Program Notes
Guest speaker: Joanna Harcourt-Smith
[NOTE: All quotations are by Joanna Harcourt-Smith.]
“In my childhood, and in those [wealthy] circles, I never encountered compassion. If I ever encountered compassion it was from someone who was serving these people. And I wondered why that is. And this man said to me, ‘Well, you see, the very, very rich have to kill compassion in their children. Every child is born innately compassionate, but they have to kill compassion in their children so that they don’t give it [great wealth] away.’ I mean, how could we own most of what is if we had compassion?”
“Human beings have a right to change their consciousness, and it is unconscionable and absolutely wrong for any government or any person to stand in the way of someone choosing to change their consciousness.”
“Once the System has you in their clutches there are no laws.”
“A lot of times myth is stronger than reality. The mythological story endures. The personal story doesn’t really make it, and some people are myths in their own lifetimes. Timothy Leary is one of these people.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:24 ►
From Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And it seems as if it’s been forever since we were here last together in the salon.
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As you already know if you’ve read the message that I posted on Facebook a few days back,
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I was laid low by a really nasty virus a couple weeks ago and to tell the truth I’m still not back to 100%.
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It’s actually the most sick I’ve been since I had pneumonia about five years ago, and while I never really felt as
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if I was going to die, I did get to the point where I actually didn’t care if I did. It
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was a really nasty little bug, but now I’m on the mend and slowly getting back to normal,
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or at least what’s going to be the new normal for me.
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You see, spending all that time in bed, not even caring to read, well, it gives one a
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chance to think a few things through.
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So before I introduce today’s program, I want to pass along a few of the things that I’ve
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been thinking about these past couple weeks.
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And what is this big announcement, you ask?
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Well, it really isn’t all that big, but
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after the first few days of not logging on to the net and checking my email and the various
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social media inboxes, I began to experience a great deal of anxiety and stress, well,
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just knowing how far behind I’d be once I finally got back online. And then I began to hear that Aldous Huxley soundbite that I played a few podcasts ago,
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where he said that if we aren’t careful, our machines were going to take over our lives,
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and we would become slaves to our own machines.
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And suddenly I realized how true that is in my own life.
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So then and there I decided to begin to detach myself from the tyranny of my own machines.
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And now I’m happy to report that I can go two or three days without even turning on my computer, let alone checking email.
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And that’s when I realized that I’d gotten myself into an interesting little paradox here.
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All my life I’ve wanted to be popular, and from time to time I halfway succeeded.
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But it’s been here in the salon, through my hobby of podcasting,
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that I finally broke through to where I’m actually a lot more popular than is comfortable for me.
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So, as dearly as I prize all of the wonderful Facebook mail, Twitter mail, LinkedIn mail, and all the other places I’m digitally attached to,
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well, in order to eliminate a huge amount of stress in my life, I’m giving them all up.
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Now, if you’re a Facebook friend of mine, you already saw my notice that even though I have over 300 unread messages in my Facebook inbox,
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I’m no longer going to even click over to see who they’re from.
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You see, what happens is that I go out to Facebook or check email and I see a message from an old
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friend and so I read it and often answer it. But that leads me to seeing all of the other new
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messages and one thing leads to another and before long I’ve spent two or three or four hours reading
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email. Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s actually a great experience and the wonderful comments that come
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in, well they truly warm the cockles of my heart and make life worth living. But after several
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hours of doing this I get so worn out that I often wind up putting off working on the next podcast or
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working on my new book because, well, I’m just mentally wrung out.
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In the past, you know, it wasn’t like that.
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I could work 15 hours a day and never seem fatigued.
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But now I wear out in only a few hours sitting here in front of this computer screen.
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And so I also gave that a lot of thought.
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Then the other day, I happened to catch my reflection in the mirror
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and was shocked to find that I hardly recognized myself.
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I realize how strange that sounds, but apparently when I shave in the morning and get ready for the day,
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I must not actually be thinking about the image that’s coming back to me.
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Like most old people that I’ve spoken with about aging, on the inside I’m still a teenager,
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but suddenly I discovered that on the outside I’m actually over halfway through my 70th year.
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And now, for the first time ever, I’m finally experiencing the fact that I’m old. Really fucking old.
