From the Vault: John C. Lilly

The figure of John C. Lilly as psychedelic dolphin communicator burns in the collective memory as a counterculture avatar, yet his legacy embodies far more than the mythologized and/or vilified figure that most of us know. Join Robert Lamb and Christian Sager as they examine the life, career and ideas of Lilly the scientist, Lilly the counterespionage researcher and Lilly the psychonaut. Welcome to the province of the mind. (Originally published Feb. 23, 2016)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday,
so we're going on into the vault. And what do
I see in the vault this time but a bunch
of dolphins. That's right, we're going back to February. This
was an episode that I did with Christian on John C. Lily.
John C. Lily the Psychonaute. Yes, yes, the man has

(00:27):
a very fascinating history, from counter espionage researcher for the government,
to uh, you know, Maverick and even renegade dolphin researcher
to to counterculture icon. Just a fascinating figure to look at,
and that's what this episode does. Well, put on your
Davy Crockett hat and get ready to listen to John C. Lily.

(00:54):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hey, you're welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I am
Christian Sager, and we're going to be talking about a
great combination of things today isolation, tanks, dolphins, and psychedelics. Yeah,
the creature from the Black Lagoon will actually show up

(01:17):
Cold War era anti espionage, weird science. It's it's quite
a package. You couldn't make this up. Like if you
wrote a fictional account of a guy like John C. Lily,
it would seem absurd, but this is a life he led.
Yeah indeed. I mean even the fictionalized accounts of the man,
I feel that they don't quite capture the weirdness and

(01:40):
strangeness and just mind expanding awesomeness of his actual story.
They don't know. So, but before we roll right in,
because I think we should really just dive into the
deep end. No pun attended with John C. Lily. Uh
do we just want to remind our audience that, uh,
you know, we don't just do the podcast Stuff to
Blow Your Mind mind as a multi media conglomerate, and uh,

(02:03):
you can visit us at stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com, where you can find blog posts by us.
The podcast is obviously there, of course, but for every
podcast episode we add related content so in case you're
curious about learning more, Uh, there's places that you can go.
And then we also do videos as well. That's right.
And hey, wherever you listen to it's be it iTunes

(02:23):
or uh Spotify or any of the various wonderful platforms
out there. You can support the show by simply giving
us a positive rating and positive review of the platform
allows that kind of interaction. Yeah, and the last thing
I'll say is before we get into Lily is don't
forget to follow us on social media. If you're on Facebook,
you're on Twitter, you're on Tumblr. We're on all those
platforms as Blow the Mind. And we don't only post

(02:46):
our own stuff, but we curate lots of weird science
e bizarre addity type stuff that we find throughout the
day as we're doing our research. That's right. So let's
talk about Lily first. Why are we covering him because Lily,
for people who don't know, comes up frequently. I'd say
in the last year of doing the show, he's come
up at least four or five times. Yeah, and in

(03:06):
past episodes, I'm I know that we haven't had at
least three episodes that have dealt with him, at least
in small portions. Right. Yeah, you guys did a dolphin episode.
You and Julie did a dolphin episode, and then there
was the what was it, the like kind of crazy
rock star life of Scientists. Yeah, yeah, we did one
that was just kind of a sampler platter of different
real life scientists that had sort of a weird side

(03:28):
to them. But Lily is one of those individuals first
of all, that, as we've been saying, deserves a deeper dive.
He deserves a closer look because he was just he
was into too many things. He really lived too many
lives to just try and condense it to a quick
little segment about his psychedelic dolphin research, which is what
most people may think of when we mentioned John C. Lewis.

(03:52):
This is one of those moments too where I feel
like the podcast format is really at an advantage here
because in our ca you know, like lots of the
stuff that I've read about Lily, like you said, either
focuses on one aspect of his work or another. Right,
It's like it's either like the isolation tanks or it's
just the dolphins. But I feel like we have the

(04:15):
opportunity here to like gather a lot of different resources,
come together and kind of try to piece it all
together and figure out this like epic figure somehow, and
especially the like like you said to like um for
those of you who don't know, there's been two feature
films at least two that we're made based on Lily
as a character. The first was Day of the Dolphin

(04:36):
with George C. Scott, and then the second one is
Altered States, of Course, which is you know, we're huge
fans of here, and it stars William her you know,
of course, as this Lily kind of figure who takes
acid in isolation tanks and then finds himself devolving basically
right into various forms of proto humanity. Yeah, so he's
he's he's a figure that hit the castle, a large

(04:58):
shadow across are popular culture, and I think that can
also be a stumbling block because you think of you
might think of that older uh John C. Lily kind
of a post hippie nut job with with a coonskin
cap talking about expanded consciousness and perhaps being something of
a pariah. Uh. Two individuals who were working in legitimate

(05:20):
scientific areas that he was once a part of. Yeah,
there were certainly people who did not embrace the direction
that he went in towards the latter part of his career.
But so this is what's interesting to me about him,
especially like once we got into I knew the surface
level stuff, but going back and looking at his early
life and how he started off and how kind of
standardized his scientific career was to begin with. It's really

(05:43):
fascinating to see where he goes and the kind of
journey that he takes everybody on. Yeah, indeed, I mean,
this is a guy that was trained in medicine, psycho analysis, biophysics,
um and he went from being published as a researcher
in scientific journals to writing his own books about spirit
ruality in the self. And one of the things that's
really important about Lily I think to just like our

(06:04):
general culture today, it's it's hard to think of this
because it's from from my entire life. It's been this way.
But people didn't used to think of dolphins as being
intelligent mammals, that we're cute and cuddly and that we
should try to keep from being killed in the ocean. Right, Yeah,
that's right. I mean you go back far enough. There
are various myths that involve humans turning into dolphins or
vice versa, but generally speaking, before the nineteen fifties, dolphins

(06:28):
were a pest of fishermen. They were some they were
a fatty creature you might render down for various products,
but nobody was giving a lot of thought to what
they were thinking or indeed what their consciousness might consist of. Yeah,
and so almost every account that I read about Lily
traces his research with dolphins to how we treat dolphins

(06:48):
today even too, you know, good or bad however you
think of it, of like theme parks of like Sea
World and things like that, but like, uh, the interaction
that human beings have with dolphins or other male uh
mammals in the water like whales, uh, you know, in
in that kind of a setting, you know. Um, he

(07:09):
really changed the way that we considered them as I
guess partners on Earth is how he would probably put
it right. Yeah, it's hard to imagine where we'd be
right now, uh, considering dolphin intelligence without Lily, I mean
I think, I mean, I think we would definitely get
to this point where we we recognize the intelligence of
the dolphin, uh and and even engaging discussions about its

(07:30):
potential personhood. But would we have gotten there as quickly?
Would we have? Would we have gotten there with as
much media attention? And it all really came down to
him wanting to map human consciousness, you know, the dolphin work,
the isolation tanks taking NSTI. All of it really boiled

(07:51):
back to his medical background and just trying to figure
out like the physicality of human consciousness where it was. Yeah,
he in in his um and later on, certainly by
by the nineteen seventies, he would often talk about the
province of the mind, which we reference in the title
to this episode. Yeah, so here's the Lily quote that

(08:11):
comes from you know what we what We've based the
title in the episode from he says, in the province
of the mind, what one believes to be true is
true or becomes true with certain limits to be found
experientially and experimentally. These limbs are further beliefs to be
transcended in the mind. There are no limits. That was
in nineteen seventy two, So this was this was a

(08:33):
post Dolphin work going into LSD work. I'm assuming, yeah,
and I think it This is a It's a great
quote because it mentions this idea of the province of
the mind, something that he all of his work throughout
his life, as you mentioned, seems to be questing for.
And then it also touches on this idea of subjective truth,
which becomes an increasingly important part of his work and

(08:56):
at times a definite flaw in his scientific work. Right. Yeah,
and it's especially important to consider too, I mean, like
we say, his whole life here. I read an account
that when he was sixteen years old he was first
starting to think about this in journals and things like
that that he was working on, like as a kid.
This was something that concerned Lily up until his death.

