Carcosa Bound

Can we access other-than-conscious processes, reprogram the personality, and achieve mystical states using a combination of flotation tanks and hypnotic inductions?

Sounds completely plausible, exciting, big if true. A few years ago, I gave it a shot. Nothing to lose, everything to gain.

Did it work?

Short version: Sort of; inconclusive but promising; more experimentation and testing needed.

Longer version, with context: Flotation tanks are great for isolating, relaxing, and offering a fairly-controlled environment. Modern tanks have speakers, and the guys at the frontdesk will play your tunes if you ask, I’ve found.

I’ve been playing with hypnotic induction – on and off, on myself, and others – for years now, since doing a life-changing NLP Practitioner course in the mid-2000s.

I figured could be a pretty cool force multiplier.

Float tanks: one path from pale ape to Cosmic voltigeur

Float tanks are great, and the experience is something no one – not Altered States auteur Ken Russell, nor float tank evangelist Joe Rogan, can fully codify – or indeed ever want to. The tank gives like that. There’s no right way to float, only your way, and you work it out by doing it.

Void Intention – card from my 8-circuit model neurotarot

Current applications – and popularity – go so far beyond even where originator John Lilly could have imagined. My hunch is this Cetacean-communicating extreme sportsman of the mind would never have expected this wonderful experience to be available in any major city worth the name.

I’d become a semi-regular floater, and was more than comfortable navigating with everything that can come up during these experiences. I’ve certainly had some strange times.

Hypnosis: It’s only a suggestion, it just works.

Hypnosis has a perhaps questionable reputation among some more conventional thinkers and those fearful of losing ”control”, insofar as they deem themselves to have it.

A fairly classic objection relates to various stage hypnotists, who lean into the timeless desire for the sketchy, and carnavalesque, with a dash of exhibitionistic control kink.

While all these objections are valid, and, in the right situations undeniably compelling and possessing a certain charge, the hypnosis I learned is a bit different; much more therapeutic, strengths-based, relaxing.

For me, it has done only good, and with no apparent downside, danger or risk – rare indeed when working with powerful change techniques. In a lot of ways, I’m the man I am today, through the work I’ve done. Self-made, and self-scripted, in no small sense.

This, more than anything else, is probably what I’d regard as the most valuable benefit of studying this – it’s an incredibly-practical body of knowledge for testing and expanding one’s own mind control.

Bringing it together: Spacetravel at the speed of Mind

Nothing comes from nowhere. I guess I took influences from Altered States, and Lilly’s wild texts The Center of the Cyclone and Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer.

Also playing a part in this, I think, was Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles. In this millennial comic series, the good guys – the eponymous terrorist cell (but in an ahem good way) – and the bad guys – agents of the Outer Church – both use tanks as a tool for various astral projection, remote viewing and hypernarrative intervention.

Boiling all these together, the overall aesthetic seemed badass, my intent perhaps presumptuous: by cracking some sort of murky secret deep state black op techniques, I could:

• become some trans-dimensional boddhisatvic secret agent, in touch with my last incarnation at the end of all time;
• massively expand my consciousness, using a (slightly wonky) Qabalistic understanding to magically empower my body as a powerful magical battery;
• skip the boring, hard slow parts of theurgic practice to directly meet gods and goddesses, all in a few sessions.

I’d had the intent to try this for a while, and following the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns, I figured I needed some shaking up and out of stale conditioning.

This seems a chapter in our recent history many want to forget, or forgotten. For me, the disruption and instant curtailing of freedoms had left a deeper psychic wound that I initially cared to admit. I’m sure I was not the only one, and am convinced that societally, we haven’t fully reconciled this yet.

Meeting the Goddess, using free and open source software

Preparation: So, I wrote a series of inductions, and recorded them on my phone. I did the basic mixing using Audacity. I’d got extremely into DungeonSynth during lockdown, and had a back catalogue of deeply powerful and intense tunes that seemed to fit.

These inductions variously focused on around ascending and integrating knowledge from the Qabalistic Tree of Life; informing my current configuration with knowledge from my final permutation at the moment before The End of Everything; radically reinstating personal authority; meeting the Lord of the Wild Hunt and getting amongst it, and achieving insight of and congress with the Black Goddess of Infinite Space.

Process: I carried out a series of 6 long floats, over 6 weeks. After each float, I’d repeatedly listen to the induction I’d floated with.

Probably too much, too quickly, but I had things to do.

Prognosis: Did it actually work? I’m not sure. Can I verify any insight from this? Again, I’m not sure.

Were my hypno chops up to the task? Probably not – though they were a lot better than when I began.

Am I now a trans-dimensional free agent, and eternal hunter of the void, beyond space, time and limitation? As far as I can tell, not so much, in waking hours at least.

It was fucking rad, though. It demolished the rut I was stuck in. I got loose, and life got exciting again. I met the beautiful woman I married, shortly after. My magical practice leveled up, too; I think I found treasures of immeasurable value, in the warm, wet darkness.

And – above all – it reaffirmed that sometimes, you just have to draw out and run with the ideas that whisper at the edges of your awareness, until they, and you, see where you wind up.

As with anything: If you take things far enough, I guarantee you’ll arrive somewhere interesting.