253 - Whatever Happened to Timothy Leary

Program Notes

Guest speakers: Timothy Leary and Ram Das

This is an audio collage of three talks. The first is by Dr. Leary in 1966. That is followed by a 1973 interview with Ram Das on his current feelings about Leary. The final segment is a 1986 appearance by Dr. Timothy Leary on the Larry King show.

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

“Psychedelic art is the public face, a communication device, of our new religion.”

“Psychedelic drugs, which include marijuana, should be totally supervised by the state. That is, quality should be established, and you should have to be trained in how to use them, and they should be prescribed, and if you screwed up they’ll take your license away. You’d have to show that you knew how to use them like [you do] an automobile.”

“I would say 90% of the kids who are under the age of 40 who are in computers now, ninety percent of them, have had some kind of experience in brain-change, or neurotransmission. That’s why I may be misunderstood or not liked among certain segments of the country. But computer people really understand where I’m coming from and they welcome me.”

“The only defense against totalitarianism has always been, Jefferson said it too, constant vigilance on the part of the individual. There ain’t no one going to protect us against Big Brother and Big Sister except ourselves linked up as free agents.”

“So go over there [India]. Try it all. Don’t get hooked. Don’t follow leaders. Watch your parkin’ meters, and stay away from gurus. But try it all out!”

“The basic trajectory of my life, no matter whether you agree with me (you don’t have to agree with this) is to free yourself, to think for yourself, to question authority.”

“I love institutions. They’re intelligence tests. Institutions are prisons that you have to escape from… . The only thing is don’t get trapped in them. The most addictive, dangerous, mind-screwing thing in the world is conformity to an organization.”

Eldridge Cleaver denouncing Timothy Leary in 1971
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Eldridge Cleaver’s friendly private message to Timothy Leary in 1995
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Khadoma & Kevin: Deer Harbor Live — Autumn 2010
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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 today, thanks to Bruce Dahmer and Dennis Berry, who is currently responsible for the Timothy Leary Archives,

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and who sent me these recordings, we’re going to hear an audio collage from a couple of different programs on which Dr. Leary appeared,

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as well as hearing from Ram Dass about his feelings near the end of their active collaboration in the 60s.

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First, we’re going to hear part of a 1973 radio program from KPFA in Berkeley that was titled, Whatever Happened to Timothy Leary?

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It begins with an excerpt from an earlier interview with Dr. Leary that was recorded in 1966.

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Then it jumps up to a live 1973 interview with Ram Dass, who gives an interesting appraisal of Leary’s

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character and talks about ending his collaboration with Leary in the 60s.

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So, let’s time travel back a bit right now and

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first hear what was on Timothy Leary’s mind back in 1966

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as he was broadcast on Berkeley’s Pacifica station, KPFA,

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in August of 73. Into the light, into the light of bare naked truth.

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This time around.

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You can be anything this time around.

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You can be anyone this time around.

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You can do anything this time around.

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You can be anyone this time around.

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Whatever happened to Timothy Leary?

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You can do anything.

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Whatever happened to Timothy Leary?

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In December 1966, shortly after he founded the League for Spiritual Discovery,

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Dr. Leary was interviewed in Berkeley by Elson I. Thompson,

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who was then KPFA’s public affairs director.

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We hear first excerpts from their conversation.

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Three months ago, we formed a new religion called League for Spiritual Discovery.

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Like every other religion, we have our own sacramental methods and our own goals, and

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we practice the religion in small groups privately.

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But like other religious groups, we have our public educational and demonstration ceremonies,

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which we call celebrations.

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And the private ones are the esoteric side of the situation, I gather?

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And the public ones are, as all religions have been, translated for the masses?

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Or not so much the masses as the non-initiated or the non-communicants.

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This, of course, may sound strange to Americans, but actually it’s the most orthodox form of religion. And indeed,

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it’s not that much different from the way that, for example, the Catholic Church or

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the Jewish religion operates. You have your sacramental services, which are reserved to

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the communicants, and then you present to the public what your aspirations are, and

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you try to show people what you’re discovering. So, in the last three months in New York City,

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every Tuesday night we’ve been running

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what we call psychedelic religious celebrations.

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Thousands of years, men have been having

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what we now call psychedelic experiences.

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Mystics, visionaries, far-out artists and poets.

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And after you have this experience,

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you struggle, you hunger to communicate it,

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mainly, of course, for yourself.

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It’s a way of reminding yourself what it

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was, but also to communicate to your fellow men. We think that every religious group in its origin

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struggled to start a new art, and indeed you can test the validity of any new religion by the art

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that it creates, because words, after all, are a fragile freight for carrying the deepest impulses of man. So like

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other religions in the past, we have developed our own art form. Rather, it is automatically

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developed. Psychedelic art is the public face or the communication device of our new religion.

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Now, what is psychedelic art? Psychedelic art is multi-energy. Instead of using one form of light

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or of movie or of slides,

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we will have up to 26 slide projectors

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and motion picture cameras or projectors

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going on one huge cinemascope screen.

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The screen is undulating with cellular forms

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and changing patterns, stroboscopic flashes,

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and swimming in and out of this Niagara of visual material

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are what we call mythic forms.

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It’s as though your own protein memory banks,

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your genetic code is being decoded,

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and these millions of file cards

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that have been stored for thousands of years begin to flash.

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Each week in our celebration,

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we reenact or we renew

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one of the great ancient religious stories.

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We’ve just finished doing

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the reincarnation of Jesus Christ.

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In the present time,

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we’re doing the illumination of the Buddha.

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These great religious figures of the past

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are men who have been turned on

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and who have worked out a new metaphor

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for stating the

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divine plan or the way things are. And we seek to use modern methods, electronic and

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multimedia, to turn on the audience. The aims and goals of our religion are highly orthodox.

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We seek to find the divinity within, call that what you will. But it’s been well known for thousands of years that man can focus

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his microscope inside

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and turn on to energies

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and revelations

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which are built

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into your nervous system

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and your cells.

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Your body is an instrument

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of communication

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which has been around

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for two billion years

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and there’s a lot

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to learn from it.

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Now, we don’t want

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other people necessarily

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to use our sacraments, LSD and marijuana.

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We’re not advocating the use of these.

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And in our celebrations, which we’ll be putting on January 27th and 28th here in the Bay Area,

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there’ll be no attempt to urge people to use drugs.

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We are attempting to get people to turn inside, to look within and to turn on.

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And we don’t care what sacrament people use throughout human history the human race has used the most incredible variety of

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techniques for turning on they’ve used flagellation and dance they used

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immobility solitude noise some meditation exactly meditation fasting

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sector of sacramental foods the The interesting thing is that man’s attempt to turn on

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just staggers the imagination of hardly anything

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that hasn’t been used in one time or another,

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in one culture or another, to get this experience.

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And often the most opposite things have been used.

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It’s well known that overstimulation, noise and crowds

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is one way of flipping you out of your external mind

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within.

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On the other hand, silence is something else.

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Mobs, in other words.

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Mobs, yes, or chanting, or you get a large group together and you get a kind of a hypnotic

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effect.

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Sexual renunciation is one method.

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On the other hand, ritual use of sex, where the mates become gods and goddesses for each

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other, is another.

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Of course, throughout human history, men have used chemicals, plants, vines, roots.

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Wine itself was originally a sacramental method of turning people on.

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So we don’t care what method people use.

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We treasure and glorify any method that can get you high, that is, can turn you on.

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But we also insist that no one tell us we can’t use our sacrament if it seems to work for us.

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Well, now, there are a number of aspects of this that I would like to ask some fairly frank questions about.

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I have heard it stated, and with some understanding,

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that some of the people who become involved with the use of LSD,

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that it becomes a sort of dead end. In other words, here is an experience which is highly

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stimulating and extremely exciting in the deepest sense of the word.

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And the repetition of that experience,

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the sort of going off in a corner, as it were,

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mentally and spiritually,

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becomes some kind of an end in itself.

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I’ve heard it stated that quite a number of creative people,

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for example, who have gotten into this,

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no longer produce. Now, I’m going to pose a theory, namely,

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that the proper use of such awareness is bound up with what you bring back and implement in the society around you,

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and that as everything can be abused, so could these methods of hyper-awareness be abused,

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and in fact have been abused, because I presume that black magic is exactly using the same powers. And I have the idea that no one creates,

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either in their life or in any visual outward sense, without submitting themselves to some kind of discipline,

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either their own or some higher discipline

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to which they are prepared to submit.

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Now, where along this line does the creative,

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in the sense of our society,

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in the sense of the world that we live in,

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how do you tie this

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all in?

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Well, you’ve raised several points, and I find myself in complete agreement with each

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point as I followed what you just said. Number one, the internal experience cannot be the

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final goal. Of course, monastics and people in my profession, shamans and alchemists

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and people who have attempted to change consciousness

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for thousands of years have debated this point.

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As a matter of fact, in Southeast Asia,

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there are two schools of Buddhism,

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Northern Buddhism, Mahayana Buddhism,

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says exactly what you’ve just said.

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It’s one thing to turn on,

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but then you’ve got to come back to society

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and make it show in your behavior.

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There’s another school of Buddhism,

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as most of you listeners probably know,

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Southern Buddhism, which says,

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no, just stay high all the time.

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Anything is a trap in the way of going back to society.

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Well, we belong to the school which believes that

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by your fruits you shall be known.

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It’s inconceivable to us that people could take LSD regularly

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and not be driven

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to come back to society and to try to glorify or to express what they have learned.

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And what is it that you think they have learned? Well, it’s highly individual, obviously.

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And of course, you mentioned the misuse of LSD. It’s obvious.

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Every form of energy that man has invented has been misused.

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I think the auto engine is misused.

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I think even radio and television is misused by most other stations.

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It’s too much to ask that our new form of energy, which is placed by LSD,

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is going to immediately cause everyone to become an ecstatic and productive saint.

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cause everyone to become an ecstatic and productive saint.

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On the other hand,

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all we can do is say over and over again,

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every lecture and every performance that we give to the public, that discipline and training

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and a conscientious attempt to express productively

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is the inevitable result of your LSD experience. And I think that’s one of the

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tragedies that many people take LSD and are so entranced and delighted by this internal world

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that they just turn off the external world. And this inevitably leads to tragedy, because you

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just can’t stir up all this energy and get so many ideas flashing without harnessing it up.

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And if you don’t do that, then you get this endless rumination and you get the so-called LSD freak out where the person

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is just spinning around in his own mind. The motto of our religion is turn on, tune in, and drop out.

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Turn on, of course, means contact these internal possibilities. Tune in means harness it back

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in works of art, in works of beauty, in works of harmony.

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So I couldn’t agree with you more when you make these comments.

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And what’s the dropout?

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Well, this is an easily misinterpreted phrase.

