This post has continually suggested that some type of introspection is necessary to achieve a valued sense of awareness, at the very least. This has been taken to extremes by thousands worldwide - from the famous cases of Tibetan Buddhist monks to the Desert Fathers of the early Church to individual cases of hermitage - so we have a broad field to inspect to see just what the fruits of extreme isolation are. And what we find does vary, but seldom does it coincide with what I saw in an old movie last Saturday.
I forget the name, although I doubt if any of the readers would have seen it anyway; made in 1963 England at the height of the Cold war, it concerns a top-secret project at Oxford, where it is found that one of the professors involved was paid by "Eastern European gentlemen with snow on their boots" to divulge the secrets revealed in the experiments. This professor kills himself, which reveals his payment, and which then sends a major with the counter-espionage force to find exactly WHAT the experiments were and what might have been divulged. He contacts another professor involved in the experiments who, on hearing that his partner is being written off as a traitor, strives to convince the major that the dead professor could not help his manipulation because of the experiments in which they were involved. We then find out what these experiments concern - hours spent in an isolation tank! The major is not convinced, and so the professor offers up his sanity to prove the point to the major. He descends into the tank, and within 8 hours, has become a complete vegetable. To test the professor's hypothesis, the major then has the other men in the lab try to convince the man in the tank that what he holds most dear - the love of his wife - is a lie.
It works, but not forever, for in the end Love concurs all.
Ten years later, another movie was made, "Altered States" with William Hurt. In this, the professor (Hurt) also spends long hours in the tank. In a nod to the 70's, he does not simply become a vegetable - instead, he travels further and further back into his DNA until at last he is a zygote, riven through with cosmic lightening, one in the same with the first speck of matter at the beginning of the Big Bang. He goes mad, too, although his mind has not turned to jelly. And he, too, is saved by the love of a woman (I believe his ex-wife who never stopped loving him but couldn't handle the weirdness).
The former was apparently the prototype for the latter, and both were intense psychological films. But how right were they? Does isolation really produce a mind of jelly or madness? In some cases, yes. The first time I came across this phenomena was years ago in an article on the Basque shepherds in Nevada's Great Basin. There, shepherds will sometimes leave for the big open deserts with the sheep for 6 months, alone. The author of the article was introduced - or pointed to - a young shepherd who had done just that a few years before. When he came back, he had the madness - I can't recall the name the Basque's had for it, but it was common enough to have a name - and wouldn't speak. He was lost in some sort of interior self from which he would not - or could not - return.
There was also the man who went to Antarctica (many decades ago when this could be done) and dug a hole in the ice with a bulldozer during the summer. He spent the next 6 or more months in that hole until the icebreaker could come back for him. He wrote a book about it - or a book was written about him, I can't recall - in which one or the other states that the man never went back to being himself; what he had understood in his solitude had taken all the lightness from life.
There are the stories of men lost in the Nularbor Plains in south central Australia. This is a vast extension of desert where the highest point in sight might be a short stubble of grass. There it is claimed - corroborated, too, on occasion - that trackers have found the lost prospectors or what have you weeping, clinging desperately to the clumps of grass. One man found thus said,"I felt the earth would throw me off into the stars."
What of the hermits in the caves? And what, first off, of those real-life people who did extensive work in the isolation tanks? On the latter, the best resource is John Lilly, the original scientist in this area. Lilly is best known for his experiments with dolphins, the man who made the image of the dolphin that we have of it to this day - that is, of an intelligent and social animal with a great brain and communication skills. But along side these experiments were the tanks, which he designed himself to minimize sensory perception - to the point where urine bottles were placed so as not to be noticed, so that one could relax every muscle possible (he claimed that this alone sent him into an unexpected bliss; the last time most of us have had this experience was when we were two). On top of that, he and others working with him often went into the tanks after taking varying doses of LSD. The results? Intense experiences both with and without the drug. With LSD, there were some freak-outs, and people were outside the tanks just in case, but usually the experiences were those of awe. Without the drug, there was also awe, and learning - I don't believe anyone became psychotic.
The experiments came about his way: in 1954, Lilly got a job as a young neurological scientist at Bethesda, Maryland. There, a senior professor wished to test a hypothesis: that without external stimuli of any kind, the mind would go blank, become a void. Lilly designed the tanks and then dug in. After tens of hours of this work, he says that he experienced dreamlike, trance-like and mystical states but throughout all, he felt intact, centered and "there" (the senior's theory, of course, was shot to hell). In other words, he never lost his sense of being, the "center:" his brain never became jelly. He met a "supraself" and "supra species meta programmers", and had other experiences far beyond words. He also experienced brain activity at an unknown "sub" level, and communication on a "network" of civilization "way beyond ours." He also did experience the "zygote" phenomena on LSD, but did not go insane, either.
Lilly, however, was a special man, a true neural explorer. Others might panic when meeting "supra species meta programmers". As he himself said, in the tank, "alone with one's God, one has no alibis." From that, one can see that perhaps there had been some hard times. But the self was not lost, and insanity was not a natural expectation. Isolation in this way is not what the movies have told us: that is, we might have heavy experiences, but we will not be destroyed - or at least, it is not a natural outcome, although some may have personalities or disorders that make them susceptible to psychosis under these conditions.
