Chapter 40 True Wisdom in Laughing Part 5-10

There was a time when I taught at Hughes Aircraft every Wednesday.One day I arrived a little early, flirting with the counter lady as usual, and suddenly six or seven people came running in, never met before.A man said, "Is Professor Feynman going to give a lecture here?" "Yes." The counter lady replied. He asked if his people could come and listen. "I don't think you'd like to listen to it very much," I said. "Those classes are quite professional." After a while, the smart lady thought: "I bet you are Professor Feynman!" It turned out that the man was John Lilly, who had done some dolphin research, and he and his wife were working on sensory loss and building some test chambers.

"Did hallucinations occur under those circumstances?" I asked, excited. "Really will." I've always been fascinated by images that appear in dreams, or images of unknown origin that appear in the mind, and I'd love to see for myself what hallucinations are like. I even thought about trying psychedelics, but I was a little afraid of doing it: I like to think, so I don't want to break "me" this machine.And I think there should be no danger to the body just lying in the sensory loss experiment box, so I really want to try it. I quickly accepted Li Li's invitation to try his experiment box; they also came to my class.

A week later, I went to him.Li Li explained everything about the experiment box to me—I believe he would explain it to everyone.There are many light bulbs there, like neon lights, and there are various gases in the lights.He showed me the periodic table and made up a lot of mysterious and absurd sayings about what different lights will have different effects and so on.He told me how to put my nose up in the mirror and look at myself before going into the box - a whole lot of weird tricks and nonsense.I didn't listen to that crap much, but I did exactly what he said because I wanted to go inside the box, and I thought maybe all this preparation really made me more prone to hallucinations.The only difficulty is choosing what color lights, because it will be pitch black inside the box.

The sensory loss chamber looks a lot like a bathtub, but it has a lid that lifts off.It's completely dark inside, and the cover is thick, so it should be silent.The box goes to a pump that pumps the air in; but then I found out that you don't have to worry about running out of air, because there's plenty of air in the box already, and you can't lie in it for two or three hours at most.Also, when you breathe like normal, you don't consume as much air.Li Li said that the main reason why he installed the pump was to make everyone feel at ease.I judged it was just a psychological effect and asked him to turn it off because it was a bit noisy.

They added Epsom salts to the water to make it denser than normal water, making it easier for the body to float up.The water temperature is human body temperature, 94 degrees Fahrenheit or something, he's figured it all out.While in the box, theoretically, you have no light: no perception of sound or temperature, at all!Occasionally you'll float aside and touch the side of the tank slightly, or drip from condensed water vapor - but even this slight disturbance is rare. I went back and forth a total of 12 times, and each time I lay in the box for about two and a half hours.I didn't have any hallucinations at the first time, but later Li Li introduced me to a man who was said to be a doctor, and he mentioned to me a drug "catamin" used as an anesthetic.I've always been interested in questions about falling asleep or being unconscious.They showed me the documentation again and gave me a tenth of the normal dose.

Then I had a weird feeling, and I never could figure out what that effect was.For example, those medicines have a great effect on my vision, I feel that I can't see very clearly.But when I look hard, I can see again.It's as if if you don't want to look at something, you're more casual and slouching; but once you look at it, everything is—at least for a split second—all right again.I picked up an organic chemistry book, turned to a very complicated diagram, and to my surprise found that I could read it. I also did a bunch of other things like spreading my hands apart and moving them closer together to see if the fingers could touch.And even though I felt disoriented and felt like I couldn't do anything, in fact, I still didn't find that there was anything I couldn't do.

As I said before, I didn't get any hallucinations on the first try, and I didn't see hallucinations on the second try either.But Li Li and his wife are very interesting people, and it is a pleasure to be with them.They often took me to lunch; soon we were talking on a higher level than just lighting.I find that a lot of people think the lab box is scary, but to me it's an interesting invention. I know exactly what it is: it's just a jar of Epsom salts, so I'm not afraid. When I went to his place for the third time, there was another person—I met many interesting people at Li Li’s—named Baba RamDas.

