233 - Ram Das and Timothy Leary – 1983 Harvard Reunion

Program Notes

Guest speakers: Dr. Timothy Leary and Ram Das

[NOTE: The following quotations are by Ram Das.]

“The next thought I had that I can remember was, Wow you can be anything this time around, you’re free. You can do anything, because it became so apparent to me the way in which mind creates. And I suddenly experienced myself as the creator rather than the victim.”

“Methods are methods are methods. Meditation’s a method and psychedelics are a method. Methods are all traps. A method by its nature is a trap. It has to entrap you into itself in order to eject you at the end. You just hope it self-ejects.”

“Psychedelics was one of the major forces in a shift in consciousness in this culture.”

“Wisdom is what you are. Knowledge is what you know.”

“I don’t for one moment wish that I was not thrown out of Harvard … anymore."

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0061655937“All form in the universe, including your mind and your thought, is part of law, it’s unfolding lawfully, it’s the karma unfolding, just law. And within that there is no freedom. There really is no freedom in form. The freedom comes as the formless creates the form. There’s where the freedom is. And that freedom, of the formless coming into form, is a place from which you stand, or you don’t stand, in which you experience the creation of your own universe around you.”

[NOTE: The following quotations are by Timothy Leary.]

“[So Emerson] came to Harvard Divinity School, gave that famous speech in which he said, ‘Don’t look for god in the temples, nor in the buildings, nor in the pulpits, look within, find divinity inside yourself, drop out, become self-reliant (translated as do your own thing) and for, I believe thirty-three years, he was not allowed back on this sacred territory. We’re back after twenty!”

“We were smart enough to know how little we knew.”

“Once you put that pill in your mouth, YOU were the Principle Investigator … like it or not.”

“The problem with running Happiness Hotels is that nobody wants to leave.”

http://http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0980060540Raw Master Files of This Talk
la15-leary-alpert-harvard-reunion-part1.mp3
la15-leary-alpert-harvard-reunion-part2.mp3
la15-leary-alpert-harvard-reunion-part3-track1.mp3
la15-leary-alpert-harvard-reunion-part3-track2.mp3
Harvard Crimson Announcement of this Talk
The Varieties of Religious Experience
By William James (free Project Gutenberg edition)

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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And to kick things off today, I would first like to thank Forrest R., Jimmy A., and our frequent donor, Colin F., all of whom sent in donations this past week that are very welcome in that they help us pay some of the bills associated with these podcasts.

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So, Forrest, Jimmy, and Colin, thank you ever so much for your kind support.

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Well, can you believe that it has now been three months since we last heard from Dr. Timothy Leary?

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It was way back in my podcast number 219, I think it was.

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But I’m going to take care of that right now, because I found a really interesting little presentation that Dr. Leary made along with Ram Dass, the former Richard Alpert.

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Thanks to Bruce Dahmer and Dennis Berry, who is the custodian of the Leary Archive,

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we now have access to digital copies of much of the material in this very large archive.

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And the tape I’m going to play today is in the folder labeled Horowitz.

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And so I’m assuming that this is a today is in the folder labeled Horowitz.

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And so I’m assuming that this is a recording that was made by Michael Horowitz,

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who was actually Dr. Leary’s official archivist, I believe.

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And in any event, we owe all those people our thanks for preserving this material for us to have access to today.

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The talk I’ve picked is from April 23, 1983, and it was given at Harvard University on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Leary and Alpert being kicked out of Harvard.

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And here is the only reference to it that I could find on the Harvard website. It reads,

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In 1962, Harvard fired two controversial young psychologists from their faculty posts following a year of tumult about the pair’s research on LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs.

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Tomorrow, both men will return to Harvard.

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Timothy Leary, whose turn-on tune-in drop-out became the rallying cry for a generation of drug users,

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and Richard Alpert, who now goes by the name Ram Dass.

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The two will speak at Sanders Theater at 10.30 a.m. in an event being billed as a psychedelic

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reunion.

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The forum will be moderated by Professor of Psychology David C. McClellan, who chaired

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the now-defunct Social Relations Department at the time of the controversy.

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Now, without pulling out a few old books to refresh my memory, I can’t quite recall

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all of the history surrounding McClellan and the Leary team. However, if I’m not mistaken,

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McClellan was interested enough in their work to visit them at their compound in Mexico,

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although, as I recall, he didn’t participate in their research work there. Also, on the Arrowood.org site, there’s a copy of an

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article from the June 10th, 1963 issue in, I think it was Newsweek, in which it was reported that,

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according to Dr. David C. McClellan, head of Harvard’s Department of Social Relations,

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and I quote, the more drugs Leary and Alpert took, the less they were interested in science.

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But now we’re going to hear them all together once again,

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just 20 short years after the dust-up that sent Leary and Alpert on the road to,

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well, I don’t know to where exactly,

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but it was certainly a different road than the one they’d been traveling up to then.

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And I should mention that the recording I have of this event was split between three files, which together run a little over two hours altogether.

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However, I’ve taken the liberty of editing it down to about an hour and a half so that this podcast wouldn’t be overly long.

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But in the event that you are a Leary, Ram Dass, or Harvard aficionado, or scholar, and would like to hear the entire recording, I’ll place a link to the

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three original MP3 files along with the program notes for this podcast. So you can go there and

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download the raw files for your own archive if you’d like. Now let’s travel back to a darker age,

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back to the medieval reigns of Ronnie Reagan and Maggie Thatcher, back to a time when the IBM PC XT,

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with its monstrous 10-megabyte hard drive,

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was only one month old.

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And, by the way, you may laugh at such a puny-sized hard drive,

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but if you find somebody who was an early adapter back then

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and ask them what they thought when they fired up that monster box,

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I’ll bet you that most of them will tell you

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that one of their first thoughts was that they would never be able to fired up that monster box. I’ll bet you that most of them will tell you that one of their first thoughts

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was that they would never be able to fill up that drive.

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It’s really amazing the technical progress we’ve made in the last 27 years since this talk took place.

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Now, let’s hope that we can make the same kind of progress

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in the conscious evolution of our everyday consciousness.

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If we’re going to be able to solve the big problems that our technology is now causing,

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then we’d better expand our awareness of what is taking place

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before we pass some kind of a tipping point and foul this little planet

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and poison the oceans to a point where humans lose their ability to hang on to life here.

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But enough of my editorializing.

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Let me now get out of the way for David McClellan, who will actually get out of the way much

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more rapidly than I have.

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So I will now get out of the way and let them tell it as it is, as it has been, and as it will be.

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Well, David.

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Good morning.

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It’s nice to be back at Harvard.

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I think I’d really like to share just reflections about psychedelia, psychedelics, psychedelic chemicals,

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tryptamine derivatives,ed states of consciousness.

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I must say the past 20 years have been the happiest years of my life.

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Scary, but happy.

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but happy.

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And over these years, I’ve continued to

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depends on who

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you ask, honor

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or play with

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psychedelics.

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From 1963

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when I left Harvard,

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I became very active in the psychedelic

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movement.

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And then went to India later

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and met a guru.

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And the second day, somebody had told him apparently

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that I used LSD and he said to me,

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you use that yogi medicine?

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I said, yes.

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You got any of it?

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Yes. I said yes you got any of it yes so I brought out the bottle of this and that

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and I put it in my palm

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and I pointed out the LSD

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and I gave him one

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which was 300 micrograms

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which was a good adult dose of pure acid.

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And he said, come on, so I gave him 300 more.

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I said, come on, so I gave him 300 more.

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He took them in his hand and he went like that.

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And I, as a social scientist, said, this is going to be very interesting.

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It would be very interesting.

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And at the end of an hour, nothing had happened at all.

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At the end of two hours, nothing had happened.

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Now, I couldn’t believe that anybody could take 900 micrograms and nothing would happen.

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This is truly a miracle, a power, a Sydney.

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So I came back to America, and I told all about this.

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But I had this gnawing suspicion in the back of my mind that maybe what he did was sort of hypnotize me,

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and he threw them over his shoulder.

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So when I came back to India,

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I found myself in his presence after some months.

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And one of the things he said to me was, did you give me some medicine last time I was here?

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I said, yeah.

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He said, did I take it?

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And he looked at me.

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I said, well, I think so.

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That was that dialogue.

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And he said, what happened?

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I said nothing

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looked at me

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Jow go away

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so I went away for the night

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and the next morning I came back

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came up and he said

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got any more of that medicine

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I said yeah

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so I brought my medicine kit

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and I had five pills left, five pills that were 300 each. So I

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put one in his hand and he took more and two more. He took every one but the broken one.

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He didn’t want the broken one. He took the four sacred plants and he held them and he took each one and he opened his mouth and stuck out his tongue.

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Then he said to me, will they make me crazy? And I said, probably.

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crazy. And I said, probably. And he said, can I take water? I said, sure. So he got water,

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he drank water, and then we said, he brought an old man over with a watch. He said, how long will it take? So I thought, body weight, you know, maximum an hour, my goodness. So I said, an hour.

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So he held the watch, and at the end of an hour, nothing.

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And he says, these medicines were known about in the Kulu Valley long ago.

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But he said, that kind of knowledge has been lost for a long time.

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Been lost.

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So later, somebody said, is it useful?

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LSD?

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He said, it could be useful.

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He said it could allow you to come in and have the darshan of Christ.

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Meaning you could come in and be in the presence of living spirit.

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But he said, you can’t stay there.

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You can only stay about two hours, he said, and then you’ve got to leave.

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He said it would be better to become the living spirit of Christ than to visit it.

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But he said, your medicine won’t do that.

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He said, it’s not the true samadhi.

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Now, I’d suspect that I’ve taken LSD about once every two years since I first ingested with Timothy.

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I’ve taken it many, many more times during the first five or six years.

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But I don’t think I’ve missed a two-year period.

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Because I always assume that I’m going to start from a different launching pad.

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Because all the things that happened to me in that two years

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will put me in a different space from which to take off.

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I’ll explore a new, unchanneled kind of planes of reality.

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And then I also feel like I’m a member of an old explorer’s club

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that has a loyalty to have reunions, you know.

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And… has a loyalty to have reunions, you know. And so let me describe one trip to you, because that will always convey what’s happening to me.

