floatation

I arrived at the room number in the building where Blue Light was...and didn't realize that the floatation tank is run out of this guy's apartment. He was a really mellow guy and when I remarked about my surprise at the fact that the tank was just in his apartment he told me that he had ben doing it there for 23 years. After I used the bathroom, he showed me the room where the tank was, opening it briefly to allow me to see inside and see where the light switch (well, button) was.

The tank itself was essentially a modified jacuzzi that he had built into an isolation tank, surrounded by soundproof walls and in a soundproofed room, about half the space of which the tank itself took up. He closed the tank up, not wanting the treated atmosphere to leak out too much, and we went into the living room where he gave me a prep talk. He had a gorgeous living room with high, stuffed bookshelves. I saw one shelf that read DMT: The Spirit Molecule, LSD: My Problem Child, Tripping: An Anthology, etc. from left to right. A glowing crystal adorned one corner table, African style carvings peppered the high tops of the bookshelves. The whole atmosphere in the apartment was remarkably calm and relaxing.

I was given some instructions on how best to settle into it, different positions to try, and then was left in the half of the apartment with the bathroom and the floatation tank. He cut himself off from that part of the apartment with Japanese sliding doors and I went into the bathroom to shower - he doesn't want the saltwater mixture to get too polluted so it's important that you wash your hair and body thoroughly. Then I went, naked, to the floatation tank. Yep. I was naked in another man's apartment the other day. Go figure.

When you enter the tank, you want to do your best to minimize the amount of disturbance you inflict on the calm water. It is a viscous water, far thicker than I expected, even knowing how loaded with salt it was. I shut the door behind me, then I sat back into the water and then leaned back. The sensation was very unsettling. Instant buoyancy came up from beneath me. I laid back, steadying my hands on the sides of the tank and holding myself still while the thick water sloshed back and forth, and with my left hand turned the lights off.

The water was lapping the sides and I was holding on, my eyes trying to deal with the fact that there was absolutely no light. Or was there? I thought I could see the contours of the tank, which was as tall as a regular shower stall. But could I? My eyes started playing tricks on me immediately. I lay my head back in the water, only my face protruding, my ears submerged, and I hear my heart beat loud and clear. It doesn't take long for you to become hyper-aware of the lack of audio or visual input coming from the outside world. I could hear myself blink. It was crunchy.

I was very uncomfortable and couldn't find the right position for my arms and legs. Relaxing your body, even in a semi-weightless state, is not as easy as you might think it is. I tried breathing deeply, but a terrible anxiousness was creeping over me and I came very close a couple of times to just throwing in the towel, getting out of the tank and just quitting. It was really bothering me, the amount of "What do I DO with myself?!" that was bubbling up inside me. But then I realized how much of a parallel there was between this need to let go and the need to let go when tripping. And I realized much like when tripping becomes overwhelming in the come-up, that I was a source of most of the things distracting my mind. I was being my own worst enemy.

I calmed myself down through deep breathing and tried to do a yoga exercise the owner told me about, where you scan your body with your mind, thinking about the individual parts and trying to relax them. It was a very strange experience, because I would become aware of my calf muscle...there would be a sensation there as I would think about it. My mind would jump to label it pain or discomfort, but that was just because those are the only times when I am really in touch with my body, when it is hurt or uncomfortable. This was something else, this was just a throbbing awareness, an is-ness on the part of my muscles.

Meanwhile, my arms were tingling from the elbow to the fingertips. Absolutely felt like all the cells in them were vibrating. MY upper back muscles hurt and so did my neck so I tried floating with my arms stretched behind my ahead instead of at my sides. I immediately grew far more relaxed and was able to give myself over to the experience...

By the time I was really getting deep into the float, and letting go to it, I don't think there was much time left. I entered this semi-dream state that was unbelievably pleasurable and relaxing. It felt like all the best parts of being asleep, while being aware. With my eyes closed (though there wasn't really any difference between having them closed or open) I would see slow, unfurling explosions of the darkest purples and browns occurring behind my eyelids. With my eyes open, sometimes I would see little vectored lines against the darkness.

