Earth Coincidence Control Office

OMNI
You're probably best known as "Dr. John Lilly, the dolphin man." What is the aim of your current dolphin research?

Lilly
At Marine World, we're working with computers to develop a human/dolphin code, analogous to the Morse code used in telegraphy. The project is called JANUS -- for Joint Analog Numerical Understanding System. Like the Roman god Janus, it has two "faces" -- a dolphin side and a human side.

A human/dolphin language must contend with the fact that dolphins communicate at frequencies ten times above the human range. While our speech falls between three hundred and three thousand hertz, or cycles per second. dolphins talk to one another underwater at frequencies from three thousand to thirty thousand hertz. If you go into a pool with a dolphin and he starts whistling, you'll hear what sounds like very high-pitched squeaks. So the problem is to bring their frequency down into our sound window and ours up into theirs.

We're using a computer system to transmit sounds underwater to the dolphins. A computer is electrical energy oscillating at particular frequencies, which can vary. and we use a transducer to convert the electrical waveforms into acoustical energy. You could translate the waveforms into any kind of sound you like: human speech, dolphin-like clicks, whatever.

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.

MISHLOVE: You also mentioned the term ECCO. What is ECCO?

LILLY: E-C-C-O. In Italian it means, "This is it." But it means to me the Earth Coincidence Control Office, which is one of God's field offices. ECCO runs our lives, though we won't admit it. If you're an ECCO agent, you can be very, very careful to use your best intelligence in ECCO's service, and you realize there are no discoveries, there are only revelations. That was a come-down for me as a scientist.

MISHLOVE: Well, I've found in my own work in the media and parapsychology, that I'm very much guided by coincidences.

LILLY: Right.

MISHLOVE: And I guess it's looking to coincidences as signs along the way that defines this relationship with what you've defined as ECCO.

LILLY: Right, the Earth Coincidence Control. It's coincidence control that they do, and they say, "We control the long-term coincidences; you control the short-term ones. And when you find out how we do the long-term ones, you no longer have to remain on earth; you don't have to return there."

MISHLOVE: It seems to me as if your concept of ECCO is a way of modeling a mechanism behind what Jung has defined as synchronocity.

LILLY: That's right. Jung defined synchronicity only in a good fashion in his introduction to the I Ching, and he uses the term coincidences.

MISHLOVE: Meaningful coincidences.

LILLY: But of course the coincidences are in your own construction, your own language construction of the events. So that's all a fake too. As I say at the beginning of my workshops, "Everything I say here is a lie -- bullshit, in other words -- because anything that you put in words is not experience, is not the experiment. It's a representation -- a misrepresentation."

MISHLOVE: And here we are misrepresenting to each other in order that we can learn from these lies.

LILLY: Right. Now if you use language injunctively, as a set of directions, then it's not as bad as it is otherwise.

MISHLOVE: So in other words, for example, when you talk about ECCO, when you talk about perhaps going into an inner reality using sensory isolation, which is one of the other technologies in which you pioneered --

LILLY: In 1954, I invented it.  ...

MISHLOVE: You've referred several times now to the fact that in the province of the body there are limits, and you yourself have thrown yourself up against those limits on many occasions and have written about it. In your writing you seem to be warning people maybe not to do everything that you've done.

LILLY: That's right. They don't have to. See this hand? I have to keep it in ointment, because on 11-11-87 I drove my car up a slight bank, turned it over, and totaled it. The battery acid burned this hand, and these knuckles were broken, and that's all. If I'd had my seat belt on I would have been decapitated. But ECCO was showing me something, that I wasn't exploring alternates properly. I was caught with one.

MISHLOVE: There's a wonderful section in your book The Scientist, in which you describe a conversation amongst different beings in an altered state, who are describing how carefully they worked to create all the coincidences so that you could have an accident in which you nearly died, and were resuscitated by your wife Toni who had just learned mouth-to-mouth resuscitation three days earlier.

LILLY: Right. Then the other accident, the one that closed off Vitamin K for me, where I was on a ten-speed bicycle going down Decker Canyon Road, and the chain caught, and I hit the road and nine bones were broken. But I didn't say in The Scientist that I was on PCP at the time, forty-two milligrams injected. So I was out in the hospital for five days and five nights, and was taken by ECCO to planets that were being destroyed by supernova waves, by atomic warfare, and so on. It was incredible. When I'd try to come back here, I'd come back and Toni would be there and I'd grab on for six or seven hours, then they'd take me back out. I hadn't finished the lessons.

