peaceable kingdom

… We were nearing the end of our tour when Bill suggested we visit the beluga whales (Delphinaptereus leucos), or "the canaries of the sea" as the whalers of the last century called them. He led us up a stairway through a large door and down a hallway to the top of an enormous tank. Suddenly I was looking down at one of the most unusual beings I had ever seen in my life.

The beluga whale looked like Caspar the Friendly Ghost –– pure white with a flexible neck and a mobile facial expression.

I had the feeling I was perceiving, and being perceived by, an immense presence. I was simultaneously speechless and trying to absorb a vast amount of information that I was unable to fit into adequate patterns of past experience. It somehow transcended the human experience, going deeply into unknown mysteries.

There were a few eternal moments of recognition … the frequency between us was like a brightly lighted tunnel of happiness. Everything else around me dimmed in the white light that soothed and pervaded my very essence.

I vaguely remember walking through the rest of the laboratory. ...

A whale raised her head above the water to peer at me. I looked directly into her eyes. Suddenly, she shot a stream of water from her mouth that splashed over my face and shoulders and slowly down over my body. It was a loving touch--an invitation to a more intimate communication--as sensual an approach as I have ever experienced from my own species. Without thinking, I cupped some water in my hand, brought it into my mouth, and shot it back at the beluga. The joy of the next few minutes can only be described as absurd. I was able to hug and kiss her soft white skin. This was what I had hoped to experience--I had crossed a boundary, a new space opened, I was fulfilled. This whale's invitation to share her world gave me a glimpse through a cosmic crack between species … a oneness of all living beings as we will know them someday in the future … a place we have been before and will return to again … as peaceful paradise … the "peaceable kingdom."

The process of contraction and expansion … emerging from a dense pattern of loneliness (interspecies deprivation) to overlap with the whales in a startling new way. …

The white ghosts had a sense of curious loving selves, careful of my vulnerability in their watery environment. They are my self living in the ancient, cold sea in which I swam in the dim, distant past before my cells organized and climbed out onto the land. That day with them I rejoined my archaic self in the water.

I will go back, I hope, and talk with them with new understanding of my origins and share the breaking of the long separation of human and cetacean.

--Antoinetta L. Lilly, "Invitation from a White Whale", in
Communication Between Man & Dolphin by John C. Lilly, M.D. 1979


[illustration by Doug Millison, after Lilly's photograph]