 Welcome again. Our world, our culture is becoming more complex and compressed while we seek expansiveness and simplicity. Here where impulse, thought, utterance and movement create an energetic matrix like the living matrix of the body, here we can dissipate a bit into a suspended state of connection and relation. We enter the in-between. When I talk about the in-between or liminal state, I am in part referring to the theta state. And in the theta state, we are in that state in hypnosis, in EEG, biofeedback, in REM sleep. You can achieve the theta state in deep, experienced meditation. You are between the conscious and the unconscious, sometimes referred to as the subconscious. And yet you retain memories and feelings. It is compared to the trance state and the ability to act beneath the conscious mind. It gives you a sense of connection and unity. You can experience visualization, inspiration, creativity and insight. The theta voice has been described as the silent voice. In the in-between, as experienced at theta, Charles Tartt stated, there is a qualitative alteration in the overall pattern of mental functioning. There is a disturbance of the time sense. And you can achieve a sense of the transpersonal, a direct experience of connectedness to all and to everything. It is an undifferentiated state which forms the substrate of our reality, our self-concept and our beliefs. You are in the nothing-something. You are in the in-between. The recognition and utilization of this state holds great promise for our ability to effect change and expand awareness. It is in the float experience that we most readily and easily enter this state. It is here, through its inherent connectedness, that in the Kabbalic sense, we enter tikkun ho alam, the healing and repairing of the world through practical action. And this comes from the inherent sense of compassion, vibrant and natural in the in-between or theta state. It is here where we come into contact with archetypal representations, symbols and ideas and concepts across cultures which represent common patterns in human memory and process. These are Jung's contents of the collective unconscious and self-portrait of the instincts. These help to organize emotion into meaning. It is here where we often have mystical or spiritual experiences which have an ineffable quality, so profound and intense as to defy description and that also have a noetic quality which give a sense of reliable insight concerning deeper aspects of reality with great practical importance for how to live one's life. The goal in this is the creation of a mini-paradigm based on the experience and use of the in-between state in which practices of domination, fundamentalism and mechanisms of control can be questioned and overcome through the individual's immersion in an open-ended potential, creativity and relationality, a community, and here we are. And all of this beginning through a simple radical practice where truly simplicity is profundity, the float experience. At this point, I would like to give brief examples of this in-between or theta state as articulated in various fields of inquiry in our culture. The French philosopher Deleuze has a founding concept of the plane of immanence. This means existing or remaining with as opposed to transcendence which is beyond or outside. This plane is consistent with Spinoza's single substance, God or nature. On this plane, all distinctions, all opposites are brought together into a consistent state. There are only relations of movement of unformed elements and particles of all kinds which create assemblages. A philosophical and metaphysical in-between state which is about becoming the creation of assemblages and demands creativity and ethics. It can be seen as the ground of life and as the manifestation of consciousness in life. Another concept by Deleuze and his partner Gattari is the rhizome which they propose as a model of life. The rhizome is about interconnectedness and open-endedness. It is non-linear and non-hierarchal. It has no beginning or end but a middle, a milieu from which it grows and overspills. It connects any point to any other point. And in a community, like ours, it is about growth through mutual support and relation. The in-between state in theology is best exemplified by feminist theologian Catherine Keller. She challenges the doctrine of creational ex nihilo or creation from nothing by reinterpreting the te home, literally the deep or abyss, as creational a liquid or creation from chaos or from the nothing something. The pre-existent chaos, a multi-dimensionality, the matrix in which creation becomes the all mother. In Dao De Jing, a nothingness that is a cornucopia that never runs dry. It is the deep source of everything. It is nothing and yet in everything. The Dao invokes a flowing, formless infinity that nurtures all things. In Buddhism, the plenum void, the nothingness which holds the potential of all things. The source of the three Buddhist insights that operate with respect to everything else. Non-self, impermanence, and connectedness. This void has also been called the particulate seed. In Buddhism this can relate to the period of kalapa or smallest things. They are units not of matter but of experience. Their sensation is often pleasant and has been described as flow. Kalapas are less what you actually feel than the background against which you feel. They are the empty template of sensations. It has been said that a kalapa is hearing the voice of the cell. I believe we often all see kalapas in the tank. In Greek, quintessence. The highest element that permeates all of nature. The essence of the thing in its purest, most concentrated form. In physics, dark energy. Or the quantum field. The physical vacuum in field theory which is not a state of nothingness but contains the potentiality for all forms in the particle world. This vacuum is an in-between