The simulation I call me

Or how a mad scientist left me a riddle to solve

The article below was printed in Studio Voice in its Japanese translation in 1994

Circa 1992: I was about to meet a legend. Though excited with last minute preparations for his arrival, I had the nagging feeling that I was totally unready for the encounter, having not bought that book back in the psychedelic seventies. The 'Centre of the cyclone' had been well discussed by fellow travellers on the road to Katmandu in '71 and I had overheard accounts of its writer, a scientist named John Lilly repeatedly dropping LSD inside an isolation tank. In there he would literally transcend the confines of 'normal' consciousness conjuring up in my mind images of a pioneer shaman. Extraterrestrial contacts, solitary trips into totally uncharted inner realms - Lilly returned with stories to spark wonder in even the most jaded heart . While many had toyed with hallucinogens in those days Lilly had, in the words of Stanislav Grof, (another altered states pioneer who showed up in my reality in Kyoto too) "really played hardball with LSD". He had gone, alone and unaided where no contemporary scientist had ever gone before, totally disappearing from consensus 'reality' for days at a time risking mind and body in what appeared to me as a heroic initiation. And having returned from such entheogenic exploits he was about to enter my reality tunnel for a series of talks in Kyoto. The door opened...

It is of course all thanks to ECCO that we met. According to Lilly the 'Earth Coincidence Control Office' seamlessly creates the precise event sequences that manifest as our daily lives. Long before the term 'synchronicity' had become a new age hiccup, this neuro-explorer had encountered phenomenal beings in the very boiler house of the Gods. They revealed to him how short term and long term 'coincidence' is crafted into our dimension of 'reality'.

Just six weeks earlier on a trip from Canada to Tokyo, a video had caught my attention in a fashionable Aoyama bookstore. "Thinking Allowed", a taped interview with Lilly by the PBS television host Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove had gone home with me that day, along with a biographical documentary on Carl Jung and an interview with scientist Karl Pribram. After immersing myself in Pribram's holographic brain theories and marvelling at Jung's having kept a mistress in his household for most of his productive life, I then cued up the Mishlove tape expecting a fiftyish psychedelic guru. What I got on the screen was a sixtyish parody of Davy Crocket in a tight leather suit. Six weeks later an old man stepped into my tatami room..

The sound of a laboured rasping of breath preceded his gaunt 1992 biophysical form-a body he claims to have frequently left and re-staffed with 'walk ins' after many of his neurodimensional jaunts. One felt that here was this husk of an enormous being but that the essential core was still back there, deep in the depths where the isolation tank connects cortical hardware to untranslatable hyperspace. I knew that he was now seventy seven, but still had not expected such a dose of mortality in a psychedelic iconographer. Dr. Timothy 'tune in, turn on, drop out' Leary swears that this man is one of the two most important philosophers of the century. As Lilly settled into a window seat looking out on the fall colours and contours of Mt. Hiezan and its Daimonji symbol carved into the earth, I seriously wondered how he had made it to this age at all..

He has probably ingested enough psychotropic substances in his lifetime to keep any one of us in a constant altered state for at least a month. Like the doctors of old who deliberately waded into jungle swamps to get exotic fevers for their research, Lilly had been both the subject of the experiment and the experimenter. I kept coming back to that thought over the next five days as I read his detractors rail on about how a great scientist had been ruined in the tank. Perhaps as we begin to emerge from our obsolete, mechanistic paradigm of the universe to a truer understanding of being, more researchers will find the courage to abandon their glass barriers. Perhaps they will directly confront the multilevelled reality of their most important tool-consciousness itself. Surely only a scientist as solidly grounded in classical medicine, biophysics and neurophysiology as the wizened magus now sitting before me could have retained enough 'objectivity' to record for our benefit his experiences. They were clearly hard won records of priceless and prodigious phenomena, the travel notes from a realm far outside of the comfortable certitudes of what we limply call ‘here’. What do you ask Theseus on his return from the labyrinth?

"Would you like something to drink Dr. Lilly?" I served him the glass of milk he had requested and decided to read the books he brought with him before plunging into an interview. The first five days we spent together (he slept in my tatami room on a very hard floor) slowly unfolded like the conversation between a sorcerer and his young apprentice. In our breakfast dialogues and in the interview that follows, Dr. Lilly repeatedly stresses a fundamental insight: what we assume to be reality is just a belief system, a system that we must constantly strive to transcend until we are completely capable of 'expecting the unexpected." When he left I could not easily find the will to move back into my room. Like Lilly himself who had been 'zapped' telepathically with a trove of information by a passing, compassionate whale, I was going to need some time to process the impact of these thoughts and his being..