Towards the end of the float, there are speakers in the bottom of the floatation tank, and he begins to play light, soothing tones when you have a few minutes left, so as not to startle you from your trance but gently wake you from it. I really did feel like I was waking up from a dream. I sat up in the water, breathing heavily, feeling quite a glow all around me. and in fact, I thought I saw light in the room. I thought to myself, wait, is it really lightproof? I sat back and took in the last few minutes by soaking in the darkness, and I thought I could discern where the corners of the tank were, how far I was sitting from the walls.

I reached out my arms to where I thought one wall and one corner would be and realized I had absolutely no idea what angle I was sitting at and where anything was. Laughing, I turned on the lights, which are dim so as not to hit your eyes too harshly. I then rinsed off in the shower and dressed, and went back out to the living room where a chilled cup of delicious herbal tea awaited me. I sat drinking it for a bit while the proprietor prepared the tank for his next customer, then he came out and we discussed the experience a little bit.

I told him that I saw a lot of parallels between the psychedelic experience and the float, especially in the beginning of the float when you really need to Let Go and give yourself over to it. Sometimes when I trip I try and lay back and just quiet my mind and it will seem so unbelievably hard to do. There are so many distractions. And just like in those moments tripping, when I was trying to relax in the tank I realized I was creating all those distractions myself. Despite his impressive collection of books on psychedelics, he seemed less than eager to follow this line of conversation.

I told him that one part of my body I could not calm down the whole time was the underside of my belly, and he told me that was where the Hara, one of the chakras, is located. Apparently there are schools of meditation where you try and quiet the head-mind by redirecting your energy flow down to your other mind, which is located in the Hara, and that you can attain a quiet state that way. He gave me the names of books to read on the subject which I scribbled down. Then I finished my tea, walked out on to the street, and was quite aglow. I walked about 40 blocks feeling like I was on air the whole time.

So what did I get out of all this? I'm not quite sure, to tell you the truth. I wasn't entirely mentally prepared for the experience, which is kind of how I have been feeling in regards to many of my consciousness-expanding pursuits lately, especially my adventures with dimethyltryptamine (DMT). This experience reaffirmed my feeling that I have a lot of work to do on myself, on my mind, on the way I process information and float through the world and let the world float through me. My mind is not quite open enough, I'm not as prismatic as I aim to be. But I also realized I can't overthink that and I just need to BE it.

What do I mean by prismatic? Well, I can't stop thinking about that idea after this experience, because there was so little coming from without into me. I had a vision once, on LSD. Everyone I looked at had a prism nestled deep in their being. And in fact, they were an extension of that prism. The basic unit of human life was this prismatic soul. Each one formed completely uniquely, with its own bends and divots. Each prism accepted external input, and as that input crossed the threshold of their perception is was bent and bounced around inside them in the way only their minds could singularly bounce those ideas and concepts and things around. And then we each would refract those things back outwards. There is breathing in, and breathing out.

In the tank, when I breathed in, my mind was completely empty except from the knowledge of being alive and breathing. And when I exhaled, my mind would rush, scream, sing, yell, ideas would stream like hi-speed traffic in between my eyes and out my third and into the æther. I'm able to process input. I'm able to flow through life quietly and suck it in and experience it and engage with it. But the goal now is to attain a level of quietness and consistency in the way I exhale the world, the way I breathe back into the spiritual ecosystem that's nourished me all my life. I must learn to quiet my monkey mind. Every day is a step towards that. There's no attaining quiet mind on the turn of a dime.

I'll definitely go back into the tank. I don't know when, but I will. It was an experience I don't quite know how to process, and that is what is drawing me back to it, though it may be some months before I try it again. Much like tripping, the experience is a question mark. And I know it will never be the same twice. And while I don't necessarily have anything to hold on to or show for what it's taught me, it has left me with something, even if that something is nothing more than a quiet moment that can serve as a reference point for the more turbulent times in my life.