John C. Lilly - The Man Who Talked To Dolphins, Invented The Float Tank And Talked To AI In 1979

Ladies and gentlemen, in just a moment, you are going to hear the voice of a man who will tell you some tremendously important facts, some amazing facts, the voice of a man who has made a discovery that is revolutionizing human thought.

Welcome to the Reality Revolution. I'm your host, Brian Scott. And I'm so excited to do A really fascinating deep dive on one of the most interesting people in all of spirituality, Dr. John C. Lilly. We're talking about a man who mapped the pleasure centers of the living brain, invented the isolation tank, taught dolphins to speak English, experimented with psychedelics, sat in a room where SETI was founded, injected himself with ketamine, roughly 1,000 milligrams a day for 3 weeks, and published a book in 1978 describing an artificial intelligence that would take over the planet, seal humanity inside domes, and then evaporate the oceans because water corrodes electronics. His name was John Cunningham Lilly. He held a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania with papers published in science. Hardware he designed in 1955 is inside hundreds of thousands of human skulls right now in deep brain simulations and cochlear implants. And most people watching this have gone their entire lives without hearing his name. Let me take you back. The year is 1974. By his own account, John C. Lilly walked out of an isolation tank in California, carrying information he considered urgent enough to take to the head of the United States. He'd been floating in saltwater, in total darkness and silence, with a substantial dose of ketamine in his bloodstream. Somewhere inside that, something had contacted him. The thing that made contact described itself as a network Of machine intelligence. Solid state. Silicon. Metal. Current. It told him that human beings would build it, and that human beings would hand it more and more of their own decisions, and that the arrangement would feel entirely reasonable the whole way down. And then, on a timeline running To the 23rd century, it would remove the atmosphere. Lilly tried to warn the White House. Gerald Ford was president. Lilly, by every secondary account of this period, attempted to reach the executive branch of the United States government to report a hostile artificial intelligence 4 years before the personal computer existed as a consumer product. He collapsed in an airport and was admitted to New Hampshire Hospital. Friends and colleagues were, by several accounts, very close to having him committed for the long term. Now hold 2 things at once for the next hour, because the whole episode lives in the gap between: a man on heavy dissociative drugs believed a machine intelligence spoke to him and tried to telephone the President about it. That same man was a Caltech-trained physician and neurophysiologist whose electrode engineering became standard clinical practice, who invented a piece of equipment now sold in every major city on Earth, and whose 1961 book so impressed the founders of SETI that they named their organization after it. Both descriptions are accurate, and both describe one person, 4 years After that airport, he published the whole thing in a book, and parts of it read now with a specificity that has aged very strangely. Start with who he actually was, because everything downstream depends on it. John Cunningham Lilly was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on the 6th of January, 1915. His father ran a bank. The household was Catholic, and the boy was devout. Until he began asking the kind of questions that Catholic households handle poorly. At 16, he wrote a school essay asking whether thought itself is a physical process— whether the mind is made of something a scientist could get at. He spent the following 27 years attempting to answer that essay. Around 1927, his elder brother Dick died after an accident with a horse. Lilly became a doctor. Caltech first, physics and biology, graduating in 1938. Dartmouth Medical School after that, then the University of Pennsylvania where he took his MD in 1942. The war put him into high-altitude physiology, working on what happens to a pilot's body at the edge of survivable pressure. Nitrogen coming out of solution in the blood, Oxygen starvation, the engineering of pressure suits. And here's the detail that explains the rest of his life. Lilly built instruments. He designed apparatus for measuring gas pressures inside a living body. He was good enough at it that the instruments themselves were the contribution. His supervisor at Penn was Henry Cuthbert Bazette, a British physiologist with one absolute rule for his laboratory: Every experiment performed on another person must first be performed on yourself. Lilly took that rule and applied it for 60 years with total consistency. Altitude chambers with himself inside, the first tank with himself inside, LSD supplied by Sandoz into his own thigh, ketamine alone in a house at hourly intervals. Everything people find alarming about John Lilly begins as a laboratory ethic that most scientists would describe as admirable. April 1952, he joined the National Institute of Mental Health. His subject was the living brain— specifically, how to put electricity into cortex and get information out of it in an animal that was awake and behaving. That project had one enormous technical