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The Interview

JC: Dr. Lilly, on this early Autumn morning in Kyoto I'd like to thank you first of all for offering to share your utterly remarkable life insights with us. As both as scientist and doctor you have probed far beyond the limits of conventional knowledge regarding other states of consciousness. With your own Mind/Body you have ventured deep into what is now called 'hyperspace'-a region of consciousness we know practically nothing about. Can we begin by asking what urged you on to risk this hero's journey?

JL: Well, I wrote it up when I was sixteen years old, I did a paper for my school, a newspaper called 'Reality' and in that I apparently planned out the rest of my life and didn't know it. The question was, "The thoughts of the mind are somehow or other reflected in the activity of the brain but how do we get an understanding of which one leads which? And where does self initiative come from? Does it come from God or from within oneself?" Well that was a sixteen year old talking so I cited bishop Berkeley who said, "Reality is either in a mind like mine or it is in the mind of a greater spirit beyond us." That still holds .

Bishop Berkeley was a philosopher who championed ‘immaterialism’ i.e. only mind is real

JC: You studied the brain as a neurophysiologist in the early days looking for clues as to how consciousness operates. What were the results of that period of experimentation with the brain?

JL: I went into psychoanalysis and spent three years five to seven days a week with a Ph.D. in physics by the name of Robert Belder from Vienna who was one of Freud's students. And he was chosen very carefully by my psychoanalytic friends because they didn't want the usual psychoanalytical dogma in my treatment. So I took a professional analysis and the result of that was that I realized my brain and my mind had been limited by my scientific education and my medical school education and that there was much more beyond that. So integrating, holographically if you wish or holistically, the mind and the brain led to areas of dream work. Illusions , so called, and all these pejorative terms didn't apply. One could be objective about all of this, experience these things and then come out of it-back into some sort of intelligent point of view, which could be modified..

JC: You talk about how we 'program' ourselves via our belief systems. In modern schools of thought like NLP and also in the new medicine movement, the fundamental role of belief is becoming more and more obvious. However you actually experienced the belief/reality connection through an ongoing series of revelations about the nature of the Mind. Has your understanding changed since your seminal work, ' Programming and metaprogramming in the human bio computer ' was written?

JL: Well after that I wrote a book called, ' Simulations of God, science of belief ' and in this I presented two dozen different belief systems that are current in consensus reality. I introduced this by saying, "Examine your own beliefs and throw out those that are fixed." What I believe is unbelievable-don't get caught!

JC: But over the years many people have put you down because in their belief system taking drugs and floating in an isolation tank is not a valid way to study consciousness. One is reminded of what happened to Galileo and other scientific pioneers. Any estimates on how long it will take before your work is recognized as the prototype in mapping altered states?

JL: I noticed the other day that the Pope, 359 years later, reversed the inquisition (Galileo was condemned by the Pope) so it may take another 359 years for me to be accepted also. That was very well timed by the Pope wasn't it?

JC: A lot of people talk about synchronicity these days and some assume that we create our own reality. You have been very specific in targeting ECCO (Earth Coincidence Control Centre) as the real programmer of our destiny. If we control the short term coincidences, or synchronicities, and ECCO controls the long term ones isn't this just another way of talking about Self and Other? In other words we can do a whole lot by our own power to live more consciously but the real energy behind our evolution as spiritual beings is in ECCO. Any comments?

JL: Remember what I said in the 'Dyadic Cyclone' , that ECCO is controlled by the Solar System Control Office, which is controlled by the Galactic one and then the Cosmic one? We are constantly being programmed on the long term basis by these beings, if you wish, these higher intelligences, and they also control our genetic code so that the evolution of our brains from small brains to large brains over the last million years is under their control. They put that control in the DNA and the RNA system of evolution. Nobody knows quite how the DNA and RNA changes over the centuries. Our brains have increased in size a half a gram a century but why, how, I don't know. And that is the basis of the long term 'coincidence control'. Does that make sense?

JC: Yes it does and it strikes me that the majority of scientists being in the employment of specific belief systems like the government or the military have no way of transcending the Newtonian tradition that still informs most of our education and social mores. To do so would be like biting the hand that feeds. You have steadfastly refused to allow the CIA or other 'agencies' to prostitute your findings. You have been put in mental hospitals as you ventured between consensus reality and profoundly different realities. How has this intense isolation from mainstream scientific practice affected you over the years mentally and physically?

JL: Well I wasn't in the mental hospital very  long! The head of the mental hospital where a couple of friends had put me was actually a friend of mine so he transferred me to another hospital also run by a friend so you could say there is a network which supports me. It is mainly medical, psychiatric, psychoanalytic and psychological (in nature) and then even in Moscow it turned out I had an underground. They had translated my books and distributed the xeroxed copies free. That has happened in various places around the world and I think it is now happening in the US government. You see since LSD was introduced enough people now in government, in the bureaucracy have had LSD so they are introducing new changes in government itself. So you can see that the rapacious military attitude of many years ago is decreasing radically. We even elected Clinton the other day instead of Bush. Bush, bad history, the CIA and all the rest of it. So I don't think that you can say that scientists in general have demeaned my work at all. Fred Warden in an interview in the University of Pennsylvania medical school alumni magazine at the end of the article said , "Lilly is the one who has kicked the shit out of our assumptions in science and has introduced radically new points of view which I find very valid." So if you look around you'll see that there is a new wave of thinking going on and that I and some other people started apparently.

