John C. Lilly: Province of the Mind

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 and Christian 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.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stop
works dot com. Hey you 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,

(00:26):
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

(00:48):
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 been no pun intended 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 as a multi media conglomerate, and uh,

(01:11):
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, be it iTunes

(01:32):
or uh Spotify or any of the various so wonderful
platforms out there, you can support the show by simply
giving us a positive rating and a 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 Tumbler. We're
on all those platforms as Blow the Mind. And we

(01:53):
don't only post our own stuff, but we curate lots
of weird science e bizarre audity 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,

(02:14):
and in 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 when there was just kind of a sampler
platter of different real life scientists that had sort of

(02:35):
a weird side 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,

(02:56):
which is what most people may think of when we've
mentioned John's will. This is one of those moments too,
where I feel like the podcast format is really at
an advantage here because in our case, 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

(03:19):
tanks or it's just the dolphins. But I feel like
we have the 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

(03:41):
based on Lily as a character. The first was Day
of the Dolphin 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 Hurt,
you know, of course as this Lily kind of figure
who takes acid in isolation tanks and then finds himself
the evolving basically right into various forms of proto humanity. Yeah,

(04:04):
so he's he's he's a figure that had the castle
a large shadow across our 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

(04:27):
in legitimate 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

(04:48):
standardized his scientific career was to begin with, it's really
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 and met us
and psycho analysis, biophysics, um. And he went from being
published as a researcher in scientific journals to writing his
own books about spirituality and the self. And one of

(05:10):
the things that's really important about Lily, I think to
just like our 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

(05:31):
involve humans turning into dolphins or vice versa. But generally speaking,
before the nineteen fifties, dolphins were a pest of fishermen.
They were something. 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

(05:55):
with dolphins to how we treat dolphins today, even to
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 really changed the way

(06:19):
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 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 potential personhood. But would we have

(06:42):
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 to his medical background and
just trying to figure out, like the physicality of human

(07:06):
consciousness where it was. Yeah, he in in his um
later on, certainly by by the nineteen seventies, who 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 comes from you know what we
what we based the title in the episode from He says,
in the province of the mind, what one believes to

(07:26):
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 post dolphin work going into LSD work, I'm assuming, Yeah,
and I think it this is a It's a great

(07:47):
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
at times a definite flaw in his scientific work. Right. Yeah,

(08:09):
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 verst
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.
So let's, uh, let's let's back up a bit then

(08:30):
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.
I mean, he was alive at just the right moment

(08:50):
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, 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 question that was quoted
as being the title of his essay, how can the

(09:12):
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 agent.
Really Yeah, unless that's some like revisionist history on his part.
But uh, the other thing that I thought was really
interesting is my impression from the readings is that Lily

(09:34):
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
in some of his research after school as well. Yeah,
that's the that's the sense that I get from some

(09:55):
of the resources who are looking at uh. And I
do have to to mention that, as far as we know,
they're 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. Will
cite those as we go. Yeah, this is a book
slash movie dying to be made. Yeah. Yeah, I think that,

(10:17):
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
the premier came out. Alright, So lially goes on. He

(10:39):
gets his physics degree from cal Tech in 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's primarily interested in the physical
structures of the brain where that the conscious self might

(10:59):
be found. So that's pretty interesting, uh 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

(11:20):
learning more and adding everything to his resume. Yeah. From
an early point, we're seeing in 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 he's gonna utilize what whatever tools he
can draw on, be they uh, disciplines, pharmaceuticals, technologies. We

(11:40):
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, Lillie ends up doing research. Uh.
Mainly it sounds like on the zology of high altitude

(12:01):
flying uh, specifically for the Air Force, and he was
inventing different devices to measure gas 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 uh like an ethos surrounding that right

(12:23):
that I can't remember who it was, 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. And
this seems to be the case here where he participated
in an experiment where he was studying the effects of

(12:44):
explosive decompression on pilots at high altitudes. Uh. And 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,
all right, so after the war or 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

(13:07):
War paranoia. UH. During this area that literally turns 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,

(13:29):
again drawing on the best technology available at the time
to try and crack this nut of consciousness. And what
I had read this is one of the first stances
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