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By dropout, we mean dropout of meaningless activities.

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We don’t mean dropout of life.

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We don’t mean dropout of the really meaningful behaviors. We’re convinced,

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and I think it wouldn’t be hard to prove my point, that most Americans are involved in

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a meaningless robot assembly line series of activities. They don’t really know what they’re

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doing and why they’re doing it, but they’re just pushed onto this assembly line and off

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they go. We tell people to drop out on to this assembly line and off they go.

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We tell people to drop out.

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This is the oldest message of visionary prophets, which happens to be my profession.

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My trade union has always come back to society and said,

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look, detach yourself from the immediate trial

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and be very careful how you spend your time

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and what sort of activity you dedicate your energies.

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So by dropout we don’t mean just to sit around and grow a beard and discuss the ultimates

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and philosophy. We mean dropout of the meaningless and tune in to the productive. We live, for

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example, in a large estate in upper New York.

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There are 60 of us who have dropped out of American society.

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We think we have our own country there.

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In addition to starting our own religion, we start our own country,

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and we leave our little plot of land.

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I can say I’m going back to the planet Earth and to the United States,

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in a friendly message of communication.

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And we are trying to develop their pilot study

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of how man can drop out, how Americans can drop out

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of the robot aspects of our society

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and tune back into the more basic human activities,

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which are familial, which are tribal,

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and which are involved in individual acts of beauty rather than huge mass movements of power and efficiency.

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I have always suspected that either the great religious teachers

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were completely irrelevant

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or else what they said was not some kind of pious hope but in fact an observation of fact.

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Exactly. That’s something else that most Americans and Westerners don’t realize

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that the science of consciousness is just as regular, just as lawful, and just

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as complicated as the science of energies outside. One of the early mottos

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of my profession was her hermetic code. It was on the Emerald Tablet of Hermes back in Alexandria.

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It says, what is without is within.

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Simply reminding us that there’s no energy transformation that you find outside around

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you that isn’t recorded in protein historical records inside your body.

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Even now, when it comes to space exploration, as I have taken LSD and hurtled it around inside inner space,

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there are all sorts of unidentified flying objects

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in the metaphorical sense that whiz by your projectors.

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All of the political and all of the scientific problems

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of the external world have been worked out over and over again

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by your cells and your tissues.

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And unless you get into some contact with this,

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we think that you’re any kind of a robot

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just being pushed around

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and reacting to external forces.

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In what role

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and at what level of that role

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do you visualize yourself, Dr. Larry?

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Well, I’ve given a great deal of thought to that. I think, as I read history, and of course

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in my profession, which is religious teacher or shaman, you have to look back. We have

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our tradition, just like the physicist knows about Einstein and Bohr and Newton. I have

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studied the earlier adepts in my profession, which is the changing of consciousness. I have studied the earlier adepts in my profession,

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which is the changing of consciousness.

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I don’t think we’re ever going to have

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any more holy men

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or any more messiahs,

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and I hope we’re not going to have

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any more martyrs.

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You see, a thousand years ago,

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someone stumbled on a new method

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of turning on.

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Maybe it was the Buddha over in India.

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His original method was the sit-down.

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He sat under that tree

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and stayed there until he had to sit in. He found under that tree and stayed there until the sit-in.

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He found a method, and he came back, and he taught it.

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Well, by the time that method and the name of the Buddha reached the Mediterranean,

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it was maybe a hundred years, slave galleys and folk singers,

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and it’s always the young and the lower class and the alienated that carry the message.

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By the time it got over the Mediterranean, the Buddha was perhaps two or three generations dead.

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So then you set him up as a special person who had a virgin birth or a miraculous death and so forth.

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That’s not true.

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He was just a human being struggling to find meaning the way the rest of us are.

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Now, in the present technological age, that’s never going to happen.

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When we announced the formation of our religion in New York

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three months ago, at 10 o’clock in the morning,

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by 10.10 it was on a news ticker in London,

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and 10.15 it was on a news ticker in Tokyo,

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and probably 10.17 it was on a news ticker in Peiping,

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and they were wondering,

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what am I doing over there now?

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There’s no more room for mythological,

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supernatural religious teachers.

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I’m simply an American of Irish descent with all of the faults and virtues of my time and culture,

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struggling for meaning,

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and we have got a method which works for those people who know how to use it,

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so that I don’t see myself as a historical figure in this old sense.

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We’re not going to have any of these legendary…

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Messiahs.

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Yeah, that’s right.

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I think that religion in the future

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is going to be much more personal.

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Every man should start his own religion.

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That’s my advice to young people today.

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Don’t think it was all done 2,000 years ago

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or 500 years ago. The great challenge of human life is really to found your own religion. That’s my advice to young people today. Don’t think it was all done 2,000 years ago or 500 years ago. The great challenge of human life is really to found

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your own religion. That means you personally cast off your tribal mind and come to real

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tissue and fleshly grip with these ancient problems. And you hammer out your own ethical

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code on your tablets of whatever they are. You become your own Copernicus.

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You probe these mysteries yourself and come out with your own answers. Now, you’re going

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to come out with pretty much the same answers that Christ and the Buddha came up with, because

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that’s the science of it. There are certain basic truths, but you can’t take them in cliché,

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static form. Nobody can pass on these truths to anyone else, or they’re just meaningless

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formula. You have to have your dark night of the soul. You have to have your LSD flip out. You have

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to wonder what’s real, who am I, and then slowly you’re going to have to recapitulate

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the evolution history of the human race yourself. That’s what the challenge of LSD is. And come

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out with your own prayers, your own rituals, which work for you and your family

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and perhaps a few friends.

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That’s the excitement of it.

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And we deplore the mass conformity of most religions today, which become just like General

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Motors and NBC television.

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On March 16, 1970, Dr. Leary was convicted in Orange County, California, of possession of marijuana and was sentenced to six and a half months to ten years in state prison.

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whom it described as a well-known advocate of psychedelic drug use,

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had apparently escaped late the preceding Saturday night from the California men’s colony at San Luis Obispo,

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where he was serving his sentence.

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Officials at the prison said Dr. Leary was first missed at the midnight bed check,

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and they added that they did not know how he had escaped.

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They said that Dr. Leary had been transferred the previous May to San Luis Obispo, which is a minimum security prison, because he was not believed likely to attempt escape, and they described him as a model prisoner.

00:20:53 ►

Speaking to you from Lama Drag, a beautiful fishing port outside of Algiers, Algeria.

00:21:04 ►

fishing port outside of Algiers, Algeria.

00:21:14 ►

My escape from prison and Rosemary and my escape from the country was engineered,

00:21:24 ►

executed, designed, and aesthetically carried off by the noble and beautiful Weatherman Underground.

00:21:28 ►

And since we’ve been in Algeria,

00:21:30 ►

we have been under the wise,

00:21:33 ►

benign, and loving protection of the Black Panthers,

00:21:36 ►

led by the genial genius,

00:21:39 ►

Eldridge Cleaver.

00:21:42 ►

It is true that in the company of Field Marshal D.C. of the Black Panther

00:21:50 ►

Party and Jennifer Dorn and Mark Kenner, I embarked on an adventurous trip throughout

00:21:59 ►

the Middle East to visit the Palestinian guerrillas. All statements that we were ejected from Arab countries

00:22:10 ►

or received hostily are distortions and lies

00:22:15 ►

by the wicked, pig, capitalist bourgeois press.

00:22:21 ►

We receive every place with fraternal arms live and let live

00:22:30 ►

we say to every human being black white left right brother sisters live and let live. Human brothers and sisters, let’s live and let live.

00:22:50 ►

Dr. Leary’s appearance in Algiers and his association with the intercommunal section of the Black Panther Party

00:22:56 ►

attracted a great deal of attention from the media and from the public at large at the time.

00:23:02 ►

Shortly after Dr. Leary announced that he was in fact in Algiers, Babaram Das,

00:23:07 ►

Dr. Richard Alpert, a former associate of Dr. Leary’s, was interviewed by editors of the

00:23:12 ►

Psychedelic Review, and one of the topics of their conversation was the radicalization of Tim Leary.

00:23:18 ►

Can you talk a little bit to us about the radicalization of Timothy Leary. We’re doing an article in the next issue on this. What do you think are the specific reasons for his departure

00:23:31 ►

from a previous commitment toward consciousness of nonviolence and spirituality?

00:23:40 ►

Don’t you say Dorchester or Roxbury?

00:23:42 ►

Dorchester. I’m Eric.

00:23:43 ►

I can’t get a departure.

00:23:45 ►

Born in Roxbury, a person, Dorchester or Roxbury? Dorchester. And Roxbury. And Departure. First born in Roxbury, then moved to Dorchester.

00:23:49 ►

Okay.

00:23:50 ►

Okay.

00:23:57 ►

Timothy is a extraordinarily high mystic visionary.

00:24:06 ►

Timothy is not a realized being.

00:24:09 ►

There is work Timothy yet has to do on himself

00:24:11 ►

before all his seeds of attachment are cooked.

00:24:17 ►

And thus any statement that comes from Timothy,

00:24:19 ►

just like any statement that comes from me,

00:24:22 ►

is only as pure as we are at the moment.

00:24:26 ►

In some way it reflects where we’re not.

00:24:32 ►

From the time of the bust in Laredo,

00:24:37 ►

which was not a pure test case,

00:24:40 ►

and Timothy was told that,

00:24:42 ►

Timothy felt that he had to carry the standard

00:24:48 ►

and in a way was perfectly conscious of his legend

00:24:53 ►

and it fit in very much harmony with his whole way of relating to authority

00:24:59 ►

and to establishment and to law. establishment into law and the article that we wrote back in 1961 or two in the Harvard

00:25:10 ►

Review, Harvard Review, called The Politics of Consciousness, really defines exactly what

00:25:16 ►

Timothy saw as the choice.

00:25:18 ►

And he said the visionary will be closer to the prison than to the professor’s chair.

00:25:23 ►

Because he saw that change involved overthrow

00:25:27 ►

there are other ways in which evolution occurs than overthrow

00:25:31 ►

in your way timothy has been having a self-fulfilling prophecy

00:25:37 ►

he because to be busted once he had the choice then of making a test case or not.

00:25:45 ►

He chose to make it.

00:25:47 ►

Then being busted again and again and again and again

00:25:49 ►

merely shows a total disregard of the system

00:25:54 ►

or at least a definition of himself

00:25:57 ►

in a very powerful model role,

00:26:03 ►

perhaps martyr, perhaps not,

00:26:06 ►

but a very strong role Tim’s letter

00:26:11 ►

Tim walking out of jail

00:26:13 ►

felt to me

00:26:14 ►

knowing Timothy like an exquisitely

00:26:17 ►

pure act

00:26:17 ►

done beautifully, it was awesome that the sheriff

00:26:21 ►

or whoever runs the prison

00:26:22 ►

said when Dr. Leary left,

00:26:26 ►

there was no violence and no property destroying.

