Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations with Terence McKenna, Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, John Lilly, Carolyn Mary Kleefeld, Laura Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, and others…

by Brown, David Jay

  So we then took the tape of this over to a friend of mine's house and his tape machine ran at only half the speed of what we had recorded in. It was incredible. Dolphin making human sounds. We didn't believe it at first. What he was trying to do was to say, "I can talk your language, let me talk to your leaders, then we can really get this straightened out about positive and negative reinforcement."

  So when I got my lab organized in Miami I turned to Ellsbrough and I said, "I'm going in there to try this with Elvar." So I went and shouted at the dolphin we called Elvar, "Elvar! Squirt water!" He zoomed right back immediately, "Squouraarr rahher." And I said, "No. Squirt water." And finally after about ten times, he had it so we could understand it. It was just an amazing experience.

  DJB: Do you think that he had an understanding of what he was saying, or do you think he was just mimicking the sounds?

  JOHN: If you're experiencing a foreign language, what do you do?

  DJB: Well, the first thing you do is mimic.

  JOHN: That's right. And slowly but surely, your phoneme system masters the sounds, right? And it doesn't make any difference whether it makes sense or not. Then the next thing you have to do is hook the phonemes up and make words. And then you have to hook the words up to make sentences. And then the meaning, the semantic system in your brain, starts working. So we have to go through all these steps and if you're at all smart you'll realize that you have to have intensive contact with the other language, with someone who speaks it very well. I learned Swedish that way and that's what we did with the dolphins.

  DJB: Right. So this work with the dolphins, how did it influence your experiences with ketamine in the isolation tank?

  JOHN: Well, I discovered that dolphins have personalities and are valuable people. I began to wonder about whales which have much larger brains, and I wondered what their capabilities are.

  There's a threshold of brain size for language as we know it, and as far as I can make out it's about 800 grams. Anybody below that, like the chimpanzee or the gorilla can't learn to speak a language. But above that language is: acquired very rapidly, as in a baby. Well, this means that the dolphin's life is probably as complicated as ours. But what about their spiritual life? Can they get out of their bodies and travel? Are they extraterrestrials? I asked those kinds of questions. Most people wouldn't ask them.

  So I took ketamine by the tank at Marine World in Redwood City. I got in to the rank and I had a microphone near my head and an underwater speaker that went down into the dolphin tank. My microphone hit their loudspeaker under water. So I waited. Then I began to feel that I was in direct contact with them and as soon as I felt that one of them whistled, a long whistle, and it went from my feet right up to my head. I went straight out of my body. They took me to the dolphin group mind. Boy, that was scary! I shouted and carried on. I said, "I can't even handle one dolphin, much less a group mind of dolphins!"

  So instead of that they put me into a whale group mind and when you have an experience like that, you realize that some of the LSD experiences may have been in those group minds, not in outer space at all. Since then I suspect that they're all ready to talk and carry on with us if we were not so blind. So we open up pathways to them with ketamine, with LSD, with swimming with them, with falling in love with them and them falling in love with us. All the non-scientific ways.

  RMN: Why did you stop doing the English experiments with the dolphins?

  JOHN: Because I didn't want anyone to speak to them. So I did it more esoterically with ketamine in the tank, and so on, which these idiots in the Navy wouldn't do. I was appalled by what they were doing.

  RMN: Have you ever managed to learn enough of their language to communicate with them on their level?

  JOHN: No, because they're too fast and too high frequency. They're ten times as fast as we are and ten times the frequency. So if you record it on tape and then slow it down ten times you can get an idea. When they're working on human speech, at first they're too fast for you, and then they suddenly realize it so they slow down.

  DJB: Have you ever given ketamine to a dolphin?

  JOHN: No. I gave them acid to see if it would knock out their respiration. It didn't. I couldn't understand what was happening to them on LSD except for one thing they did. They turned around along the tank at the same time, and suddenly they turned their beaks down and turned on their sonar straight downwards. I remember on my first acid trip that suddenly the floor disappeared and I saw the stars on the other side of the earth, so I stamped my foot on the floor to find it. That's what they were doing.

  Also, the dolphin Pam had been spear-gunned three limes by Ricco Browny in the "Flipper" series. The first time, Pam went over to Browny and pulled the spear from him. The second time, she took one look at him and turned away. The third time she ran like mad and wouldn't go near him or any humans. It was just awful. So when we got her she was staying away from us with the other dolphins. So I gave her LSD and she climbed all over us. It was marvelous.

