Isolation Tank Gnosis

For years, I misunderstood what the scientist and consciousness explorer John C. Lilly meant by insanity and internal sanity in his groundbreaking book The Deep Self.

At first glance, it’s easy to assume that Lilly saw insanity and internal sanity as two sides of the same coin — that his “madness” was just another word for mystical expansion. After all, he often described wild, visionary experiences in isolation tanks that resembled what psychiatry might call psychosis.

But that interpretation misses the central point of Lilly’s philosophy. The difference between insanity and internal sanity, in his eyes, wasn’t about how extreme an experience was — it was about who was steering the mind while it happened.

🌌 The Deep Self and the Search for Inner Reality

In The Deep Self, Lilly documents his decades of work with sensory isolation tanks, exploring the far reaches of consciousness beyond external stimulation. Inside the tank, the mind begins to run its own “programs,” generating visions, emotions, and inner worlds independent of sensory input.

Some of these inner experiences resemble madness: losing the sense of self, hearing voices, or drifting beyond time and body. But Lilly learned that these states can either shatter a person — or transform them — depending on the presence of one crucial faculty: the metabelief operator.

🔁 What Is the Metabelief Operator?

Lilly defined the metabelief operator as the part of the mind that can observe, question, and modify its own beliefs.

“The term ‘metabelief’ is defined as a belief about beliefs themselves. Thus a metabelief operator is a concept, function, or agent that operates on, transforms, introduces changes into belief systems.”
— The Deep Self, Chapter 6

In other words, it’s the self-aware function that allows you to realize, “I’m not my thoughts. I’m not my beliefs. I can rewrite the program.”

When this function is strong, you can navigate even the most intense internal experiences without losing your center. When it’s weak or absent, the mind becomes trapped inside its own simulations — mistaking inner constructs for external truth.

⚖️ Insanity vs. Internal Sanity

For Lilly, insanity wasn’t defined by hallucinations or unusual experiences — those were neutral phenomena. Insanity meant losing the observer, the inner pilot who can navigate and interpret such experiences.

Internal sanity, on the other hand, was the state of awake authorship — the ability to explore one’s inner worlds while keeping the awareness that “this too is a creation of mind.”

🌀 Why Society Mislabels Transformation as “Madness”

Lilly also observed that rapid belief changes — the very sign of a healthy metabelief operator — are often treated by society as signs of instability.

“In the consensus reality, fast belief changes in a given person are suspect; that person is considered abnormal, far out, diseased, mentally ill, fanatic, unstable.”
— The Deep Self, Ch. 6

In other words, the ability to reprogram beliefs — to evolve, to change rapidly — threatens social consensus. Yet for Lilly, this flexibility was the essence of inner sanity. A person capable of rewriting their own beliefs was free from “paper realities,” the prepackaged belief systems handed down by culture, media, and authority.

What led me to question my belief that insanity and internal sanity were the same?

Because I just evicted a woman who was holding onto certain delusions and starting to destroy and steal property of myself and neighbors…. I began to wonder how I could accomodate and tolerate and embrace her internal model of reality when it was leading to damage to myself and my neighbors. I called the police on her and requested they do a wellness check. After talking with her, they forcefully took her away without her belongings of any sort. She was to go for a mental evaluation and could be back the same night. But I have not seen her in 2-3 weeks. The sad part is she was in school to be a psychiatrist who treated mental illness without drugs… but she could not function long enough to graduate.

Imagination is truly the stuff reality is made of: there is no objective reality beyond what we collectively agree to, moment by moment. And collective agreement can be as small as 2 people or as large a 1 million. And certainly all 7 billion homo sapiens do not hold unanimous collective agreement on any thing.

But I began to wonder just where the line was on internal models of reality. Below I show the footage of the police questioning my former guest and arresting her. The issues that I have with her model of reality are shown in the videos.

1. 0:42–1:13 She explains that her neighbors have been connecting to her Wi‑Fi and interfering with her ability to make phone calls. Heather claims to have repeatedly tried to disconnect them…. in other words, she wants to call her boyfriend so he can pick her up so she can leave before I evict her. But she cannot call because neighbors have been connecting to her Wi‑Fi and interfering with her ability to make phone call
2. 3:20–3:40 The police warn that she is putting herself in danger by walking onto other people’s property. Heather calmly replies that she is not worried about danger at all. 3:40–3:43 Heather asserts: “Father God, the whole place is watching.” This marks the moment she claims divine protection and shows her conviction that she is acting rationally and watched over.
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN2fwA__M5M&list=PL3XbhV5b3Os3bUECP2ImPIU4Z_Oh-sn-9 notice that when she is asked where he lives, she engages in avoidance behavior – she cant provide hard facts about this phantom fiance and starts avoiding questions and attempting to tell the officers to leave.
4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SepdEiowWt0&list=PL3XbhV5b3Os3bUECP2ImPIU4Z_Oh-sn-9&index=3 – it’s really painful to hear someone protesting in pain and agony. She does not share reality with me, the landlord, or the neighbor whose property she vandalized, or the police who interrogated her. But to her mind, she had every right to do everything she did. But all of us did not and we won the battle of opinions. It’s sort of like seeing a cow in a slaughterhouse. It’s doing it’s best to get out of the situation. But the butcher and the consumers want steak, so the hooks go around the cows ankle (against his will), he gets his throat slit (against his will) and he gets hung upside down (against his will).

The entire set of recordings is here: