 I'm listed as speaking about performance and peak activity in the float tank. And I'm not going to be speaking about that. What I want to talk to you about tonight is a bit, is about gravity. It's one of the most taken for granted ideas, and I really don't think it should be. Gravity is weird. Let me say that again. Gravity is really weird. Gravity might be the weirdest thing we barely think about, even though we struggle against it all our lives. So let me just say this again. Gravity is really weird. If we go back to the beginning, and by the beginning, I mean that big kabah, the big bang, whatever that was, whatever happened there. Gravity is good. Vegas odds, probably the primordial force who arrives. Now, gravity operates as this primary force, drawing these particles towards one another, every particle exerting an attraction over every other particle. It has laws, but gravity is not a law. It's an energy. Now, from dust to stars, meteors to elephants, planets, pineapples, people, solar system, gravity rules all in orders, all physical processes. It controls universally, and at all times, controls all the traffic and the movement of the universe. It makes things into efficient round orbits in a nice circle, and it decides if you can dunk a ball. Gravity is really weird. It invisibly binds all the bodies together because it's an attraction between two or more bodies, created by those bodies, and it's equally in the empty space between the bodies, filling the void of space with its binding presence. So if you think about it, that's really a bit metaphysical. For example, gravity is omnipotent and omnipresent. There's not a corner of the universe untouched by it nor a speck of matter unmoved by it. In fact, all matter, all physical material of the known universe must organize itself in dynamic relation to gravity, but gravity itself is immaterial, immeasurable, and unobservable. Now, gravity does all of that. It's everywhere, all powerful at all times, but we can't see it. We can't measure it. Nothing. And that's just weird. And we can measure light energy. That's not immaterial. We find it in photon or waveform, zipping around space and time. Electromagnetic energy, totally measurable. Get the right metals, right crystals, get on the right wavelength, and you'll find it. Chemical energy is measurable, even visible through electron microscopes. Even heat is measurable and observable. Yet, gravity's effects define in rules all of known reality. You could feel it, you are subject to it, yet it's invisible. Sorry again, plain weird. To make matters worse, it's something to consider how much of our conscious experience is shaped and conditioned by gravity. Even though our bodies evolved in a defiance of gravity with this unparalleled 90% of the activity of our central nervous system having to do with processing gravitational information relayed from even the slightest change in muscle tonus, there is no other sensory information that is so constant or in such quantity. And since it's the sensory input which grows in the mind, then it must be said that gravity has grown, conditioned, and developed much of the conscious experience of living. Again, that's pretty weird to think about. So let's unpack that a bit. What we think of as our sensory material, color, odor, temperature, texture, as far as the brain is concerned, are only secondary senses. The primary sense is muscular, and that's because it has to do with mass. Internally where yours is at, in a gravitational field and how much force is distributed in your structure in terms of compression and strain, as well as all the muscularity involved in the maintenance of balance, of positioning in a three dimensional environment. And that's ignoring adding environmental pressures. Yet all this information, all these ongoing equations, calculations, and computations are happening all the time. Or as Feldenkrais concluded, the bulk of the stimuli arriving at the nervous system is from muscular activity constantly affected by gravity. So not only is gravity really weird, it's probably the largest sensory input you will ever experience. Because your nervous system evolved structurally to defy gravity by sensing it. All our bodies form themselves in a way to be this container that could survive gravity's force. Then one that can move about in a gravitational field. And the only way to do that would be to design a body with a nervous system capable of processing the types of movements that this organism would wanna do. And so as form has become more sophisticated, so then more and more neural circuitry has been added to handle increasing gravitational computations necessary for movement and integrity. And one of the ways it did that was by designing a nervous system that it could process the bulk of these stimuli. And it's gotten pretty good at that. But the basic unity of the nervous system must never be forgotten. In the vast network of neural impulses, there is no local activity which does not affect or is not affected by the entirities of the activities of the organism. Whether internally or externally. All the time, gravity costs energy. It costs, both internally and externally. If we were a video game character, we'd have a little power life bar above our heads in direct relation to the ongoing drain of our life force just from moving around in a field of gravity. Just trying to hold our physical form together against gravity. And probably another power bar for how many action point costs and gravity points. Gravity is so weird. It so acutely shapes our consciousness because it is our primary sense. And as a primary sense, it's one unless I fall on my face, I am not always acutely aware of, if at all. So it's very interesting to note that when we change our regular acute awareness and the appreciation of tactile senses, both extra receptively and proprioceptively, we alter the organizing principle of the organism. Or in other words, when the body experiences a difference in how it knows itself from its acute regular gravitational senses, the body will reorganize itself. It will adapt. Or in even simpler terms, the nervous system relies on its sensory information to know itself internally and externally. Its primary sense is a gravitational one. The slightest alteration in the gravitational, kinesthetic sensory awareness changes all the math. If you change it acutely, the organism will adapt by reorganizing, adapting plastic changes, changes in structure. It will evolve to deal with environmental pressures. It's like inputs always equal up to adaptations. So to beat a dead horse one last time, gravity is weird. And let me put it like this. There is simply no place in the known world where a body can go hang out and reduce gravity field. Gravity, that shit is everywhere, always. And it's kind of out to get you. And it gets you every time, everywhere, with the exception of the float tank. Really think about that. And when you step into a float tank, you're stepping in this radical shift of environment. It might seem like the greatest bathtub ever invented, but as far as your nervous system is concerned, it's an alien world. Because there is literally nowhere and nothing else like it on Earth. I don't know about you, but for me, that's some seriously sci-fi shit. Think about it like this. The tank is an alien world for your nervous system. No piece of our collective genetic heritage has ever had any sensory experience similar to the float experience, because there are no reduced gravity stimulus fields native to the planet Earth. The