John Lilly: psychedelic scientist

CJ Stone reveals how a neuroscientist's research into consciousness lead him to take vast quantities of LSD and ketamine in his invention - the first floatation tank

Dr John C Lilly: psychedelic explorer and pioneer of interspecies communication  

via the Robert Anton Wilson Fans Facebook Group

Alan Watts - A Tribute From His Friends

John C. Lilly and Laura Huxley amongst others. Still have to check it myself!

These are a few of my favorite books

Robert Anton Wilson - Prometheus Rising: awesome manual on how to deprogram & reprogram.

Robert Anton Wilson - Cosmic Trigger: fascinating biography

Robert Anton Wilson & Robert Shea - Illuminatus! Trilogy: Funny and intriguing conspiracy story featuring Hagbard Celine and his golden submarine (the Leif Ericson) vs the Illuminati.

Philip K. Dick - Valis & The Divine Invasion: PKD wrote "revelation" disguised as sci-fi, he didn't really understand what was going on in his head, a quote by him: "After all if you're a buddha, you should be able to figure it out for yourself."

Terence McKenna - True Hallucinations: my favorite orator goes into the Amazon with his brother to trip on psychedelics and things get weird. (The audiobook has great production, music and sound effects that really add to the experience.)

Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking glass for the wonderful lifehacks. (Lesser imaginative conspiracy theorists, this obviously means I am a mind controlled puppet of the illuminati.)

Rick Strassman - DMT The Spirit Molecule: fascinating musings and reports of his experiments on test subjects with the psychedelic DMT, specifically the weird alien encounters.

Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf: visit the Magic Theatre!

Lon Milo DuQuette - Low Magick It's All in Your Head You Just Have No Idea How Big Your Head Is: my favorite occult author, great humor and explanations.

John Lilly - Simulations of God: Great exposition of different reality tunnels and human motivations.

Anything from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series: Hilarious fantasy humor, only read a handful so far but enjoyed each one, reading "Guards! Guards!" now. Small Gods is my favorite so far, I'm still wondering if Terry Pratchett is in fact a master magician in real life or just really clever at life.

Favorite Comic Books are The Invisibles by Grant Morrison and Promethea by Alan Moore. 

Robert Anton Wilson Lecture - The H.E.A.D. Revolution

Oh haven't seen this before! My day is made! (update: though seemingly I've posted it also last november, blast my memory!!!)

The HEAD Revolution - Hedonic Engineering And Development - began with the psychedelics and bio-feedback machines of the 1960's, then graduated to Lilly float tankes, scientific study of yoga, and neo-reichian body relaxation and neuro-awareness teques. Describing the latest brain-change machines, Dr. Wilson argues that Hedonic Engineering has come of age and we are the first generation in history to have the capacity to tap the full potentials of our brains and graduate from humanity to superhumanity.

RAW lecture given on 03/04/1988, at the First Unitarian Universalist Church in Paradise Valley, Arizona.

See the comments for the explanation of the above image. I took a test http://www.selectsmart.com/RELIGION/ about which religion/BS i subscribe to, and I can't really express in words just how funny and apt I find it that I crashed the application!

In Minneapolis, the world's quietest room

There was an article in a Belgian paper recently about the quitest room, an anechoic chamber - I can't even imagine how noise must sound in there. It said the longest anyone has ever been able to remain in it was 45 minutes, a reporter. Because of the sensory deprivation, people start to hallucinate quite fast. The room is used to test the resolve of Astronauts to suppress hallucinations before they are allowed to go into space. It sounds so fascinating, I would love to give it a try, I also would love to find a flotation tank once like John Lilly used.

Leary & RAW discuss Ketamine @ Lilly's

I go on

This poem (I know) by John Lilly is helping me go through a very scary time in which I have one month left to find a suitable affordable appartement while going through great financial uncertainty.

First another passage from the book appendix 1: Reality to help clarify the poem.

Reality (excerpt)
The primitive Romans, in expressing what appeared to them the most real object, used the word res, a law-court.
A law-court in their time meant the power to judge over life and death, family and possessions, in short, everything that their existence consisted of. Their minds couldn't quite express the meaning of our word reality, so they used this appropriate word to signify the most positive fact of their life. Through successive generations res gradually assumed the meaning of the modern thing - an object of thought. Thing itself, in the original Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic, meant law-court. Here we have two separate primite peoples expressing their concept of reality by a law-court. Reality has evolved directly from these concepts.
(Kinda scary seeing how quite unreliable and expensive the "just-ice" systems of today are.)


"Res, the Lawcourt Reality" Poem by John C. Lilly,
7 sept 1969 (Appendix 2 of Simulations of God).

Res is the thing, the real a lawcourt.
What is so real as being in front of a court as defendant?
Those others in the court are human, I hope.
But they play an old honored game, as if not humane.
They use procedures, rules adapted to win or lose.
Win or lose what?
Everything in consensus group reality - money, property, wife, child, mistress, reputation, power.
Up against power, into court I go, propelled by lawyers.
The true nature of the game, the real rules cloaked in jargon, appals my naïve mind.
I shudder, shake, wish for more power, money, better lawyers - thus wishing, I fall into their game.
I lose.
By their judgment I am depleted of money, power, repute.
Why play? To lose? Why play to lose this game?
Outside of this game are other games, to avoid this one.
Direct messages of direct feeling - goodwill, friendship, the right people, the right activities.
Another reality, not res, the thing, the lawcourt.
Love everlasting, right living, right friends.
Trusting Them, out there, I go on.

Dr.John Lilly - In the province of the mind

John Lilly channeling Davy Crocket lol

"In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is 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."

This video is an excerpt, Full Video here, Full text.

MISHLOVE: Well, I suppose for our culture the really special thing about you is the fact that you really have a foot in both worlds, the scientific camp and the mystical camp. And in a way you seem dissatisfied with both of them. Neither camp seems to provide an adequate enough model of reality for you.

LILLY: That's right. My own beliefs are unbelievable.

MISHLOVE: And you seem to be saying that it's up to each person to in effect make the same bridge that you have, and to create their own belief system, so that in creating that belief they can move into the state that that belief leads them to, so that they can then discard it again.

