Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads, the show where we grab the
most tangled complex ideas out there, pull on one thread
and see what reality unravels.
Speaker 2: And today we are going full reverse engineer. We're not
just you know, talking about the mind. We're trying to
decompile the actual software that runs what we think of
his reality.
Speaker 1: That's right, and we've got the notes. We have the
field notes of a scientist who systematically and frankly terrifyingly
mapped the entire geography of innerspace.
Speaker 2: It's a huge topic.
Speaker 1: It is because there's a hitting code, right, a kind
of programming governing every single experience you have, and most
of us never even define it, let alone try to
rewrite it. It's the operating system in your own head.
Speaker 2: And our guide for this entire journey is doctor John C. Lily.
Speaker 1: Okay, so before we go any further, we have to
ground this. Who is John C.
Speaker 2: Lily?
Speaker 1: Because he wasn't. He wasn't some guru on a mountain.
Speaker 2: No, absolutely not, and that's essential. This guy was a credentialed,
rigorous scientist. He was a researcher for the National Institutes
of Health the NIH. He invented the isolation tank, the
sensory deprivation chamber. He spent I mean decades researching dolphin communication.
He genuinely believed they had a language far more complex
than ours.
Speaker 1: So this is a serious person who approached the bazaar
with just absolute scientific discipline, exactly.
Speaker 2: And when he found really it changes the whole conversation
about free will, about destiny, about your own personal power,
And it.
Speaker 1: All kicks off with his foundational principle, his core maxim.
He calls it the belief engine, and it's always running.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and his maxim is so direct, I'll just quote
it here. In the province of the mind, what one
believes to be true either is true or becomes true.
Speaker 1: Okay, But when you hear that, I mean, come on,
that sounds a lot like something you'd see on a
manifestation vision board, a self help mantra.
Speaker 2: It does. It sounds suspiciously close to that. But Lily
treated this like a law of physics, like the first
law of thermodynamics. It was a non negotiable principle, but
only within a very specific domain. Right.
Speaker 1: And this is the part where it gets really interesting,
because he didn't just leave it there. He immediately defined
the limits.
Speaker 2: He did. And the limits are the most fascinating part.
He says, these limits, they have to be found experimentally, experientially. Okay,
And here's the kicker. He says, those limits, they just
turn out to be further beliefs that you then have
to transcend.
Speaker 1: Just a feedback loop.
Speaker 2: It's the ultimate terrifying feedback loop. If you believe deep
down that you can only ever earn, say one hundred
thousand dollars a year, that belief acts as a hard
ceiling in your reality. You will experimentally run into that
ceiling again and again. But the ceiling isn't the market,
it's not the economy. It's a program you installed.
Speaker 1: And the only way to get past it is to
truly believe the ceiling isn't real, to just move the code.
Speaker 2: Which brings us to the two provinces. This is so critical.
The first profits the province of the mind.
Speaker 1: In that space, he says, no limits.
Speaker 2: No limits whatsoever. You're terrifying, unadulterated, infinite freedom. You are,
for all intents and purposes God in that space.
Speaker 1: No. And this is a huge butt, a huge But.
Speaker 2: He was not a fool. He was very clear about
the second province, the province of the body, the physical
world we're.
Speaker 1: In right now, and here the rules are different.
Speaker 2: Completely different. He drew an absolute red line. There are definite,
non negotiable limits that are not to be transcended. Gravity, pain, death.
You can't just believe your way out of walking into traffic.
Speaker 1: That distinction is everything. He's not selling some kind of
mystical escape. He's giving you a guide to separate the
external physics from your internal programming.
Speaker 2: Exactly. So, our mission today here on thrilling Threads it
isn't to argue if these experiences are real. It's to
understand the hardwired mechanics of this human biocomputer he talks about.
Speaker 1: And maybe the strangest part of all, to explore the
intelligence agency that he claimed runs the entire universe's timeline.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're going way beyond simple self help here. We're
looking at the actual structural mechanics of belief and reality
as defined by this this groundbreaking and let's be honest,
sometimes incredibly reckless scientific journey.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the first big implication of this maxim this
belief engine, is that we are fundamentally not really in
touch with reality.
