John Lilly

He also authored a dozen books like:

• Simulations Of God
• John Lilly, So Far
• The mind of the dolphin; a nonhuman intelligence (1967)
• The Center of the Cyclone : An Autobiography of Inner Space (1973)
• Programming and Metaprogramming the Human Biocomputer : Theory and Experiments. (1974)
• The dyadic cyclone : the autobiography of a couple (1976)
• The Deep Self: Profound Relaxation and the Tank Isolation Technique (1977)
• Communication Between Man and Dolphin : The Possibilities of Talking With Other Species (1978)
• The Scientist : A novel Autobiography (1978)

Perhaps it's good to note that he loves making funny and weird web pages too. If it's still online, check out http://www.JohnCLilly.com.

Devoted to a philosophical quest for the nature of reality, John pursued a brilliant academic career among the scientific leaders of the day, mastering one science after another and eventually achieving a perspective that transcends the centuries-old conflict between rationality and mysticism. He has lived in the company of associates and intimates including Nobel physicists Richard Feynman and Robert Milliken, philosophers Buckminster Fuller, Aldous Huxley, and Alan Watts, psychotherapy pioneers R.D. Laing and Fritz Perls, spiritual teachers Oscar Ichazo and Baba Ram Dass, and a host of luminaries, inventors, writers, and Hollywood celebrities.

In my humble opinion will John C. Lilly be a very important name in our history. His works are not really integrated and widely published yet, but they offer some deep and awesome insights. He is what Win Wenger is to Accelerated Learning and Adult Education.
Today, John Lilly stands as the twentieth century's foremost scientific pioneer of the inner and outer limits of human experience. He is a relentless adventurer whose Search for Reality has led him repeatedly to risk life and limb, but whose quests have resulted in astonishing insights into what it means to be a human being in an ever more mysterious universe.

By using cognitive psychology's computational model of the mind, defined consciousness as the human iocomputer's self-metaprogrammer. The biocomputer's programming, according to Lilly, is that set of internally consistent instructions which prepare, send, store, process, and select signal information in and out of the biocomputational activity of the brain, most of which can be adjusted through a self-metaprogramming process initiated by the self-metaprogrammer.

A real must-know-about !   Try some of his quotes for starters (taken from www.QuoteBase.org):

In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true.
Or in its more compleet form: 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.

All laws are simulations of reality.

Our only security is our ability to change.

• John's grandfather's signature is on the 1927 ten USD dollar bill.
• Burgess Meredith was a life long friend (John appeard in five episodes of The Twilight Zone).
• Two movies where inspired by John: Day of the Dolphin and Altered States (1980).

He combined training in medicine, psychoanalysis and biophysics, while living an eclectic life that shifted between "official" research published in scientific journals and speculative musings on psychedelic self-experimentation published mostly in books aimed at fellow students of spirituality and the self.

Along with ground breaking work studying the brain's electrical activity and the behavior of dolphins, he experimented with LSD and isolation tanks, an enclosed body temperature,saline bath he designed in 1954 as a tool for studying sensory deprivation.

Dr. Lilly's work inspired two movies, "Day of the Dolphin," in 1973, in which the navy turns the animals into weapons, and "Altered States," in 1980, in which scientists combining drugs and isolation tanks enter a world where reality dangerously unravels.

He wrote 12 books among which were several accounts of his work with dolphins, including "Man and Dolphin" and "The Mind of the Dolphin," which popularized the study of marine mammals and aroused public fascination and curiosity with dolphins, whose brains are 40 percent larger than those of humans.