LILLY: That's the gnostic point of view -- self transcendence, not transcendence through a church or a group.

MISHLOVE: Back fifteen years ago or so, you were exploring the mystical states, as described classically as the various levels of samadhi, in your work with Oscar Ichazo in Chile, in the Arica school.

LILLY: Right.

MISHLOVE: You had achieved, as we have described earlier, some of the very highest states of those mystical traditions, and you wrote about them from your own personal experience. People in the mystical traditions view these states as being ultimate states. I get the sense that you don't think of them that way. You think of them more the way a scientist would look at tools.

LILLY: Well, Patanjali, for instance, in 400 B.C. said, "When you reach the highest form of samadhi, you realize there are hundreds more beyond that." I agree; there's no limit.

MISHLOVE: Well, John Lilly, it's been a pleasure having you with me. Thank you very much.

LILLY: Thank you. It's a pleasure being here. You sure do know how to ask the right questions.

John Lilly's Simulations of God - Science of Belief excerpt 6

God as Consciousness-Without-an-Object

If by getting into a state of High Indifference, of Nirvana, Samadhi, or Satori, then one can function as a teaching example to others and it may be that if a sufficiently large number of us share this particular set of metaprograms we may be able to survive our own alternative dichotomous spaces of righteous wrath. If righteous wrath must go as a nonsurviving program for the human species, then it may be that High Indifference is a reasonable alternative.
Setting up a hierarchy of states of consciousness with High Indifference at the top, Nirvana next, Satori next, Samadhi next, and Anada at the bottom is an interesting game, especially when one becomes capable of moving through all these spaces and staying a sufficient time in each to know it.
This may be a better game than killing our neighbors because they do not believe in our simulations of God. At least those who espouse these states claim that these states are above any other human aspiration; that once one has experienced them, he is almost unfit for wrath, for pride, for arrogance, for power over others, for group pressure exerted either upon oneself or upon others. One becomes fit only for teaching these states who are ready to learn them. The bodhisattva vow is no longer necessary for those who have had direct experience. One becomes the bodhisattva without the vow. One becomes Buddha without being Buddha.
One becomes content with the minimum necessities for survival on the planetside trip; one cuts back on his use of unnecessary articles - machines, gadgets and devices. He no longer needs motion pictures, television, dishwashers, or other luxuries. One no longer needs much of what most people value above all else. One no longer needs the excitement of war. One no longer needs to be a slave to destructive thoughts or deeds. One no longer needs to organize.
Krishnamurti's story of the Devil is pertinent here. Laura Huxley furnished me with a copy of it. The Devil was walking down the street with a friend, and they saw a man pick something up, look at it carefully and put it in his pocket. The friend said to the Devil, "What's that?" The Devil said, "He has found a bit of the truth." The friend said, "Isn't that bad for your business?" "The Devil said, "No, I am going to arrange to have him organize it."
So it behooves us not to organize either the methods or states... It is better not to try to devise groups, techniques, churches, places, or other forms of human organization to encourage, foster, or force up on others these states. If these states are going to do anything with humanity, the must "creep by contagion," as it were, from one individual to the next.
God as Consciousness-Without-an-Object, if real, will be apperceived and introcepted by more and more of us as we turn toward the inner realities within each of us. If God as Consciousness-Without-an-Object inhabits each of us, we eventually will see this. We will become universally aware. We will realize consciousness as being everywhere and eternal. We will realize that Consciousness-Without-an-Object in each of us is prejudiced and biased because it has linked up with a human brain.

Excerpt 1, number 2, number 3, number 4, number 5.

ECCO: Earth Coincidence Control Office

Excerpt from "The Dyadic Cyclone" by John C. Lilly M.D.

Don't really like the language used here myself, but if you can get over it, it sure is fascinating. I offer this as catma probable, not dogma absolute. Check out the comments for some re-shaping of it.

"In ones life there can be peculiarly appropriate chains of related events that lead to consequences that are strongly desired. After such experiences, one wonders how such a series of events developed; sometimes there is a strong feeling that some intelligence (greater than ours) directed the course along certain lines which It/He/She was/is programming. Several years ago, I enunciated a format for such concatenations of events, somewhat."

"There exists a Cosmic Control Center (C.C.C.) with a Galactic substation called Galactic Coincidence Control (G.C.C.). Within which is the Solar System Control Unit (S.S.C.U.), within which is the Earth Coincidence Control Office (E.C.C.O.). The assignments of responsiblities from the top to the bottom of this system of control is by a set of regulations, which translated by E.C.C.O. for humans is somewhat as follows:"

To all humans. If you wish to control coincidences in your own life on the planet Earth, we will cooperate and determine those coincidences for you under the following conditions:

1) You must know/assume/simulate our existence in ECCO [Being aware of the mere concept of Synchronicity, meaningful coincidence will get you started.]

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 advancing/advanced member of ECCO's earthside corps of controlled coincidence workers. You are expected to use your best intelligence in this service.

4) You are expected to expect the unexpected every minute, every hour of every day and of every night.

5) You must be able to maintain conscious/thinking/reasoning 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/apparently happens to you.

6) 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 shorter-term coincidences by your own efforts.

7) Your major mission on earth is to discover/create that which we do to control the long-term coincidence patterns: you are being trained on Earth to do this job.

8) When your mission on planet Earth is completed, you will no longer be required to remain/return there.

9) Remember the motto passed to us (from GCC via SSCU): "Cosmic Love is absolutelely Ruthless and Highly Indifferent: it teaches its lessons whether you like/dislike them or not."

Thanks to Càm

John Lilly's Simulations of God - Science of Belief excerpt 5

Excerpt 1, number 2, number 3, number 4.

God as the Belief, the Simulation, the Model

In the modern world the distribution of the written and spoken word and the distribution of motion pictures and videotapes has become so widespread that those in charge of these media have constructed a new god, the God of Belief, the God of Simulation, the God of the Model. As was demonstrated by the owners of newspapers in the beginning of this cnetury, God as Power can be controlled and expressed through the belief, the simulation, and the model as expressed in language.