Speaker 2: We're divorced from it.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he found that you're not You're not the conductor
operating to your brain.
Speaker 1: You are the brain.
Speaker 2: You are the software running on the hardware of the brain.
So when you think you're seeing objective reality, what you're
actually seeing is a highly refined, extremely convincing internal simulation.
Speaker 1: I think we've all had those moments, you know, where
you realize how subjective everything is. But what he's saying
is it's total. The simulation is entirely constructed by your beliefs,
the ones you don't even know you have.
Speaker 2: The code you got from your parents, from your culture,
from trauma. Your brain just generates a virtual reality that
perfectly conforms to that core programming.
Speaker 1: It's the ultimate eco chamber.
Speaker 2: It is. But if the brain's a computer and the
mind is the program, why does it feel like we're
watching the world through a screen, why does it feel
so separate?
Speaker 1: He had an answer for that. He identified the specific mechanism,
and it's something we use every second of every day.
Speaker 2: Language, the screen of language.
Speaker 1: He described it as a literal film, a tangible screen
separating us from raw, nonverbal reality, and we spend our
whole lives making that screen thicker.
Speaker 2: It's so counterintuitive, isn't it. We're taught that words illuminate things.
You label something to understand it, right, Lily concluded the
exact opposite. Words don't just describe the world, they actively
block it. They prevent direct perception. He called language, and
this is a quote, a very poor instrument.
Speaker 1: And he wasn't the first person to think this, right, No.
Speaker 2: Not at all. He was building on ideas from people
like William James, the great American psychologists, who said language
was the filmiest of screens. Yeah, it's not totally opaque,
but it just it obscures the vastness of what's really there.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's make this practical. If I'm walking down
the street and I see a tree, this idea of
the descriptive loop trap suggests I'm not really seeing the tree.
Speaker 2: You're not. You're seeing the word tree. You're seeing the
concept of tree, which is a file in your brain
that's loaded with associations.
Speaker 1: Like provide, shade made of wood, leaves.
Speaker 2: Fall in autumn, exactly all of it. And you're instantly
trapped inside that descriptive loop, that automatic need to label everything,
and that stops you from just experiencing the raw physical
reality of the thing itself.
Speaker 1: It sounds exhausting, like a low level hum of cognitive
noise all the time, a prison made of dictionary definitions.
Speaker 2: It is, And Lily realized the only way to really
explore that first province, the province of the mind, was
to abandon description completely. You have to shut off the
internal monologue.
Speaker 1: Stop talking, and start traveling exactly.
Speaker 2: And once you strip away language and your attachment to
the body, which you know often took deep isolation or
for him, powerful chemicals, then that terrified buying freedom the
no limits of the mind is finally revealed.
Speaker 1: The terror isn't just the infinite space. It's that there
are no signposts, no walls. If you can become anything,
how do you choose? How do you even navigate a
place with no map?
Speaker 2: And that's what Lily the scientist decided he had to
solve next. He wanted to make a map.
Speaker 1: So instead of running away from insanity, he treated it
like a like a travel destination.
Speaker 2: That's a perfect way to put it. He didn't want
to pathologize these states of consciousness. He wanted to quantify them,
so he developed a quantitative coordinate system for innerspace.
Speaker 1: He put a number on the state of your.
Speaker 2: Soul, pretty much shifting it from vague spirituality to structural geography.
Speaker 1: Let's walk through this map, then, because these coordinates are
the key to understanding the programming. We have to start
at the bottom level nine to six.
Speaker 2: Level nine of six, the dark knight of the soul.
This is the place of absolute, maximum terror. Lily described
it as a guided tour of hell, intense psychological pain,
crushing guilt, existential dread. He said he was quote totally terrified.
Speaker 1: And everything in our biology. When we feel those things, pain, guilt, dread,
it screams at us to run, to distract, pull out
your phone, turn on the TV, do anything to avoid
that feeling.