state. A living void pulsating in endless rhythms of creation and destruction. In physics the quantum is the fundamental unit of perceptual experience. It is everything that you see, hear, smell, touch, and taste. Yet it is too small to notice. It shows up only in physics laboratories with the help of technology or in a quiet mind. The concept of the interstitial in biology and philosophy or in nature as a wetland is an empty space or a gap between spaces full of structure or matter or concepts. This is explored as the interstitial self or life. Where one places creativity, novelty, innovation, and the new at the center of speculation. Life is novelty. Life is a characteristic of empty space. Life lurks in the interstices, the in-between, the empty spaces. Here is the realm of the potential. A futurity that already haunts the present. One of the essential aspects of the in-between state is the process of becoming. Political philosopher William Connolly states, I belong to a growing contingent who thinks that a perspective defined by active examination of becoming can make positive contributions to explorations of spirituality, economics, political action, poetic experience, and ethics. He often articulates the process of becoming as open-ended and exquisitely sensitive, much like the theta or in-between state. He also suggests that we will need the attributes of a seer as one who by definition lives at the edge, dwells in the liminal space, the in-between, who senses the vibrations and allows new thoughts, judgment, and experiments to ferment. I refer to Glenn's cultural creatives. The seer is a personage of the theta and the in-between as is the trickster. The trickster as a personage puts one at the center of creation and creativity. They push for redefinition in the face of habit and tradition. Tricksters, to quote Professor Kremmer, are the present spirit and archetype that attack all archetypes. Suspicious of everything, eternal, they drag it into the time haunted earthly to see how it fares. They disrupt imagination so new imagination may arise. They evoke shadow material so that individual growth may be triggered. The trickster questions reason and when reason deteriorates, they may be called to outrageous activity. The trickster knows as a personage of change and of the in-between state that the truth cannot be achieved by reason alone. The knowing of the body, the knowing of the heart, the knowing which comes from increased or altered awareness all need to intertwine. In the tank, at some level, aren't we all a seer or a trickster? And may I state that many people that I've talked to in this audience and all of the float-on staff possess trickster quality. The in-between state is the state that the shaman enters in trance. Now one can engage in hard shamanism in which one ingests the entheogens or psychoactive substances to generate an altered state of consciousness or they can engage in soft shamanism. This trance state is created through dancing, drumming, endurance activities, deprivation, dietary means, and also in holotropic states, deep meditation and wilderness rapture, which is the boundary state between civilization and nature, human and animal. Also known as the inner wilderness experience. In biogenic structural theory, they define consciousness as occurring in phases and warps. Phase attributes may be bodily sensations, feelings, sensory cues, or activities. It is the warp which is the in-between state. Although a phase is a discrete, cognized strip of unfolding experience dominating the sensorium, a warp is the transition phase, which has a causal influence on pre- and post-phase. It is a liminal event, a sort of ritual or symbolic doorway between phases. The warp is organizational chaos related to the order of the phases. The question is, could this warp of consciousness be the in-between state, ongoing, which we manifest in the theta way? Robert Lanza, Dr. Lanza has created a theory which he states, consciousness is the in-between or liminal state. He speaks of the interrelatedness of consciousness in the physical universe. He uses concepts from physics and creates a field of mind that the external world only occurs in mind in consciousness and that it is the interior of one's brain that's cognized out there or in here. In Buddhism, mind creates reality. In biocentrism, consciousness creates reality. Maybe we are opening ourselves to an interconnected and complex ecology of consciousness. This opening is supported and facilitated by suspension in the in-between state most easefully accomplished in the float experience. An excerpt from a poem by Robert Breenhurst. What is is what lies out of sight, thought, talking. Open them. Open the three fists clinging to the world. No instruction is certain. No knowledge complete. What is has no essence. What is is interdependent and empty. What is is unsingled, undouble, unplural, unborn, unenduring, unbearing, undying. What is has no past, no future, no shape, and no nature. No being, no having then. Going to be or becoming. No wholeness and no incompleteness. What causes what is is the hunger to be and to keep being. There is no center, no side, no top, no bottom. There are no literal statements. There is no unmetaphorical language. Emptiness is also empty. Nothing is not nothing. Nothing is and is is nothing. All that is is nothing. Yet there is no nothing that you can cling to. We are also then the nothing. And the nothing is the hunger. And the hunger is the question. And the answer be pure wonder. Maybe, just maybe. That is what this is all about. Wonder. And is that what draws us in? Wonder. Maybe the in-between and the theta is the fluid state of wonder. Or to quote Lawrence Furlinghetti, the perpetual rebirth of wonder. Is it the wonder in its wondering that binds us in opening to what can be? The wonder of our spirit. The wonder of the possible. The wonder of us.