Those in control of the distribution of ideas thorugh the media have access to manipulation of power such as the world has never seen. The modern communication satellites, modern radio and TV, are demanded by masses of people. In most metropolitan areas the most commonly stolen objects are TV sets. The believers in the media want to be sure they stay in contact with what the media are saying.

Language can be used in many different ways; it is one of the most flexible instruments ever invented. It can be used to transmit essential information, to predict, to give instructions, to program individuals or large groups, to express very precisely very precise ideas; it can be used to harangue crowds, to excite war and its concomitant activities, to construct computers, to control the human species.

However, language is not universal. There are too many languages on the face of the earth to allow of universality. Therefore, there are discrepancies across language barriers: discrepancies in belief, in simulations, in models of reality and in models of one another. The devil is buried in language, as is God. As linguists have shown over the last fifty years, there is no primitive language left among humans. Every language which previously was called primitive, when looked at more carefully and studied more deeply than before turned out to be an extremely sophisticated instrument for communication of man's inner states.

Language itself contains mysteries. The study of semantics, of logic, of proto-logic has led ever deeper into theories, the science of the human, all science. As semantics, becomes polished, as mathematics matures, our beliefs, simulations, and models and their power are all improved-the power to dissuade from a belief, to construct a belief to take the place of another belief, to acquire simulations "as if true." The power of models where one's life is sacrificed in the service of models is also present in the advance of semantics, linguistics, and mathematics. God as the Word, God as the Sentence, God as the Meaning, God as the Belief rule our social reality.

John Lilly's Simulations of God - Science of Belief excerpt 4 Synchronicity & Coincidence Control

Excerpt 1, number 2, number 3 and the book download link.

God as Science (continued)