tank can dampen gravity's effects in truly profound ways. And it's simply ingenious. To start out, you got roughly 10 inches of water with somewhere between 850 and 900 pounds of Epsom salts. This creates a small artificial environment of salt and water, something like a 60% greater salt to water ratio than you find the Dead Sea. The buoyancy of the water is such that it creates a feel where gravity's effects are reduced something then by like 86 to 92%. Now, not to mention the other large component of the float experience. This further shift of the dominant sensory inputs, the lights are off, it's quiet. Water temperature, the skin neutral, all the normally dominant sensory information as the volume turned down dramatically. The vertebral column decompresses itself upwards of about an inch and a half, and gravity's external forces are radically diminished inside the field of the tank. But your body evolved its nervous system to adjust to even the slightest gravitational and sensory information externally and internally. So the float experience is possibly the greatest kinesthetic shift that the body can ever undertake. The body, the soma, the whole being must reorganize itself from the environmental pressure of its normal way of being in the world, not being optimal. That's an evolutionary stress. Now as the rule goes, sensory information grows your nervous system, and your nervous system structures all of your experience. So as the float experience is the thing you were consciously engaged in, it is an act, it's a behavior, an evolutionarily new behavior in the genetic history of the organism, and floating is a pretty bizarre behavior, a novel, clean slate for the whole being to re-experience itself. And that behavior, like all new behaviors, bring forth new neural structures and circuits. And just as these new neural mechanisms in the cells open up new modes of behavior, you know, your body has to learn to float. You have to learn how to let go of this way of being in the other world, because to enter the tank is to enter another world. The float tank is this fully immersive somatic experience. Every level of being is affected, and it's this radical alien environment. But when we confront it with a new challenge as an environment, the body always adapts, always seeking homeostasis, balance. It wants to find its best operating parameters based on its given environment. Our sensory motor systems of the body are all primarily gravity-based sensory systems. They're all exceedingly complex, sensitive structures that organize the organism to adapt to the environment. The alien environment of the tank gives the body new evolutionary possibilities by challenging it to adapt a new novel ways to the float experience. As the body meets itself in this new environment, it does just that. The type and qualities, the functionality, even of the awareness normally used outside the float experience is not helpful in the float experience. Its left hemispheric dominance becomes defocalized from the shift in gravitational and environmental inputs. The right hemisphere ascends in dominance based on the type of behavior that the body is engaged in in the float experience, brain waves phase, the hemisphere is coming to a state of hypersynchrony. And more than that, even all the pieces of the brain finally get to meet each other in an evolutionary first and learn to work together in synergistic coordination all because of the evolutionary challenge of the float experience. As far as our consciousness goes, it's a kind of emergent property of all the parallel information sources from all these different computers, all these different pieces of our brain, which are all just the different levels of the brain talking, basically. The information of each part composes one piece of the symphony of consciousness. But as we all know from living, we are in this kind of state of schizo-physiology. We are at war with ourselves. And it's arguable that a big part of that comes from all the performers not really being aware that they're in the same band. All three levels of the brain, speaking vertically, are completely divided and for the most part, completely unaware of each other. As in each deal, completely different, different kinds of languages and symbols and information. Now, please go with me on this one here, but I picture the triune brain as this kind of apartment building. Like an old triplex walkup, each family is stacked on top of the next. The downstairs neighbors were there when the building was just a one-bedroom unit. And then the landlord decided to build a second one-bedroom unit on top of the first, have them share power, plumbing all of it. They just never know that there was somebody living on top or underneath them. And then he puts another two-bedroom on top of both of them, even though it's like the trickiest slum lord ever. But in all the while, these units are kind of like one unit. They all think of themselves as one unit because even if they are noise from the neighbors and these are really noisy neighbors, everything they hear would, for the most part, all be in different languages than they were familiar with. They would just think it was a shitty building or something. The float experience for your brain, though, is more of like if all the people in that building, all of a sudden were in some kind of goofball 80s sitcom, like Three's Company. All of a sudden, they would all be introduced to each other and wacky hijinks would unfold. And just like in those shows, everybody all comes together, integrated in a state of greater hypersynchrony. But whatever it is about the float experience, the temporary reprieve from the standard effects of gravity, when we float all our normal sensory ways of being in the world are challenged and such that they come into radical new evolutionary contact with all of ourselves. Every aspect of our being is reintroduced to ourselves. Our normal evolutionary, biological epistemology is challenged and the body's response is truly beautiful. It evolves, synchronizes, and integrates the radical change of input and kinesthetic sense, which causes the organism to adapt. And it adapts by deeply reintegrating, increasing capacity, potency, and range. But the vertical and horizontal integration and the hemispheric synchronization is, in my opinion, one of the sexiest things about floating. And there are so many badass things, but the definition for sexy of me, but this one is something unique, something truly magical and something that nobody else has or does. And I've spoke with a couple of neurologists who I've gotten to agree with on this point, that there is nothing else available, no technology, location, or super secret serum available. Nothing except for floating to induce these increases in hemispheric harmony and vertical and horizontal neural integration, synergy, and coordination. That's pretty sexy. But in a bigger sense, it's truly evolutionary. I see the float experience as a way to transcend an experience of gravity, one that has shaped all of life on this planet and most of our conscious awareness. Floating is a defiance of gravity, a tool, a means of liberation, an inspiration for humanity. Very simply, I believe that every time you float, you evolve, and that when you become a deeper, more integrated, synchronized nervous system, your consciousness deepens in your capacity and possibility increase, and what better way to defy gravity than to float away. So in closing, gravity is really weird, and be careful, it's out to get you. Thank you very much.