American psychoanalyst and neuroscientist John Lilly (1915 - 2001) is known for his daring explorations of the nature of consciousness. He pioneered the study of how the human brain and psyche function in isolation. Lilly conducted his research in a sensory deprivation (floating) chamber - a closed capsule with salt water that isolates a person from any sensations, and also used psychedelics in experiments on himself. We publish translated excerpts from an interview with John Lilly, in which the scientist talks about the rules of floating, non-existent objectivity and the meaning of fear.
When I was 16 and preparing to go to college, I wrote an article for the school newspaper called Reality. It was she who determined my life path and the direction of my thoughts, connecting them with the study of the activity and structure of the brain.
I went to California Institute of Technology, started studying biological sciences, and took my first neuroanatomy course. Then I went to Dartmouth Medical School, and there I took another such course, and then I went to the University of Pennsylvania, and there I studied the brain even deeper. So I learned more about him than I can tell you.
As a child, I went to a Catholic school and learned a lot about rude boys and beautiful girls there. I fell in love with Margaret Vance, but I didn't say anything to her, although it was incredible. I didn't know about sex, so I fantasized about exchanging urine with her.
My father had an exercise machine with a belt that had to be worn on the stomach or on a soft spot, and an electric motor that vibrated the belt. I once stood on this machine and the vibration stimulated my erogenous zones. Then I suddenly felt like my body was divided into parts, and my whole being was seized with delight. It was amazing.
The next morning I told the priest about this, and he said: "You masturbated!" I didn’t know what he was talking about, and then I understood and answered: “No”. He called it a mortal sin. I left the church. I thought, “If they call God's gift a mortal sin, to hell with them. This is not my God, they are just trying to control people."
Objectivity and subjectivity are the traps people fall into. I prefer the terms "internal sanity" and "external sanity". Internal sanity is your life within you. It's very personal, and you usually don't let anyone in because it's totally insane - although I often meet people with whom I can talk about it.
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When you get into a deprivation cell, external sanity disappears. External sanity is what we are doing now, during a conversation: exchanging thoughts and the like. I am not talking about my inner sanity, and the journalist is not talking about his. However, if our inner sanities overlap, we can become friends.
I never use the word "hallucination" as it is very disorienting. It is part of an artificial explanatory principle, and therefore useless. Richard Feynman, a physicist, has been immersed in a deprivation chamber 20 times. Each time he spent three hours there, and then sent me his new book on physics by mail.
On the title page, Feynman wrote, "Thanks for the hallucinations." I called him and said, “Look, Dick, you're not acting like a scientist. You should describe what you have experienced, not throw it into the trash can marked "Hallucinations". This is a psychiatric term that distorts the meaning; nothing of your experience can be called unreal."
What exactly is this experience? Well, for example, a person can say that in the deprivation chamber he felt his nose move to the navel, and then decided that he did not need a nose or a navel, and flew into space. There is no need to explain anything - you just need to describe. Explanations in this area are meaningless.
I studied for 35 years and did psychoanalysis for eight years before going to the deprivation cell. At that moment I was freer than if I hadn't done all this. Someone will ask: "There is no connection here." I can say: "Yes, but I learned that from my knowledge I will not need it."
I recognized all this bullshit, which people from academic science carry, and also started talking nonsense. My own nonsense is a guarantee that I will forget the professor's nonsense, except for the really valuable and interesting things.
When I go to the deprivation chamber, the main principle that I use is something like this: "For God's sake, do not predetermine, do not look for a goal, just let it happen." I did the same with ketamine and LSD; I slowly let go of control of my own experience.
You know, some people lie in a cell for an hour and try to experience the same thing as me. I knew about this and eventually wrote the foreword to The Deep Self and said, if you really want to know what it means to be in a deprivation cell, don't read my books, don't listen to me, just go and lie in it.
I have no mission. The mission would make me ridiculous. Every time I took acid in the deprivation chamber, it was not the same as before. I guess I couldn't even begin to describe it. I received only a tenth of a percent of the experience possible and described it in books.
The universe protects us from our tendency to predestine. When they take you out of your body and give you complete freedom, you understand that there are intelligences in the world much greater than the human. And then you become truly humble. Then you always have to come back, and you think: "Well, here I am, again in this damn body, and I'm not as smart as I was when I was there with them."
Have you read the work of Catherine Perth? She discovered 42 peptides that allow the brain to create mood. Perth said, "Once we understand brain chemistry, psychoanalysts are no longer needed." She believed that the brain is a huge, multifaceted chemical factory.