Freud, in a brief monograph on religion, wrote, "No, science is no illusion, but it is an illusion to suppose that we can get anywhere else what science canot give us." This is an expression of a Westenr man with a very deep belief in the efficacy of knwoledge, carefully collected and experimentally verified. It is also an expression of a man who did not know mathematics, who was weak in the construction of theory and strong in the collection of empirical facts ruthlessly gathered irrespective of the social attitudes of his time. Freud's conflict with Jung over the intuitive sources of knowledge is well known; Freud worshipped the laws of cause and effect, which Jung thought were not necessarily true. Jung tried to enunciate with Pauli the "law of synchronicity." Synchronicity is the result of the effect of the human psyche upon events. This can be freely translated into another system which I derive from empirical science, a system I call "Coincidence Control." Coincidence control goes something like this: If you live right, the coincidences will build up for you in unexpected and surprising and beneficial ways. If you do not live right, the anti-coincidences will build up in unexpected and direful, sometimes disastrous ways. The criterion of wether or not you are living right is empirical observation of the coincidences. If the coincidences build up, you are living right. If they do not build up, you are not living right and had best examine your way of life.
Of course this system depends upon the method used to interpret events in terms of what one wants. The method of interpretation, the pattern-recognition systems applied to events, the chosen variables, the chosen parameters, and the patterns that these seem to make to the observer determine what one calls a "coincidence." There is a basic fallacy here in projecting one's own wishes onto the world and its events. One can easily rationalize, i.e., choose any theory that will fit the apparent pattern-recognition system of events. For example: I leave a gas station and drive down a freeway seventy miles. On the way I see three or four accidents, one of which happened two minutes before I arrived at the scene. If I had been two minutes earlier I would have been completely crushed by a huge truck that turned over with a load of steel and blocked the whole freeway. At the gas station I had been delayed two minutes while I sought out the man to clean my windshield. If there had not been this delay I would have arrived at the accident scene and probably would have been totally destroyed.
What's wrong with this story? The whole story depends upon my construction of it. My brother, David Lilly, has a saying, "Hindsight is twenty/twenty vision." One might say, "Please don't disturb my theory with the facts." Now let us go back over the series of events with a more objective point of view.
Before leaving the gas station I looked at a road map and wondered wether I should continue down the freeway or take off into the mountains between the freeway and the sea. I then thought of what I had to do at the other end of the trip and, realizing that I couldn't take the amount of time I would need to go into the mountains, I chose to continue on the freeway.
I had another alternate, but I did not use it. The map showed that there was another freeway running paralllel to and a few miles from the one I used. There were many more probabilities, but when I finally made my decision these became certainties concerning a short time in the future. In other words, the certainty in the fact of the indeterminacy of the real situation may last only for a few minutes or perhaps up to a few hours. As time is extended the indeterminacy increases. As the indeterminacy increases, the probability that something will happen which now can be named "coincidence" increases. Any unexpected event that does not follow the pattern of certainty that one is laying on the future one tends to call a "coincidence." Coincidence Control, then, is merely a hindsight name for that which one chooses to call a coincidence out of all events going on. One's survival mechanisms in his biocomputer tend to select certain events as if they are the ones that determine his survival or non-survival. Hence it is these systems which are paramount in selecting the patterns called "coincidence." (On this topic, I recommend a book called 'the Rules of Chaos, Or why tomorrow doesn't work" by Stephen Vizinczey.)
This view of coincidence as projectino from a certain biocomputer expresses only a part of the synchronicity of Jung. Jung's synchronicity statement includes, then, psychic control of events, i.e. a certain amount of determination by a given individual of what will happen to him in the future. If he has an unconscious self-destructive aspect, he may not survive the events that he creates. J.W. Dunne, in a book called An Experiment with Time, shows that one can detect real events that are going to happen a shot time in the future. His theory expressed a parallel time track or a loop in time. Such events, according to Dunne, are not determined by the psyche but are perceived by the psyche; the determinants are beyond the self, resident in the total feedback system of which one's self is only a small part.
Recently I encountered one such instance which is in agreement with Dunne but which can be interpreted by the Jungian or the Coincidence Control view as well. A friend of mine, B.M., who lives in a beach house on the Pacific Ocean, dreamed during the night that a dolphin came up on the beach in front of the house and was then pushed back into the sea by the children of the neighborhood. I arrived at his house that morning, he told me the dream at breakfast, and within two hours a dolphin came up on the beach and he, his wife, and the children participated in pushing it back into the sea.
This could have been a incidence of Coincidence Control, i.e., by his dream my friend was setting up the possibility of the ocincidence that the real dolphin would arrive, directly by some form of mental telepathy or other means of control which our science does not yet know about. Or it could have been a causal event in the Jungian sense with a synchronicity of the dream material and of the actual event of the dolphin's arrival on the beach. Or it could be interpreted, as modern scientists would interpret it, as "merely a coincidence."
I would prefer to say that the total field situation involved-of my expected arrival at his house, of his association in his mind of me and dolphins- had programmed the dream. He may have had dreams of dolphins many other nights without remembering those dreams. Dolphins do beach themselves in Southern California and are pushed back to sea without much to-do unless they die and must be disposed of. Thus in the fabric of probabilities one would have to find out how many people dream of dolphins beaching themselves and how many nights of the year and many of these dreams are followed within, say twenty-four to forty-eight hours by an actual beaching of dolphins along all the beaches of Soutnern California and possibly of the whole world. Until we had the results of this survey (and I'm afraid they would not be very accurate), until we had worked out a method of accurately reporting both the internal event (the dream) and the external event (the beaching), we would not have an experimental-science toehold on the connection between these types of events. I don't know what the connection is, if any, other than that the patterns of the dream and the patterns of the event happen to match by some means we do not yet know. I hope that eventually man will be sufficiently advanced to begin to investigate such happenings with a more relaxed attitude toward them and without attempting to "prove" something by means of such correlations. I find such happenings exciting, but this does not prove that there is either mental telepathy or coincidence control.
I have often experienced a feeling of awe, of revernce, and of weirdness in the presence of dolphins. When dolphins begin to cooperate with one in a commmunication of information back and forth by whatever means is available to each side, one begins to feel that here is someone in that particular body who in an alien and far-out way is at least one's peer if not superior. However, my scientific training says, "Do not allow your feelings of awe, of reverence, and of weirdness be mistaken for the appreciation of a truth. The work has just begun with these feelings; these feelings are your motivation to start an experimental series to find out what is going on and how it happens." If I allowed science to be my God and dictate the truth to me from strictly intuitive unconscious sources, I would be making the same mistakes that many people have made in the past who refused to polish up and discipline their theories so that they were applicable in the experimental and experiential sphere. Sloppy thinking is not a science. Science is the best thinking of which the human species is capable - ruthless, with no holds barred, at least in the province of the mind.
No, science is no illusion, and it may not be an illusion to suppose that we can get from anything else what science cannot give us. However, we must realize that we cannot today be dogmatic as to what science in the future will be. There are regions of mystery, regions of ignorance, regions which we have yet to penetrate in science. It would be an illusion to suppose that our present science is complete. Science, as far as I am concerned, is an open-ended system, a system of exploration, of processing data which makes sense, a logical system. And yet, in the future it may include regions which today we call illogical, irrational, psychotic, superstitious, occult, esoteric, religious or what have you. The new frontiers, as we see them as frontiers, are developing into the inner sciences as well as in the other sciences. Those who have occult esoteric authority and try to dictate what is real may be on the right track. One of science's jobs is separating one's own projections into those which match those simulations which simulate best some reality inside or outside. There may be those who have tapped into omniscient sources of information who have attained states of mind, states of being, states of consciousness way beyond those of the ordinary human. I have been through such experiences and have felt while in those states, that there are omniscient sources available to the human through his institution, through his unconscious.
The only problem then becomes one of expression with an incomplete science, an incomplete language, an incomplete human vehicle. Coming back from such regions, one feels squeezed into the human frame, the human limitations, the human brain as a limited computer prejucided and filled with pseudo-knowledge that blocks the transmission of True Knowledge.
Any sage, any wise man, any guru that I have spoken to showed his humanity in many, many ways in the sense that he was not an error-free computer. Some of these people claim that God is Science of a more advanced form than any that we can know, and yet they have failed to express this in sufficiently cogent, succint and understandable terms so that they are useful on the planetside trip. I find such people using all-too-human mechanisms of brainwashing, of human control of groups, and of creating "in-groups" to worship them and their knowledge. They have not gotten beyond God as the Group, or God as Myself, or God as Her/Him/It.
And yet there are those like Einstein and others who have gone to these regions and then come back and used all their inspirations and intuitions of these vast regions into something that will revise our science and make it advance into the future science that can approach more closely that which one knows exists. As Gregory Bateson, author of Steps to an Ecology of Mind, said in talking of a psychic who was demonstrating his powers, "We like to think it is not difficult." Science is difficult; any discipline requires a degree of dedication, inner-directed work after one receives intuitive jumps in understanding. No, science is not an illusion, but to derive by scientific methods that which will bear up under experiential and experimental testing by the self and others is a lot of hard work.

John Lilly's Simulations of God - Science of Belief excerpt 3 God as Science

Earlier excerpt and another one, and the book download link.

God as Science

Western science became divided into two major movements: experimental science, which depended upon careful observation and experiment, and mathematics, which depended upon an intuitive grasp of abstract principles and the reduction of these to equations and functions expressible by a new symbology. Several mistakes were made by commentators on this scene. One of them was that science was neglecting sources of information other than that from the natural external world and experiments upon that world. In an almost underground way the subjective aspects of experience were paid court by the mathematicians and their intuitive sources of inner knowledge, examined and expressed in a disciplined, careful "inner experimental" way.

For those who think that science originates in the external reality, I ask the question: "Where does mathematics come from?" This is as deep a mystery as the mystical experiences of the Eastern philosophers and mystics. The "Yoga of the West" is divided into the "Mathematical Yoga" and the "Experimental Science Yoga." Each of these disciplines requires just as much discipline, mastery of self, and ability of inner and outer actions as anything imported from India, China or Japan. In my teaching experience, teaching science of the West and teaching technique from the East, I find that those who need the least teaching, i.e., who already have the self-discipline necessary to master any of these techniques, are those in the West who are trained in mathematics and/or science.