  Boy, I've been trying to stop talking about dolphins. I was enslaved by them for twenty years and now I'm trying to avoid them for a while. But I can't. People like you come out and remind me of them.

  RMN: That's wonderful. Okay, let's get back to people. Could you tell us, in what ways you think the exploration and mapping of the human psyche can help to improve the quality of people's lives and what about people with mental disorders?

  JOHN: Do you know Thomas Szasz's book, The Myth of Mental Illness? Well that's where I'm at. I don't believe any of this mental health stuff; it's all bullshit. Having been through psychoanalysis with a doctor of physics, Robert Beltim from Vienna, that's what I've come to think. He used to analyze analysts, Anna Freud and so on. I started quoting papers: from psychoanalysis and finally he said, "Dr. Lilly, we're not here to analyze Freud or the psychoanalytic literature; we're here to analyze you, and you're just avoiding yourself. I learn more from you and you learn more from me than we'll ever get in the literature." So that's the way I've looked at everything. Wide open.

  RMN: What do you think about people who suffer from a disruption of their interior reality? People who experience problems in coming to terms: with their inner process in relation to the world around them?

  JOHN: Do you know Candice Pert's work? Well, she's found fifty-two peptides in the brain that control mood. As Pert said, "Once we understand the chemistry of the brain there will be no use for psychoanalysis." She said that the brain is a huge, diverse chemical factory. We cannot make generalizations about any one of these yet but, for instance, if you give an overdose of this one people get depressed, if you give an overdose of that one they get euphoria, and so on. If you OD on cocaine your brain changes its operation, but if you're aware of this: and you pay attention you realize that yes, it modifies some things, but it doesn't always do it in the same way. So there's this continuous modulation of life versus brain chemistry. So I gave up long ago trying to figure out how the brain works because it's so immense and so complex. We don't yet know how thought is: connected to operations in the brain!

  DJB: Do you think it would be possible to create some kind of window into the brain to see the dynamics of how thoughts arise and what their interaction is by using some kind of highly precise combination of EEG and MRI scannings?

  JOHN: No. It's impossible. The Positron Emission Topography or PET scans show the changes in various parts of the brain and of various substances. When the observed person is learning, a compound acts one way, and then another way. But what's that? That's one compound that they're looking at. Imagine what else is going on.

  DJB: Years back you helped to pioneer the original electrical brain stimulation research. With the understanding that you've gained in this area, do you think that it will eventually be possible to directly stimulate brain centers without using electrodes, in order to create psychedelic experiences?

  JOHN: Electrical stimulation of brains is very poor without brain electrodes and with electrodes yo
u wreck the brain when you put them in there. That's why I quit.

  DJB: So you think then that it is possible to stimulate brain centers without using electrodes?

  JOHN: Yes. A friend of mine at the University of Illinois showed me a set-up in which he was stimulating a brain at minute spots with focused ultra-sound and electrical interference.

  RMN: Do you think that men’s and women's brains operate in a very different way?

  JOHN: You know, I've been researching that for years, and finally I admit that you are another universe that I can't possibly be in because you're female and I'm male.

  DJB: What directions do you think neuroscience should be taking' What are the most important avenues of exploration?

  JOHN: The most important things to do in science is to figure out who the human is and how he operates biochemically. We're never going to understand how the brain works. I always say that my brain is a big palace, and I'm just a little rodent running around inside it. The brain owns me, I don't Own the brain. A large computer can simulate totally a smaller computer but it cannot simulate itself, because if it did there wouldn't be anything left except the simulation. Consciousness would stop there.

  DJB: Could it not be possible for human beings to create a computer system large and complex enough that, although it may not be able to understand itself, it would be able to understand the human brain?

  JOHN: No, because we don't know the basis for the human brain. As Von Neumann said, it was strictly by accident that we discovered multiplication, addition and subtraction first. If we discovered the mathematics of the brain we'd be way ahead of where we are now.

  DJB: You mean the binary language?

  JOHN: There's no way to tell what the hell language the brain uses. Sure, you can show digital operations of the brain, you can analyze neural impulses traveling down your axons, hut what are those? Well, as far as I can see they are just a recovery from a system that's in the middle of the axon, and that's operating at the speed of light. Neuronal impulses going down the axons are just clearing up the laser points so that it's ready for the next one, continuously. It's like sleep. Sleep is a state in which the human biocomputer integrates and analyzes what went on the previous time it was outside, throws out all the memories that aren't going to be useful tomorrow and stores only those memories which will be useful. So it's a process like a big computer in which you have to empty memory and start over. We do this all the time.