00:26:28 ►

That he did it so exquisitely.

00:26:31 ►

And I think all of us, Allen Ginsberg and Wavy Gravy and all the people that I’ve talked to

00:26:36 ►

that have been doing this merry dance,

00:26:39 ►

honored Timothy for the high-flying act of just walking out of the prison.

00:26:43 ►

He served six months.

00:26:44 ►

He asked for parole. It waslying act of just walking out of a prison. He served six months. He asked for parole.

00:26:45 ►

It was not granted, and he walked out.

00:26:48 ►

At the same moment, all of us had a feeling of trepidation

00:26:51 ►

that had lived with, I know, Timothy,

00:26:53 ►

because from then on, his game must be so exquisitely disciplined

00:26:57 ►

that any one flaw in the whole thing,

00:27:00 ►

and he either ends up dead or in prison for the rest of his life,

00:27:04 ►

because when they get him this time, they throw away a key. It’s maximum security.

00:27:09 ►

Now, and all of us who know Timothy

00:27:11 ►

know that one of the qualities where he isn’t really cooked is discipline.

00:27:16 ►

That his mind is beautiful, but it moves very wide-ranging

00:27:20 ►

and rapidly, and he drops and moves and changes and drops.

00:27:26 ►

And perhaps what he could have done as a discipline being was disappear into the woodwork and

00:27:30 ►

become somebody else since he had just published a record

00:27:33 ►

Douglas records saying you can be anything this time around he had the

00:27:37 ►

option of becoming somebody else which could have been done but in a way but

00:27:44 ►

excuse me by somebody else you mean while out of prison he could have been done. But in a way, by somebody else you mean, while out of prison he could have assumed a different type of…

00:27:50 ►

A different identity and then either built a whole thing on a new identity or been through the underground, released material,

00:27:59 ►

and just become a secret word appearing and all the time living in the world as somebody else

00:28:05 ►

that would be the exquisite that’s the dance I think I would do where I’m

00:28:08 ►

derivative now in some way my interpretation of Tim’s letter is that

00:28:16 ►

Tim wanted to continue to build an influence and work with the dramatic changes that are occurring in this culture and he saw that the major two high-energy fields at the moment

00:28:32 ►

although a third coming up fast on the rail is the spiritual one the two major ones thus far the government and the radical movement

00:28:40 ►

and I think what he

00:28:47 ►

movement. And I think what he attempted to do by that letter was to pay his dues to gain

00:28:52 ►

membership into that club, into that high energy field. Now, there are two things about the letter that are important. One is that though it advocates violence, when you read

00:28:57 ►

it you do not feel violent. And that leads you to an understanding that it is no act in and of itself that is significant.

00:29:06 ►

It is who does the act and the consciousness of the person doing the act.

00:29:11 ►

And the consciousness of the person reading the letter.

00:29:13 ►

But that also is a function of the person writing it.

00:29:16 ►

In other words, whether Tim adopts karma for advocating violence

00:29:20 ►

is a function of Tim’s attachment when he writes the letter.

00:29:24 ►

And if Tim isn’t attached, the letter doesn’t make you violent.

00:29:27 ►

It’s much more subtle the way the whole thing works.

00:29:30 ►

It’s vibrations of information.

00:29:33 ►

And Timothy’s letter didn’t make me feel violent.

00:29:36 ►

At the same moment, it felt like he was making some kind of a pact with the devil to beat the devil

00:29:41 ►

because in the world of polarities anytime you identify with

00:29:45 ►

one polarity you strengthen the other now but the added point is that timothy is not a violent man

00:29:52 ►

and he’s a very conscious man and i would like very much to have people like eldridge cleaver

00:29:58 ►

and huey newton and seal and all these people hanging out with timothy leary rather than just

00:30:04 ►

with each other.

00:30:09 ►

Because I would like to have conscious beings involved in each end of the polarity. And in a way, Timothy may be doing more of a service to the West, you know,

00:30:16 ►

in just becoming maybe the resident poet for the Black Panthers, you know,

00:30:22 ►

and that the letter may be his dues.

00:30:25 ►

it for the Black Panthers, you know, and that the letter may be his dues. I’ve also noticed the amount of discontent and upset and confusion that that letter’s created, and I appreciate that very

00:30:32 ►

much, because that kind of confusion is good, healthy work on individuals, because they had

00:30:38 ►

Timothy in one bag and Eldridge Cleveland in another bag, and they’re forced now to deal with

00:30:42 ►

a Malcolm X phenomenon of a really beautiful

00:30:45 ►

being who is still saying very radical things.

00:30:47 ►

They are forced to it and also, as you say, Eldridge Cleaver and the socialist countries

00:30:53 ►

that he’ll be visiting will be exposed to Timothy Leary now and it will be very interesting

00:30:58 ►

to see.

00:30:59 ►

Exactly.

00:31:00 ►

Now, Timothy may get caught in spinning out in the scene. And he’s doing a very funny dance now.

00:31:06 ►

I mean, this latest thing with Lebanon and Palestine,

00:31:08 ►

and nobody wants him, and Algiers doesn’t want him back.

00:31:11 ►

Oh, is that true?

00:31:12 ►

That was the latest I heard from his son yesterday.

00:31:15 ►

And it may well be that he’s, you know, he’s not,

00:31:19 ►

he never defends his back on these things.

00:31:22 ►

That’s the exquisite part of a high dancer like Timothy.

00:31:21 ►

defends his back on these things

00:31:22 ►

you’d see

00:31:22 ►

that’s the

00:31:22 ►

exquisite part

00:31:23 ►

of a high

00:31:23 ►

dancer like

00:31:24 ►

Timothy

00:31:24 ►

but they

00:31:25 ►

often burn

00:31:26 ►

up like

00:31:27 ►

you know

00:31:28 ►

shooting stars

00:31:29 ►

you know

00:31:30 ►

they burn

00:31:30 ►

up going

00:31:30 ►

across the

00:31:31 ►

heavens

00:31:31 ►

and

00:31:32 ►

you know

00:31:34 ►

there’s

00:31:35 ►

Wilhelm

00:31:36 ►

Reich

00:31:36 ►

and there’s

00:31:38 ►

Ezra Pound

00:31:38 ►

you know

00:31:40 ►

and there’s

00:31:40 ►

lots of

00:31:40 ►

there are

00:31:41 ►

lots of

00:31:42 ►

beings around

00:31:43 ►

as models

00:31:44 ►

of what

00:31:44 ►

happens you know how fierce the whole trip is and I just read Eldridge Cleaver’s There are lots of beings around as models of what happens,

00:31:45 ►

of how fierce the whole trip is.

00:31:48 ►

And I just read Eldridge Cleaver’s conversations with Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers,

00:31:51 ►

and it’s no picnic.

00:31:53 ►

Tim’s trip is no picnic.

00:31:55 ►

I would imagine that people do discover that here,

00:31:57 ►

even despite a certain repression,

00:32:00 ►

is still one of the freest places in the world.

00:32:02 ►

Well, I had a long talk with Tim’s son yesterday

00:32:08 ►

who talks about the pigs

00:32:09 ►

and the tremendous anger towards everybody.

00:32:12 ►

The same moment, he owns Tim’s house, right?

00:32:16 ►

I said, well, then you certainly don’t mind

00:32:17 ►

if I come and take your house away.

00:32:20 ►

He said, well, I’m not a pig.

00:32:21 ►

I said, well, how do you know you’re not a pig?

00:32:23 ►

You own a house, don’t you?

00:32:25 ►

Aren’t you a landowner, a property owner in Brooklyn?

00:32:27 ►

And it’s a very clear, it’s such a delicate thing

00:32:30 ►

about the amount of energy that’s available in the society

00:32:34 ►

and how we only use old models and we have more energy.

00:32:40 ►

It’s just the son cutting the balls off daddy, that’s all.

00:32:43 ►

And when he gets in the position, then he he runs the ship just like he becomes the new daddy

00:32:47 ►

Mm-hmm, and there are very few radicals that I would like to serve under in terms of having them form my government

00:32:54 ►

Because there aren’t wise men at either pole at the moment. Mm-hmm

00:32:57 ►

But you said before something about a self-fulfilling prophecy prophecy to to

00:33:03 ►

Timothy Leary’s life.

00:33:06 ►

But his lawyer, one of the lawyers, Joe Ryan,

00:33:11 ►

kept emphasizing how bugged he had become in the past few years

00:33:16 ►

with this legal hassling,

00:33:19 ►

and that this was one of the main reasons

00:33:24 ►

why he had reached this type of decision,

00:33:29 ►

that it was not something he was trying to bring on himself.

00:33:31 ►

And his lawyer said that this last incident in Orange County,

00:33:37 ►

the evidence was planted by the police.

00:33:39 ►

Well, that well may be.

00:33:41 ►

And I think that part of what’s happened is a combination of…

00:33:49 ►

You see, the history I’m working out of is I remember being called into the chairman of the department’s office at Harvard

00:33:57 ►

and them saying to me, look, you’re a close friend of Tim’s.

00:34:01 ►

We love him very much. We know he’s a great intellect, but, man, he’s completely

00:34:06 ►

screwing up the system.

00:34:07 ►

And if you don’t control him,

00:34:09 ►

we’re going to have

00:34:10 ►

to get rid of him

00:34:10 ►

because we can’t handle him

00:34:12 ►

because he’s too disruptive

00:34:13 ►

of all the structure

00:34:15 ►

of the games.

00:34:15 ►

It’s as if

00:34:16 ►

all structure at all

00:34:17 ►

was too much for Timothy.

00:34:19 ►

I mean,

00:34:19 ►

I lived with years

00:34:20 ►

of bounce checks.

00:34:22 ►

You know,

00:34:23 ►

I mean,

00:34:23 ►

there’s nothing to do with that.

00:34:24 ►

That bounce, you don’t have to be against the bank system you know i mean when you write checks

00:34:30 ►

you don’t have money for i mean that to me it doesn’t feel good it doesn’t feel vibrationally

00:34:35 ►

right i don’t care you know i don’t think that’s economically radicalism that’s just uh you know

00:34:40 ►

that’s not being willing to play any games at all. Well, probably yours anyways. And I feel in a way that Timothy was hassled tremendously.

00:34:50 ►

There’s no doubt about it.

00:34:52 ►

And Timothy is right in the sense that

00:34:56 ►

what the guarantees in this country

00:35:03 ►

guarantee freedom and the right to happiness and privacy.

00:35:11 ►

And he is very obvious in his reiteration of Thomas Jefferson, really, the Jeffersonian ideal,

00:35:18 ►

how much has been lost in the shuffle.