He's from Harvard, he's been to India, and he wrote a popular book called Be Here Now.He described how his Indian master taught him how to "go out of his body" (on the bulletin board at Li Li's place, he often saw similar words): Focus on the breath, on how the air is drawn in and out through the nostrils, etc. I was willing to try anything in order to experience the hallucination, so I entered the box again.At a certain stage in the process, I suddenly felt--it's hard to put it into words--that I moved an inch to the side.In other words, my breath—in, out, in, out—was not exactly in the middle: my ego was off center by a little bit, maybe an inch.

I thought, "So where the hell is the ego? I know everyone thinks the center of gravity of the mind is in the head, but how do they know it has to be? From what I've read before, I already know that a lot of psychology has been done on those It is not so obvious to those who are experimenting. For example, the Greeks believed that the center of gravity of the mind is in the liver." I thought again: "Is it possible, this is because when we were young, we saw grown-ups say, 'Let me think about it. The idea that I often put my hand over my head when I was in the middle of the night? In this way, the self is a concept behind the eyes, and it may have been taught from generation to generation!" I weighed if I could turn the self An inch to the side, then I should be able to move it a little further, and that's when my hallucinations started.

After trying for a while, I could move the ego down the neck and up to the chest.When the water dripped onto my shoulders, I felt it dripping "on top" - higher than "me".Every time there is a drop of water, I startle and the ego jumps back through my neck to its usual place: then I have to try again and let the ego run back to the chest again.At first I had to work really hard to get it to run, but it got easier and easier.I could even get my ego up to the waist and out to the side, but for a long time that was about as far as I could go. Another time in the tank, I decided that if I could move my ego up to my waist, I should also be able to move it completely outside my body.As a result I could "completely sit on the sidelines".It's not easy to explain - I hold my hands up and shake the water, and although I can't see them, I know where my hands are.