  DJB: Along these lines, I'm wondering, do you think memories are actually stored in the brain or do you agree with Rupert Sheldrake's theory that memories are stored in information fields or something similar.

  JOHN: I've read some of Sheldrakes's stuff and he's too glib. He's got all explanation for everything. The universe is much more complicated than he's trying to make it out to be. People tend to do this-I've tried to avoid it. I make fun of my own theories. I say, what I believe to be true is unbelievable, so that I don't believe in anything, you see? Temporarily I may in order to talk with somebody. Memories are stored in the feedback with ECCO and ECCO takes care of all this. I don't know how they operate, but Sheldrake calls stuff memory which isn't memory; it's living program.

  DJB: Do you think that the brain acts as a transceiver?

  JOHN: Yeah, that's right. The brain, the bio-computer is a huge transmitter/ receiver and we're just beginning to see what it is. Have you ever seen anything like a TV show on ketamine?

  DJB: Yeah, with commercials even.

  JOHN: Well, they're real. The first time I saw that I thought, my God, all we’re doing is increasing the sensitivity of the brain to microwaves. And the problem with microwaves is that they're influencing us below our level of awareness all the rime. Well, this morning for instance, on ketamine, I went into this place where all these people were interacting and I got involved. When I came back I realized that I had got into a soap opera on TV and was taking part in it as if it were reality!

  Now kids must do this all the time. Marvelous! But you got to watch out because you may be taken in and think they're extraterrestrial or something, unless you can see something that cues you in that this is a TV station.

  DJB: Have your experiences with ketamine and your near-death encounters influenced your perspective on what happens to human consciousness after biological death?

  JOHN: I refuse to equate my experiences with death. I think it's too easy to do that. When I was out for five days and nights on PCP, the guides took me to planets that were being destroyed and so on. I think ECCO made me take that PCP so they could educate me. And they kept hauling me around and I tried to get back hut they said, "Nope, you haven't seen all the planets yet." One was being destroyed by atomic energy of war, one was being destroyed by a big asteroid that hit the planet, another one was being destroyed by biological warfare, and on and on and on. I realized that the universe is effectively benign; it may kill you but it will teach you something in the process.

  DJB: Do you think that there is actually some kind of learning process that's going on as a result of ECCO's positively or negatively reinforcing certain behaviors so that humanity's evolution is guided in certain directions?

  JOHN: I had the illusion that humanity is making progress ill certain directions, yes.

  DJB: Do you feel that when synchronicity happens, that it's actually being arranged either by ECCO or by us?

  JOHN: The only place that Jung defined synchronicity at all well was in the introduction to the I Ching, and he talks about controlling coincidences. He fell into the same trap I did. Synchronicity doesn't mean anything; it's an explanatory principle.

  RMN: Do you think that ECCO is concentrating on humans?

  JOHN: Of course not! ECCO is the one that's running everything on the whole planet.

  RMN: So they have no particular interest in our survival, we're just a minute part of what's going on?

  JOHN: They? You're personalizing. I used to personalize. I saw angels, extraterrestrials, then I called them guides and finally I called them ECCO and it's totally impersonal. It's way beyond what people can understand except in a ketamine or LSD state. Then they tell you, well we're at a low level, there are influences above us. It would be nice to meet these entities that experience these various states. They won't take human form, though; it's a waste of their time. And once I joined them and realized that that's where I came from and that I had gotten bored and become human in order to have some different experiences with a smaller intelligence. It's like becoming a cat or something, to find out what's going on with the cat.

  RMN: I feel that my dog, Safety, might have done that very thing. She's more human than many people I know.

  JOHN: Well a dog finally convinced me of this, that there are levels that these entities choose to be, dolphins or whatever. When I experienced level +3 (refer to The Center of The Cyclone), I was part of a huge consciousness that was creating from the void. It was taking energy and creating a form, life and so on. It wasn't me. My ego afterwards wanted it to be me but of course it wasn't.

  DJB: Do you have a hard time bringing information back?

  JOHN: Oh, of course. It isn't hard to bring it back, it just doesn't come back. It's in you, though; ECCO put me straight on that. They said, "Well, everything that’s happened is stored and when it's important that you know it, you'll know it."

  RMN: When you're ready for it.

  DJB: Bringing information back from my ketamine experiences is a real struggle for me.

  JOHN: You've got to be more passive. If you struggle, then all you'll see is your struggle. It's like trying to do something instead of doing it.

  DJB: Let me ask you John, how do you, or do you, distinguish between mind and body, spirit and matter'!

  JOHN: Those are all explanatory principles.