00:35:20 ►

And he had an exquisite possibility of doing a very high dance

00:35:25 ►

in his running for governor in California

00:35:26 ►

in a whole reiterating

00:35:29 ►

the Thomas Jefferson thing

00:35:30 ►

what happened to that?

00:35:31 ►

well he got into so much legal hassle

00:35:33 ►

he got put in prison

00:35:33 ►

and then he couldn’t do it

00:35:36 ►

James Curley ran for mayor

00:35:37 ►

of course we know James Curley well

00:35:39 ►

and in a way

00:35:41 ►

that’s what I mean about lack of discipline

00:35:44 ►

you see because

00:35:46 ►

Timothy’s power

00:35:47 ►

didn’t necessarily have to do

00:35:50 ►

with the way he was living

00:35:51 ►

I mean there were very few people

00:35:55 ►

coming through the gates of the ranch

00:35:56 ►

or the places that were getting busted

00:35:58 ►

that was just Timothy’s own

00:36:00 ►

kind of looseness

00:36:02 ►

of living because he was going to live it

00:36:04 ►

his life was going to be a model

00:36:06 ►

yeah and that is something that he kept losing his degree he like kept losing the cards in his hand

00:36:13 ►

every bust he’d get but this is what i’m trying to get clearly on mind talking with you now about

00:36:18 ►

this and the way that you speak of it on a level of…

00:36:26 ►

as if you were absentmindedly getting into all of this trouble

00:36:30 ►

and fulfilling this self-fulfilling prophecy,

00:36:34 ►

rather than…

00:36:36 ►

It seems that something about…

00:36:38 ►

Man, when I’m Timothy Leary,

00:36:39 ►

I don’t cross into Mexico carrying a pipe.

00:36:44 ►

That, to me, is sloppy.

00:36:46 ►

I mean, I’m a game player.

00:36:47 ►

I was an LSD smuggler for years, man,

00:36:50 ►

and I know how to play exquisite games,

00:36:51 ►

and Timothy’s game is sloppy.

00:36:53 ►

If Timothy is playing…

00:36:55 ►

But aren’t the games of prophets always sloppy?

00:36:58 ►

Not necessarily.

00:36:59 ►

Not necessarily?

00:37:00 ►

Only the ones that get killed get killed.

00:37:02 ►

They’re the ones that you remember.

00:37:04 ►

Well, you remember the killing yeah you don’t have to turn the temples all the tables over in the

00:37:10 ►

temple unless that’s your trip you happen to be the table turner over and that’s who timothy is

00:37:16 ►

see before timothy took any drugs at all at west point timothy spent like nine months where nobody

00:37:23 ►

at west point would talk to him and he would talk to nobody

00:37:25 ►

because he had broken one of the rules

00:37:27 ►

and he wouldn’t leave

00:37:28 ►

and he demanded an apology

00:37:30 ►

a public apology in the dining hall

00:37:32 ►

before he’d leave

00:37:32 ►

and after nine months of all beat the system

00:37:35 ►

they publicly apologized

00:37:36 ►

and the next day he left

00:37:37 ►

he was teaching there?

00:37:38 ►

no he was a student

00:37:39 ►

he was a student at West Point?

00:37:41 ►

yes

00:37:41 ►

I never knew that

00:37:43 ►

and he went over the wall for a chick or a bottle or something one night,

00:37:47 ►

and he had broken the code of the academy.

00:37:51 ►

Look, I don’t want to spend all our time on Timothy.

00:37:54 ►

I wanted really to get to you.

00:37:57 ►

Let’s just say one more thing.

00:37:59 ►

I mean, at the other end of the coin is that Timothy’s life

00:38:04 ►

is becoming a very powerful statement about those freedoms.

00:38:12 ►

And to the extent that it is pure, it will serve to help us check back into our baseline.

00:38:24 ►

To the extent that it isn’t pure,

00:38:26 ►

that it was an ego act of Tim’s,

00:38:28 ►

it won’t.

00:38:29 ►

Because that’s the way communication works.

00:38:31 ►

Communications come through

00:38:32 ►

as high as the beings who communicate them.

00:38:35 ►

There’s a whole other level at which the game is played.

00:38:38 ►

And so that all of the,

00:38:39 ►

as I go around the country,

00:38:40 ►

all the hundreds and hundreds of people

00:38:42 ►

that have come up and said,

00:38:43 ►

hey, where’s Timothy Leary at?

00:38:47 ►

And when I say, well, why do you ask?

00:38:49 ►

They say, well, he writes this beautiful stuff, but there’s something about him.

00:38:54 ►

Well, that is true.

00:38:56 ►

There is something about him.

00:38:57 ►

And everybody that’s ever lived with him has said the same thing.

00:39:00 ►

There are places in Tim where he doesn’t work on himself.

00:39:03 ►

And whether he can’t or he doesn’t or what but this is the way

00:39:07 ►

All of his wives his children

00:39:10 ►

Me I mean all of us have shared that feeling and I’ve had many acid trips with him

00:39:15 ►

I’ve been inside his head really deep

00:39:20 ►

Overlapping spheres for you, right? This is is your own, in a sense, radicalization

00:39:25 ►

from that previous stage of your life

00:39:29 ►

where you and Timothy broke the ground

00:39:32 ►

for the whole cultural revolution.

00:39:35 ►

Well, in all fairness, let’s point out very clearly

00:39:38 ►

that Timothy broke the ground.

00:39:39 ►

I was a student.

00:39:41 ►

I was a co-faculty member,

00:39:42 ►

and I took care of the kitchen, the children,

00:39:46 ►

the relations with the administration,

00:39:48 ►

and the bank statements, right, and the

00:39:49 ►

neighbors, and the garbage, and the dogs,

00:39:51 ►

and the whole thing that

00:39:53 ►

Jewish mothers do. But

00:39:55 ►

man, his was the vision, his was

00:39:57 ►

the consciousness, and I was like,

00:39:59 ►

I rode his coattails through the whole psychedelic

00:40:02 ►

thing. The Tibetan Book of the Dead was

00:40:03 ►

his book. He just put my name on it because I cleaned i cleaned the kitchen well i mean that’s really been our role

00:40:09 ►

in fact i i define in 1961 i said too i thought to myself i’ve never met a great man before and

00:40:17 ►

this is one of them and it is enough for my life merely to serve such a being i’m perfectly happy

00:40:22 ►

to just do it and for two years I kept doing that

00:40:25 ►

until suddenly I saw

00:40:27 ►

that there was a destructive quality in Tim’s game

00:40:30 ►

and that no matter how beautiful it got,

00:40:33 ►

it kept being converted into some horror all the time.

00:40:37 ►

And then I kept feeling,

00:40:38 ►

he kept saying,

00:40:39 ►

that’s the way it’s got to be.

00:40:41 ►

And in my heart,

00:40:42 ►

it didn’t feel like that’s the way it had to be.

00:40:44 ►

We didn’t have to have police and bill collectors and lawyers and the whole thing and all this chaos all the time,

00:40:50 ►

chaos, you know. And so at that point, we split apart. And once we had split, my life just started

00:41:00 ►

to flow out. And for about six or eight months I was in traumatic shock really feeling

00:41:05 ►

well I’ll just get I was working as a computer programmer right and I thought I’ll just do

00:41:10 ►

my gig and maybe I’ll become a show for something I just mind my own business and because I’ve

00:41:13 ►

had enough of the trip you know okay I did it and then I suddenly started to see that

00:41:20 ►

I had a consciousness too you know I mean that was the first time that I ever started to redefine what my role was to be.

00:41:27 ►

We say to every human being,

00:41:29 ►

black, white, left, right,

00:41:30 ►

brother, sisters,

00:41:34 ►

live and let live.

00:41:42 ►

And that is exactly the way this tape ended.

00:41:45 ►

Ram Dass was kind of cut off in mid-thought, I thought,

00:41:48 ►

and then the haunting voice of the ghost of Timothy Leary came in.

00:41:52 ►

Now, this tape isn’t one that has been uploaded to the Internet Archive yet,

00:41:57 ►

and we may find the rest of this program if it exists at some later date.

00:42:02 ►

I did come across a partial recording that Eldridge Cleaver made

00:42:06 ►

after Leary escaped from his so-called protective custody in Algeria

00:42:10 ►

and was on the run in Afghanistan,

00:42:13 ►

where the Americans eventually captured him and returned him to prison.

00:42:17 ►

Those were pretty wild times indeed.

00:42:19 ►

And I’ll post that recording with the program notes for this podcast

00:42:23 ►

for you to download should you want to hear it.

00:42:26 ►

And that website you can find via psychedelicsalon.org.

00:42:30 ►

Also, I should mention that the other day, Timothy’s son, Zach, told me that Ram Dass had asked him for some CDs of Terrence McKenna’s lectures

00:42:38 ►

and that he was burning some copies of old salon podcasts of Terrence’s work.

00:42:43 ►

So on the outside chance that you ever hear this podcast, Ram Dass, I hope that you know

00:42:48 ►

that you still have hundreds of thousands of fans around the world and that your work

00:42:53 ►

is still very much relevant.

00:42:55 ►

But even more, we want you to know how much you’re loved and appreciated just for being

00:42:59 ►

you and what a wonderful you you are.

00:43:02 ►

and what a wonderful you you are.

00:43:08 ►

So now, let’s flash forward about 20 years to 1986,

00:43:14 ►

after all of that mountain of potential troubles facing Leary had been chipped away,

00:43:17 ►

and Timothy Leary was riding high once again.

00:43:18 ►

Pun intended.

00:43:21 ►

You know, it still seems remarkable to me,

00:43:25 ►

but he always seemed to rise again after every adversity,

00:43:31 ►

and always with his sense of humor intact, which may have been his most beguiling feature.

00:43:39 ►

So now let’s jump into the middle of this 1986 appearance by Timothy Leary on the Larry King radio program,

00:43:44 ►

just to get a sense of who he had become as he began the last decade of his life.

00:43:51 ►

You were, for a time, very villainous in this country, I guess,

00:43:55 ►

with the LSD situation, and people would be angry about Timothy Leary.

00:43:57 ►

They still are, by the way.

00:43:59 ►

Yeah, but it’s temperate somewhat.

00:44:02 ►

How are you, in fact, I guess there’s young people who wouldn’t even know your name, right? That ain’t the truth, right.

00:44:03 ►

How did you react to all of that attention?

00:44:09 ►

Well, you remember, just to give a brief historical recap,

00:44:13 ►

from the years 1960 to 1963 at Harvard University,

00:44:16 ►

we assembled a really brilliant crew of philosophers and psychologists

00:44:21 ►

and divinity students and divinity professors studying the

00:44:27 ►

effects of psychedelic plants, basically mushrooms and peyote and then the chemical forms of them.

