Center of the Cyclone: Looking into Inner Space
Focal top of the Cyclone: Looking into Inner Space Books
- ISBN13: 9781579510381
- Shape up: New
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Product Description
In this long-out-of-print counterculture classic, Dr. John C. Lilly takes readers behind the scenes into the inner life of a scientist exploring inner space, or ?far-out chairs,” as Lilly called them. The book clarifies how he derived his theory of the operations of the human mind and brain from his private experiences and experiments in solitude, isolation, and confinement; LSD; and other methods of mystical experience. It also includes glimpses into Lilly’s friendship with such 1960s’ notables as Oscar Ichazo, Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, Albert Hofmann, Fritz Perls, and Claudio Narajo. Written for the non-specialist, Focal top of the Cyclone shows an vital, modern thinker at his most private and profound.
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i found this book to be very right. i really liked the words, they followed one another
nicely and made sentences and subsequently paragraphs. the punctuation is, outstanding!
i am glad the book didn’t have one of those typical cliche endings, like “the end”.
Rating: 5 / 5
I wish someone would proofread the Kindle version for typos, It has many annoying ones. Thanks.
Rating: 3 / 5
Fascinating concepts, was hoping for a more scientific look into the depths of these fields but rather was met with a private tale of Lilly’s progress spirituality
Nonetheless, this book is a fantastic look at what our minds are capable of and or other theories of reality.
Rating: 4 / 5
Lilly was one of the greatest scientists and pioneers on the limits of human possibility of modern times but after his death a collective amnesia has descended and his is now nearly forgotten.
Lilly was a generation (or more) ahead of his time. He is nearly single-handedly responsible for the fantastic interest in dolphins (which led to the Marine Mammal Protection Act in the USA and helped to found the animal rights movement). In 1958 he noted that the brains of elephants and cetaceans were larger than ours, that we should not abuse them and that it was one our most vital projects to communicate with them. He invented sensory isolation tanks (at NIMH in 1954) and used them extensively with and without powerful psychoactive drugs at a time when it was plotting that either the brain would shut down or one would go insane if external stimuli were eliminated.
He made methods for implanting electrodes in mammal brains and was plotting to do it to himself. He was one of the first to make serious use of computers in bioscience research and made the hardware and software to make the first attempts to communicate with dolphins. He self experimented with perilous physiological investigations in high altitude medicine for the military during WW2, took LSD with dolphins and movie stars, submitted himself to the rigors of Arica training, and taught classes at Esalen.
He was the first one to investigate the bizarre psychedelic ketamine, and his consequences (published in the two last chapters of his book `The Scientist`) are still the best data on the dose/effect relation of any psychedelic on one person. And all this happened before most of us were born!
He had courage,honesty and integrity that is rare anywhere and nearly nonexistent in science. His goal was to find the ultimate truth about everything and he went about as far as anyone ever has. He had small patience with the stupid and hypocritical games one has to play to fit into monkey society. Of course the reaction of the establishment was predictable. He left the NIMH and was never given any government or academic support for the last 35 years of his life. His paper and comments at a conference on sensory deprivation were indifferent from the published version. He was not invited to government sponsored symposia on dolphins(he had refused to help develop them as weapons), though he clearly knew more about them than anyone in the world.
He liked to live and work on the edge and few may possibly keep up with him, as this books make clear. If you have read some of his other books it will be much simpler going. He was a pioneer in consciousness research and hard-pressed the boundaries of our understanding of who we are and what we might become. Among other things he catalogs the various states reached by drugs, meditation, and isolation, tries to determine their significance, and suggests how to use them.
As a result of all his research, especially his months of continuous hourly injections of ketamine, he became convinced that our run of the mill reality was not the only one. During his trips he was often in communication with members of a civilization a 1000 years in the future. We all allow ourselves such experiences every time we watch a sci fi movie and sometimes it leaves us more than just amused, but when anyone meditates or takes a drug to do it we tend to discount the consequences. Lilly but, took it all sincerely, and parts of his book clarify why. Whatever our mind produces –by any means –only happens because our brains are programmed by our genes to make it possible. So it’s at least plausible that any of these routes inward reveal fundamental aspects of what’s possible for us in the future, or even for some other species elsewhere in the universe.
