 I've been thinking about this for a long time, because it's the last one, even before that. But when Ashkahn started yesterday, or the day before yesterday, talking about kind of the nature of the flotation world, it hit me because I feel that same way, it's the most... I mean, it's a bunch of people who get together who care about each other, and it's so touching to be part of a group of humans who like each other and who work on each other's behalf, and that we gather here is touching. So I'm getting carried away with the feelings. Anyway, I'm going to... what I thought it might be nice to do, because this is the last one, is that because we came in through John Lilly, that I would like to tell you something about what it was like to be... to have him be our boss. You know, what was he like? What did we have to do? And he was very particular. He was a scientist and everything that he said was very precise. It wasn't left, it wasn't sloppy and wide. It was, you ought to do this. And he started telling us that what he wanted us to do, well first of all, we had to start floating. And so he had to build something for us to float in. And so we first started going into a tank and finding the world of floating, because it didn't exist somewhere. John only built two or three tanks, and those were specifically research tanks. So when he would sit down with us and he'd say, when Glenn asked him about making a tank for himself and on the people, and he got a yes on it, then Glenn had to get to work and do something. And he, John, would always check up on us. How he doing, how is that going? But not in a way as if we weren't doing it, but he was very precise. You know, well, did you put a way to breathe in that system? Did you do this or that? He was very specific about his instruction. And I think he kept on checking to see whether we did what he asked. You know, just imagine that you are somebody who's going to do something huge in the world, like spread floating around. And some people come along and they're interested. Well, you want to check it out. Are they going to do what they say they're going to do? Are these worker bees? Or are they going to sit there and just take stuff? And we didn't know any of that. We just loved to work, and we just got up and worked, and that's what we worked and worked, and we asked, is this alright? And is that alright? And is that alright? Yes, yes, yes, no. And so we were trained in that way of doing what we said we were going to be doing and being told why we were doing it and what it was about. And do you have anything to add to that, to what our instruction was at the beginning? Well, he gave us all the details of how to build the first one. But since he had only done two or three, when I went home, I started researching the distractions, like sound. I went to a physics professor at UCLA and learned all about how to stop sound and other kinds of inputs, what was the best way. One of the things I learned is that it's very, very hard to get rid of all light. Most materials are translucent and allow light through. Generally, a material has to be completely black in order not to allow light through. So it was quite a learning to learn all that stuff. He was totally about learning. And so a lot of the time we'd go up to his house. He lived in, this is down in Southern California. He lived in Malibu Canyon. The ocean is here and you go up and around the hills. And he and his wife, Tony, had this house that was constantly full of people who were coming for advice from him. But Tony ran the house. She was a remarkable woman. They needed money. She planted an avocado orchard to bring them income. She was a great cook. Nobody ever went hungry there. He was sitting there, hey, you want to come and get something to eat? She would cover unusual things that would happen. One of the days we were there, somebody knocked at the door. There was no door. The house, you had to kind of know and walk around the trees and so on to find out where the entrance was. And so she came in and she said to John, John, this man is knocking at the door. Will you see him? Now the doorway was behind a bunch of trees and there was this guy knocking on the door and John said, no, I'm busy. So Tony went out and she told the guy, no, Tom could, I mean, John couldn't see him that day. The guy came back the following day. I want to speak with John. And Tony said, this guy's back again. So the guy comes back the third day and Tony goes to John and says, he's back again. He really wants to talk with you. John stands real still and he says, is he bigger than me? John was very practical. That is exactly how he worked, you know, he takes the situation of now and says, what do we need to do to get through it now? And that's how he worked with us over and over again. Whatever we did was our now good enough. And did we understand why we were doing it? And you know, that's why we worked. So he was he came after the brain, sensory, the sensory deprivation, all that stuff had gone by. John was not working with flotation at that time. What he was studying was the scientific quandary that the brain go to sleep in the absence of outside input. So one school of thought said, if there's no outside input, the brain goes to sleep. And the other one said, no, the brain never goes to sleep. And that was what scientists of that day were looking at. And so John set up a series of research of experiments to try to check what does the brain do with a lack of water, with a lack of light, with a lack of touch and so on. And it was he discovered that no, the brain did not require outside input, but it developed its own input. And so he was he came from a very old family of bankers, and people who were high up in them. The power structure of this country. And so he was so well connected, like in the National Institutes of Health, he was sent when he said, I need a place. He wanted to add water to the brain research. He said he wanted to try having a wetness of water to check out the work of the brain. And so he had at the National Institutes of Health, he was told to go see a doctor Hect at the National Institute of Arthritis and Metabolic Diseases about his interest in research. And he was told in the conversation, by coincidence, there is a suitable facility available in our Institute, which is not