It's easy enough to guess it's a holiday around here. There is not much noise except for the weekend pilots taking off and landing. Airplanes oughta be forced to use mufflers like cars do. It's like having a motorcycle with no muffler hovering above my house. It's not like these assholes are actually going somewhere in their toy planes.
I wrote a post to the Thomas group about my experiences using the float tank I built a while back. Ben took a chainsaw to it and stopped my whining about it taking up so much room in my house. I could have repaired it or reworked it to make it better, but the truth is that the I Ching told me enough was enow, by suggesting I'd learned what i needed to know from that experience, and pushing the envelope wouldn't plant any peas.
The post I wrote this morning reminded me of what was really important about what can be gained from an ongoing process of experiencing sensory deprivation. A predictable moment of transition happens after ex-is-ing in a sensory deprived state-of-being repetitively, if not right away.
The transition happens gradually and rather inconspicuously until it upsurges into consciousness. Something physical happens that's prima facie evidence for the change that follows. Most interestingly, is that the lactic acid accumulated in one's muscles is immediately converted to a harmless chemical, and a sense of physical ecstasy resulting from the lack of weariness in one's muscles can be one of the most joyful things an animal can experience.
It's this physical transition that one tolerates the extreme boredom and ennui one suffers to get to this release that seems instructive. Sound familiar meditators? It should. It's the same result one seeks through meditation.
Here's what happens to bring this physical transition about. I'll be brief.
When you get into a sensory deprived situation and your brain can't update it's current impressions from the ambient sensory environment, the control factor turns up the sensitivity of what conscious awareness it employs at the moment. I've read this control is located in the medulla oblongata, but I might have forgotten where it actually happens. Who cares?
Whatever abstract constructs are being entertained by the thetic consciousness about the data produced by the five senses has to constantly be reinforced by sensory stimuli or it gets erased from short-term memory. I'm attempting to describe the same thing that happens to last night's dreams if you don't indict them for later consideration.
Ideally, the sensory deprivation chamber is 100% dark and 100% quiet. The sensory modality of sight and sound are removed from consideration by physical barriers. That leaves three more that might stimulate the thetic process. The senses of touch, smell, and taste.
Touch can be reduced mightily by the salt-laden water inside the float tank. That's why it's called a float tank. In my home-made float tank I had about a foot of water that had been laced with Epsom salt. Eight hundred pounds (363 Kg) of Epsom salt. That made the heated water I floated in 25% more buoyant than the salt water in the Earth's oceans, and more equivalent to the water in the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
Floating in this solution removes a large part of gravity from the equation. The water is heated to about five degrees lower than normal body temperature, and must be maintained at that temperature. Keeping the temperature right is the most significant problem I ran into for my home-made tank. If the temperature of the water got even as high as my body temperature I started perspiring. If it got lower than five degrees below my average body temperature, then it took heat from my body.
The temperature had to be just right in order to forget it altogether, if possible. The temperature is also a part of nullifying the sense of touch, which "feels" the effect of gravity. The sense of taste and smell are hardly distinguishable in a sensory deprived situation, You can smell the salty air, and if you get the salty water in your eyes or mouth it's a negative factor, but ignorable if you're really after the desired transition.
So, these are the elements which make sensory deprivation so powerful. 100% of the sense of sight and sound can be negated. Period. Most of the sense of touch can be compromised by the above factors, but never all of it. The senses of smell and taste are easily ignored because there is only one source to activate them.
In a sensory deprived situation the brain is not a happy camper. It opens the flood gates of sensitivity wide-open, and it still can't sustain the thoughts it entered the tank with. A human being need sensory input or it can't maintain it's abstract thoughts.
You don't have to take my word for it, get naked and crawl into a float tank. It ain't gwine happen. The active ideations the brain entertains as you crawl into the tank are going to act like old soldiers and fade away if you stay there for more than a few minutes.
For about forty-five minutes to an hour you're gonna be bored to tears. Some people just can't stand this. Apparently, from the response of the people I conned into getting inside my float tank, not many people at all can stand being totally bored for more than ten minutes, and then they panic.
I learned not to stand near the door of my tank when somebody got in it. That door got torn off twice by friends and relatives trying to get out of that tank as fast as they could, and apparently any way possible.
The highly sought transition happens when your brain gets tired of attempting to entertain itself with the objects of it's sensory environment, and turns within to it's own devices. All the lactic acid in the muscles are immediately converted into less irritating chemicals, and produces a profound state of ecstasy. So, here you are, as consciously aware as is physically possible, kicked back floating in unimaginably warm, comfortable water, with the ability to observe the content of your non-thetic consciousness with the patience of Job.
You can learn about that transition meditating. It's just not as easy to ignore the boredom and ennui.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
