That was awful. Mhm. I was totally terrified in that one. And there uh leaves of different railways all around me. I could look into the future and the present is right here in each of those and it goes on out to many years from now. It goes to infinity upwards and this tremendous amount of power grinds through this. The man who broke reality and returned to tell us what waits on the other side. His name was Dr. John C. Lily, a scientist who once held the respect of the medical establishment before stepping into territory no one dared to touch. In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true within certain limits. These limits are to be found experimentally and experientially. When so found, these limits turn out to be further beliefs to be transcended. He claimed the mind wasn't just thought or imagination, but a place, an endless landscape of heavens and hells, of beings that whispered in patterns too precise to be chance. He spoke of seeing every reality stretched out before him, as if the universe itself was a library he could wander through. To most, his words sounded like madness. But Lily never wavered. He insisted he had gone beyond the edges of reality itself. And what he brought back was not fantasy, but warning. You've probably devoted your your whole life and certainly many decades recently to to pushing to see, you know, what what really were the limits, right? Going into new realities, taking on the belief systems of those realities and then then coming back to your basic working reality and challenging those beliefs, integrating those beliefs with with your own. In in your writings, you've explored uh almost every state of consciousness I could imagine. You've established probably a uh a more significant mapping of of inner space than than almost any other modern modern person. And I think we all owe a great debt to you for that. But don't get stuck with those. I've abandoned all of them. It's impossible. Mhm. Because there infinities within the mind. Dr. John C. Liy was never a man who stayed inside the lines. A neuroscientist once trusted by the National Institutes of Health. He began as a respected researcher studying the brain, human behavior, even dolphins. But then he made a choice that separated him from the rest. Instead of keeping his focus on the lab, he turned his tools inward into the hidden space of the human mind. That decision changed everything. What he reported back no longer sounded like science. It sounded like something far stranger, as if he had stepped beyond reality itself. Lily became known for a single maxim that summit up his years of exploration. In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true. For him, the mind was a world where belief itself shaped reality. There's one use of language that's valid. That's the injunctive use, telling you how to do things. The descriptive one is very poor. And William James said it, the other world was separated from this one by the firmst of screens. And I found this screen is language. Mhm. So you have to abandon it when you're going to these other real alleys. If you believe something strongly enough, it would become the framework you lived in. But there was a twist. Each belief eventually revealed itself as a limit, a kind of wall. And once you push past that wall, a new layer of reality appeared. The process never stopped. There was always another layer, another deeper truth waiting to be uncovered. But if you take if you take the same kinds of trips, you'll find a different foreign father. Mhm. Each time. Each time. Yeah. Right. So the problems of the minds are no limits. And yet if one if one pushes that very very far I guess one you know no limits almost means nothing. There's nothing there. Limits limits is what defines things. It what it's what creates form. Well there are no limits that you put on it previously and new limits may appear which define an entirely new way which is much larger. It might sound mystical, but decades later, modern science began to circle back to the same idea. In 2019, a study in cognitive sciences argued that the brain does not simply record reality like a camera. Instead, it actively constructs it, filtering and building the world we see out of raw data. Lily had already been saying this back in the 1960s and '7s. He had simply lived it through his experiments long before neuroscience had the tools to back him up. So the real question becomes, if your brain is building reality, what kind of world is it making for you? Lily wasn't willing to leave that unanswered. He went inside his own mind to find out. And what he brought back was nothing short of a map to heaven and hell. He tried to chart it as if he were a cgrapher mapping an unknown continent. In his book, The Center of the Cyclone, 1972, he laid out what he called levels of consciousness. Each level was numbered, moving upward into experiences of bliss and unity, or downward into terror and chaos. He wrote about states like plus three and plus one where he felt pulled out of his body and into a vast union with the essence of creation itself. There was one state beyond plus three. That's plus one. But you're not allowed to remember that. Once you go into it, you have union with God. And so you're nonhuman. So there's no way you can recount what happened. They have no way of saying it because it's beyond language. Yes. Well, all those states are beyond language. Language is a very poor instrument to express. And he described plus 12 as the so-called blissful idiot state where everything appeared golden, glowing, and perfect, as if joy itself had soaked into the fabric of reality. But then there were minus levels, too. And these were not the kind of places anyone would want to visit. At -6, he said he endured what he called a guided tour of hell. a state so filled with terror and despair that it scarred him permanently. And then there the minus states, but uh I don't go into those. No, but at one point you you wrote about the importance of going into the minus states and remaining perfectly aware, being conscious in those negative states, not trying to block out the negativity. And you described that as I recall, as burning karma. Yes. And then there's a in the center of the sac's a chapter called the guided tour of hell which was minus minus six and that was awful. Mhm. So I never had to go back to that and I was never frightened again. I was totally terrified in that one. I suppose it's what the Christian mystics sometimes refer to as the dark night of the soul. Well, it was the dark night of my soul. Mhm. He admitted he