Dr. John C Lilly

Dr. John C. Lilly died on September 30th, 2001, in Los Angeles, of heart failure. Dr. Lilly was best known for his work with dolphins and interspecies communication, his development of the isolation tank, and his research into altered states of consciousness. The main characters in two popular films, The Day of the Dolphin and Altered States, were based on Dr. Lilly.

His Books Related to Floating:

• Tanks for the Memory - Dr John C. Lilly and E. J. Gold
• Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer - Dr John C. Lilly
• Center of the Cyclone - Dr John C. Lilly
• The Deep Self - Dr John C. Lilly

For those who do meditation, it is also a definite aid. It turns out that the tank and its isolated environment do for one what one must do within one's own mind-body when meditating in the usual environment. While meditating, sitting cross-legged or on a chair, or lying in a bed, one examines the environment. Slowly but surely during the meditation, one can inhibit the responses of these patterns of stimulation and get deeper down inside one's own mind. The tank eliminates the presence of these shifting physical input patterns and their changes and reduces the intensity of stimulation down to the most minimum level possible; this "reduced" environment allows one to start the meditation at the point only achievable outside the tank after some inhibitory work and some time spent doing that work.

In the tank one need not do that work. Undistracted, one starts concentrating immediately upon one's inner perceptions and dives deep into one's mind (when one is trained on how to do this transform). "In the province of the mind, in the inside reality, what one believes to be true, either is true or becomes true within certain limits. These limits are to be discovered experimentally and experientially. When so determined these limits are found to be further beliefs to be transcended.

Dr. John C. Lilly "The Deep Self"

Dr. John C Lilly

Born January 6th, 1915, in Saint Paul, Minnesota to Rachel and Richard Lilly, Lilly was educated at St. Paul Academy, California Institute of Technology, Dartmouth College Medical School, and the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. During WWII, he conducted high altitude research at the Johnson Foundation for Medical Physics. After the war, he trained as a psychoanalyst.

While a Commander in the U.S. Public Health Service, Lilly worked at the National Institutes of Health, where he developed the isolation tank, which came to be known as the "Lilly tank". In 1959, he established the Communication Research Institute in the U.S. Virgin Islands to study the vocalizations of Bottlenose dolphins. The work later continued in San Francisco under the aegis of the JANUS Project. He also established the Human Dolphin Foundation, and worked with Samadhi Tank company to help popularize the isolation tank experience.

From the late sixties until he retired to Hawaii in 1992, Dr. Lilly worked from his home lab in Malibu, California. He traveled extensively, teaching and lecturing at academic institutions, international conferences, and growth centers like Esalen, where he was a long-standing artist in residence.

Dr. Lilly published over one hundred and twenty-five scientific papers, relating to his work in various fields, including Respiratory Physiology, Neurophysics, Neurophysiology, Psychiatry, interspecies communication, and the nature of consciousness and the self. He also published nineteen popular books, including the influential Man and Dolphin, 1961; The Dolphin in History (with Ashley Montagu), 1963; The Mind of the Dolphin, 1967; Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer: Theory and Experiments, 1972, 1987; The Center of the Cyclone, 1972, 1987; The Dyadic Cyclone (with Toni Lilly), 1976; Lilly on Dolphins, Humans of the Sea, 1975, a revised edition of two previously published books, Man and Dolphin, The Mind of the Dolphin, and The Dolphin in History, a lecture; Simulations of God: The Science of Belief, 1974; The Deep Selp: Isolation Tank Relaxation, 1976; The Scientist, a Novel Autobiography, 1978, 2nd. ed. 1988; Communication Between Man and Dolphin: The Possibilty of Talking with Other Species, 1978, 1988; In the Province of the Mind (with Francis Jeffrey); John Lilly So Far, by Francis Jeffrey (with John C. Lilly, M.D., Ph.D.) 1990; and Tanks for the Memories, Floatation Tank Talks, by Dr. John C. Lilly and E.J. Gold, 1995.

Dr. Lilly has made significant contributions to psychology, brain research, computer theory, medicine, ethics, and interspecies communication. His work with dolphins and whales created a global awareness that lead to the enactment of the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972. Today, Dr. Lilly is considered the father of dolphin researchers.

In the 1940s, Dr. Lilly invented new types of capacitance manometers to aid in researches of human metabolism, and invented gas concentration and flow meters to study respiration, gas mixing, and pressure and altitude. In the '40s and '50s, Dr. Lilly was on the cutting edge of Neuroscience. He was the first to map the brain of chimpanzees, in the process inventing the "Lilly Wave": an electrical pulse that could be used to stimulate the chimp's brain without any damage. He also developed the twenty-five channel EEG moving relief maps of the electrical activity in the brain and dynamic iconic displays for researching pulse shapes and electrodes. His brain mapping with acoustic, motor, and travelling waves predated today's state of the art by fifty years. His research in electronic brain stimulation, dreams, schizophrenia, and the neurophysiology of motivation - involving the identification of punishment and reward systems -- were published in a number of psychiatric journals.

In conducting his brain research, Dr. Lilly developed an interest in large brain systems. This led him to work with dolphin communication. In the process he invented various spectral analyzers and hydro-phones, and pioneered the use of minicomputers with real time programming and original software.

While working at the National Institutes of Health on isolation, solitude and confinement, he invented the floatation tank, a tool to maximally isolate sensory stimulation to better understand what the mind does without exterior influence. NASA and other important organization have used his research into sensory isolation. After ten years of tank research, and while still in the employ of NIMH, he was given the responsibility to experiment with LSD in the tank. The results of that study were reported and published by that institute in his classic treatise, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer. Like all his research, this was eventually made available to the public. Dr. Lilly considered this documentation his most original work. This is where he first published his famous statement,

"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"

I find it essential to be able to relax completely irrespective of anything that is going on in the environment at certain times. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with an idea that I want to work out, so rather than disturb my wife, I float in the tank and work out the idea at great length and in the detail. I am then able to put it down on paper or to dictate it in the morning.

For a businessperson, a scientist, a professional of any sort, this is a boon: to be able to think, free of physical fatigue of the body. The methods allows one to become free within a few minutes.

In certain cases the gravitational-field-countergravity forces in the body cause pain because of arthritis, broken bones, or some sort of disease. The tank is specifically beneficial to these people in that it relieves these pains in a way that nothing else can.

The tank is an asset to anyone who leads a very busy life. It allows one to attain rest faster than one can in a bed in a darkened room. It allows one to experiment with states that one could not otherwise experiment with safely: states of being, states of consciousness. For example, one can ask the question: "If I am fatigued from a long day's work, what can the tank do for me?"

Floating in the tank after a busy day's work brings a great relief. Suddenly all of the stimulation of holding one upright against gravity disappears. One realizes that a good deal of the fatigue accumulated during the day is caused by keeping one's body uupright in a gravitatoinal field. From a neurophysiological standpoint, one has immediately freed up very large masses of neurons from the necessity of constant computations (as to the direction of gravity, the programming by visual and acoustic inputs, by temperature changes, etcetera). For example, one's cerebellum is now freed for uses other than balancing the body.

In summary, then, the tank experience is a very refreshing one, a resting one. If one wants to push further than this, one can do so to the limits of one's mental discipline and to the limits of one's imagination.

Dr. John C. Lilly "The Deep Self"