00:44:35 ►

And we felt that this is a wonderful tool to expand consciousness and if you thoughtfully

00:44:41 ►

would help you get different perspectives. And we were very, very, very enthusiastic about it.

00:44:47 ►

And some of the older professors took me aside and said,

00:44:50 ►

listen, you’re going to get into a lot of trouble.

00:44:52 ►

Because number one, a lot of people don’t want to have consciousness expanded.

00:44:57 ►

Number two, the very word drug.

00:45:03 ►

We didn’t call them drugs.

00:45:04 ►

They were neurotransmitters,

00:45:05 ►

or they were psychedelic activators.

00:45:08 ►

But the word drug carries a tremendous traffic

00:45:10 ►

and freight of fear.

00:45:13 ►

So it was a great shock to me

00:45:15 ►

when I suddenly discovered I was unpopular

00:45:18 ►

and being set up as someone

00:45:20 ►

who was going to bring down the…

00:45:21 ►

All the things you were doing

00:45:23 ►

were under the auspices of the university, though?

00:45:25 ►

For the first three years, and then we got

00:45:28 ►

thrown out. And they were experimentally approved?

00:45:29 ►

Oh, yeah. And you were thrown out? Uh-huh.

00:45:31 ►

For? Well,

00:45:33 ►

basically

00:45:35 ►

because that kind of research

00:45:37 ►

shouldn’t be done at a university.

00:45:39 ►

It’s avant-garde research, and because

00:45:42 ►

undergraduates are beginning to use it,

00:45:43 ►

we were not giving it to undergraduates, and it started circling out.

00:45:47 ►

A lot of parents complained because their kids were calling up and saying,

00:45:52 ►

guess what, Mom and Dad, I’ve just had a wonderful revelation.

00:45:57 ►

I’m going to leave now and go to India, or I’m now going to change my life.

00:46:01 ►

And the kids, you know, parents, I was, you know, I was very sympathetic to the authorities.

00:46:05 ►

They didn’t send their kids to Harvard

00:46:06 ►

to become young Buddhists

00:46:07 ►

or become rock stars.

00:46:08 ►

You became kind of the guru of this.

00:46:10 ►

I don’t like the word guru.

00:46:11 ►

As a good Irishman, you know,

00:46:13 ►

I don’t like that idea.

00:46:14 ►

Is LSD a thing of the past now?

00:46:16 ►

I was on a show today in Philadelphia.

00:46:19 ►

Yeah, it’s Tuesday, isn’t it?

00:46:21 ►

And a man named Martin Lee,

00:46:23 ►

who’s just written a book on LSD,

00:46:24 ►

was there, and he said that government statistics say there’s as much LSD being used today as

00:46:30 ►

there was in the 60s. The eye of the media sees leaving LSD alone. Now you’ve got crack

00:46:35 ►

and you’ve got Nicaragua, and now you’ve got Ayatollah Khomeini, so that the…

00:46:40 ►

Because it’s not in this week.

00:46:41 ►

Is the eye.

00:46:42 ►

What have you been doing for 23 years?

00:46:45 ►

What have I been doing? If this is your is, yeah. What have you been doing for 23 years? What have I been doing?

00:46:46 ►

If this is your first honest job, what have you been doing?

00:46:49 ►

I’m a free agent.

00:46:52 ►

Now I’m drafted.

00:46:54 ►

Yeah.

00:46:55 ►

I mean, what have you been doing, though?

00:46:56 ►

I write books, give lectures.

00:46:59 ►

For about five of those years, I had my rent paid by the United States.

00:47:04 ►

What did you serve time for?

00:47:06 ►

Possession of two roaches, which somehow appeared in my ashtray of my car, which I didn’t know about.

00:47:15 ►

And you did five years for that?

00:47:16 ►

Uh-huh.

00:47:17 ►

Why? Why so long?

00:47:18 ►

They were pretty mad at me.

00:47:20 ►

For?

00:47:21 ►

Well, for… Sam was out of my mind, and talking about consciousness and drugs,

00:47:27 ►

and you remember the 60s, it was pretty…

00:47:29 ►

You had a period there.

00:47:31 ►

I guess the worst thing that happened to you

00:47:33 ►

was there were some people who committed suicide with LSD, right?

00:47:37 ►

The Art Linkletter daughter case and the like.

00:47:39 ►

Well, she actually didn’t kill herself.

00:47:41 ►

She hadn’t taken LSD for six months.

00:47:44 ►

Yes, there’s no question

00:47:45 ►

that people got tremendously confused and hurt themselves and killed themselves during

00:47:52 ►

the period. How many, we don’t know. How should the society use LSD?

00:48:12 ►

I testified in 1963 before Teddy Kennedy’s committee answering that same question.

00:48:24 ►

And I said that psychedelic drugs, which include marijuana, should be totally supervised by the state. That is, quality should be established,

00:48:26 ►

and you should have to be trained in how to use them,

00:48:29 ►

and they should be prescribed.

00:48:32 ►

And if you screwed up, they take your license away.

00:48:36 ►

You’d have to demonstrate you knew how to use it,

00:48:39 ►

like an automobile.

00:48:39 ►

That sounds very tame today.

00:48:42 ►

Does it?

00:48:42 ►

Yeah.

00:48:43 ►

How does the mind expansion… What did mind expansion do to better people?

00:48:51 ►

You mean the mind expansion of the 60s?

00:48:54 ►

Yeah.

00:48:54 ►

Well, see, the interesting thing is, Larry, that the whole culture is LSD. For example, in the late 60s,

00:49:06 ►

we were running these psychedelic light shows

00:49:08 ►

in which we were trying to express

00:49:10 ►

the color and wonder of the turned-on brain.

00:49:14 ►

And these light shows were then taken over

00:49:16 ►

by rock musicians,

00:49:20 ►

and suddenly movie makers were coming to our shows,

00:49:23 ►

and then suddenly Kubrick was making

00:49:24 ►

these special effects, and suddenly… I were coming to our shows and then suddenly Kubrick was making these special effects

00:49:25 ►

and suddenly…

00:49:26 ►

I remember when Squirt, the drink,

00:49:30 ►

said, turn on to flavor, tune in to bubbles

00:49:33 ►

and turn off the cola habit.

00:49:35 ►

I’m using this as an example.

00:49:37 ►

Then advertising, multiple images,

00:49:41 ►

simultaneity, fusion…

00:49:42 ►

We understand all that.

00:49:43 ►

What does it do for us?

00:49:46 ►

It has given us,

00:49:48 ►

I think America today,

00:49:50 ►

American consciousness is much more sophisticated.

00:49:52 ►

The average kid today

00:49:54 ►

can handle seven, eight, nine programs,

00:49:57 ►

sounds, ideas.

00:49:59 ►

It has,

00:50:01 ►

you know, the brain,

00:50:04 ►

we’re told, has 100 billion neurons.

00:50:08 ►

Each neuron is the knowledge, information, capacity of an Apple computer.

00:50:13 ►

You’ve got 100 billion, I sound like Carl Sagan here,

00:50:15 ►

100 billion Apple computers in your brain.

00:50:21 ►

We’re not even starting to use our brain unless you can sum up program.

00:50:25 ►

And now the brain operates very quickly and flashing.

00:50:28 ►

And there would not have been a, I would say 90% of the kids that are under the age of 40 who are in computers now,

00:50:37 ►

90% of them have had some kind of experience in brain change or neurotransmission.

00:50:48 ►

kind of experience in brain change or neurotransmission. That’s why I may be misunderstood or not liked among certain segments of the country. But computer people really understand where I’m

00:50:55 ►

coming from and they welcome me. You’d have been a hero if they were popular in the 60s,

00:50:59 ►

right? You’d have done it another way. Yeah, sure. Now, do you think time will change our attitude toward you?

00:51:11 ►

I think history will perceive you differently

00:51:13 ►

than it perceived you in the 60s.

00:51:15 ►

It depends who writes the history.

00:51:17 ►

We all know that the history is rewritten by the conquerors.

00:51:20 ►

And it depends who wins this particular chapter of evolution

00:51:24 ►

that we’re working on.

00:51:25 ►

If the forces that are running America now continue,

00:51:28 ►

the Christian right wing and the fundamentalists

00:51:32 ►

and the militarists and so forth,

00:51:33 ►

I will be known as some eccentric footnote.

00:51:36 ►

Do you think the Christian right wing is running the country?

00:51:40 ►

I said if they do,

00:51:42 ►

they certainly are moving into more power.

00:51:44 ►

They’re certainly on the upswing.

00:51:47 ►

And the superstition and the lack of clear thinking that characterized American society is a shock to me.

00:51:53 ►

And I think in five years, how, you know, clear thinking to me seems…

00:51:59 ►

Why do you dislike corporations, structure, organizations?

00:52:03 ►

Just like corporations, structure, organizations?

00:52:10 ►

I feel there’s a law of bureaucracy.

00:52:12 ►

There’s a law of social organization that inevitably the social organization protects itself.

00:52:17 ►

And we all know any bureaucracy is in business

00:52:19 ►

mainly to perpetuate itself and keep itself going.

00:52:22 ►

No matter how wonderful the bureaucracy is to start with,

00:52:25 ►

whether it’s a Christian church or whether, and I’m sorry to say,

00:52:27 ►

many of our democratic institutions fall into this trap.

00:52:31 ►

Eventually, the bureaucracy to please the boss, to cover yourself,

00:52:35 ►

to, I went to West Point, I was trained, I went to Jesuit schools,

00:52:40 ►

I’ve been at Harvard University, I was five years in the Army,

00:52:43 ►

I’ve been in prisons for five years, I’ve seen bureaucracies in and out.

00:52:46 ►

I know how they operate.

00:52:47 ►

And we all know that you join the team and the main function of the team is keep it going.

00:52:52 ►

Bureaucracies tend to limit individual initiative, creativity, and above all, change.

00:52:58 ►

The bureaucrat wants to keep the ship from, you know, losing course.

00:53:05 ►

Let’s go to some calls. We’ll lend us first questions as we go for Dr. Leary, New know, losing course. Let’s go to some calls.

00:53:06 ►

We’ll lend us first questions as we go for Dr. Leary, New York City.

00:53:09 ►

Hello.

00:53:10 ►

Hello, Dr. Leary.

00:53:11 ►

How are you?

00:53:11 ►

Hello.

00:53:12 ►

I’m fine.

00:53:12 ►

That’s good.

00:53:13 ►

I was wondering if you had tried ecstasy and what you thought of it and also how you would

00:53:18 ►

or if you would compare it to LSD.

00:53:22 ►

Yeah.

00:53:22 ►

Of course, I’m not anxious to talk about drugs a lot, but I know I have to because that’s the turf that I’ve charted out.

00:53:28 ►

I have taken ecstasy.