never wanted to go back. The experiences were surreal. Lily once described hearing a bird call in ordinary life and suddenly perceiving its sound echoing through the entire galaxy. At other times, he felt like he had been trapped in pits of horror so deep that no amount of reason could free him. These descriptions sound unbelievable, but modern research has noted uncanny parallels. A 2014 study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that volunteers under psychedelics reported states of overwhelming cosmic unity as well as terrifying encounters with dark, hellish realms. And this is where you have to stop and ask yourself, what if those strange highs and terrifying lows weren't just happening inside his mind? What if something was shaping them from the outside, guiding him toward a bigger revelation? One of Lily's most unusual claims came after a near fatal car accident. He believed the crash hadn't been an accident at all. According to him, it had been staged by a hidden intelligence that he called Echo, short for the Earth Coincidence Control Office. And what it means to me, the Earth Coincidence Control Office, which is a a one of God's field offices, and Echo runs our lives, though they won't we won't admit it. And if you're an echo agent, uh, you can be very very careful to use your best intelligence of service and you realize there are no discoveries during the revelations. And that's a that was a comedown for the scientist, me as a scientist. He said they didn't just pull strings during his accidents. They also seemed to manipulate everyday life. Meetings with strangers, lucky breaks, and even moments of life-saving timing. To Lily, this was no coincidence. It was Ekko's design. He described this agency as both playful and serious, teaching him lessons by setting up elaborate situations. If he ignored the lessons, Ekko would push harder, sometimes to the point of risking his life. To outsiders, it might sound like paranoia, but Lily insisted these patterns were too precise to be chance. He felt he was in constant dialogue with a hidden system. Almost as if reality itself had a control office sending him coded messages through coincidences. There's coincidence control. It's coincidence control what they do. Mhm. 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. Modern psychology has studied this idea under a different name. In 2021, a review in Psychology of Consciousness examined how people interpret meaningful coincidences, often treating them as signs or hidden order in their lives. Whether or not a cosmic control office exists, the human tendency to find significance in chance events is undeniable. Lily simply pushed that idea further than most. And if coincidences could be messages, Lily wondered, "What about realities themselves? If hidden forces could bend chance, could the mind also bend the very structure of existence? That was when his visions took an even stranger turn. There was one vision that Lily spoke of more than any other. I experienced alternity very dramatically when I came back from Chile. Mhm. I sat in Elizabeth Campbell's living room in Los Angeles and in what I called the prophet meditation was sitting on the floor. my spine where I'm not straight and suddenly a line of light comes down through my spine and there leaves of different realities all around me. I can look into the future and the present is right here in each of those and it goes on out to many years from now and goes to infinity upwards and this tremendous amount of power going through this. He said he reached a point where he could see all realities at once. not just one life, not just one timeline, but every possible version of himself in the universe. He described it as if he were standing in the middle of an infinite library with shelves upon shelves of different reality stretching out forever. Each shelf was another world, another choice, another outcome already existing. In that state, he claimed he was given the ability to choose. Out of the endless possibilities, he could decide which branch of reality he would continue living in. The choice was not random. It was deliberate, as though he could flip through the pages of existence and select the story that would unfold next. For Lily, it was an event he lived through in the depths of his experiments. It would sound like a fantasy to you, but physics has been moving in a strange direction that echoes his vision. A 2022 study published in Nature Physics explored the idea of quantum multiverse branching, suggesting that all possible outcomes exist simultaneously until one path is selected. In other words, multiple realities are not just speculation, they may be a real feature of the universe. So, was Lily hallucinating or did he stumble into the truth that science is only beginning to approach? He insisted he saw directly from inside his own mind. He believed consciousness itself was the key that allowed him to peer into the library of worlds. But let me tell you this, Lily's journey into consciousness were not without danger. He was not a cautious explorer. He pushed himself to the edge with powerful substances like testing how far the mind could be stretched before it broke. I don't like it anymore. But it it creates an a state where one can enter into inner inner realities free from the attachments of the body. Echo told me to stop using it and get back here and learn how to be human. These were not gentle experiments. They left scars, both physical and psychological. He often admitted that his explorations took him to places few would dare to go, and fewer still would survive. It was a path that demanded everything: sanity, safety, even his own sense of self. Lily risked it all, convinced that the knowledge he brought back was worth the danger. Today, these ideas no longer sound like fringe speculation. Conversations about simulation theory, virtual reality, and alternate timelines dominate science and philosophy alike. People question whether our lives are happening in a fixed physical world or inside something designed, coded, and layered like a simulation. Lily went further than almost anyone ever dared. He shattered reality, stepped through its ruins, and somehow returned with stories that still disturb and inspire. His message was simple but dangerous. Build your belief, live inside it, then destroy it again and again until something greater reveals itself. It leaves us with an uncomfortable question. If reality is only one of many programs, what happens when you decide to step outside of it? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.