MISHLOVE: What do you think the lesson is?

LILLY: Well, the lesson in that case was, "Look up the dose for PCP before you take any." It's two milligrams, not forty-two. And the other lessons, of course, were that I came back and wanted to put on radiation suits. This planet is not very stable. It can be destroyed at any time.

But ECCO was not there only to guide Lilly unfettered through his mind-bending research; these extraterrestrial benefactors were also there to test Lilly, to help him overcome his deepest darkest fears with psychic-shock therapy. One evening after a kick-ass shot of K, Lilly sat watching TV when an alien representative of ECCO appeared and – with some advanced form of psychic surgery – bloodlessly removed John's penis, nonchalantly handing it over to him. "They've cut off my penis," Dr. Lilly exclaimed. His wife Toni came to the rescue and pointed out to John that his penis was still intact. Upon closer examination of his male member, Lilly saw that the ET's had replaced his normal human penis with a mechanical version that could become voluntary erect when he wanted it to. An hour later, after the effects of the K wore off, John Lilly found his normal human penis in place of the mechanical one, exactly where it had always been. ...

After three weeks of hourly K injections, Lilly decided that he would travel to the east coast to warn political leaders and members of the media of the threat posed by SSI. In New York, he phoned the White House to warn then President Gerald Ford about "a danger to the human race involving atomic energy and computers." A White House aide fielded the call and, although quite aware, of Dr. Lilly's impressive credentials, was not convinced of the urgency of the matter, and informed him that the President was unavailable. ...

When Dr. Lilly decided to ride his ten-speed bike down the road to meet his wife, the drug had not yet taken full effect. But midway through his trip, Lilly was zapped by its intoxicating magic and instantly felt quite wonderful with the wind blowing deliciously through his hair; it was as if he'd taken a trip down memory lane to the days of his free wheeling youth. Unfortunately, this flashbackfull sense of euphoria came screeching to a disastrous halt when the bike chain suddenly jammed, and he was catapulted onto the harsh reality of the concrete pavement, puncturing a lung, breaking several ribs, and suffering cranial contusions. This bicycle crash resulted in several days of hospitalization, where Dr. Lilly was once again visited by the otherworldly representatives from ECCO, who told him he had a choice: He could go away with them "for good" or remain on the planet, mend his body and concentrate on more worldly affairs. The good doctor wisely chose the latter. With this decision came a turning point in his life, and a conscious effort to focus his remaining years not only on more earthly matters – as opposed to the whims and wishes of ECCO – but to dedicate the rest of his life to his wife, Toni, and their soul mate journey together through physical time and space.

9) Remember the motto passed to us (from GCC via SSCU):

Cosmic Love is absoluteley Ruthless and highly indifferent it teaches its lessons whether you like/dislike them or not.

Perhaps you were led to the site by the good folks over at Lilly's ECCO?

And then he said to me in bis mind, "If he saved all the worlds,
but tormented just one man, would you forgive him? Or if he was
a little harsh only to one stupid child? What has our pain to do with it,
or our failure? Star Maker! It is a good word, though we can have no
notion of its meaning.
Oh, Star Maker, even if you destroy me, I must praise you. Even if you
torture my dearest. Even if you torment and waste all your lovely
worlds, the little figments of your imagination, yet I must praise
you. For if you do so, it must be right. In me it would be wrong, but
in you it must be right."
He looked down once more upon the ruined city, then continued, "And if
after all there is no Star Maker, if the great company of galaxies
leapt into being of their own accord, and even if this little nasty
world of ours is the only habitation of the spirit anywhere among the
stars, and this world doomed, even so, even so, I must praise. But if
there is no Star Maker, what can it be that I praise? I do not know. I
will call it only the sharp tang and savor of existence. But to call
it this is to say little."

Olaf Stapledon, Starmaker - page 52, 53

Let nothing disturb you,
Let nothing frighten you,
All things pass away:
God never changes.
Patience obtains all things.
He who has God
Finds he lacks nothing;
God alone suffices.