Deferring to my guests, I chose to float on the second day of the opening Float Party Fiesta. I had floated in 2003 at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley, as research for a book project. Impressed by the tank's effects on my swim stroke the next day, I vowed to cajol a tanning salon to set aside some space for a samadhi tank upon my return. I released the meme upon arriving back in State College in January 2003, and by the Fall of 2005, we had instead found an enthusiastic and experimental host and collaborator in geneticist Mark Shriver. Fortunately for us, life really is like one long game of Telephone. So when it was my turn to get naked and into the eleven inches of supersaturated water, I pulled the door after me knowing that this strange little ship had been grown from the meme stock I had helped transplant from Berkeley.

I found it useful to consider the tank as a vehicle. An involution engine, the tank dials external input to near zero for the human sensorium, nudging the mind back toward itself and substituting a squishy, levitating mobius body for the more desperately Euclidean wetware On The Other Side of The Tank. Pulling shut the door to my involutionary probe, I leaned back and floated toward the center of the cyclone, scientist ( and tank inventor) John Lilly's name for the self's observation of itself. I opened to what what Lama Govinda describes as the turnabout in the seat of consciousness", the focusing of the mind on the mind.

My body was webbed, spreading through the interior of the tank, comfortably uncoiling a filamentous body that more and more began to feel like a mesh. This slick amphibian body gave way to a silken, spongey mass.

Clearly they had forgotten to retrieve me. Or perhaps I hadn't heard them come in. For I became aware of the fact that I had been in this tank forever, and could easily stay here forever. The subjective experience of eternity is often composed of repetitions (Michaux), and I rather repetitiously kept falling into and out of the consciousness of an eternity opening up "inside" of any given moment of time.

When the knock came, my feet were together, toes pointed, body skipping along a gelatinous plane toward a spiraling galaxy. Until next time...