I came across this article and wasn't sure where to post it.....  however much of it is about what we are talking about in this thread.

The Unlimited Mind of Doctor John C. Lilly

May, 1964: The Virgin Islands

Dr. John C. Lilly floats on his back in 10 inches of seawater heated to 93.5 degrees fahrenheit. Outside the tank, the warm Caribbean air blows through the trees and open windows of his custom built beachfront island laboratory. Below him, a pair of bottlenose dolphins drift together in specially designed pools, floating like the scientist upstairs.

John has injected himself with 100 micrograms of LSD-25, courtesy of the United States government. No one has ever taken LSD in an environment like the sensory deprivation tank before. No sound, no light, no gravity, virtually no external sensations whatsoever. There is nothing for the mind to focus on but itself.

A wave of terror washes over him. It has occurred to him that he might die from this experiment, there is no one to help him should he lose control of his body and allow his face to sink below the surface of the pool. As the drug takes effect, the overwhelming fear coalesces into a brilliant blinding ball of light that suddenly explodes, propelling him like a rocket out of his body, out of the solar system, blasting him into another reality.


His consciousness is no longer that of Dr. John C. Lilly, scientist, inventor, human resident of planet earth. He has become something older, wiser, more powerful and as vast as the universe. He soars through infinite space and nebulous clouds of living energy radiating pure joy. He senses the presence of other beings like him. He has seen beings like them before – they watched over him throughout his childhood. This time he feels that he is one of them.

John C Lilly was a born scientist. At age 13, the boy nicknamed  “Einstein Jr.” already had a penchant  for experimentation. He had a habit of building bombs from household chemicals and detonating them in the wilderness outside his family home. He liked to stay late in the school science lab, mixing and measuring, hypothesizing and observing. Despite his father’s wishes for him to become a banker, he studied physics at CalTech, biology at Dartmouth, and Medicine at Penn State. He became a doctor of neurophysiology, a licensed psychotherapist, and an inventor of numerous medical instruments, technologies, and methodologies, many of which are still in use in the field today. He invented a device called the Bavatron which he used to become the first scientist to measure and record multiple bio-electrical impulses across the brain’s surface. His cetacean studies reintroduced to the west the knowledge that dolphins were creatures of extraordinary intelligence capable of forming close relationships with humans and even mimicking speech. But he is perhaps most famous for his experiments with psychoactive drugs and the isolation tank, which he invented at the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland in 1954.

The dominant psychological paradigm of the day was behaviorism, which took all emphasis off of the subjective mental states and the study of the conscious and unconscious mind, focusing instead solely on observable behavior. Joseph B. Watson, one of the leading behaviorists of the early 20th century, summed up the basic tenets of the philosophy of behaviorism as follows:

“Behaviorism…holds that the subject matter of human psychology is the behavior of the human being. Behaviorism claims that consciousness is neither a definite nor a usable concept. The behaviorist, who has been trained always as an experimentalist, holds, further, that belief in the existence of consciousness goes back to the ancient days of superstition and magic.”

Lilly was never a believer of behaviorism – he had his own theories of mind and reality which he would for the most part keep to himself. Then as now, the fields of science and academia were hostile to radical ideas, or any ideas at all, that challenged the dogmatic assumptions of the dominant paradigm. If a scientist was to succeed, it was best to keep such ideas private, which Lilly did for many years until publishing some of them in a report for the NIMH which was later released as a book entitled Progamming and Metaprogamming in the Human Biocomputer in 1972.

Read more @ http://realitysandwich.com/219385/the-unlimited-mind-of-doctor-john-c-lilly/



"What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us."  ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~