What of the anchorites, the religious people who live in isolation, sometimes for years on end? More on that later, FK
I forget the name, although I doubt if any of the readers would have seen it anyway; made in 1963 England at the height of the Cold war, it concerns a top-secret project at Oxford, where it is found that one of the professors involved was paid by "Eastern European gentlemen with snow on their boots" to divulge the secrets revealed in the experiments. This professor kills himself, which reveals his payment, and which then sends a major with the counter-espionage force to find exactly WHAT the experiments were and what might have been divulged. He contacts another professor involved in the experiments who, on hearing that his partner is being written off as a traitor, strives to convince the major that the dead professor could not help his manipulation because of the experiments in which they were involved. We then find out what these experiments concern - hours spent in an isolation tank! The major is not convinced, and so the professor offers up his sanity to prove the point to the major. He descends into the tank, and within 8 hours, has become a complete vegetable. To test the professor's hypothesis, the major then has the other men in the lab try to convince the man in the tank that what he holds most dear - the love of his wife - is a lie.
It works, but not forever, for in the end Love concurs all.
Ten years later, another movie was made, "Altered States" with William Hurt. In this, the professor (Hurt) also spends long hours in the tank. In a nod to the 70's, he does not simply become a vegetable - instead, he travels further and further back into his DNA until at last he is a zygote, riven through with cosmic lightening, one in the same with the first speck of matter at the beginning of the Big Bang. He goes mad, too, although his mind has not turned to jelly. And he, too, is saved by the love of a woman (I believe his ex-wife who never stopped loving him but couldn't handle the weirdness).
The former was apparently the prototype for the latter, and both were intense psychological films. But how right were they? Does isolation really produce a mind of jelly or madness? In some cases, yes. The first time I came across this phenomena was years ago in an article on the Basque shepherds in Nevada's Great Basin. There, shepherds will sometimes leave for the big open deserts with the sheep for 6 months, alone. The author of the article was introduced - or pointed to - a young shepherd who had done just that a few years before. When he came back, he had the madness - I can't recall the name the Basque's had for it, but it was common enough to have a name - and wouldn't speak. He was lost in some sort of interior self from which he would not - or could not - return.
There was also the man who went to Antarctica (many decades ago when this could be done) and dug a hole in the ice with a bulldozer during the summer. He spent the next 6 or more months in that hole until the icebreaker could come back for him. He wrote a book about it - or a book was written about him, I can't recall - in which one or the other states that the man never went back to being himself; what he had understood in his solitude had taken all the lightness from life.
There are the stories of men lost in the Nularbor Plains in south central Australia. This is a vast extension of desert where the highest point in sight might be a short stubble of grass. There it is claimed - corroborated, too, on occasion - that trackers have found the lost prospectors or what have you weeping, clinging desperately to the clumps of grass. One man found thus said,"I felt the earth would throw me off into the stars."
What of the hermits in the caves? And what, first off, of those real-life people who did extensive work in the isolation tanks? On the latter, the best resource is John Lilly, the original scientist in this area. Lilly is best known for his experiments with dolphins, the man who made the image of the dolphin that we have of it to this day - that is, of an intelligent and social animal with a great brain and communication skills. But along side these experiments were the tanks, which he designed himself to minimize sensory perception - to the point where urine bottles were placed so as not to be noticed, so that one could relax every muscle possible (he claimed that this alone sent him into an unexpected bliss; the last time most of us have had this experience was when we were two). On top of that, he and others working with him often went into the tanks after taking varying doses of LSD. The results? Intense experiences both with and without the drug. With LSD, there were some freak-outs, and people were outside the tanks just in case, but usually the experiences were those of awe. Without the drug, there was also awe, and learning - I don't believe anyone became psychotic.
The experiments came about his way: in 1954, Lilly got a job as a young neurological scientist at Bethesda, Maryland. There, a senior professor wished to test a hypothesis: that without external stimuli of any kind, the mind would go blank, become a void. Lilly designed the tanks and then dug in. After tens of hours of this work, he says that he experienced dreamlike, trance-like and mystical states but throughout all, he felt intact, centered and "there" (the senior's theory, of course, was shot to hell). In other words, he never lost his sense of being, the "center:" his brain never became jelly. He met a "supraself" and "supra species meta programmers", and had other experiences far beyond words. He also experienced brain activity at an unknown "sub" level, and communication on a "network" of civilization "way beyond ours." He also did experience the "zygote" phenomena on LSD, but did not go insane, either.
Lilly, however, was a special man, a true neural explorer. Others might panic when meeting "supra species meta programmers". As he himself said, in the tank, "alone with one's God, one has no alibis." From that, one can see that perhaps there had been some hard times. But the self was not lost, and insanity was not a natural expectation. Isolation in this way is not what the movies have told us: that is, we might have heavy experiences, but we will not be destroyed - or at least, it is not a natural outcome, although some may have personalities or disorders that make them susceptible to psychosis under these conditions.
What of the anchorites, the religious people who live in isolation, sometimes for years on end? More on that later, FK
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