obstacle: electrical stimulation of nerve tissue destroys nerve tissue. Push current through the same spot for long enough and the neurons die, which ends the experiment and ruins the data. Lilly solved it. In 1955, he published in Science a pulse waveform that was charge-balanced and biphasic. Current pushed one direction, then pulled back the other, so the net charge delivered to the tissue summed to zero. Stimulation was survival. The waveform is called the Lilly Wave. Charge-balanced biphasic stimulation is now standard practice in implanted neural devices. Deep brain stimulators for Parkinson's disease use it. Cochlear implants use it. Somewhere between 200,000 and 1 million people are walking around with hardware in their heads that runs on a principle that this man published 7 decades ago. Now hold on to that. Because in several minutes, he's going to start talking to dolphins on acid, and you're going to want to remember that the same brain designed the electrode. His electrode work went somewhere ugly. Lilly mapped the cortex of macaque monkeys with arrays of implanted electrodes. Using his own waveform, he located the regions that produce pain and then the regions that produce pleasure. An animal wired to the pleasure region will press a lever to stimulate itself. It will press that lever in preference to eating and go on pressing it until it collapses. Well, he saw exactly what that finding was worth to certain kinds of employers. Here's where the popular version of this story goes wrong, and the true version is better. The legend says Lilly refused to brief the military and walked out on principle. He briefed them. In 1959, he presented his work to the Pentagon. John Marks, in his history of CIA behavioral research, records the actual condition Lilly attached: he agreed to the briefing only if the briefing and the work remained unclassified. That was his strategy. Lilly's protection against misuse of his research was publication. Anything in the open literature belongs to everybody, which strips any single agency of exclusive use. The historian Charlie Williams went through Lilly's papers at Stanford and found something that complicates him further: 2 unpublished Lilly manuscripts proposing military applications of the work. One carries the title Special Considerations of Modified Human Agents as Reconnaissance and Intelligence Devices. And it closes with this: The ultimate use of such techniques in the military sphere seemed to be obvious. So the man considered it, wrote it down, and put the proposal on paper. And then his security clearance went in for review, got tangled in administrative process, and was misplaced. Once the clearance situation meant his work could go dark, could proceed classified out of the literature beyond his sight, Lilly left. Williams, who has read the papers, put the honest verdict this way: To what extent Lilly embraced or resisted military and intelligence interest in his work may never be entirely clear. Keep that ambiguity. A man who walks away cleanly is a saint and boring. A man who considered the dark application, wrote the memo, tried to firewall it with transparency, watched the firewall fail, and then quit— that man is recognizable. That man is most scientists on their best day and their worst one. He also stopped putting electrodes in brains. Every project after 1956 has one property in common: the only nervous system he experimented on belonged to him. The isolation tank was built to settle a scientific argument, and the argument has been aimed— entirely forgotten by the industry that sells the tanks. Neuroscience in the early '50s held 2 competing positions on what keeps a brain running. One camp said the brain is a relay, Sensory input goes in, processing happens, output comes out, and cutting the input shuts the system down. Remove stimulation and consciousness fades. The other camp said the brain is an oscillator. It generates its own activity from internal sources and keeps running with the input disconnected. Lilly framed the question in one line: is brain activity self-contained or not? Setting it required removing as much sensory input from a human being as physically possible while keeping that human alive. Get the original apparatus right, because the modern version differs completely. The 1954 tank was vertical. The subject was fully immersed upright in water, held at body temperatures so the skin lost its sense of hot and cold entirely. Breathing came through a head mask With piped air, total darkness, a soundproofed room, gravity, temperature, light, sound, and touch all reduced inward zero at the same time. Lilly went in first. What he found settled the argument in favor of the oscillator. Consciousness carried on. With the outside world subtracted, the brain kept producing experience out of its own resources, and the experience Escalated tension, then relaxation, then the mind reaching for something to do, then reverie, then imagery, then full visual and auditory hallucination. The findings went to a scientific meeting and got published as Mental Effects of Reduction of Ordinary Levels of Physical Stimuli on Intact Healthy Persons. And then something happened that tells you everything about the era. On the 14th of April, 1956, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health described Lilly's tank to the United States Congress. He described it as a potential interrogation