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I’ve been a student over the years of Theravadan Buddhism,

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which is the Pali doctrine of Buddhism.

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And in the Vasudhimagga, which is one of the old texts,

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it describes the way as your concentration deepens

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by doing Vipassana meditation,

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as your concentration gets more laser-like

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and your awareness stands back from time more,

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you get to the point where in very deep meditation

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you begin to see your own thoughts

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arising, existing, and passing away.

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Now, as Buddha pointed out, those thoughts are passing at the rate of about one trillion per blink of an eye.

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So for you to stand back far enough to see a thought come into existence, exist, and pass away,

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a thought come into existence,

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exist and pass away,

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means that you have gotten your mind very far back in the relation to time.

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Is that coming through?

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Can you hear what I’m saying?

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Anybody out there?

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Okay, thanks.

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My ego needs a lot of love,

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so you’ve just got to remember that.

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Okay.

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It works basically on love.

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The more you love it, the more you get out of it.

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Okay, so there’s this great description of the Vasudhamagga.

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The Vasudhamagga is like a thing that makes Western psychology of the human mind look kind of uninteresting.

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Because it is so sophisticated in its analysis of states of consciousness.

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And then it describes how as you get to the point where the thought comes into existence,

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exists and passes away,

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between the end of that thought and the beginning of the next thought,

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there is a space.

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And if you enter that space,

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you are known as a stream enterer.

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And that is entering into what’s called nibbana,

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which is the field behind the form, if you will,

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or the field that is inherent within the form,

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or the field out of which the form arises.

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Okay, now let’s shift gears.

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I am at the Mid-America Motel in Salina, Kansas.

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I have been driving across the country and a rather secretive friend of mine has given me a bottle of LSD

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which sparkles in the dark.

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And I am on my way to Boulder, Colorado

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to teach with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche at a place called Naropa Institute, where we began Naropa that summer.

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And so I’ve got a whole trunk full of Tibetan tankas that I’m delivering to Trungpa.

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And I’ve got three days free, so I decide room 125 of the Mid-America

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Motel is my ashram, my monastic cave, and I take the tankas out of the trunk and hang

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them over the different things. I put a picture of my guru in the middle of the television

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set, turn on the picture with no sound so it’s all coming out of his head.

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And I have different pictures around the room.

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And then in the floor in front of the television said, I have important questions to ask myself.

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Like, you know, who are you?

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You know, things like that.

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Take off all my clothes.

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I take this medicine.

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And I need to go to the toilet.

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And I figure I’ve got 20 minutes to sort of get everything.

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And I had candles and incense.

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And I had pushed the beds aside.

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Well, I was in the toilet. And it was like an elevator in the trade building.

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It was like an elevator in the trade building.

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And I realized that whatever this was, it was more than I had anticipated.

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And that moment of fear of more than is a great one.

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I thought, what did he give me?

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Maybe I got the wrong dosage. I shouldn’t trust him anyway.

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shouldn’t trust him anyway. I began what you would call a bad trip in the technical language of this psychedelic movement. So I proceeded to go directly from the toilet to the door of the motel to call for help.

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Now, my mind then imagined a naked man rushing out of room 125 calling for help. I knew I was going to die, you see. 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1- and lights and I’m going to die anyway and why don’t I die a different way than that way?

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So I come back inside. I just had opened the door to the chain, closed the door again, come back in

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and I sit down in front of the television set and I take up a picture of my guru and I look

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directly. It’s a very fierce one in which he’s pointing like, stop fucking around.

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And he looks at

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me and I say to him, Maharaji, let me die.

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I figure this is as good a time to go as any.

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And what do they find?

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I just imagine them finding the next day this man with all these little signs and this picture in the middle of the set.

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And I mean, these are the artifacts that are left from that.

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That’s the message.

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And it seemed like as good a message as any.

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So I said, let me die.

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And I lay down and I cuddled into a fetus position.

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And my mind, I began to pull back from my mind and I began to see my thoughts arise, exist and fall away.

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And for moments you could focus on the arising of mind and you could see how, like Christ says, I am making all things new.

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Look, all things making all things new. Look, all things

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are being made new. And you saw what it looked like to look and see the creation of all forms

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out of form. There was another moment where you just saw the kind of continuity of it all.

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And then there was this moment where you saw it all turning into shit,

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just decaying. You saw everybody turning into skeletons. You saw everything turning into liquid. It was the one where a lot of Buddhist monks commit suicide.

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Because you and everything you believed in and everything turns into that.

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Shiva.

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It’s the dance of Shiva.

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And then I saw this space.

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And so at one point I just, not by choice, I just drifted into the space.

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The next thought I had that I can remember was, wow, you can be anything this time around.

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wow, you can be anything this time around.

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You’re free.

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You can do anything.

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Because it became so apparent to me the way in which mind creates.

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And I suddenly experienced myself as the creator

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instead of the victim.

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Because as long as I identify with my creation,

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I’m the victim.

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Now, what I experienced was a break in consciousness,

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not like sleep and not like dream.

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What I experienced was a break in consciousness.

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And when I came back from that,

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I experienced that I had not come back from nothing.

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And I came back very, very peaceful,

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very fulfilled, very present, very at home,

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very free.

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Later, when talking in Bodh Gaya in India

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with a meditation teacher.

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I merely described

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this experience to him.

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I didn’t mention the LSD.

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And he said to me,

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Oh, you are a stream enterer.

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You have entered nirvana.

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I said, no,

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but you don’t understand.

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I took LSD to do that.

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He said, it doesn’t matter.

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You are a stream enterer.

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And that’s the way I understand

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that methods are methods are methods.

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Meditation is a method

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and psychedelics are a method.

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Methods are all traps.

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A method by its nature is a trap.

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It has to entrap you into itself in order to eject you at the end.

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You just hope it self-ejects.

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Because I’ve met a lot of dry meditators.

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Are you enlightened? I meditate.

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I know, but are you enlightened? I meditate.

00:22:43 ►

And I’ve certainly met a lot of acid

00:22:46 ►

heads. Are you enlightened? I take acid. I know. I’m just going to tell you one story that I’ve

00:22:54 ►

just told around because it just is such a beautiful statement of what was inherent in

00:23:00 ►

what happened in the 60s. I was going to go much further out in this lecture, but I guess you’re not worth it or something.

00:23:09 ►

I’ll get there.

00:23:10 ►

Let me tell you this one story.

00:23:11 ►

Oh, don’t mind it.

00:23:12 ►

It’s all right.

00:23:13 ►

You can handle being unloved.

00:23:21 ►

We love each other enough to be able to handle that.

00:23:26 ►

Okay, this is the thing I’ve told in a lot of my lectures.

00:23:28 ►

It’s so juicy.

00:23:29 ►

In the late 60s, everybody that came to my lectures all looked alike.

00:23:34 ►

They all, in the 70s, they all smiled, wore beads, and they had, you know,

00:23:40 ►

I’ve seen it all.

00:23:42 ►

You know, I’ve seen the light.

00:23:43 ►

I’m happy.

00:23:43 ►

You know, I… And I light. I’m happy. You know, I…

00:23:45 ►

And I was sort of like an uncle.

00:23:50 ►

You know, this was the Godfather, and I was sort of an uncle.

00:23:55 ►

And I would speak on the road, and all this crowd would come,

00:23:59 ►

and we’d all smile at each other,

00:24:00 ►

and then I would say outrageous things that you only knew if you knew.

00:24:05 ►

And everybody would, yeah, we know.

00:24:07 ►

Well, there was a woman in the front row and she was about 70 and she had a little hat

00:24:11 ►

with oranges and cherries and things on her head.

00:24:15 ►

She had a black patent leather bag and responsible looking Oxford shoes and a print dress.

00:24:21 ►

She looked like one of your relatives.

00:24:21 ►

and a print dress.

00:24:22 ►

She looked like one of your relatives.

00:24:26 ►

And she was sitting there and everything I said,

00:24:30 ►

she went like this.

00:24:32 ►

And I thought, how does she know?

00:24:35 ►

I mean, so I’d say something more outrageous

00:24:37 ►

that only real heads would know.

00:24:41 ►

And she’d go like this.

00:24:42 ►

And I thought, well, she may have a neck problem.

00:24:44 ►

You know, and I’m studying.

00:24:49 ►

Finally, at the end of the lecture, I sort of egged her on to come over.

00:24:52 ►

And she came over and I said, she said, oh, thank you so much.

00:24:55 ►

That made perfect sense, all the things you were talking about.

00:24:58 ►

I said, how do you know?

00:25:00 ►

What method do you use that brings you into the space where you know those things?

00:25:04 ►

She leaned forward very conspiratorially and she said, I crochet. what method do you use that brings you into the space where you know those things?

00:25:07 ►

She leaned forward very conspiratorially and she said,

00:25:08 ►

I crochet. I crochet.

00:25:34 ►

And if I look out at my audiences these days and see the heterogeneity of the group gathered,

00:25:46 ►

I see that what we were a part of in the psychedelia in the early 60s and all through the late 50s and through the 60s and 70s.

00:25:53 ►

All of that whole process, not in itself, it’s certainly television and transportation and economics and so on have all contributed, but psychedelics was one of the major forces

00:26:01 ►

in a shift in consciousness in this culture.

00:26:04 ►

major forces in a shift in consciousness in this culture.

00:26:13 ►

And it is very, very fast becoming a massive just change in awareness, as I can see.

00:26:16 ►

And it’s a much more heterogeneous group.

00:26:18 ►

It’s people that come from all they crochet.

00:26:21 ►

And yet they know something.

00:26:22 ►

Something did indeed happen. There was one time in the 60s when Tim and I were working together.

00:26:29 ►

When I took psilocybin with Madison Presnell.

00:26:32 ►

Madison Presnell was a black psychiatrist.

00:26:35 ►

He was our doctor in residence.

00:26:40 ►

And Madison and I took psychedelics.

00:26:42 ►

And I grew up in Newton.

00:26:47 ►

And I was, yes, Weeks Junior High School in Newton High.

00:26:54 ►

And, see, I grew up in a middle-class Jewish ghetto.

