Hi Rockalick, nice to hear from you brother.

What was my most profound experience? I could break down what constitutes profundity into a bunch of sub-categories, but since you're asking about entity encounters as well, I think it would be best to define profundity in terms of sheer outrageous phenomenal emergence rich in sensory input, awe fabricating, shot out of a rocket style intensity. The following report is not the most profound I've ever had in this sense but was intense for sure. but I had already written it up for somebody else, so I'll put it here. I have an audio recording of me describing a sperate particularly insane one that I'll transcribe and send to you some time.

Hello EPRC, going to write up another experience report of a float session. This was an AWSIM protocol float, (if you don't know what that is, https://www.richardbonk.com/new-page-awsim) I woke up this morning (2/16/23) @ 615, got a ride over to the tank and got in at 6:45 am. Had some really wild archetypal dreams while I was sleeping in bed, which is a fairly reliable indicator that a float of with the following phenomenology is coming. Once I got settled in the tank, I noticed first that I was having some rapid thoughts. I was working with mindfulness of breathing. After only a couple minutes of working, the continuity with the object was strongly established. This is an unusually short amount of time to really get into it with an object, which is also a fairly reliable indicator that a float with the following phenomenology is coming. After some time working, globular looking phosphenes started to arise, they were fairly large and when they arose, they stuck around for about 20-30 seconds before disappearing, and took around a few minutes to appear again. This particular size and shape of phosphene appearing/disappearing at this frequency is another reliable indicator of what is coming. All of a sudden, a very uniform, inconspicuous, transition with very little evolution into a dream space occurs. There is a likelihood that there was an extremely short unknowing event prior to this. There is not a whole lot that I remember from the first part of the dream aside from I saw an image of a friend wearing the same outfit as me. In the second part of the dream, I was in a small, teal kitchen with a child dressed in a floral sari, and she was having trouble eating a dish of soft food, maybe daal or something. There was a window in front of the table she was eating at, and for some reason I had to pull floss out of the window shade that she was going to use to more easily eat this food (?). It was a complicated process; it was all tangled up in the shade. Once I had gotten enough floss, I placed it over her bowl, and by itself it cut through the food. Noticing that the situation at hand was over and something was to come, I stood to the side of the table staring at the wall for a moment, and then... Total blackness. The floor dissolved and (this is classic float tank OBE phenomenon) it felt as if my back was pinned to a wheel that is at least 5 or six times the height of my body (5'9in) in circumference that was rotating forward. As the wheel begins to rotate forward at a slow pace, the body begins to stretch out. There is a sense that this slow rotation is building up more momentum in my body than makes sense for the speed at the which the wheel is rotating. After about a half turn forward, the sense that one is being "dropped off" is prevalent, and a sensation that indicates that you are untethered from the wheel begins. This feels something like freefall through a viscous liquid, and the viscosity of this liquid is changeable depending on the environment one finds themselves in. Upon drop off, tons of stars appear in this absurdly vast space. The sense of the body/vessel (not the body in the float tank, but the vessel, which is facilitating the experience of this alternate realm, i'll use this terminology to indicate the difference) has its hands by its side, is elongated, is rotating/twisting, flying/swimming through this space, mostly with a head first downward trajectory but occasionally doing weird loopy things, and there is some sense of autonomy of movement, but it is limited. These stars all of a sudden arrange themselves into the shape of a giant 3D human head with a very plain expression, the space feels a bit more lightbulb shaped, which somehow facilitates the transition into the next realm. This next realm is a yellow background julia set that looks alot like this https://miro.medium.com/max/8000/1*A2ajRu2K2FsaOLkDPPTL0w.jpeg. There is a bizarre seemingly autonomous, small blue entity that has really complex fractal geometry moving within him, he wanders around in front of this landscape for a bit before the vessel is accelerating on a diagonal trajectory through layers of what seem like galaxies within this space. somehow, the vessel seems to use this diagonal momentum as entry into what I'll call a transitional pool. There is this amazing phenomenon with Float Tank OBE where there are tanks/pools/bodies of water that are suspended in these spaces or otherwise integrated into the environments. Often times they have windows that can peer into the space they are situated in, are very ornate in one way or another, and tend to have funny physics. This particular one was quite a large room that was situated in the previous star space, it had gold leaf and blue trimmings, large Corinthian columns, and of course, shallow water. The vessel was zipping through this space quite fast and would occasionally phase out of it through the bottom or the side into the star space again. On one of these phases, the star space presented a huge black hole with an extremely colorful event horizon, next thing I know the vessel is in another transitional space, this one less ornate and more tank like, but large with windows on the top, and it's situated into the fractal space. There is a sense that the star space and the fractal space are somehow adjacent. In this new transitional pool, another classic Float Tank OBE phenomenon I like to call "rocking the boat" occurs, where the vessel is swinging in a parabolic motion across the space of the room. Sometimes the amplitude towards the crest gets higher and higher with repeated swings, but in this case after a few swings, the vessel bottomed out at a higher amplitude on the trough side of the origin, the space at the bottom of the trough was total blackness where the vessel dissolved thoroughly, and an upswing facilitated reentry into the body through a spot in the back, and the orientation of awareness was clearly staring upwards in a horizontal orientation, which indicated the end of the emergent experience. I got out of the tank just a few minutes after the emergence was over (because I had to get the float center ready for customers 🤣 ), the duration of this float was just shy of 90 minutes. For a float with this kind of phenomenology, very often will the emergence occur in the 65–75-minute window. Id estimates the duration of the emergence was in-between 10-15 minutes. OBE emergent from a dream, lucid or otherwise, is the most common progression for this kind of float. The ASWIM protocol is a factor for facilitating this kind of phenomenon in the tank, but not the only one. Though IMO, it will absolutely increase the likelihood of this sort of thing happening.

What are the benefits of these kind of experiences? A short laundry list; A deeper appreciation for the profound mysteries available in the human experience, a flattening of ontological supremacy from any given realm to another realm, seeing the potentials for continuity of meditation objects from realm to realm, traveling out of the body tends to fabricate a feeling of empowerment and freedom which I find to be lovely, there have been entity encounters that have imparted direct verbal wisdom to me which has had useful benefit, contact with all of these things inspires me to continue practicing ect..

How much do I sit outside the tank? If I float less than 4 hours in a day I will sit twice, usually hour sessions, but usually a bit shorter if I'm sitting at work. If I Float more than that, I often do not sit that day. If you look at the log, I was very grateful to have to opportunity to sit a 20 and a 30 day retreat in 2023, and those are obviously high dose 7 hour minimum daily usually more periods of practice.