...As a student of science, I was shocked to realize that scientists depend upon mechanics, and mechanics depend upon previous mechanics who taught them their trade. I was shocked also to find that metallurgy was not yet a science; it was an empirical technological, heuristic, pragmatic, empirical art. When I was working in scientific instrumentation, I discovered that most of the knowledge I needed was not in scientific journals or the scientific textbooks at all; it was in engineering handbooks, it was in various "how to do" manuals from technology, it was in books like John Strong's Procedures in Experimental Physics. These sources depend not upon scientific experiments so much as "try it - if it works, use it." I found that to be a scientist I could be a technologist, a mechanic, a carpenter, a plumber, an electrician, a wire man, a circuit designer, an optician, a bacteriologist, a farmer and so forth. True science is imbedded in practically every human activity that one can conceive of. It is not something alone, by itself, apart from the rest of the reality of human existence.

I make these points in order to show that it is totally inappropriate to make science into God. Science is the result of human activity; it is not something God-given and forced upon the human race by some superior being. And yet there are those in legislatures, in public life, in the media, in the performing arts, who have not been educated in science and thus put it on some sort of pedestal and worship it as if it were a god. This can be extremely dangerous; it means that one is setting up a w hole sphere of human knowledge, of human activity, as if seperate from oneself and hence subject to attack or to worship, or whatever else one wants to do with this simulation.
Once one simulates Science as if God, or as if the Devil, he has lost contact with it. It now is in the position of a paranoid system of delusion which he can then treat unrealistically and as if not part of his own planetside trip. As is discussed in other chapters of this book, science has much to offer - in the region of cosmology, for example, in the region of submicroscopic reality, in reality, in the region of explaning the operations of our own brain. I agree with those who maintain that science is only the best application to our planetside trip of the best thinking of which man is capable (and I would include in the planetside trip the inner realities as well as the other realities). Science is not something to be worshipped; science is something to be acquired as one's own thinking machinery can assimilate it, as one's own biocomputer can be trained by it. Science literally is a Yoga, a union with our own humanity, a union with the universe as it exists, not as we may wish it to be.

Science of itself is ruthlessly indifferent. It is an expression of the state of High Indifference. Science does not take sides; its products can be used to kill, to create, or to grow. Science as we know it is now capable of feeding adequately every human being on the face of the Earth. Science as we know it is now capable of turning the seas into vast farms, of turning the deserts into green paradises. The proper use of science could make a veritable Eden of our planet, without pollution and with a balanced view of the totality of all species of plants and animals. Science can then function as a benign god rather as the devil that we make of it when we worship God as War, God as Righteous Wrath, God as Power, and so forth. Science is our handservant, science is our concubine, science is our wife, science is our husband, science is our children, science is our thinking, science is our feeling, science is our doing.

John Lilly's Simulations of God - Science of Belief excerpt 2 God as War

Earlier excerpt and book download link.

Excerpt 2 from John Lilly's Simulations of God - Science of Belief. In this one John Lilly's stretches our associations of war.

GOD AS WAR

In the old-fashioned sense, God as War, War as an instrument of God as is recounted in the Bible, war between small villages in the Middle East, is not to be compared with modern warfare simultaneously involving several hundreds of millions of people. The old Gods of War are too small for modern human society. The Jewish God is too small. Baal and Maloch are too small. Ra is too small. Kali is too small. And the philosophies of all these ancient Gods and all the other ancient Gods, such as Huitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipoca of the Aztecs, are too small.

...If either the Spaniards of the Aztecs had had atomic energy at their disposal, the planet would probably have become sterilized. We no longer can afford God as War. We now have God-like instruments of destruction. Our God must be greater than a protagonist in human battle.
The basic assumption that "We are right and they are wrong" also must be treated as a delusion. As a substitute for violence we must negotiate; we must bring disparate belief systems into congruence through communication, not through violence. The language barriers of the world must not only be crossed but toppled. The belief barriers of the world must be diminished to the point of triviality. All modern technology must be used to increase the knowledge of all peoples throughout the planet. National security boundaries must be abolished bilaterally. Self-righteous virtue and concerted anger must be denied to those in power. Profit through war must be abolished.

It may be that all the above reasoning is idealistic and totally wrong. It may be that war on our planet is the result of orders sent to the human species from other superior civilizations hundreds, thousands, or millions of years in advance of ours. War may be a laboratory for the development of weapons to be used elsewhere. War may be the supreme form of human achievement. It may be that our short-term view of the destruction of human bodies, of human vehicles, one by the other, is a technique for freeing up essences needed elsewhere in our galaxy or the unvierse. If we want to continue with God as War, some such belief systems as this must be carefully taught to al peoples on Earth. There are various methods for such teaching. For example, we can declare that it is necessary for the Americans and Chiense to carry on their military research and their testing of new material in real wars in order to develop super-weapons which will eventually could be used against extraterrestrial invaders.
Further alternatives are that the screams of the dying, the pain, the terror, the panic of war, all telepathically broadcast throughout our galaxy, may be needed as energy - as food or as fuel - somewhere else in the galaxy.

It may be that Earth is merely a small portion of some other beings' laboratory in which they are testing out various ways of exciting various kinds of organisms to high energy states. It may be that the supervisors of this laboratory must every so often dump some sort of destructive antibiotic activity on us, the bacteria, to keep our numbers in control. It may be that they finally have furnished us with the formulae for our own antibiotics. We, as the bacteria in the laboratory they have set up on this planet, are merely living out their instructions. These instructions involve observing how organisms with our size brain can kill one another most efficiently. These superextraterrestrial beings furnish us with ideas of God, of the devil, of prophets, of power, of inflated egos, of megalomanic belief systems in order to play games in their laboratory.

Or it may be that we are just simulation computers at the behest of very much larger computers who are in control of us, and that we are simulating a war they are waging among themselves; or that they have agreed to take sides on this planet, some controlling one side and others controlling the other side. These lesser gods of cosmic war games are undetectable to us because we have post-hypnotic trance orders to forget the fact that we are under their orders. Our simulation does not include the simulation of Them. Our orders say: "Accept the orders that we give you in sleep. When you are awake do what we have dictated and forget that we gave you these orders in sleep."