00:27:00 ►

And I was trained not to have prejudice.

00:27:08 ►

So I didn’t have any prejudice.

00:27:17 ►

And when I took psilocybin with Madison, I really liked Madison. We were friends.

00:27:26 ►

But I was still very aware the figure was still color. And somewhere in that session,

00:27:27 ►

I looked at Madison

00:27:28 ►

and I saw a fellow being just like me

00:27:31 ►

who was traveling through an incarnation

00:27:33 ►

that was different than mine

00:27:35 ►

in which he went through wearing that costume

00:27:37 ►

and I went through wearing this costume

00:27:39 ►

and he had that set of experiences

00:27:41 ►

and I had this set of experiences

00:27:42 ►

and we both grew through the experiences.

00:27:44 ►

Everything was going fine

00:27:46 ►

and it changed my feeling towards all individual differences in other human beings

00:27:53 ►

it allowed me to see to reverse figure in ground so that I saw the way in which beings are one

00:28:01 ►

rather than the way in which there are many. Not instead of, but and also.

00:28:09 ►

And the shot in the arm that gives to one’s compassion is immense.

00:28:16 ►

Because you can, with psychedelics, you can control states of consciousness.

00:28:21 ►

You can go to the one where you look around and you see everybody as brothers and sisters.

00:28:26 ►

And then you go to the one

00:28:28 ►

where you look and you see

00:28:29 ►

that it’s behind sexual identity

00:28:31 ►

and it’s behind even separateness

00:28:33 ►

and you see you’re looking at yourself,

00:28:35 ►

looking at yourself,

00:28:35 ►

looking at yourself,

00:28:36 ►

looking at yourself.

00:28:38 ►

And there’s only one of it in drag.

00:28:41 ►

It’s the one saying,

00:28:42 ►

hey, let’s be the many for fun.

00:28:45 ►

What do we do today?

00:28:46 ►

What do I do today?

00:28:47 ►

Well, I think I’ll be many.

00:28:50 ►

Ooh, you’re scary.

00:28:52 ►

Olly olly and free.

00:28:54 ►

Now we’re the one again.

00:29:01 ►

And when I look at you as one, if you hurt, I hurt.

00:29:03 ►

and when I look at you as one if you hurt, I hurt

00:29:04 ►

and I can feel that a lot of my social action now

00:29:10 ►

my anti-nuclear stuff

00:29:11 ►

my planetary interests

00:29:13 ►

my prison stuff

00:29:14 ►

my dying project

00:29:15 ►

it all has to do with

00:29:17 ►

my experiencing the different parts of us

00:29:21 ►

that feel pain

00:29:22 ►

and just like you would adjust your back

00:29:25 ►

with a pillow when it hurts,

00:29:27 ►

you just start to move the energies

00:29:29 ►

into that area of being with it

00:29:32 ►

in a way that it is free to let go

00:29:34 ►

of the pain if it wants to.

00:29:38 ►

And I’ve had these dialogues

00:29:40 ►

with Dan Ellsberg,

00:29:41 ►

just to compete with his dialogues

00:29:43 ►

with Gordon Liddy.

00:29:44 ►

It’s a great minuet, I’ll tell you. I mean, it’s unbelievable when you think about it.

00:29:49 ►

Tim gets busted by, is this stealing your material? Tim gets busted by Gordon Liddy.

00:29:55 ►

Liddy ends up in the White House. I mean, busting Nixon.

00:30:02 ►

Tim and Liddy both are in jail. Tim and Liddy both are in jail

00:30:05 ►

Tim and Liddy both end up with the same lecture agent

00:30:08 ►

one creative thought

00:30:16 ►

and there’s a whole year of Liddy versus Larry

00:30:20 ►

Liddy went really busted Nixon

00:30:24 ►

based on breaking into Dan Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s

00:30:26 ►

office. Tim and I were partners in this minuet. Then we turned to our four, our corner, and there’s

00:30:33 ►

Gordon Liddy for him and Dan Ellsberg for me. So I’ve been doing my dance with Dan, who’s an ex-Marine captain.

00:30:49 ►

And Dan can’t understand how I could trust that place in myself that my social action would come out of a sense of the intuitive rightness of my heart and act.

00:30:55 ►

Because he wants to stir up my mind with fear and urgency.

00:31:00 ►

And I can see from psychedelia and meditation and everything I put into myself,

00:31:05 ►

because my message to you today is me.

00:31:09 ►

I’m it.

00:31:12 ►

This is the datum.

00:31:14 ►

This is the product of whatever psychedelics is about.

00:31:19 ►

It wasn’t an error in my life.

00:31:23 ►

And I can say to Dan, Dan, I don’t need to scare the shit out of myself to act

00:31:29 ►

because if I act out of fear, all I am doing is perpetuating fear. And the root of the nuclear

00:31:37 ►

fear, the root of nuclear threat is fear. And my actions can come out of joy and a sense of my impeccable

00:31:49 ►

warrior-ness, my intuitive participation in life.

00:32:08 ►

I noticed I had two kinds of people in my audiences.

00:32:15 ►

Those people who wouldn’t cop to the fact that they had experienced being other than who they thought they were.

00:32:18 ►

You know, they said, I’ve never turned on.

00:32:20 ►

Everybody’s had thousands of these experiences.

00:32:21 ►

It’s all nonsense.

00:32:23 ►

It’s just figure ground.

00:32:25 ►

You treat it as error until you can look at it. So I’d have half the audience and I want to say to them, go, baby, go, get loose,

00:32:32 ►

get high, lose a step, dance, come on, turn on. And the other part of my audience,

00:32:38 ►

they found that out and they’re floating out in La La Land.

00:32:44 ►

See, and I want to say to them come on get your shit

00:32:46 ►

together learn your zip code get a job clean here you know Because form is no other than emptiness, and emptiness is no other than form.

00:33:10 ►

And form is emptiness, and emptiness is form.

00:33:13 ►

And to deny this world of form, this exquisite, awesome world of manifestation,

00:33:20 ►

of the formless into form,

00:33:23 ►

to deny that is to go astray.

00:33:27 ►

Because it’s God made manifest.

00:33:30 ►

And I’m just learning how to be a human being.

00:33:32 ►

And I’ve been through a cycle of trying to be holy

00:33:34 ►

and push Dick under the rug.

00:33:42 ►

And I can feel all these changes going on,

00:33:45 ►

and my days at Harvard,

00:33:46 ►

and the days in psychedelia,

00:33:49 ►

and the days in India,

00:33:50 ►

it’s not an either-or proposition at all,

00:33:51 ►

it just all keeps summating,

00:33:53 ►

as your wisdom deepens,

00:33:55 ►

and your knowledge gets tempered into wisdom,

00:33:57 ►

wisdom is what you are,

00:33:58 ►

knowledge is what you know,

00:34:00 ►

that’s enough for the first round

00:34:07 ►

applause

00:34:09 ►

music Thank you. Well, I’m pretty happy to be here.

00:34:50 ►

Thank you.

00:35:00 ►

With Richard.

00:35:03 ►

With Richard.

00:35:11 ►

With David McClellan, who brought us together.

00:35:15 ►

Helped us move on.

00:35:22 ►

Helped us come together again.

00:35:27 ►

I understand that Walter Houston Clark is here.

00:35:30 ►

Walter,

00:35:31 ►

where are you? Thank you all, because I think your movement needs one good square.

00:35:55 ►

Thank you.

00:36:04 ►

Great one-liner. Maybe everybody didn’t hear that, Walter said, every good movement needs one good square.

00:36:19 ►

Walter, you’re round and you’re square and you’re spiral and whatever geometry is needed, you’re there with it.

00:36:30 ►

Thank you for coming.

00:36:36 ►

There are many other of our old friends present, I’m sure.

00:36:40 ►

There’s going to be a reception afterwards and I know we’ll meet again there.

00:36:57 ►

I feel this is a homecoming, not just in the sense of being with Richard and David and Walter, and most of all you, to be back at Harvard, but also in a deeper genetic sense.

00:37:12 ►

I was

00:37:13 ►

produced on this planet

00:37:20 ►

as an American-Irish person.

00:37:27 ►

And to come back to Boston,

00:37:31 ►

which is, after all, the Atlantic seaport

00:37:35 ►

to which eight of my great-grandparents arrived

00:37:40 ►

after migrating from the old world,

00:37:46 ►

after climbing the 3,000-mile wall

00:37:50 ►

of the stormy North Atlantic,

00:37:53 ►

to come to a new and kind of scary continent,

00:37:59 ►

to start a new life,

00:38:03 ►

settling around Boston,

00:38:05 ►

Woburn, Wafam,

00:38:08 ►

is coming back to my roots.

00:38:19 ►

There are many ways in which

00:38:21 ►

I could talk, many metaphors, many models,

00:38:24 ►

many computer programs. I could pop, many metaphors, many models, many computer programs.

00:38:25 ►

I could pop in the biocomputer today.

00:38:29 ►

I started off with the sociobiological or the genetic to recall for myself and for you that I have an Irish background,

00:38:44 ►

which is nicely celebrated in Boston.

00:38:55 ►

As soon as I got old enough to look around the planet,

00:39:00 ►

I migrated away from Massachusetts, 3,000 miles west,

00:39:07 ►

and for the last 30-odd years, I have been an immigrant, a migrant,

00:39:17 ►

a frontier person on the far banks of the Pacific Ocean,

00:39:24 ►

a Californian. on the far banks of the Pacific Ocean,

00:39:26 ►

a Californian.

00:39:37 ►

So it’s like coming back to the old sod to come to Boston.

00:39:45 ►

As I did at the invitation of David McClellan in 1960 to meet up with my partner and friend Richard.

00:39:52 ►

I didn’t know much about Harvard when I got here.

00:39:59 ►

The first few weeks I was here,

00:40:02 ►

I was guided around by Richard and by our friend Frank Barron,

00:40:11 ►

an old and loyal, distinguished psychological colleague.

00:40:23 ►

as I wandered around Cambridge and Harvard

00:40:25 ►

I slowly began to realize that

00:40:29 ►

there was an extraordinary tradition here

00:40:33 ►

a mainline tradition

00:40:39 ►

of psychological inquiry

00:40:43 ►

now I’m not talking about Professor Skinner of psychological inquiry.