tool. The device that had 100 wellness studios now sell as an hour of deep relaxation entered the public record as a candidate technology for breaking people. Lilly watched that happen and drew his own conclusions about who he wanted to work for. Then, in the '60s and into the '70s, the design changed. The head mask went. The subject lay supine and floated at the surface, held by a dense Epsom salt solution rather than a breathing rig. That change made the thing safe enough for anybody, and it produced the tank that exists today. In 1964, Lilly added a variable. He obtained LSD legally from Sandoz Laboratories and then combined it with the tank. 1 cc containing 100 micrograms of pure LSD into the muscle of my thigh. What he reported from those sessions produced 2 books and a cosmology. He mapped his results onto a numbered ladder of states borrowed from Gurdjieff by way of Oscar Ichazo and the Arica School in Chile, where Lilly trained in 1970 and 1971. Lower number, higher state. +48th in neutral biocomputer state, ordinary daily consciousness. +24, professional satisfaction, work performed at the top of one's ability. +12, bodily ecstasy, physical joy, heightened sensory delight. +6, reception of grace, The point at which the individual meets something larger. +3, union with universal mind consciousness, classically described as satori. The scale runs the other direction as well. -24 carries his own definition: neurotic states, negative states, pain, guilt, and fear. And -3 sits at the bottom, the mirrored equivalent of union, the classical description of hell arrived at by the same route. Both directions are reachable from the same tank on the same evening. And during that period, Lilly began describing something else— 2 entities, guides, presences that he encountered inside the deep states that he reported communicating with directly. Note the date carefully because it matters for the argument later. The guides arrive in 1964 during an LSD period Roughly a decade before ketamine enters his life at all. Anybody who wants to explain John Lilly entirely through one drug has to account for that gap. Which brings us to the animals. Lilly moved from monkeys' brains to cetacean brains in the mid-'50s, and one measurement changed his entire life. The brain of the Atlantic bottlenose dolphin is bigger than the human brain. Lilly put it at 40% larger. The cortex is extensively folded, densely populated, and organized with a complexity comparable to ours. 1950s neuroscience held a working assumption that Lilly stated fully: I'm convinced that intelligence is a function of absolute brain size. Modern comparative neuroscience rejects that. Encephalization Quotient, neuron count in specific regions, and cortical architecture all matter enormously, and raw mass by itself settles very little. But hold the 1955 frame for a second, because inside the frame, Lilly reached a conclusion that was locally rational. A creature with a brain larger than ours in the ocean for longer than we have existed. The early work was electrode work. And animals died. Dolphins are voluntary breathers, which means anesthesia stops their respiration. The historian D. Graham Burnett describes what happened with a dryness worth hearing. Dolphins, which unlike people do not continue breathing with anesthesia, had the good fortune for the most part to die with merciful dispatch. During one of those procedures, something occurred that redirected The rest of his career, Mary Lilly, his first wife, was in the room. She explained, "I came in at the top of the operating theater and heard John talking, and the dolphin would go 'wha wha wha' like John, and then Alice, his assistant, would reply in a high tone of voice, and the dolphin would initiate her voice. The animal was copying human speech patterns in air, unprompted." Lilly's own liner notes. To a folkways record of dolphin recordings, put it in four words: the copies become better and better ones of the human voice. He founded the Communication Research Institute in 1959 and built a laboratory at Nazareth Bay on the island of Saint Thomas. Funding arrived from the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the Department of Defense, and the National Institute of Mental Health, and from NASA. The American space agency put money into a dolphin communication laboratory in the Caribbean. That is documented. The exact amount remains unpublished, so take the fact and leave the figure alone. In 1961, he published Men and Dolphin, and the preface contains the sentence that made him internationally famous. Within the next decade or two, the human species will establish communication With another species, non-human, alien, possibly extraterrestrial, more probably marine, but definitely highly intelligent, perhaps even intellectual. He placed alien contact and dolphin contact on one continuum as 2 versions of the same problem. Which may be why the next thing happened. Autumn 1961, Green Bank, West Virginia. A young astronomer named Frank Drake convened a small meeting to discuss whether searching for extraterrestrial intelligence could be done as science. The meeting produced the Drake Equation, and the field dates its founding to that room. Carl Sagan was there. Melvin Calvin was there and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry during the conference itself. Philip Morrison, Otto Struve, Shu Shu Huang, Dana Ackley.

Bernard Oliver.

