Physical Isolation Experience in the Tank

In the original concept, the solitude, isolation and confinement tank was devised as a research instrument in 1954. In the ensuing twenty-three years of working with tanks, I have found various ways of making the apparatus simpler and safer.

In the original tanks, we were required to wear rather complicated head masks in order to breathe underwater. These have been eliminated completely.

In the latest models of tanks, we use a saturated solution of Epsom salts (MgSO4 7H2O) at a solution density of 1.30 grams per cubic centimeter. It was discovered that this density of solution allows one to float supine and have the whole body at or near the surface of the liquid. One's hands float, one's arms, legs, feet and, most important, one's head, float. We have found that even the thinnest person with the least amount of fat floats in this way in the tank.

With these simplifications of the technique it has turned out that we have devised a method of attaining the deepest rest that we have ever experienced. The research instrument has become a practical possibility for use by those untrained in research. We have records of over five hundred cases of persons who have used the tank for one or more hours and several cases of much more intensive use, up to several hundred hours. The safety of the method for use by the average person is demonstrated by the fact that these persons range from housewives, businessmen, scientists and mystics, to children.

Some preprogramming of many of our tank users has gone on because of my personal research using the tank and the publications of the work. Such preprograms generate expectations in various people's minds about what they will experience when they go into the tank.

It is not necessary for one to have any expectations upon entering the tank. One may go there for a rest, to get away from the busyness of one's life for an hour or two; one may have a problem in the middle of the night in which case the tank, rather than a bed, is more suited to relax one's muscles, provide the rest that one needs physically, and at the same time allow mental operations to continue toward solving the problem.

I have not made it clear in my previous publications that this "rest" is my primary personal use of the tank. Whenever possible I have furnished my environment with a tank, no matter where I was. I first had one at the National Institute of Mental Health (Bethesda, Maryland); I made one in the Virgin Islands (Saint Thomas, U.S.V.I.) and one in Miami in the dolphin laboratories. In our present location (Malibu, California), over the last two years, we have had as many as five tanks operating simultaneously.

I find it essential to be able to relax completely irrespective of anything that is going on in the environment at certain times. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with an idea that I want to work out, so rather than disturb my wife, I float in the tank and work out the idea at great length and in fine detail. I am then able to put it down on paper or to dictate it in the morning. For a businessperson, a scientist, a professional of any sort, this is a boon: to be able to think, free of physical fatigue of the body. The method allows one to become free within a few minutes.

In certain cases the gravitational-field-countergravity forces in the body cause pain because of arthritis, broken bones, or some sort of disease. The tank is specifically beneficial to these people in that it relieves these pains in a way that nothing else can.

Recently I had an accident with a bicycle and broke several bones. As soon as I returned home from the hospital I arranged to have the tank changed in such a way that even though still convalescing, I could get into it. I had not slept for a period of three nights in a row. As soon as I found that the pain disappeared while I floated at the surface of the Epsom salts solution, I slept soundly for an hour and a half, the deepest sleep that I have ever had. In this particular case I came out amazingly refreshed. (For sleeping in the tank we have a special float for people who need it, to feel safe: the head won't turn sidewise while they are asleep.)

For those who do meditation, it is also a definite aid. It turns out that the tank and its isolated environment do for one what one must do inside one's own mind-body when meditating in the usual environment. While meditating, sitting cross-legged or on a chair, or lying in a bed, one examines the environment, the sounds coming from the environment and whatever light patterns are shifting around in that environment. Slowly but surely during the meditation, one can inhibit the responses of these patterns of stimulation and get deep down inside one's mind.

The tank eliminates the presence of these shifting physical input patterns and their changes and reduces the intensity of stimulation down to the most minimum level possible; this "reduced" environment allows one to start the meditation at the point only achievable outside the tank after some inhibitory work and some time spent doing that work. In the tank one need not do that work. Undistracted, one starts concentrating immediately upon one's inner perceptions and dives deep into one's mind (when one is trained on how to do this transform).

Some people come to a tank expecting certain things to happen. All we can say to these people is — nothing will happen that you don't already know about;...