John Cunningham Lilly

At the lunch Wednesday for Robert (Mexican Lunch -- Tahitian Music, posted Feb. 28) the topic of conversation turned, as it often does when you have two hippy-aged old farts like Robert and me in the room, to the question, "What kinds of drugs did you do, or can't you remember?" People are often surprised to learn, especially after reading my writing, but also after looking at me, that I have never done any hallucinogens whatsoever. To excuse myself for that, I always mention the natural auditory and visual hallucinations I had during that little teenage psychotic episode of mine, that convinced me that I shouldn't do those kind of drugs for the same reason I shouldn't smoke while pumping gas.

Then, to explain why I didn't change my mind and try some acid or mescaline in graduate school, say, when the psychosis would have been far enough behind me as to encourage my native recklessness, I mention the caution inspired by the story of John Lilly, the great dolphin scientist and famed acid-neuronaut . When I did this at our lunch only Anitra, who is exactly eight days younger than myself, knew of whom I was speaking. I expected Robert wouldn't know, even though, as I've said, he's about my age, because Robert isn't that into the details of the Persian Carpet of Life, so to speak. Except for Tim Harris, our Director, I thought youth and 9-11 excused the rest of the party for not knowing who Lilly was. Most of his celebrity was achieved before they were born, and the fact that he picked 19 days after 9-11 to die meant there wasn't the usual national 5 minutes of obituary for the old guy that might have clued the younger generation in.

But when Tim didn't know I have to say I was a little surprised. Here's a guy whose blog (Apesma's Lament) is named for a Captain Beefheart lyric. He's posted a medical illustration of an extended hemorrhoid on said site, as well as a 5-7-6 Haiku. So he NEEDS to know who John Cunningham Lilly was and still is. Therefore I am talking about that.


















In this picture, found on a web page titled "John C. Lilly Community of One Love" we see, from left to right, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, and John C. Lilly, hanging out in 1991. This gives you one idea who he was.


Another way you can get an idea of him is to read the fourth book of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy. Chapter 31 of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish introduces a character called Wonko the Sane, and named John Watson, who lives in the outside part of an inside-out house called Outside the Asylum (the inside part being the part the rest of us are living in.) The Wonko character is obviously an amalgam of about 80% John C. Lilly with about 20% James Watson (of Watson and Crick.) John C. Lilly was the dolphin scientist of the two. But both had interests in neurology.

Lilly was the one guy most responsible for the popular notion that if Cetaceans aren't really really smart, they're at least like, really sensitive, and wise. One of the things he worked hard on, besides attempting to learn how dolphins talk to one another so we could join in their conversations, was at understanding how dolphins see with sonar. Lilly came to the think that dolphins and whales have the neurological capacity and the sensory equipment necessary to see in sonar not only in stereo (like we do with our eyes) but in true 3-D. The difference between stereo and true 3-D is the difference between seeing the surfaces of your surroundings and seeing the insides as well. John Lilly arrived at the tentative conclusion that dolphins could see the workings of each others internal organs and so could read moods and feelings off internal states. He realized that if true this could make understanding a dolphin language beyond all human capacity because we could never grasp its context. We don't have any way to relate to that kind of continuous unrelenting intimacy.

These ideas spawned the best Star Trek movie with the original cast ever, IV, The Voyage Home, with humpback whales in place of dolphins. We also got Day of the Dolphins, sadly.

Before trying to understand the different ways another species might conceptualize reality as a context for communication, Lilly thought of going back to square one and seeing what happens when you remove the context altogether. That was the gist of the idea of sensory-deprivation tanks. Lilly may not have been the first to think of exploring sensory-deprivation, but he made it work. He solved the engineering problems and he wrote about his experiments and fired the public up about it. That got us Altered States and at least one Simpson episode.

Lilly's involvement with LSD was big-time. Like Timothy Leary, John Lilly's career was begun in league with the CIA and the Military-Industrial Complex. The military probably funded his earliest research, which involved mapping brain activity on cathode ray tubes. The sensory deprivation research began in 1954. By the early sixties Lilly was incorporating LSD in his sensory-deprivation experiments. The LSD was provided by the CIA as part of a project called MK-ULTRA.

In MK-ULTRA, also called MKULTRA, and later MKSEARCH, the MK apparently stood for Mind Kontrol. Maybe they wanted to avoid MCULTRA for fear their acronym would end up on a fast-food menu. Anyway MK-ULTRA was all about the CIA's attempt to discover cool new ways to manipulate people's minds. MK-ULTRA research included sensory-deprivation studies from the outset, and they may have funded all of Lilly's 1950s experiments on that. But by the sixties they were definitely supporting Lilly.

I don't think Lilly took part in it himself, but some of the other research involving sensory-deprivation for the CIA explored its use as a means of enhancing the impact of psychological torture.

I read about Lilly's work with dolphins before I got to graduate school. By the time I got to grad school, Lilly had written Centre of the Cyclone, which documents his LSD experimentation, both official and personal. One of his stories details a singularly bad trip in which he saw his wife as a hairy ape and freaked out. That was enough to convince me that I didn't want the stuff, because I was looking to get laid, and didn't need those sorts of complications. Reading the book I got the impression that Lilly was pretty scared by the whole thing.

It must not have scared him too much though, because not much later he was back at it, this time with ketamines. He is reported to have tried to warn President Ford at one point that computers were trying to take over the world.

By the end of his life Lilly had his own website, so he must have decided to stop fearing the computers and learn to communicate with them from within their own frameworks. Lilly lives on at that website.