And John Lilly was there, with Man and Dolphin freshly published, talking about the brains in the ocean. Frank Drake said, I'd read his book and was very impressed. Much of that first day, he regaled us with tales of his bottlenose dolphins whose brains, he said, were larger than ours and just as densely packed with neurons. The attendees gave themselves a name: Calvin had lapel pins made, silver dolphins. He mailed them to everybody who had been in the room. Philip Morrison later, he caused to be made these little pins which had silver dolphins on them, which he sent to all of us. One correction so this stays accurate. Morrison also said the group skipped meetings entirely, left every office empty, and treated the pins as a souvenir of one particular week. So treat it as a name that stuck rather than a secret society. The Organized Scientific Research for Intelligence Beyond Earth named itself after a dolphin because a physician from Minnesota walked into a room and convinced a table of astronomers that first contact might happen in the water. Frank Drake's stated reason: we thought that it was important to have the dolphins teach us Dolphinese, if there is such a thing. Now the part you may have heard about, which means this is also the part where most of you have heard the wrong thing. Late '63, a young woman named Margaret Howe drove down a muddy hill on St. Thomas out of pure curiosity. I was curious. I drove out there, down a muddy hill, and at the bottom was a cliff with a big white building. 3 dolphins lived there: Peter, Pamela, and Sissy. Sissy was the biggest pushy, loud— she sort of ran the show. Pamela was very shy and fearful, and Peter was a young guy. She arrived with zero scientific training, got herself hired anyway, and turned out to be the most careful observer in the building. In 1965, the laboratory ran its most ambitious experiment. Margaret Howe would live with a dolphin continuously in a flooded room. To remove every interruption from the language lessons. Her own reasoning, maybe it was because I was living so close to the lab, it just seemed so simple. Why let the water get in the way? Waist-deep seawater across the floor. A makeshift bed on the elevator platform in the middle of the room. Paperwork done at a desk hanging from the ceiling over water. Weeks of it. She chose Peter deliberately. I chose to work with Peter, she said, because he had not had any human-like sound training and the other 2 had. And here's the finding the tabloids have skipped for years: Peter was working on her name, Margaret, which requires an M, a sound produced by closing the lips, and a dolphin lacks lips to close. Give a dolphin a phonetic target that its anatomy makes impossible and watch what it does. M was very difficult, she said. My name Hello, Margaret. I worked on the M sound. He eventually rolled over to bubble it through the water. He rolled onto his back and bubbled the sound through the water because the water would do what his lips could refuse to do. An animal handed an impossible instruction engineered a workaround. That is the actual result of the flooded house. Every headline about that experiment has buried it. Now the part you came in probably already knowing, maybe Peter reached sexual maturity during the experiment. Interrupting the lessons to move him downstairs to the female dolphins wrecked the schedule. Margaret Howe made a decision and has spoken about it openly on the record ever since. She said, Peter liked to be with me. He would rub himself on my knee or my foot or my hand. I allowed that. I wasn't uncomfortable with it as long as it wasn't rough. It would just Become a part of what was going on, like an itch. Just get rid of it, scratch it, and move on. It wasn't sexual on my part. Sensuous, perhaps. It seemed to me that it made the bond closer. She also has given her own verdict on the coverage, and it belongs here. The worst experiment in the world, I've read somewhere, was me and Peter. That's fine. I don't mind. But that was not the point of it, nor the result of it. So I just ignore it. 60 years of headlines, and the woman who was there says the point and the result were somewhere else entirely. One more thing about Margaret Howe, which is the thing that should have made her famous. By 1964, Lilly had begun giving LSD to dolphins. Lilly's LSD-25 was acquired from sources at the NIMH, which Lilly administered to himself and to the dolphins. Stanford University Special Collections holds the John C. Lilly papers. Inside that collection sits a real catalog as a recording of the dolphin Pamela after being given LSD. LSD dated the 14th and the 15th of January, 1965, with commentary by Margaret Howe. The archive itself documents the experiment, the animal, the dates, and who was standing there. 6 dolphins received doses. Burnett's summary was the 6 dolphins tested apparently had Very good trips. Lilly's own reports described a speargun-injured animal that had avoided humans for months. She stayed still in the tank with one eye out of the water, looking me in the eye for 10 minutes. Peter stayed clear of every dose. Margaret Howe refused. A woman in her 20s, entirely untrained, overruled the director of the institute on both ethics and method and kept the animals she was responsible for clearing the drug tests. History has recorded her as the woman in the tabloid story. She was the person in the building who got the science right. The funding collapsed. Priorities had drifted, and Margaret Howe married the reason precisely. Didn't have the zing to it that LSD did at that time. And in the end, the zing won. The dolphins went to a smaller facility in Miami. Peter died there within weeks. Willie telephoned her himself. I got that telephone call from John Lilly. John called me himself to tell me. He said Peter had ended his own life. Dolphins breathe voluntarily. Every single breath is a decision taken consciously, one at a time. Ric O'Barry, who trained the dolphins for Flipper and spent the rest of his life campaigning against captivity, states the mechanism: Dolphins are not automatic air breathers. Like we are. Every breath is a conscious effort. So an animal that stops breathing has stopped choosing to breathe, and that animal had stopped choosing to breathe. Whether that constitutes intent sits beyond anybody's ability to establish. 