284 - The Revolution Continues Part 1

Program Notes

[NOTE: All quotations are by Timothy Leary.]

“From my earliest years I wanted to figure out what life was about. I wanted to find out why I was here so that my actions and my desires would have some meaning. I don’t understand why everyone isn’t mainly and centrally a philosopher, because if you aren’t trying to figure that out for yourself you’re borrowing, or begging, or passively taking on someone elses philosophy, and this may lead to situations that are unsatisfactory.”

“A philosopher never gets in trouble if his ideas are not new.”

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic

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salon.

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Space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. And before we get started today, I first would like to thank Andy W., William K., and longtime salonner and donor Andrew O.,

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all of whom made donations to the salon to help offset some of our expenses with these podcasts.

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So Andy, William, and Andrew, thank you all for your support and for being a part of the salon.

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Now, a few days back, one of our fellow salonners either posted a comment or sent me an email saying that he liked all the latest podcasts, but he was really in the mood for some more Timothy Leary.

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Well, you’d better be careful what you ask for because you’re in for two or maybe even three podcasts in a row with a good Dr. Leary.

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And don’t worry, I’ll get these out in less than three weeks, but what I’m going to play covers three hours.

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It was a three-hour long interview, and that’s way too long for a single podcast.

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However, all the material seems to go together.

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I’ve actually only heard the first

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third of it, but I’ll try to get these out as close together as I can, and I’m looking forward

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to hearing the next part myself, so I won’t drag my feet on that. And in case you think that I’ve

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got some kind of a grand plan as to how I program these podcasts, I can assure you that that is

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about as far from the truth as can be.

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You see, a couple of years ago, my friend Bruce Dahmer connected me with Dennis Berry,

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who at the time was the custodian of the Timothy Leary Archive. And thanks to Dennis and Bruce,

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I’ve now been able to play a lot of the audio material from that archive, which, as you know,

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has now been acquired by the New York City Library.

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And so, I’ve been sprinkling in a Dr. Leary program every month or so, but when my computer

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crashed earlier this year, I lost my master copy of which of the Leary talks I’d already

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podcast.

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So now I have this great big file full of his talks and interviews, but I’m not sure

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which ones I’ve already played for you.

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So today I decided to work from the bottom of the file and just spot check each one of them in order

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and see what the sound quality was like and then see what the content was. Well, only a few items

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from the bottom, I came across three one-hour recordings from an interview that Dr. Leary did on KPFK Radio in Houston, Texas,

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a city that is very dear to my heart, as that is where my two sons were born,

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where I attended law school, and where I also practice law. In fact, I was actually practicing

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law in Houston at the time this recording was made, in a studio somewhere probably not far

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from where I was.

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Now what I’m going to play for you right now is the first hour of that radio interview with Dr. Timothy Leary, and it was on the Houston, Texas Pacifica radio station on November

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13th, 1976, which means that this was one of his first interviews after being released

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from prison in April of that same year.

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one of his first interviews after being released from prison in April of that same year.

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And I should mention also that the long introduction we are now going to hear is exactly as it was on the tape.

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This is how they started their radio show.

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He flies so high, he swoops so low, he knows exactly which way he’s going to go.

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Which way he’s gonna go Sometimes I make very clear in my public lectures, as I’ll make clear right now,

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I don’t want anyone listening to this program to believe anything I say.

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I don’t believe in belief in the sense that belief is a static structure that your mind

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and your brain use to repetitiously program experience.

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I do now and have for many years considered myself to be, as you said, a simple code clerk.

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I’m trying to decipher the genetic code to find out why we’re here. I think that scientific laws and scientific order can provide us the directional and navigational clues to why we’re here and where we’re going. Dr. Timothy Leary is out of prison,

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still to all appearances a person who aspires to be a leader of men.

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Behind him stretches one of the most controversial careers of our time.

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In front of him is an aspiration to move mankind

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into the next step of human evolution.

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Is this man to be believed?

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Not really, as he says himself.

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What then are we to make of this man,

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his ideas, and his example?

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Perhaps in this two-part presentation we will find out.

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What we will hear in this program

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is essentially one long interview

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given by Dr. Leary in Houston, Texas,

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on November 13, 1976.

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Dr. Leary arrived in Houston

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willing to discuss any of the rumors and suspicions

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about his recent past.

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He was also eager to talk about his current plans for space migration, increase of intelligence,

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and extension of life.

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Part one of the program will deal primarily with the past of Timothy Leary.

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Part two will deal with Tim Leary now.

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Timothy Leary.

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Timothy Leary.

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Mr. Leary hasn’t been doing too much speaking out in public

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since he’s been released from incarceration,

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and this is an opportunity for a lot of people to find out

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a lot that they might be wanting to know from Dr. Leary.

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Our guests include Howard Perlstein, who is Director of Publications at the Contemporary

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Arts Museum here in Houston, and Dr. Henry Marshall, a psychologist from the Texas Research

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Institute of Mental Sciences.

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psychologist from the Texas Research Institute of Mental Sciences.

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Henry Marshall is working in psychohistory,

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and part of his work involves a study of Dr. Leary.

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I must say, it’s a pleasure to see you, Mr. Leary.

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Very happy to be here.

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How are you doing?

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Doing great. Never better.

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Enjoying Houston? I think Houston is, you know, it has a claim to be the city of the future.

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It’s just flatlands here with all those towers pointing upward,

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and a lot’s happening here, and I can feel the energy.

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I’m glad to be part of it.

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It gets very energetic sometimes.

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I don’t know.

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It’s not quite as mellow as it might appear,

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but there’s tremendous energy that appears in the growing plants and vines

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and in the minds of people from time to time.

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We see it reflected in this radio station and feel it sometimes in this radio station

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and the relationship between the people that are operating it

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and the people who are listening sometimes is very strong.

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Well, Howard, I’d kind of like to pass the ball to you.

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Okay, I got it.

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The question I seem to focus on is the term guru.

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In its more classic sense, guru is a term that does not specifically mean teacher, but

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one who exemplifies the way.

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Since you describe yourself as a code clerk for the DNA code, and that information being

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ways a way that has been shown to you, maybe we can clarify the whole guru, teacher, non-teacher,

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or merely another disciple along the way?

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Well, I’m a little uneasy about the term guru. Of course, any term, however good it is, can

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be misused. I’ve never called myself a guru. That’s one of the 24 meaty images that’s been

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laid on me by an anxious and disturbed public, I tend to shy away from

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the term guru because you get involved with concepts like perfect masters.

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If you’re looking for a perfect master, you’re recruiting yourself to be a perfect slave.

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I think that, sure, we learn from people who have information or who have some styles and energy techniques

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that will help us develop. I sometimes call myself a friendly radio broadcaster from station

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KDNA. Do you use K or W?

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No, we’re K. You know, there actually was a KDNA in St. Louis.

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Well, then you’re really, you know,

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basically the position that you’re in is you’re playing the game along with the rest of us

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as we’re all playing this game side by side of discovery.

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But some people don’t really care much about the meaning of the game.

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From my earliest years, I wanted to figure out what life was about.

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I wanted to find out why I was here so that my actions and my desires would have some meaning.

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I don’t understand why everyone isn’t mainly and centrally a philosopher.

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Because if you aren’t trying to figure that out for yourself,

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you’re borrowing or begging or passively taking on somebody else’s philosophy.

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And this may lead to situations that are unsatisfactory.

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There’s one difference between my philosophy and many of the philosophies

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that you’ll find taught by professors of philosophy in universities and colleges.

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And that is that I’m quite serious about it, it’s an all-out proposition to me,

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and when I discover what I think to be a natural law or a signal from the DNA code

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as to how individuals or species are supposed to evolve, I act on it.

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This, of course, can get you in trouble.

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A philosopher never gets in trouble if his ideas are not new

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or if his ideas simply mellow out and sustain the current anthill social structure.

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But if a philosopher’s ideas are new and if they are effective

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and if they are accurate transcriptions of the DNA message,

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then you’re going to shake things up.

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Then you’re going to have people listening to you and changing,

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and you’re going to bring about revisions and reformations

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in the understanding that we have of human destiny.

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So that it’s inevitable that I live out my philosophy,

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because I really believe in it.

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I’m not getting paid by a philosophy department to hold on a ten-year chair or to win a Nobel Prize

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or to win any of the anthill rewards for being clever at putting words together

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totally engaged and involved in what I’m doing and that’s my lifestyle changes

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I’ve gone through at least over 30 different life changes in the last 20 years. By life change, I mean different residents, different profession, different languages that I’m using to explain myself and talk to others, different goals.

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goals. People often say to me, well, why, it’s terrible, you’re inconsistent, and you’re changing. Well, I look at them and I say, well, aren’t you changing? The name of the

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game is change. That’s the basis of evolution and mutation and growth is to change. I have

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played out parts, sometimes I call them B-movies. I’ve been involved in some of the most important social and cultural and political events of

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the last 15 years.

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I think this is inevitable.

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I didn’t choose this.

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If I were to do it over again, I would probably avoid some of these political situations.

