 We wanted to share with you parts of a chapter from Floating in Quiet Darkness, the book we are working on writing that will be out early next year. I invite you to imagine when you were a toddler learning to walk and join me in my crawl down memory lane. In our living room, I crawl over to the chair with the ladder back and using one of the bars of the ladder, I lift myself to standing. I pull and push until I'm balanced front to back. Then I switch my weight to my left leg, pushing with my right. I pull and push until I'm balanced on my left leg. Then I turn to the right and I step out and I shift my weight to my right and I lose my balance in fall and laughing and crawl over to the chair and start again. This kind of focused attention and experimentation allows me to learn very quickly to walk. I use similar attention and presence to learn to eat and talk and all of the other things that babies and young children learn in the first few years of their life. When learning any of these skills, I am fully present with great attention. I'm constantly watching the people around me and trying experiments to see what works and what does not. During this period of our lives, we are generally present, which is what I'm working to be now. That is, we're generally conscious. As adults, when we walk or talk or eat, the experience when we were young, those experiences are used by the brain to allow us to do these activities without our conscious participation. We can walk down a crowded city street while talking to a friend without focusing any of our attention on our walking or how to talk. These activities are handled totally automatically by our brains. Most adult activities are done this way. Besides walking and talking, once we learn to drive, cook, even argue, they are mostly done automatically. How to do one is automatic. In other words, done by the part of the brain using past experiences. Dr. Marcus E. Rayichel, a neurologist in 2001, discovered a part of the brain called the default mode network, DMN. One of the functions of this network is to track input, sensory input, and find experiences from the past that relate to the situation at hand. As soon as it finds the relevant experiences to use in handling the current situation, it ignores further input. That is, it limits the amount of input we receive to an absolute minimum, just enough to know what past experiences to access. This is very useful. If a tiger is headed our way with its mouth open, salivating, we do not want to think about what to do. Instead, the brain tells us based on past experiences whether we should run or pray. It is very important for us as adults to be efficient. The time for learning and experimentation is childhood. Adulthood is for functioning, using the experiences from when we were young to function efficiently and automatically. I have to prepare onlets for the guests that have arrived and are sitting at the pass-through in front of the stove where I'm going to cook them, the omelets, not the guests. Most of the time, we have done all of these things many times before. In fact, it is so routine that my brain pulls up experiences from the past and is mostly done as easily and automatically as walking, with as little conscious participation as walking takes. While I am cooking, I can put my focus on talking to my guests. Dr. Allison Gopnik, a child psychology professor and associate professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley, points out that our childhood is the largest of any animal so we can learn so many things that as adults we can do automatically and efficiently. By protecting and caring for our young for so long, the young children can learn massive amounts about how to function in any new environment, like technology that hasn't been around for 20,000 years, much less 200 days. Dr. Robin Cahart Harris, a neuro-scientist researching the working of people's brain when they're on psychedelics, found the default mode network is not active when they are on psychedelics or have been meditating. In these times, we are very open to all of the input. Without the default mode network bringing up earlier experiences, we get a much wider range of input and possibilities. That is where babies and young children spend their time. It turns out that they are better at solving problems that require thinking outside the box. Let me repeat that. Young children are better at solving problems that require thinking outside the box. This is because they are not being fed the data from the past that keeps them from seeing all of the sensory input. Dr. Gopnik for some experiments created a music box that would only start with the proper colored block when the block was set on it. Halfway through the experiment, she changed it so that it required two blocks to work. In testing four-year-old children and college students, she found that the four-year-old students did far better. The children were far more willing to consider and try possibilities outside the box. Their job as young children is to learn from all possibilities. They are excellent at trying anything, not such a good procedure to follow if a tiger is headed our way. Dr. Gopnik is struck by the similarities between the LSD experience and her understanding of the consciousness of children. For example, more possibilities, diffuse attention, magical thinking, and less sense of self. She suggests if you want to understand what an expanded consciousness looks like, have tea with a four-year-old. She says children's brains are extremely plastic, good for learning, not accomplishing. Better for exploring than exploiting. It has a great many more neural connections than the adult brain. Once we are adult, the neural connections we have used the most remain and unused ones disappear. As adults, our past experiences are used to solve current problems. We only come up with solutions that our