Excerpt adapted from Buddha in the Float Tank
What is a float tank? What does it teach us about perception, selfhood, and out-of-body experiences?
The tank is a lightproof, soundproof chamber filled with saline water. This solution, saturated with Epson salt, is so dense that one floats effortlessly, with no muscle tension. What’s more, the water is heated to the temperature of the skin. Thus, besides being dark and silent, the tank is also absent of any gravitational, tactile, or thermal sensations. The so-called proprioceptive sense, which operates outside the traditional five senses to locate limbs and other body parts in space, also goes dormant in the tank. Once the body is still, floating effortlessly, all that’s left is the mind.
Except, the mind is all you ever had to begin with. Everything you ever see, hear, or touch is happening in the mind. How could it be otherwise? Nothing really changes in the tank. The tank just reveals the nondual nature of consciousness.
What is nonduality?
Here, we need to get philosophical for a moment. The term nondual emphasizes that subject and object are not separate. The world is not “out there” while the self is “in here”. The perceiver and the perceived are one. Consider this illustration below from Wikipedia. If “I” am located somewhere internal to my head, watching the world outside like a person in a movie theater, then how does this little homunculus perceive the inside of the theater? There would need to be a little person in his head, and so forth, ad infinitum.
It’s one thing to grasp nonduality intellectually. It’s another thing entirely to grasp it through direct experience. The illusion of separateness from the world is so convincing that we rarely glimpse through it.
The float tank makes it easier to see through this illusion. The ordinary sense of being a subject in the head looking out at objects in the world ceases when that world disappears in the tank. One no longer feels that they are experiencing things from a distance. Rather, there is just consciousness.
Out-of-body experiences
There’s another curious consequence of the zero-stimulus environment called dissociation, or extreme psychological detachment. Here, we encounter a paradox: the body is perceived more clearly, but in a new, non-self context. On the one hand, it’s unsurprising that one becomes more aware of bodily sensations in the float tank, for these are the only sensory channels that are still buzzing with information. Indeed, enhanced cardiorespiratory awareness in the tank has been reported in scientific research. On the other hand, because one no longer feels like a subject internal to the body, the body is no longer the center of awareness. Nondual awareness is centerless, which probably explains reports of out-of-body experiences in the tank (including my own brief experience).Except where noted otherwise, the above reflections on floating and nondual awareness are anecdotal, based on my own float sessions. However, the idea that floating alters self-perception in a manner similar to meditation or even psychedelics drugs is also supported by a neuroimaging study of healthy volunteers who had brain scans before and after three float sessions. These volunteers showed changes in the brain’s default mode network—widely regarded as a neural substrate of the autobiographical self—similar to what has been reported in other studies of meditation and psychedelic substances like psilocybin and LSD.
Conclusion
Of course, there’s still much that we don’t know about how floating compares to other altered states of consciousness, and whether it has similar (and likely safer) therapeutic potential as psychedelics seem to have for mental illness. I strongly advocate for future research to address these questions.This exert was adapted from a recent post, Buddha in the Float Tank, on Joel Frohlich’s Substack newsletter, Something It’s Like. Click to the link above to read the full post, including Joel’s perspective on inner and outward journeys in the context of travel.