(09:19):
So let's, uh, let's let's back up a bit then
and just deal with the Lily timeline. Let's talk about
where he came from and uh and take listeners and
ourselves on a journey through his life whereas much of
it as we can actually digest in about an hour's time. Yeah,
and I'll say this too before we get into it.
I found that there were a lot of differing accounts too.

(09:39):
I mean, he was alive at just the right moment
in time where it was. It wasn't like we couldn't
log his life as we do now with social media,
you know what I mean. And there's like some different accounts. So,
like I said, when he's sixteen years old, he supposedly
wrote this essay. He was born in nineteen fifteen in
Saint Paul Minnesota. Uh And and this is the specific

(10:00):
a question that was quoted as being the title of
his essay, how can the mind render itself sufficiently objective
to study itself? That's pretty heavy for a sixteen year old.
I don't think I had thoughts like that until much later. Yeah,
that's that's a that that's he was thinking big for
for that age. Really. Yeah, unless that's some like revisionist

(10:20):
history on his part. But Uh. The other thing that
I thought was really interesting is my impression from the
readings is that Lily came from a very wealthy family
I think, UH and his father, it sounds like, wanted
him to become a banker, but Lily wanted to be
a scientist, and so eventually his father kind of came
around and supported him going to school to study science,
but also backed him financially and some of his research

(10:42):
after school as well. Yeah, that's the that's the sense
that I get from some of the resources who were
looking at uh. And I do have to to mention
that as far as we know, there's not a good,
like solid concise biography out there, not yet, hopefully somebody's
working on it. There are some very fine resources that
we used for this episode and will cite those as
we go. Yeah, this is a book slash movie dying

(11:06):
to be made. Yeah yeah, I I think that, like
in the same way that characters like Reich that we've
talked about on the show before Shulgun just make for
great like potential fictionalizations. Uh, and I think you know,
I just learned this after we recorded the Reich episode.
There's a feature film coming out about Reich. Oh yeah, yeah.
When I was searching for artwork for it, photos from

(11:26):
the premier came out. Alright, So Lily goes on. He
gets his physics degree from cal Tech in night, receives
a doctorate in medicine from the University of Pennsylvania two
and as a faculty member he studies biophysics and psycho
analysis at the University of Pennsylvania. Is primarily interested in
the physical structures of the brain where that the conscious

(11:50):
self might be found. So that's pretty interesting in that,
like he got his he got his doctorate in medicine, right,
and then he continues to do research or take classes
as well as he's a faculty member. Like my understanding
was the psychoanalysis stuff wasn't quite yet in the field
when he was in school, but he's still dabbling and

(12:11):
learning more and adding everything to his resume. Yeah. From
an early point, we're seeing a guy who has this
goal in mind, this mystery that he wants to crack,
and he's gonna throw everything he has at it. And
he's gonna throw it. He's gonna utilize what whatever tools
he can draw on, be they UH, disciplines, pharmaceuticals, technologies.

(12:32):
We see this throughout his life. Yeah. And in some
cases it's also like where he's going to get the
support from. Right. I think all of us who have
like large scale creative endeavors that we're trying to push
and can't find necessarily the financial backing end up making
compromises and uh, come World War two, Lily ends up
doing research UH. Mainly it sounds like on the physiology
of high altitude of flying, uh, specifically for the Air Force,

(12:56):
and he was inventing different devices to measure GA gas
pressure for those purposes. UM. And this is one of
the first times apparently that he used himself as a
guinea pig, uh Lily at which he would go on
to do quite a bit later in his career. In fact,
I think he had sort of a like an ethos
surrounding that, right that I can't remember who it was,

(13:17):
but I read that he um he he took this
from another like kind of big thinker scientist who basically said, like,
if you're not willing to experiment on yourself, then you
shouldn't be willing to experiment on other human beings. Uh So,
and this seems to be the case here where he
participated in an experiment where he was studying the effects
of explosive decompression on pilots at high altitudes. Uh And

(13:40):
by all accounts that I read, this was something that
could have killed him, but he went about and did
it anyways. And this is in the thirties going into
the forties, alright, So after the war, we're getting into
the post War War two area. We're getting into the
nineteen fifties at a time uh increasingly defined by Cold
War paranoia. It is during this area that Lily turns

(14:02):
to neuroscience, which is a logical next step in this
quest for consciousness. Right, And he's motivated in a large
part by pioneering brain surgeon Wilder Penfield at this point.
Uh And in short, what he ends up doing is
he applies electronic engineering to the monitoring and mapping of
the central nervous system, again drawing on the best technology

(14:23):
available at the time to try and crack this nut
of consciousness. And what I had read this is one
of the first sences of his father, sorry, instances of
his father funding him. His father helped him pay for
the design of something he called the Baba Tron, which
was a device for recording the impulses from within a
rabbit's brain and they would project these impulses up onto

(14:45):
like a television screen as waves. Um. So, the baba
Tron included an array of sensors that were this is
something we're gonna come back to over and over again
with Lily, basically putting electrodes on the surface of the
brain of different animals and human beings. Uh. And in
nineteen fIF he want he published a paper that showed
how to display these patterns in such a way projecting

(15:06):
brain electrical activity on a television like screen. Uh. And
I recently spent some time in the hospital. I had
a family member in I see you, and I thought, wow, like,
think of the just the standard hospital machinery we have
that are like measuring and showing us things like oxygen
levels and and uh, breathing and and and brain activity.

(15:28):
You know, Lily was one of the pioneers and that
you can thank him for that. This is a guy
who who really did like impact our understanding of medicine
and of thought. And you know, despite where he went
down further in his career, he really did have like
some contributions. Yeah, down or or out or out, Yeah,

(15:49):
however you want to look at it. Absolutely From here
he moves on to the National Institutes of Mental Health
or NIM UH, and this is an area where he
begins to get into a lot of interest and and
at times kind of creepy work. Yeah. And I read
an interesting thing that said that one of the reasons
why he specifically went for this research position with NIM
was that it gave him access to both the National

(16:10):
Institute of Neurological Diseases, because that would give him access
to resources about the physical brain, but it also gave
him access to the National Institute of Mental Health, which
focused on the mind, and he really wanted to combine
the two uh, and he experimented on living brains with
all these different techniques he developed, so you know, we've
got the rabbits. We talked about that, but then he

(16:32):
moved on to monkeys. His goal was to stimulate monkey
brains without causing trauma or damage to their brain tissue.
So he was one of the first scientists to locate Uh,
this is a monkey brain, not a human brain, obviously,
but he located their pain and pleasure centers, and his
work there allowed him to map their neural networks and
to link sensory events, muscle movement, and other behaviors related

(16:56):
to the activity in their brain. This is going to
be important later on when we get the dolphins. Yeah,
and this is my understanding. Some it's pretty invasive surgery
at this point in experimentation, and he spends essentially a
decade working on it. Here uh again connecting invasive of
vivisections of the cranium. And this is where things get

(17:18):
into some creepier territory. Um. Again, he's laser focused on
his goal, but he is an employ of NIM. He's
working in the in the time of nineteen fifties Cold
War paranoia. Uh, it's US versus the Soviets. There's they're
all these fears of of of mind control, brainwashing, uh,
all sorts of strange counter espionage techniques, and according to D.

(17:43):
Graham Burnett's excellent paper A Mind in Water, which is
published in Ryan Magazine and is available online, one could
have linked to it on the landing page. He says.
Lily later claimed not to care for this sort of thing,
but in his prime as a government employee, he had
high level security clearance. J Edgar Hoover knew him by
name and was actively involved in research into brainwashing or

(18:06):
reprogramming as it was then called, among the cognizanty sleep
deprivation and operant controlled of animals with wires implanted in
the pain centers of their gray matter. Unquote. Wow, so
this gets back to when we were talking about we
three on the animal weaponry thing. So, yeah, I can

(18:26):
imagine with all the things we learned from that episode
of like people stuffing bats into bombs and trying to
figure out ways to use bees to attack people, that
of course they would be looking at ways to try
to stimulate their brains as well. And in the goal here, Yeah,
the goal here was not just animals but humans. In
an unpublished paper of Lily's titled Special Considerations of Modified

(18:47):
Human Agents, as reconnaissance and intelligence devices. I really don't
have to go much further than that just title, but
he talked about such things as the quote covert and
relatively safe implantation of electrodes into human brain for the
push button control of the totality of motivation and of consciousness.