But what is different from real life is that it used to feel like one hand on one side, but now it feels like both hands are on the same side!Each finger felt exactly as it always did, except now my ego was sitting out there, "watching" it all. Since then, I have been able to hallucinate almost every time, and I have been able to move myself further away from my body.Later when I moved my hand, I saw things like machines moving up and down—they were no longer physical, they were machines—but I was still able to feel all the sensations.My senses match up perfectly with the movement, but I also feel "he's like that". In the end, "I" was even able to go outside the room and roam some distances to places where I had seen things happen before. I have had many kinds of "out-of-body" experiences.For example, at one point I was able to "see" the back of my head with my hands attached to it.When I move my fingers, I see them moving, but between my fingers I see the blue sky. Of course that's not true, it's a complete illusion.But the point is that when I move my fingers, they move exactly as I'm imagining what I'm seeing.The whole image will appear and match your sensations and movements, as if you wake up in the morning and touch something (you don't know what it is yet), but suddenly you know exactly what it is.Then the whole image suddenly appears, but it is special because you are used to imagining the ego at the back of the head, inside the skull, and now it is at the back of your skull! One thing that always bothers me is that when I see hallucinations, maybe I'm actually asleep and just dreaming.But I've had a lot of experience with dreaming, and I wanted to try something new.It's kind of mind blowing because when you're hallucinating, you're not as sharp as you normally would be, so you do silly things like checking to see if you're dreaming or whatever.Anyway, I'm constantly checking to see if I'm really not asleep: since my hands are often behind my head, I rub my thumbs back and forth to feel them.Of course, maybe even these tests were a dream, but I know I'm not, and I know it's real. After the initial period—that is, when I get too excited and “jump out” or stop hallucinating—I become more relaxed and the hallucinations last longer and longer. After a week or two, I began to think a lot about how the brain works like a computer, especially how information is stored.One of the very interesting questions is, how does memory exist in the head?You can obtain information from different sources, and you don't have to find the correct memory file first like a computer. For example, if I want to find the English word "rent", I may be able to use crossword puzzles to find a four-letter English word that begins with "r" and ends with "t"; You can imagine various incomes, or imagine some behaviors such as borrowing and lending, which in turn may bring us to a whole lot of other related information.I'm thinking about how to make an "imitative" machine that can learn language like a child, so that we can talk to the machine.But I can't figure out how to store the information in a systematic way and let the machine retrieve it as it wants. When I was in the tank that week and hallucinated, I tried to think about earlier memories.I keep saying to myself: "Go back to earlier memories, earlier" - I always feel that the memories that appear are not early enough. When I get a very early memory, such as the hometown town where I was born, then immediately A string of memories will emerge, all from that small town.If I then think about another city, say, the town of Starhurst, a whole bunch of Starhurst-related memories come flooding back.So my conclusion is that memory is stored according to where the experience occurred. Satisfied with my discovery, I climbed out of the tank, showered, dressed, and drove to Hughes Aircraft to give a lecture.So that was about 45 minutes or so after I left the tank, and suddenly I realized for the first time that I had no idea how memories were stored in my head; I was just hallucinating how memories were stored in my head!Everything I "discovered" has nothing to do with how memories are actually stored in my head, just some games I'm playing with myself! In my countless discussions with Li Li, whenever I talked about hallucinations, I emphasized to him and others that just because you imagine something to be true, doesn't mean it's true.If you see a golden ball or something and tell yourself in your hallucination that they are another kind of intelligence, that doesn't necessarily mean that they are really intelligence, it just means that you have the hallucination.So I was also very surprised that I thought I really discovered the way of memory storage, and it took 45 minutes to realize that I made a mistake, and this is a mistake I have been telling others not to make! Another question I often wonder is, are hallucinations, like dreams, influenced by something already in your mind, say, by an experience a day or two ago or by something you wish to see in your mind?I believe that I will have the experience of "being out of the body", entirely because just before I was about to enter the experiment box, everyone was discussing this topic.And the reason why I have hallucinations about how memories exist in my head, I believe, is also because I have been thinking about that topic for the previous week. I have discussed the authenticity of experience with many people there, and they counter that according to the principles of experimental science, if an experience can be repeated, it should be real.So if a lot of people are seeing talking golden balls talking to them non-stop, then those golden balls must be real.My idea is that there must have been some discussion about the golden ball before this situation, so that when the experimenter hallucinated, he would see something close to the golden ball—maybe a blue ball— He thought he was repeating that experience. I think I can understand that there is a difference between those who have made up their minds to agree with a certain point of view, and the agreement obtained from experiments.The funny thing is, it's not that hard to point out the difference, but it's hard to define it! I also believe that there is no correlation between the external environment and the internal psychology of the hallucinating person.But there are many people who, based on their own experience, still believe that there is reality hidden in the illusion.This idea can also be used to illustrate many successful examples of dream interpretation.For example, some psychoanalysts discuss the meaning of various symbols in order to interpret dreams; then, it is likely that these symbols will appear in the next dream.So I think maybe interpreting the hallucinations and the dreams themselves, is a self-generated thing - generally you'll have some degree of success, especially if you discuss it with someone up front. Usually it takes me 15 minutes for the hallucinations to occur, but there have been a few times when I've smoked a bit of marijuana beforehand and the hallucinations have come quickly.Still, 15 minutes is fast enough. What often happens is that along with the hallucinations, there is also a lot of "garbage" Uninvited: Lots of jumbled images, completely random crap.I also tried to jot down the junk images so I could sort them out, but they were all extremely difficult. I think at that point, I was pretty close to falling asleep—like there was some kind of logical connection, but when you recall what made you think of what you were thinking, you couldn't.In fact, pretty quickly you forget what it was you were trying to remember. All I can remember is like a white street sign in Chicago with a dot or something on it and then it just disappears, it always does. Li Li has several different experiment boxes, so we did various experiments. As far as hallucinations go, the results didn't seem to make much of a difference, and I've come to believe that the tank is simply unnecessary.Now that I know how to do it, I feel like I just need to sit still - why all that fancy gear? So I ran home, turned off the lights, and sat down in a comfortable chair in the living room, but I tried and tried, and it didn't work.I never get hallucinations after leaving the tank.I'd love to try hallucinations at home and have no doubt you can do that with meditation and practice, but I've never practiced that way.