01/03/2023
Böckernas bok så att säga vad det gäller floating. Finns i hyllan bredvid soffan hos oss på Alternativhälsan. Kom in, läs, slappa och floata. Välkommen 🙏✨
John Lilly Foreword to Samadhi Flotation Tank Book
By Dr. John C. Lilly
It is with pleasure that I introduce this new book by two long-time associates of mine who are
also two veterans—or I might say, survivors—of the now over twenty-year history of the
floatation tank practice which I myself initiated. Glenn Perry attended some of my earliest
workshops exploring the underwater environment and gestalt of the dolphin species. Along with
Steve Conger, he was among the first to take my original modified laboratory equipment and
refine the design to create a range of efficient and aesthetic tanks for home and experimental
uses. In case it is not clear from Glenn and Lee’s own book, I will state here that Glenn was and
is a top-notch engineer and artisan whose tank designs transcend the ordinary. He and his wife,
Lee, an admirable working dyad, have certainly left the realm of commercialism far behind in
their consistent offering of tanks of superior quality and performance.
The Perrys’ Samadhi Tanks are worthy of praise. Their marketing has also escaped the
large morass of fantasies and misrepresentation in relation to exploration of consciousness so
prevalent currently. There is something more that needs saying here about their way of working
with floating over the years.
In my first publication of The Deep Self, the original book on the subject of floating, I
quoted as an epigraph the following passage from earlier work, Programming and
Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer:
To become impartial, dispassionate, and general purpose, objective, and open-ended, one
must test and adjust the level of credence in each of his sets of beliefs. If every Man is to
be faced with real organisms with greater wisdom, greater intellect, greater minds than
any single man has, then we must be open, unbiased, sensitive, general purpose, and
dispassionate. Our needs for phantasias must have been analyzed and seen for what they
are and are not or we will be in even graver troubles than we are today.
Our search for mentally healthy paths to human progress in the innermost realities
depends upon progress in this area. Many men have floundered in this area of belief; I
hope this work can help to find a way through one of our stickiest intellectual-emotional
regions.
This is a statement I will stand by as a good opener for any book on the tank and the work
involved with floating. As I have stated and written elsewhere, it is no longer possible for any
human to have the tank experience that I had, i.e., floating in darkness and isolation with
absolutely no prior conditioning regarding what one might sense and experience. I was able to
approach floating with a purely experimental outlook, a hypothesis to prove or disprove, with no
preliminary data weighing the issue one way or the other.
By this time, so many accounts have been published, so much research done, so many
articles printed, so many citations in the literature, recorded interviews and lectures—not to
mention movies and television—that it is hardly possible for a first-time floater to have no
preconceived notions of the floating experience. I must personally take responsibility for a large
part of this widely-circulating reportage. On the other hand, in a training situation, or in a public
floatation tank facility, there is a great deal that can be done to minimize the effects of pre-
programmed beliefs about the tank. Attitudes of the trainer or the tank center operator will have
influence, and the degree of impartiality versus bias as modeled by the local space “authority”
will inevitably produce expectations or beliefs for the novice.
This being the case, I would like to state for the record that Glenn and Lee Perry have my
endorsement as researchers of the highest caliber in the study of belief systems. I know I can
trust them never to unnecessarily influence other humans and that their approach to floating will
always follow the guidelines of my own personal and professional researches in “alternity.” I
heartily recommend their practice of floating, their methods of exploration, their uses of the
benign and highly beneficial technology I have pioneered. The balanced, scientific, and pristine
nature of their practice has been clear to me for years and so, not only for their expertise and
their ingenuity, their skill and aptitude in tank manufacture, but also and especially for their
genuine integrity and sincerity in this research—I recommend to you the Perrys’ book