00:40:46 ►

Now, I’m not talking about Professor Skinner

00:40:48 ►

or Professor Bruner

00:40:51 ►

or Professor Kissinger

00:40:53 ►

or Professor Schlesinger,

00:40:57 ►

all of whom have

00:40:59 ►

performed brilliantly.

00:41:04 ►

I’m talking about another tradition

00:41:06 ►

which has existed in this small village

00:41:11 ►

since the early days of its founding.

00:41:16 ►

A tradition of transcendental thinking.

00:41:23 ►

A tradition of wondrous internal paganism, a tradition that said,

00:41:33 ►

turn on, tune in, go within, become self-reliant, a tradition that was perhaps founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

00:41:51 ►

You know, Emerson is an interesting person.

00:42:01 ►

Emerson came to the Harvard Divinity School in, I believe, 1838. Before that, he’d been in Europe,

00:42:06 ►

where he had hung out with such notorious druggies

00:42:10 ►

as Coleridge, Wordsworth,

00:42:15 ►

the nature school of English philosophy and poetry,

00:42:20 ►

who were expanding their minds with such substances as hashish and opium,

00:42:28 ►

turning on their minds

00:42:29 ►

with such strange and curious

00:42:30 ►

and illuminating books

00:42:33 ►

as the Bhagavad Gita.

00:42:36 ►

Swarmasam came back to Boston,

00:42:39 ►

came across the Charles River

00:42:40 ►

at the Harvard Divinity School,

00:42:44 ►

gave that famous speech

00:42:46 ►

in which he said,

00:42:48 ►

don’t look for God

00:42:50 ►

in the temples

00:42:52 ►

nor in the buildings

00:42:54 ►

nor from the pulpits.

00:42:56 ►

Look within.

00:42:59 ►

Find divinity

00:43:00 ►

inside yourself.

00:43:04 ►

Drop out. divinity inside yourself, drop out, become self-reliant, translated as do your own thing.

00:43:19 ►

And for, I believe, 33 years, he was not allowed back

00:43:25 ►

on these sacred

00:43:26 ►

we’re back after 20

00:43:39 ►

they’re more forgiving now.

00:43:47 ►

As an evolutionary genetic scientist,

00:43:50 ►

I would hope this is one piece of evidence

00:43:53 ►

suggesting that evolution is speeding up.

00:44:02 ►

Of course, American psychology,

00:44:04 ►

as we were taught it

00:44:07 ►

was founded

00:44:10 ►

by a Harvard professor

00:44:12 ►

named William James

00:44:15 ►

he wrote Principles of Psychology

00:44:24 ►

which is the classic text of American psychology.

00:44:31 ►

And looking that over as I arrived here, I came across those interesting chapters,

00:44:38 ►

which led me to read the other book by William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience.

00:44:40 ►

by William James,

00:44:44 ►

The Varieties of Religious Experience.

00:44:50 ►

A book which has corrupted many a mind.

00:44:59 ►

In which he describes the glories of nitrous oxide in far more colorful prose

00:45:04 ►

than the most intoxicated Irishman.

00:45:13 ►

Every day as we walked from

00:45:15 ►

across Harvard Square

00:45:17 ►

to our offices in

00:45:19 ►

5 Divinity Avenue,

00:45:23 ►

the significance of which

00:45:27 ►

did not escape us

00:45:28 ►

we passed by that little

00:45:34 ►

jewel chapel

00:45:35 ►

the Swedenborgian chapel

00:45:36 ►

and Frank Barron

00:45:38 ►

told me that

00:45:39 ►

William James’ father

00:45:40 ►

was the

00:45:41 ►

I think he was the minister there

00:45:44 ►

the great em think he was the minister there.

00:45:58 ►

The great eminence of the social relations department in those days was another wondrous New England scholar named Harry Murray.

00:46:06 ►

Harry Murray was not your run-of-the-mill pedantic academic.

00:46:13 ►

Among other things, he was one of the founders of the OSS, which later became the CIA.

00:46:32 ►

During World War II, he assembled the best minds, if there are such, of American psychology to develop new ways of assessing personality.

00:46:52 ►

Some of the first studies on brainwashing, drug-induced cathartic verbalization, were done by the OSS.

00:47:03 ►

When we met Murray for the first time, after we’d started our research, he looked with great interest and approval. And, as I remember, quickly volunteered to be one of our subjects.

00:47:12 ►

It was a little later that we discovered that the tradition of transcendent thinking,

00:47:20 ►

the tradition of mind-expanding chemistry was not limited to Emerson or Thoreau or to Margaret Fuller, one of the first great American feminist philosophers,

00:47:48 ►

who also had spent some time in Europe studying transcendental philosophy,

00:47:50 ►

taking the drugs of the time,

00:48:00 ►

married a dashing Italian revolutionary baron,

00:48:05 ►

came back to America to continue the crusade, and unfortunately was shipwrecked off Fire Island. In addition to this long tradition, mainstream tradition Gnostic Harvard experimentation.

00:48:34 ►

There was another branch of drug research.

00:48:40 ►

The CIA had been running projects in this area for at least ten years before David McClellan

00:48:44 ►

brought the two of us together.

00:48:48 ►

Matter of fact,

00:48:49 ►

hundreds of Harvard students

00:48:51 ►

had been tripped out

00:48:53 ►

by answering ads

00:48:56 ►

in the Harvard Crimson.

00:48:59 ►

He goes,

00:49:00 ►

you got $25

00:49:01 ►

if you volunteered

00:49:03 ►

for an experiment.

00:49:05 ►

Turned out later You got $25 if you volunteered for an experiment. Really?

00:49:05 ►

Mm-hmm.

00:49:05 ►

Yeah.

00:49:07 ►

Turned out later that such people as Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg

00:49:11 ►

had first been illuminated by volunteering for such experiments.

00:49:21 ►

So when I got here in 1960, I must tell you that

00:49:24 ►

I was a square kid on the block.

00:49:31 ►

Harvard University was the big league of chemical psychoactive exploration.

00:49:41 ►

And for that, I thank you, John Harvard.

00:49:54 ►

Starting in 1960, that was an interesting year.

00:49:58 ►

John Kennedy was running for the presidency against Richard Nixon.

00:50:04 ►

I guess he stole it, the election,

00:50:08 ►

in Texas and Chicago, but in any case, he became president. There was a sense of youthful

00:50:17 ►

energy in the country. Richard and I and Frank Barron, and Walter Clark, and Gunther Weil, George Litwin, and many…

00:50:34 ►

Ralph Metzner.

00:50:34 ►

Ralph Metzner, and many others began what was known as the Harvard Psychedelic Research Project.

00:50:42 ►

Harvard Psychedelic Research Project.

00:50:47 ►

In those days,

00:50:49 ►

it did seem almost miraculously simple.

00:50:55 ►

We gave,

00:50:58 ►

we shared,

00:51:00 ►

we took these drugs

00:51:01 ►

00:51:03 ►

novices, as amateurs,

00:51:14 ►

hesitantly moving into a field that had no signposts or guidelines.

00:51:22 ►

There was simply no language in Western psychology

00:51:24 ►

to describe altered states of consciousness

00:51:26 ►

or ecstasies or visions or terrors.

00:51:31 ►

The psychiatrist said these were psychotomimetic experiences,

00:51:35 ►

but that didn’t seem to tell us too much.

00:51:43 ►

We were smart enough, and I give us this credit

00:51:46 ►

to know how little we knew

00:51:49 ►

00:51:52 ►

we share these experiences

00:51:56 ►

with several hundred people

00:51:58 ►

first of all with young graduate students

00:52:01 ►

and with young instructors

00:52:04 ►

and older professors. As

00:52:09 ►

a matter of fact, anyone that really wanted to take the voyage was welcome to come along.

00:52:20 ►

We went out to Concord Prison because we wanted to see how the illuminated or the activated or the accelerated brain would work with people very dissimilar from Harvard professors and Divinity School scholars.

00:52:42 ►

With the leadership of Dr. Pankey and Walter Clark,

00:52:47 ►

we went over to Boston University.

00:52:50 ►

And on that famous Good Friday,

00:52:55 ►

we gave psychedelic drugs and placebos

00:52:58 ►

to, I think, 30 divinity students from Andover Newton.

00:53:18 ►

It’s probably the greatest Good Friday in 2,000 years. For half of the subjects.

00:53:33 ►

The control subjects got to read the Bible.

00:53:41 ►

If we learn one thing that day, Walter,

00:53:43 ►

we learn that it’s foolish to do a double-blind,

00:53:45 ►

controlled placebo experiment in which you have half the people in the room on an LSD

00:53:53 ►

and the other half not, because after five minutes, no one’s fooling anyone. In these first two or three years,

00:54:20 ►

we performed,

00:54:24 ►

without the benefit of federal grants

00:54:28 ►

or foundation support.

00:54:32 ►

There must have been 30, 35 of us

00:54:34 ►

working together voluntarily

00:54:36 ►

with no

00:54:39 ►

principal investigators.

00:54:50 ►

That’s awesome. principal investigators once you put that pill in your mouth you were the principal investigator

00:54:52 ►

like it or not

00:54:55 ►

it did seem so simple

00:55:00 ►

and so wondrous

00:55:02 ►

because we were

00:55:04 ►

we were fairly good people

00:55:07 ►

with a wonderful support system.

00:55:12 ►

Seriously and frivolously,

00:55:16 ►

joyously and thoughtfully,

00:55:18 ►

knowing that we were on some frontier,

00:55:23 ►

moving into some wonderful future.

00:55:30 ►

And naturally, our results were positive.

00:55:37 ►

Because we were positive.

00:55:43 ►

There were a few moments of fright.

00:55:48 ►

Ships lost aloft.

00:55:53 ►

Aldous, where are you?

00:55:57 ►

Where’d Aldous go?

00:56:00 ►

Oh, yeah.

00:56:02 ►

Here’s Aldous.

00:56:04 ►

There’s Wilbur Norville.