So far, of course, we cannot generalize anything here, but we know that in the case of some substances, an overdose leads to depression, in the case of others - to euphoria, and so on. It turns out that life is constantly modulated by brain chemistry. Personally, I gave up a long time ago and stopped trying to calculate how the brain works, because it is so complex and boundless. However, how difficult it is, we do not yet know.
The main task of science is to understand who a person is and how he acts from the point of view of biochemistry. We will never fully understand how the brain works. I always say that my brain is a big palace, and I am just a small rodent prowling around it. It’s the brain that owns me, not I - the brain. A large computer can completely imitate a small one, but it cannot imitate itself - because that way there will be nothing left but imitation. There will be no awareness after that.
I don't think a human can create a supercomputer that simulates the brain. Many of our discoveries were completely random. If we had first discovered the mathematics of the brain, then now we could go much further.
God knows what language the brain uses. You can show digital brain operations, analyze, nerve impulses descend and ascend along axons - but what are nerve impulses? As far as I understand, this is just a way to restore the working state of the system, which is located in the middle of the axon.
The nerve impulses that descend along the axons simply clear its central points to prepare them for the next impact, constantly. It's like a dream. Sleep is a state in which the human biocomputer integrates and analyzes what happened outside, throws out useless memories and sorts out useful ones. This is similar to the operation of a large computer, which gets empty memory every time before starting. We do this all the time.
A person can say that in the deprivation chamber he felt his nose move to the navel, and then decided that he did not need a nose or a navel, and flew into space.
We are looking for meaning and explanation in everything. This is naive. The explanatory principle protects us from the terror of the unknown; but I prefer the unknown, I am a disciple of the unexpected.
Margaret Howe (Lilly's assistant at the St. Thomas Research Institute for Communication in the Virgin Islands) taught me a thing or two. I went to university one day and she said, “Dr. Lilly, you are constantly trying to make something happen. This time you will not succeed: you will just sit and watch. Do you understand what I mean? If I create events all the time, I end up getting bored. But if I can just relax and let something just happen, there will be no boredom and I will give others a chance. Now I can afford it, because I do not need to earn my living. However, some people know how to make money and at the same time behave damn passively.
You can become an administrator who knows nothing, and then people will have to explain something to you all the time. My father was the head of a large banking network, and he taught me a thing or two about passivity. He said, "You have to learn to act like you are pissed - and you will be ahead of those who are truly pissed."
I said, "What about love?" He repeated what he had said. All these powerful feelings … You can act as if you are experiencing them, but at the same time remain indifferent - and you will not lose the ability to think clearly.
I learned this lesson. Once I got very angry with my older brother and threw a can of calcium carbide at him, and it exploded, simply because he was teasing me so much. He teased me terribly. I threw a can at him and it flew past, a couple of inches from his head. I froze in place and thought: “My God, I could have killed him! I will never be angry again."
I once wrote a chapter called "Where Do Armies Come From?" Do you know where they come from? From traditions. Children are taught the history of the war, so they are all programmed in advance. If you read the history books, you will understand that they are all about the war, it's just incredible!
In my Latin lessons, I studied Caesar's wars, then I took up French and began to study Napoleon's wars, and so on and so forth. What have we learned about Caesar? That you shouldn't divide Gaul into three parts. What have we learned about Cleopatra? That you can kill yourself with a snakebite. But if you start to study the history of Italy and run into Leonardo da Vinci or Gallileo, it all falls apart. They lived on their own and did their job, and that's great. This is the only part of the story that can be interesting.
The goal of fear is to move from ortonoia to metanoia through paranoia. Ortonoya is how most people think; they create imitation variants that everyone accepts. Metanoia is when you leave it all behind and are able to appreciate what a high level of mental development is. But the first time you do it, you are scared to death.
When I first went to the deprivation chamber after taking acid, I panicked. I suddenly saw in front of me a line from the National Institute of Mental Health aide-memoire: "Never take acid alone."
One researcher disregarded this rule and was devoured by his own cassette recorder. I couldn't think of anything else. It is a great happiness that I was so scared. That I had no idea what was going to happen. This is real rocket fuel!
I've moved farther in the universe than ever. So paranoia is the rocket fuel of metanoia. Before I started diving into the deprivation chamber, I was wary of water. I sailed a lot in the ocean and was terribly afraid of sharks. It was a real ongoing phobia. In the end, I went to the cell and went through this terrible experience, I was scared to death. Now I am no longer afraid of water.
I never tell what I'm doing. My psychoanalyst described it well. Once I came to him, sat down in a chair and said: "I just had a new idea, but I'm not going to talk about it." He replied: “Oh, so you realized that the new idea is like an embryo. It can be killed with a needle, but if the embryo has already become an embryo or an infant, it will feel only a slight tingling sensation. " You need to let the idea grow before you start talking about it.
Natalia Kienya