(19:07):
I wonder how much Lily's sort of like beginning work
set the stage for brain computer interface work you know
that's being studied today, because that's obviously like a big
field of um of inquiry right now. Yeah, I mean
to to whatever extent his his ideas here were actually
applicable given that the technology of the time, and he's

(19:29):
certainly foreshadowing where the technology would go. He's certainly dreaming
in the in the direction that we're that we're still headed.
So one of the things that I was trying to
figure out what we're doing the research was whether or
not these were pain free methods. And I believe later
in his career he definitely wanted to get to a
point right Like I mentioned earlier that you know, his
goal was not to cause trauma in the monkeys and

(19:50):
not to damage their brain tissue. But I imagine it
wasn't comfortable having these electrodes stuck in their brains, right, Yeah,
I had my understanding. It also depended on what he
was working on. So, um, you could use anesthetics on
certain animals, but as we'll discuss, there are other animals
that that simply stop breathing if you put them under
an anesthetic, right. Yeah, And there's always there's a very

(20:14):
interesting like, despite his profound respect for dolphins later on,
there's some weird stuff that goes on with the dolphin
research as well too, in terms of like kind of
treating them humanely. Yeah, and uh and and certainly at
this point in his career he has he's he's a
very unsentimental guy. He's laser focused on this consciousness enigma. Uh.

(20:34):
But he's not necessarily he's not he's certainly not the
sort of hippie mythic figure counterculture figure we see later on.
Quite the opposite. This is a guy who's on first
name basis with Jaguar Hoover. He's very much a part
of the establishment and kind of a scary part of
the establishment. Yeah, and he is going to do what
needs to be done to get the results. Right. So

(20:56):
it's during this creepy period that little. He first learns
from an oceanographer colleague that the largest brains are found
in small toothed whales. Intrigued, he sets out to implant
electrodes in the brains of captive dolphins at Florida's Marine Studios.
Now this place still exists today under the name Marine
Land of Florida. Some of our listeners have been there

(21:17):
and can speak to it. But at the time they
specialized in B movies. Really of particular note, they shot
the Creature from the Black Lagoon here and Revenge of
the Creature from ninety five. Wow. So John C. Lily
was like peripherally involved with like universal horror, specifically the

(21:39):
Creature from the Black Lagoon. I would I think you
might have mentioned this before the podcast. How cool would
it be for there to be like a Creature of
the Black Lagoon remake that like mixes in some of
the John C. Lily ideas of you know, both dolphin
human communication but also isolation tanks and hallucinogenics. Yeah, I mean,
And in fact, we'll get back to the creu from

(22:00):
the Black Lagoon in a minute, because the connection between
Lily and the creature he is even closer than you
might be thinking, right now, okay, cool, cool, Okay, So
he he engages in this work, right, he's uh, he's
he's putting the electrodes on the dolphins brains. One of
the problems here, as I mentioned, is that dolphins stop
breathing when they're under anesthetic. And this has to do

(22:21):
with the conscious nature of dolphin respirations that it's it's
not as as much of a you know, a subconscious
activity is as as it is for us surface dwellers. Um.
So it's it's pretty rough work. Dolphins are dying during
the experiments, but one of them, before it passes, makes
a series of sounds, and Lily has this really this

(22:44):
epiphany that he he feels he's listening to the sound
that this dolphin is making. It sounds as if they're
attempting to mimic his voice. They're attempting to mimic the
voice of the other researchers in the room. And and
it's just this, this Eureka moment for him. He's been
searching for consciousness, searching for for some sort of you know,

(23:04):
ultimately connection to another mind, and he feels as if
he has glimpsed it. So this is sort of a
good segue, I guess then from his dolphin or actually,
this isn't even the really scratching the surface of his
dolphin research, right, is where he first sort of dabbles
in it. Yeah, this is where, yeah, he dabbles in it,
and and the light bulb goes off and he realizes,

(23:26):
I have to work with these dolphins. Everything else I'm
gonna I'm just gonna walk away from because this, this
is where I need to be. And then, in order
to facilitate this type of study he develops he invents
the isolation tank, which most of us know nowadays, right,
because it's a fairly popularized thing. I was first familiar
with it from Altered States. That was the first time

(23:47):
I'd ever heard of it. I think I probably saw
Altered States when I was like nineteen or twenty or
something like that. But just last year, maybe two years ago,
my wife for my birthday got me um a gift
card to go visit an isolation tank center here in Atlanta.
Oh yeah, I think we've likely been to the same place. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
you've done it as well, right. Yeah. For those of
you who are not familiar with it, uh, yeah, you

(24:07):
can probably find a float a place in your your
area and you try it out for yourself. But essentially
it is a chamber, a dark chamber filled with very
buoyant salt water. You go in there, you you know,
maybe you put on some goggles, maybe you're wearing a
bathing suit, maybe not, and you're just floating there in
the silence. Uh. You all your hearing is just the

(24:30):
sound of the water, the sound of your your own heartbeat. Uh.
And because you're floating, you don't really sense any touch, right.
It's which is unusual for us. We're always like kind
of bound to something by gravity. But this allows you
to kind of just float there. Um. The darkness takes
away your eyesight for the most part. The one I
was in kind of I don't know about you, but

(24:50):
it had like a little bit of a transparency to it,
so natural daylight kind of came in. Um. And then
there was what was the other Oh, they gave me
ear plugs? Did you get ear plugs? I may have
gotten near plus I can't remember now. I do remember
seeing lights eventually, because I think I was in darkness.
And I also have to say that the warmness of
the water is it tends to be calibrated so that

(25:11):
it's about human body temperature. Yeah, so that it's in
a way the barriers of your body are no longer
as obvious. So it's about isolating the mind. And and
apparently like the idea for this came out of Lily's
work at NIM Again, think back to the counter espionage work.
How do you break down a potential spy? How do

(25:32):
you get break into their mind and interact with their consciousness? Well,
what if you were to put a scary latex mask
over their face so they can't see anything, submerge them
in this buoyant tank of salt water, and just rob
them of their senses without actually harming them. So really
it was a form of psychological torture that was being devised,

(25:54):
and it was apparently pretty traumatic for some of the
individuds who tested it out. But of course Lily tested
it out as well. He solved the positive potential for
the kind of inward focus that it allowed. Yeah, I mean,
the basic idea here was he wanted to test whether
the brain would actually shut down if there was no
stimuli received. Right, But yeah, it's really interesting. Again, So

(26:15):
like the figure that he becomes this kind of hippie
psychedelic grew figure. You trace back his history and it's
like ultimately connected to this kind of movement of torture
and interrogation, right. I mean, like people, I don't know
that they're necessarily using isolation tanks, but sensory deprivation is
very much a thing that we do nowadays, we the

(26:36):
United States military and government when we're trying to get
information out of, you know, somebody that that might have
something that's going to you know, potentially affect a citizen
or or an operation overseas, oh yeah, or even just
dishing out essentially punishment on individuals that are in solitary confinement. Yeah.
And it's this is fascinating to me too, because this

(26:58):
is right around it's a little bit earlier, but around
the same time that Michelle Fucot is really starting to
look into sort of the philosophy of discipline and punishment.
And I'm really curious if these two guys knew about
each other, uh, and if they even or if they
interacted to you know. Yeah, indeed, so Lily Yeah really

(27:18):
gets into the idea of the isolation tank, and this
is this is kind of happening in the background to
the dolphin stuff. We we just mentioned the beginnings of
the dolphin stuff. Um. I'm gonna actually just read uh
one quote from him and have you read another one,
because I think Lily really captures what he saw in
the tank. Uh, what he saw in the tank's potential

(27:39):
for the human mind. He said, all the average person
has to do is get into the tank in the
darkness and silence and float around until he realizes he
is programming everything that is happening inside his head. You
are free of the physical world at that point, and
anything can happen inside your head because everything is governed
by the laws of thought rather in the laws of

(28:00):
the external world. So you can go to the limits
of your conceptions. And so this is a good moment,
I think for us to sort of back up for
the listener for you out there listening. If you've never
done this and you've never seen it depicted or read
about it. Um. People oftentimes report that during their experience
in these tanks, they see colorful images, they have memories

(28:22):
flashed by, they kind of have like waking dreams. Uh.
And there's even there's an Some people report an experience
of levels of consciousness where they feel they're in contact
with other intelligent being sort of outside of them, right. Yeah,
I mean it's essentially a really meditative space. So I
only floated once. I did not get that kind of experience.