00:56:12 ►

We kept careful records and we made thoughtful observations

00:56:16 ►

and came out with many important theories of psychopharmacology,

00:56:22 ►

including set and setting and so forth. The problem was, of

00:56:32 ►

course, that I guess the world wasn’t ready for us. I think they were. I think it all worked fine. I mean, I don’t for one moment wish that I was not anymore.

00:57:12 ►

There are a few Harvard people here in the room.

00:57:15 ►

About 10%?

00:57:23 ►

I think I can speak for Richard

00:57:24 ►

when I say that

00:57:25 ►

we have never, since the day of our being canned,

00:57:33 ►

felt any rancor towards Harvard University.

00:57:39 ►

I’ve already told you it’s the main line of American mysticism and transcendental thinking. You’re way ahead

00:57:49 ►

of West Point on that. There have been many wonderful men and women

00:58:06 ►

that have been Harvard graduates

00:58:09 ►

and it’s nice to say

00:58:10 ►

you know I’m a Harvard graduate

00:58:12 ►

in the history of Harvard

00:58:20 ►

there have only been two men who’ve been fired.

00:58:29 ►

Is that true? Really? I didn’t know that.

00:58:43 ►

I didn’t know that. Emerson doesn’t count.

00:58:46 ►

He was like,

00:58:47 ►

I’m long sabbatical.

00:58:53 ►

Whether it’s a fact or not,

00:58:54 ►

I love the image.

00:58:55 ►

Yeah.

00:58:57 ►

It’s a serious question,

00:58:58 ►

you know, in a hundred years

00:58:59 ►

whether Harvard will be known

00:59:00 ►

for its graduates or its…

00:59:03 ►

Oh, God.

00:59:06 ►

What chutzpah he has.

00:59:08 ►

It’s unbelievable.

00:59:15 ►

What was the name of that college

00:59:18 ►

that fired Socrates, Richard? we’re going to make sure

00:59:32 ►

that Harvard’s name will go down in history

00:59:34 ►

when we left Harvard…

00:59:46 ►

By the way, you know, it was the Harvard Crimson that got us canned.

00:59:55 ►

The Harvard Crimson has asked both of us to write an op-ed essay,

01:00:00 ►

which will appear, I think, in Monday’s paper.

01:00:04 ►

I’d like to accept that invitation

01:00:06 ►

if you’re going to be around, will you do it together?

01:00:08 ►

I’m not going to do it

01:00:08 ►

look if I do it

01:00:10 ►

send my love

01:00:13 ►

and if the Harvard Crimson is here

01:00:15 ►

what I’d like to do is

01:00:16 ►

I’d like to come over to the Harvard Crimson office tomorrow

01:00:20 ►

and sit there in the newsroom

01:00:23 ►

and if you can loan me a typewriter, I can even

01:00:26 ►

handle a word processor, and I’d like to type a little essay right there in the newsroom.

01:00:36 ►

I’ll get some notes from you so that you’ll know what to say.

01:00:41 ►

I’ve signed your name to joint essays in the past.

01:00:48 ►

He has indeed he wrote psychedelic experience

01:00:52 ►

when I was out in the kitchen washing dishes

01:00:54 ►

now sometime

01:01:04 ►

after we left Harvard,

01:01:09 ►

well, right after we left Harvard,

01:01:10 ►

let’s see, we went to Mexico,

01:01:12 ►

got kicked out of Mexico.

01:01:15 ►

Dominica.

01:01:15 ►

Dominica, got kicked out of Dominica.

01:01:17 ►

Antigua.

01:01:18 ►

Antigua.

01:01:18 ►

Oh, did we get kicked out of it?

01:01:23 ►

Millbrook.

01:01:23 ►

Then we went to Millbrook.

01:01:24 ►

Yeah.

01:01:25 ►

When we assembled at Millbrook, New York to Millbrook yeah like when we assembled

01:01:26 ►

at Millbrook, New York

01:01:27 ►

in the fall of 1963

01:01:28 ►

we looked at each other

01:01:29 ►

and said

01:01:30 ►

we’ve been kicked out

01:01:31 ►

of one college

01:01:32 ►

and three countries

01:01:33 ►

in three months

01:01:34 ►

now that’s

01:01:35 ►

we’re doing well

01:01:37 ►

yeah

01:01:38 ►

and then we found

01:01:39 ►

melon country

01:01:40 ►

melon country

01:01:41 ►

yeah

01:01:41 ►

interestingly enough

01:01:43 ►

I haven’t showed this

01:01:44 ►

to Richard yet,

01:01:45 ►

but I got my Freedom of Information files from the CIA,

01:01:48 ►

and they actually tracked us,

01:01:52 ►

and I have the CIA documents about what we were doing in Dominica

01:01:57 ►

and how many people we were there.

01:01:59 ►

And they say, these people are going to start, quote,

01:02:02 ►

this is CIA language, an alleged happiness hotel.

01:02:19 ►

We should have hired them for press.

01:02:25 ►

The CIA is wonderful, and I’m sure that Harvard being the home of the OSS and the CIA,

01:02:33 ►

I hope there’s some alumni here of the CIA.

01:02:37 ►

Like when they kidnapped me in Afghanistan, the memo said, informal extradition.

01:02:44 ►

Really? said, informal extradition. Anyway, no more CIA jokes. After this experience of getting

01:02:57 ►

a can from Harvard in three countries, we ended up at Mellon Country in Millbrook, New

01:03:03 ►

York, and stayed there for about three years.

01:03:06 ►

A wonderful series

01:03:07 ►

of chapters

01:03:07 ►

in my autobiography.

01:03:10 ►

Just released.

01:03:13 ►

Being published

01:03:14 ►

next month

01:03:14 ►

by Jeremy Tarcher

01:03:16 ►

and Houghton Mifflin.

01:03:18 ►

Jeremy, are you here?

01:03:21 ►

There’s Jeremy. Thank you.

01:03:32 ►

Two wonderful pictures of Richard in my autobiography.

01:03:34 ►

Worth it for that.

01:03:35 ►

It’s actually good, though.

01:03:39 ►

I read parts of it, because I’ve only seen it for a few hours.

01:03:41 ►

But it is fun.

01:03:46 ►

So we ended up in Millbrook, New York and stayed there for three or four years.

01:03:49 ►

And then we realized that we had escaped

01:03:52 ►

from a wonderful institution

01:03:54 ►

called Harvard University.

01:03:57 ►

And it set up another institution called,

01:03:59 ►

well, it was IFIF.

01:04:00 ►

It was the Kaseya Foundation.

01:04:01 ►

It was called the…

01:04:02 ►

Freedom Center.

01:04:03 ►

Freedom Center, League for Spiritual Discovery.

01:04:05 ►

God knows we had a name of the week.

01:04:07 ►

God knows.

01:04:07 ►

I remember that one.

01:04:11 ►

We’d had enough of happiness hotel keeping.

01:04:16 ►

The problem with running happiness hotels

01:04:18 ►

is that nobody wants to leave.

01:04:33 ►

So we decided to, we literally decided we would, remember that time we decided we would define ourselves as global travelers. This was perhaps, this was after Sputnik, but before

01:04:41 ►

Apollo. And we found out that for, in those days, $1,700, you could

01:04:45 ►

get an around-the-world ticket, which you had to use within one year. So we agreed that

01:04:52 ►

we would make an annual rotation around the globe in one year. And first Ralph Messner went and then Nen and I went and then you went

01:05:05 ►

and we

01:05:07 ►

we closed

01:05:10 ►

down our center at Millbrook

01:05:11 ►

and like

01:05:14 ►

astronauts

01:05:18 ►

buckling our

01:05:20 ►

spacesuits and heading

01:05:22 ►

for the four quadrants of the galaxy

01:05:23 ►

or like knights of old saddling

01:05:26 ►

to go to the four quarters, or four prison escapees heading in four different directions,

01:05:36 ►

whatever metaphor you want to use, we decided to spread over the globe and see what was going on out there.

01:05:47 ►

And after 20 years, we reassemble to share with each other and with you some of our observations.

01:05:57 ►

The last 20 years have been remarkable.

01:06:00 ►

They have put us through the changes, And we’ve put them through some changes.

01:06:10 ►

I know there’s no us and them.

01:06:14 ►

It’s only us putting ourselves through changes.

01:06:16 ►

I know you’re going to say that.

01:06:17 ►

I’ve got to treat you in language.

01:06:19 ►

I’ve got to clean up his act.

01:06:23 ►

I’ll be the straight man.

01:06:26 ►

Intern.

01:06:27 ►

Richard is a Unitarian.

01:06:30 ►

He ends up his book

01:06:31 ►

by calling me

01:06:31 ►

a Theosophical Unitarian Minister,

01:06:34 ►

right?

01:06:34 ►

Is that what you call me?

01:06:36 ►

With a congregation of millions.

01:06:38 ►

Congregation of millions, yeah.

01:06:39 ►

It’s not a bad role.

01:06:40 ►

It’s a little stodgy.

01:06:42 ►

I know.

01:06:44 ►

Well, I read his book.

01:06:50 ►

I read his book putting on this image of myself that his mind creates, you know,

01:06:56 ►

and I’m this horny minister, you know, is all I can describe myself with hope I use the metaphor

01:07:13 ►

one of the books that

01:07:15 ►

really damaged my brain

01:07:18 ►

at an early age

01:07:19 ►

and left me

01:07:22 ►

hopelessly

01:07:23 ►

whatever you call that.

01:07:28 ►

It’s too hopeless to remember.

01:07:29 ►

Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.

01:07:33 ►

I think that’s the ultimate American book.

01:07:36 ►

It’s the old trip up and down the river.

01:07:44 ►

I only crossed the river.

01:07:48 ►

Helping to free

01:07:49 ►

any slaves along the way.

01:07:53 ►

I can never figure out whether I’m Tom

01:07:56 ►

and you’re Dick or Jerry.

01:07:59 ►

Tom and Jerry, I think it is.

01:08:02 ►

I’m hooking your Tom.