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I don’t know if you can, but I’ve been involved in many of these B-movies, prisons and Algerias

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and drugs and so forth.

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People don’t realize that they expect that I’m going to live up to some of these past movies.

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Well, like anyone who’s, of course, when you’re in the movie,

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you’re playing full tilt all out to transmit that energy.

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Forgive me for being the skeptical interviewer.

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That’s your function?

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Yeah.

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That’s your function?

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Yeah.

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I’m trying to picture you relating to in late 1974, early 1975,

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when nobody quite knew exactly where you were,

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but the rumors were that you were somewhere in federal hands and you were talking to a bunch of federal people.

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And I’m trying to picture you, as you were talking to a bunch of federal people, and I’m trying to picture you, as you were talking to me,

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I’m trying to picture you relating to those people and what you might have been telling them.

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I have spent the past couple of hours going through our files here on Timothy Leary,

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and I found…

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Oh, you’ve got a file.

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I’m going to file into the Freedom of Information Act.

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You can look at them at any time.

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Somebody told me that this story was in the news that you tried to buy a refrigerator

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the other day and you forgot your Social Security number and you had them call the FBI to get

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it.

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Is that true?

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As a matter of fact, that is true.

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I had to get a credit thing and I had to… It was

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actually by car. I’m becoming very American, middle class, and I didn’t know what my social

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security number was the last time that I remembered using it. The last time I had a conventional

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job was at Harvard back in 1963. So I called Harvard and they couldn’t locate it. So I

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was thinking about how I was going to do this.

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So then I personally called the FBI in San Diego and said,

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Hey, you’re there, you’re public servants, you’re a servant to the taxpayer.

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You guys are on the ball.

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I want this information.

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So they called back in about ten minutes.

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They were very embarrassed and they said, Well, you were never wanted in San Diego and

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we don’t have any of you. So I said, well, get on your Watts free telephone line and call San Francisco or call Los Angeles.

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About an hour later, I got a phone ring and I picked it up.

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And the guy said, hey, Tim, 69438, and I said, what?

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I didn’t know who it was.

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It was an FBI agent who gave me the number, courtesy of the Los Angeles Bureau of the FBI.

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That leads us into the area you wanted to know about my conversations with law enforcement.

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Yeah, there’s a lot of questions.

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I have some.

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If you’d like to start off, you can go ahead.

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If you would rather not, I have some rather specific questions here that I’d like to ask you.

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Yeah, well, let me say two things in preparation,

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and you can ask anything you want,

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and I’ll react directly to the fact that I know the answers to your questions.

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I’ll give them to you.

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Number one, the more I found out about what happened in the 60s,

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The more I found out about what happened in the 60s, the more I realized that I was a pawn of plans and projects.

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I was acting out scripts that were written by other people.

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For example, in the first September issue of Rolling Stone this year,

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there was an interesting article in which FBI agents have openly admitted, proudly admitted, that they forged letters to Eldridge Cleaver

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attacking me, signing the names of militant Black Panthers.

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And I remember very clearly the day in Algeria when Eldridge,

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who had been very friendly, suddenly came around to see me,

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and he was very angry.

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He said, look, man, you’re ruining all my credibility

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with the Black brothers back in the States

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because what am I doing here running a honky-tonk, hippy-dippy circus?

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We’re supposed to be fighting a revolution and they want to know.

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And that led directly to the breakdown between me and Cleaver.

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Now come to find out, it was the FBI that forged those letters

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and deliberately provoked the quarrel between me and Cleaver.

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Those bastards did all kinds of stuff like that back in the 60s.

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Then they turned around and they wrote Huey Newton forged letters from Black Panthers saying,

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what’s Cleaver doing breaking up quite black unity?

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And that led directly, now it probably would have happened anyway,

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but it led directly to provoke the breakdown between Cleaver and Newton.

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Now, I don’t know yet what happened during much of the late 60s and early 70s and so

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forth because there were so many double agents and because there were so many scripting written,

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the authorship of which we may never know.

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I have no hard feelings about this.

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I think that my feeling about the FBI was that was the ballgame and they outwitted us.

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It’s like pro football.

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They pulled a new reverse on us.

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So that I think it’s, yeah, I feel a little sheepish

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that I was pushed into positions that I didn’t understand.

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Secondly, I feel that I made a mistake in the

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1960s by becoming so violently partisan. I got very angry when I was thrown in prison

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for life during the Nixon administration. I became angry. And I don’t think that anger is a, I don’t believe in

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the politics of anger. And I regret this because I think that it’s our duty to educate the

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police, to relate to the police, to raise their consciousness. And I don’t believe in

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us and them. I don’t believe we can alienate ourselves from any aspect of society, particularly the people who run society.

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In general, when I was in Folsom Prison, I realized that I had to make some reconciliation

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with the authority. I knew I would never get out of state prison until Ronald Reagan was

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knocked out of office. He actually resigned. I knew

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that Brown would get elected. That was my bet, and that happened. I knew I’d never get

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out of federal prison as long as Richard Nixon was in. It was a great break for me that Watergate

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happened. It was a great break for all of us, but we’re talking about my situation.

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I don’t think I’d be in this room right now if Richard Nixon was still in the White House.

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I’d still be waiting out the Carter administration to get bailed out.

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Now, during the last couple of years that I was in prison,

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I did spend time talking to government officials.

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I did not talk about, I did not inform anybody.

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For number one, they knew more about what I was doing than I did. They were very clear that their agents infiltrated into my home

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and into my projects all the way through the late 60s and 70s.

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The CIA actually orchestrated many of the moves I made.

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I didn’t realize it, but they were doing it.

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So there was nothing I knew.

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See, I’m not a criminal.

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I’ve never had anything to do with dope dealing.

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The whole brotherhood myth was a no brotherhood.

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I’ve never informed on dope dealers.

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I don’t know anything about dope dealing.

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The government did release a press statement that I was informing on revolutionaries and on dope dealers.

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That was a press release by the Justice Department.

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I consider that a test of intelligence.

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Yeah, after that, UPI and all picked him up, and that was official.

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Leary has been giving information to federal authorities.

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They could say that as a fact, whereas before, Leary is reported to have been giving information to federal authorities. They could say that as a fact, whereas before,

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Liria is reported to have been giving information.

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You say that they already had all this information.

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Do you think that if I was giving information,

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that the last thing in the world the investigators would do would be warning the weatherman that I was doing it.

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They certainly wouldn’t be blurting it out.

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I consider this really a test of intelligence.

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They did that deliberately to cause dissension and paranoia

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among the drug takers, among the counterculture,

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and among the militant left.

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I think that was quite obvious,

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and it succeeded to a certain extent in creating

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paranoia in those that… There’s another aspect to this. See, as I say, I can’t tell…

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I don’t know everything that’s going on. I’ll tell you what I know, though. I think it’s

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of great interest to those who are interested in government conspiracies.

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After the Nixon administration came into power in the late 60s, early 70s, one of the big

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functions of the Internal Security Division of the Justice Department was to go after

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dissidents, counterculture people, and in a sense, Democrats. After all, Watergate was an attempt to bust Larry O’Brien, if you remember.

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And they were trying to set up Teddy Kennedy,

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and they were trying to literally put their enemies in prison.

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In those days, it is true that the Justice Department was putting a lot of energy

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into surveying and grand jurying and indicting and trying anti-war dissidents,

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the Chicago Seven, the Gainesville people, the Camden.

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And at that time, they were looking for the weathermen.

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The situation now is entirely different.

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And I’ve been to Washington. I’ve talked to these people.

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I’ve observed.

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I’ve spent about three years studying the matter.

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Again, I don’t know.

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We’re involved in very murky.

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But I’m convinced, matter of fact, I know that at the present time the Justice Firemen

00:23:00 ►

has no interest in busting the Weathermen.

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Number one, because the weathermen are infiltrated

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and know exactly where the weathermen are.

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Number two, they know that if they get them,

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they can’t try them because of electronic surveillance,

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which is illegal.

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So there’s no way they can ever put them in prison.

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Number three, even if they could,

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they don’t want any more trials.

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Even before the Carter election,

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under the Ford regime,

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they didn’t want any more of these political trials

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because they lost them all with simply an embarrassment.

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Sure, it gave Nixon kicks, but after Nixon was out.

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Number four, to the extent that the weathermen are in any way irritant to the American body

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politic, as defined by people in Washington, they’d much rather have them silenced underground

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and under observation than open

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running around today.

00:23:48 ►

So I would say to anyone listening who knows any people in the Weathermen that I’m convinced

00:23:52 ►

that if they were to get a good lawyer, I don’t mean a militant lawyer who wants to

00:23:57 ►

use them as martyrs, assuming they don’t want to, but if they get a good lawyer to investigate

00:24:02 ►

it, I think that I’ll put my reputation

00:24:05 ►

on the line. It’s a risky thing to do. And say they have a 99 chance out of 100 that

00:24:10 ►

they would never do, they would never be tried, and they would never go to prison. And they’d

00:24:15 ►

be allowed to operate freely in the American culture. And maybe they don’t want to do that.

