 Loaders, it changes everything when we're all in the same place. So thank you for doing this Float On. Ashkan, I know you've had a lot to do with it, and it's really a good place to be. So first I'm noticing that there are so many scientists who are presenting today, which is a great thing. And I notice that there is one scientist who's not here today, and I just happen to find this in getting the papers ready for this. This is written by John and Tony Lilly, hereby accept the position of board members on the board of the Flotation Tank Association January 7th, 1985. And so in certain way he is here, and he's not here physically, John Lilly, for those of you who have not yet read him, the mentor, the inventor, he named us, he taught us, and he always let us know that his programs were much better than ours. He gave us Echo, the Earth Coincidence Control Office, and about there the guys who run the Earth and who program us, though we're not aware of it. I asked them, this is John's voice. I asked them, what's your major program? They answered, to make you guys evolve to the next levels to teach you, to kick you in the pants when necessary. So that was John's structure of how things go here on planet Earth. And his major instruction to us about floating, you know, he had to teach us what tanks should be, what they need to be made of, how they should operate, and so on. And we said, okay, we got that part, now what do we do about the people? And he said, thou shalt not program. So we were told never to program people before they get into the tank. We don't know what needs to happen for them. It's their job to have their experience, and that's our job to supply the place for them to have that experience. And so we've taken that as our job, and we've been at it for an extended time. In fact, we can't seem to stop. He definitely delivered an education that's still very much in process, and I'm grateful for the opportunity. So here's the little icebreaker story, is that people who came to float in our place, you know, all kinds of people come to float. Those of you who are already operating centers know the variety of people who show up is, you know, just from anybody you could ever think of and who never thought would come. And the ones who are very, very important to the center are the ones who know how to talk about it somehow. They know how to tell their friends better than anybody else. They know how to tell their friends how important this was, how changed their life, and they seem to always bring people with them. They know so many people that keep on coming to the center. Oh yes, Patricia sent us. She told us all about it. She has such a wonderful time. And Patricia came and told us after about her sixth time that what she did was that she was a high-end prostitute. And she brought all of her dates to the center because it ensured that they would have a much better time. She was the best mouth we had. So our center was very beautiful. I think, Michael, what you were saying about, you know, a center is so much more than its parts. I mean, the parts are cleanliness and people. There are so many elements that are part of the center. We had ideas about it because we had put four years of working at home. We had two tanks at home. And we had spent four years kind of finding out what was important if you wanted to run a place. You know, for example, Ashkan and Salt, telling the Salt stories. This is really not the tank business. It's the salt business. You know, that having your shower directly in front of the tank makes such a huge difference that we knew about that part. We knew about having it attractive, about having it peaceful. We knew about the sound of the place, that there's a quiet that resounds in a center that's different than other kinds of quiet, that the colors have a deep impact on people. We were in our first center that we opened, happened to be in Beverly Hills. And not knowing how to put it together, we walked down Rodeo Drive, which is a very high end street in Beverly Hills. And we went into every shop to see what kind of colors they used and how did it look and so on. And what we decided is that we wanted it to be up to date, but we didn't want it to look like anything else. And so after getting an idea of the palette of the time, we met some people whose job was color. And they came and they advised us about the right colors for that particular place. The colors that would have the late afternoon sun as it was going down leave the color of sunset on the walls. You know, little touches like that that they were expert at. And it made a very big difference in the way our place looked. It was just, it just was so welcoming that we were next door to a beauty salon. And it happened to be a black beauty salon. And the black men who brought the women to get their hair done there would just come and sit in that center and read or, you know, just kind of soak up the atmosphere. It was quite extraordinary. What we felt was the idea is that everything in that center mirrors the experience of the tank so that if we had any question about how something ought to be, we would ask, well, how is the tank? How does the tank do that? And we would do it that way. No programming, no intervention where it wasn't necessary. So here we are today. We have this question of the future of floating. That was the question that we were asked to consider. And we've heard so many different things about that today. Now there are lots of things that people get from floating from on the physical plane. Cures for ailments, diagnoses, information on various hormones, cures for things that haven't been thought of before. We also knew from our early floaters that there was an impulse for people to start considering things that were healthy for them. People would come back and they'd say, I'm changing my diet because I know that that stuff wasn't good for me. I quit smoking. I started doing exercise. Various things that were in line with their own well-being, that seemed to be motivated by their having experiences that made them feel better about themselves. That was my interpretation of it. And the things having to do with the physical body were very strong and that's where science has been, you know, Tom's report and Rod's report talking about things that science has been investigating which are very, very important. And it seems to me that there's another area of floating that is in danger. And that's in our conversation about the future of floating. We began to look at, okay, we have all these new people who are coming to floating