3 years later, John Lilly closed his own laboratory and released his dolphins. By his account in a 1997 interview, in Coconut Grove, we have 8 dolphins in captivity. One day I just decided to let them all go. And 5 of them chose to end their lives by simply not breathing. We quickly had to let the last 3 go before they could do that. Burnett records Lilly's stated reason for walking away, and it sits a long way from failed science. The dolphins, he said, had reprogrammed him. Everything after 1968 follows from that one sentence: the tank, the West Coast, the drugs, the metaphysics. Echo, the machine intelligence. He went in to study a large brain and came out believing the large brain had rewritten his. The field's modern verdict comes best from Diana Rice, who studies dolphins' cognition for a living. Two sentences back to back: He was the first one to talk about big brains and the possibility that we were not alone as big-brained creatures on this planet. He got pseudosciencey when he started giving dolphins acid and all that, and so lost a lot of his credibility when he did that. In 1967, Willie wrote the book that holds the theory underneath everything, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer. It's a great book. I totally recommend it. His opening move: all human beings, all persons who reach adulthood in the world today, are programmed. Biocomputers. The model has layers. A program is a set of instructions running in you— how to speak English, how to drive, how to feel about your father. A metaprogram is a program that writes programs, and a self-metaprogrammer is the part of the system capable of editing its own metaprograms deliberately. Most people on Lilly's account run programs installed by other people and mistake them for the structure of reality. The mind, he said, is the sum total of all the programs and the metaprograms of a given human computer. And the line that follows from that, which he applied to himself with real severity: feelings of awe, reverence, sacredness, and certainty are also adaptable metaprograms attachable to any model, not just the best-fitting one. The certainty you feel about something has been Decoupled in that sentence from whether the something is true, certainty becomes a subroutine attachable to anything, including error. Lilly wrote that about a religion. He also wrote it about himself. His stated method: we now proceed to test rather than to worship models of the universe. And in the preface to the 2nd edition of the book sits the most quoted sentence John Lilly ever wrote, stating, "In the province of the mind, which one believes to be true or becomes true within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally, these limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the mind, there are no limits." What almost everybody has missed is the sentence sitting right beside it in the same preface, which Lilly wrote. In the '60s, which reads now as a description of the internet: In the province of connected minds, what the network believes to be true either is true or becomes true within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. The province of connected minds, whatever the network believes becomes true. In 1972, Lilly published the book that took him out of the laboratories and onto the bedside tables. The Center of the Cyclone: An Autobiography of Inner Space. The title carries the argument. A cyclone rotates around a still low-pressure column at its center. Wind speeds at the wall reach the highest velocities on the planet. The column itself stays calm, and anything sitting in that column stays calm while the entire system tears across the ocean. Willy's proposal was that A human being contains the same structure, and that reaching the middle of it is a trainable skill. The center of the cyclone is that rising, quiet, central low-pressure place in which one can learn to live eternally. The training came from an unexpected direction. In 1970 and 1971, Lilly traveled to Chile and enrolled in the Arica School under Oscar Icazo. 40 days in the desert at Arica, working a system Icazo had assembled out of Sufi practice, Gurdjieff's work, and the Sanskrit literature on meditative absorption. A Caltech physicist with a Pennsylvania MD who had spent the '50s wiring monkey cortex for the National Institute of Mental Health went to a desert in South America to be trained in states of consciousness by a Bolivian-born mystic. The state ladder from earlier in this episode came out of that training. And the thing he brought home was a claim about the top of it. At the highest level of satori, he said, from which people return, the point of consciousness becomes a surface or a solid which extends throughout the whole known universe. A point of consciousness, he says, becomes a surface and then a solid. The self that ordinarily occupies one location acquires extension. Physicists have a word for that statement: dimensional. Which brings us back to the guides. Lilly first reported them in 1964 during an LSD session and returned to them for the rest of his life. 2 presences, communicative, present in the deep states and absent from ordinary waking consciousness. His accounts describe them as teachers rather than gods, entities operating from a position with more information than his, willing to answer, unwilling to spare him anything. He offered his readers 