00:24:22 ►

I know the government doesn’t want them to do it. But again, the government I’m talking about is the government that existed in Washington

00:24:26 ►

a month ago.

00:24:28 ►

And with the Carter regime coming, I heard that Congressman Jordan, for example, could

00:24:35 ►

be the next Attorney General.

00:24:36 ►

It wouldn’t be at all a surprise.

00:24:39 ►

So again, any of these political or conspiracy theories have to change as we go along.

00:24:47 ►

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

00:24:51 ►

Okay, that kind of answers quite a bit of this.

00:24:56 ►

I would like to show down through the questions once again.

00:24:59 ►

First thing is, okay, did you turn in attorneys for paying money to the Weather Underground

00:25:05 ►

to spring you?

00:25:08 ►

Did I turn them in?

00:25:09 ►

Well, did this happen?

00:25:11 ►

Did attorneys get by the Weather Underground?

00:25:13 ►

Did attorneys buy your escape?

00:25:15 ►

And did these attorneys subsequently get evidence presented against them by you?

00:25:21 ►

Yes.

00:25:22 ►

All that’s true.

00:25:30 ►

Okay. Okay. You want to elaborate? Why don’t you ask questions?

00:25:42 ►

I don’t really have any. I’ve been through about 29 B-movies and I’d be glad to go into any details on them.

00:25:52 ►

I’m not a suitable cross-examiner really.

00:25:56 ►

Do you think this was one of those many scenarios in which we haven’t quite discovered the scriptwriter

00:26:03 ►

yet?

00:26:04 ►

Oh, yeah, yeah.

00:26:05 ►

There’s among three attorneys that were involved in my case,

00:26:15 ►

four, at least two of them are double agents or even triple agents

00:26:22 ►

since they were, number one, involved in actually

00:26:27 ►

planning criminal activities, which I was involved in, but they didn’t know about.

00:26:32 ►

And second, they were acting as my attorney.

00:26:36 ►

And thirdly, they were involved fairly actively with the government.

00:26:44 ►

I call that three-way attorneys.

00:26:49 ►

I wrote an article in the National Review

00:26:52 ►

called The Outlaw Industry.

00:26:55 ►

Did you read it?

00:26:56 ►

No, I didn’t.

00:26:57 ►

In which I went into great detail about

00:26:59 ►

what I consider to be

00:27:04 ►

an outlaw industry,

00:27:08 ►

which is masterminded,

00:27:10 ►

in which the attorneys are the directors,

00:27:14 ►

the media is the producers,

00:27:15 ►

and the stars are outlaws

00:27:18 ►

who flash onto the scene for a brief period of time

00:27:21 ►

and there’s a whole scenario there.

00:27:23 ►

There’s a search, then they’re busted,

00:27:24 ►

there’s a grand jury, then there’s a search, then they’re busted,

00:27:27 ►

there’s a grand jury, then there’s a big trial,

00:27:28 ►

and then they’re convicted,

00:27:29 ►

and they disappear from the scene.

00:27:36 ►

And a new series of outlaw criminal stars develop.

00:27:42 ►

In one year, 1973, I had a list of my 12 such outlaw people, the SLA, the body hears, Squeaky Frome, Joan Little, the Berrigans coming in and out,

00:27:50 ►

Eldridge Clear has come back.

00:27:52 ►

How are you getting along with all the people who joined in an organization called People Investigating Leary’s Lies?

00:27:59 ►

Well, let’s see.

00:28:03 ►

Specifically, you’d be talking about Baba Ram Dass.

00:28:10 ►

He has agreed later that he was used politically by that, and he’s expressed his regret for

00:28:16 ►

being involved in that.

00:28:18 ►

Allen Ginsberg was involved in that.

00:28:20 ►

He again has expressed regret, although I understand his position was rather…

00:28:26 ►

He was not part of it.

00:28:27 ►

He agreed to speak there and did not oppose, but he tended to reestablish some reality

00:28:34 ►

at the place, yes.

00:28:35 ►

Then there’s my son Jack, who had been told a lot of lies about…

00:28:41 ►

They told my son Jack that I was informing on him and that I was

00:28:46 ►

trying to get him busted, for example. That was the background of that thing. He and I

00:28:52 ►

were… He was made of metal. I pulled out and he wasn’t around for a while. I hadn’t

00:28:58 ►

seen him for seven years. So he and I are friends again. Jerry Rubin, well, you know Jerry.

00:29:07 ►

He’s telling people that he loves me and wants to debate me.

00:29:16 ►

Jerry’s name was not on the petition, actually.

00:29:21 ►

On the day of the press conference, there were several telegrams from people who had

00:29:26 ►

subsequently found out that he was on it, asking that their names be taken off of it.

00:29:30 ►

Ken Kelly’s name was the only one on it.

00:29:33 ►

And quite a few telegrams came in saying that we had known that Jerry was involved in this.

00:29:38 ►

We wouldn’t have signed.

00:29:39 ►

So when you talk about, yeah, friends, see, the friends, the people I knew, Ginsberg,

00:29:43 ►

my son, Bob Aramdas, I never met Ken Kerry.

00:29:47 ►

He’s not a friend of mine.

00:29:48 ►

We have a lot of political differences.

00:29:50 ►

I want to make clear I’m very opposed to partisan politics, and the extreme right and the extreme left,

00:29:57 ►

which operate on bad vibes, are by definition my enemies, and I don’t back away from that.

00:30:03 ►

I’m not out to get them.

00:30:03 ►

are by definition my enemies, and I don’t back away from that.

00:30:04 ►

I’m not out to get them. On the other hand, I clearly am a threat to bad vibration politics.

00:30:10 ►

So there’s a talk about friends.

00:30:14 ►

The only other friend that was there from my past was Gene Schoenfeld,

00:30:18 ►

who actively tried to break things up with comedy.

00:30:21 ►

So there were no friends.

00:30:22 ►

There was all this rumor about friends. I was informing our friends.

00:30:26 ►

My friends were denouncing me.

00:30:28 ►

Well, at the conference, Howard was there.

00:30:31 ►

I attended it.

00:30:32 ►

We went through it.

00:30:33 ►

As a journalist, I was working.

00:30:37 ►

To try and put together a story from it,

00:30:40 ►

the only things of interest that really came out

00:30:41 ►

was Allen Ginsberg’s 44 questions

00:30:43 ►

because he questioned all the premises.

00:30:47 ►

What we came out with was the hard information, so-called, they had,

00:30:50 ►

was that there was a videotape deposition that a woman who nobody knew,

00:30:57 ►

but who was later identified as somebody who works with the police in New York,

00:31:00 ►

had written about in Village Voice,

00:31:03 ►

which is not really enough to go on to even

00:31:05 ►

do a speculative article, and that’s all I’ve ever heard of that.

00:31:10 ►

Then there was the report that you had informed on Bernadine Dorn at the grand jury, whose

00:31:17 ►

name you had also mentioned.

00:31:18 ►

That was supposed to be a Chicago grand jury, right?

00:31:20 ►

Right.

00:31:21 ►

But that information had been published a couple years before in

00:31:25 ►

Conventions of a Hope being and in several other places. The only other thing that he

00:31:29 ►

got away with during the press conference, which we checked out with lawyers later, was

00:31:33 ►

that you reportedly testified against your attorney, Chula, for having brought you some dope in jail.

00:31:49 ►

And I was told later that, in fact, you had not testified at his trial.

00:31:50 ►

That’s right, yeah.

00:31:51 ►

He was never in jail, yeah.

00:31:53 ►

I’ll talk about that.

00:31:59 ►

I’ve never talked about it publicly because Chula has got a lot of,

00:32:07 ►

he’s, yeah, I don’t want to, he’s got problems, but now you bring it up.

00:32:15 ►

I’ll talk about one point during a parole hearing.

00:32:23 ►

I was asked, did you on March something 1970 receive a small hashish from attorney George Chula now I remember that

00:32:33 ►

incident very well because the Orange County Jail and I was going to see Chula and another

00:32:40 ►

prisoner came out and he said to me hey man, man, thanks a lot. And I said, thanks for what? And I went to see Chula.

00:32:45 ►

And Chula handed me a little block of hashish, which I immediately devoured,

00:32:51 ►

because you’re under the eye of a guard.

00:32:56 ►

And Chula told me that he had given the former prisoner some of my hashish,

00:33:05 ►

and that’s why the prisoner was thanking me for hashish.

00:33:08 ►

So it was obvious to me when the parole board brought this up,

00:33:14 ►

there was no way that I’d never mentioned it,

00:33:17 ►

so that somebody had reported that to the authority.

00:33:24 ►

So I said, yeah, Chula had given me hashish. So then

00:33:28 ►

the parole board turned me down. This is my record for parole for several reasons, but

00:33:35 ►

one of the reasons mentioned was that I had been taking illegal drugs. I admitted to taking

00:33:40 ►

illegal drugs in prison. So then I was called before a grand jury and

00:33:45 ►

they asked me that and I said, yeah, essentially that. But they didn’t indict Chula on that

00:33:49 ►

because, number one, there was no evidence, and number two, it was petty.