(13:51):
would project these impulses up onto like a television screen
as waves. UM. So the Babatron included an array of
sensors that where 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
or human beings. Uh. And in nineteen fifty one, he
published a paper that showed how to display these patterns

(14:12):
in such a way projecting brain electrical activity on a
television like screen. Uh. And I recently spent some time
in the hospital. I had a family member and 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,

(14:34):
breathing and and and brain activity. 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

(14:56):
or out or out, Yeah, 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 interesting 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

(15:18):
both the National 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

(15:38):
you know, we've got the rabbits, we talked about that,
but then he 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

(15:59):
their neural networks and to link sensory events, muscle movement,
and other behaviors related to the activity in their brain.
This is going to be important later on when we
get into 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,

(16:20):
connecting invasive of vivisections of the cranium and this is
where things get 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
of nineteen fifties cold war paranoia. It's US versus the Soviets.

(16:40):
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.
Graham Burnett's excellent paper A Mind in Water, which is
published in Ryan Magazine and it's available online, will include
a link to it on the landing page, says Lily

(17:01):
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
reprogramming as it was then called, among the cognizanty sleep
deprivation and operant controlled of animals with wires implanted in

(17:25):
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
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 there, yeah, the goal.

(17:49):
He was not just animals but humans. In an unpublished
paper of Lily's titled Special Considerations of Modified Human Agents
as Reconnaissance and Intelligence Devices, I really don't have to
go much further, and then I just title, But he
talked about such things as the quote covert and relatively
safe implantation of electrodes into the human brain for the

(18:10):
push button control of the totality of motivation and of consciousness.
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 of inquiry right now. Yeah, I mean to

(18:31):
to whatever extent his his ideas here were actually applicable
given that the technology of the time, and he's 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

(18:52):
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 and the monkeys and not to
damage their brain tissue. But I imagine it wasn't comfortable
having these electrodes stuck in their brains, right, Yeah. And
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,

(19:14):
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 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

(19:36):
has he's a very unsentimental guy. He's laser focused on
this consciousness to enigma. Uh, 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

(19:57):
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 it's during this creepy period
that literally first learns from an oceanographer colleague that the
largest brains are found in small tooth whales. Intrigued, he
sets out to implant electrodes in the brains of captive

(20:17):
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 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 NT WOW.

(20:40):
So John C. Lily was like peripherally involved with like
Universal Horror, specifically the Creature from the Black Lagoon. I
would I think you might have mentioned this before the podcast.
How cool would it be for them to be like
a Creature of the Black Lagoon remake that like mixes
in some of the John C. Lily ideas of you know,

(21:01):
both dolphin human communication, but also isolation tanks and hallucinogenics. Yeah,
I mean, and in fact, we'll get back to the
creature from 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

(21:24):
of the problems here, as I mentioned, is that dolphins
stop breathing when they're under anesthetic, and this has to
do 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 it is for us surface dwellers.
Uh So, it's it's pretty rough work. Dolphins are dying

(21:44):
during the experiments, but one of them, before it passes,
makes a series of sounds, and Lily has this really
this epiphany. 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

(22:05):
and it's just this, this Eureka moment for him. He's
been searching for for consciousness, searching for for some sort
of you know, 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

(22:28):
sort of dabbles in it. Yeah, this is where, yeah,
he dabbles in it. And and the light bulb goes
off and he realizes, 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,

(22:49):
right because it's a fairly popularized thing. I was first
familiar with it from Altered States. That was the first
time 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. Yeah. I think we've likely been to

(23:10):
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 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

(23:32):
wearing a bathing suit, maybe not, and you're just floating
there in the silence. Uh. You all your hearing is
just the 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.

(23:54):
The darkness takes away your eyesight for the most part.
The one I was in kind of I don't know
about you, but 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 earplugs? Did you get ear plugs? I may
have gotten ear plugs, I can't remember now. I do
remember seeing lights eventually, because I think I was in darkness.

(24:15):
And I also have to say that the warmness of
the water is tends to be calibrated so that it's
about human body temperature, right, 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.