right now. Some people have never floated. Some people have floated very few times. The time is ripe and we're going to have an explosion of centers all over the country. It's happening all over the world at the moment. And what is there about floating that we want to be sure is remains, can go through, can be kept, can be maintained? So that's been the series of discussions that Glenn and I have had about what we wanted to tell you. This is what we're looking at that is very, very important about the future of floating. So there are many different uses of floating. I'm going to mention three. And the first one I'm going to talk about is the one that we have found others who came to our centers. It was the most common one. And the reason we've used the tank a lot. And when I get out of the tank, I feel calmer, more peaceful, easy, lack of emotions. I'm not thinking much, kind of basic. I'd like to have a show of hands of people who can relate to that experience after they float. Okay. Most everybody raised their hands. If you have had that experience gotten to that space outside of the tank, raise your hands. Okay. Maybe a third, I would say, of the people. And raise your hands if you know how to consistently get there from out of the tank without going into the tank. Okay. Probably half of those. Okay. So in our normal life, it's involved with mental, emotional, and physical domains. And there's all of this mental activity both inside the tank and outside the tank. And I'd like to suggest that there is a different space that we can get to as a result of floating. And some of us know how to get there outside of floating. But it's certainly a lot easier to get there from floating. And I'd like to address that space. And it's a space that most of us are not familiar with in our normal everyday life. We in our business, when we opened our center, both before we opened our center and after we opened our first center, we would spend hours talking about what was this space that we can get to. How do we talk about it? What is it? How do we communicate it to another? And in those early years, we couldn't come up with a good answer to that. The best that we could do was that it was a little like falling in love the first time or at the beginning of falling in love or being at the top of a mountain in awe at the incredibleness of the scenery or possibly being totally involved in a project where everything else disappears. So if it's so hard to talk about, maybe it's hard to understand. And if it's hard to understand, do we actually know how to provide it? In other words, what is it about the tank that is actually producing this that, for me at least, is so absolutely incredible. It's something I can't easily get to another way. What is it about the tank? About the tank environment? And so on that allows me to get here. John had mentioned that he liked Patanjali's aphorisms, the book as described in the book or delineated in the book, How to Know God. And after that book, we pursued some other spiritual endeavors. And we finally, after a while, discovered something. And we feel that we discovered what this thing was that we got to. And it's called being, consciousness. And it's characterized by a lack of mental activity. And since this is actually the domain of the spiritual, we investigated whether those disciplines could help us since meditation actually serves this beingness. Spiritual practices design their guidelines to meditation to remove all distractions because a feed mental chatter interferes with being and becoming more conscious. Daniel Goleman, a Harvard professor who was a friend and colleague of Richard Albert, also known as Ram Das, practiced spiritual disciplines in India for a long time and studied many other spiritual disciplines and wrote a book called The Meditative Mind. And in it, he spoke about the classical, about one classical Buddhist text. And he mentioned that unvirtuous thoughts lead to distractedness in meditation. They're a waste of time to the serious meditator. Purification means paring away distracting thoughts. He said behavior is controlled in these spiritual disciplines because it affects the mind. Purity of morality has the goal of purity of mind. In other words, each spiritual discipline has rules like the Ten Commandments. And the actual purpose of these, originally in the spiritual disciplines, was not for morality. It was to stop all this mental chatter that if you're doing things that are inappropriate, you're going to be doing a lot of thinking about it. And the more serious you are in terms of your meditation, the more rules there are to make it so that you won't be involved in all this mental chatter. So these traditional philosophies that have specialized in understanding the area of consciousness outside of our normal existence are saying that lack of mental distractions is important to being and being more present. In other words, the more distraction-free the environment, the more successful will be the floater. The more emptiness than the emptier the floater. So an environment and a tank free of distractions is really good. Many people before they float the first time have some fears, whether it's drowning, darkness, suffocation, claustrophobia, or finding out about yourself. But there's a fear that's much bigger than all of these. When people come to float, those people that are afraid, their biggest fear is that it's not okay to be afraid. So we let people know that many people have fears before they use the tank the first time. And in this situation, you should use it in whatever way is comfortable for you. And we let them know that they're totally in control of this situation. They can get in, out whenever they want, they can leave the door open, and so on. And once they know that many people are afraid and that they're in control, it's easy for them to handle all of the other fears. They can do it on their own. It's very simple for them to deal with it on their own. And if many people want to find out about themselves as Joan Rogan has mentioned, imagine the joy and satisfaction that someone can get by dealing with some fear that they've had. They come and float, and some fear that they've had they deal with on their own. And that creates a ripple through their life. So we think we should be careful about protecting people from the fears before they float the first time. The use of floating is handling mental, emotional, and physical disturbance or discomfort. And it can usually by, usually be handled by going into it fully. Discomfort is usually the result of us removing