Speaker 2: And Lily says running is the fundamental mistake, that's what
keeps the program looping forever. The key action in this
state is completely counterintuitive, which is don't run, don't distract,
his advices, stay there, remain perfectly aware.
Speaker 1: Stay perfectly aware of the worst possible thing. You can imagine.
Why what's the point of that?
Speaker 2: He called it burning karma. By staying fully, conscious fully
aware of the pain without fighting it, without reacting, you
are letting this psychological energy that fuels that negative cycle
just burn itself out.
Speaker 1: So you're depriving the fire of oxygen.
Speaker 2: You're letting the program run to completion consciously until it
runs out of fuel. You are in effect consciously deleting
the fear program from your own hard drive.
Speaker 1: That's a really powerful action idea. Okay, so that's the basement,
the terrifying basement where do most of us live?
Speaker 2: According to this met most of society resides at level
plus twenty four the professional.
Speaker 1: State functionality, competence, getting things done.
Speaker 2: Yes, you are completely lost in your discipline. You're the
perfect lawyer, the dedicated doctor, the focused parent. You're functioning
flawlessly within the rules of the province of the body.
But this is critical. You're also asleep a.
Speaker 1: High functioning bio robot running a very successful script exactly.
Speaker 2: And the cost of being stuck there is that you
are so immersed in the simulation that you believe the
simulations all there is. You're efficient, but you are profoundly
unaware of the deeper code You're.
Speaker 1: Playing in the game, so well, you forgot it was
a game. Okay, I'm moving up from there, level plus
forty eight. This sounds like pure detachment.
Speaker 2: It is level plus forty eight, the neutral state. It's
pure information exchange. Think of a server farm, just data
moving back and forth, no emotion, no connection, just the
network operating at peak efficiency.
Speaker 1: A place of cure calculation.
Speaker 2: Right. But the state that sounds the most alluring, the
one people are actively trying to get to, is the
one that breaks the ceiling of that professional state.
Speaker 1: Level plus twelve the blissful idiot.
Speaker 2: Ah, the blissful idiot. This is where this filter just
drops away. You're still in your body, but everything is beautiful,
everyone is happy. You feel this intense positive energy moving
through you.
Speaker 1: Lily described hearing a bird saying and feeling like it
was an echo of the entire galaxy. Everything connects, everything
is meaningful. Sounds like nirvana.
Speaker 2: It does. But here comes the big flashing warning sign.
Lily says, this state is dangerously useless, useless.
Speaker 1: How can bliss be useless?
Speaker 2: Because you can't do anything. It's not much use unless
you can find another bliss ninety, as he called it,
another blissful idiot in the same space. If you get
stuck there, you become useless to.
Speaker 1: The simulation because you're too busy floating in golden light
to pay your rent or feed yourself.
Speaker 2: Exactly, the province of the body demands engagement. You found
the fire exit, but you can't leave the building, and
you can't go back to class to do the work.
You have to keep moving. The point isn't to rest
and bliss, it's to integrate what you learn there.
Speaker 1: But if we're trying to move up this ladder, what
keeps knocking us back down? Why is innerspace so unstable?
Speaker 2: The hardware. You have to look at the biocomputer itself.
Speaker 1: The physical brain.
Speaker 2: Yes, the brain is hardwired for survival, not for enlightenment.
It has these powerful ancient survival programs burn right into
the circuits. These aren't you. They're just loops of code
designed to keep the meat suit alive, the carrot and
the stick absolutely the rewarding systems pleasure, euphoria, sex, and
the painful punishing systems, anger, rage, fear. These are physical
parts of your brain, non negotiable hardware, and.
Speaker 1: The cortex, the part of us that thinks that reasons.
Speaker 2: It's just a switchboard. This is the shocking part. The
conscious thinking mind is just a switchboard that triggers these
powerful survival programs based on you.
Speaker 1: Guessed it, your core beliefs, the code that was installed
in you.