Paranoia has two components. We forget that paranoia includes a megalomanic center-of-the-universe arrogance. This state could easily have been programmed into us by Them. The only additional component needed to start a war would then be fear. Fear is easily excited because it has been built into the biocomptuers as a survival program. Many things - including the natural forces - can be used to excite fear. Start a hurricane or a typhoon and move it in the right direction across the surface of the earth. Or begin a very large earthquake, or excite a solar flare and cause the particles from the flare to hit the earth's atmosphere, thus changing the mood of all the earth's creatures, including man. Or beam secret information into the world's houses of power - that on the opposite side of the world are you enemies, so go there and kill them.

Such projections of responsibility upon the cosmos in the past were called God. Now we must perform an operation almost out of science fiction in order to simulate the same sort of results. Imbedded in us is a righteous wrath of our own fear, our own megalomania, our own arrogance. When we become angry enough to kill - then is the time to stop, to stand off, to find out how much of our program is biologically determined, how much is determined by communication with others through at-present-unknown channels, and how much is determined by our peer group and by the known physical pathways of communication between humans on this planet. The destroy-to-create simulation either must go or must be carried to its full extreme of totally destroying in order to start totally over somewhere else.

John Lilly's Simulations of God - Science of Belief

I'm reading this great book that is really helping me to make some more sense of motivations of my own and others and this crazy reality.

Check out these meaningful chapter titles: God as the beginning, I am god, god out there, god as her/him/it, god as the group, god as orgasm and sex, god as death, god as drugs, god as the body, god as money, god as righteous wrath, god as compassion, god as war, god as science, god as mystery, god as the belief, the simulation, the model, god as the computer, god simulating himself, god as consciousness without an object, god as humor, god as superspace, the ultimate collapse into the black hole, the end, the ultimate simulation, god as the dyad.

"What I wish to do in this book is to give you enough samples to learn your own simulations of God, understand your own system of belief, and find out what is most important to you within yourself..." John C. Lilly, M.D.

Excerpts:
Belief System: In a given person a belief system is that conscious/unconscious set of basic beliefs, assumptions, axioms, biases/prejudices, models, simulations which determine, at a given instant, decisions, actions, thoughts, feelings, motives and the sense of the real and the true.
A given person usually has several belief systems, which may or may not overlap, may or may not generate paradoxes, agree/contradict, control/be controlled by one another, be arranged/dissaranged, logical/illogical, be fixed/shifting.

From 'I am God':
The belief largely still held in the field of science - and by the community at large - is that on this planet man - the human scientist - is at the top of the heap - this with no investigation of the criteria on which this opinion is based. Such defenses, as "Well, if these other animals are so great, why aren't they building the way we're building?" put one's self in the "I am God" position where science, knowledge, and the other species are concerned.
"What I do, then, is the be-all and end-all on this planet. I have demonstrated this because I can destroy the others. In fact, now I have the capability of destroying everything on this planet, including the planet itself; therefore, I must be at the top of the pyramid of development. Therefore, the others are my prey and I am justified in killing them for purposes of my industries, my survival, or my warfare."
In this sense, then, the "I am God" position denies that there is any such thing as an essense, that there is any such entity. It denies that there is any connection between us and the other species; it denies that there is a any connection between us and the rest of the universe; it denies that there is a "God"; it denies that here is a Star Maker who has any knowledge of what humans do. This in a sense is the existential position, without religion and without the kinds of experiences about which I and others have written. In other words, in order to make one's self God in the sense of he who controls our planet, with nuclear power, chemical and biological warfare, and political means of exerting power within a very limited framework, one assumes God-like powers and believes there is nothing else but one's self and one's own species.
With this belief system, the be-all and end-all is humanity. There is nothing on the planet comparable to humanity. All other species are potential victims of the human species. There are no unknowns in communication with either these species or at-present-undiscovered species elsewhere in our galaxy. This view is quite as dogmatic and dangerous as the view of the Catholic Church during the inquisition, of the Mohammedans following Mohammed, of the hordes of Genghis Khan coming into Europe, or of Attila the Hun.

From 'God as him/her/it':
Of course one must examine very carefully the unconscious tape loops, the tape loops below one's level of awareness which could select who is to be his particular guru as God. In fact before seeking a guru, one should look to his motives. It may be that he is merely once again seeking a situation which he considers to be "ideal" - with mother or with mother and father or with a sibling. One's ideals generate what he considers to be virtuous behavior; it is wise to consider wether or not this "virtuous" behavior is really what one wants. One can behave for years in accordance with what he considers to be a virtuous mode, and then suddenly discover that the mode is anything but virtuous, that it is postulated not upon virtue but upon something else inside himself that he was unaware of. With the gain of proper experiences, a whole system of beliefs can fall apart and one may be left with a reconsideration of the whole basis of his total motivation and life-style.
If one wants to take the position of the Tao, he can say that these are learning opportunities which have been thrown his way as he followed the Way. One hears some Taoists saying, "Everything that happens is perfect as it happens: all lessons are to be learned as presented." In effect, this is saying that the spirtiual path is perfect of itself. This claim reminds me of a famous modern Tibetan spiritual leader who, when asked, "What is liberation?," said, "Liberation is freedom from the spiritual path."

From 'God as a group':
The galaxy itself may have groups that are watching and caring about what our groups are doing. It may also not. If we are going to project our patriarchal, and matriarchal, ideas onto the galaxy, we are probably going to make the same mistakes that we made in the past in regard to our planet. If we suspect that there are out there beings thousands of years ahead of our civilization who are going to rescue us from our own childish mistakes, we are probably setting ourselves up for a stunning surprise.
There are those who claim divine guidance and wish to pass messages on to the rest of us, messages derived from entities not human, from networks of communication not available to all of us, from direct personal contacts with other entities, spirits and guides way beyond anything that we have directly experiences on this planet. Such experiences have given rise to pronouncements about God; pronouncements about God Out There, pronouncements about God in Here, God as The Group, God as Her/Him/it.
We can see that in the future our regions of ignorance will be much larger than our regions of knowledge. We still do not know how, when, or where we are connected to other entities in this galaxy in terms of our modern science. We do not know how large a galactic group we are members of. Certain direct experiences I have had in isolation and others have had under similar circumstances seem to indicate that we are in contact with a much larger network than our current consensus science says we are. In this sense God as the Largest Group may extend far beyond our planet and even beyond our galaxy into the whole universe.