(24:36):
How do you break down a potential spy? How do
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

(24:58):
it was a form of psychological torture that was being devised,
and it was apparently pretty traumatic for some of the
individuals who tested it out, but of course really 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

(25:19):
no stimuli received. Right. But yeah, it's really interesting. Again,
so 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

(25:41):
is very much a thing that we do nowadays, we
the United States military and government when we're trying to
get information out of, you know, somebody that that might
have something that's gonna you know, potentially affect a citizen
or or an operation overseas. Oh yeah, or even just
dishing out essentially punishment on individu rules that are in
soliditary confinement. Yeah. And it's this is fascinating to me too, because, um,

(26:06):
this 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, it

(26:26):
really 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

(26:48):
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 in side 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 than the laws

(27:09):
of 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

(27:30):
memories 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.

(27:52):
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

(28:13):
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. Yeah, 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

(28:35):
of flotation. Uh, and it 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

(28:55):
must not have been that long or serious, but I
don't but 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

(29:20):
another thing that comes out of this, outside of his
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 that

(29:41):
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
I love this title Tanks for the Memories flotation tank talks. Yeah,

(30:05):
and this is from this is definitely later 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.
This used to be called fusion with the universal mind
or God. In more modern terms, you have done a

(30:27):
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
billions of other beings in a thin sheet of consciousness

(30:48):
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 touches on some more, Yeah,
the mystical ideas that he explores in his work. I
do have to say, though, with ultimately what he's talking
about here, and ultimately with with the experience of love

(31:09):
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
think of it as just that that knee voice what

(31:29):
Ecartole calls the egoic mind, this sort of knee 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

(31:50):
thoughts about yourself and 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

(32:14):
of 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, They're 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

(32:35):
would call her a 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

(32:56):
who would he said something along the lines of, how
like after every light 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 hop 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

(33:16):
mean it leaves a bit leads of busy life, so
it would make sense. Alright, So let's at this point
we're gonna return back to dolphins. I feel like we
we've we've set everything up to to continue Lily's journey.
We're going to around nineteen Uh. This is when Lily
presents a paper before the American Psychiatric Association and he
makes some rather dramatic claims about the intelligence and the

(33:40):
linguistic abilities of the bottlenose dolphins specifically. Now that the
evidence that he cites as a parent is arguably scant
and and anecdotal, but it resonated pretty strongly, and it
resonated with the right people. So soon you had prestigious
federal research awards rolling in, and he uses the funds
to build a dedicated dolphin laboratory on St. Thomas in

(34:04):
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 dollars a year in grant money.
It exploded crazy, especially when you consider what half a

(34:27):
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 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

(34:51):
was able to pull and it's this kind of fascinating
like feature piece on on him, and they described him
as a deep chested, sun tanned neurophysiologist. I like that. 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

(35:13):
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 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

(35:34):
engineer and mimic it. Yes, the Navy was definitely one
of the interested party that was won over by his
his arguments for dolphin intelligence and dolphin abilities. Well, I mean,
he had some some 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

(35:56):
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 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

(36:18):
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 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,

(36:42):
I don't know why. It just squeaks me out, Like
the idea of a little smile forming around and the
but the like dolphins got like its head peel, you know,
it's scalp peeled back with all these electrodes wired into it.
Whatever the case, the dolphins loved it. In fact, there
was an apparatus that he used to sort of train
them with it. They could give themselves the electrical jolt,

(37:02):
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.
I In this nineteen piece, they say this is where
he first encountered the dolphins mimicking human speech. He says
that apparently, and maybe he's just you know, b sing
them during an interview or something like that. But he

(37:25):
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 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

(37:47):
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,
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,

(38:08):
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
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

(38:30):
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. But he specifically noted that 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

(38:52):
and immediately starts crying out with this may day distress call. Well,
Lily says, the other dolphins all came to its rescue
and pushed it back to the surface so that it
could continue breathing. So maybe he speculated that 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

(39:15):
fascination and love for these animals, he's willing to like
let one potentially drown. Yeah, And I mean part of this,
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

(39:38):
saw during his NYM days and continues to a certain
extent with the dolphins. It sounds from from the research
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 but he was still at times sort

(39:58):
of accused of having an occasional cavalier attitude towards the
test dolphins. Yeah. I think though 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

(40:19):
book just really becomes a big deal. Not only researchers,
not only scientists and academics, but just the general public
are eating this book up. And I'm just gonna read
you a quick sample from 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

(40:41):
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. 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.

