Authors: David Jay Brown,Rebecca McClen Novick
DJB: John, what was it that originally inspired your interest in neuroscience and the nature of reality?
JOHN: At age sixteen, in my prep school, I wrote an article for the school paper called "Reality," and that laid out the trip for the rest of my life--thought versus brain activity and brain structure. I went to CalTech to study the biological sciences, and there I took my first course in neuroanatomy. Later I went on to Dartmouth Medical School where I took another course in neuroanatomy, and at the University of Pennsylvania I studied the brain even further. So I learned more about the brain than I can tell you.
RMN: In what ways do you think your Catholic background influenced your mystical experiences?
JOHN: At Catholic school I learned about tough boys and beautiful girls. I fell in love with Margaret Vance, never told her, though, and it was incredible. I didn't understand about sex so I visualized exchanging urine with her. My father had one of these exercise machines with a belt worn around your belly or rump and a powerful electric motor to make the belt vibrate. I was on this machine and all the vibration stimulated my erogenous zones. Suddenly my body fell apart and my whole being was enraptured. It was incredible.
I went to confession the following morning and the priest said, "Do you jack off!." I didn't know what he meant, then suddenly I did and I said, "No." He called it a mortal sin. I left the church thinking, "If they're going to call a gift from God a mortal sin, then to hell with them. That isn't my God, they're just trying to control people."
RMN: What is your personal understanding of God?
JOHN: When I was Seven years old I had a vision alone in a Catholic church. Suddenly I saw God on his throne: an old man with a white beard and white hair surrounded by angels and the saints parading around with a lot of music. I made the mistake of asking a nun about the vision and she said, "Only saints have visions!" I assumed that she thought I wasn't a saint.
So I kept that memory, and on my first acid trip I relived it completely to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. And suddenly I realized that the little boy had constructed this to explain the experience he had. I realized that one has to project onto an experience if one is going to talk about it because the experience itself can't be said in words. But if you are going to talk about it you choose words which you feel are most appropriate. I understood that, as a seven year old I had done that. I saw an old man with white hair because the pre-programming was there. It wasn't physiology; it was something inside, the inner reality.
RMN: Has your understanding or idea of God evolved over time as a result of your changing experiences?
JOHN: Well, when I started going out on the universe with LSD in the tank, I'd come to a certain group of entities and I'd say, "Are you God?" And they'd say, "Well, we say that to some people but God is way up there somewhere with the angels." And it turned out no matter how big they were, God is bigger. So finally I got to the Starmaker. But as Olaf Stapledon says in his book, it's impossible to describe the Starmaker in human terms. He was well aware of the bullshit of language.
I call God ECCO now. The Earth Coincidence Control Office. It's much more satisfying to call it that. A lot of people accept this and they don't know that they're just talking about God. I finally found a God that was big enough. As the astronomer said to the Minister, "My God's astronomical." The Minister said, "How can you relate to something so big?" The astronomer said, "Well, that isn't the problem, your God's too small!"
DJB: Do you think that the concept of objectivity is valuable, or do you think that separating the experimenter from the experiment is impossible?
JOHN: Objectivity and subjectivity were traps that people fell into. I prefer the terms "insanity" and "outsanity." Insanity is your life inside yourself. It's very private and you don't allow anybody in there because it's so crazy. Every so often I find somebody that I can talk to about it. When you go into the isolation tank outsanity is gone. Now, outsanity is what we're doing now, it's exchanging thoughts and so on. I'm not talking about my insanity and you're not talking about yours. Now, if our insanities overlap then we can be friends.
DJB: How would you define what a hallucination is?
JOHN: That's a word I never use because it's very disconcerting, part of the explanatory principle and hence not useful. Richard Feynmen, the physicist, went into the tank here twelve times. He did three hours each time and when he finished he sent me one of his physics books in which he had inscribed, "Thanks for the hallucinations."
So I called him up and I said, "Look, Dick, you're not being a scientist. What you experience you must describe and not throw into the wastebasket called "hallucination." That's a psychiatric misnomer; none of that is unreal that you experienced." For instance he talks: about his nose when he was in the tank. His nose migrated down to his buttonhole, and finally he decided that he didn't need a buttonhole or a nose so he took off into outer space.
DJB: And he called that a hallucination because he couldn't develop a model to explain it?
JOHN: But you don't have to explain it, you see. You just describe it. Explanations are: worthless in this area.
RMN: How do you feel about the role that discipline has to play in the process of self-discovery?
JOHN: It's absolutely essential. I had thirty-five years of school, eight years of psychoanalysis before even going into the tank. So I was freer than I would have been had I not had all that. Everybody could say, "Well, that was dissonant," and I would say, "Yes, but I learned what I don't have to know." I learned all the bullshit that's put out in the academic world and I would bullshit too. This bullshit is an insurance that I don't remember the bullshit that the professor says, except that which is really worthwhile and interesting.
RMN: What guidelines do you use when traveling through innerspace?
JOHN: My major guideline when I go in the tank is, for God's sake don't preprogram, don't have a purpose, let it happen. With ketamine and LSD I did the same thing; I slowly let go of controlling the experience. You know some people lie in the tank for an hour trying to experience what I experienced. Finally I wrote an introduction to
The Deep Self
, and said, if you really want to experience what it is to be in the tank, don't read any of my books, don't listen to me, just go in there and
be
.
RMN: So you don't ever try and go in with a mission or an idea of what you want to accomplish?
JOHN: Why should I? I'd only have gotten more ridiculous. Every time I took acid in the tank in St. Thomas it was entirely different. I think that I couldn't even begin to describe it. I only got 1/10 of 1% of it and I wrote that in books. The universe prevents you from programming and when they take you out, they tear you wholly loose and you realize that these are massive intellects, far greater than any human. Then you really get humble. When you come back here you say, "Oh well, here I am, back in this damn body again, and I'm not as intelligent as when I was out there with them."
I took an acid trip in the Carlisle Hotel in Washington, near the FBI building. I turned on the tape recorder and I just lay down on the bed. I was a tight person but it was an incredible trip. They look me out and showed me the luminous colossus, and then the Big Bang that they created three times. And they said, "Man appears here and disappears there." And I said, "That's awful. What happens to them'!" And they said, "That's us." I went into a deep depression because I didn't identify with that. Then, about a week later, I suddenly realized they're also talking about me. You see all this in the introduction to
The Center of the Cyclone.
DJB: John, let me ask you, how did your earlier inter-species communication research with marine mammals influence your later work where you experienced contact with extra-terrestrial or inter-dimensional beings on your psychedelic travels?
JOHN: Let me say how I got to work with dolphins first. I was floating in the tank for a year and wondering, who floats around twenty-four hours a day'? I went to Pete Shoreliner and he says, "Dolphins. They're available. Go down to the Marine Studios in Florida." So I did, and I immediately fell in love with them. Then we killed a couple of dolphins to get the brains, and when we saw them we said, "Oh boy! This is it. This is a brain bigger than ours!" And I thought, this is what I want to do.
Well, I didn't kill any more dolphins. I studied their behavior and interactions. I was working alone at Marine Studios and I had a brain electrode in one dolphin, which I regret immeasurably. Anyway, when I would stimulate the positive reinforcement system he would just quietly push the lever and work like mad, and if I stopped he would vocalize immediately. I knew monkeys wouldn't do that. And if we stimulated the negative system he would push the lever, shut it off, and then he'd scold us. See? Then he broke the switch and just jabbered away.
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?