00:33:54 ►

The general consensus of opinion at that time was that six months in the joint would do

00:33:59 ►

just about every dope boy in the country a little bit of good. Nobody took that terribly seriously one way or the other.

00:34:09 ►

Though I think there was a good deal of concern,

00:34:13 ►

I know I was very puzzled by what seemed to be your deafening silence

00:34:18 ►

at the time that there were so many rumors and charges going on about you when it seemed obvious the government

00:34:28 ►

was doing something to make you sound like you were informing and that people who had

00:34:34 ►

some contact with you were being very critical. I’m still puzzled, really, why you remained

00:34:41 ►

silent and just let that happen.

00:34:48 ►

Well, all the time that I was in prison, both before my escape and afterwards,

00:34:53 ►

I never wanted to have visits from people except very close people

00:34:58 ►

that were very involved in my case case because I feel that the prisoner’s situation is so different that honest communication

00:35:14 ►

between a prisoner and somebody on the outside, it’s an undignified position to be in.

00:35:18 ►

So I was no, just as a matter of policy, didn’t get involved in a lot of writing.

00:35:28 ►

I was in close touch with certain people that I wanted.

00:35:31 ►

For example, Ken Kesey. I was in correspondence with Ken during much of that time.

00:35:37 ►

Two or three other people.

00:35:39 ►

You called the Brotherhood of Eternal Love issue really just a myth?

00:35:44 ►

Yes.

00:35:46 ►

See, the way that happened was when I escaped to Algeria and then went to Switzerland,

00:35:51 ►

I found out the CIA didn’t want me,

00:35:55 ►

the FBI didn’t want me,

00:35:55 ►

but the narcs didn’t want me back,

00:35:57 ►

and Nixon wanted me back.

00:35:58 ►

And my lawyers have a memorandum

00:36:00 ►

which came from the White House on January 13, 1973,

00:36:03 ►

in which the White House ordered their people overseas to bust me.

00:36:07 ►

That’s illegal because you can’t bust an American citizen.

00:36:10 ►

So there’s some people around Nixon.

00:36:13 ►

It’s the Liddy-Haldeman group who are responsible for this sort of stuff.

00:36:18 ►

They did want me back.

00:36:22 ►

Now, what the government did was, in 1972,

00:36:25 ►

they invented what they called the Brotherhood of Eternal Love Conspiracy.

00:36:31 ►

And I was charged with 29 counts of drug dealing.

00:36:35 ►

Now, each of those counts had to do with some kid that I’d never met in Laguna Beach

00:36:38 ►

getting busted for hashish.

00:36:40 ►

They added up 29 Laguna Beach Orange County bus and called it a conspiracy.

00:36:45 ►

And they indicted something like 30 people.

00:36:48 ►

Of those 30 people, I knew two.

00:36:51 ►

One was a good friend of mine.

00:36:53 ►

One I knew vaguely.

00:36:54 ►

The other, 28.

00:36:55 ►

I had never heard of him.

00:36:58 ►

Then they set a $5 million bail on me.

00:37:01 ►

This followed in Switzerland.

00:37:03 ►

Now, the reason they did that was to put pressure on the Swiss government to kick me out. The Swiss government had essentially

00:37:08 ►

given me asylum and said, after all, he’s a professor that’s guilty of possessing two

00:37:13 ►

joints. So then they could come back to the Swiss government and say, look, he’s the grandfather

00:37:18 ►

of the hashish LSD mafia and they invented the Brotherhood of Eternal Love

00:37:25 ►

now there was a Brotherhood of Eternal Love

00:37:27 ►

which is made up of about 7 or 8 surfers

00:37:30 ►

around Laguna Beach

00:37:31 ►

in the middle 60’s

00:37:33 ►

who did a little grass stealing

00:37:34 ►

and for a while they did a little hashy stealing

00:37:37 ►

from Afghanistan

00:37:37 ►

it was all a very spiritual kind of

00:37:40 ►

Laguna Beach

00:37:43 ►

mysticism

00:37:44 ►

surf mysticism this group disbanded in 1968

00:37:50 ►

when the central figure and a guy named Johnny Griggs died of an apparent overdose of psilocybin.

00:37:57 ►

Then after that, the Brotherhood was known to be a bunch of my friends. Every dope dealer

00:38:03 ►

in Southern California who had any dope to peddle would say, this comes from the Brotherhood was known to be a bunch of my friends. Every dope dealer in Southern California who had any dope to peddle would say,

00:38:07 ►

ìThis comes from the Brotherhood.

00:38:08 ►

Itís like Johnny Walker Scotch or Timothy Larry Budweiser beer.î

00:38:15 ►

I had literally thousands of people come up to me and say, ìHey, I tried some of your

00:38:19 ►

stuff.î I said, ìWhat stuff do you mean?

00:38:21 ►

Get away from me!î It was a chic commercial marketing thing to do.

00:38:25 ►

And every honky-tonk dope dealer in Southern California

00:38:29 ►

called himself a member of the Brotherhood.

00:38:31 ►

It was like Kennedy’s PT boat.

00:38:33 ►

We all dealt dope with Timothy Leary.

00:38:37 ►

So that the image of the Brotherhood

00:38:40 ►

became like a guerrilla Che Guevara romantic thing

00:38:44 ►

deliberately picked up by

00:38:45 ►

Cecil Hicks who’s the district attorney of Orange County and build up into this

00:38:50 ►

monster conspiracy but the you know the narcs and know very well the marks know

00:38:57 ►

much more about all of this than I do or any or any dealer does and they knew

00:39:01 ►

very well that there was no conspiracy when they even they were very

00:39:04 ►

embarrassed man when they got me back by kidnapping then they had these charges dealer does. They knew very well that there was no conspiracy. They were very embarrassed

00:39:05 ►

when they got me back by kidnapping me. Then they had these charges of 29 counts, and my

00:39:11 ►

lawyers were very eager to get me back into court on that because then we could file habeas

00:39:16 ►

corpus and I might have gotten out because the jurisdiction would have been brought down

00:39:20 ►

to Orange County. They tossed those cases out of court so fast,

00:39:25 ►

which is that they didn’t want to go to trial on a conspiracy brotherhood theory.

00:39:31 ►

So, number one, there was no brotherhood.

00:39:34 ►

Number two, I don’t know anything about dope dealing.

00:39:37 ►

Number three, I never testified about dope dealing.

00:39:41 ►

When that warrant came out, it was approximately seven weeks before the election

00:39:45 ►

in 1972.

00:39:46 ►

It was issued for Timothy Leary and 99 John Does.

00:39:51 ►

It was the first issuance before they had any names to fill in on it.

00:39:56 ►

That was issued a week after—I’m trying to connect two points here which may not necessarily

00:40:03 ►

be related, but after Watergate they seem to be.

00:40:05 ►

After Nixon’s famous appearance in San Jose, in which several members of the press identified

00:40:10 ►

the people that were throwing eggs at him as members of the White House staff, the press

00:40:15 ►

members who traveled with Nixon, when he stood in the car and gave his double V sign as they

00:40:21 ►

started throwing eggs.

00:40:22 ►

It seemed at the time, the impression received was that it was pre-election hype.

00:40:28 ►

I mean, you know, there was Orange County, which was thinking about other things.

00:40:32 ►

That was 72.

00:40:33 ►

The California Marijuana Initiative was in full force

00:40:36 ►

and discovered two months before the election that there was Orange County

00:40:40 ►

was something like 41% in favor, which they felt was exceedingly dangerous of the initiative.

00:40:48 ►

A lot of that had to do with politics.

00:40:51 ►

At least that was what it had to do,

00:40:54 ►

but at the time that was what it was observed as.

00:40:59 ►

Okay, a couple more questions.

00:41:01 ►

Did your activities have an influence on the death of Dennis Martino?

00:41:08 ►

No. No.

00:41:09 ►

No.

00:41:09 ►

I don’t know how Dennis Martino died.

00:41:15 ►

They say he died of an overdose of drugs in Marbella, Spain.

00:41:19 ►

Dennis was involved in a lot of triple and quadruple agent stuff

00:41:24 ►

that I just have the

00:41:25 ►

slightest knowledge of. I was surprised and very saddened to hear about his death. I don’t

00:41:34 ►

know anything about it. And I don’t know, who knows about it.

00:41:43 ►

How about the names Billy Hitchcock

00:41:46 ►

and Michael Boyd Randall

00:41:47 ►

Mike Randall

00:41:51 ►

is an old friend

00:41:52 ►

Mike was one of the

00:41:53 ►

original members

00:41:54 ►

of the Brotherhood

00:41:55 ►

and has been

00:41:57 ►

and still is a friend of mine

00:41:59 ►

I don’t know

00:42:01 ►

of any activity

00:42:01 ►

Michael

00:42:02 ►

any illegal activity except for some dope smoking.

00:42:11 ►

He’s still a friend of mine.

00:42:13 ►

He knows that I don’t know anything about him, and they were justified against me.

00:42:35 ►

Jack is an old friend of mine who apparently was involved in an acid transaction. I never knew much about this matter, but I was surprised in later years to find out who

00:42:43 ►

it was that was making that acid.