past experiences point to. That is why we can't think outside the box. We only use whatever our experiences dictate. Einstein said no problem can be solved by the same kind of thinking that created it. Lots of our problems need a different kind of thinking. How do you turn off the default mode network so you can consider all possibilities and think outside the box? As previously mentioned, a four-year-old could help us. Or we could take psychedelics. Additionally, the DMN does not work during a session after we have been meditating or floating frequently or long enough. So we could meditate or float. A lot of meditators think that floating is the ultimate place to meditate. They find it makes meditating much easier and more effective. It is sure my experience. I think floating is the ultimate place to be creative because it allows us to move into a conscious state where the DMN is not active. Any time I have a highly creative job to do, I float at least every day. Actually I generally float every day anyway. As a result, I have become far more creative outside the tank than I used to be inside. The default mode network chooses what it uses to solve current problems. For example, as an adult, Lee started public speaking and found it terrifying. She floated and hung out in the fear, simply experiencing it. It took several times before she found this. You loved it. Once Glenn was working with this material, I had a long-standing fear of public speaking. Our annual talk here, one year, I couldn't even go through with it. I got so tight. What I saw was that I understood that every time I got up to talk, this old habit was being pulled out and used to aggravate and have that fear come up very fast and quick. What I did when I went into float was I started looking for all the things that could have happened to me that I was storing in memory that would come up and be used to aggravate that fear. What I found was that when I was five years old, I was tap dancing. My class was giving a performance for the parents. There were 10 of us in a line dancing. It was in a room probably like this, not quite as big, but with a wooden floor. This one doesn't have that. With a wooden floor and the piano was playing, and the parents were all there, and very soon I started feeling something moving. The costume was a silver shirt and black pants, and my pants started feeling as if they were in motion. I didn't know what to do. I noticed that there was a lot of laughter coming from the audience, and a lot of the attention of the audience was in my direction. I then, very soon after, noticed that my pants fell to the floor, and again, out of not knowing what to do, I bent down, picked them up, finished the dance, and went crazy. I worked with that. That was one of the things that I made a note about this. Once I saw that decision that I knew what it was, now I could release it. That was something that happened to me a long time ago, and I made a new decision that was right there inside of me that I no longer had to be afraid of public speaking, and that has been able to stay with me. There are still pieces that come up, but I have a tool to work with now that is very useful, and I highly recommend it. The brain never asks us for our rating or ranking of experiences when they are stored, whether they should be used, valued, or thrown out. It stores them all. The brain also does not ask us whether we agree with the experiences chosen now to solve the current problem. It figures out on its own how to value them and what to use for any situation. To have a high quality of life, we cannot let the brain arbitrarily choose its selection from the past to handle a problem in the present. Lee has just illustrated that. The automatic functioning of the default mode network is not always choosing the past experiences we would like it to use. In order to change that, we have to work hard to become conscious and not allow unconscious functioning of our brain to control our life for us. There are lots of ways we can work to become more conscious. Our second book will be all about that. Lee shares how one early tank owner worked with that. This was a really long time ago. He was one of our very first tank owners. At that time, we were selling cardboard tanks mainly by phone. We got a call from somebody in Vermont who told us that he had no skills for any work other than being a parking lot attendant. Somebody told him that he could work on himself in a tank. He had the ability to take care of that problem. We sent him a cardboard tank, we sent him to Vermont. He wanted to work on himself until he was able to have a job that he was aiming for by floating. The first thing on his agenda was to clear his relationship with his parents. He set out a system for getting it okay with his parents. He worked on that until it was done, months. Then he made up his next assignment of what he had to do, his goal being to get a job that was better than being a parking lot attendant. He went on like that. Three years later, we got a call from him and he said he had just been hired by a research scientist in Australia. He was given a job and he was going to be driving cross-country with his new wife. Could they stop by and visit with us? We said yes. He made up his own system of becoming conscious and the floating, it took three years, got him through it. Besides floating, John Lilly gave us the gift of inspiring us to include expanding our consciousness as a high priority in our life. No matter how you are supporting people using the tank, if they use it, it is likely they are at some level expanding their consciousness. Supporting people floating is a very high calling. John said it is my firm belief that experiencing higher states of consciousness is necessary for the survival of the human species. We want to acknowledge your participation in expanding consciousness. Thank you all.