’ll like the new edition of The Scientist. It has all the things I left out of the first one, seventy-five new pages in it, and fifty new photographs. And I admit that it was Ketamine, not Vitamin K.
MISHLOVE: But you’re not using Ketamine currently.
LILLY: No. I don’t like it anymore.
MISHLOVE: Are you still doing work in sensory isolation?
LILLY: Once in a while. But I never talk about what I’m doing currently. Remember Human Biocomputer? I was doing that work with LSD in the tank in St. Thomas, and the National Institute of Mental Health, from which I was on a fellowship, thought I was just working with dolphins. So when I sent them Human Biocomputer as the report for five years of the fellowship, they wrote back, “We didn’t realize we were going to get a monograph from this work.” I don’t think they read it.
MISHLOVE: And they cut off your funding shortly thereafter, didn’t they?
LILLY: Yes. Somebody told the people supporting the dolphin research that I had brain damage from LSD. Well, I got that rumor, so I took it to the head of the Mental Health Council that was supporting the work. He was the head of the Neurological Institute in New York, and he got angry when they said that, so he spent three days examining me. I never had such a thorough examination. He got angrier and angrier. He said, “Absolutely no evidence.” He said, “Do you want any more research money?” I said, “No, I’ve quit that.” So he said, “All right, I’m going to fire two people, one in the Institute and one on my committee.” So he did.
MISHLOVE: Well, I suppose for our culture the really special thing about you is the fact that you really have a foot in both worlds, the scientific camp and the mystical camp. And in a way you seem dissatisfied with both of them. Neither camp seems to provide an adequate enough model of reality for you.
LILLY: That’s right. My own beliefs are unbelievable.
MISHLOVE: And you seem to be saying that it’s up to each person to in effect make the same bridge that you have, and to create their own belief system, so that in creating that belief they can move into the state that that belief leads them to, so that they can then discard it again.
LILLY: That’s the gnostic point of view — self transcendence, not transcendence through a church or a group.
MISHLOVE: Back fifteen years ago or so, you were exploring the mystical states, as described classically as the various levels of samadhi, in your work with Oscar Ichazo in Chile, in the Arica school.
LILLY: Right.
MISHLOVE: You had achieved, as we have described earlier, some of the very highest states of those mystical traditions, and you wrote about them from your own personal experience. People in the mystical traditions view these states as being ultimate states. I get the sense that you don’t think of them that way. You think of them more the way a scientist would look at tools.
LILLY: Well, Patanjali, for instance, in 400 B.C. said, “When you reach the highest form of samadhi, you realize there are hundreds more beyond that.” I agree; there’s no limit.
MISHLOVE: Well, John Lilly, it’s been a pleasure having you with me. Thank you very much.
LILLY: Thank you. It’s a pleasure being here. You sure do know how to ask the right questions.
I have a saying, "There are no mistakes, there are only correctable errors. There are no errors, there are only alternate programs." They just get the guilt.
Sensory deprivation is a physical term – it admits that the physical senses are reduced. But let’s notice that worlds and awareness unfold with this deprivation. The metaphysical standpoint is: the ever alive inner sense is liberated when the outer senses are reduced, or as Glenn put it: when we subtract the body.
Let’s take a trip through the metaphysical writings for references to this alive inner sense.
KEN OGGER, Freezone Scientologist
In the Motions Universe, we have the beginning of real sensation as we know it now. … And as people became more attached to sensation, it became possible to control and confuse them by hitting them with waves of sensations. And so we have the individual much more at effect than he was previously.
ANALYSIS: the creative spiritual being, Our Real Self, known as a “thetan” in Scientology, exists prior to sensation. The initial creative being existed as a nothing but over time created the ideas of motion and sensation. By reducing sensation, we naturally become more Our Real Self, prior to sensation.
THERAVADA BUDDHISM
Theravada Buddhism’s primary practice is satipatthana – observation of the rise and fall of body, feelings, mind and mental objects with equanimity.
ANALYSIS: Buddhist nirvana occurs when one no longer craves or rejects sensation. Quang Duc, a Buddhist monk, set himself on fire and remained perfectly still ( )
He was free and happy of the senses. A floater does not master his senses, but he does get away from them.
ASTRAL PROJECTION (aka OBE, OOBE)
When a person leaves their body and views it from above, they do not feel the pain of that physical body. They have achieved sensory deprivation via a Near-Death experience. This obviously means there is a YOU who is ALIVE and watching the body and that YOU is eternally sensory deprived.
In the Western Wisdom Teachings
According to Max Heindel‘s Rosicrucian ( http://rosicrucian.com/ ) writings, called Western Wisdom Teachings, there are in the brain two small organs called the pituitary body and the pineal gland. This last gland is also called by medical science as “the atrophied third eye”; however, these teachings describe that none of them are atrophying: the pituitary body and the pineal gland at the present time are neither evolving nor degenerating, but are dormant. It is said that in the far past, when man was in touch with the inner worlds, these organs were his means of ingress thereto, and they will again serve that purpose at a later stage. According to this view, they were connected with the involuntary orsympathetic nervous system and to regain contact with the inner worlds (to reawaken the pituitary body and the pineal gland) it is necessary to establish the connection of the pineal gland and the pituitary body with the cerebrospinal nervous system. It is said that when that is accomplished, man will again possess the faculty of perception in the higher worlds (i.e. clairvoyance), but on a grander scale than it was in the distant past, because it will be in connection with the voluntary nervous system and therefore under the control of his will.