being used. The major portion of the expensive apparatus, which you need already has been constructed and available for your use. And Dr. Lilly was a commissioned officer in the Public Health Service. He was on duty 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and it cost him nothing. And they had even put a pipe through the tank that was in that place that had a constant flow of water at 93 degrees Fahrenheit so that he had access to something that was allowing him to check what he thought was true about the brain in a piece of equipment that was given to him at no cost whatsoever that he could use. Not only could he use it whenever he wanted, but nobody else would be in there so that he had complete privacy in whatever he did in that situation. And that was where he did the work, but it was because he was from a family that was integrated into the structure of the workings of the United States. And when you have that kind of somebody on your team, you have access to things that probably most of us in this room don't know about. Like those of us who start to work at center, you don't go up to the president of your county or the head of your county and say, hey, what's available? What's not being used around here that I can open a center in? Well, in his position and being a part of that system, he had access and they gave him a place to study what would happen in the brain when it was floating around in water. And what he discovered with his first floats in that tank that was given to him was that he never felt better in his life. He got there and he was not floating. This was not salt water. Glenn will tell you about his dolphin breathing probably in a little while. But just being in that 93-degree water, he was able to be in that tank for two hours and get the equivalent of eight hours of rest. And so that was his experience with being in water and the function of the brain. So, Glenn, you want to take over on the next part? So, for, maybe I should start on page one instead of two. Okay. Or do it my way. Wing it. I received something incredibly valuable besides a tank from John. And that was, I was inspired to spend this life pursuing becoming more conscious. And I was in desperate need of becoming more conscious so it was an easy sell. As a child, I grew up in a little hick town of about 200 people in the western part of Massachusetts. When I was 11, we moved to a very ritzy area just outside New York City. Third of the kids went to prep school and us poor people went to public school. I was, they said I talked like I had a hot potato in my mouth. And they called me Perry the fairy. I was effeminate. In college one year, there was a gay black guy who taught me how to look more masculine. I was terrified of everything, especially if it was human. I constantly felt there was something wrong with me, that I was not all right, that there was a big hole that I didn't know how to fill. Before I met John, I was a systems computer programmer programming a state-of-the-art time-sharing system. My boss realized that I was trying to find a way out of my dismal life and referred me to John's Book Center of the Cyclone. I was so impressed by it that a couple weeks later, when I saw an ad for a five-day workshop he was presenting, I immediately signed up. I was the first one to use a makeshift tank, isolation tank we had there. And when I got out, the whole universe was scintillating. It seemed like bells were ringing and time was different. And John after lunch asked me to share my experience with the rest of the people in the group and I was comfortable doing that. I thought if something could make me comfortable talking to people, it must be pretty incredible. And so I immediately decided to build my own since nobody was making them. By the end of the week, listening to others and having more experiences of my own, I decided maybe other people would want one and so I decided to make them for others and asked John what he thought of that. He liked the idea. So I went home and did the research I spoke about earlier and made a prototype. Now the first tank that John used was a deep tank and he was totally submersed in it with equipment, but very quickly he realized that that was unnecessary and really got in the way of the experience. And so he moved it to a tank with solution 20 inches deep and he bent at the knees and put his feet on the bottom. And so in order to be above the surface of the solution, he had to inhale, hold his breath and then exhale quickly and inhale again when he needed the next breath. He called this dolphin breathing, later called this dolphin breathing because that's what dolphins did. They take a breath and then they go swimming around and when they need another breath, they come up and take another breath. Well, John had a very open, loose, soft body. I mean, it was strong, but it was open. It wasn't dense, whereas I was rigid, tight. When I went to somebody who did deep tissue work with me, releasing traumas and after she had worked on me a while, she said, I've been doing this for 10 years and there's only two people who had tighter bodies in you. The cables that you see holding up telephone poles, your body was, that's what your whole body consisted of. So it was very dense, so I didn't float very well. And John, when he gave me what little he knew about building isolation tanks, he had had on one tank in the Virgin Islands the ocean going through. So he said, you know, you might, and the ocean is 3% salt. So he said, you might want to add 3% sodium chloride so you float a little better. Well, as I just explained, I didn't float well at all. So I added more than 10% salt. And when he tried that, it's like he'd been in there floating and he'd been going to other spaces and leaving his body to do this dolphin breathing. So to not have to do that, it was absolutely incredible and he loved it. And so he invented the isolation tank, but in some way I invented the float tank because we added salt. That looks good. Ah, shucks. So I attended maybe 10 workshops. They were MD workshops that he gave for the two years before I met Lee. And I learned a lot about how he approached living and consciousness and so on. Who was this guy, John Lilly? Well, when he was 7, he started wondering about the nature of reality. And almost as soon as he could read, he