The Deep Self

I had a friend who took an initiation. He wasnt happy with the system because he felt that nothing was happening when he did the meditation. I have two responses to this#1 – the tank always awaits a chance to loosen you

I just finished an hour in the tank. For the most part I was certain that “nothing was happening” and guess why? Because I was locking my body into place in the tank. The second I relaxed just a bit, the tank took the opportunity to loosen all sorts of muscle groups – across the spine, up and down the sides, the neck, you name it. Then I started pointing and flexing my toes and one toe would not flex back as fast as the rest – it had a mini Charley Horse. But then it worked its way out.

I was literally creating a limited tank experience by holding my body fixed. The tank destructured me and exposed my attempt to create a limited body-tank relation.

I’m so impressed with the ability of the tank to loosen up the physical body that “floating”, the secular term for what we do, is called “loosening” in the vocabulary of my religious organization devoted to floating [0]

#2 – expect the unexpected instead of filtering your environment

The instructions to John C. Lilly from E.C.C.O. [1] were: “Expect the unexpected every moment 24/7” – when you simply sit down and expect the unexpected, then your awareness expands and all sorts of trivial things you would never notice come to your attention – the refrigerator turning on, an ant walking across the rug, the wind rustling outside, a cabinet door creaking. You realize that “you” typically are a stick in a fast flowing river of phenomena.

But the ego is so focused on filtering the environment so that only stimuli which enhance/threaten survival come to your attention, that you actually dont even notice 1% of what is usually happening!

#3 Praise to Lilly

We results-oriented Westerners would not have ever had a crack at samadhi (samadhi being that crack between events which allows us to create and control as we learn to widen the GAP) because we are so fixated, locked down and focused. The whole lot of meditative experience has been gifted to the West thanks to the bold research efforts of John C. Lilly.

# References

[0] http://git.thedeepself.org/definitions/#loosening
[1] http://www.evolver.net/user/drongo23/blog/dr_john_c_lillys_earth_coincidence_…