(28:43):
I understand that one needs to do it many times
to get used to it. But but I have had
experiences in meditation where I have I have seen things
and felt things that that line up to a certain
extent with this kind of you know, subjective experience. Yeah,
I mean it's possible too. So this is another instance
that I um where the like the reporting seems to

(29:04):
be a little bit varied for me. I read that
it's possible that he actually started dabbling in this before
any of the dolphin research. Maybe it was more official
later on. No, I believe you're right on that, Okay,
because he apparently considered dolphins and other water mammals because
of the idea of consciousness that existed in the state

(29:26):
of flotation. Uh, And it's somehow brought that up. But
so here's another thing. We were talking about. How you
bring the temperature to about the same as the body
the body's temperature. Apparently, at one point while Lily was
experimenting on himself. He's trying to bring the temperature to
the right thing, and he fell into a coma. That
was another thing that I read. And I mean, it

(29:47):
must not have been that long or serious, but and
I don't quite know how that would happen, even especially
given my experience in an isolation tank. But this was
in one of the papers I read. He also speculated,
Now this is the beginning of the John C. Lily
everybody came to know and love that in a tank
a person meaning a man could orgasm without ejaculating. So

(30:12):
another thing that comes out of this, outside of his
like speculations on orgasms and ejaculation, is uh that he
also figured out that even in the tank that the
pure mental state that he was looking to achieve wasn't
necessarily possible because it even eliminating all sensory stimulation, just

(30:32):
that kind of isolation in the tank wasn't achieving that. Um,
this is probably a good opportunity for me to read
that second quote you mentioned. So this is from Lily
wrote lots of books on his own outside of his
work with the government, and that weren't published really by
I wouldn't call them peer reviewed in any sense, right,
and this is one of them. I believe it's called

(30:52):
I love this title Tanks for the memories flotation Tank talks. Yeah,
and this is from this is definitely later, this after Yeah,
so okay. He says, at the highest level of satory
from which people return, the point of consciousness becomes a
surface or solid which extends throughout the whole known universe.

(31:13):
This used to be called fusion with the universal mind
or God. In more modern terms, you have done a
mathematical transformation in which your center of consciousness has ceased
to be a traveling point and has become a surface
or solid of consciousness. It was in this state that
I experienced myself as melded and intertwined with hundreds of

(31:36):
billions of other beings in a thin sheet of consciousness
that was distributed around the galaxy, a membrane. Now, this
definitely touches on some of his wackier theories that we're
going to get into later. Yeah. It it touches on
some more the mystical ideas that he explores in his work.
I do have to say, though, with ultimately what he's

(31:56):
talking about here, and ultimately with with the experience of
of meditation, but also with the flow tank, a lot
of what's happening is the shutdown of what's called the
default mode network. Actually we understand it more now is
a series of of of interconnected resting state networks involved
in vision, hearing, movement, attention, and memory. But you can

(32:18):
think of it as just that that me voice, what
Cartole calls the egoic mind, this sort of me centered
narrative that's always running in the background of our head,
whether we are conscious of it or not, you know,
worrying about the past, worrying about the future. And if
you can shut that off, then you're in this point
of clarity and now illness, and you can actually explore

(32:42):
thoughts about yourself in the world around you in ways
that you're often crippled from. Yeah, I mean this is
certainly like what I try to get out of, you know,
with yoga and meditation in some situations. But but also
I gotta say, after doing the isolation tank thing, I
want one of those in my home. And maybe maybe
if you did it too much, it would it would
sort of defeat the purpose for achieving that sort of

(33:06):
lack of self right of thinking about everything else around you.
I don't know. I've never heard anyone say they do
it too much. There always people are really into it.
Or if I could just like after every day coming home,
just hop into one of those for thirty minutes, that
would be great. I read an account about there was
a woman in the nineteen eighties who was apparently like
a I don't know that I would call her a

(33:27):
student of Lilies, but she was somebody who followed his
work closely. She was one of the first people to
open like a business around isolation tanks, and she had
one in her home on the twenty floor of a
Manhattan skyscraper, and she I think at the time she
charged people like twenty five dollars per hour. And one
of her main clients was a television executive who would

(33:48):
he said something along the lines of, how like after
every flight home back to Manhattan, after like you know,
doing a bunch of television sales type stuff, he would,
before even going home, go to her place and up
into one of these isolation tanks. It's kind of fascinating
that like a guy like that saw the value and
just kind of slowing everything down. Yeah, I mean it
leaves a bit leads a busy life, so it would

(34:10):
make sense at this point we're gonna return back to dolphins.
I feel like we we've we've set everything up to
continue Lily's journey. We're going to around nineteen Uh. This
is when Lily presents a paper before the American Psychiatric

(34:31):
Association and he makes some rather dramatic claims about the
intelligence and the linguistic abilities of the bottlenose dolphins, specifically.
Now that the evidence City cites as apparent is arguably
scant and and anecdotal, but it resonated pretty strongly, and
it resonated with the right people. So soon you had

(34:52):
prestigious federal research awards rolling in, and he uses these
funds to build a dedicated dolphin laboratory on St. Tom
Miss in the US Virgin Islands, the Communication Research Institute
or c r I. Yeah, And the most fascinating thing
that you added to these notes is that at its height,
this institute, under Lily's guidance, was receiving half a million

(35:17):
dollars a year in grant money. It exploded crazy, especially
when you consider what half a million dollars was worth
back then. That's nuts, uh, that that he was getting
that much support Uh. And it sounds like during this
time he I guess he had a home in Miami.
Sounded like he'd become fairly acclimated to Florida and liked

(35:39):
it a lot there. But he had the lab in St. Thomas. Uh.
And there was this really interesting nineteen sixty Time magazine
piece that I was able to pull and it's this
kind of fascinating like feature peace on on him and
they described him as a deep chested, sun tanned neurophysiologist.

(35:59):
I like that. Uh. That that must be where the
idea for the George C. Scott character and the dolphin
came from. But at the time that they came to
visit him Time Magazine, that is Uh, he was working
on an elaborate system of jetties and pools at the center.
The idea was that he was trying to learn about
dolphins sonar for the Navy. They were paying for the

(36:20):
expenses of this construction. Uh. And the idea was that
they they felt that dolphins sonar was better than their
own capabilities at the time, so they wanted to figure
out a way to reverse engineer and mimic it. Yes,
the Navy was definitely one of the interested parties that
was won over by his his arguments for dolphin intelligence
and dolphin abilities. Well, I mean he had some some

(36:41):
convincing evidence. Like you said, it wasn't all like uh perfect,
But when he he must have been a very charismatic guy,
I'm imagining, because when he gives these presentations, people just
fall head over heels for it. I mean, you hear
it in his voice, and you will actually hear his
voice at the end of this podcast. Like one of
the things that I think he convinced the Navy with
was by dissecting dolphin brains. Uh. You know, we we

(37:03):
talked about this earlier. They're bigger than human brains obviously,
but they also have as complicated a cerebral cortex. Uh.
And so this is when he starts planting electrodes in
the dolphin brains, kind of along the same lines of
what we were talking about with the monkeys earlier, trying
to stimulate their pleasure centers, specifically with electricity. And this
is the weirdest, Like this grossed me out. This quote

(37:26):
from the Time magazine article. He said when he first
stimulated their pleasure centers with electrodes, the muscles around their
blow hole smiled. That is the weirdest, like I don't
know why, it just squeaks me out, like the idea
of a little smile for around and the but the
like dolphins got like its head peel, you know, it's

(37:46):
scalp peeled back with all these electrodes wired into it.
Whatever the case, the dolphins loved it. In fact, there
is an apparatus that he used to sort of train
them with it. They could give themselves the electrical jolt,
and they did it so much that they became addicted
to it. Uh. And this is this is so this
is a different story from what I um you mentioned earlier.

