Episode description

Talking with animals and aliens is the stuff of children’s stories and conspiracy theorists. But for John Cunningham Lilly, it was his life's work.

So, who on earth is John Cunningham Lilly?

At the age of 16, most of us can barely organise our way out of a paper bag, hold more than a grunting conversation with our friends, or ask anything intelligent of anyone. 

But Lilly wasn't just anyone. See, at 16 he had a pretty profound question: whether the mind could render itself sufficiently objective to study itself. 

Woah.

It became his life's work trying to answer that question. Where it took him may surprise you.

Early in Lilly’s career, it led him to become the first scientist to locate the pain and pleasure centres in the brain. And the first to... artificially stimulate them. 

But, you don’t study techniques for stimulating pain and pleasure in the brain without the FBI, the CIA, Air Force Intelligence, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the National Security Agency, Army Intelligence, and the State Department all becoming interested.

So when Lilly realised that furthering this research meant the weaponisation of it, he abandoned the research and found another way to answer his question. 

Flipping the script, Lilly decided that sensory deprivation might be a pathway to understanding the mind. His quest to be cut off from sight, sound, temperature and gravity led him to invent the first-ever isolation tank. Not only was it the most relaxing thing he had ever been in, his time in the quiet, wet darkness led him to find “other things”. He experienced presences, both known and unknown. He eventually began to see through to another reality.

At this point in his career, after guidance from some alien beings and a chance encounter with the gargantuan brain of a pilot whale, Lilly’s secret mission to study the human mind turned to the study of bottlenose dolphins.

Lilly was determined to bring humans and dolphins into close proximity, so they could learn from each other and humans could teach the dolphins English.

This work led him to believe that dolphins deserved a seat at the United Nations, and the creation of the little-known Order of the Dolphin. 

But did Lilly actually manage to talk to animals? And did he ever actually answer that driving question - can we understand our own mind?

Sources 

• Bruce Clarke’s John Lilly, The Mind of the Dolphin, and Communication Out of Bounds
• Gerard A Houghton: John Lilly Obituary 
• Alex Leyman’s John C. Lilly: The Mad Scientist Who Gave LSD to Dolphins 
• John C Lilly’s Dolphins' Complex Communication
• John C Lilly’s Autobiography The Scientist: A Metaphysical Autobiography [described by the New Age Journal as “at times naive and frustrating”]
• John C Lilly / Ecco - Dolphin Voice, uploaded to Youtube by musick2138
• Christopher Riley’s The dolphin who loved me: the Nasa funded project that went wrong.
• Maria Temming and Anthony Crider’s The Order of the Dolphin: Origins of SETI

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