Speaker 2: Yep, your cortex doesn't decide to feel fear. It just
reacts to a situation based on the installed code of
what you believe is dangerous, and it flips the fear switch.
Speaker 1: So if your code says being vulnerable will get you abandoned,
your cortex just flips the switch for the painful system,
and you feel anxiety even if there's no real threat.
Speaker 2: You're just running the abandonment script. And Lily being Lily,
had to test this. He had to push the fear
program to its absolute limit.
Speaker 1: And this is where the story shifts from you know,
intellectual exploration to something closer to a horror movie.
Speaker 2: It really is. He read a study about psychiatrists curing
patients by putting them through their worst fears. He decided
to do it to himself.
Speaker 1: He used a sledgehammer, a massive dose of ketamine, a
dissociative anesthetic, fifty milligrams. The goal was to exit the
body completely.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a dose for major surgery, not for a
Tuesday afternoon experiment.
Speaker 1: And the story he tells is, well, it's terrifying. He
mentally leaves his body and he finds himself under the
control of this entity, the Earth Coincidence Control Office.
Speaker 2: And in his mind. In this reality, these entities start
removing his body parts. He specifically details them taking his
hand and his penis and experience of just profound, agonizing loss.
Speaker 1: He screamed, He said, it was this visceral, absolute terror.
His wife ran in saw him thrashing around, and she
confirmed his physical body was completely fine, it was whole.
Speaker 2: But the mental terror was one hundred percent real to him.
Speaker 1: It was happening, and his first reaction, his very human reaction,
was to just scream at the ceiling, who is in
charge of there a bunch of crazy kids.
Speaker 2: And the answer he got back, this voice he heard,
defines the entire relationship. It was so simple, so chilling.
It just said, well, you had an unconscious fear, so
we put you through it, just the way the arrangement did.
Speaker 1: The arrangement.
Speaker 2: The arrangement, this is the whole point of mental destruction.
The province of the mind lets you face any fear, dismemberment, drowning, anything,
without any physical damage to the meat suit.
Speaker 1: You can be mentally destroyed. And wake up perfectly fine.
Speaker 2: And the purpose of that is the realization Lilly understood immediately.
Fear isn't your fate. It's just a program. It's code
waiting to run. And if you consciously run that fear
program to the very end, it deletes itself. You can't
control the switchboard anymore.
Speaker 1: But that voice, the entity that administered the whole terrifying
lesson that raises the biggest question of all. If reality
is a simulation, who is the system administrator?
Speaker 2: And that brings us to the core of this whole thing,
ECO the Earth Coincidence Control Office.
Speaker 1: Most people would call this God or fate or the universe. Lily,
being a scientist, gave it a hilariously bureaucratic name.
Speaker 2: He didn't see it as a vague spiritual force. He
described it as an intelligence agency or quote, one of
God's field offices. He even liked that echo an Italian
means this is it. This is it.
Speaker 1: This is the office running the long term timeline, and
their main job is what coincidence control?
Speaker 2: Coincidence control. We've all felt this. You think of an
old friend and suddenly they call you missed the train
that later crashes. Those moments where reality seems to bend
just for you.
Speaker 1: Jun called that synchronicity meaningful coincidence.
Speaker 2: Right, But Jung saw it is just spiritual poetry, a
causal Lily said, no, it's not random. Synchronicity is management working.
It's Eco adjusting the dials of the simulation to guide you.
Speaker 1: Okay, but hold on an office. Is he being literal?
Is there a cosmic bureaucracy running the universe?
Speaker 2: He's serious about the function. He's not saying there's a
guy named Dave in a cubicle somewhere. He's saying he
experienced a systematic, coordinating intelligence that uses coincidence as its
primary tool, and that led him to the contract of coincidence.
Speaker 1: The contract. This defines our free will in this whole system.
Speaker 2: It does. The contract is explicit. Eco controls the long
term coincidences, the big stuff, the arc of your life,
the people you meet, the accidents you avoid.