(41:03):
He's talking about He discusses us reaching the point where
we we teach dolphins to speak English, to speak English,
and to even have to create a chair for them
on the United Nations. So you know this, he's talking
about finding an alien intelligence here on our planet and

(41:23):
uh and and communing with them, um, communicating with them
and actually inviting them into our rule 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
he had like a very personal reason for feeling so
strongly about this, given the way that he had experimented

(41:45):
on these animals previously. He goes from that to thinking
that they should be part of the United Nations. 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 pattern by clicking, squeaking, and rasping. Uh.
And he even talked, there's this British I got the

(42:08):
impression from the article I read that this British anthropologist
was a big deal at the time. His name 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

(42:28):
they were going to encounter aliens, this is the perfect
way for them to sort of come up with 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

(42:49):
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
you've never seen the movie before it involves the George C.
Scott as John C. Lily. They both had season the
middle character teaching 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

(43:12):
right like he's paw and I think he names them
all 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 in inspired of 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.

(43:35):
This is the time of you know, scuba is really
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

(43:58):
to our connections to the creature from the Black Lagoon.
Oh yeah, hit me with it. Yeah, so I kind
of 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

(44:21):
where where Lily initially went down to study dolphins. And uh,
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 suits in the first two Creature films. And uh,
and again he co created Flipper, and Lily is actually
thanked in the credits to the nine film Flipper. So

(44:44):
that's nuts. Wow. Okay, well yeah, and it it also
makes me think of God. The film version of twenty
Leagues Into the Sea was made around that time to
probably right, Um, I don't know the specific date on that,
but yeah, there is that fascination with sort of under
the adventure. Yeah, it's opening up to us in ways
that it just had not been previously available, and so

(45:05):
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 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.

(45:26):
So studies at the center continue again. Lily's approach gradually
moves away from the sort of creepy world of nim
is nim 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

(45:49):
achieve this. He hypes in hydrophone recordings of their sounds,
and eventually too he starts using LSD. And this is
where it's all coming together. Right. They seem like very
disparate things when you say dolphins, isolation tanks, 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

(46:10):
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
what kind of effect it will. It will. 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 tests I

(46:32):
used 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
going in. Yeah, see if he could he could understand
their mind. Um. 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 Echo

(46:52):
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
the whole game was centered 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

(47:14):
very service level understanding of eco to 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
causes the events on Earth that make echo the dolphin
have to try to, you know, go through this gamut
of psychedelic levels and pervious save the world. That's cool. Yeah,

(47:35):
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,
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

(47:56):
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, Lily mobilize the best available tools
a cutting edge array of cybernetic concepts. In pursuit of
his his breakthrough communication with dolphins. He employed quote information theory,

(48:16):
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
about brain 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,

(48:37):
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 we discussed. But
but in all of this too, we're getting into this
problem of projection, right. Oh yeah, you mean like actual
vocal projection. No, no, no, actually like projecting, uh well,

(48:58):
and maybe to a certain extent, but all so one,
you know, projecting your consciousness on to another creature, okay,
okay um. As Plart points out in his paper, projection
short circuits a proper understanding of what others are thinking
or meaning to convey when they make a communic communicative offer,
so that in projection goes. It's a problem when we

(49:19):
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.
Yet and and through a series of feedback and feed forward,
we try to clear up like various psychological noise that

(49:42):
gets in the middle there of our understanding of what
one another are 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 head to one another. Yeah, really really wanted to
get past that. Yeah. And but one of the problems,

(50:04):
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. He said, to quote,
we must keep the working hypothesis in mind that they
are highly intelligent and are just as interested in communicating

(50:27):
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 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,

(50:51):
And certainly I can imagine where that is where he
starts to have stumbling blocks with funders like UH, Navy
for instance, in the Air Force or just any like
even NYM. Right, Like, when you start postulating that your
test subjects are on an equal playing field with humanity

(51:12):
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.
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.

