As I said before, the first time in the tank I didn’t get any hallucinations, and the second time I didn’t get any hallucinations. But the Lillys were very interesting people; I enjoyed them very, very much. They often gave me lunch, and so on, and after a while we discussed things on a different level than the early stuff with the lights. I realized that other people had found the sense-deprivation tank somewhat frightening, but to me it was a pretty interesting invention. I wasn’t afraid because I knew what it was: it was just a tank of Epsom salts.
The third time there was a man visiting—I met many interesting people there—who went by the name Baba Ram Das. He was a fella from Harvard who had gone to India and had written a popular book called Be Here Now. He related how his guru in India told him how to have an “out-of-body experience” (words I had often seen written on the bulletin board): Concentrate on your breath, on how it goes in and out of your nose as you breathe.
I figured I’d try anything to get a hallucination, and went into the tank. At some stage of the game I suddenly realized that—it’s hard to explain—I’m an inch to one side. In other words, where my breath is going, in and out, in and out, is not centered: My ego is off to one side a little bit, by about an inch.
I thought: “Now where is the ego located? I know everybody thinks the seat of thinking is in the brain, but how do they know that?” I knew already from reading things that it wasn’t so obvious to people before a lot of psychological studies were made. The Greeks thought the seat of thinking was in the liver, for instance. I wondered, “Is it possible that where the ego is located is learned by children looking at people putting their hand to their head when they say, ‘Let me think’? Therefore the idea that the ego is located up there, behind the eyes, might be conventional!” I figured that if I could move my ego an inch to one side, I could move it further. This was the beginning of my hallucinations.
I tried and after a while I got my ego to go down through my neck into the middle of my chest. When a drop of water came down and hit me on the shoulder, I felt it “up there,” above where “I” was. Every time a drop came I was startled a little bit, and my ego would jump back up through the neck to the usual place. Then I would have to work my way down again. At first it took a lot of work to go down each time, but gradually it got easier. I was able to get myself all the way down to the loins, to one side, but that was about as far as I could go for quite a while.
It was another time I was in the tank when I decided that if I could move myself to my loins, I should be able to get completely outside of my body. So I was able to “sit to one side.” It’s hard to explain—I’d move my hands and shake the water, and although I couldn’t see them, I knew where they were. But unlike in real life, where the hands are to each side, part way down, they were both to one side! The feeling in my fingers and everything else was exactly the same as normal, only my ego was sitting outside, “observing” all this.
From then on I had hallucinations almost every time, and was able to move further and further outside of my body. It developed that when I would move my hands I would see them as sort of mechanical things that were going up and down—they weren’t flesh; they were mechanical. But I was still able to feel everything. The feelings would be exactly consistent with the motion, but I also had this feeling of “he is that.” “I” even got out of the room, ultimately, and wandered about, going some distance to locations where things happened that I had seen earlier another day.
I had many types of out-of-the-body experiences. One time, for example, I could “see” the back of my head, with my hands resting against it. When I moved my fingers, I saw them move, but between the fingers and the thumb I saw the blue sky. Of course that wasn’t right; it was a hallucination. But the point is that as I moved my fingers, their movement was exactly consistent with the motion that I was imagining that I was seeing. The entire imagery would appear, and be consistent with what you feel and are doing, much like when you slowly wake up in the morning and are touching something (and you don’t know what it is), and suddenly it becomes clear what it is. So the entire imagery would suddenly appear, except it’s unusual, in the sense that you usually would imagine the ego to be located in front of the back of the head, but instead you have it behind the back of the head.
One of the things that perpetually bothered me, psychologically, while I was having a hallucination, was that I might have fallen asleep and would therefore be only dreaming. I had already had some experience with dreams, and I wanted a new experience. It was kind of dopey, because when you’re having hallucinations, and things like that, you’re not very sharp, so you do these dumb things that you set your mind to do, such as checking that you’re not dreaming. So I perpetually was checking that I wasn’t dreaming by—since my hands were often behind my head—rubbing my thumbs together, back and forth, feeling them. Of course I could have been dreaming that, but I wasn’t: I knew it was real.
After the very beginning, when the excitement of having a hallucination made them “jump out,” or stop happening, I was able to relax and have long hallucinations.
A week or two after, I was thinking a great deal about how the brain works compared to how a computing machine works—especially how information is stored. One of the interesting problems in this area is how memories are stored in the brain: You can get at them from so many directions compared to a machine—you don’t have to come directly with the correct address to the memory. If I want to get at the word “rent,” for example, I can be filling in a crossword puzzle, looking for a four-letter word that begins with r and ends in t; I can be thinking of types of income, or activities such as borrowing and lending; this in turn can lead to all sorts of other related memories or information. I was thinking about how to make an “imitating machine,” which would learn language as a child does: you would talk to the machine. But I couldn’t figure out how to store the stuff in an organized way so the machine could get it out for its own purposes.
When I went into the tank that week, and had my hallucination, I tried to think of very early memories. I kept saying to myself, “It’s gotta be earlier; it’s gotta be earlier”—I was never satisfied that the memories were early enough. When I got a very early memory—let’s say from my home town of Far Rockaway—then immediately would come a whole sequence of memories, all from the town of Far Rockaway. If I then would think of something from another city—Cedarhurst, or something—then a whole lot of stuff that was associated with Cedarhurst would come. And so I realized that things are stored according to the location where you had the experience.
I felt pretty good about this discovery, and came out of the tank, had a shower, got dressed, and so forth, and started driving to Hughes Aircraft to give my weekly lecture. It was therefore about forty-five minutes after I came out of the tank that I suddenly realized for the first time that I hadn’t the slightest idea of how memories are stored in the brain; all I had was a hallucination as to how memories are stored in the brain! What I had “discovered” had nothing to do with the way memories are stored in the brain; it had to do with the way I was playing games with myself.
In our numerous discussions about hallucinations on my earlier visits, I had been trying to explain to Lilly and others that the imagination that things are real does not represent true reality. If you see golden globes, or something, several times, and they talk to you during your hallucination and tell you they are another intelligence, it doesn’t mean they’re another intelligence; it just means that you have had this particular hallucination. So here I had this tremendous feeling of discovering how memories are stored, and it’s surprising that it took forty-five minutes before I realized the error that I had been trying to explain to everyone else.