If you find his scientifically based viewpoints irrational, consider that most people judge without evidence (really with abundant evidence to the contrary) in excellent and terrible luck, in super beings living in space who rule the earth, in a place in spacetime where dead people go, in stars millions of light years away influencing their lives, and in ghosts, angels, witches, and gods that come to earth to inhabit statues that read our thoughts and violate all the laws of physics, chemistry and biology in order to help us personally.
He describes his tank work (and lots more) in The Dyadic Cyclone, The Focal top of the Cyclone, and in Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer (1967) and other books and papers.
This and his other books are pleas to examine your beliefs with an open mind.
He defines metabeliefs as those about belief systems. He says that our simulations of reality (with meditation, isolation, drugs, computers) can provide access to other realities which may include the future, the past, or extraterrestrial. He refers to metaprograms as learning tools (symbols, programs, languages, thoughts, models) which our central programs (mind or part of it) run all the time. Cognitive psychology did not really exist at the time he was most active and now we would likely call the central programs cognitive templates, modules or inference engines.
He refers to self-metaprograms (or essences) as parts of the mind that program our experiences.
Though he carried out an exhausting and perilous program of self experimentation with psychedelics (what many now call entheogens), he did not judge they are a final or complete path to higher consciousness.
But, as I reflect on this, I note that tens of millions have successfully explored their cognitive templates with psychedelics even as meditation lonely may have generated a few hundred thousand satoris and probably less than 1000 mystics of whom we know. It is also clear that psychedelics have led millions to meditation.
He mentions the very psychedelic Revelations of St. John and understands that Jesus taught revelation from within– ie, the same sort of self transcendence as Taoism and Buddhism. He discusses how we use drugs, sex, money, groups, war etc as substitutes for God. God as compassion, science, consciousness or superspace (the then current concepts of cosmology are clarified and he imagines the universe collapsing and being reborn–very contemporary!). He discusses god in here vs god out there but notes that if it’s out there then its a puzzle where math comes from. His experiences make him doubt that death is the end.
He was very open to all thoughts and his desire to consider all points of view makes some parts of his books rambling and a bit incoherent. He crams so many thoughts on each page that there is easily enough in each to form the core of ten books or a lifetime of research and private exploration. Among the snow flurry of mind boggling thoughts are: war is the resultof a future civilization using us for war games; we are god simulating himself, our interstellar rockets find intelligent machines that follow us back to earth and take over; government sponsored meditation classes, computers that control and watch all communication and take control of civilization, our genes generate the illusion that we live in a certain and determinate universe; we are simulated by God or vice versa.
Though he must have crossed paths countless times with Indian mystics and Buddhists,strangely, he was most influenced by an obscure American mystic named Franklin Merrell-Wolff–another remarkable figure now nearly really lost in time.
Lilly was an extremely bright and highly rational person yet he became convinced of the reality of his extraterrestrial membership in a future civilization and he went into a 6 week depression after a ketamine trip in which they showed him the collapse of the universe.
It was clear to him that the phenomena of the mind were capable of scientific study but this was quite heretical 40 years ago. What a fantastic pity that he never delved into Wittgenstein’s philosophy nor became familiar with Osho!
Some of his books like “The Scientist” end with reprints of some of his papers and poems.
Someone should place all his writings plus photos and other memorabilia on a DVD!
Rating: 3 / 5
This is the tale of Dr. John C. Lilly’s go from dolphin research to “inner space” research. We read of the weird places we can go to in our head.
The first third of the book concentrates on Lilly’s experiments with LSD. The relatively detailed first hand accounts of what a hallucinogenic trip can be like makes fascinating reading for those of us who have never experienced such a brain state. These chapters certainly made the book truly memorable for me and are written in a very engaging style that reveals Lilly’s own enthusiasm for the material.
In the mid section Lilly describes his experiences at the Esalen Institute both as a participant and lecturer. This includes sessions with the Gestalt Therapist Fritz Perl and the psycho-masseuse Ida Rolfing. These were truly ‘happening’ experiences in the sixties, but may be more familiar to twenty first century readers.
The final third of the book covers Lilly’s experiences with mystical, corporal exercises in an esoteric “school” in Chile. Much time is devoted to describing different psychological “states” classified according to Gurdjeiff’s system. I found this section of the book a chore to read, but the events and in rank were observably very vital to Lilly.
Rating: 4 / 5