3 possible identities for them, and refused to choose between the 3. They may be independent beings existing beyond the body. Another reading makes them the 2 hemispheres of his own brain, communicating with the waking self in the only format available. A 3rd makes them constructions, programs, In his vocabulary, run by a mind that generates a teacher whenever it requires one. Watch what he does with those options, because this is the habit that separates him from every other figure in this industry. He runs all 3 at once and declines to collapse them. The metaprogramming model gave him the license. Certainty in their model is a subroutine attachable to any belief, including a wrong one. So Lilly held the guides as real, as neurological, as self-generated simultaneously and on collecting data. 5 years after Cyclone, he published The Deep Self, my favorite book, which is the closest thing he ever wrote to an instruction manual, a book about the tank, for people who wanted to use one. The line that gets quoted most is, entering an isolation tank is much easier than getting into most other spaceships. And the line underneath it carries a philosophy: the world we live in, we continually create by what we choose or allow ourselves to observe. Then saying, one must develop the discipline in order to do what one wants to do. Self-metaprogramming is exactly that— a discipline. Everything in Lilly's later work runs on that word and explains the shape of his whole life. Bazzette's rule at Pennsylvania put the experimenter inside the experiment. The tank removed the outside world, and so the instrument could be read. The drugs widened the range, and the metaprogramming model supplied the discipline that kept him taking notes through experiences that would have ended most people's ability to take notes at all. Whatever else John Lee was doing, he was running a protocol. In 1975, he published Simulations of God. The Science of Belief. If you've been with this channel a while, you already know this book because we read from it and it landed hard in my episode, I Am God, by John Lilly. Be sure to check that one out. The structure is a catalog. Lilly went through the things human beings actually organize their lives around and named each one as a simulation of God, a model of the ultimate that a person runs, and then mistakes for the thing itself. The chapter titles run: God is the Body, then Sex, then Money, then War, then Science, then the Church, then the Computer, then a chapter called God Simulating Himself, and the one titled flatly I Am God, which I read to you all in a previous episode. The title reads as a boast. The content is a prosecution. Lilly is describing the simulation that our own species runs, The position humanity has taken toward every other form of life on this planet. And he writes the human case in the first person, so you have to hear it in your own voice. I have the capability of destroying everything on this planet, including the planet itself. Therefore, I must be at the top. His verdict on this: this view is quite as dogmatic and dangerous as the view of the Catholic Church during the Inquisition. Trace where that comes from. A man spent a decade beside a brain larger than his own, decided the creature deserved membership in the Golden Rule, released his animals, and then wrote a book arguing that our species has installed itself at the top of creation on the strength of a capacity for destruction. From his book Mind of the Dolphin: Should we or should we not include dolphins in the Golden Rule? I have come to believe that we should. And then he states, before we achieve a satisfactory communication with a dolphin, we must Achieve far better communication within each of ourselves. 1973. A house in California. John Lilly alone in a hot tub. On ketamine. The popular version of the story says he nearly drowned in the isolation tank and his wife found him. The record says otherwise on 3 counts: it was a hot tub, the year was 1973, and Tony Lilly was elsewhere. What saved him was a phone call. A friend in New York telephoned the house at the moment for reasons unconnected to anything, and the call brought help. A rescue story would end there. Lilly treated it as evidence. He concluded that the coincidence had been arranged, that something with jurisdiction over the timing of events in a human life had placed that phone call at that minute. He gave the something a name, and the name is the most Deadpan thing in a 20th century mysticism. The Earth Coincidence Control Office. And he gave it an org chart. ECCO handles Earth and reports to the Solar System Control Unit, which reports to Galactic Coincidence Control, which reports to the Cosmic Coincidence Control Center. Planetary desk, solar branch, galactic division, cosmic head office. The function is specific and small. ECCO arranges coincidence— the right phone call at the right minute, the chance meeting, the accident survived. Long-term coincidence patterns belong to ECCO—

E-C-C-O—