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Now, don’t get me wrong. Outside of this recent virus, I’m actually in much better shape than many men my age.
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Outside of this recent virus, I’m actually in much better shape than many men my age.
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You know, I’m careful to eat only organic food, almost all of which is grown within 50 miles of where I live.
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And I usually get exercise every day.
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So I feel quite certain that I’ll exceed the life expectancy for an American male.
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But here was a shocker for me when I checked out that statistic. The average male in this country
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only lives to be 75.6 years old, which gives me only six more years. And I’m here to tell you that
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that isn’t nearly enough time for me to complete some of the projects that I’ve already begun,
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let alone the ones that I have on the drawing board. And seeing as how I’m now the last of my
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birth family to still be alive, and after seeing
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so many of my contemporaries already fade off into the sunset, I’ve had to have a serious talk
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with myself in very realistic terms, and come to some kind of conclusion about how I’m going to
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spend whatever time is left to me. Hopefully I’ll have at least another ten good years in which to accomplish a few of the things that are important to me.
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Which at long last brings me to the point of this little self-indulgent rant.
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I calculated that out of the working hours I can put in each day,
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if I continue to read email and the messages that are coming in from all the various sources,
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that I’ll be giving up almost three or four of those ten years just in correspondence.
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So please don’t think that I don’t find your messages to be important.
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I know they are.
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But from now on, I am sorry to report,
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I’m no longer going to even be reading my email or any messages from other social media.
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Granted, I still have to deal with the web hosting companies where I post these podcasts,
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and of course, without the ongoing support I receive from our fellow salonners who either
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make direct donations or buy a copy of one of my books, well, these podcasts wouldn’t
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be online.
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And so I’ll also still be dealing with the financial matters online and contacting our
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donors, things like that.
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But other than a few small things like that, I’m going to do my best to extract myself from the tyranny of my machines.
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Maybe once my next book is finished, I’ll be able to again join the world of email.
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But for now, the only way you’re going to get my attention, I’m sorry to say, is through your comments on our Notes from the Psychedelic Salon blog,
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which, as you know, you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.
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And since I’m the only administrator for that site, and since each comment has to be personally approved,
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that means that I do read each one, and as you know, I also often add my own comments to them when there’s a question asked.
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I’m really sorry to have taken so much of your time with this, and particularly here just before
00:07:32 ►
a really fascinating interview, and I apologize up front for taking your time with these introspective
00:07:39 ►
comments, but now that I think about it, given the amazing story that we’re about to hear,
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but now that I think about it, given the amazing story that we’re about to hear,
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maybe the title of this podcast should be Introspections of a Couple of People Who Actually Made It Through the 60s.
00:07:52 ►
So let’s get on with the show.
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Now, today’s program actually is a result of a series of emails
00:07:59 ►
that Joanna Harcourt Smith and I began exchanging last year.
00:08:03 ►
As you’re most likely aware already,
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Joanna was the main companion of Dr. Timothy Leary
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during the phase of his life after he escaped from prison,
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after he escaped from the U.S.,
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and after he lived in Algeria as a guest, so-called, of Eldridge Cleaver,
00:08:19 ►
where he was leading the Black Panther government in exile.
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And so by the time Joanna and Timothy became connected,
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the good Dr. Leary was already a worldwide legend.
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But then things got even more interesting.
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You see, Joanna was with Leary when he was kidnapped in Afghanistan by the U.S. government
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and then returned to a California prison.
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And just as a little aside here,
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in case you think that the state of California is in any way progressive or forward-looking,
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I should point out the fact that California spends five times as much of its tax money on its prisons
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than it does on its schools.
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So even on the West Coast, we live in a gulag that soon may be even more horrific
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than the Soviet gulags once were.
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But I digress once again.
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Now after this interview, I’ll add a few more of my own comments about those turbulent and exciting times.
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But one thing that I want to suggest before we listen to this interview
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is that you give some thought to something that she says here in a few minutes
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about what it’s like growing up as a child of the family
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who is in the upper stratosphere of the upper stratosphere
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of what is now called the 1%.
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I think that her comments may give you a somewhat different idea
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of what the so-called 1% are actually like,
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particularly about what they’re afraid of.