01:08:08 ►

I always saw you as this captain of the African queen

01:08:10 ►

which is funny considering

01:08:13 ►

me standing behind you

01:08:16 ►

like Winston Churchill

01:08:18 ►

being stolid

01:08:19 ►

he wasn’t it turned out

01:08:21 ►

but he looked that way

01:08:22 ►

giving you courage to go on that was the myth i used to work up you know

01:08:29 ►

we got a few miles off that one we got miles out of so many scenarios and so many myths

01:08:35 ►

we still are now when we when we uh

01:08:40 ►

whenever you want to play, just tell me.

01:08:45 ►

Yeah, you can listen to my thing.

01:08:46 ►

When we left 20 years ago today,

01:08:50 ►

on our voyage of discovery,

01:08:54 ►

I’ve been very involved in politics,

01:09:00 ►

activism, prison escapes,

01:09:04 ►

running for governor

01:09:05 ►

running for governor

01:09:06 ►

exile

01:09:09 ►

I’ve been in 40 jails

01:09:12 ►

in four continents

01:09:14 ►

I haven’t even been busted yet.

01:09:33 ►

I’m ready to notch it.

01:09:39 ►

We may have blown that whole stage.

01:09:40 ►

Yeah.

01:09:41 ►

That seems past.

01:09:42 ►

Well, I did it for you.

01:09:44 ►

I appreciate that.

01:09:47 ►

I knew that at the time.

01:09:56 ►

I find that the metaphors I’ve been picking up in the last 20 years have been different, naturally.

01:10:01 ►

I’ve gone through different terrains, learned new dialects, perfected some of the old dialects.

01:10:04 ►

The language is important, and as I listen to Richard

01:10:06 ►

and read what he writes,

01:10:08 ►

I see that he’s saying

01:10:09 ►

very similar things,

01:10:11 ►

but in different words.

01:10:13 ►

At the moment,

01:10:15 ►

I’m very intrigued

01:10:17 ►

by the language

01:10:17 ►

of the information revolution,

01:10:22 ►

computerese.

01:10:26 ►

I’m entranced and enthralled by the notion of the brain

01:10:29 ►

as a network of 40 billion

01:10:31 ►

personal computers

01:10:32 ►

apples and oranges

01:10:34 ►

and IBMs

01:10:36 ►

and the drugs or access

01:10:38 ►

codes and so forth

01:10:40 ►

so that

01:10:41 ►

we have

01:10:44 ►

naturally picked up the dialects of the terrains we’ve been going through.

01:10:49 ►

I have been with Richard now for about almost 48 hours.

01:10:58 ►

Yeah.

01:10:58 ►

In Massachusetts on a farm, coming across northern Massachusetts.

01:11:08 ►

It’s been intoxicatingly wonderful 48 hours.

01:11:16 ►

We’re just very happy to be here.

01:11:20 ►

Yeah.

01:11:20 ►

Yeah.

01:11:33 ►

Do you want to take a break?

01:11:38 ►

Why don’t we take a break and come back in ten minutes?

01:11:43 ►

And we, the real electricity, the real… Well, it may or may not be, but we’ll have questions and answers.

01:11:47 ►

No, but it can come, I hope, from your questions, your answers, your comments.

01:11:49 ►

We’re going to have microphones somewhere over there, I believe.

01:11:52 ►

Yeah.

01:11:53 ►

I hope you have one microphone and one camera.

01:11:56 ►

Maybe there’s one right there and one there.

01:11:57 ►

Ah, good.

01:11:57 ►

Okay.

01:11:58 ►

See you in ten minutes.

01:11:59 ►

Yeah.

01:12:14 ►

Good. I just like to introduce to you

01:12:18 ►

the person who brought us together today.

01:12:35 ►

person who brought us together today. Our reunion is the conception, naturally, of a student. His name is Joey Kasson.

01:12:47 ►

I ask you to join us in a grateful applause for our host.

01:12:53 ►

Thank you for this moment.

01:13:15 ►

Did you know, by the way, that Samuel Clemens, of course, grew up in Hannibal, Missouri,

01:13:21 ►

was working as a journalist or typesetter, got a little bored. And what set him on his wondrous voyage of discovery and adventure,

01:13:32 ►

he read a book about some travels in South America in which the

01:13:43 ►

adventurer reported that the South American Indians in the Andes

01:13:48 ►

were using a substance which they chewed or ingested,

01:13:53 ►

which gave them tremendous euphoria and energy.

01:13:56 ►

It came from the cocoa leaf.

01:13:58 ►

So he started his career as a wanderer

01:14:02 ►

by leaving Hannibal and going down to New Orleans,

01:14:05 ►

where he planned to take a boat to Peru and bring back and market to the American public a substance

01:14:11 ►

that would produce euphoria and energy. says there’s a long tradition of neurochemistry that we are just beginning to…

01:14:32 ►

I like you in spite of the methods we’ve used to get there.

01:14:39 ►

It’s interesting.

01:14:40 ►

I saw Tim last year.

01:14:42 ►

I hadn’t seen him for quite a while.

01:14:43 ►

We’d see each other often,

01:14:46 ►

but it was often a little like we had no business with each other.

01:14:49 ►

But I really wanted to honor Timothy,

01:14:51 ►

and I went up to his beautiful home

01:14:55 ►

in the Hollywood Hills

01:14:56 ►

with an absolutely exquisite wife, Barbara,

01:14:58 ►

and son, Zach.

01:15:01 ►

And I brought fruit and wine

01:15:04 ►

and a beautiful day

01:15:06 ►

and we sat outside in the sun.

01:15:09 ►

And there was a point,

01:15:11 ►

Tim and I exchanged,

01:15:12 ►

you know, it’s like explorers meeting

01:15:15 ►

and where have you been

01:15:16 ►

and let me describe the terrain there.

01:15:20 ►

And then at one point in the living room,

01:15:21 ►

later in the evening,

01:15:24 ►

you and I were alone for a moment.

01:15:26 ►

I think Barbara was putting Zach to bed or something like that.

01:15:28 ►

And I said to you,

01:15:31 ►

Timothy, it’s more beautiful than it’s ever been before.

01:15:33 ►

It’s all so empty.

01:15:35 ►

And you said, it is for me too.

01:15:38 ►

Remember that?

01:15:39 ►

And it was like at that moment we met in a space

01:15:42 ►

that we know each other so well

01:15:43 ►

that exists behind all of the Leary drama

01:15:47 ►

and the Alpert drama and all that stuff.

01:15:51 ►

It was just a flicker.

01:15:52 ►

It was like a reassurance in a way.

01:15:55 ►

It’s like grace for me.

01:15:57 ►

Did you feel that when I…

01:15:58 ►

Yeah.

01:16:02 ►

It’s interesting because explorers go in these different directions

01:16:05 ►

any paranoia you’ve got is going to you’re going to feed upon it because the models are so disparate

01:16:12 ►

that i’ll experience us as separate if i get caught in my model at all

01:16:19 ►

and i keep getting caught and so you became an object to me. Too bad about Tim.

01:16:26 ►

Got caught in materialism, wants to go into outer space, you know,

01:16:30 ►

like, what kind of crap is that, you know, the inner space?

01:16:33 ►

Oh, yeah.

01:16:38 ►

Should we play that? Which one should we play?

01:16:45 ►

We better do. We’ve got to be out of here in 45 minutes, by the way.

01:16:48 ►

We have to stop in 45 minutes,

01:16:50 ►

so the question thing at some point, whenever you want.

01:16:53 ►

There are tremendous differences.

01:16:55 ►

There have been and always will be between us

01:16:59 ►

because we come from different gene pools.

01:17:04 ►

We were exposed to different imprints.

01:17:06 ►

At least.

01:17:07 ►

Child, yes.

01:17:09 ►

At least.

01:17:10 ►

I’m playing on the error variance.

01:17:13 ►

Go ahead.

01:17:14 ►

I honor these differences,

01:17:16 ►

but there’s a similarity that I find,

01:17:19 ►

not just in us,

01:17:21 ►

but in hundreds, thousands,

01:17:29 ►

and I may be Celtic exaggerating here, but I would say millions of Americans that share our basic position,

01:18:02 ►

A discovery of, a resurrection of, an acceptance of, an eventual, occasional glorification of our singularity, our uniqueness, our rarity as highly special people.

01:18:03 ►

We’re all that way. The way I’d say it is, the deeper

01:18:05 ►

I got, the deeper

01:18:08 ►

I could acknowledge that part of me

01:18:10 ►

which is one with everything.

01:18:12 ►

It just is.

01:18:13 ►

The deeper the faith, not belief, but

01:18:15 ►

faith, the more I

01:18:18 ►

could let myself into my humanity,

01:18:20 ►

into my uniqueness.

01:18:21 ►

And I’ve never been more fully unique

01:18:23 ►

than when I am least fully unique.

01:18:26 ►

I mean, I’m not,

01:18:27 ►

it’s going from somebody-ness

01:18:28 ►

to nobody’s specialness

01:18:29 ►

to uniqueness.

01:18:31 ►

You know, it’s like a unique face of God

01:18:33 ►

of the formless.

01:18:36 ►

And it’s interesting

01:18:37 ►

because when he said he went to prison for me,

01:18:39 ►

of course he does.

01:18:40 ►

Casper Weinberg is working for me too I’m carrying an American passport

01:18:52 ►

I mean what the hell

01:18:53 ►

let’s take some questions

01:18:58 ►

we have questions on either side

01:19:01 ►

and we have to do them alternately

01:19:02 ►

and don’t yell out unless you’re at a microphone

01:19:04 ►

and where are we there’s one there and where’s the one over there okay why don’t we

01:19:10 ►

start over here okay um basically i have so many questions right now that i couldn’t really think

01:19:21 ►

of one that would cover a broad spectrum of things i’d like to know from you

01:19:26 ►

but we’ve got very little time all right the one that i’d like to ask is where do we go from here

01:19:34 ►

you know i mean you’ve you’ve said something up for us we got the question and yeah where do we

01:19:40 ►

go from here i’ll tell you may i suggest something? Let me suggest. You and I sort of face each other a little more

01:19:46 ►

and let the questions sort of come into the middle of the consciousness

01:19:49 ►

and let’s play with them for a couple of minutes.

01:19:52 ►

Is that all right with everybody?

01:19:56 ►

It makes you a little into the role of being voyeurist, but that’s not bad.