00:53:29 ►

What is ecstasy?

00:53:30 ►

I mean, I know what it is, but I don’t know it as a drug.

00:53:34 ►

I don’t want to pose as a…

00:53:35 ►

I know it as a lifestyle.

00:53:36 ►

Yeah.

00:53:38 ►

I don’t want to pose as a pharmacologist here.

00:53:40 ►

Ecstasy is called MDMA,

00:53:42 ►

and it’s the drug that became popular two or three years ago. It was

00:53:47 ►

legal then. It’s a drug which apparently most people creates a sense of deep empathy. The

00:53:53 ►

difference between this and hallucinogens like LSD is that there’s no alteration of reality.

00:53:59 ►

It’s a very clear, clear thinking experience. It was made illegal about six months ago, and they’re still fighting that case.

00:54:08 ►

Did you enjoy its usage?

00:54:10 ►

Well, my wife Barbara and I came to New York about eight years ago.

00:54:16 ►

And someone, see, in my position, I get offered the gourmet psychopharmaceuticals that come along.

00:54:23 ►

And a doctor that I knew said,

00:54:26 ►

Tim, try this.

00:54:28 ►

And Barbara and I tried it,

00:54:29 ►

and we were married three days later.

00:54:32 ►

You’re still married?

00:54:33 ►

We’re still married, yep.

00:54:34 ►

Plug for ecstasy.

00:54:35 ►

Washington, D.C., hello.

00:54:37 ►

Good morning.

00:54:38 ►

Dr. Leary, the last time I talked to you

00:54:40 ►

was in 1967 at the League for Spiritual Discovery.

00:54:43 ►

Hey, that goes back, doesn’t it? Yeah, I was 36 years 1967 at the league for spiritual discovery hey that goes back doesn’t it yeah i

00:54:46 ►

was uh 36 years old the time i’ve been doing psychedelics for three years and my love affair

00:54:52 ►

with marijuana continued until december of 1984 when i walked into a detention center in maryland

00:54:58 ►

and there was my son pale as a ghost with cigarette burns on his arms. Oh, boy. In general, had pretty well wrecked himself.

00:55:07 ►

I’ll say now that he’s got 18 months of sobriety since then.

00:55:11 ►

That’s good. What’s the question?

00:55:12 ►

The question is, do you agree that PCP and cocaine

00:55:16 ►

have been central to the particularly hellish effect

00:55:19 ►

that drug use has had on young people in recent years?

00:55:23 ►

Yeah, you know, I don’t know anything about PCP,

00:55:25 ►

and I don’t know anything about cocaine.

00:55:27 ►

My specialty back then, you know, 26 years ago,

00:55:30 ►

were the relatively gentle psychedelics.

00:55:33 ►

So, yes, I think that…

00:55:35 ►

And, of course, the problem is that these black market drugs,

00:55:37 ►

you don’t know what PC is.

00:55:38 ►

It’s made by some jerk in a garage.

00:55:41 ►

Cocaine, apparently this stuff is being boiled up with bicarbonate of soda.

00:55:46 ►

You don’t know what it is.

00:55:47 ►

Well, you always did.

00:55:48 ►

You’re not favored its use, whatever use, under controlled conditions.

00:55:52 ►

Yeah, you should use any drug.

00:55:55 ►

I mean, does this cocaine thing worry you?

00:55:58 ►

You mean the crack thing?

00:55:59 ►

Yeah, the crack, apparent epidemic of it in this country.

00:56:03 ►

Well, let’s face it.

00:56:05 ►

The major dangerous drug in this country

00:56:08 ►

to which a hundred times more people are addicted

00:56:13 ►

than all the other drugs put together legally is alcohol.

00:56:16 ►

And if the government wants to do something,

00:56:18 ►

or if moralists want to do something about addiction,

00:56:21 ►

lies being ruined, crimes,

00:56:22 ►

why not hit alcohol?

00:56:25 ►

That’s, I think, obvious, and I think…

00:56:26 ►

Austin, Texas, for Dr. Timothy

00:56:28 ►

Leary. Hello. Hi, Larry.

00:56:31 ►

Hi. Greetings from Austin, Tim.

00:56:32 ►

Hey, I love Austin. Thanks.

00:56:35 ►

I understand that the citizens of Austin

00:56:36 ►

this November will vote on whether to legalize

00:56:38 ►

the growing of marijuana for personal use.

00:56:41 ►

Since Ronald Reagan for

00:56:42 ►

years has been promising to get government off

00:56:44 ►

people’s backs,

00:56:45 ►

I was wondering if you had any thoughts

00:56:47 ►

as to why the president

00:56:49 ►

hasn’t spoken out in favor of this initiative.

00:56:51 ►

Yeah, Mr. William Buckley has, by the way.

00:56:53 ►

Yeah.

00:56:54 ►

A large number of conservative doctors,

00:56:58 ►

lawyers, and columnists like Bill Buckley

00:57:00 ►

have, including Louis Neisser,

00:57:02 ►

just recently,

00:57:03 ►

say we should legalize

00:57:04 ►

and get real

00:57:05 ►

government control of it. Yeah, I’d vote for that referendum. Is it going to pass? Gosh,

00:57:10 ►

tell us. Do you think it’ll pass, sir? If people are thinking clearly, I believe it

00:57:15 ►

will. That makes it possible. No, what, will it pass? I think it will. Austin is, of course,

00:57:22 ►

the most enlightened town, perhaps, in the South.

00:57:26 ►

Minneapolis. Hello.

00:57:27 ►

Hi, Larry.

00:57:28 ►

Hi.

00:57:28 ►

Mr. Larry, is it true in the book that you once wrote in 1980 that you liked the Fonsipers, Gurdjieff, and Alistair Crowley?

00:57:34 ►

It sure is. They taught me a great deal. It’s too bad they were born 1,500 years too early.

00:57:38 ►

Okay, thank you.

00:57:39 ►

Thank you.

00:57:39 ►

They’re both great psychologists.

00:57:41 ►

We go to Cape May, New Jersey, with Dr. Timothy Larry. Hello.

00:57:45 ►

Dr. Larry, I’d like to thank you for just being you all these years.

00:57:49 ►

Well, we’re trying our best, and it’s going to get better.

00:57:52 ►

We need people like you around, especially with the swing to the right this country’s taking.

00:57:57 ►

Listen, we have just begun.

00:57:59 ►

We haven’t even…

00:58:00 ►

Stick around.

00:58:01 ►

We’re just getting our act together.

00:58:03 ►

Two quick questions.

00:58:04 ►

Do you ever see Richard Alpert anymore?

00:58:06 ►

Yes, I see him quite regularly.

00:58:08 ►

He’s at the present time living near Boston with his father.

00:58:11 ►

He’s very happy.

00:58:12 ►

He’s very influential.

00:58:13 ►

He’s doing fine.

00:58:15 ►

And the other question is, and it’s been years since I’ve done any psychedelics,

00:58:20 ►

I would like to know, you said they altered reality.

00:58:25 ►

Do they?

00:58:26 ►

I mean, the things that I saw, the things that I experienced,

00:58:30 ►

was that an alteration of reality?

00:58:32 ►

Well, sure, there are hundreds of levels of reality in your brain.

00:58:35 ►

Your brain can calibrate probably thousands of levels of reality

00:58:38 ►

we haven’t even tuned into yet.

00:58:41 ►

We haven’t even begun our exploration of the realms

00:58:44 ►

and mysteries and wonders of the

00:58:46 ►

human brain. Yeah, they’re

00:58:48 ►

all different. I’m not saying one is a real reality.

00:58:50 ►

They’re all real.

00:58:52 ►

In your own life, you know,

00:58:54 ►

when you go to sleep is a different reality.

00:58:55 ►

When you’re dreaming, when you’re making love,

00:58:58 ►

when you’re… I needn’t say no more.

00:59:01 ►

Thank you. You can make love

00:59:02 ►

with this machine, too, huh?

00:59:03 ►

The blind mirror.

00:59:04 ►

Take the survey to bed?

00:59:06 ►

It’s a Woody Allen kind of thing.

00:59:07 ►

I could see this as a gag in a movie.

00:59:09 ►

All right.

00:59:10 ►

He and the girl take the machine to bed, the Leary thing.

00:59:12 ►

It’s called Mind Foreplay.

00:59:14 ►

What would you do now?

00:59:15 ►

Well, plug it in.

00:59:16 ►

San Jose, California. Hello.

00:59:18 ►

Hi, Larry, Mr. Leary.

00:59:20 ►

I just wanted to say that compared to people who were running the Vietnam War in the late 60s and early 70s,

00:59:26 ►

I thought you were a moral giant, especially in the academic world.

00:59:29 ►

On a scale of 1 to 10, I think you’d be a 1 in terms of your drug stance,

00:59:33 ►

but I think the people running the war would be a.001.

00:59:37 ►

And I just wanted to say, do you think your role now is kind of a media court jester,

00:59:41 ►

along with G. Gordon Milley?

00:59:43 ►

Ladies, excuse me.

00:59:45 ►

Well, Gordon and I did our debate, and I hope we entertained people.

00:59:48 ►

I hope we provided some thoughts.

00:59:51 ►

I might say, by the way, there’s nothing wrong with being,

00:59:54 ►

making people laugh in a very provocative way.

00:59:57 ►

Socrates did it, Lenny Bruce did it, Marcel did it.

01:00:00 ►

As a matter of fact, some of the great philosophers of all time were those people that…

01:00:02 ►

Mark Twain was a man.

01:00:03 ►

Oh, how about, he’s my favorite.

01:00:06 ►

Larry?

01:00:07 ►

Yeah.

01:00:08 ►

First-time caller, long-term listener.

01:00:10 ►

Hi.

01:00:10 ►

I want to ask Dr. O’Leary what he feels about the efficacy of LSD in personal psychological development under…

01:00:21 ►

in therapy, basically.

01:00:23 ►

How effective is it?

01:00:24 ►

When it was legal to do this,

01:00:26 ►

many reports said it was extremely effective,

01:00:29 ►

but unfortunately no such research has been done

01:00:30 ►

in the last 15, 20 years.

01:00:31 ►

What is your gut think?

01:00:33 ►

Yeah, if used correctly, I think it can be very helpful.

01:00:36 ►

For a psychiatrist, psychologist, and a patient.

01:00:38 ►

Yep.

01:00:39 ►

Okay, we go to South Boston, Massachusetts.

01:00:42 ►

Hello.

01:00:42 ►

Hello.

01:00:43 ►

Hi.

01:00:44 ►

Hi, I would like to ask Dr.

01:00:46 ►

I wouldn’t give him that much material or whatever.

01:00:51 ►

How does it count for the lives that were ruined by his LSD in Boston College?

01:00:59 ►

I personally know two girls that were twins.