Speaker 1: But you, the human agent, you control the short term ones.
Speaker 2: Exactly. So, Eco builds the maze, but you choose how
you walk down the hallways.
Speaker 1: That's our free will, which means if you decide to
work for Eco to be an intentional agent, you have
to accept something.
Speaker 2: Massive, you have to accept that there are, as Lily
put it, no discoveries. There are only revelations.
Speaker 1: Meaning even his greatest scientific breakthroughs, the isolation tank, the
dolphin research, he didn't invent them.
Speaker 2: He downloaded them. He was just the antenna, a really
sensitive receiver picking up a signal from the field office.
If you want better data, you have to accept you
are not running the show. Your job is just to
have a clear reception.
Speaker 1: And the ultimate goal of this whole bizarre arrangement, the
simulation we call life. ECO told him what it.
Speaker 2: Was they did, and it's a bombshell. They told him,
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.
Speaker 1: Graduation. The whole point of life in this model is
to figure out the algorithm of coincidence. Crack the code,
and you graduate from the simulation.
Speaker 2: It changes everything. The real work isn't striving or creating.
It's cleaning the antenna, reducing the noise from the survival
programs and the static from the descriptive loops of the
signal comes through.
Speaker 1: Clearly, and when you start bitting those clear signals. When
you step outside of linear time, you enter a state.
He coined a new word.
Speaker 2: For alternity, not eternity, a state where all possibilities exist
at once. He saw it as this cosmic tapestry, a
series of branching paths where every outcome is happening right now.
Speaker 1: He used the analogy of a tree. The trunk is
this present moment, but branching off it are thousands of leaves,
and each leaf is a different reality, one where you
took that job, one where you never met your partner,
one where you're dead, all of it existing simultaneously.
Speaker 2: And being a scientist, he immediately saw the connection to physics.
He said, this lines up perfectly with the Many world's
interpretation of quantum physics.
Speaker 1: Which says that every time a quantum wave collapses, the
universe actually splits into parallel branches, one for each possible outcome.
Speaker 2: So when you make a decision, you're just chew using
one of those leaves of alternity to become your new present.
The others keep going without you.
Speaker 1: That sounds like ultimate power, But seeing all of those timelines,
it came with a very serious warning.
Speaker 2: Hubris, a huge warning about ego. The moment Lily felt
this immense cosmic power. He started to think, wait, did
I cause this? Am I John Lilly generating the universe
just by observing it?
Speaker 1: And the universe responded immediately and physically.
Speaker 2: Very next morning, the huge nineteen seventy one San Fernando
earthquake hit Los Angeles. It threw him out of his.
Speaker 1: Bed, a literal physical slack from reality.
Speaker 2: The lesson was instant. He realized he didn't cause the earthquake.
He was just tapped into the same energy source that did.
He'd confused the observer with the creator, the antenna with.
Speaker 1: A transmitter, a devastating clarification. In the mind, you are limitless.
In the body, you were fragile. And he kept pushing
that boundary, trying to bring the no limits rule of
the mind into the physical world, and.
Speaker 2: The results were brutal. He totaled his car driving it
up a sand bank, got battery acid burns on his hand.
In another incident on a bicycle, he broke nine bones
and was in the hospital for five days.
Speaker 1: This wasn't bad luck. This was him trying to hack
his own biocomputer with a sledgehammer. He admitted taking forty
two milligrams of PCP when the safe dose was two.
Speaker 2: He was trying to download the entire Internet onto a
floppy disk. He was seeing planetary destruction and atomic wars
in his mind, and he could barely get back to
his own body. He was gripping the bedrails for six hours,
just trying to stay grounded.
Speaker 1: The system's message wasn't a punishment, it was just maintenance advice.
The vehicle is fragile. You can't download infinite data without
melting the hardware, and Lily was melting.
Speaker 2: Which brings us to the ultimate paradoxical punchline of his
entire life's work.