(38:08):
I In this nineteen sixty piece, they say this is
where he first encountered the dolphins mimicking humans speech. He
says that apparently, and maybe he's just you know, b
ssing them during an interview or something like that. But
he says, an apparatus broke down one day at the St.
Thomas laboratory and he had left a tape recorder running
and he heard a Donald Duck like voice on the

(38:31):
tape recorder later on that was imitating him saying the
words three hundred and twenty three over and over again.
And then he also said that the dolphins imitated the
buzz of a transformer and the rattle of a movie
camera that we're in, I'm assuming in the same laboratory space. Yeah.
So there's this feeling that he's getting here that not
only is he reaching out to them to make communication,

(38:54):
but they are reaching out to us, and he has
to meet them in the middle. He has to find
a way to make this connection. Uh. And towards that end,
he starts like documenting what he thinks is dolphin language.
And now you know, I think that it's it's fairly
well documented at this point that we know that there
is such a thing. Uh. He learned one phrase in

(39:14):
dolphin language that he reported back to time in nineteen
sixty and it was what he called their may day
distress call, and he describes it as sounding like a
wolf whistling, which I don't I don't know that that's
necessarily a description that immediately calls a sound to my mind.
But maybe Lily was encountering more wolves than I do
on a daily basis. Uh. But he specifically noted that

(39:35):
this happened when he put a paralyzed dolphin in a pool.
So one thing I want to stop and ask is,
why would you do that? He puts this paralyzed dolphin
in the pool, right, the dolphin sinks to the bottom
and immediately starts crying out with this may day distress call. Well,
Lily says, the other dolphins all came to its rescue

(39:55):
and pushed it back to the surface so that it
could continue breathing. So maybe he speculated that was going
to happen, and this was just kind of a test
of their I guess, like bond together. But it just
again I was like wow, Like, uh, despite his fascination
and love for these animals, he's willing to like let
one potentially drown. Yeah, And I mean part of this,

(40:18):
I think is that he's he's certainly working, you know,
within the scientific atmosphere of the day and the attitude
towards uh test animals of the day. And you can
probably chalk a bit of it up to his uh,
you know, his his laser focused vision, which we certainly
saw during his NYMN days and continues to a certain
extent with the dolphins. It sounds from from the research

(40:41):
I was reading that his his work with the dolphins
definitely got less invasive he got further and further away
from the sort of the the harder stuff of the
NYM days. But uh, but he was still at times
sort of accused of of having on an occasional cavalier
attitude towards that the test dolphins. Yeah. I think though

(41:01):
that that sort of phases out over time, you know. Um.
But not a year later after this time thing, that's
when he published his like big dolphin book, right, yes,
nineteen one Man and Dolphin Adventures of a New Scientific Frontier.
And this book just really becomes a big deal. Not
only researchers, not only scientists and academics, but just the

(41:22):
general public are eating this book up. And I'm just
gonna read you a quick sample from it so you
can get just an idea of some of the things
he's talking about. In this book. He's documenting his work
with dolphins thus far, but he's also talking about where
he thinks this work can take us. He said, quote,
eventually it may be possible for humans to speak with
another species. I have come to this conclusion after careful
consideration of evidence game through my research experiments with dolphins.

(41:45):
If new scientific developments are to be made in this direction, however,
certain changes in our basic orientation, orientation and philosophy will
be necessary. So he's talking about just a game changing
development here. He's talking about he discusses us reaching the
point where we we teach dolphins to speak English, to

(42:05):
speak English, and to even have to create a chair
for them on the United Nations. So you know that
this he's talking about finding an alien intelligence here on
our planet and uh and and communing with them, um,
communicating with them and actually inviting them into our rule

(42:27):
of the world. And he's clearly going into his own
soul searching too. If we sort of like compare this
with the history of his life, you know, I mean,
I think he had like a very personal reason for
feeling so strongly about this, given the way that he
had experimented on these animals previously. He goes from that
to thinking that they should be part of the United Nations.

(42:47):
Uh and and by the sixties, he's this is when
he's publishing academic papers glore showing that dolphins can mimic
all kinds of human speech patterns by clicking, squeaking, and rasping.
Uh And he even talked there's this British I got
the impression from the article I read that this British
anthropologist was a big deal at the time. His name

(43:08):
is Gregory Bateson and the US Navy and and him
and Lily were all kind of influenced by the research
that was going on at the center. And Lily pitched
human dolphin communication to NASA at the time, saying that
if they were going to encounter aliens, this is the
perfect way for them to sort of come up with

(43:29):
a model of communications standards with an alien intelligence. Yeah
to And it makes sense, right if you're attempting to
communicate with a as a different yet equal form of consciousness,
and this could conceivably be an experiment in that. And
you can see now where Day of the Dolphin came from.
I don't know what year that came out. I want
to say it was early seventies maybe, but uh, if

(43:52):
you've never seen the movie before, it involves the George C.
Scott as John C. Lily. They both had season the
middle character eaching dolphins to speak English. They can speak English,
and I believe it's on behalf of the U. S. Government. Uh,
And you know they say things like fall loves paw Right,
like he's paw, and I think he names them all

(44:12):
things that rhyme with paw because it's easier for them
to pronounce or whatever. It's kind of a silly movie,
but it's also a little bit touching in a way. So, yeah,
the book is a huge success. It inspires these movies.
That's the idea just spells like spreads like wildfire. And
this was a period again, the fifties and sixties, during
which fascination with the underwater world is really taking off.
This is the time of you know, scuba is really

(44:34):
really exploding, Jacques Cousteaux is is making a big name
for himself. It's the time of Sea Hunt. And in
nineteen sixty three, of course, you see the television show Flipper. Yeah,
a mainstream television show about an intelligent dolphin that communicates
with humans. Yeah, and this is where we come back
to our connections to the creature from the Black Lagoon.

(44:57):
Oh yeah, hit me with it. Yeah, So I kind
I had forgotten this, but that TV series Flipper was
based on a nineteen sixty three film of the same name,
a film co created by ricou Browning. Okay, riccou Browning
worked at Marine Studios, which we mentioned earlier the place
where where Lily initially went down to study dolphins, and uh,

(45:22):
Browning actually portrayed the creature from the Black Lagoon in
the first two films. So Lily is actually the guy
wearing the rubber suit. Yeah, he was a guy in
the rubber suit in the first two Creature films. And
uh and again he co created Flipper, and Lily is
actually thanked in the credits to the film Flipper. So
that's nuts. Wow, Okay, well yeah, and it it also

(45:45):
makes me think of God the film version of twenty
Leagues into the Sea was made around that time too,
probably right, Um, I don't know the specific date on that,
but yeah, there is that fascination with sort of undersea adventure. Yeah,
it's opening up to us in ways that it just
had not been previously available. And so we're we're fascinated
with this new world down there. And then to to
to also have this potential revelation laid on our plate

(46:08):
that there is an intelligence down there, uh more or
less on par with our own. I wonder what John C.
Lily thought of the ABYSS. I don't know that would
have been interesting. Huh. Yeah, that's probably in a way.
That's a very Lily movie, isn't it. So studies at
the center continue again. Lily's approach gradually moves away from
the sort of the creepy world of nim his nim

(46:30):
work and into less invasive techniques. He abandons the use
of electrodes and instead attempts to essentially meld minds with
the dolphins to understand the shape of their consciousness. Um
He turns increasingly to the flotation tank and attempt to
achieve this. He pipes in hydrophone recordings of their sounds,
and eventually too, he starts using LSD. And this is

