For my first floating experience, I basically talked to myself and maybe felt God. On my second floating experience, I messed around with what movement felt like, eventually fell asleep, and for a brief moment thought I was dead. For my third floating experience, I tried to do absolutely nothing.
The spot was very quiet - I didn’t see anyone else there except for the woman who was working. There was no wait, she took me to my room, asked if I needed anything else, shuffled herself out, and I was in that pod within a couple of minutes. I know the routine.
And I did nothing. I breathed in for three, out for five, and tried to just clear my mind for a full hour. I’m not good at clearing my mind - never was. Back in college, I tried my first meditation class. The instructor was telling people to clear their minds of all thoughts and just thinking about clearing my mind made it harder to actually clear my mind. I would jump from one thing to the next - to-do lists, memories, future plans, aspirational dreams, favorite foods, etc. I tried focusing my mind on just one thing, to start: music. I would think about a song and try to get that to be the only thing on my mind. I would then picture that song playing from a phonograph, and then I would try to disappear the phonograph. It was impossible to disappear the phonograph. It simply would not go away. I would devise Looney Tunes-inspired ends for that phonograph’s life - steamrollers and clubs and whatnot - but that would just lead my mind into other things as the song kept playing and nothing quieted down, at all.
I’ve gotten better at it, now that I realize that thoughts will pop into your head - you need to train yourself to let them go. Some of those thoughts are impossible to let go of - tasks that are looming, mistakes that you’re making, people that you’re neglecting. But you can try, at least. It’s cute when you try. But do you know what thought is almost impossible to let go of? The thought that you are floating in six inches of water, in complete darkness, with the only sound being the pulsing of your heartbeat in your ears.
Here is what I thought about while I tried to completely clear my mind: I thought about a single layer of skin at the very bottom of my foot. I thought about the tissue, I thought about the neurons that sense that floor and tell my brain that it’s touching a surface. I thought about the proteins that make up that cell and the atoms that make up that protein. I thought about a single carbon atom at the very bottom of my foot, and a single electron that’s the farthest away from my body at a single moment in time although, yes, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle tells us that we can’t know which electron that is, exactly, but this is a hypothetical. I wondered what size that single electron is in relation to my body and how that compares to my size in relation to the universe. And then I wondered, using that ratio, how far would I need to traverse across the universe to travel the same relative distance an electron at the bottom of my foot would need to travel to get to a single electron at the top of my head? I couldn’t figure it out in that pod, but I started to list the things I would need to look up to figure it out at home.
It was at this point that I wondered if I was hallucinating.
Then the timer went off and somehow an hour passed and even with the pod open and the lights on, I felt like I was asleep. I wondered if it was safe to drive so I sat in my car for a little while. When I finally got home, I laid in bed and fell asleep shortly after. I slept great.
I have one more pre-paid session left. Will I continue on? Not sure yet.
Anyway, the diameter of an electron is 4E-10 cm. I am 6’3”, which is about 190 cm. I am 475 trillion times “taller” than an electron. Neptune is 458 trillion centimeters from the earth and pluto is 533 trillion centimeters from the earth. So, relatively speaking, traversing from the bottom of my foot to the top of my head, an electron would travel an equivalent distance that I would take traveling from earth to somewhere between Neptune and Pluto. The electron wouldn’t use little feet to move, tho, and it would actually travel the distance of my body so quickly that it would seem instantaneous to all equipment we currently have and, I imagine, all equipment we’ll ever have. It would essentially take me more time to get the idea to start to jump.