I originally wanted to write another article about my movie CLEVELAND'S SCREAMING! which will premier next Wednesday July 25th at 7:30 at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood (get your tickets here). But some other stuff has come up I want to write about. So you are all honor bound to attend the movie premier next Wednesday without my hyping it any further here. If you’re not there I will beat you up.

So last weekend I was up in Montreal, at the Fantasia Film Festival. This is my third visit and I’ve made some friends up there including a guy named Thibault DuChene. Thibault is a grad student at McGill University’s Counseling Psychology Department who is interested in Zen as well as in the various technologically enhanced meditation methods now on the market, such as isolation tanks, and sound and light generators intended to induce meditative states. Thibault has access to a place where you can rent time on some of these contraptions. Knowing full well that I have said some not so nice things about such mechanical meditation devices in the past, Thibault invited me to come and check some of them out myself.

I don't think isolation tanks and sound and light generators are bad, or evil, or any of that. And who cares if I did. But I do say that the effects they produce have nothing at all to do with what we are aiming at in Buddhist practice. Yet there is tremendous confusion on the issue. I once saw a Buddhist Master tell his student that she could make years worth of progress along the Buddhist path by spending just a few hours in an isolation tank. He was full of shit. Ads in Buddhist magazines claim that sound and light generating machines can have you meditating as deep as a Zen monk in minutes with no prior experience. Also bullshit.

I’ve said this before and people always screech, “You’ve never tried these things!!! How can you know?!?!?!” This is ridiculous logic. I’m certain dog shit does not taste like chocolate without ever having done a blind taste test. In any case, none of those crumb-bums can ever again tell me not to knock ‘em if I haven’t tried ‘em. So there.

An isolation tank is like a really, really big bathtub. It’s filled with thick salt water kept at exactly body temperature. The tub is enclosed on all sides by a fiberglass shell that shuts out as much sound and light as possible. The reason it’s filled with salt water is so that you float in it just like you can float on the Dead Sea, without your body ever touching the bottom. When you lay in this thing, shut the door, turn out the lights and let the salt water fill up your ears you lose almost all sensory information from the outside world. Theoretically there’s no light, no sound, and no sense of touch.

Once I got in I found quickly that did not like the fact that my, urm, bait and tackle bobbed out above the water like a little pornographic island. It’s not like a normal bathtub where the bottom half of your body sinks. Still, I relaxed and tried to let the experience occur as it would. At first, in the absence of any visual evidence to the contrary I tended to experience the tank as being immensely huge, like the ceiling was miles above and the salt water extended to the edge of the known world. This soon passed when my feet bumped up against the end. But it was cool for a couple minutes.

In order to try and get as meditative as possible as I lay there I tried to establish the state of mind you get in Zazen practice. I found this utterly impossible. Zazen is a physical practice and depends as much upon bodily sensations and feedback — including a certain degree of discomfort — as any sport. The design of the isolation tank is based on the idea that mind and body are two distinct and eternally separate entities. But the state of mind divorced from body never exists in nature. We think it might, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who could convince me they’d ever experienced such an absurd thing.

Close as it strives to come, the isolation tank doesn’t really provide the sense of mind free from body. I could hear people walking around upstairs by the vibrations carried through the structure of the building. I could hear my own heartbeat. I could feel the water to a degree and I was certainly aware of my, urm, bait and tackle flopping around there like a rotted keilbasa carelessly tossed into the Great Salt Lake. I could also see darkness around me. And darkness isn’t really the same as the absence of optical information.

In any case, I tried my best to let myself go. But after a few more minutes I just nodded off. I was awakened at the end of my hour by some weird new age music that reminded me a bit of the soundtrack to Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (the second greatest film of all time, the first being, of course, Cleveland’s Screaming). When I got out I was disoriented and dizzy. It took a minute or so to find my land legs again. This too was quite different from Zazen which has sometimes left me a bit stiff legged but has never interfered with my natural sense of balance.

My biggest disappointment is that I did not transform into an ape man like William Hurt did when he came out of the isolation tank in the movie Altered States.

After the isolation tank was over I got a chance to sample one of them sound and light machines that are supposed to have you meditating as deep as a Zen monk in mere minutes.

The one I tried was called the Pulsar. But just in case anyone doubts that these guys really do claim their stuff works just like Zazen, there’s another similar machine called The Zen Master.

To use it you sit on a comfy fake leather recliner just like dad used to slouch in to watch the Indians get beat by the Cubs. Then you slip on some DEVO-style sunglasses in which a bunch of little blue lights have been embedded. Finally you strap on a pair of headphones and switch on the unit. A CD plays a series of tones that are synchronized to the lights embedded in the glasses such that the lights blink at different rates according to the tones.

Weeeeeee-woooooop-wahhhhhhhhhh-Nnnnnyurnggggggg-woooooooop….

While the isolation tank had been relaxing and pleasant, this thing was just annoying. But I was committed to giving it the old college try for the full thirty-minute dosage. After a while it stopped being annoying and started being boring and once again I nodded off. I could not see the point of this one at all, I’m afraid. My only guess is that the tones might interrupt a person’s trains of thought and produce something that felt like whatever people who haven’t got a clue in the world think Zazen feels like.

So my verdict is that isolation tanks are pleasant enough and may have some therapeutic value but the sound and light machines are a complete waste of time. Both are highly artificial constructs created to try and realize some idea that thought has created. Zazen on the other hand aims to free us from everything thought has constructed. This is a far more vital concern. And something absolutely different. Nuff said.

Here's an outtake from CLEVELAND'S SCREAMING!. Something you won't see on Wednesday (but it'll be like this).



Brad Warner is the author of Hardcore Zen and Sit Down and Shut Up!. He maintains a blog about Buddhist stuff. If you're in Southern California and you want to try some Zazen for yourself, he has a group that meets every Saturday in Santa Monica.