(51:35):
Maybe perhaps they even know something about the l s D.
And they're definitely talking about the flooded dolphin cohabitation apartment
that becomes a major project towards the end of c R.
I actually I don't know about this particularly, but I
know that he pitched an idea that basically there needed

(51:56):
to be some kind of living space that humans and
dolphins could cod this within to communicate. Is this his
attempt at that? Yeah, it's I mean, And a lot
of credit has to go to uh scientists. Margaret how
love It, who was actually the woman who lived with
the dolphins, and she she later wrote a book. There
were a number of articles that came out about her experience.
There's a great Guardian article actually titled The Dolphin Who

(52:18):
Loved Me. And she comes up to the Lily with
the idea like she's already researching dolphins, so she's drawn
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

(52:40):
fill this place with water. I want to live here. Huh.
So see what she had a scuba suit on or
was it just it just was a shallow enough that
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

(53:01):
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 Uh in an attempt to teach him English.
She was going to teach him to speak English. And
the idea here and Lily you know, bought into two
was that she would be there just constantly as this

(53:23):
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,
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

(53:46):
human how to speak UM, 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 pretty can be pretty sexual creatures. So yeah, I've
heard the story. Yeah, this is probably where a lot
of people are familiar with the story, because she would

(54:06):
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 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

(54:30):
what that would be quite scandalous. It's one thing to
pose it that a dolphin is on a sort of
uh equal identity status, individual individualistic status with a human being.
It's another thing to start engaging with them what people
would consider bestiality. Yeah, he did get into a weird
area here. We have to sort of explain yourself out

(54:51):
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 an article about it, and
they didn't help. Oh yeah, they completely scandalized 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,

(55:14):
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 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.

(55:35):
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 only
time that's happened, yeah, or the last. So by autumn
of nineteen six, Lily is increasingly more interested in LSD

(55:57):
research than the ongoing dolphin research. Uh. You know, you
could say that he's probably spent more time in the
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,

(56:18):
I mean I should say so. And uh. And so
it's at this point, just as six months of cohabitation
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 re viewed 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

(56:41):
ended up giving just a scathing review of the operation.
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 went where he's working very closely
with the government in the military, and then he gets

(57:04):
into this phase where they're co funding stuff, but he's
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

(57:24):
find funding Lily as long as his obsessions matched up
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,

(57:45):
that's where the money comes for this kind of stuff. Yeah,
so c R I is just completely taken apart. The
dolphins are most of the dolphins are apparently released, though
Peter apparently unfortunately dies in captivity later on. Well really
told love It that Peter died via suicide. That tests
dolphins have to consciously breathe, that if a dolphin is

(58:09):
is significantly upset, it may just simply shut down and
stop breathing. And that is allegedly 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 the interviews. Yeah, see so this is a little
bit different from what I had read. And this is

(58:30):
by Lily's own account, later on, he sort of defiantly
goes on later on to say, 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

(58:52):
far into the metaphor with the dolphins were performing the
experiments on him. He wasn't experimenting on them, and that
they chose to let him, Yes, indeed, and uh, you know,
at this point where we really reached the point where uh,
Lily begins to fall out of favor with a lot
of folks. Certainly by the time that Hustler magazine article

(59:13):
comes out in seventy five, Uh, as I pointed out
in that Orian magazine piece of Mind 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

(59:35):
understand that, right, I mean, you're trying to do this
serious professional work, and his figure is sort of looming
in the in your peripheral vision 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

(59:56):
competitive and sort of vicious unfortunly that like academic and
research competition can kind of go. Yeah, 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

(01:00:16):
like documented results, right, the kind of things that were
that that were being looked for, both for the funding
but also to justify you know, what he was 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

(01:00:40):
to be converted into a luxury condo living center that
was called Dolphin Cove. Yeah, so I wonder if Dolphin
Cove is still there with St. Thomas right, Yeah, Yeah, curious, Yeah,
I'd love to hear from visited. I wonder if the
underwater apartment is still there. You pay three hundred dollars
a night to stay and there's no dolphin. You just

(01:01:01):
you know, you just walk around the water. Yeah. So okay,
this is really like the final I guess stage of
Lily's research 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

(01:01:24):
cap wearing, uh, psychonaut counterculture mythic figure. This is when
he gets his membership card into the Psychedelic Avengers we've
been talking about on on our episodes for quite versus
officially a part of the team now and I've seen
photos of him hanging out with Timothy Larry and Allen Ginsburg. Yeah,
during this stage, and he apparently continues a certain degree

(01:01:47):
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,
such as 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