JC: A modern myth seems to be emerging around the whole concept of extraterrestrial intervention in human affairs. Do you currently believe that in the universe which consensus reality perceives, alien beings exist?

JL: (laughs) They aren't alien. They have been communicating with us and with our evolution for millions of years and they are always there needing no 'vehicles' to arrive on this planet like UFO's because the influence is always with us. Just get in the tank and take some LSD and you will meet them. Or take Ketamine. (note the former is currently illegal and some serious research is being done with the latter, a veterinary anaesthetic)

JC: What about the cetaceans? Locked in their enormous brains could be the keys to understanding alternate dimensions of reality of reality. After all you have done with dolphins, where do we stand now vis a vis communicating with them?

Lilly suggested I swim with wild dolphins. So I started to in 1993. Here in Bimini in 2019

JL: Well I wish we could say that we were more successful in teaching them English for example! I think we can teach them Japanese better! Anyway you see that they have had brains the size of ours (at least) for 22 million years. We have only had them for 200,000 years and the largest brain on the planet is that of the sperm whale at 10,000 grams-that's six times the size of ours. Now if we hadn't killed off the older ones we probably could have gotten the teaching stories they use to teach (their own offspring) and we could have found out about the origins of our planet, about what cosmic catastrophes have taken place and knocked out the dinosaurs for example. But we have lost that opportunity just in the same way that we lost it when the Spaniards came into central America and destroyed all the knowledge the Mayans had. However once you break that barrier to communicating with cetaceans it will change the human race radically. There will be entirely new philosophies and points of view and entirely new histories..

JC: If the silicon rich crust of the Earth acts like computer chips storing our thoughts and subconscious yearnings as we discussed yesterday, and the Van Allen belts permit us, as the bio-intelligence of Gaia to receive information from extraterrestrial intelligence would you agree that the mind of our planet is soon to undergo a radical evolutionary jump?

JL: Well it is already here, it's just that we are slow to take it up. Now the mind of the planet of course if you read Olaf Stapleton's 'Starmaker' is like this...you will see how he went out into outer space and joined other minds and found out how the mind of the planet became obvious and then the planet communicated to other planets in the galaxy till there was finally a galactic planetary mind. And the stars each had a mind and they joined till finally the galactic mind had both (star and planet minds). Then that galaxy communicated to other galaxies with the galactic mind and then when all the galaxies hooked up the mind of the universe was there. Then, and only then, was it able to face the Starmaker. As Stapleton said the Starmaker looked at His or Her creation and thought the way an artist would. "Should I destroy it and start all over, should I evolve it further or should I make another one entirely?" Now that's a God big enough for me!

JC: Being with you I have sensed over the past few days a longing to live an ordinary life and settle down with a good woman. Having been to what you call Alternity and back so often you seem to be like the beaming Fool who returns to the market place after experiencing the void in those famous zen oxherding pictures. But is the program that simple? You have radically altered your mind-where to from here?

**Alternity is Dr. Lilly's term for the point from which all possible futures can be perceived and which he experienced in the tank.

JL: I am going to leave it to ECCO. I am a student of the indeterminate. That Coincidence Control-if you read Jung in his introduction to the I Ching he makes a point that synchronicity for him was coincidence control. It was the only place he ever said this..

JC: Could it be that we, as humans are just beginning our true spiritual evolution, just starting to understand the multibevelled nature of reality? Must we evolve totally beyond this planet and set off into space as a living metaphor for the exploration of deep Mind?

JL: Well the urge is there for sure, but I don't know if we'll succeed or not..

John Lilly left this world in 2001 at the grand age of 86. Some of my friends from Kyoto were there to see him off. It is a perhaps a wise idea to recall his maxim:

Lilly's Maxim

In the province of the mind what one believes to be true, either is true or becomes true within certain limits. These limits are to be found experimentally and experientially. When so found these limits turn out to be further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind there are no limits.

As to the title of this article I clearly remember John telling me that he felt that he was a ‘simulation’ of his real self. Now that we live in a different century the concept of all of us being inside a simulation is not at all so far fetched. The Netflix TV show 1899 deals with that very subject..

If you enjoyed this article you may be interested in another inner explorer, Dr. Chris Bache. My interview with him can be accessed here and has Japanese subtitles

You might also consider listening to the audio version of my chapter on Lilly taken from Sovereign Souls (to be published in Japanese in 2023)