 I have had a secret. I have not told people for 49 years. But first, I need to tell you some other things. I open the door of the Samadhi tank. The air seems a little warm. I step in, I kneel, roll down onto my right outer thigh, reach my left arm behind me, and roll back on my rear and bob to the surface. I try to make Da Vinci's Petruvian man for 20 seconds and bend my knees until I can steady myself with my feet on the floor for another 20 seconds as insurance against bouncing off of the sides. It is actually a little cool. I like it that way because being cooler makes it less stuffy. As long as I do not move and keep my arms by my body, I will feel perfect in a few moments. I assess my mental and physical states and find nothing unusual. Very soon, my mind goes to garden projects. During the previous two days of this five-day program of floating up to two to three hours a day, I had worked out what to plant, where, and when. Now, I am working on the details of a new irrigation system with an occasional distracting thought about tank design question, which I shelve. I work out the watering system. Then I address the pressing design question that wants to grab my attention. I am working on designing the best yet ever new tank model. What I need to work out is how to handle controlling a function the floater needs to be able to manipulate while floating. I define exactly what I want the requirements to be. I do not need the solution now, but only to define exactly what the problem is. I come up with all the requirements for the problem. Everything I know, I make note of. And I define what I do not know, what I need an answer for. I have developed the habit of asking the universe to assist in helping me solve problems. I lay out what I want and what I need and then let time go by. After I have completed that design question, I look around for what to handle next. Without floating and doing this work, these things would be mental chatter. We all are talking around, walking around with lots of mental chatter all the time. This chatter consists of all sorts of things. Unprocessed events from the past, concerns about the future, unresolved project actions like what I have just been working on, and uncompleted aspects about relationships. This last is what my mind comes to now. I have a meeting with two people. I work on that until I know what I want to do with them. The mental chatter subsides. The number of thoughts reduces significantly. Now, space. I have moved out of my mind into an altered state. This seems to be where my creativity comes from. I notice my breathing. At the end of each inhale and exhale, I think, gone. Because they have ended or disappeared back to where they came from. After 20 minutes of this focusing on my breathing, I notice a recurring discomfort in my left shoulder and along one side of my bicep. These are the primary two areas of discomfort. There are a number of much weaker secondary areas of discomfort. I ignore the primary areas and pay attention to these secondary areas. I focus on each of them in turn, noting the exact sensation and where it is. I label where each resides. Elbow, upper arm, shoulder, shoulder, forearm. After a while, the pain subsides some. Once it is less or I become tired of doing that work, I may move to a body position where the discomforts do not appear. There is usually a position I can find that offers relief. Often, if I go back to the previous painful position, it has amazingly disappeared. Both of these practices, the breathing and the pain practice, come from the author of the science of enlightenment, Shinsin Young. When we had our float center in Beverly Hills in 1979 and the early 80s, he would often sign up to bring 10 of his students to our Thursday all night floats. Half of them would do a practice he gave them in the tanks while the other half would meditate in the reception area and halfway through the night, they would switch. Each day, the discomfort of my shoulder and arm is less than the day before. Meditating on pain helps me develop better concentration, so distractions influence me less. I get an urge to get out. I think, can I stay a little longer? Over the next, oh, maybe 35 minutes, I do this three times. And the fourth time, I get out. On this float, as I am scooting forward to the front of the tank and rolling on to my right side to sit up, the answer to the design problem pops up. Sometimes it happens in the shower or in another float or during the day. It is seldom I don't receive an answer. Often in that case, I have to change the question because I have been working on the wrong question. Most float center owners provide single occasional floats of one to one and a half hours. The advantage of sequential daily floats is that there is an accumulative effect of doing it every day. Coupling that with extending the floats to two to three hours, the floater is able to access an altered state that is fleeting with occasional shorter floats. Longer floats and even sequential shorter floats increase the chances the floater will experience this altered state and that it will stay with them a while if they nurture it. Having this experience will likely be significant to them. To nurture it would be to avoid mental activity. Asking them after their float, how is your float? Will move them out of their altered state, put them back into their mind. Not a good idea. I would consider one of two forms to the packages. The first would be offering them two hour floats five days in a row. The other, which I prefer, is starting with a one hour float and increasing it half an hour every day. It would go like this. A one hour float the first day, one and a half hour the second, two hour the third, two and a half hour the fourth, and finally three hour float the fifth. All of these are scheduled limits, not expectations to use all of the