I was laying there thinking… “ok I’m totally relaxed… and this is getting boring… so I’m getting out.” Then, a tennis-elbow like pain startled to whistle through my elbow clear up to my scapula. and down my left side.
And after it had cleared I began to have fantasies of striking out baseball players and being a great bowler — clearly cellular memory detoxing itself.
Today, when I reached a good point of relaxation, I began a series of moans… “oooooohhhhh” , “aaaaahhhhh” — getting out that unseen tension via sound…
However, I must admit that methodic use of the Silva Ultra Mind System brings you to a much deeper relaxation methodically.
Thus, I think I will start using it regularly.
That float was totally beyond words….
I might get in trouble for this, but most religious groups have communal services more than once a year.
That was POWERFUL. My skin is ringing, vibrating, tingling. Head, arms, legs, back… this is wild. Almost like someone is holding a vibrator all over me. I felt like some sort of voltage was passing through me for most of the float. Some sort of intelligence… completely tweaked out float… Floating already owns but this was way beyond what a float normally does.
Jesus Christ.
Thanks to Kane Mantyla of Float Matrix in San Francisco, CA we are having the first (and not last) World Floatation Day. This is a day when we get together and float with a common intention. If you need an alarm clock, I use this software for the PC. Here is Kane’s final announcement!
I found out yesterday that I owed 11,000 in taxes. Now normally, I dont float for anything mundane like stress relief, but as soon as I got home, I turned up the heat, stripped off my clothes and DIVED into the tank. And normally, I like to satisfy my mind with a bit of music or a guided meditation, BUT NOT THIS TIME.
The only thing I wanted was to get away from it ALL…drop EVERYTHING.
And that is just what I did. I had to pee after a long time, so I came out for a shower. And my body was pleading “go back in, go back in” and go back in I did… nothing better to do on the weekend so back we go. And yes, more and more comfort even in the waking state.
This was a float to return me tobaseline stress levels, to return to my normal wigged out self instead of the near-psychosis that the tax news put me in.
It amazes me that I cannot sit still and watch my breath without being carried off into thought.
Is this simple Buddhist practice showing me what I’m really made of? That because I cant control my thinking, any thinking really is just robotic response mechanisms?
Perhaps I’m taking the wrong viewpoint. Who said there is a me, a breath, and a visual thing to focus on. maybe floating starts way beyond this. Beyond the physical assumptions of that breath practice.
What I find in the tank is constant floating of thought – no ability to hold a thought train. What I find in shamatha meditation (the breath thing) is that I fixate on certain thoughts which aggravate or excite me.
So one practice draws me into a bee’s hive of attraction or repulsion if I am not aware. The other keeps thoughts surfacing and falling away if I am not aware…. hmm..
Now, if you can have a thought and not react to it, then that means that you have weakened its effect on you. So maybe floating is dropping the charge in my thought bank automatically. While I have to work at it in shamatha?
In an interview given in 1988 to the Star Gazette, an American newspaper, Palmer says he was the victim of an “extortion campaign” at the same time promising to make refunds, with no obligation, as a “gesture of kindness.”
He then set out “to explore many systems of beliefs, the psychedelic movement, Eastern philosophies, the hippie movement, Zen, modern psychology….” It was at this time he began to develop a particular technique: “I create my experience according to what I believe.” 
To arrive to this end, he replaced the table of his dining room with a 500 kg sensory deprivation tank. He remained inside over an eight week period in a state of weightlessness, thanks to an Epsom salt solution dissolved in water. “It was at this time,” he states it in his book “Living Deliberately, “that the Avatar lessons appeared. I observed my consciousness become defined, starting from the void, advancing and ebbing like the tide, in this non-space ocean of inexpressible source consciousness. From this point of view, one can perceive or apprehend (i.e. to perceive without instructions) a thought form. It is something!” Before concluding: “relativity is the ultimate truth! If Albert Einstein had had a tank, he would have understood that much earlier.”
Here is a cutaway view of a floatation tank: 
It contains 1000 pounds of Epsom salt in water… so you float effortlessly. It is warmed to skin temperature. And it is sound light-proof. So you are free of stimulus… an easy automatic way to “get away from it all” without taking a trip to the Swiss Alps!
Not aggressive space music. Very floatey. This first release by Deepspace has joined my discriminating collection.
I own “Programming the human biocomputer” but was wondering why this work was titled differently from the book mentioned in “Tanks for the Memories”… and here we have a clarification by Beverly Potter.
Well I just ordered two copies of the original text and am curious about how they vary. In order that I get the “pure Lilly” I will wait on those books.