From 'God as the body':
...Once one has taken the spiritual path and achieved a certain experience with various far-out states of consciousness, he begins to expand his criteria of beauty into regions where, before they were almost forbidden. In these states of consciousness one's criteria are so expanded that anything and everything becomes beautiful and perfect. One pulls out of the human conditions and the necessity for survival of the physical being and moves into eternal spaces united with all other sentient beings throughout the universe. The impact of such experiences is so great that one's criteria of beauty or of sin and virtue are completely flipped. One goes through peculiar transformations in that what used to be considered beautiful expands to include many, many things that one might have considered ugly. Finally, the dichotomy "beauty and ugliness" disappears; one achieves a state of High Indifference in which he realizes that bliss does not come from the outside world, it comes from within. One elicits his own bliss, he elicits bliss in others. He realizes his own eternal nature and hence is no longer quite so subject to the survival programs of the biocomputer.
God as the Body disappears. One is no longer subject to the same kinds of programming that he was previously. The body is now part of a more immense God whose vastness encompasses the whole universe and all of one's higher states of consciousness. For example, in the old belief system of God as the Body, one's own death was unjust, catastrophic, a complete disaster. With the new belief system, death is merely a transition form, a change in state of oneself, a change in a state of being, a change of consciousness into a new, more expanded state, highly desirable and not as restricting as the state of consciousness which was tied to a body. Once can leave the body with joy, with a sense of completeness of his planetside trip, and go to whatever it is that one goes on to. God as Death is also gone.

From 'God as money':
For many people the possession of money is equated with God. The belief "God is money: money is God" is a powerful determinant of behavior in our Western society. According to the usual social criteria, the misuse of money by private individuals and by public officials is the list of sins against this God. Those who blatantly steal money without surrounding their theft with all sorts of legal safeguards, are subject to the severest penalties. Those who know how to obtain large amounts of money and who can hire sufficiently powerful law firms who in turn can influence the judges, can make a very subtle priest-like game out of playing with their God.
Public officials in charge of grants, of disbursement of government funds and of the collection of government taxes, similarly are priests in the church of this God. The taxation authorities have the power to examine the personal life of any individual citizen or of any corporation to find any heresies that have developed in the worship of this God. Rules for the worship of money as God are quite stringent and specific, like any of the litanies, rituals and belief systems of any church that has appeared in the Western wrodl. The new inquisition has powers of jailing (practically for life) those who do not adhere to the proper rituals, litany and paper work necessitated by this God.
Certain new privileges appear that were not present at the lower levels of money flow. One now has the best possible advice from accounting, auditing and law firms. He has become a member of the "privileged priests" of the God of Money. One can now be in competition with the other priests or in confederation with the other priests. Publicly one acts as if he is in competition, whereas privately he acts in cooperation with the other priests. They advise him on how to reduce his taxes to a microscopic level; on how to put his money in trust for his offspring; and on how to keep a low profile for the public media. He is taught how to use the media in the service of the Money God.

Also from 'God as money':
Already we are disillusioned with fixed litanies, fixed rituals of churches. The new software, as opposed to that of old churches, is more flexible, more adaptive, and more interesting. Some spectacular things can be accomplished in the inner realities with the proper human software programming. Telling people how to do things inside their own heads is becoming a new industry in which fortunes are to be made.

Deoxy Wiki

Deoxy.org is a great site and its wiki feature allows users to add their own pages. Check out these great pages: Human Biocomputer, Memefare, Psychic aikido, Qabalah, The Noosphere and The Gaian Mind, Valis the Opera, Zen Koan, Zhen Potential, You are Smarter than God, The Cosmic Schmuck Principle, Fascist Insect, The Thinker and the Prover & its Exercises:

The Thinker can think about virtually anything.

The earth is:

• Hollow
• Suspended on the backs of infinite turtles
• Floating in space

Religion, philosophy, politics:

• Mortal
• Immortal
• Both mortal and immortal
• Scientific relativist
• Marxist
• Nazi

Medicine:

• Hypochondria
• Placebo cures

John C. Lilly audio & video

John C. Lilly, M.D., was a consciousness pioneer, mind and brain researcher, author, trained psychoanalyst, neuroscientist, inventor, cetaceans and dolphin researcher. His interspecies communication research inspired the film Day of the Dolphin. He worked extensively in biophysics, computer theory, and electronics. He invented the isolation tank to understand how the brain works in sensory deprivation. He explores inner consciousness and psychoactive substances, and inspired the film Altered States. He considered his book, Programming and Metaprogramming the Human Biocomputer, his most original work. He was a founding Director of the Association for Cultural Evolution.

Somebody buy all this stuff and put it online, now :p

John C. Lilly Quotes

John C. Lilly was an American physician, psychoanalyst and writer. He was a pioneer researcher into the nature of consciousness using as his principal tools the isolation tank, dolphin communication and psychedelic drugs, sometimes in combination. He was a prominent member of the Californian counterculture of scientists, mystics and thinkers that arose in the late 1960s and early 70s. Albert Hofmann, Gregory Bateson, Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, Werner Erhard, and Richard Feynman were all frequent visitors to his home.

"In the province of the mind, what is believed to be true is true, or becomes true within certain limits to be learned by experience and experiment. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind. There are no limits."

or

"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. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the network's mind there are no limits."

"Our only security is our ability to change."

"Well, when I started going out on the universe with LSD in the tank, I'd come to a certain group of entities and I'd say, 'Are you God?' And they'd say, 'Well, we say that to some people but God is way up there somewhere with the angels.' And it turned out no matter how big they were, God is bigger. So finally I got to the Starmaker. But as Olaf Stapledon says in his book, it's impossible to describe the Starmaker in human terms. He was well aware of the bullshit of language.

I call God ECCO now. The Earth Coincidence Control Office. It's much more satisfying to call it that. A lot of people accept this and they don't know that they're just talking about God. I finally found a God that was big enough. As the astronomer said to the Minister, 'My God's astronomical.' The Minister said, 'How can you relate to something so big?' The astronomer said, 'Well, that isn't the problem, your God's too small!'"