00:42:45 ►

During the period before I went to prison, it was to everybody’s advantage that I’d not

00:42:50 ►

know anything about or be involved very closely with people who were making acid simply because

00:42:57 ►

I was out front.

00:42:59 ►

I made no bones about the fact that I was smoking grass and that I felt that consciousness

00:43:05 ►

change was something that was part of human development so that any smart dealer would

00:43:16 ►

never be seen in public with me.

00:43:18 ►

Certainly, I would never be the last one to have any active involvement in dope dealing or an acid manufacture.

00:43:28 ►

Okay, this cross-examination is really getting tedious.

00:43:33 ►

A lot of those questions were raised in that Craig Vetter article in Playboy, which is

00:43:41 ►

going unanswered. So I guess, what, 14 million people read that?

00:43:47 ►

Yeah.

00:43:47 ►

Probably important.

00:43:48 ►

Well, okay.

00:43:49 ►

I’ve got a couple more.

00:43:51 ►

It’s nothing unresolved, right?

00:43:52 ►

Finish it off and get back to the present work.

00:43:56 ►

There were words during, I guess, late 74, early 75,

00:44:02 ►

that you were being held under very severe circumstances,

00:44:06 ►

sleeping on steel sheets,

00:44:08 ►

I believe was one of the words

00:44:09 ►

that was used.

00:44:14 ►

I’ve been in 29 jails and prisons

00:44:16 ►

in four continents.

00:44:20 ►

During 26 months

00:44:22 ►

of the 44 months that I was in prison,

00:44:24 ►

I was in solitary confinement.

00:44:29 ►

Part of this was because of my escape.

00:44:32 ►

The prison authorities were very angry at me when they brought me back because the escape

00:44:37 ►

had embarrassed them.

00:44:39 ►

So I was thrown in various holes for about six months and then forced for about seven

00:44:43 ►

months. Then,

00:44:46 ►

yeah, I

00:44:47 ►

did a very hard time.

00:44:51 ►

And I was,

00:44:52 ►

but I was never abused. There was never,

00:44:55 ►

there were a lot of rumors

00:44:56 ►

too.

00:44:59 ►

The nature

00:45:00 ►

of my profession is one that rumors generate

00:45:02 ►

about me.

00:45:04 ►

There’s hardly any lurid rumor or immorality or insanity that hasn’t at one time or another

00:45:11 ►

been attributed to me by the left or the right.

00:45:17 ►

I’m looking for lobotomy scars.

00:45:19 ►

I don’t know.

00:45:20 ►

Yeah, right.

00:45:21 ►

There was the… For example, when I was sent to Vacaville,

00:45:25 ►

the reason I was sent to Vacaville was because they kept…

00:45:29 ►

Any time I’d make friends in prison, they’d immediately ship out my friends

00:45:32 ►

because they were afraid that I’d be the center of some sort of a resistance.

00:45:37 ►

So finally, my best friend at Folsom Prison was a man named Wayne Benner,

00:45:43 ►

who was considered the most dangerous prisoner in the state system.

00:45:49 ►

Not because of any violent tendencies, but because he was an extremely intelligent person who was tying up the CDC under his suits.

00:45:57 ►

He was in Max Max, in Folsom, and they couldn’t transfer him. So they transferred me to Vacaville in a great hurry

00:46:07 ►

to get me away from activities,

00:46:14 ►

to isolate me from what they thought were activities

00:46:18 ►

of a vertical sort at Folsom.

00:46:21 ►

So when I went to Vacaville, I went there not as a patient.

00:46:24 ►

Vacaville is I went there not as a patient. Vacaville is

00:46:25 ►

a medical hospital, but I went there as a trustee or call it the special H category.

00:46:32 ►

I was a worker. But then the rumors went out, and Allen Ginsberg, who tends to be a little

00:46:39 ►

hysterical at times, was doing me no favor by running around the country accusing the government of putting

00:46:45 ►

me in a mental hospital.

00:46:47 ►

Now, this is, again, the sort of rumors that generate, that sounded, that confirmed the

00:46:56 ►

favorite rumor of the right wing and the left wing that I was brain-toasted or that I was

00:47:02 ►

in bad psychological shape. Actually, I had the best time I’ve ever had in a prison in Vacaville.

00:47:09 ►

I had a trustee’s job, which was nothing.

00:47:12 ►

I spent most of my time playing tennis, and I had nothing to do with the…

00:47:15 ►

I was not there as a patient, but I was able to investigate the rumors about Vacaville

00:47:21 ►

because in a prison there are no secrets.

00:47:24 ►

Everybody knows what’s going on.

00:47:25 ►

There’s no way that you can have secret operations in a prison.

00:47:30 ►

Now, there may be some secret facilities and others.

00:47:32 ►

No, but I don’t think so.

00:47:34 ►

And I can tell you and your listeners that during the period that I was there at Vacaville,

00:47:40 ►

and my questioning leads me to say that even before I was there,

00:47:45 ►

there’s never been any attempt to brainwash or to lobotomize or to…

00:47:53 ►

Sure, maybe they proposed it at times.

00:47:55 ►

You know, prison kooks do that.

00:47:57 ►

But the legislature of California is very alert.

00:48:01 ►

It’s a democratic legislature.

00:48:02 ►

It’s very sophisticated lawmakers in Sacramento

00:48:05 ►

who watch the prison system like hawks.

00:48:08 ►

All these rumors about Vacaville,

00:48:11 ►

which had tremendous currency.

00:48:13 ►

I had the experience of being in Vacaville,

00:48:15 ►

reading the Berkeley Bar,

00:48:16 ►

with front-page exposés of brainwashing

00:48:19 ►

and behavior modification

00:48:21 ►

and lobotomy at Vacaville.

00:48:24 ►

It really irritated me because false rumors

00:48:28 ►

I even think are sometimes originated by the right wing because false rumors take your

00:48:40 ►

eyes off the real problem.

00:48:42 ►

The real problem is not attempts by the prison system

00:48:46 ►

to modify prisoner behavior.

00:48:48 ►

The real scandal is that they don’t give a damn about that,

00:48:52 ►

that the last thing they really want to do

00:48:54 ►

is change prisoners’ behavior,

00:48:56 ►

that they’re very satisfied with the fact

00:48:58 ►

that they have a large criminal population

00:49:00 ►

that’s guaranteed to keep coming back to the prisons,

00:49:03 ►

therefore guaranteeing an increase in the prison budgets and increase in prison staff and guaranteeing their jobs.

00:49:12 ►

The real scandal there is that nothing is being done to change prisons.

00:49:18 ►

Sure, you get kooky psychiatrists who can always get headlines by proposing something like this.

00:49:26 ►

To my knowledge, nothing of this sort.

00:49:28 ►

The only thing I could find out of Vacaville was they were using prolixin.

00:49:33 ►

During my stay at Vacaville, I talked to some of the psychiatrists at Vacaville,

00:49:39 ►

and I extracted promises from most of them that they would stop using Prolixin because it does

00:49:45 ►

produce a zombie state, which is probably no different than the average middle-class suburban

00:49:50 ►

driving to his office, but still. And again, you have to realize that Vacaville is a difficult

00:50:00 ►

place because there are a lot of criminally insane people. I mean, you can’t duck the hard fact that there are a lot of sick people in our society.

00:50:09 ►

And hopefully the next mutation will take care of that.

00:50:13 ►

But in a crowded urban environment, you get a lot of very violently sick people,

00:50:21 ►

and it’s a problem.

00:50:22 ►

We shove it off to the prison system.

00:50:25 ►

What are they going to do with a guy that absolutely will physically attack anyone that comes near him?

00:50:29 ►

It’s easy to, you know, we just brush that under the rug. So there are wards at Vacaville

00:50:36 ►

where they keep people, they’re pre-locked up and they’re allowed out on roofs and cages.

00:50:42 ►

And every time I’d go out to the yard to play tennis or to get some athletics, these guys, it’s a bad situation. They’re like animals.

00:50:51 ►

They would come crowding to the cage and wave to me. I’d stand there and talk back to them

00:50:56 ►

and tell them, you know, get out, man, and straighten up until the gun guards would whistle and or the last he could tell me to move or i’d

00:51:06 ►

get shot yeah mackerville is a there’s a lot of tragic stuff there but i don’t there’s no prison

00:51:14 ►

brutality that i know of i i you brought up uh um Gordon Liddy.

00:51:34 ►

I just found out a short time ago that Liddy was the assistant district attorney that busted you up in Millbrook.

00:51:41 ►

Can you give any description of your perceptions of Liddy based on that experience?

00:51:47 ►

Yeah, I wrote a little book about that called Curse of the Oval Room,

00:51:51 ►

which is published by High Times, the slick magazine.

00:51:53 ►

It comes out in New York.

00:51:59 ►

Liddy was a very ambitious assistant DA.

00:52:03 ►

And he is a nice… I really almost like Liddy because he’s such a comic opera figure.

00:52:09 ►

He would carry a gun around.