01:20:00 ►

It’s as fun as any other role.

01:20:03 ►

Is this okay?

01:20:05 ►

Okay.

01:20:06 ►

So the question before us, doctor.

01:20:11 ►

Where do we go from here?

01:20:16 ►

Well, everyone is pilot of your own spaceship,

01:20:19 ►

and there’s no reason why you can’t go wherever you want to go.

01:20:24 ►

So, assuming… there’s no reason why you can’t go wherever you want to go.

01:20:32 ►

Assuming you are serious enough and intelligent enough to get the navigational guides,

01:20:35 ►

to check out the landing strips,

01:20:38 ►

to know your equipment well enough to know

01:20:40 ►

what speed and altitude you can move at,

01:20:45 ►

but there’s no reason why at this moment in history

01:20:47 ►

we are so fortunate, so blessed with options

01:20:52 ►

and with virtuous perspectives,

01:20:56 ►

there’s no limiting where any one of us can go

01:21:00 ►

individually or collectively.

01:21:02 ►

I agree.

01:21:05 ►

I have a friend who is a disembodied being named Emmanuel.

01:21:10 ►

You have your kind of friends, I have mine, okay?

01:21:13 ►

And Emmanuel speaks through a lady named Pat Rodergast.

01:21:17 ►

And Emmanuel, who I trust completely, I said to him,

01:21:20 ►

Emmanuel, what do I tell people about death?

01:21:21 ►

He says, tell them it’s absolutely safe.

01:21:21 ►

Emmanuel, what do I tell people about death?

01:21:23 ►

He says, tell them it’s absolutely safe.

01:21:30 ►

He said, it’s like taking off a tight shoe.

01:21:33 ►

Who wouldn’t trust somebody like that?

01:21:38 ►

And Emmanuel said to me, you have the choice of whether you want to be the creator or the victim.

01:21:45 ►

He said that all form in the universe, including your mind and your thoughts, is part of law.

01:21:47 ►

It’s unfolding lawfully.

01:21:49 ►

It’s the karma unfolding, just law.

01:21:51 ►

And within that, there is no freedom.

01:21:54 ►

So there really is no freedom in form.

01:21:57 ►

The freedom comes as the formless creates the form.

01:21:59 ►

It is where the freedom is. And that freedom of the formless coming into form

01:22:05 ►

is a place from which you stand,

01:22:08 ►

or you don’t stand,

01:22:10 ►

in which you experience the creation

01:22:12 ►

of your own universe around you.

01:22:15 ►

And he said, you have the choice.

01:22:17 ►

Do you want to identify with the law,

01:22:20 ►

or do you want to identify with that

01:22:21 ►

which lies behind the law?

01:22:23 ►

And so I think your answer is right on.

01:22:26 ►

Everybody’s got every possibility.

01:22:29 ►

I can see the kind of tensely thinness

01:22:32 ►

of the whole political superstructure of the earth.

01:22:36 ►

It’s like one thought away from something.

01:22:39 ►

Do you get that feeling?

01:22:45 ►

Go ahead.

01:22:48 ►

Question.

01:22:50 ►

Richard Alpert.

01:22:52 ►

You said, Mr. Alpert,

01:22:53 ►

emptiness is form, form is emptiness.

01:22:56 ►

To deny this world is to go astray.

01:22:59 ►

Yet I couldn’t help noticing during the course of this dialogue that now and then you would detach yourself and go into a meditation.

01:23:03 ►

It reminded me as I was watching you that Emerson once said,

01:23:06 ►

the unity of mankind is to be found when all of the uniters are perfectly isolated.

01:23:11 ►

Personally, I think this is a deception.

01:23:14 ►

I think that the unity of mankind is not to be found when we are detached from each other at all.

01:23:19 ►

We must make our oneness real.

01:23:21 ►

We must do the very thing you’re doing in prison.

01:23:23 ►

Okay, we got the question. Come on, don’t do that.

01:23:26 ►

I’ll say what I want, just as you did.

01:23:30 ►

We’re all one, brother. I say what I want and I’m free too.

01:23:33 ►

This is Cambridge and Harvard, okay.

01:23:35 ►

Just answer my question.

01:23:41 ►

Of course I’ll answer your question.

01:23:43 ►

If you wish. You don’t have to either.

01:23:45 ►

You’re free also.

01:23:46 ►

I understand.

01:23:50 ►

I like rowdy crowds.

01:24:01 ►

I like best the rowdy ones where the hearts are open.

01:24:05 ►

You know?

01:24:08 ►

And just as long as there’s love, there can be incredible rowdiness.

01:24:12 ►

That’s like an Irish, you know, thing.

01:24:17 ►

The minute the love gets brittle and everybody’s trying to do it, you know, when the humor gets that way.

01:24:22 ►

It’s Shiva, but I don’t particularly choose those evenings.

01:24:26 ►

We can smother any aggression with mellow.

01:24:33 ►

We’re answering your question.

01:24:35 ►

Don’t go away.

01:24:40 ►

I think that the Castaneda line of being an impeccable warrior is right on.

01:24:46 ►

And I think to be an impeccable warrior, you can’t be a slob at any level.

01:24:49 ►

And the level at which we are at form,

01:24:52 ►

to be a conscious being means to care about other human beings

01:24:55 ►

and be involved with them and be responsible for them

01:24:58 ►

and to be sharing with them.

01:25:00 ►

And that unity is the physical vehicle into the other realms of unity.

01:25:05 ►

It’s a method.

01:25:06 ►

It’s the method of tantra, of going through form to beyond form.

01:25:10 ►

And it’s an honorable form.

01:25:13 ►

It’s an honorable form.

01:25:15 ►

Question?

01:25:16 ►

Yes, good afternoon.

01:25:18 ►

While I appreciate the twain image,

01:25:20 ►

I personally would view it more as the Brett and Bart Maverick of the scene. I would

01:25:26 ►

like to ask you, Mr. Leary, what, A, was your relationship to the Brotherhood of Eternal Love,

01:25:31 ►

if any, in Southern California? And B, what did you think of Kesey’s letter to you that was written,

01:25:38 ►

I believe, and published in Rolling Stone when you were in exile?

01:25:48 ►

stone when you were in exile? The Brotherhood of Eternal Love was a group of Southern California young people. It was about eight or ten men and women, or no, couples, 16 or 20 men and women,

01:25:59 ►

for one brief period were bringing in more dope into this country than perhaps anyone in history.

01:26:13 ►

There’s that rare moment in American history when dope smuggling was a, if I can excuse

01:26:19 ►

the expression, a holy enterprise. They were… Well…

01:26:25 ►

It should be, but these were the days before transport planes

01:26:34 ►

and Bolivian generals and million-dollar payoffs.

01:26:37 ►

These were kids, high school and college kids from Southern California

01:26:41 ►

that would go to Mexico on their old beat-up cars

01:26:43 ►

and drink tequila with the wonderful people down there and bring a few kilos back, smoke half, and

01:26:48 ►

sell the rest. They were doing it conspicuous underconsumption. They drove terrible cars.

01:26:58 ►

They were always breaking down on the highway filled with contraband. There were eight or ten of them.

01:27:09 ►

They became a legend.

01:27:10 ►

They became a myth.

01:27:11 ►

At one point,

01:27:12 ►

you could go in any youth ghetto

01:27:13 ►

in the Western world

01:27:15 ►

or you could go to any town

01:27:16 ►

in Afghanistan or Lebanon

01:27:18 ►

or Pakistan

01:27:21 ►

and say the few magic syllables, Brotherhood of Eternal Love

01:27:27 ►

and you were immediately accepted. Then it became like any

01:27:30 ►

myth or institution. It became too popular. Pretty soon there were lots of people going around

01:27:35 ►

saying they were members of this group and eventually

01:27:39 ►

it became like Johnny Walker after a while.

01:27:45 ►

Like any other group.

01:27:48 ►

The same thing happened to Christianity, you know, after…

01:27:55 ►

Ken Kesey has always had a very interesting relationship with us.

01:28:04 ►

We honor and love and respect what Kesey did always had a very interesting relationship with us.

01:28:09 ►

We honor and love and respect what Kesey did on the West Coast when we were in our more meditative and pedantic scholarly mood here at Harvard at Millbrook.

01:28:17 ►

Kesey and Ken Babs and his group, the Merry Pranksters,

01:28:20 ►

just barreled across the United States emitting day-glow sparks of illumination

01:28:26 ►

and played a wonderful role.

01:28:30 ►

I find Ken kind of dull.

01:28:33 ►

Yeah.

01:28:36 ►

He has become dull.

01:28:38 ►

Yeah, he has become dull, exactly.

01:28:40 ►

But I think he’ll come back.

01:28:42 ►

Undoubtedly, we all do.

01:28:45 ►

But I was trying to think of dayglo Sparks, and I don’t

01:28:48 ►

get off that way from him. I know, but

01:28:50 ►

we’re in touch

01:28:51 ►

with Ken.

01:28:55 ►

Tuning out, Ken.

01:28:57 ►

We’ll get him on a platform sometime.

01:29:03 ►

Question.

01:29:05 ►

I’d like to ask about writing in collaboration with another person

01:29:09 ►

or in a team with people as a means of broadcast.

01:29:12 ►

Do you think it enhances or detracts creative output?

01:29:15 ►

Is there a good algorithm for multiplexing different inputs

01:29:19 ►

when you’re trying to write in a team?

01:29:21 ►

And specifically, Dr. Leary,

01:29:22 ►

are you going to write with Robert Anton Wilson again?

01:29:26 ►

Or would you with Alistair Crowley

01:29:27 ►

if you’d have had the shot at it?

01:29:29 ►

Is that all that?

01:29:29 ►

No, I didn’t. Did you?

01:29:30 ►

The question is about writing as teams

01:29:32 ►

and with other consciousnesses like,

01:29:36 ►

you know, who are you going to write with?

01:29:38 ►

Things like that.

01:29:38 ►

That’s an interesting question.

01:29:40 ►

And the input of a lot of ideas.

01:29:41 ►

Yeah.

