From the Vault: John C. Lilly

John C. Lily the Psychonaute. Yes, yes, the man has 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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.

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 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 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 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

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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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. 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 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

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

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

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

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

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 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. 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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

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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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

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 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

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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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

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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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

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.

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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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.

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, 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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. 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, 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, 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 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

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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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

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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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,

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

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 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 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

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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 of the Mandala. One problem in human existence it's the tendency to repeat repeating wants control m. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works dot com.