Eugene weekly., December 29, 2016, Page 13, Image 13

H E A L T H
was supposed to be happening, trying to clear my mind,
forcing it a bit.
My first stage of experience involved a feeling of free-
floating anxiety, a sort of amorphous sense that I’d
forgotten something important and that unspecified
things happening in the outside world might require my
immediate attention. My mind flipped like a blurry
Rolodex through a series of cloudy disasters that were
currently occurring, none of them holding still long
enough to even define themselves.
You know that feeling of having left the burner on the
stove going? Raise that to an abstraction, give it a little
amphetamine nudge of panic, and that was my initial
response to the float. It quickly dissipated.
I use the word “quickly,” but time in a float tank
becomes as fluid and changeable as the darkness
enveloping you. So when I speak of the second stage of
my experience, I offer no ticking off of minutes. All I
know is that it happened.
The next phase, then, involved a bit of decompression
and self-reckoning. Basically, I was trying so hard to have
a profound spiritual experience that I scuttled myself with
frustration. Nothing brings you up short on greatness like
striving for greatness as an end in itself. I was strangling
the process in the hopes of achieving ultimate nirvana,
and until I realized this, I was a stuck.
At some point, I sort of unclenched and let go: I gave
up the ghost, in a sense. If I was just going to be an
overcomplicated under-stimulated American lunkhead
floating like a corpse in a lightless tank of warm saltwater,
then so be it. I quit worrying about whether reaching
down to scratch my balls would prevent me from achieving
satori. Loosen up, dude.
I’m a bit hesitant to mention what happened in the tank
after this, not because I’m embarrassed, or think you
won’t believe me, or worry that you might consider me
whacked or whatever. I don’t really care about all that.
My concern is that the experience was so profound and
personal and spiritual that even the act of describing it
reduces it, by creating a second-hand account that merely
mimes the eternal now of all experience.
In the pitch black, I raised my hands and meshed my
fingers together so my palms were open before my blind
eyes. In total darkness, there is no focal point, and yet
there are infinite focal points, and as I stared outward like
a mole, the places where my fingers were — or, perhaps,
might have been — clasped together began to burn with
an orangey glow. It looked like a burbling, smoldering
orange brain was expanding in my field of vision, fusing
my fingers and then both my hands in a nova of brilliant
light.
From that point on, everything lit up like a Christmas
tree. I crooked my head forward and beheld the outlines
of my body glowing with a beautiful celestial blue, while
a surge of pure white light expanded in stuttering stop-
motion from my crotch, neither serpent nor tree but a little
of both. Tilting my head back, I let my vision stretch ever
outward as red, veiny, pulsating membranes descended
and passed over and through me, bursting me forth into
succeeding dimensions of an infinite starry night.
None of this was scary, though at certain points I
would sense a presence, less malevolent than urgent,
lunging at my periphery; I welcomed it forth. For a long,
long time I simply stared at a Gothic wall of deep red
brick that was angled at 45 degrees, towering over me into
the dark beyond, oozing and pulsing with a vivid flesh-
like vitality, until suddenly I was watching myself
watching the wall.
FLOAT OM FOUNDER ANKUSH VIMAWALA
I am aware of the claims of subjectivity, of firefly-like
neurons buzzing and zipping across the brain and conjured
images from the repository of memory being projected
onto the optical cortex, of how hallucinations are locked
in the skull. I find them compelling but incomplete. If
what I saw and experienced in that tank was simply the
perchance-to-dream of me, then I am still a mystery
worthy of exploration.
We are the cosmos. At the level of primordial soup, all
we are is a wide-open eye staring in childlike awe, and all
our talking about it is just the mausoleum upon which
civilization is built. There is nothing more profound in
this than saying there is only now, forever now, and in the
float tank I touched this truth, if only fleetingly. No
present and no past. Just now.
When the music came on signaling the end of my float,
I was amazed. Time flies when you’re having a moment.
I emerged feeling completely alert, sharp of thought,
buoyant. My body felt great, almost euphoric.
MY SECOND FLOAT IN THE BIGGER TANK , a week
later, was a different beast altogether. I’d been fighting a
cold, and inevitably I had expectations. Expectations be
damned. I came up face to face with myself in a different
way, and I went to war. It was less fantastic, or rather less
phantasmal, but no less valuable.
And I must have gone deep, because this time it felt
like it was over in a blink. That’s all I really want to say
about it, not because it was disturbing, per se, but because
the places it took me were so personal it would take a
novel to set the context. I folded inward, my thought
shuffling and dissolving like so much rice paper. And
despite the difference between the two floats, I felt the
same after both: refreshed, clear, at peace.
“Yes, everyone’s experience does differ to an extent,”
Vimawala says. “Even for the same person, each float is
somewhat different. It depends on what they’ve been
going through the past couple of days and a variety of
other things. Most people have profound experiences and
come out of the tank with their minds blown.”
That said, Vimawala says he’s never met anyone who
regrets floating, though it does indeed happen that folks
fall asleep. “Most people go through some period of sleep
during the 90 minutes in the tank ... As the mind quiets
down and eases into the more natural flow of things, the
body is able to access its own intelligence, and knows
what is needed to heal and come into an optimal state of
being.”
There was a time in my life when this would have
sounded to me like new-age crap, a con and a put-on,
because perspective is everything, and my perspective
was full of fear and anxiety. Life seemed like a dark,
dastardly game with no exit. I was terrified of death. I
believe our consumer society runs primarily on a fear of
death, which leads us to pursue with overweening anxiety
an empty therapeutic release in the materialism that’s
foisted on us. We don’t live; we compete. We don’t
awaken; we put ourselves to sleep, over and over again.
The immaterialism of floating strikes me as an
appropriate palliative to the dictates of today’s rat race.
“Western capitalist culture seems to idealize super-sizing
things,” Vimawala says.
“There is an underlying unease, a need to upgrade,” he
continues. “If one just stops for a moment and maybe
takes a float or two, it might help snap one out of the
modern-day hypnosis induced and maintained by a
constant bombardment of sensory input and the perceived
need to grasp for gratification from outside oneself.”
Float Om Healing Center & Tranquility Tanks is at 111 E. 16th Ave.; call
541-632-3231 or visit float-om.com. Inner Health Center at 2757 Chad Dr.
also offers sensory deprivation and float tank therapy; call 541-684-0365.
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