Daily Dedroidify: Believe Nothing!

Daily Dedroidify: Believe Nothing!

...I began to develop a strong suspicion that there was, somewhere in space-time, another Adept of Brain Change, or perhaps a School of Adepts, helping and guiding me. This is not at all unusual. In most human societies, historically, the shamans have used similar brain-change drugs and soon became convinced they have "allies" [for instance Animal Guides, which are archetypical forces aswell] helping them. Even a man with such a long and orthodox scientific career as Dr. John Lilly confesses that he thought he had super-human "Guides" on some of his LSD voyages.
My teachers seemd to have a damned peculiar sense of humar at times. At one point I was almost totally convinced that my teachers were a school of extraterrestrial adepts resident in the double-star system of Sirius. Strange coincidences - or Jungian synchronicities - then accumulated around me, supporting this theory.
Later, a "psychic reader" told me I was "channeling" the spirit of an ancient Chinese sage. Coincidences or "omens" supporting this model then obligingly appeared.
Then, another "psychic" told me I was channeling a medieval Irish bard. More synchronicities followed.
This sort of things always happens to people who mess around with Cabala (even if they don't use Acid) [Or those who mess around with consciousness alteration and conscious evolution in general]
The late Dr. Israel Regardie, a psychotherapist and Cabalist, often distinguished two ways of looking at this phenomenon, when it happens to you. The objective theory, as he called it, assumes an external reality to these "entities." The subjective theory, on the other hand, assumes the "entities" exist only in our brains, as anti-selves or Jungian archetypes or something of that sort. Dr. Regardie believed you will get the best results when you are not committed to either theory but just open yourself to whatever happens.
Somewhere along the way I got concerned with the direction all this was taking and decided to safeguard my sanity by choosing the subjective theory (it's all in my head), and ruthlessly repressing any tendency to speculate further about possible objective theories (there are super-human forces at work here...). In terms of the neurological model then current, I explained everything as my over-developed left brain learning to receive signals from my usually "silent" right brain. (We now know that this left brain/right brain model does not quite explain everything, and Karl Pribram's hologram model of consciousness seems more inclusive.)
Robert Anton Wilson: Cosmic Trigger 2: Down to Earth

Some other thoughts, maybe our unconscious is so powerful that we can let it guide us (another useful metaphor is maybe we are all God like in the Hindu sense that if we want can lead our unconscious, or Higher self, or God, etc etc to guide us out of the maze we got ourselves into), this comes in whatever forms we prefer consciously or have imprinted unconsciously and can change if we so 'intend' it. Intention and Archetypes are powerful stuff! Maybe the subjective side of reality as we filter it with our nervous systems is much more powerful than we now think after the one-sided objective materialistic age which has obviously not made us happy to our fullest potential. Sometimes it seems help from 'outside' no matter how strange is required for our growth. The moral of the story however is BELIEVE NOTHING; It is the highest form of intelligence =)

"Nothing is true, everything is permitted."
Hassan-i Sabbah

"In this book it is spoken of the Sephiroth, and the Paths, of Spirits and Conjurations ; of Gods, Spheres, Planes and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether they exist or not. By doing certain things certain results follow ; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them."
Aleister Crowley - Liber O vel Manus et Sagittae, reprinted in Magick

John C. Lilly: Beliefs Unlimited

Excerpt from 'Center of the Cyclone' p127 and on.

The next exercise was the "Beliefs Unlimited" exercise in which one attempted to move beyond one's current belief structures. We listented to a tape programmed in a repetitive fashion (5 presentations each time) to maximize absorption. The directions for listening to the tape were to lie in a comfortable position on the floor with the lights very dim and to just allow the metaprogramming to enter one's biocomputer.

Beliefs Unlimited.
In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true within certain limits, to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are beliefs to be transcended.
Hidden from one's self is a covert set of beliefs that control on's thinking, one's actions, and one's feelings.
The covert set of hidden beliefs is the limiting set of beliefs to be transcended.
To transcend one's limiting set, one establishes an open-ended set of beliefs about the unknown.
The unknown exists in one's goals for changing one's self, int he means for changing, in th euse of others for the change, in one's capacity to change, in one's orientation toward change, in one's elimination of hindrances to change, in one's assimilation of the aids to change, in one's use of the impulse to change, in one's need for changing, in the possibilities of change, in the form of change itself, and in the substance of change and of changing.
The unknown exists in one's goals for changing one's self, in the means for that change, in the use of others in the changing, in one's capacity for changing one's self, in one's orientation toward changes, in the elimination of hindrances to changing, in one's assimilation of the aids to changing, in one's impulses toward changing one's self and undergoing changes, in one's needs for changse, in the possibilities for change, in the form of the changes tehmselves, an din the substance of the changes and of changing itself.
There are unknowns in my goals toward changing. There are unknowns in my means of changing. There are unknowns in my relations with others in changing. There are unknowns in my capacity for changing. There are unknowns in my orientation toward changing. There are unknowns in my assimilation of changes. There are unknowns in my needs for changing. There are unknowns in the possibilities of me changing. There are unknowns in the forms into which changing will put me. There are unknowns in the substance of the changes that I will undergo, in my substance after changes.
My disbelief in all these unknowns is a limiting belief, preventing my transcending my limits. My disbelief in these unknowns is a belief, a limiting belief, preventing my transcending my limits.
By allowing there are no limits; no limits to thinking, no limits to feeling, no limits to movement. By allowing, there are no limits. There are no limits to thinking, no limits to feeling, no limits to movement.
That which is not allowed is forbidden. That which is allowed, exists. In allowing no limits, there are no limits. That which is forbidden is not allowed. That which is not allowed is forbidden. That which exists is allowed. That which is allowed, exists. In allowing no limits, there are no limits. That which is not allowed is forbidden. That which is forbidden is not allowed. That which is allowed, exists. That which exists is allowed. To allow no limits, there are no limits. No limits allowed. No limits exist.
In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true. In the province of the mind, there are no limits. In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true. There are no limits.