Speaker 1: After all that time trying to escape the meat suit,
the tanks, the drugs, the dolphins, the system administrator's ego
finally stepped in. They cut off his high level access
and gave him a direct order.
Speaker 2: A completely unexpected order. They told him stop using it
and get back here and learn how to be human.
Speaker 1: Learn how to be human. That was the final assignment.
He realized that getting high mystically or chemically was the
easy part, the blissful idiot state. That was the trap.
Speaker 2: If you're floating in gold light, you're not learning the
lesson of the simulation. The problems of the body is
the classroom. You can't skip class just because you found
the fire exit. The lessons about limitation, about pain, those
are the ones you need to solve the algorithm.
Speaker 1: So he had to ground himself, stop the extreme doses.
He realized the biocomputer needs maintenance. If you crash the car,
you can't drive it.
Speaker 2: But once you've been through all that, once you've seen
the code behind the curtain, you have a huge social problem.
Speaker 1: You can't tell anyone.
Speaker 2: You can't tell anyone or they'll lock you up. If
you walk into your professional level plus twenty four office
and start talking about eco and alternate realities, Yeah, you're done.
That's the problem of insanity.
Speaker 1: So what was his solution. This is one of the
most brilliant punts of his work. He called it outsanity
shared madness.
Speaker 2: Shared madness. He said, if I am crazy alone, I
am sick. If we are crazy together, we are a culture,
We are a movement. His books, his lectures, they weren't
for everyone. They were a beacon call to find the
other outsane people.
Speaker 1: So it's like spycraft for the spiritual agent.
Speaker 2: It is the core rule is never express your full
insanity in the outside world. You have to protect the signal,
and you have to protect yourself.
Speaker 1: Find your tribe, the people who know the code, and
speak the truth only to them, to everyone else.
Speaker 2: You play the game, you wear the mask of the professional.
You function at level plus twenty four on the outside
while operating with the knowledge of everything else on the inside.
You're a cognitive double agent.
Speaker 1: And this all leads to the final metaprogram, the master
key that unlocks everything else, including the idea of ECO.
Speaker 2: Itself, radical agnosticism.
Speaker 1: All beliefs are unbelievable.
Speaker 2: Every single one. Christianity, quantum physics, simulation theory, even the
maps we just talked about, the coordinate system ECO, they
are all just tools.
Speaker 1: Use the tool, never ever mistake the tool for the truth.
Use the story of the Eco if it helps you
manage coincidence. Use quantum physics if it sharpens your mind.
Speaker 2: But once you cross the bridge, you burn it. If
you get stuck clinging to the map, you've just built
yourself a new prison. Lily eventually abandoned his own maps.
He realized the map is not the territory.
Speaker 1: So the final conclusion is it's the most empowering one.
You are the programmer of your own human biocomputer society,
your parents social media. They installed the default software fear
dot execonsumerism dot app.
Speaker 2: And Lily's work. It doesn't just show you the map,
It shows you where the keyboard is, so you can
finally start rewriting your own operating system.
Speaker 1: He showed that if you're brave enough to face your
own level leven o six your personal hell, and you're
smart enough to listen for when a coincidence is management working,
you can actually become the controller of your short term reality.
Speaker 2: What does this all mean for you listening right now?
We've gone from the hard limits of the body to
the infinite, mapless province of the mind, led by a
scientist who intentionally mapped hell.
Speaker 1: The lesson isn't to escape reality. It's to understand its
rules and to understand that the rules themselves are just
self imposed beliefs waiting to be deleted.
Speaker 2: We're all stuck here in the province of the body,
but the mind is unlimited territory. The real challenge is
finding that balance. Being brave enough to sit with your
own deepest fears to burn that karma, and smart enough
to live as an outsaane agent protecting your signal.
Speaker 1: And it brings us back to that ultimate choice from
the system administrators. If the purpose of life is to
figure out the algorithm of coincidence so you can graduate
from Earth, what short term coincidence could you control right
now to move one step closer to that final revelation?
What small intentional choice today signals to ECO that you
are ready for a new assignment. But do you think