(46:54):
where it's all coming together, right if they seem like
very disparate things when you say dolphins, isolation, hanks, and LSD.
But he's combining all of these things together. Yeah, And
at the time it's legal, he's able to get it
through his his connections, his clearance. He's getting it totally
on the board and uh. In beginning of nineteen sixty four,
he also is injecting it into the dolphins to see

(47:16):
what kind of effect it will. It will he oh,
I didn't know that really, And this was pretty standard
for the time. This was a time when there were
a lot of LSD experiments going on, and we were
putting LSD into the bodies of various animals and testo
just to see how they responded. Uh. And apparently they
did not really respond to LSD, which he was kind
of disappointed with, but he kept taking it. He kept

(47:37):
going into Yeah, see if he could he could understand
their mind. Yea. So one of the things that I
read when researching him, and I hadn't really realized this.
Do you do you remember a video game called Echoes
the Dolphin. Yeah, I do. I vaguely remember it. I
didn't play it. I talked to Joe about it, our
co host, and he did play it. Uh, and apparently

(47:58):
the whole game was sent it around Lily his research
and his sort of philosophy. Yeah, I had no idea.
It apparently gets really psychedelic as it continues. I only ever,
like played like the first level, so I have a
very service level understanding of ECO. I think it's like
something Joe said. It was something to the effect that
like there's even like an alien sort of overmind that

(48:19):
causes the events on Earth that make Echo the Dolphin
have to try to, you know, go through this gamut
of psychedelic levels and nervious save the world. That's cool. Yeah,
So it's c R I. We continue to see him
doing what he's always done. He's using the best technology,
various methodologies, and an attempt to achieve his his goal here. So,

(48:41):
for instance, he uses state of the art code breaking
computers and an attempt to crack the code of dolphin
vocalization patterns and uh as. As Bruce Clark points out
in his Communication plus one paper from two thousand and fourteen,
John Lily The Mind of the Dolphin and Communication out
of Bounds, He says lially mobilize the best available tools,

(49:04):
a cutting edge array of cybernetic concepts in pursuit of
his his breakthrough communication with dolphins. He employed quote information theory,
bound up with first order cybernetics, and operated with the
heuristic computational metaphors alongside the actual computers of his era.
So that actually speaks to my my question from earlier

(49:25):
about bring computer interfaces. It sounds like he did have
quite a bit of influence on the BC I. Yeah,
it's it sounds like he did. Yeah, he was, you know,
basically any area he applied himself to, he managed to
influence that discipline. Uh, sometimes in a positive direction, sometimes
in a negative direction as well as well discussed. But
but in all of this too, we're getting into this

(49:46):
problem of projection, right. Oh yeah, you mean like actual
vocal projection. No, no, no, actually like projecting, uh well,
and maybe to a certain extent, but also want you know,
projecting your consciousness on to another creature, okay, okay um.
As Clark points out in his paper, projection short circuits
a proper understanding of what others are thinking or meaning

(50:09):
to convey when they make a communic communicative offer, so
that in projection goes. It's a problem when we just
try and communicate with each other, Like I'm not just community,
I'm not communicating solely with you. I'm communicating with a
version of you I have in my mind, my expectations
of you. And then the kind of feedback you provide
as well. It's the inherent problem of human communication, and

(50:31):
through a series of feedback and feed forward we try
to clear up like various psychological noise that gets in
the middle there of our understanding of what one another
is saying. But yeah, it's it's kind of like the
human dilemma, right, is that like we're we're never going
to fully be able to at least, you know, with
just our voices, uh, communicate what's going on inside our

(50:54):
head to one another. Really really wanted to get past that. Yeah,
And but one of the problems, of course, is that he's,
despite his scientific background and all of the vigoris throwing
into this, he seems to always be working with the
certainty that communication can truly be established, and that not
only is he reaching out, but they're reaching out to us.

(51:15):
He said to quote, we must keep the working hypothesis
in mind that they are highly intelligent and are just
as interested in communicating with us as we are with them.
So you know, that's a potential stumbling block to your
your efforts here, because you already have it firmly established
in your mind that this can be done, that this

(51:35):
connection is there to be made. I mean, and again,
the intelligence of dolphins isn't in doubt. But to work
with that kind of certainty, uh, with with the kind
of certainty that they reflect our desire to communicate as well,
that's problematic. Yeah, and certainly I can imagine where that
is where he starts to have stumbling blocks with funders like, uh,

(51:55):
the Navy for instance, in the Air Force, or just
any like even NYM Like when you start postulating that
your test subjects are on an equal playing field with
humanity and should be treated as such, that's going to
be immediately problematic for them, right because it's outside of
their world understanding, but it also doesn't fit their agenda. Yeah,

(52:17):
and and word of these experiments and some of his
methods and ideas, they're leaking out. He has some researchers
that are leaving him and working exclusively for the Navy, uh,
perhaps whispering about his his excessive use of the isolation tank.
Perhaps they even know something about the l s D.
And they're definitely talking about the flooded dolphin cohabitation apartment

(52:40):
that becomes a major project towards the end of c
R I. So this is actually I don't know about
this particularly, but I know that he pitched an idea
that basically there needed to be some kind of living
space that humans and dolphins could coexist within to communicate.
Is this his attempt at that, Yeah, it's I mean
a lot of credit has to go to scientists. Margaret

(53:03):
how Love it who was actually the woman who lived
with the dolphins, and she she later wrote a book
where a number of articles that came out about her experience.
There's a great Guardian article actually titled to Dolphin who
Loved Me? And she comes up to the Lily with
the idea like she's already researching dolphins, so she's drawn

(53:24):
to his activities here. And according to her in the
Guardian piece, she says, maybe it was because I was
living so close to the lab. It just seems so simple.
Why let the water get in the way. So I
said to John Lily, I want to plaster everything and
fill this place with water. I want to live here. Huh.
So see what she have a scuba suit on? Or
was it just it just was a shallow enough that

(53:46):
she could wait around And basically they waterproofed this whole
living area. They made like a floodable apartment so that
she could live there with the dolphin four months of
eventual eventually, I think they talked about it being a
three month period, but it ended up being a six
month period where she was living with this dolphin, handpicked
dolphin named Peter, in an attempt to teach him English.

(54:09):
She was going to teach him to speak English. And
the idea here and really you know, bought into two
was that she would be there just constantly as this
kind of mother figure, that they would have this chance
to to bond in a in a way that human
and dolphin had not previously. And I'm assuming that like
she must have approached this like linguistic effort, I guess,

(54:32):
like using the same basis for which we teach young
humans language. Right, Yeah, that's my understanding very much. It
was like an adult human attempting to teach a child
human how to speak with the some added complications, um
that end up being important later on in that they
helped us to scandalize the work here. But dolphins are

(54:54):
pretty can be pretty sexual creatures. So yeah, I've heard story. Yeah,
this is probably where a lot of people are familiar
with the story because she would occasionally have to help relieve,
help dispense Peter of his sexual urges, let's say, in
order to keep the work going. And that's she says,
that's the way she approached approaching and not from a

(55:14):
sexual uh you know vantage point. But it was this
is a part of how Peter behaves as a dolphin,
and we need to just sort of get that out
of the way so we can continue working on language. Okay, well, yeah,
I could see what that would be quite scandalous. It's
one thing to pose it that a dolphin is on
a sort of equal identity status, individual individualistic status with

(55:37):
a human being. It's another thing to start engaging with
them what people would consider bestiality. Yeah, he'd get into
a weird area here. We have to sort of explain
yourself out of that, or attempt to explain yourself out
of that to your your backers or by nineteen seventy five,
actually Hustler magazine comes out with them with an article
about it and didn't help. Oh yeah, they completely scandalized

(56:01):
love It and It and the experiment. They had some
sort of a provocative illustration and just made it sound
like like love It and Lily were just engaged in
a you know, a pan species free for all there
something which criticisms of this experiment aside. You know, clearly
wasn't the point they were. They were trying to teach
this creature to speak English. They were trying to to

(56:22):
bridge this gap between the species and it. But it
did get into some pretty weird areas. This sounds like
another like we should add this to our our little
document of ideas. This sounds like a great thing that
we should cover for a future episode. Is like how
much animal sexuality gets in the way of human animal experimentation. Uh,
and and like this can't be the first time or