01:01:02 ►

And this goes back a few years.

01:01:01 ►

First thing, though, two girls that were twins.

01:01:04 ►

And this goes back a few years.

01:01:10 ►

That he ruined by his experimentation, giving it out in class.

01:01:11 ►

All right, doctor.

01:01:13 ►

Well, I don’t know how they were ruined.

01:01:14 ►

I’d like to have them here. How were they ruined?

01:01:15 ►

Yeah, I’d like to hear them say this.

01:01:17 ►

I’ve heard many people…

01:01:18 ►

What?

01:01:19 ►

I don’t think they’re still out.

01:01:22 ►

Yeah, well, I’m not sure.

01:01:24 ►

I’d like to see you say that.

01:01:25 ►

Well, let’s put it this way, for the lady’s sake.

01:01:27 ►

Were you playing a semi-dangerous game in areas where we still have things to learn?

01:01:32 ►

And in all progress, there were people who took experimental drugs before they discovered a cure for polio.

01:01:39 ►

Somebody took that live vaccine and maybe got polio.

01:01:42 ►

Were there people harmed by your experiment?

01:01:45 ►

I mean, no question there were.

01:01:46 ►

But not by my experiments, by use of LSD, probably street LSD.

01:01:51 ►

Yes, no question of it.

01:01:53 ►

But no one you know of in your own.

01:01:54 ►

And I feel very, very sorry that anyone had one moment of suffering or of confusion.

01:02:05 ►

On the other hand, I got to put it to you very bluntly.

01:02:08 ►

My role in society is a role of explorer.

01:02:12 ►

Jackson, Mississippi. Hello.

01:02:14 ►

Yes, sir. Dr. Leary, I’m a history major and a lawyer from Mississippi,

01:02:17 ►

and I want to tell you that the Medi-Blues are wrong. You’re not dead.

01:02:20 ►

I called at 1030 Central, and if I missed this point, I want to apologize.

01:02:24 ►

He had called it 1030 Central, and if I missed this point, I want to apologize.

01:02:31 ►

G. Gordon Liddy, I believe, was one of the FBI agents that busted you in Upper State, New York.

01:02:37 ►

And if that is correct, sir, how do you feel on the fact that June 17th of 1986 would be the 15th anniversary of the Watergate break-in,

01:02:41 ►

in which Mr. Liddy, of course, participated in?

01:02:44 ►

I’ll hang up and listen.

01:02:45 ►

Thank you.

01:02:45 ►

Thank you. Today is the anniversary.

01:02:46 ►

That’s great.

01:02:47 ►

Wonderful.

01:02:48 ►

I take a bit of credit of that

01:02:49 ►

because Liddy kept busting me

01:02:51 ►

and busting me and busting me,

01:02:53 ►

but he never caught me with anything.

01:02:54 ►

I told you, Pete Moss.

01:02:56 ►

But he did drive me out of the county

01:02:58 ►

because it was just too much of a hassle.

01:02:59 ►

Gordon, like Inspector Clouseau,

01:03:01 ►

with his mustache in my bedroom

01:03:02 ►

night after night.

01:03:03 ►

So I moved out to California.

01:03:05 ►

Gordon was a hero in the county.

01:03:07 ►

He said, my gosh, let’s promote him to the White House.

01:03:10 ►

So they sent Gordon off to the White House,

01:03:11 ►

where he then started other midnight burglaries,

01:03:14 ►

which are even more far out.

01:03:16 ►

And between the two of us, Gordon and I,

01:03:18 ►

like the Keystone Cops, we brought down the Nixon administration.

01:03:21 ►

And Gordon will confirm the basic bra facts that he won’t

01:03:26 ►

enjoy my glee over this wonderful feat which we pulled out.

01:03:31 ►

Ocanus, Michigan, hello.

01:03:33 ►

Hello, Dr. Leary?

01:03:34 ►

Hello.

01:03:34 ►

Hello.

01:03:35 ►

Is it true that Marilyn Monroe or Jack Kennedy came to you for advice on using LSD?

01:03:42 ►

No, that’s not true.

01:03:44 ►

It’s a wonderful rumor, but it’s not true.

01:03:45 ►

Austin, Texas. Hello.

01:03:48 ►

Hello, this is Boston.

01:03:49 ►

Oh, Boston. I’m sorry.

01:03:50 ►

Hello, Larry.

01:03:51 ►

Timothy is a person who was politely asked not to complete the EST training

01:03:58 ►

because he just didn’t fit in.

01:04:00 ►

I think I speak with some free spiritual qualification.

01:04:05 ►

You mean you got booted out of Est? Yes, I did.

01:04:07 ►

Boy, you naughty boy.

01:04:09 ►

It was a naughty problem indeed.

01:04:11 ►

Sounds like losing your library card. Anyway, go ahead.

01:04:14 ►

It was traumatic, Larry. It really

01:04:15 ►

was. I don’t

01:04:17 ►

want to engage the

01:04:19 ►

sort of psychedelic mythological

01:04:22 ►

Larry or the

01:04:22 ►

even right now the spiritual, philosophical, intellectual,

01:04:26 ►

or even computer Larry.

01:04:28 ►

You don’t want the electronic Larry?

01:04:31 ►

No, I don’t want the electronic Larry.

01:04:32 ►

What Larry do you want?

01:04:34 ►

I just want to be present with you right at this moment,

01:04:37 ►

Timothy, to tell you that I like you

01:04:40 ►

and that the possibilities in that are an open book.

01:04:43 ►

And I think that I sense that you have always had the ability to be astoundingly, astonishingly present with whatever’s going on around you.

01:04:53 ►

And that’s a clue, perhaps, to the resiliency of your vision and your fortitude in yourself.

01:04:59 ►

And this has been a real privilege.

01:05:01 ►

Well, I’m going to send you a message.

01:05:03 ►

Open up your eardrums.

01:05:08 ►

I want your eardrums naked, and I’m going to send you a wonderful word of thank you very much. That was a wonderful call.

01:05:13 ►

Fresno, California, for Dr. Timothy Leary. Hello.

01:05:16 ►

Yes, I have two questions. One, with the modern

01:05:20 ►

electronics, such as micro-oscillators that can be implanted under

01:05:24 ►

the skin of the head,

01:05:26 ►

and with brain entrainment and modern drugs,

01:05:29 ►

does Mr. Leary think that the people now can be programmed and controlled?

01:05:35 ►

Well, I’m sure that there are a lot of people in big government buildings around the world

01:05:41 ►

that are thinking thoughts of how wonderful it would be to do that.

01:05:44 ►

government buildings around the world that are thinking thoughts of how wonderful it would be to do that my life is dedicated to arming ourselves with intelligence and courage so we won’t let that

01:05:51 ►

happen for example i i can take any drug in the world and they won’t be able to phase me because

01:05:57 ►

i’m not afraid of any drug because i can deal with it and most of the fears of addiction and drugs

01:06:02 ►

even what they are is a craven cowardice.

01:06:05 ►

What’s all this stuff about America being afraid of a little piece of crack cocaine?

01:06:11 ►

Come on, we can lick those things.

01:06:13 ►

It’s the American way.

01:06:14 ►

And we’re being scared by all this propaganda.

01:06:17 ►

I agree with you that there are these problems.

01:06:20 ►

But the only defense against totalitarianism has always been,

01:06:25 ►

Jefferson said it, to constant vigilance on the part of the individual.

01:06:29 ►

There ain’t no one that can protect us against Big Brother, Big Sister,

01:06:31 ►

except ourselves, linked up as free agents.

01:06:34 ►

Sausalito, California. Hello.

01:06:37 ►

Hello, Dr. Laird. It’s a pleasure to talk to you.

01:06:39 ►

Hey, Sausalito’s in early here. Good for you.

01:06:41 ►

Yeah, I really enjoy your enthusiasm.

01:06:44 ►

I have a question for you. Yeah, I really enjoy your enthusiasm. I have a question for you.

01:06:46 ►

I’ve heard that a spiritual argument against the use of drugs

01:06:51 ►

did result in that you have multidimensional experiences through the use of drugs,

01:07:00 ►

but the argument is that you have no control with your own will

01:07:05 ►

and that the experience itself is unrepeatable.

01:07:10 ►

Do you have comments on that?

01:07:13 ►

Oh, that’s a heavy, heavy theological question.

01:07:16 ►

You’d have to have the Pope and the College of Cardinals.

01:07:19 ►

A lot of people think that the more pleasure you have

01:07:22 ►

and the more spiritual pleasure they have,

01:07:24 ►

you’re draining your ecstasy

01:07:26 ►

account or your spiritual account.

01:07:28 ►

I don’t really believe that.

01:07:30 ►

I think that more is better as long as it’s

01:07:32 ►

intelligent and used for good purposes.

01:07:34 ►

But that’s the end of my theological

01:07:36 ►

wrap. Spokane, Washington.

01:07:38 ►

Hello. Yeah, considering

01:07:40 ►

your fascination in the mind,

01:07:41 ►

what are your personal experiences and opinions

01:07:44 ►

of Eastern religious practices

01:07:45 ►

such as Zen Buddhism?

01:07:47 ►

Well, I went to India. I think everyone

01:07:49 ►

should take a trip over this. Almost obligatory.

01:07:51 ►

I took Hinduism 1A on the

01:07:54 ►

banks of the Ganges when I was a young man.

01:07:55 ►

I learned everything that I thought I could learn.

01:07:57 ►

I treasure the things I learned there.

01:07:59 ►

You’ve got to keep moving. There’s no final answer.

01:08:01 ►

Hinduism, by the way, would agree with that.

01:08:03 ►

So go over there. Try it all.

01:08:04 ►

Don’t get hooked. Don’t follow leaders. Watch your parker meters. Stay’s no final answer. Hinduism, by the way, would agree with that. So go over there. Try it all. Don’t get hooked.

01:08:05 ►

Don’t follow leaders.

01:08:06 ►

Watch your parking meters.

01:08:07 ►

Stay away from gurus.

01:08:08 ►

But try it all out.

01:08:10 ►

With Dr. Timothy Leary, San Francisco.

01:08:13 ►

Hello.

01:08:14 ►

Next question is, I’d like to have your comments on the tremendous construction program underway here in California to build more prison facilities.

01:08:24 ►

And I’ll take my answer on the air.

01:08:26 ►

All right.

01:08:26 ►

Yeah, well, I don’t think building prisons is the answer to the crime problem.

01:08:32 ►

So I’m not in favor of it.

01:08:35 ►

Middletown, New York.

01:08:36 ►

Hello.

01:08:36 ►

Hi, Larry.

01:08:37 ►

Hi.

01:08:37 ►

A couple of questions, Dr. Leary, quick on Ram Dass, Richard Albert.

01:08:42 ►

His books have meant a lot to me.