00:52:11 ►

The state police hated him because he was always pulling his own operations.

00:52:15 ►

He was a young kid that believed all the spy stories that he read.

00:52:21 ►

He was so romantic.

00:52:23 ►

Anyway, he surveyed us. He led several midnight raids

00:52:28 ►

on my place. He did get me. He forced me out of Texas County because it was just too much

00:52:34 ►

of a hassle to live there. Although none of the raids ever produced any otherwise indicted

00:52:40 ►

several times on marijuana charges, they never found a drop of marijuana because we had things pretty well hid.

00:52:48 ►

Anyway, after Liddy drove me out of the county,

00:52:50 ►

he ran for Congress on a conservative ticket in Dutchess County.

00:52:57 ►

And his campaign picture was a picture of me

00:53:00 ►

with a blurb about how Liddy had driven degeneracy from the county.

00:53:14 ►

He ran for the Republican primary and was beaten by a man named Hamilton Fish.

00:53:20 ►

Then after the primary, Liddy was going to run on the conservative ticket, which would have drawn off votes from Hamilton Fish,

00:53:27 ►

so a deal was worked out that Hamilton Fish agreed to get Liddy out of the county to the White House

00:53:34 ►

and get him a federal job.

00:53:36 ►

Fish later was on the House Judiciary Committee.

00:53:38 ►

That’s right. He became famous during that.

00:53:40 ►

He’s a good guy. I don’t blame him for this. He wanted to get elected.

00:53:43 ►

He was having a hot election against the Democrats.

00:53:46 ►

So it was for a Democrat seat, as a matter of fact.

00:53:48 ►

So the deal was that Liddy would go to the White House and not run against Fish.

00:53:54 ►

Of course, Fish was elected, and Liddy went to the White House.

00:53:58 ►

When Liddy got to the White House, his credentials were the leading dope cop in the country because

00:54:02 ►

he had got my butt.

00:54:08 ►

Let me ask you one thing that’s passed into the mythology and find out if it’s true.

00:54:11 ►

There was one possibly apocryphal raid that he led on Millbrook

00:54:16 ►

in which he appropriated a whole bunch of incense that was there

00:54:21 ►

and issued an indictment for paraphernalia and conspiracy to religion?

00:54:27 ►

Yeah.

00:54:27 ►

Is that true that that was the jury?

00:54:29 ►

Yeah.

00:54:32 ►

Okay.

00:54:33 ►

When Liddy got to the White House, and he was a drug expert, as you know,

00:54:36 ►

Liddy was the mastermind behind the Project Intercept,

00:54:39 ►

and he was such an invaluable agent to the White House

00:54:44 ►

that they put him in charge of Watergate and the Ellsberg break-ins and so forth.

00:54:50 ►

Operation Intercept also brought in Caulfield and Alaska wins.

00:54:54 ►

I’m using…

00:54:56 ►

How is it, Terminal Island Federal Prison?

00:55:01 ►

Lydia just left, but he left me a friendly note saying,

00:55:04 ►

Dear Tim, brother, wish you luck and hope we’ll meet again,

00:55:08 ►

which was an interesting fallout.

00:55:12 ►

And the funny thing was that when Lydia was at Terminal Island,

00:55:16 ►

he belonged to a creative writing class,

00:55:20 ►

and he would attend it regularly.

00:55:22 ►

And finally it was his turn to read what he had written.

00:55:26 ►

So he stood in front of the group like a West Point cadet

00:55:29 ►

in a very military uptight situation,

00:55:33 ►

and as though he was barking out orders,

00:55:34 ►

he read a story which was about his raid on my Millbrook establishment,

00:55:39 ►

which he later got published in True magazine.

00:55:41 ►

Yes, I read it there.

00:55:42 ►

In fact, we read it on the air.

00:55:44 ►

It made a big hit.

00:55:47 ►

later got published in True magazine. Yes, I read it there. In fact, we read it on the air. It made a big hit. So I wrote to Allen Ginsberg just before I got out of prison. I said, look, just after I got out of prison, Allen Ginsberg is very involved in pen.

00:55:57 ►

The Pen Club is the association of authors and they’re always trying to get writers out of prison, particularly writers who were in for their writing, and Penn did help to get me out.

00:56:08 ►

Then Eldridge Cleaver got out, and I said,

00:56:10 ►

look, the only two writers left in prison are G. Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt,

00:56:16 ►

and they’re both in prison for political crime.

00:56:19 ►

You may not like their politics,

00:56:21 ►

but why don’t you get the Penn Club to back the liberation of these fellow writers,

00:56:28 ►

Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt, whom I consider comic figures, really.

00:56:33 ►

And then Ellen wrote back and said, well, I never thought of that, but I don’t think

00:56:38 ►

they should be allowed on unless they tell all.

00:56:40 ►

Now, I thought that was a very funny, like, double morality here, that it’s all right for them

00:56:47 ►

to tell all, but no.

00:56:50 ►

That’s all the questions I have.

00:56:53 ►

I thank you very much for your excellent testimony.

00:56:56 ►

I’d like to present you with a Pacifica FM 90 T-shirt in appreciation.

00:57:00 ►

Well, thank you.

00:57:03 ►

We have been talking with Dr. Timothy Leary.

00:57:08 ►

My name is Steve Heimel, and I’m pretty well have exhausted my question.

00:57:12 ►

I’m going to shut my mouth and let some of the others get into it.

00:57:17 ►

With us are Howard Perlstein, who is a director of publication for the Contemporary Arts Museum,

00:57:24 ►

who is a director of publications for the Contemporary Arts Museum,

00:57:31 ►

and Dr. Henry Marshall, who works at the Texas Research Institute of Mental Science and is a psychologist and more than that is also into psychohistory.

00:57:37 ►

He’s into figuring out the relationships between people, thoughts, and the time.

00:57:47 ►

Henry, I thought I might turn it over to you for a while,

00:57:50 ►

and I thought maybe you could go into the whole subject of Timothy Leary and his times.

00:57:56 ►

Well, I wanted to, in the form of a question,

00:57:59 ►

one of the skeletons, I think, that we didn’t unearth is an image that has been created of Dr. Leary

00:58:09 ►

of being some kind of brain-destroyed madman who was messed up by LSD,

00:58:18 ►

who was once a very great, perhaps, psychologist who somehow went crazy when he took too much acid.

00:58:27 ►

And I wanted to just ask you, have you had any testing that would be evidence that would

00:58:40 ►

discount the fact that your chromosomes have been broken and your brain has been destroyed.

00:58:45 ►

Is there any evidence, as it were, besides your ability to talk with us here?

00:58:54 ►

Well, you’ve raised two ominous possibilities.

00:58:59 ►

You referred to the chromosome myth about LSD.

00:59:06 ►

Now, I want to see, anytime I talk about drugs, I’m being pulled into the trap that I was pulled into in the 60s,

00:59:12 ►

that if unscientific slander is made about a drug, if you say marijuana is addictive,

00:59:20 ►

and then I say, no, it’s not, it sounds as though I’m somehow advocating marijuana.

00:59:21 ►

And then I say, no, it’s not.

00:59:24 ►

It sounds as though I’m somehow advocating marijuana.

00:59:35 ►

So with this qualification, I will risk answering your question about chromosomes.

00:59:37 ►

About your chromosomes. Well, in general, there’s been no evidence that any of the drugs that developed in the 60s affect chromosomes.

00:59:49 ►

However, to take your question more personally,

00:59:55 ►

in 1969, I went to the Harvard Medical School

01:00:02 ►

and went through blood tests in which they did broken chromosome counts.

01:00:09 ►

It turns out that I had significantly fewer chromosome breaks than the average person.

01:00:17 ►

It was like a mystery how come I had such.

01:00:20 ►

Then this led to other accusations on the part of psychedelic politicians that I was

01:00:27 ►

a fraud and I’d never taken LSD at all.

01:00:30 ►

So there you go.

01:00:33 ►

So that my chromosomes are doing dandy.

01:00:37 ►

As far as brain damage and psychosis is concerned, I feel fine.

01:00:48 ►

I’ve never felt more productive.

01:00:51 ►

Sure, there are a lot of things that happened in the 60s.

01:00:54 ►

The 60s was kind of a crazy time.

01:00:55 ►

We were all running around or bobbing around on one of the biggest waves of cultural change in history.

01:01:07 ►

one of the biggest waves of cultural change in history. Each month in the 60s, enormous

01:01:14 ►

tidal waves were crashing over us and there were very few of us that even had a glimpse of understanding as to what was happening. There were many mistakes I made. There were

01:01:18 ►

many postures that I got into. I was easy to trap in public situations because I’m basically a courageous person.

01:01:26 ►

I have confidence in my own beliefs, so I charge around.

01:01:31 ►

It was easy to make me look foolish, but that never bothered me, really.

01:01:38 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:01:43 ►

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

01:01:50 ►

As much as I would like to hear the rest of this interview right now, I’m going to cut it off here and we’ll pick up on the interview in a day or so with another podcast.