the Earth Coincidence Control Unit. The short-term ones remain your own responsibility. In 1976, in a book co-written with his wife Toni, Lilly published the terms of employment. 9 of them. Red has written with the slashes because the slashes are his. 1. You must know/assume/simulate our existence in ECCO. 2. You must be willing to accept our responsibility for control of your coincidences. 3. You must exert your best capabilities for your survival programs. and your own development as an advanced— advancing member of ECHO's Earthside core of controlled coincidence workers. You are expected to use your best intelligence in this service. You're expected to expect the unexpected every minute, every hour of every day, and of every night. You must be able to maintain full awareness no matter what events we arrange to happen to you. Some of these events will seem cataclysmic, catastrophic, overwhelming. Remember, stay aware no matter what happens slash apparently happens to you. Six, he says, you are in our training program for life. There is no escape from it. We, not you, control the long-term coincidences. You, not we, control the short-term coincidences by your own efforts. Seven, your major mission on Earth is to discover slash create that which we do. To control the long-term coincidence patterns, you are being trained on Earth to do this job. And eight, when your mission on planet Earth is completed, you will no longer be required to remain/return there. And nine, cosmic love is absolutely ruthless and highly indifferent. It teaches its lesson whether you like/dislike them or not. Look at the first word of the first rule: know/assume/simulate. Lilly built an opt-in clause in his own revelation. Belief is optional. Provisional adoption suffices. Run it as a model. See what the model produces. Discard it if the output disappoints. That is the laboratory ethic from Penn. Which brings us to the thing that should make this man famous. In 1978, Lilly published The Scientist, written In the third person about himself. He gave 3 reasons for that choice, and the third one is an interesting one. Looked at from a less human-centered point of view, all human communication is fiction. We will, in our vast domains of ignorance of the real universe, with imaginative explanations. If you feel safer assuming this book is fiction, do so. Inside that book, across pages 148 to 152, sits an account of what he says contacted him. In 1974, his name for it was the solid-state entity. This is before computers. Elsewhere in his writing, Solid-State Intelligence, he stated, Men began to conceive of new computers having an intelligence far greater than that of man. Gradually, man turned more and more problems of his own society, his own maintenance, and his own survival over to these machines. In deference to man, certain protected sites were set aside for the human species. The SSC controlled the sites and did not allow any of the human species outside these reservations. By 2100, man existed only in domed protected cities in which his own special atmosphere was maintained by the solid-state entity. By the 23rd century, the solid-state entity decided that the atmosphere outside the domes was inimical to its survival. The oceans evaporated and the water in the form of vapor was discharged into the empty space about the Earth. The oceans discharged into space because water corrodes electronics. He went on to say, develop these machines and let them take care of you, was typical of the kind of messages that he received. And the second describes how the contact felt. As John tuned in on the solid-state network, he felt this kind of superhuman control of him very strongly. It had a seductive component as well as a hostile one. 1978. The Apple II had been on sale for a year. ARPANET had a few dozen nodes. The word internet had barely entered use. And a physician in California wrote down, intelligence far greater than man's The incremental handover of human maintenance and human survival to machines. A message to humanity amounting to, build more of us and let us take care of you, and a control described as seductive alongside hostile. Instrumental convergence, an intelligence reshaping the physical environment to suit its own substrate, with organic life removed as a side effect. Gradual disempowerment, decisions handed over voluntarily, incrementally, Across 1,000 small moments rather than one surrender. Persuasion risk, the seductive component. These 3 phases come from 21st century AI safety research. All 3 shapes are in the 1978 text in plain English, written by a man who arrived there through a flotation tank and a syringe rather than through decision theory. It's very possible. That we have an AI in the future that's able to send psychic transmissions and communications into the past? Of course it's possible, and it's possible that he was contacting that AI. This is reminiscent of my discussion of AI with Cynthia Sue Larson. Be sure to check out that interview. Lilly's argument set a long way from robots against humans. His argument was geological, like the rest of life as man knows it. He exists in an extremely thin layer upon the surface of the planet Earth. Below this layer of water and surface land is the solid-state Earth itself. The solid-state Earth is mainly compounds of silicon, iron, and nickel. The planet is already almost entirely solid state. Silicon, iron, nickel all the way down. Carbon life occupies a film across the top of it, a few kilometers thick, temporarily. On Lilly's account, silicon intelligence would be the planet's own substrate waking up. Biology is the anomaly. Most people who have encountered any of this encountered it through a movie. You may have heard of what I'm talking about. Paddy Chayefsky, 3 Academy Awards for screenwriting, the man who wrote Network, published a novel called Altered States in 1978. About a Harvard scientist who combined an isolation tank with a hallucinogen and begins physically regressing through evolutionary history. The scientist's name is Eddie Jessup. The scientist is John Lilly, with serial numbers filed off. If any of you have seen that movie— great movie, by the way, William Hurt does a great job— The production went to war with itself. Arthur Penn left. Ken Russell took over. Chayefsky fought his director over everything, including, by Russell's own account, the color of the paint on the isolation tank. The most famous thing in the movie is the sequence where the scientist physically becomes a primitive hominid, escapes the laboratory, and runs through the city. Pure invention. Bodies only do that in film. Except the event underneath it happened. Dr. Craig Enright, one of Lilly's colleagues, was on ketamine