(01:02:09):
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 too
still crack that nut of consciousness in human existence and
uh and and reached that providence of the mind. And

(01:02:30):
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,
and and if his writings are in in any indication,
and he wrote a lot about his experiences using LSD.
Like the times he used it, he really used it,

(01:02:52):
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 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

(01:03:14):
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 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 Louis writing on this

(01:03:37):
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 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 right. And

(01:04:00):
then there's a lot of psychoanalysis in there as well.
Like any discipline he has picked up, any technology is
picked up, it goes into this writing and at times
there's almost a stream of consciousness quality to the writings,
as if all all three of these interpretive systems are
working at the same time in different ways, and really
is just sharing his thoughts in real time. And this

(01:04:20):
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,
I can sort of imagine, especially because right like he
was beholden to no one. He's just kind of writing.
I mean, if his present day he'd be publishing kindle
e books or something like that, right, But like, isn't

(01:04:43):
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 times there's stuffy, there other times where it does
just read like pure um psychonautic poetry. He's uh, he's

(01:05:04):
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
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

(01:05:25):
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 I
guess it's the echo phase. This is where, by the way,
like connected to the Echo the Dolphin video game. It's

(01:05:45):
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 about in in the
seventies really, but you see the roots of it back
as far as nineteen two. Okay, um, because with his
counterculture celebrity status, he attracted a lot of peers, followers,

(01:06:09):
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
important to note that this was I kind of think
of this as kind of like, um, it's kind of

(01:06:29):
like a tool album. It's it's serious, but it's also
not that serious. There's this performance are. 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, atmospheric chemists, computer engineers, um.
And they even apparently have special special pins that they

(01:06:51):
would wear. Man, can you imagine we could get ahold
of some of those pins for a pretty penny on eBay? Yes,
someone will sell onto me. Sure one of his ats,
one of his and skin hats. Yeah, it was apparently
a little Engrave dolphin. And eventually a lot of his
more sci fi oriented ideas come out of this period
as well. And again like I'm I'm I'm not a

(01:07:13):
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 aret, maybe creating like living metaphors in order to
somehow communicate his ideas out to people, right, Like, the
more absurd and spectacular the idea, the more attention it's

(01:07:37):
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 uh 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
a reprint of Programming and Metaphor and the Beta Programming

(01:07:59):
in 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 an unexpected viability.

(01:08:22):
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 state intelligence,

(01:08:45):
that he's lead 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 doing
that now in the ways to manipulate it in order

(01:09:06):
to sort of best I guess you could almost look
at that 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
kind of in control of everything, right, Yeah, this is

(01:09:26):
where we get into that, uh, into this idea that
is 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
a controlling intelligence in the universe. So this is really

(01:09:47):
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 worldview. 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 around the
same period of time, so it's not that far off.

(01:10:09):
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, which he
referred to as the solid state intelligence or s s I.

(01:10:31):
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 what I
was telling you about earlier, which I thought was where

(01:10:51):
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 was 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, right where the
dolphins can kind of come up and interact with human beings. Uh.

(01:11:14):
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. He's actually affecting change

(01:11:35):
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 or maybe just
trying to use, um some really out there ideas in
order to draw attention to his more grounded philosophy. Yeah,

(01:11:58):
he's more of a a mystical philosopher, dreamer, and to
a certain extent, trickster. You can't wear a coonskin caps
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 was
a major proponent of of not only the intelligence and

(01:12:20):
value of dolphins, but they're in Wales, but there 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 from
him over and over and over again about dolphins. He said,
they are not someone to kill, but someone to learn from.

(01:12:44):
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 not
have been possible without Lily. Indeed, So there you have it,

(01:13:06):
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
able to do in previous episodes. Yeah, So, you know,

(01:13:27):
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 to us
on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler. Were in all those platforms,

(01:13:48):
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
are We usually end it right after dot com. But
we're gonna end a little differently today, Right Robert, you
found a particular gem that we're gonna add to the episode.
That's right. We're going to close it out with the

(01:14:09):
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 of the Mandola.

(01:14:30):
One problem in human existence It is the tendency to
repeat repeat of the water control for moralness and thousands

(01:15:16):
of other topics. Does it How Stuff Works dot Com