01:01:55 ►

But I thought that with everything that’s going on right now with the Occupy Wall Street

01:02:00 ►

and the other Occupy demonstrations going on, that this is a good time to focus on maybe the ins and outs of civil disobedience.

01:02:09 ►

First of all, if you are involved in these actions,

01:02:12 ►

I hope that you keep in mind the fact that some of the people at the demonstrations

01:02:15 ►

may not be on the same page as you are,

01:02:18 ►

since there are obviously a few undercover screwheads

01:02:21 ►

who are working for the power elite to keep these things under control and spin them in the wrong direction.

01:02:28 ►

In fact, we just heard how they created hate and discontent among the revolutionaries of the 60s.

01:02:33 ►

And believe me, they’re at it again.

01:02:35 ►

So I think that it’s worth taking at least a few seconds here to replay what Dr. Leary had to say about not getting angry when confronting law enforcement, because that may

01:02:45 ►

happen. Here is what he had to say. I don’t believe in the politics of anger, and I regret this,

01:02:55 ►

because I think that it’s our duty to educate the police, to relate to the police, to raise their

01:03:02 ►

consciousness, and I don’t believe in us and them. I don’t believe we can

01:03:05 ►

alienate ourselves from any aspect of society, particularly the people who run societies.

01:03:12 ►

Now, in a day or so, I’ll get us back to the Timothy Leary interview that we just heard.

01:03:18 ►

But before I close today’s program, I want to play a short recording that I made

01:03:22 ►

of the live feed from the Occupy Wall Street demonstration,

01:03:27 ►

which, in my opinion, is a continuation of the revolution that Dr. Leary and the 60s generation were also engaged in.

01:03:35 ►

As you know, at livestream.com slash globalrevolution,

01:03:41 ►

you can watch the feed coming out of Liberty Park in New York.

01:04:06 ►

Thank you. able to watch this action live, and just as we did for the Tahir Square demonstrations in Egypt at the beginning of this year.

01:04:12 ►

And just to give you a little idea of what you’ll hear on that feed, that I’ll link to in the program notes, of course, well, the other night I recorded a brief interview with

01:04:17 ►

a man who was just released from jail after having been arrested during the protest.

01:04:22 ►

And here’s what he had to say, and you’ll also kind of pick up on the casual atmosphere of what’s going on.

01:04:29 ►

These are just people like you and I down there with their cameras and laptops

01:04:33 ►

and plugging into the net and letting us see what’s going on.

01:04:36 ►

So here is one of the little commentaries that came over live feed the other night.

01:04:43 ►

This is the monk that i was

01:04:45 ►

talking about that went on hunger strike in jail and wouldn’t talk to the cops tell him your name

01:04:49 ►

bro hello friends i’m dada i’m a monk i teach meditation and yes on Saturday, these policemen decided to block the road on the Brooklyn Bridge.

01:05:08 ►

They got in front of us and back of us, as they do.

01:05:13 ►

And they said that we were blocking the traffic. Actually, they were.

01:05:17 ►

And there I was at the back of the group.

01:05:20 ►

Didn’t realize that there was no parade behind me.

01:05:24 ►

I thought I was in the middle and I was at the end

01:05:27 ►

I turned around

01:05:29 ►

and there were all of these police across the street

01:05:33 ►

the white shirts and the blue shirts

01:05:34 ►

and these trucks ready to pick us up

01:05:39 ►

facing the wrong direction

01:05:41 ►

driving the wrong way

01:05:43 ►

on another violation of the law.

01:05:48 ►

And then I saw, uh-oh, they’re going to arrest me, everybody probably.

01:05:53 ►

So I said, what’s the best way to get arrested?

01:05:56 ►

I don’t want to be going like a dog with my tail between my legs.

01:06:01 ►

So I sat down and do what I do.

01:06:04 ►

I do meditation and thought, that’s really the way I want to be arrested

01:06:08 ►

and then they came and said

01:06:10 ►

you’re under arrest for blocking traffic

01:06:12 ►

stand up

01:06:13 ►

and I just continued doing meditation

01:06:15 ►

and then they said you have to get up

01:06:19 ►

they tried to lift me

01:06:20 ►

I just became like a dead body

01:06:23 ►

and they said you know behaving like, you can get in more trouble.

01:06:29 ►

But, you know, I just stayed like a sack of potatoes,

01:06:32 ►

and they picked me up to all 212 pounds

01:06:36 ►

and then tried to put me in the van, which they did.

01:06:41 ►

Then when we got in the van, the policeman said something really strange.

01:06:45 ►

He said, okay, there are no more cameras around now,

01:06:47 ►

so you can stop acting out this thing, which I wasn’t doing it for that.

01:06:52 ►

I was really angry with these police for the way they’re behaving.

01:06:56 ►

I mean, they should make a distinction between crowd control and riot.

01:07:01 ►

We weren’t rioting.

01:07:03 ►

They actually said that a couple times.

01:07:04 ►

Every time we were in jail, they would talk to us and they would say,

01:07:07 ►

there are no more cameras around, you don’t have to protest anymore.

01:07:09 ►

Right.

01:07:11 ►

They’re always giving this message that the reason we’re doing it is for some selfish purposes.

01:07:16 ►

Which is, I’m a psychologist as well, and we know that people project their own issues on other people.

01:07:21 ►

So I just took it as their problem, not mine.

01:07:25 ►

And then I decided, why should I talk to these people?

01:07:28 ►

They’re not doing the right thing.

01:07:30 ►

So I decided just to be quiet, not to speak to them.

01:07:33 ►

And also, one of the rules we follow as monks is we don’t eat food that is given by mean-minded people.

01:07:40 ►

So I didn’t want to take food from the policemen.

01:07:44 ►

So they offered me food, but I didn’t eat it.

01:07:46 ►

But what was really inspiring for me was all the people that were in the lockup with me as we went through, got ourselves registered or whatever you call it.

01:07:58 ►

As we walked into the room to join everybody else, people would clap and sort you know, sort of welcome us like we were

01:08:05 ►

stars or heroes or something. And then the other thing was that when I got up and explained

01:08:13 ►

to everybody why I was doing what I was doing, they called a meeting at that very moment

01:08:19 ►

and facilitated anybody want to join Dada and his decision not to take any food from the jail

01:08:25 ►

and 55 all the people there about 100 plus people in the room

01:08:29 ►

55 people that decided not to eat food in solidarity with me

01:08:37 ►

I was very touched by that

01:08:38 ►

so I think it’s important for everybody to know

01:08:41 ►

that there’s more than a demonstration that’s happening here

01:08:44 ►

this is a community it’s teaching for everybody to know that there’s more than a demonstration that’s happening here. This is a community.

01:08:46 ►

It’s teaching people how to live together, share their pleasures and pains,

01:08:50 ►

and to support each other and not to be confrontational about their positions,

01:08:55 ►

but just support people in how they’re trying to be authentic in changing the way things are done in the world today.

01:09:03 ►

The other thing that was very funny or, if you can say, concerning for me was

01:09:07 ►

when they talked about us, they said, how many bodies are in your truck?

01:09:12 ►

They said, oh, we have ten bodies.

01:09:13 ►

So instead of saying people or persons, some people said, we’re citizens, we’re not bodies.

01:09:20 ►

So I started thinking, I thought of this song, you know,

01:09:23 ►

you’re nobody till somebody loves you. So I guess these police didn’t of the song, you know, you’re nobody till somebody loves

01:09:25 ►

you. So I guess these police didn’t love us. So we were no bodies, only bodies. Yeah. They,

01:09:31 ►

they call us bodies, uh, numerous, numerous times in the, uh, when we were in the, when we were

01:09:36 ►

waiting outside the police station, there was a, me and me and Donna were in the same, uh,

01:09:41 ►

paddy wagon. There’s a couple other guys in the paddy wagon that I want. I wish they were here

01:09:44 ►

right now that I wish I they were here right now.

01:09:47 ►

I wish I could find them right now so you guys could see them too.

01:09:48 ►

But they’ll be on.

01:09:49 ►

I’ll make sure that they get on here too.

01:09:53 ►

Anyway, I had a really great time.

01:09:54 ►

I’m very inspired.

01:09:58 ►

I think this is the greatest thing to see everybody here together.

01:10:00 ►

It’s a cathartic experience. It’s a demonstration.

01:10:02 ►

It’s a statement of unity.

01:10:01 ►

experience. It’s a demonstration.

01:10:04 ►

It’s a statement of unity.

01:10:05 ►

This morning,

01:10:07 ►

every cell in my body was just

01:10:09 ►

popping like popcorn with

01:10:11 ►

happiness and inspiration.

01:10:14 ►

Having been to jail.

01:10:16 ►

Somebody asked where they can

01:10:17 ►

find you. I want to say you can find

01:10:19 ►

them in Zacuto Park. Where can they find you?

01:10:21 ►

Well, I’m here every day from 1 until

01:10:23 ►

01:10:25 ►

Unless I’m in jail.

01:10:27 ►

I miss two days.

01:10:29 ►

But you can get me online.

01:10:31 ►

I have a webpage,

01:10:33 ►

dadaprana.com

01:10:34 ►

D-A-D-A-P-R-A-N-A dot com.