01:08:43 ►

I heard that you once made a comment that when asked about Ram Dass, Richard Albert. His books have meant a lot to me. I heard that you once made a comment that

01:08:45 ►

when asked about Ram Dass, that people who

01:08:48 ►

get into spiritualism only do so if they have

01:08:50 ►

a sexual hang-up. I’d like to hear a comment on that.

01:08:52 ►

I didn’t say that. I don’t believe it.

01:08:54 ►

What do you think about what Ram Dass is

01:08:56 ►

doing these days with the Death and Dying Project

01:08:57 ►

and all this stuff? What do you think about where his head is at

01:09:00 ►

these days? Yeah, I think I’ve already mentioned this program.

01:09:02 ►

I think it’s wonderful. I think he’s a great inspiration.

01:09:04 ►

There are millions of people

01:09:05 ►

out there that have been

01:09:06 ►

influenced in the right direction

01:09:07 ►

by him, more power to him.

01:09:08 ►

He’s my partner in time

01:09:09 ►

and I’m all on his side.

01:09:11 ►

And if he’s listening tonight,

01:09:12 ►

he knows already what I’m going

01:09:15 ►

to say, that we’re good friends.

01:09:16 ►

A couple of moments left,

01:09:17 ►

Dr. Lurie.

01:09:18 ►

Do you regret anything you’ve done?

01:09:21 ►

Well, you know, I operate

01:09:23 ►

from a standpoint of team play in sports

01:09:25 ►

I have, I struck out perhaps as much as anyone in the league

01:09:31 ►

On the other hand, I’ve hit more home runs

01:09:32 ►

I’m right up there

01:09:33 ►

I’ve made a lot of mistakes

01:09:34 ►

But the basic trajectory in my life

01:09:36 ►

I think, no matter whether you agree with me or not

01:09:39 ►

You’ll have to agree with it

01:09:40 ►

Is to free yourself, to think for yourself

01:09:43 ►

To question authority

01:09:44 ►

And I’ve done that And I’ve made mistakes along the line.

01:09:47 ►

A lot of people have misunderstood me.

01:09:49 ►

I’ve let a lot of people down because I’ve changed perhaps too quickly.

01:09:53 ►

Yeah, I’ve made a lot of mistakes, but I don’t regret the direction and the goal.

01:09:56 ►

It’s the American way.

01:09:57 ►

It’s the human way to try to think better.

01:09:59 ►

Do you miss Harvard?

01:10:01 ►

Not a bit.

01:10:02 ►

I was up there last week and wandered around there.

01:10:05 ►

You know, I never wanted to be at Harvard.

01:10:09 ►

Number one, I’m not an institution.

01:10:11 ►

Some people say, gee, Jim, if you had played your cards right,

01:10:15 ►

you’d be a full-tenured, retired Harvard professor now.

01:10:18 ►

And I say, yeah, no kidding.

01:10:21 ►

Well, thanks a lot, but no thanks.

01:10:24 ►

Anything about the institutions you like?

01:10:26 ►

I’m not against institutions.

01:10:28 ►

I’ve been in them all, left or right.

01:10:31 ►

I love institutions.

01:10:32 ►

They’re intelligence tests.

01:10:33 ►

Institutions are prisons that you have to escape from.

01:10:36 ►

And the society has to have groups.

01:10:39 ►

They have to have organizations.

01:10:41 ►

I believe in teams and in clubs.

01:10:43 ►

The only thing is don’t get trapped in them.

01:10:45 ►

The most addictive, dangerous, mind-screwing thing in the world

01:10:49 ►

is conformity to an organization.

01:10:54 ►

Love the organization.

01:10:55 ►

Get the best out of it and move on to a new one.

01:10:59 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:11:02 ►

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

01:11:08 ►

Didn’t you love it just now when the good Dr. Leary said that institutions are intelligence tests that you have to escape from?

01:11:17 ►

And I agree. I think institutions are wonderful, but only for people who need to be institutionalized.

01:11:47 ►

Thank you. every day there’s another institution that’s trying to subdue your spirit. Of course, you and I know that they are never going to succeed,

01:11:50 ►

so don’t give up the good struggle and press on.

01:11:55 ►

Now, I guess I should also mention that I edited some material out of the Larry King interview that we just heard,

01:11:57 ►

but it was only the parts about the software company

01:12:01 ►

that Tim was working on at the time,

01:12:03 ►

and most of that part of the conversation is no longer very relevant today.

01:12:08 ►

Also, I hope that you noticed the caller from Austin, Texas,

01:12:11 ►

who was talking about the then-current hope to legalize cannabis in Texas.

01:12:16 ►

Of course, that measure was also never passed.

01:12:20 ►

Not that I’m against any and all efforts to legalize this wonderful plant,

01:12:24 ►

but as you can tell, the legalization battles have been going on for a very long time.

01:12:30 ►

So I wouldn’t pin my hopes on it happening anytime soon.

01:12:33 ►

In other words, be nice to your neighborhood grower.

01:12:38 ►

Now before I get out of here today, there are a couple of other announcements I want to make.

01:12:42 ►

And first of all, I truly appreciate receiving messages from you,

01:12:46 ►

but I hope that you don’t take my lack of a response as an insult,

01:12:50 ►

because the truth is I just can’t keep up with the correspondence

01:12:53 ►

and still do the research I’m trying to do to finish the book I’m working on.

01:12:58 ►

And in the past couple of weeks, I’ve received several requests

01:13:02 ►

to publicize Kickstart projects for various artistic endeavors,

01:13:06 ►

all of which are worthy of our support.

01:13:09 ►

Also, as you no doubt know, there is an effort underway to raise money to help Sasha Shulgin with his mounting medical bills.

01:13:17 ►

And to tell the truth, I’m not sure how to handle all of these requests.

01:13:20 ►

For one, I’ll be sending a part of the donations we received last month and this month to the Shulgin cause, Thank you. should first read and respond to the over 200 emails that are still waiting for me on Facebook.

01:14:09 ►

So if you sent me a message that requires a reply, please don’t give up on me.

01:14:10 ►

I’ll eventually get there.

01:14:15 ►

Also, I’ve been receiving links to some really great music,

01:14:19 ►

and I’ll try to remember to add two of those links to this week’s program notes.

01:14:25 ►

Those being a really hot rock group, Axis Mundi, who I think are based in the UK.

01:14:29 ►

And they produce some really cool videos that you can see at YouTube.

01:14:38 ►

Also, my dear friends Kodoma and Kevin have some new music out that was recorded at a recent live gathering that I really wished I’d been able to make.

01:14:43 ►

But now at least we have some music from them to enjoy the party vicariously.

01:14:45 ►

And I’ll link to that site as well.

01:14:54 ►

Also, lately I’ve been receiving quite a few requests to include essays and other items from our fellow salonners in these podcasts,

01:15:00 ►

but I simply don’t have the time to read through a half a dozen essays every week and select some to read in the podcast,

01:15:09 ►

so if the salon was my only project, I certainly would begin doing something like that, but I still have many other demands on my time, and so I can’t devote that much time to the salon.

01:15:11 ►

However, I think that Bruce Dahmer has come up with an interesting idea that will at least

01:15:16 ►

give you an opportunity to add your ideas to the discussions here.

01:15:20 ►

What Bruce is doing is he’s taking a Terrence McKenna talk and interspersing his own comments after several of Terrence’s more profound utterances.

01:15:31 ►

And in essence, he’s going to bring these great workshops back to life.

01:15:35 ►

At least that’s the attempt.

01:15:36 ►

And if this is successful, then the next step will be for you and our other fellow swanners to do the same thing.

01:15:43 ►

Play something from a McKenna talk that you maybe disagree with,

01:15:47 ►

and then add your own comments after it,

01:15:50 ►

giving the reasons for challenging Terrence on a particular point.

01:15:54 ►

Of course, it doesn’t always have to be a disagreement with him that you have.

01:15:57 ►

It could also be an enlargement of some topic he didn’t cover to your satisfaction.

01:16:03 ►

So if you sometimes are frustrated that you can’t add to a particular workshop’s conversation,

01:16:08 ►

this may be a chance for you to have your opinions heard as well.

01:16:12 ►

In a week or two, I hope to have more information about this in a demo program for you to hear,

01:16:16 ►

so stay tuned, or I should say stay subscribed.

01:16:22 ►

Finally, I’ve received several requests to find another way to make donations to the salon

01:16:26 ►

other than through PayPal, due to PayPal’s cutting off WikiLeaks from their donation stream.

01:16:32 ►

And I just checked to see what WikiLeaks is doing, and they have a number of alternate methods for

01:16:37 ►

making donations. And I’ll be looking into how they are doing that to see if it’s practical for

01:16:43 ►

us to use as well. And if you happen to know of a quick and easy way I can implement a non-PayPal Thank you. If you send me an email, be sure to put something in the subject line that will catch my attention. Something like psychedelic salon, for example.

01:17:07 ►

Because if you use a funky subject line, I may never see it.

01:17:11 ►

Each morning when I download email, there are hundreds of messages that come in.

01:17:15 ►

So the only way to handle it is to search on the subject line for the word psychedelic or salon.

01:17:20 ►

Those messages I do read right away.

01:17:22 ►

Otherwise, unless something happens to catch my eye as I scroll through the messages, I might miss your email.

01:17:29 ►

And please don’t think that I’m complaining now.

01:17:31 ►

It’s actually just really wonderful to get all that email,

01:17:34 ►

and I try to feel not too guilty about not being able to keep up with it all.

01:17:40 ►

Oh, and one last thing.

01:17:41 ►

Should you be at the Sunday session of the MAPS conference in L.A. this weekend,

01:17:46 ►

that’s the 10th, 11th, and 12th of December, 2010,

01:17:49 ►

be sure to come up and say hello.

01:17:51 ►

I’ll be the emcee for the talks that day,

01:17:54 ►

and so I’ll be somewhere around the stage during the breaks.

01:17:57 ►

I’m not going to be able to make it for the Saturday sessions,

01:17:59 ►

but if you’re there on Sunday, I would truly enjoy meeting you.

01:18:03 ►

Well, that’ll do it for now,

01:18:04 ►

and so I’ll close today’s podcast again by reminding you that

01:18:08 ►

this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon

01:18:11 ►

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

01:18:14 ►

under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 3.0 license.

01:18:19 ►

And if you have any questions about that,

01:18:20 ►

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

01:18:24 ►

which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.

01:18:27 ►

And if you’re interested in the philosophy behind the salon or some of the stories about how it came about, you can hear all about it in my novel, The Genesis Generation, which is available as a pay-what-you-can audiobook that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.

01:18:43 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from

01:18:45 ►

Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

253 - Whatever Happened to Timothy Leary_

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Program Notes

Previous Episode

Next Episode

Similar Episodes

Transcript

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