In exploring the perennial human quest for transpersonal and ‘other ways’ of knowing, ancient practices flow into modern methods, in cycles of reinvention and reimagining. From dancing, drumming, dreaming to a cornucopia of meditation practices, sweating, breathwork, psychedelics and entheogens and more, all with the key aim in common: the augmentation of states of consciousness, to cultivate awareness. Among such practices are ‘sensory restriction’ methods – abundant across cultures and history. Such methods seek to minimise or remove sensory information coming from a person’s surrounding environment, in order to heighten, sharpen or attune that person’s more subtle (and potentially psychic) senses. These are seen in many forms such as: vows of silence, social isolation before a hunt, intentional retreats from the world to caves, solitary vision quests, or hermit life-styles. Perhaps, there is an overlooked method that is simultaneously modern and yet more ancient than all the rest: floating. Being one with saltwater.
For millennia, it has been considered a very natural phenomena, such as on the Red Sea and Dead Sea (famed for it’s being a source of health boosting salt products).
What is Floatation?
The beauty of floating is in its effortlessness. Floating is natural and easy – anyone can do it, with no skill required. A person simply floats in a supine position upon a shallow body of warm salt-water, in a sensory-restricted (dark and quiet) environment. Because the water is a salt-water solution, it is buoyant. Floaters rest on the surface of a magnesium sulphate, MgSO4 (Epsom Salt) solution, gently resting like a rubber duckie in the tub.
Float tanks are known for their wellbeing and clinical benefits and are great for sportspeople recovering from arduous feats and creatives needing to unwind their minds. Yet there is a little explored spiritual application and associations (more to come on this is another post) and growing research suggests that floating may propel us into an altered state of consciousness where healing, mystical and psychic events become more readily available. With the tanks gaining pet names such as ‘Private Sea’ and ‘Time Machine’, it’s clear that floating psychonauts view their tanks as tools for mystical exploration.
Embodied Liminality
As all sensory input from the outer-world environment has gone from experience, it leaves the floater with only the experience of their inner-world (or ‘inperience’ as float-pioneer John Lilly would say). It is here in this state of liminality, that the floatee is, in a manner of speaking, suspended from the physical world and focused on the psychical. Floatation is therefore potentially a perfect solution for the parapsychologist. The key additional factor is the temperature of that salt water solution: the same temperature as the human body. Thus, the floatee experiences no sight, no sound, no sense of gravity (weightlessness) and no way to determine where the body’s surface ends and the water begins. In essence, the floater also dissolves in to the solution – they becomes ‘at one’ with the stillness and loses their sense of Self – they become unbounded.
Perhaps here, in the float tank, we call upon ancient metaphysical, shamanic-like practices of being between states – in both consciousness and in body. As we lay on a threshold of air and water, with all the elements present: earth (salt), water, air, fire (heat), we dissolve into it and become all and neither at the same time. We enter a state we might call ’embodied liminality’. Here in the float tank, perhaps we set our minds free to explore the awareness of what is subtle, unfixed, and unknown. This method offers an exceptional opportunity for parapsychology – the formal scientific study of psychic (psi) phenomena.
Psi & Floatation
It is here, at the incredibly Broughton Sanctuary (also where you will find Wyrd Experience), on the top floor of the luxury wellbeing centre, Avalon, where we are conducting just such an experiment. In collaboration with University of Northampton, myself (Kirsty, PhD Candidate) and Dr Cal Cooper are conducting a series of controlled trials, exploring a psychic phenomena known as precognition – the capacity to predict a future event or outcome without information passing through the usual and known sensory systems. Before the precognition task (where they ‘guess’ at a future target video clip) is done, our participants float for an hour – as a means of inducing a non-ordinary state of consciousness where they may be more ‘open’ or receptive to such psychic materials. What are we finding? Well, so far our participants are exceeding chance expectations of simply ‘guessing’ at the future clip, and so we predict we will have a rather interesting paper to write soon – and far more exploring to do…
If you would like to enquire about taking part in this study or for press or media interest, please email kirsty@gowyrd.org or kirsty.allan@northampton.ac.uk