01:10:37 ►

Yeah, somebody write that down.

01:10:39 ►

It’s dadaprana.com

01:10:41 ►

Yeah.

01:10:41 ►

I got all my articles about meditation.

01:10:44 ►

And you can contact me there by email if you want.

01:10:48 ►

Anyway.

01:10:49 ►

Hey, thanks, Tiana.

01:10:51 ►

Thanks, Theo.

01:10:53 ►

Who’s that?

01:10:54 ►

They wrote your website.

01:10:55 ►

Maybe you want to see my slogan on my shirt.

01:11:01 ►

Hold on.

01:11:02 ►

Can you guys see the shirt?

01:11:03 ►

Hold on, let’s see. Can you guys see the shirt?

01:11:12 ►

People who profit from the suffering of others are immoral.

01:11:16 ►

People who suffer from the profit of others are immoral.

01:11:23 ►

All right. Look, dude.

01:11:25 ►

We are with you from here We’re with you too

01:11:25 ►

So hey guys

01:11:26 ►

I think pretty soon

01:11:29 ►

They’ve got to go over to

01:11:30 ►

The drum circle

01:11:32 ►

Because it’s popping over there right now

01:11:34 ►

There’s a lot of stuff going on over there

01:11:35 ►

So we’re going to take the live feed over to the drum circle

01:11:38 ►

It was nice to hang out with y’all

01:11:39 ►

Is there any last questions that you guys really want me to answer

01:11:42 ►

Before I walk up

01:11:43 ►

Can you say the name of the gentleman Is there any last questions that you guys really want me to answer before I walk out?

01:11:50 ►

Can you say the name of the gentleman who was singing with you in the red?

01:11:52 ►

Who was stinging?

01:11:54 ►

I don’t know what stinging means.

01:11:58 ►

Do you guys realize that the whole world is watching and we really expect that there is no turning back?

01:12:01 ►

Yeah, there’s no turning back from this.

01:12:03 ►

We don’t plan on turning back.

01:12:04 ►

We know the whole world is watching,

01:12:05 ►

and I hope the whole world continues watching.

01:12:10 ►

What’s 15th October?

01:12:13 ►

Hey, Monk, say something about 15th October.

01:12:15 ►

I think that’s another big march that we have.

01:12:17 ►

That’s not this weekend.

01:12:18 ►

It’s next weekend.

01:12:19 ►

You know, somebody took my photo of my shirt.

01:12:23 ►

A lot of people take a picture of this.

01:12:25 ►

People who profit from the sufferings of others are immoral.

01:12:31 ►

And he asked me, is there any message you want to give the youth?

01:12:34 ►

And I said, get ready to go to jail.

01:12:39 ►

It’s almost like a university.

01:12:42 ►

It’s like an ashram.

01:12:43 ►

Go to jail.

01:12:44 ►

You get to understand what the police are also going through

01:12:48 ►

because they’ve got some issues too.

01:12:50 ►

And what I found out is that these guys have a union, but they can’t strike.

01:12:55 ►

So they’ve been negotiating for two years for better benefits,

01:12:59 ►

and they’re not getting anything because they have no way to pressure.

01:13:02 ►

And the government spends a lot of money for them for, you know, material

01:13:06 ►

things to make their

01:13:08 ►

work efficient, but they don’t

01:13:10 ►

give a damn about the policemen.

01:13:12 ►

Hey there, somebody asked how old you were.

01:13:14 ►

The monk is infinite.

01:13:16 ►

Well, I’m 68 years old

01:13:18 ►

going on 28.

01:13:20 ►

Alright guys, so we’re going to

01:13:22 ►

take you guys over to the jump circle.

01:13:23 ►

I’ll see you again another time

01:13:25 ►

thanks for hanging out with me

01:13:27 ►

and the monk

01:13:28 ►

bye thanks a lot

01:13:30 ►

see you guys

01:13:30 ►

well that’s going to do it for now

01:13:39 ►

and so I’ll close today’s podcast

01:13:41 ►

by reminding you that

01:13:42 ►

this and most of the podcasts from the psychedelic salon are available for you to use in your own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 3.0 license.

01:13:53 ►

And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.

01:14:02 ►

get to via psychedelicsalon.us.

01:14:06 ►

And if you are interested in some of the stories that may or may not have led you and me

01:14:09 ►

to where we’re sharing this moment together right now,

01:14:12 ►

well, you can read a few of them in my novel,

01:14:14 ►

The Genesis Generation,

01:14:16 ►

which is available in Kindle and other e-book formats,

01:14:19 ►

as well as a pay-what-you-can audio book read by me.

01:14:22 ►

And you can find out more about that at genesisgeneration.us.

01:14:28 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo

01:14:29 ►

signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:14:32 ►

Be well, my friends.

01:14:34 ►

And I’m going to leave you

01:14:36 ►

with another short soundbite

01:14:38 ►

from the live feed of the

01:14:39 ►

Operation Wall Street protest.

01:14:42 ►

It’s a song by a young man

01:14:44 ►

whose friend is now serving in

01:14:45 ►

Afghanistan. And the reason I’m playing it is simply because it reminds me quite a bit of

01:14:51 ►

the things that we heard during the anti-war protests of the 60s. But back then it was next

01:14:57 ►

to impossible to find out what was going on on the front lines because the corporate media just

01:15:02 ►

didn’t want us to know about it. But today we have the Internet, and that is a real game-changer in my opinion.

01:15:09 ►

So, now this is a bit rough, and the sound quality isn’t too good,

01:15:12 ►

because, you know, we’re talking about a microphone on a laptop here.

01:15:16 ►

But it’s a good sampling of the raw emotion that’s beginning to come to the surface all over the world

01:15:21 ►

as we head to the massive demonstrations that are being

01:15:25 ►

planned everywhere for October 15th, 2011. And I’m sure I’ll see you there. roars as the trumpets sound for the children born by the smoking

01:15:46 ►

guns in atomic

01:15:48 ►

flames where the ties

01:15:50 ►

all come undone

01:15:52 ►

when the helmets

01:15:56 ►

hit the ground will we hide

01:15:58 ►

in shame from our own

01:16:00 ►

mistakes while we place

01:16:02 ►

the blame or will freedom

01:16:04 ►

hang from a gallows pole

01:16:07 ►

while the hands of greed distort control?

01:16:11 ►

In a house of cards that was built to break down

01:16:15 ►

where action’s worn of a day that’s coming round

01:16:19 ►

when a judgment call’s gonna even things out.

01:16:23 ►

So ask yourself, what’s it really all about?

01:16:27 ►

When they say that independence is the goal we’re fighting for.

01:16:31 ►

Could it really be another way to filter out the poor?

01:16:35 ►

As we stand within the shadow of a never-ending war.

01:16:39 ►

Pay attention when the helmet’s hit the ground When the helmets hit the ground

01:16:54 ►

Is it worth the cost

01:16:56 ►

Of the land we’ve raped

01:16:58 ►

And the lives we’ve lost

01:17:00 ►

Or the prices rise

01:17:02 ►

As the dying fall

01:17:04 ►

For a bill of rights that’s only done them wrong.

01:17:12 ►

When the helmet sits the ground, it’s the perfect crime.

01:17:16 ►

Fill the tombstone rows with the fire and wine.

01:17:20 ►

For the wayward youth gather far and wide To the pearly gates with an advertised life

01:17:28 ►

And as one stands up, there’s another shot down

01:17:32 ►

The flags wave high and the bodies pile round

01:17:36 ►

By the seven seals of the blood-red skies

01:17:40 ►

The devils dance while the angels cry

01:17:44 ►

For the faithful but misguided who have died without

01:17:47 ►

a name. For the mothers and the fathers clutching picture frames in pain of their sons and of their

01:17:53 ►

daughters they may never see again. Better listen when the helmets hit the ground

01:18:19 ►

Will you ask your God

01:18:21 ►

If he’ll shed his grace

01:18:23 ►

On a graveyard plot

01:18:25 ►

where the monuments of our pride once stood for a crooked crown of brotherhood?

01:18:33 ►

And our numbers up with another one down, the walls closing on the Armageddon bound,

01:18:41 ►

and our time grows short, better figure things out, the horsemen

01:18:46 ►

ride while the chimes are

01:18:48 ►

ringing loud for a torn and

01:18:50 ►

tattered country and the battle

01:18:51 ►

she has known for the innocent

01:18:54 ►

without a choice who faces death

01:18:56 ►

alone, from the bunkers to

01:18:58 ►

the barracks, bring them all back

01:19:00 ►

home

01:19:01 ►

before another helmet hits the ground.

01:19:17 ►

Cool. Thank you all for letting me play that. Thank you. Yeah, everybody come out here.

01:19:23 ►

This is awesome and we’re changing the world.

01:19:25 ►

My name is Matt Pless, that’s P-L-E-S-S,

01:19:28 ►

and all my stuff’s free,

01:19:29 ►

so look me up if you want to find that song.

01:19:32 ►

Thank you.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

284 - The Revolution Continues Part 1

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