(56:44):
only time that's happened, yeah, or the last. So by
autumn of nine, Lily is increasingly more interested in LSD
research then the ongoing dolphin research. Uh. You know, you
could say that he's probably spent more time in the

(57:05):
tank with the l s D. The l s D
becomes the thing that is holding his interest and seems
to be the next logical place for his interest and
consciousness to really focus and to keep it in perspective.
He's he's kind of getting up to sort of sort
of retirement age at this point, I would imagine, right, Yeah,
I mean I should say so and uh and so
it's at this point, just as six months of cohabitation

(57:26):
with Peter coming to an end, funding drives up at
cr AT c r I and its closure is announced.
Um and they didn't even have a peer reviewed paper
out yet. Again, this comes up on the back of
rumors that are spreading about the experiments c r I.
Apparently a visiting board of grant examiners also came and
ended up giving just a scathing review of the operation,

(57:47):
and and Lily charges that the Navy researchers effectively sabotaged
him and all of this, and you know, maybe they did. Yeah,
And there's that sort of like this is a question
that I had along. Like basically the whole journey for
Lily is like where's the money coming from? Right? Like,
he obviously has that point where he's working very closely
with the government in the military, and then he gets
into this phase where they're co funding stuff, but he's

(58:09):
also got private resources, possibly even from his family. But yeah,
I can imagine that if they're like coming by to
take a tour or something like that, they're probably a
little bit horrified. Well, it seems to be one of
those cases where the establishment, if you will, we're certainly
find funding Lily as long as his obsessions matched up

(58:31):
with with with their goals and with their interests. But
is his obsession uh drifted out of sync with theirs
they stepped away from him. Well, it's fascinating, but it
gets back to what we talked about in the Animals
as Weapons episode, right, like nine times out of ten.
That's where the money comes for this kind of stuff. Yeah,
so c R I is just completely taken apart. The

(58:53):
dolphins are most of the dolphins are apparently released, though
Peter apparently unfortunately dies in captivity. Later on, Lily told
love It that Peter died via suicide. That since dolphins
have to consciously breathe, that if a dolphin is is
significantly upset, it may just simply shut down and stop breathing.

(59:15):
And that is allegedally what happened, and that it was
upset by the suffering of its bond. Would love it
perhaps that's why. That's what love It, That's what love
It says in in in her book and in interviews. Yeah. See,
so this is a little bit different from what I
had read. And this is by Lily's own account. Later on,
he sort of defiantly goes on later on to say,

(59:37):
like he, in the face of the Navy and everybody else,
he purposely let all the dolphins go. Uh And he
even said to the point he said, well they were
finished reprogramming me. So he you know, obviously like went
to the uh far into the metaphor with the dolphins
were performing the experiments on him, he wasn't experimenting on them,

(01:00:00):
and that they chose to let him go. Yes, indeed,
and uh, you know, at this point we really reached
the point where Lily begins to fall out of favor
with a lot of folks. Certainly by the time that
Hustler magazine article comes out in seventy five. Uh, as
I pointed out in that Orian magazine piece of Mind

(01:00:21):
in the Water that I mentioned earlier, Lily went on
to just be widely reviled by professional dolphin researchers and
working scientists have for some time tended to dismiss him
as just a lunatic, you know, as this hippie nut job.
And you can understand that, right, I mean, you're trying
to do this serious professional work and his figure is

(01:00:44):
sort of looming in the in your peripheral fision. The
whole time people were perhaps bringing him up. His he's
he's tarnished your your your work, and your passions to
a certain extent by his approach to tackling them. Well,
especially knowing how competitive and sort of vicious. Unfortunately that
like academic and research competition can kind of go. Yeah,

(01:01:08):
I'm not surprised at all that sort of like the
next generation of dolphin researchers turned on him, although you know,
it also does sound like he wasn't exactly producing uh
I guess like documented results, right, the kind of things
that were that were being looked for, both for the
funding but also to justify you know, what he was

(01:01:29):
doing exactly. Well. I I also heard that, uh, and
I'm curious if this is still true. This is from
around the time, right before he died. Apparently the research
station was going to be converted into a luxury condo
living center that was called Dolphin Cove. Yeah, so I

(01:01:49):
wonder if Dolphin Cove is still there with St. Thomas, right, yeah, yeah, curious, Yeah,
I'd love to hear from you visit it. I wonder
if the underwater apartment is still there. You pay three
hundred dollars a night to stay and uh, there's no dolphin,
you just you know, underwater. Yeah. So okay, this is
really like the final I guess stage of Lily's research

(01:02:13):
career as it were, and he kind of goes whole
hog into the LSD field, right, right, And this is
pretty much the the path he continues for the rest
of his life. Really, this is where this is where
Lily truly becomes the the the coon skin cap wearing uh,
psychonaut counterculture mythic figure. This is when he gets his
membership card into the Psychedelic Avengers that we've been talking

(01:02:36):
about on on our episodes for quite is officially a
part of the team now. And I've seen photos of
him hanging out with Timothy Learry and Alan Ginsburg. Yeah,
during this stage, and he apparently continues a certain degree
of of Dolphin research. Uh. Some of it is um
more is on the scientific side, like the use of
musical tones. Some of it is more far more mystical,

(01:02:59):
so is the looking into telepathy. But and it's and
the dolphin continues to be kind of a mascot for
him and for his work. So even though the c
r I Center is gone, the Dolphin still remains an
important part of Lily's life. But of course so does
LSD and the use of LSD and other psychoactive agents

(01:03:24):
too still crack that nut of consciousness in human existence.
And uh, and and reached that providence of the mind.
And one of my understandings is that like once l
s D became illegal, he sort of moved into other psychotropics.
Specifically ketamine was one that he used a lot um
and and wrote about a lot as well. Yes, indeed,

(01:03:45):
and and if his writings are in any indication, and
he wrote a lot about his experiences using LSD. Like
the times he used it, he really used it, like
he went in Whole Hawk. He had access, legitimate access
to pharmaceutical grade LSD and really attempted to just break
through to the other side with it. And this was

(01:04:07):
one of the actual like primary resources you were able
to get a hold of for this episode, right with
one of his books specifically about these experiences, what's it called.
It's called Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human bio Computer.
And this is just kind of his like lab notes
of taking LSD essentially, it's hiss. Yeah, his big book
of LSD observations published in nineteen seventy two, and it's

(01:04:30):
um God, it's a it's a very interesting book to read.
It's a difficult book to to read as well. Uh,
A lot of Lui's writing on this sort of thing.
Um it seems to be a fascinating synthesis of converging discipline,
so he's he's dealing with mysticism and new age thought.
He's also using a lot of computer programming terminology and

(01:04:52):
computer programming metaphors and as his evidence in the title. Yeah,
and that goes back to when he was talking about
the dolphins at the end of it too, he said
they reprogrammed him. And then there's a lot of psychoanalysis
in there as well. Like any discipline he's picked up,
any technology has picked up, it goes into this writing.
And at times there's almost a stream of consciousness quality

(01:05:13):
to the writings, as if all all three of these
interpretive systems are working at the same time in different ways,
and literally is just sharing his thoughts in real time.
And this can be at times alluring, it can be
rather alienating. Their portions of programming the human computer that
that read like the stuffiest trip guides you could possibly imagine. Yeah, yeah,

(01:05:36):
I can sort of imagine, especially because right, like he
was beholden to no one. He's just kind of writing
if his present day he'd be publishing kindle e books
or something like that, Right, but like, isn't there still
like a trust or something like that? That manages his
manages manages his publishing endeavors. Yeah, I believe so. I
mean all his books are still out there in one
form or another. Um. But you know, even though at

(01:05:58):
times there's stuffy, there other times where it does just
read like pure um psychonautic poetry. He's uh, he's he's
taking all of this these tools and he's trying to,
you know, figure out what the self is, what consciousness is,
what are the limits of consciousness? Uh? And yeah, at
times it's beautiful and at times it's it's very difficult