was reading people who had something to say about reality like Immanuel Kant. And he was constantly wondering about things like, is the brain in the mind? I mean, is the mind in the brain? And does the mind receive input from outside sources? What's real and how is it created? How do we traverse between different states of consciousness? How do we examine our programming and what tools can we use? How can we stop being reactive so we remain conscious rather than being triggered by outside insults and things? For decades, scientists have been spending millions of dollars on radio telescopes to pick up the signals from outer space trying to find evidence of other intelligent life in the universe. Who here has seen a flying saucer up close? How about somebody who has seen an alien? You haven't seen an alien, you are one. You should be standing here. She actually has seen aliens, actually swam with them. John is the first person to have ever found an alien intelligence smarter than us and he tried to communicate with them and he found that they were trying to communicate with us. Even after we continue to kill them for cat and dog food, they have never hurt humans. They continue to be kind and gentle with us. They have developed an advanced ability to cooperate because they have to have others around to help them breathe if they become unconscious because their breathing cannot be automatic and it cannot be unconscious because if they become unconscious and they breathe then they die. So they are incredibly cooperative individuals. Their brains, many of them, are larger than ours. Some are six times larger and the part of the brain that is larger is in the silent areas and the silent areas are what differentiates us from the apes. He tried to communicate with ones who had brains 20% larger and part of this increased size may have to do with memory because they don't have written word and they have been around for 50 million years just think if we could communicate with them what they might be able to tell us. I suspect that part of their brain may be in order to be telepathic even with humans like when Lee swam with them. You want to tell them about that? They follow instruction spoken or unspoken. When I first got into the pool with them they started going underwater and I didn't like swimming underwater and I thought oh gee now I'm in their territory and I have to go swim underwater immediately they came and started swimming on top of the water and when we went out of the of the swimming tank we were there was myself and a friend one dolphin and one ball and so my friend took the ball through to the dolphin and the dolphin picked up the ball and threw it to me. I was immediately included in the game it's like they are everything that happened in that short time with them was one where I could sense that that was consideration of somebody else who was there it wasn't a dolphin was getting everything that that she could from the situation but rather hey this is a group let's act like a group and it was all coming without saying a word it was just like feeling the space and acting on it it was the feeling of what happened was very strong. Relative to telepathy Lee and I have actually had an experience of telepathy ourselves we one time went into a horizontal mine shaft we went in a hundred feet and we turned off the lights and agreed not to talk and we were in an altered state and we were there for two or three hours and when we later well we knew but we also verbally checked it out with each other we both agreed that we had communicated more fully than than we ever have before or since yeah so we're in a period of enormous fear and anxiety we all experience these fears and it's important to process them rather than act on them fortunately we have at our disposal the number one tool designed to deal with them it's actually designed to explore consciousness I'm a little concerned there's there are sense center centers that are closing and I suspect that it may be that these centers are not like isolation tanks but have light and sound so people don't achieve the complete effect and I'd like to mention to you about an article by a Dr. Robert Orrn professor of psychiatry at University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine known for forensic hypnosis and altered states of consciousness and he said that the negative results that were produced in sensory deprivation experiments were the result of demand characteristics demand characteristics are those characteristics which are likely to elicit a particular behavior from the subject the early experiments were designed to study the breakdown of the mind the researchers believed that the physiological effects of sensory deprivation would cause mental breakdown and the environment and staff supported that for an example a large panic button was in the in the room two way mirror was in the room he also said subjects believe the person in charge is infallible like if a doctor starts taking notes when he's interviewing you you may think that it has something to do with what you've just told them and you'll change your behavior so that you get the right response from him Lee and I assume that floaters will have no problems handling being in an isolation tank however we think any new situation suggests people be cautious so we tell floaters that it's appropriate that they have fear if they do and there's not a particular way to use the tank that's better than another they should use it in whatever way is comfortable for them we find that completely handles yet we also let them know that the light is available if we want it but they have to initiate that on their on their own the use of it so we think that that is all that's necessary so I'd like to suggest that you all float every day for the rest of your life yes I highly recommend an environment that has no distractions if you aren't able to do that then meditate in any case I think you are the most incredible frontier to explore yourself or your being and if you work on it you might be able to talk to other beings like John has done or maybe you'll find a solution to climate change we have floated almost daily for 46 years I feel so incredibly blessed to have the best quality of life of anyone I know and a significant part of that is my relationship with my honey Lee