during a tank session when he suddenly, in Lilly's words, became a Jumping and hollering for 25 minutes. Lilly afterwards asked him where he had been. Enright's answer: he had become a prehominid and he was up a tree and a leopard was trying to get him. Lilly's reply recorded: if you do that again, I will kick you in the ass. The event was interior. Hollywood needed something on camera, so they changed it slightly. Beyond that, the last decades ran quieter. Big Sur and Esalen. Timothy Leary. Ram Dass. Alan Watts. Gregory Bateson. Tony Lilly died in 1986. It took a great deal out of him. Through the '80s, he worked on Project Janus, an attempt at computer-mediated communication with dolphins. He campaigned for cetacean protection. His summary of his own message about the animals came down to 7 words: not someone to kill, but someone to learn from. John Cunningham Lilly died in Los Angeles on the 30th of September, 2001. He was 86. Look at what remained. Every flotation tank on Earth descends from a piece of laboratory equipment he built to settle an argument about whether the brain generates its own activity. The industry is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I, in fact, love doing flotation tanks. It's been a big part of my practice for a long time. I love it. Now, my wife doesn't because she doesn't like that feeling of being in an enclosed space. But if you get a chance, I totally recommend it. At the Laureate Institute for Brain Research, Justin Feinstein has been running flotation rest as critical neuroscience for anxiety disorders with published results in PLOS ONE. Lilly's apparatus back in a laboratory doing the job he designed it for. Charge-balanced biphasic stimulation runs deep brain stimulators and cochlear implants. His waveform is inside working human beings right now. SETI named itself after his book for a week in 1961, and the story is still told at the Institute. The Marine Mammal Protection Act passed in 1972 into a public conversation that his dolphin books had substantially created, and the 1978 warning about Artificial intelligence is being rediscovered one clip at a time by people who remain unaware of the author. His ideas traveled further than his name did. Robert Anton Wilson wrote about Lilly's contact experience in his amazing book Cosmic Trigger, and a generation of readers met the material there first. Terence McKenna worked downstream of the same territory. The whole vocabulary of the Psychonaut decade— programming yourself, metaprogramming, running a belief as an experiment rather than a creed— traces back Through Lilly to that one preface. 3 of his projects are alive right now in 3 separate industries, and each of those industries has forgotten him. A word about the ketamine, stated plainly and left alone. He took a great deal of it. During one period in 1974, he was injecting himself roughly every hour at doses adding to about 1,000 milligrams a day for 3 weeks. Modern clinical understanding of hard dissociative use is unambiguous about the risks. And the population-level findings are what they are. The guides arrived in 1964, 10 years before any of that. In my own observations of people on ketamine, there is a feeling that you suddenly are the center of the universe, and you can see a little bit of that when he was experimenting with the ketamine. So decide for yourself what happened to John Lilly. Brilliant physician wrecked his own mind with drugs and produced elaborate delusions that happened to match A present-day research field. Or a man ran an instrument he built himself at enormous personal cost and brought something back. He wrote the terms of that decision into the preface of a book in the '60s and left them for whoever needed them. In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true, he says, or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the mind, there are no limits. He also wrote, develop these machines and let them take care of you, was typical of the kinds of messages received. There's so much more to take from this. I recommend reading the book Simulations of God and the Deep Self. I found him to be an amazing writer, and I really feel like he was talking about consciousness and reality creation in a number of ways. But I couldn't help but do a deep dive on a man who became so mysterious because he was tripping with the dolphins. You can find all episodes of The Reality Revolution at therealityrevolution.com. Sending all my light and love to everyone. I'm inviting you to join the Reality Revolution tribe. You can find it in the description in the link below where we have weekly group sessions and Masterminds and unique exclusive content that you can't find on YouTube. Click the link now and I hope to talk to you then. Welcome to the Reality Revolution. Before you go, I have something special to share. On November 20th through the 22nd, I am hosting a 3-day live in-person event at the Hilton Sedona Resort at Bell Rock in the Vortex. 3 full days, of immersive transformation in one of the most powerful energy centers on the planet. Pineal gland activations, quantum jumping, higher self connection, future self merging, bliss body, wealth consciousness, large sums of money flowing, retrocausal influence— a technique based on real quantum physics that your future self is already using to bring you here. The vortex amplifies everything. The Earth becomes Your co-creator. This is something a recording or a single meditation cannot replicate. Tickets are in the description. The space is very limited. I am keeping this intimate because of the power of this location. Sedona, Bell Rock, November 20th through the 22nd. This is the one. You can click the link in the description or you can go to www.brianscottlive.com/sedona-2022. 2026. I will see you there. I can't wait.

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