01:29:44 ►

The notion of the lonely writer in his or her garret and the pen pouring out the genius in that lonely room,

01:29:56 ►

being misunderstood or occasionally hitting, that’s as old-fashioned to me as…

01:30:04 ►

The quill? yeah or the paleolith uh cave person on the

01:30:10 ►

wall i think writing should be collaborative i’ve been fortunate enough in the last uh two years to

01:30:15 ►

have simply the best publisher in the world jeremy tartar jeremy has provided me with editors so that

01:30:21 ►

i now see writing a book as like making a movie in which

01:30:25 ►

I start off with a script writer.

01:30:28 ►

There are editors and film

01:30:30 ►

cutters and anyone that walks

01:30:32 ►

in the room can

01:30:32 ►

read what we’re doing, see what’s on the

01:30:36 ►

wall and change it. I noticed that

01:30:38 ►

your works have always been collaborative and

01:30:40 ►

I think that

01:30:41 ►

the future of verbal communication

01:30:44 ►

is going to be in collaboration. I’ll tell you something interesting happened to me is that I, and I think that the future of verbal communication is going to be in collaboration. I’ll tell you, something interesting happened to me is that I,

01:30:49 ►

and I think it was psychedelics and whatever Eastern trip I’ve gotten into,

01:30:54 ►

but there was some way in which I shifted from vertical to horizontal social structure.

01:31:02 ►

And I really started to appreciate what networking was about.

01:31:06 ►

And I saw that it was very,

01:31:08 ►

that even though, like at this moment,

01:31:10 ►

we are playing these roles of specialness,

01:31:13 ►

if you will,

01:31:14 ►

I don’t experience that as any more,

01:31:17 ►

that’s just like a dream reality to me.

01:31:19 ►

And behind it all, here you are

01:31:21 ►

and here I am and so on.

01:31:22 ►

And in a way, that networking quality

01:31:24 ►

makes collaboration so much easier

01:31:26 ►

because you see that everybody has a lot to offer all the time.

01:31:32 ►

My next book is my autobiography.

01:31:35 ►

It’s called Flashbacks, and I really think you should…

01:31:41 ►

Good book.

01:31:46 ►

Brain Damage Incorporated. Good book. Brain damage incorporated.

01:31:50 ►

When it comes out in paperback, I’m going to insist, if I can do it, that the contract be such that the book can be changed and revised by any reader.

01:32:03 ►

changed and revised by any reader.

01:32:04 ►

The book is on it’s on a word processing disk

01:32:07 ►

an enormous disk

01:32:08 ►

not a little sloppy floppy disk.

01:32:12 ►

And I’m going to invite any reader

01:32:15 ►

who has a different image

01:32:16 ►

of that particular event

01:32:18 ►

because hundreds and hundreds of people

01:32:20 ►

are involved in each of these scenes

01:32:21 ►

in my book

01:32:22 ►

or anyone that had a different version

01:32:24 ►

of that period can write in a book, or anyone that had a different version of that period

01:32:25 ►

can write in a line, a paragraph, even a page,

01:32:29 ►

and if it fits and if we can use it,

01:32:31 ►

we’ll put that new version in

01:32:34 ►

so that the next edition of the book

01:32:36 ►

and the subsequent edition of the book

01:32:37 ►

will be an ongoing…

01:32:40 ►

You know, I don’t revise books.

01:32:53 ►

I mean, I shudder at some of the things that were written then,

01:32:57 ►

but I figured finally to just let it all rest as stuff behind

01:33:02 ►

and clear the decks and make the statement afresh each time.

01:33:08 ►

Question?

01:33:09 ►

Yes.

01:33:10 ►

Into the mic.

01:33:11 ►

Okay, can you hear me?

01:33:12 ►

Yes.

01:33:13 ►

I would like to know, this is directed to you, Tim,

01:33:18 ►

what some of your opinions are on the physically adverse effects on the brain,

01:33:23 ►

on the drug that we’ve been talking about here today.

01:33:26 ►

And also I’d like you to expand a bit on what the government has done in terms of looking towards a future,

01:33:35 ►

perhaps in looking towards helping psychiatric patients through the positive effects of the drug

01:33:46 ►

psychiatric patients through the positive effects of the drug and how that has also had an effect on you in terms of what the government has done to you over the last 20

01:33:52 ►

years so it’s a three-part question it’s like a party with guns huh guns no it has nothing to do

01:33:59 ►

with guns what was the second part? Psychiatric.

01:34:12 ►

What’s the government doing in the future about getting funds or support for the psychiatric use of psychedelics?

01:34:14 ►

And what are the negative funds?

01:34:16 ►

Not guns.

01:34:20 ►

Is that your answer or do you want to get more?

01:34:27 ►

In other words, do you think there’s a future where instead of the government constantly trying to put it down,

01:34:33 ►

do you think there’s an opening in the future for looking towards this drug as a way of helping psychiatric patients? I think anyone that looks to the government.

01:34:37 ►

Yeah, I mean, that’s really.

01:34:43 ►

Good.

01:34:44 ►

I’ll give you that one.

01:34:48 ►

Looks to be going to solve any problem.

01:34:51 ►

It’s kind of looking in the wrong direction.

01:34:53 ►

For many reasons, I live in Hollywood now.

01:34:58 ►

Because I think it’s important to influence the people that are making movies,

01:35:01 ►

because movies influence so many people.

01:35:03 ►

And like everyone else, I’m appalled and discouraged by the violence

01:35:08 ►

and the crudity that comes out of our television and movie studios.

01:35:15 ►

I think it was a wonderful, wonderful confrontation.

01:35:20 ►

That’s what it was between two legendary spiritual images.

01:35:28 ►

The little fellow from up there and the little brown man from down here.

01:35:33 ►

I saw Gandhi as being, as playing to the old, outworn metaphors of the past this saintly

01:35:46 ►

medieval person

01:35:48 ►

with a robe

01:35:49 ►

and sandals

01:35:50 ►

and a staff

01:35:50 ►

walking among the poor

01:35:52 ►

quite anti-technology

01:35:56 ►

he didn’t know

01:35:57 ►

but high tech

01:35:58 ►

can also mean high touch

01:36:00 ►

with his spinning wheel

01:36:02 ►

the last scene

01:36:04 ►

when suffering from anorexia nervosa,

01:36:05 ►

it’s right out of the Catholic Bible. Here’s the sinner, you know, the fellow that had killed the

01:36:16 ►

Muslims. The sinner confesses. The aging, dying, holy saint blesses him and he kisses his feet

01:36:25 ►

and the saint goes off

01:36:27 ►

to get crucified

01:36:27 ►

now as Drew Barrymore

01:36:30 ►

would say

01:36:30 ►

give me a break

01:36:32 ►

I thought Ben Kingsley did it well, didn’t he?

01:36:49 ►

Couldn’t he play the part of Ben Kingsley?

01:36:50 ►

Isn’t that wonderful?

01:36:58 ►

Put you on a diet.

01:37:06 ►

Well, we would say.

01:37:10 ►

You’re welcome.

01:37:11 ►

Question?

01:37:15 ►

I have no question, only I wanted to take a moment as a part of the audience to say thank you for being here today and bringing us to this experience.

01:37:19 ►

Thank you.

01:37:21 ►

We are thanked.

01:37:37 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:37:41 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:37:48 ►

You know, I just love the Irish trickster in the good Dr. Leary.

01:37:51 ►

Who else would have the gall, while speaking at Harvard,

01:37:54 ►

to imply that for people living 2,000 years from now,

01:37:57 ►

that they would only know the name of Harvard because of him?

01:38:03 ►

And his self-comparison with the trials and tribulations of Emerson were equally amusing and entertaining to me.

01:38:06 ►

But beyond the entertainment factor, I also hope you picked up a few bits and pieces of our shared historic legacy,

01:38:14 ►

maybe that have been missing before.

01:38:17 ►

I have to admit that hearing several of the exchanges between Leary and Ram Dass

01:38:21 ►

made both of them seem much more human and somehow warmer than

01:38:25 ►

they’d seemed to me before. And while I could hear the joy in their voices, I also thought that I

01:38:31 ►

picked up a bit of melancholy. But hey, maybe that’s just my overlay on it. I’d like to go on,

01:38:38 ►

but since this talk ran longer than usual, I’m going to save my other comments for next week’s

01:38:43 ►

program. And I’d tell you what that will be, but the truth is that I haven’t decided yet.

01:38:49 ►

Suddenly I’m blessed with an abundance of riches when it comes to old recordings that

01:38:53 ►

up to now may have escaped the clutches of the internet. But fear not, between all of us,

01:39:00 ►

you included, I suspect we’re going to digitize the words and wisdom of our elders Thank you. You know, so don’t get too wrapped up in all of the drama. Unless, of course, you’re directly affected by it yourself.

01:39:27 ►

You know, pay attention, help out in ways that you can, but don’t let the establishment keep you in constant fear.

01:39:33 ►

Probably the best thing you could do right now is, no matter where you are, is turn off this podcast and put on some of your favorite music.

01:39:41 ►

Then get up and dance.

01:39:44 ►

You know, life is like a dance, my friend.

01:39:46 ►

It’s got no end point.

01:39:48 ►

Its purpose is just to move with the music, go with the flow.

01:39:52 ►

And live large, my friend.

01:39:54 ►

Whatever that may mean to you, live large.

01:39:57 ►

It’s your life after all, you know.

01:39:59 ►

Give it some meaning yourself.

01:40:00 ►

Nobody else can do that for you.

01:40:03 ►

Well, now, where did that come from, huh? I guess I’d better get out of here before

01:40:08 ►

I wind up sounding like a preacher, or worse, a politician.

01:40:13 ►

So, I’ll close today’s podcast again by

01:40:15 ►

reminding you that this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon

01:40:19 ►

are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the

01:40:23 ►

Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license.

01:40:27 ►

And if you have any questions about that,

01:40:29 ►

just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,

01:40:33 ►

which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.

01:40:36 ►

And if you’re interested in the philosophy behind the salon,

01:40:39 ►

well, you can hear all about it in my novel, The Genesis Generation,

01:40:43 ►

which is available as an audiobook that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.

01:40:49 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:40:54 ►

Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

233 - Ram Das and Timothy Leary – 1983 Harvard Reunion

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