(01:06:18):
and alienating. And so this gets us into the lily
phase that I have the hardest time identifying with. Up
until this point, I'm on board, you know, I'm interested
in what he's doing, interested in his findings, even when
it comes to like, you know, uh, masturbating a dolphin
and taking LSD to try to telepathically communicate with them.
Like I'm I'm interested. But then we get into uh,

(01:06:42):
I guess it's the echo phase. This is where, by
the way, like connected to the Echo the Dolphin video game,
it's not echo e C h O, it's e c
CEO because it's an acronym. Oh. Yes, Earth Coincidence Control Office. Yeah.
So yeah, this ends up coming at about in the
in the seventies really, but you see the roots of

(01:07:02):
it back as far as nineteen two. Okay, um, because
with his counterculture celebrity status he attracted a lot of peers, followers,
hangers on from all corners, including some of the day's
most brilliant freethinking minds, such as a young Carl Sagan
for interesting, and by sixty two he'd organized the Order
of the Dolphin and served as Grand Dolphin. And it's

(01:07:26):
important to note that this was I kind of think
of this as kind of like, um, it's kind of
like a tool album. It's it's serious, but it's also
not that serious. There's this performance are too. Yeah, there's
a certain amount of performance are, there's a certain amount
of goofery. But then there are also some serious undertones
as well. So this involves astrophysicist, radio astronomers, atmosphere at chemists,

(01:07:47):
computer engineers, um. And they even apparently have special special
pins that they would wear. Man, can you imaginef we
could get ahold of some of those pins for a
pretty penny on eBay. Yes, sir, someone will want to
make sure one of his acts, one of his coonskin hats. Yeah,
it was apparently a little Engrave dolphin. And eventually a
lot of his more sci fi oriented ideas come out

(01:08:11):
of this period as well. And again like I'm I'm
I'm not a percent sure that Lily actually believed this stuff, right,
I think it's we need to cover it in order
to sort of get the full Lily picture here, Right.
I get the feeling that this is sort of him, like, yeah,
performance art, maybe creating like living metaphors in order to
somehow communicate his ideas out to people, right, Like, the

(01:08:35):
more absurd and spectacular the idea, the more attention it's
possibly going to get. Yeah, I mean a literal interpretation
of some of these things we're talking about here, of
his later ideas and writing it, it seems a bit
too simple for such a complex individual, especially when we
looked at what Lily himself wrote about his early writings.
In particular in uh the nineteen seventy two forward to

(01:08:59):
a reprint of Programming and metaprom and the Better Programming
in the Human Biocomputer, he said, I had written the
report in such a way that it's basic messages were
hidden behind a heavy, long introduction designed to stop the
casual reader. Apparently, once word got out, this device no
longer stalled the interested readers. Somehow, the basic messages were
important enough to enough readers so that the work acquired

(01:09:22):
an unexpected viability. So he's all, he's already talking at
that stage about a kind of coded nature to his work,
that that he's hiding ideas that he's and that he's
layering these ideas. So it seems, yeah, in light of that,
it seems a bit counterintuitive to say that, for instance,
when he's talking about the threat of a um solid

(01:09:45):
state intelligence, that he's leap speaking literally. Yeah, I mean
we have to remember back up, like, this is a
guy whose whole purpose in life was human consciousness and uh,
connecting human consciousness to other consciousnesses, right, and language, he's
fully aware that language is the best way that we're

(01:10:06):
doing that now and the ways to manipulate it in
order to sort of best I guess you could almost
look at it as a like tool of rhetoric, right,
in order for him to get his ideas across. But yeah,
let's back up with like the solid state and the
echoes stuff. So this is this is pretty out there,
like he posits that there's like an alien intelligence that's

(01:10:26):
kind of in control of everything, right, Yeah, this is
where we get into that, uh, into this idea that
there's a hierarchy of coincidence control offices at the Earth level,
solar level, galactic and cosmics. So again that's where we
get down to echo right Earth coincidence control offices, and
these are essentially serving the same purpose of God as

(01:10:47):
a controlling intelligence in the universe. So this is really
this is really turning to two notions of spirituality, really
thinking about God and putting his own spin on what
God would be in his world of you. Yeah. Yeah,
and it's not that far off from like other I'm
thinking like Philip K. Dick for definitely, like he's writing

(01:11:08):
around the same period of time, so it's not that
far off. I can imagine that Lily would maybe pick
up something like Vallis and be like, Okay, maybe this
is a cool idea for me to get my ideas
of consciousness across now that the Navy has pulled my funding. Yeah.
He also, as I alluded to earlier, he prophesied a
future conflict between organic intelligence and machine intelligence, and which

(01:11:30):
he referred to as the solid state intelligence or s
s I, so specifically, he said this would be a
conflict over ideal environmental conditions for either humans or the
sort of s s I created bioforms that crave cold
and vacuums. So yeah, yeah, well, I mean and then
along this period of time too, is when he envisions

(01:11:51):
what I was telling you about earlier, which I thought
was where the apartment thing was going, but he called
it the future communications laboratory, and he called it a
floating living room. Uh. And the idea is that this
is where humans and dolphins would come to connect. So
I'm imagining something like along the lines of like a
c world type thing that's less uh imprisoning to the dolphins,

(01:12:12):
right where the dolphins can kind of come up and
interact with human beings. Uh. And and so that that
idea is like along those same lines, I guess. But
we have to remember to like nineteen seventy two, the
same time he's he's he's getting into this real weird stuff.
Lily's pivotal to establishing the Marine Mammal Protection Act within
the United States government. You know, I mean, he's grounded.

(01:12:34):
He's actually affecting change and in how human beings are
connecting with dolphins. But he's also you know, experimenting with
some of this other stuff. Yeah, I have to say,
just like backing up and looking at the big picture here.
I think he was having a laugh, you know, or
or or maybe just trying to use um, some really

(01:12:56):
out there ideas in order to draw attention to his
more grounded philosophy. Yeah, he's more of a mystical philosopher, dreamer,
and to a certain extent, trickster. You can't wear a
coonskin calf like that and expect to be taking taking seriously,
You're kind of winking at the audience at that point.
But but to your point, Yeah, he he was a

(01:13:18):
was a major proponent of of not only the intelligence
and value of dolphins but they're in Wales, but their
their rights as well. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean he believed
that killing whales and dolphins was as immoral as killing
other human beings, and they should be protected by law
and humans should understand them as sentient beings. This is
one of the big quotes that I saw pop up

(01:13:39):
from him over and over and over again about dolphins.
He said, they are not someone to kill, but someone
to learn from, and I think you see that, and
at least we're not quite there yet obviously, but I mean, like,
think of all of the protests over the last couple
of decades about like dolphins getting killed in tuna traps,
right like that kind of uh thought about dolphins would

(01:14:03):
not have been possible without Lily. Indeed, So there you
have it, John C. Lily hopefully a a much more
complete picture of the man and his work, his seriousness,
his madness, his his his imagination and his just you know, intense,
hyper focused intellect um, certainly more so than we've been

(01:14:25):
able to to do in previous episodes. Yeah. So, uh,
you know, I would love to hear from people out
there who have maybe got some because it seems like
there's just such a wide array of resources about Lily.
Is there something that we missed here or is there
more to the story. Maybe you know something about Echo
that we don't know. Maybe you've been in touch with
the Solid State intelligence. Uh, you know, you can talk

(01:14:47):
to us on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler. Were in all
those platforms, and of course the best way to get
in touch with us is directly at our email address,
which is blow the mind at how Stuff Works dot com. Now,
most of you are used to the show ending right there.
We usually end it right after dot Com, but we're
going to end a little differently today. Right Robert, you

(01:15:07):
found a particular gem that we're going to add to
the episode. That's try. We're going to close it out
with the Art Department track The Agent, off of the
two thousand fourteen album Natural Selection from Number nineteen Music.
There uh in O one nine music on Facebook, Twitter,
and Instagram. This is a really cool track and it
includes samples from John C. Lily's lecture through the Center

(01:15:30):
of the Mandala. One problem in human existence it's the
tendency to repeat repeating wants control m. For more on

(01:16:17):
this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works
dot com.