Perhaps an archaeologist of the future will stumble upon one of these sensory deprivation businesses enterprises that are cropping up all over America (they’re even in Louisville, where I live). If these future archaeologists are able to identify what they are, and what they were used for, maybe they will wonder why we paid real money to subject ourselves to this ritual deprivation. Or maybe they will have enough context to put things together. Maybe they will hypothesize that in a world where our spines were changing shape—as we hunched over our light boxes during most of our waking hours—some of us just needed to shock ourselves into a radically different sensual experience.
As someone who studies religion (I sometimes like to think of myself as an archaeologist of the imagination) I find it interesting that this “float therapy”, or restricted environment simulation therapy, rhymes with other tools and techniques used throughout history to provoke some form of self-transcendence. Some have argued that the phrase “sensory deprivation” can’t capture the feeling of weightless relaxation you experience, as you float in the dark, in water with enough magnesium sulfate to keep you from sinking. But this deprivation is precisely what makes this float therapy look like a mystical technique, to me. Asceticism of all sorts (especially the deprivation of food) is a common mode of recourse, for generating spiritual insight. But so is the deprivation of speech (through the practice of silence). Notably, speech was once considered a sense, in western culture.
You might also be thinking, “this isn’t mystical. It’s just a dark bath in water. Nothing spiritual about it.” And that’s fair. But the technique was apparently developed by John C. Lilly, author of The Mind of the Dolphin. Lilly is described in many ways (as a physician, a neuroscientist, a psychoanalyst, a psyconaut). Whoever he really was, Lilly was obsessed enough with what he called our “inner realities” that he opened The Mind of the Dolphin with quotes from the Bible, and included an entire chapter on the “spiritual side” of our relationships with oceanic mammals. He also apparently gave dolphins LSD, which was one of several things that eroded his professional credibility. I mention Lilly only just to argue that I think he, and the techniques he developed, had a kind of mystical aim at heart. He wanted to figure out how to generate dramatic forms of spiritual experience that would take us outside of ourselves and immerse us in the more than human world. For our purposes, let’s call this sort of immersion “mystical.”
So I think of these sensory deprivation tanks as, in a loose way, mystical technologies. They create a ripe and unsettling new way of experiencing the life moving through your body and back out into the wilderness around it. In this sense, I read them as similar—in key ways—to caves.
The archaeologist David Lewis-Williams argued that Upper Paleolithic cave art is a relic of a mystical experience: the record of some sort of vision. Like dreams, or the ingestion of chemical substances, Lewis-Williams believes that the sensory deprivation that Upper Paleolithic people would have experienced in a cave environment was a method for altering their consciousness. “The images were not so much painted on the rock walls,” he writes, so much as they were “released from, or coaxed through” them. The rock itself became a kind of “living membrane” that hovered between the image maker and the spirit world.
Having been deep into those caves myself, and having spent mere seconds in the kind of all-encompassing total darkness that would have surrounded these artists, I can attest to the way that these cave environments can radically alter your physical experience. There’s the rapid rise of adrenaline, of course, which feels both thrilling and terrifying. But there’s also an awareness of the hidden, beautiful, and hostile, rock world all around you. In darkness like that, senses that you often move to the background in favor of sight (proprioception, touch, smell) burn brighter.
But, of course, given my disciplinary background and training, I am especially susceptible to readings that stumble upon mystical forms of experience in the most extreme or mundane events. I see the possible emergence of mystical things everywhere.
As I’ve been working on my new research project, into dimensions of the underworld, I keep asking myself where this new obsession came from. Half of research is being obsessed with something. The other half is pondering the motive for your obsession. This week, I’ve been attributing it to an inner conviction I’ve been pursuing: that underworlds are spaces of a kind of deprivation. So they become technologies that immerse us in some kind of mystical experience: they bathe us in the more than human world in and around us.
The mystical possibilities of the underworld seem to hover just below the surface of one of the best books on the underworld that I’ve read, so far (and which I’ve mentioned numerous times): Robert Macfarlane’s Underland. His chapter on cave art is probably one of the most powerful passages of the book, in this sense. As he tries to imagine himself into a form of deep time where he can still nevertheless touch something made by the hand of another human, something dramatic seems to happen to him. I would describe it as something mystical. But he’s a poet, and so it also seems to me that this mystical possibility is veiled, and intentionally muted. I tend to think of poetry as a technology for transmitting these kinds of mystical possibilities in a hidden and often depotentiated kind of way. I love it for that reason, but there’s also a reason I became a scholar and not a poet.
Perhaps it’s because he speaks so directly that Will Hunt’s Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet has recently unseated Underland as my favorite new underworld book. The book is engaging, adventurous, and beautifully written, which helps. But right from the opening pages, Hunt feels no shame or embarrassment in explicitly noting that there is a spiritual power in the underworld. It is, he writes, “our ghost landscape.” It pulls at us in ways that we can feel, but can only barely recognize. We are connected to it in much the way that we’re connected to our shadows. As we crawl into the underworld (using our bodies or our minds), Hunt suggests that we “become attuned to all of the invisible forces that shape our reality.” We open a passage into the chambers of our imagination. “We go down to see what is unseen, unseeable—we go in search of illumination that can only be found in the dark.”
As someone educated in theological studies during a boom era in apophatic methodologies, this illuminated darkness felt immediately theological to me. That is to say, I immediately felt like an illuminated darkness was being used to transmit the experience of some sort of divine power. That it was a word technology to immerse us in a more than human wilderness. I spent the duration of Hunt’s book feeling as if it would be another one of those texts that would simply resonate with theology, but it would ultimately be incumbent upon me (the theologian) to make the argument that there’s something theological about it. And I would have to do this with the knowledge that no one would really care to hear about it anyhow: educated Americans tend to like to keep this part of things hidden. Ideas are sexier when they don’t seem “religious.”
So I was pleasantly surprised to reach Hunt’s conclusion, where he directly confronts all of the mystical potencies that I’d seen popping up in the underworld passages he opened along the way.
“I did not come to the underground as a pilgrim,” he concludes. But he admits that this is what he ultimately became. What he discovered, as he wandered into the mouths of caves or through intestinal passages below the surface of the earth was something that he describes as an “ancestral muscle memory” that also sweeps hundreds of years of scientific research under the rug.
We might know, rationally and intellectually, that we are simply experiencing a form of sensory deprivation in the underworld. We might know that we’re not entering the spirit realm. We might be able to think about what’s happening as a simple shift in our nervous system. And yet, he argues, it may be the case that our strange affective connection to caves is our most primal and deeply inscribed form of religious experience. It’s a space where we, the living, get a small sensory taste of what it might be like to be beyond the conditions for our existence: to be, impossibly. “The underground reminds us of what our ancestors always knew, that there is forever power and beauty in the unspoken and the unseen.” In this sense, “the underworld teaches us to respect mystery.”
God isn’t the only word for mystery. And, I’ll be honest, it’s not even my favorite. But it’s certainly an old, dominant, and direct one. It’s also the one Hunt gives it. “The underground helped me acknowledge the seams of ineffability in the world,” he writes, “teaching me to sit in peace with shadows, to embrace modes of thought that lie between the empirical and the visionary.” In the underworld, he writes, “I encounter God not as a voice booming down from the clouds, but as an embrace of hiddenness, an acknowledgement of certain dark hollows whose power we will always feel, even if they may never be seen.”
In the deprivations of the underworld, an unwitting pilgrim stumbles into a form of immersion—a ritual bath in the lush, sometimes hostile, but always awe inspiring more than human wilderness that made us and holds us. This is the galactic underworld—the passage below that feels like a voice from above.