ANALYSIS: In “The Quiet Center” John Lilly said (paraphrase) “I think the yogis were right. I found that in isolation I could put my body anywhere I wanted in spacetime”
MEISTER ECKHART – Concept of Mystical Union With God
If only you could suddenly be unaware of all things, then you could pass into an oblivion of your own body… memory no longer functioned, nor understanding, nor the senses, nor the powers that should function so as to govern and grace the body… In this way a man should flee his senses, turn his powers inward and sink into an oblivion of all things and himself.” ( http://tupamahu.blogspot.com/2010/03/meister-eckharts-concept-of-mystical.html )
ANALYSIS: “suddenly unaware of all things” is exactly what a tank gives you. The tank is a recipe for Eckhart’s Mystical Union with God.
Saint Teresa of Ávila
The kernel of Teresa’s mystical thought throughout all her writings is the ascent of the soul in four stages… The fourth is the “devotion of ecstasy or rapture,” a passive state, in which the consciousness of being in the body disappears (2 Corinthians 12:2-3). Sense activity ceases; memory and imagination are also absorbed in God or intoxicated.
“
During the short time the union lasts, she is deprived of every feeling, and even if she would, she could not think of any single thing… She is utterly dead to the things of the world… The natural action of all her faculties [are suspended]. She neither sees, hears, nor understands.”
ANALYSIS: I think this verse speaks loudly and clearly of the role of sensory deprivation (by whatever means necessary) for what she considers religious experience
THE BIBLE
2 Corinthians 4:16, 18
4:16 For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. 4:17 For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; 4:18 While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
Some unfortunately suppose that Christian Science leads us to ignore the body, but this is a mistaken view of its teaching and practise. The redemption of the human mind and body begins the moment that truth is accepted by one as a remedy for the ills which afflict mankind, and the work of the Christian Science practitioner is to lift thought above mortal sense, up to the true consciousness of man’s being as the likeness of God. It should not be forgotten that this lifts one above bodily consciousness into mental freedom and spiritual power, and the price paid for freedom is the surrender of material and sensual belief respecting man for the Christ-ideal of being and doing. Mrs. Eddy says, “Rightly understood, instead of possessing a sentient material form, man has a sensationless body” (Science and Health, p. 280). Sensation in the body implies a diseased tendency. Even on the human plane we are not conscious of heart, lungs, eye, or ear, unless mortal mind is offering a report of some discordant condition, and the remedy for this is to lift the discordant thought from the body, or, as the Master has bidden us, “Look up, and lift up your heads.”
YOGA
Yama: codes of restraint, abstinences (2.30, 2.31)
ANALYSIS: there are numerous shortcuts to samadhi. You could practice ethical living all your life and maybe eventually get there. You could do physical asana for 10-15 years and get there. It certainly is not a rapid approach as I’ve done both bikram yoga and ashtanga yoga and I like them, but they do not lead to samadhi very quickly. Pranayama can do it in 4-6 weeks of diligent practice. I used to work with a person who left the Self-Realization Fellowship and I was able to get to some nice thoughtless states.
So now let’s get to pratyahara – withdrawal of the senses. The yogic way to do this is called Sambhavi Mudra ( http://goo.gl/BzdVH ) … the tank is a pratyahara device automatically. So we move up to stage 5 of 8 just by climbing in. And I can vouch for the existence of John C. Lilly’s Quiet Center as being a real achievable thing just by laying in the tank.
UPANISHADS
In the Upanishads, a human being is likened to a city with ten gates. Nine gates (eyes, nostrils, ears, mouth, urethra, anus) lead outside to the sensory world. The third eye is the tenth gate and leads to inner realms housing myriad spaces of consciousness.
The vision of the brilliant Soul in the perfect unity of Yoga (Maitri Upanishad)
25. Now, it has elsewhere been said: ‘He who, with senses indrawn as in sleep, with thoughts perfectly pure as in slumber, being in the pit of senses yet not under their control, perceives Him who is called Om, a leader, brilliant, sleepless, ageless, deathless, sorrowless—he himself becomes called Om, a leader, brilliant, sleepless, ageless, deathless, sorrowless.’
SADE
“the more we know, the less we see” — Sade, Never as Good as the First Time
E. J. Gold
Our vanity convinces us that the machine is awake and supports this illusion with activity, sensation, and associative thought. — Human Biological Machine as a Transformational Apparatus.
CONCLUSION
More than one spiritual system pleads with the aspirant to flee the senses. I know it sounds prudish and I like my share of sex, drugs and rock and roll as much as the next person. But this article is focused on the automatic and lasting religious value of sensory deprivation – inner sense awakening.