our consciousness from something, a pulling away. For example, if I cut my finger on a table saw, I've pulled my body away, but I also pull my consciousness away, and it may hurt for a time, or it may not hurt, but it very quickly will stop hurting completely, and as soon as it's cured, if I tap on it, I notice that it's numb. In other words, my consciousness has left that area. I go to a group once a week, and in the group, whenever this woman talks, I was feeling put down, made less than, and it was irritating to me. I went into the tank, and I started to experience this irritation that I was having, that I felt whenever she spoke, and after a while, that disappeared, and I was faced with feeling somebody else's pain, and I did not want to do that. I really wanted away, I wanted out of there. I did not want to deal with that, and so I experienced that, pushing away that desire to not be experiencing someone else's pain, and I hung out there, and I hung out there, and then suddenly I had this picture of my father feeling really bad, running to the basement because of something my mother had said, and I did not want to deal with that at all at the time, and now I was floating, and I experienced that. I just hung out there, and I remembered it as much as I could, and noticed what my sensations, feelings, thoughts were, and I realized that there were a lot of other situations in my recent life of not wanting to deal with somebody else's pain, that this had been a recurring theme in my life, and suddenly, since then, I have not had any problem with being with somebody else's pain. It's like the thing disappeared. Well, the point is that when the incident happened with my father, I removed my consciousness from that thing, and by going into the tank, my consciousness was returned to that, and so we may be reminded of an earlier incident by repeating it, and that gives us the opportunity to heal, and we can do that by returning our consciousness possibly to the area, and it's easier, I think, to do with less distractions, and in an empty tank without an agenda, things can come up for us to look at and to clear away. In our normal life, we're moving so fast that generally we don't pause to process it all. In the tank, the volume can get turned up, and all of this mental chatter, the most urgent of it gets processed, and if we do that frequently enough or long enough, free of distractions, it can subside, and we'll find ourselves centered in being, so we're not that familiar with the state of being, but I think we need to be careful not to alter some aspect of our business that will negatively impact the effectiveness of the tank experience. It's important to understand the being state, and the lack of distractions in the tank, and in the environment, may facilitate floaters getting the maximum out of their float. So for those of you who are taking floating into the future, please remember to keep the tank empty, nothing. If you don't understand being, you might ask, how is your float when somebody comes out of the tank after their float? As I think you can understand now, the mind is one of evaluating, judging, and figuring things out, and here you've given somebody the opportunity to move to a place of beingness, and now you're asking them to go back into their mind. I'll let you work out how the staff should best support floaters coming out of the tank, and I'll leave you with what John used to say. Stop avoiding the void, get nothing from Samadhi. I'm just going to take a couple more minutes about the floatation tank association. We have a table out there. Four presenters today are on the board of directors of the floatation tank association, Tom Fine, Shoshana, Glenn and I, Ashkan and Graham recently resigned from the board of directors in order to have more time to do things like present this conference, and we have some very big jobs in front of us, one having to do with what Michael talked about, only he was talking about it up in Canada, having to deal with the health regulations. We have that in this country as well. Some of you are in the middle of it. Some of you have surrendered. Some of you have already come through the other side, and the board of directors believes that if we have a force, if this kind of a force of people who are interested in floating and are willing to get together to be a part of that force that will educate the health departments as to what floatation tanks are not swimming pools. They don't need the same set of regulations. We could present things that are not onerous to the opening of centers throughout the country. So that is the main health department area that we're in. We're also talking about having guidelines for best practices in the area so that those of you who are brand new who are saying, well, what's the right temperature? I thought body temperature is 98.6. Most of you already know that it's the skin temperature, not the interior body temperature. But these things need to be spread to everybody coming into the business so that minor errors and serious errors have a place where there's a forum of people who can give out information. We have the sign up table right outside that door. It's been wonderful how many of you have signed up to become members of FTA. You will be contacted. It would be very nice if we could kind of get a form going that says, I have a skill. You know, I'm really good with websites. I'm really good with making with filtration systems. Whatever it is that your specialty is, it could be very, very useful to the organization. What's available today when you sign up is a $25 discount in your membership fee. So please stop by and see us and join up so that we use an event like this where we get to meet each other and see what we, you know, we're a bunch of people with good ideas. Let's package them and use them in the places where they're very powerful for our benefit and the benefit of people who get to use the tanks. We have a, thank you. We have a website, a flotation tank association has a website called flotation. There's a float at the beginning of flotation, so it's spelled F-L-O-A-T-A-T-I-O-N dot org. And the, go to the right of the bar at the top and it says join. On that page, you can choose which membership is appropriate for you and you can click buy and then it will come up with a pay, something more at the right side that allows you to put in a coupon. If you put in the coupon this week, con 13, five digits, con as in conference 2013, it's just five digits, con 13, then you will get 25 off on what you're buying. Please become a member. Okay.