time. Instead, I suggest they do what I illustrated. When the urge to get out comes up, they ask themselves, can I stay a little longer? The fourth time they get out. I prefer the second plan, since as their chatter subsides faster each day, they may make use of the altered state more. This altered state has many wonderful benefits. It is one meditator's work to get to so they will love these packages. Lots of us have problems that need solving. When we are solving problems, generally, we don't think outside the box. We limit ourselves to what we are familiar with. When we are in this altered state, we are able to think outside the box. For creative problem solvers, it is an enormous asset to be able to do that. One floater who recently did this program said this ability to think outside the box lasted for several days after he had ended the program. Additionally, he reported that he could see where people were, what was actually going on with them, far more clearly than he usually could. It was all so important for his work that he is planning on doing this program once a month. Another floater who has done this for years attributes long floats with connecting him to his real purpose in life and allowing him to better accomplish it. He thought these benefits were so valuable to him he has floated two to four hours a day. In the center, how do we do these programs? The number one most important thing is to first do the program ourselves and every month we provide this. It is so important that we understand fully what we are offering. Why every month? I have taken cosmic doses of LSD in the past. Those are the ones where my identity dissolves and the reality that I know disappears. I find myself in a reality I can't bring to this reality. To some degree, this altered state is like that acid trip in that we can't transfer experiences and information from one reality to another. Imagine trying to explain the experience of sight to a person who has always been blind. The altered state we find ourselves in when the mental chatter stops can't be communicated into this reality. Not only that, as time moves on the memory of what we have experienced fades and we suspect we have been overstating what we imagine we experienced. Our world of color has turned gray and we give up thinking we have to have that experience because everything has become gray in our recollection of it. This altered state that I was talking about is not something that we know nothing about. We spend most of our childhood in this state. It is a state we have have to be in to learn anything like walking, talking, eating, and so on. Once we become adults, we spend most of our time applying what we learned in childhood. Children are better able to think outside the box than we or college students are able to. This is explained more completely in Lee's and my newly published book, Floating in Quiet Darkness. How the flotation tank has changed our lives and is changing the world. We wrote it primarily to provide a lot of useful information about things like minimizing distractions, floating, and providing floats to others, which we have discovered in our more than 49 year history. Mostly done in story form. We think this book will support floaters returning more often to your center and support all floaters getting more out of floating. What is also in the book, but not in this talk, though it is important and useful, is that in this altered state, we can clear old mental, emotional, and physical traumas that interfere with performance in present time. Shinsen says that simply frequently hanging out in this altered state works to clear those past disturbances usually without us even knowing. Getting back to how to provide this at your center, we have to provide a way for the floater to be able to urinate and then go back in the tank. If a shower isn't in front of the tank, a container needs to be provided. We explained beforehand that there's no required timeline. When they have an urge to exit, they can suggest to themselves to stay a little longer three times and only follow the urge to get out the fourth time. Processing the mental chatter can only be done well in a distraction-free environment. Probably the most difficult distractions many centers have to deal with is the one of temperature and air stuffiness. If the tank is too warm, a towel can be put in the door. If it is too cool, it helps to not move around and keep the arms next to the body. If there are sounds or music, it will interfere with letting go of mental chatter. The floater needs to know that they can always do whatever is necessary to be most comfortable. I think the most important result of doing this program is we fall in love. What do we fall in love with? Everything, the whole universe. What could be better? And when I get out of the tank, I am walking more gently on the earth. I am being a little kinder to my fellow humans, and I am appreciating everyone a little more. Everything is right with the world. I feel a deep, deep sense of inner peace, like never before. And the influences of the outer world don't affect me. Consider doing and providing a five-day program of sequential, daily, two to three-hour floats. I think you will absolutely love it. It provides us a unique period of expanded awareness or consciousness. What has been the secret? The first time I floated in John Lilly's isolation tank, when I came out, time slowed up, and the whole world was a scintillating, shimmering energy system. It sounds different, but it was simply a different form of this same altered state that I have been talking about. It's what I have always thought floating was most useful for, but the secret is I did not know what to do about it. It has taken me 49 years to discover how to provide it to others. Now you know also, don't you take 40 more years, 49 more years, to put it to use.