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Now, the interview with Joanna that we’re about to hear was conducted by her friend
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Hugh Ware, and as you’ll hear, Hugh does a great job of contextualizing what was going
00:09:55 ►
on back in the 60s with what is going on right now on both the political and cultural fronts.
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And so I see this interview as not simply a history lesson, but also a warning
00:10:06 ►
that if we don’t learn from history, we’re going to be doomed to repeat it. So to our younger
00:10:11 ►
salonners, particularly those who have written to me lamenting the fact that they weren’t alive and
00:10:17 ►
active during the 60s, well, in my opinion, what’s underway right now is going to make the 60s
00:10:23 ►
seem like the 50s. In other words,
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if we’re going to be able to work our way out of the mess we’re currently in, then it’s important
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that we make some new mistakes as we go along and not simply make the same mistakes as were made
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back in the so-called 60s. But enough of my chatter. Let’s get on with this fascinating
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interview with Joanna Harcourt-Smith
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As conducted by Hugh Ware
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Specifically for us to listen to here in the Psychedelic Salon
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I’d like to begin a conversation with Joanna Harcourt-Smith
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Concerning her new book, Tripping the Bardo with Timothy Leary
00:11:01 ►
And generally share in some of her marvelous experiences over the past many,
00:11:08 ►
many decades that she has finally put into this amazing book that I want to talk with her at
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length about. As many of you know, Joanna is a creator and a producer for a website,
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is a creator and a producer for a website,
00:11:23 ►
00:11:26 ►
which is part of the Marian Institute.
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And her podcasts and interviews
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with authors, visionaries,
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and innovators from around the world
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have become really very well known.
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And her website gets lots of hits,
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like 70,000 hits per year.
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She’s written many
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articles and publications.
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She’s given writing workshops and has been into
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poetry. She’s just an amazing woman, born in Switzerland in 1946, has grown up three children
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and has three grandchildren. And Joanna, I really can’t wait to talk about this book and your life experiences. But before we get into the book, I’d just like to say hi.
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Hi, Hugh, and I’m happy to be here with you.
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I want to tell our listeners that I have chosen my close friend, Dr. Hugh Weir, to share this conversation with me.
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He is a great animal lover and healer, and he lived intensely through the 60s and 70s.
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So let’s go, Hugh.
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Great.
00:12:48 ►
I think a little bit about some of your ancient history
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and your genes and some of that incredibly interesting drama
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of your mother and your past is people have to know this
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to know about you.
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This is a part of you that really we’ve got to talk about.
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And I’d like you to go into that,
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but I’d also like you to, you know,
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just when you speak about the really in the 60s,
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the early 60s, when you got into the U.S.
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and what was happening,
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when you became aware of like Marlon Brando or the Stones,
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of course, the Beatles and all the rock stuff,
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and then of course the Revolution and the spirit of all that
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and how that affected you and how that seduced you
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into coming to the United States and eventually meeting Timothy Leary.
00:13:39 ►
Well, I think this is a great place to start, Hugh,
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because the way I’d like to, the threads that I’d like to follow through this conversation is the social and the political and the personal, those three levels.
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And it’s in the 60s and 70s that I forgot who said it, but every life is a political life.
00:14:09 ►
The way that it began for me is that I grew up in a family that, at this time we can use that phrase, was not only part of the 1%, but was part of the 0.1%.
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And I want to say that the people who have the most money
00:14:32 ►
are the people who are the most afraid of not having money.
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So I grew up in a family where I was treated like Cinderella
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because I was costly.
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treated like Cinderella because I was costly, but yet people went to, my people went to the greatest designers and we stayed in the most luxury hotels, but yet I was treated
00:15:00 ►
like an inconvenience because I cost.
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So that was a very interesting thing. And as I was growing up, I saw the cruelty and the lack of feeling that exists in this 0, 1% of the population.
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And one day when I was much older,
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I was speaking with somebody who told me this fabulous thing.
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I said, you know, in my childhood and in those circles,
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I never encountered compassion.
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If I ever encountered compassion, it was from a person who was serving these people.
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And I wonder why that is.
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And this man said to me,
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well, you see, the very, very rich have to kill compassion in their children.
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Every child is born innately compassionate, but they have to kill compassion in their children. Every child is born innately compassionate,
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but they have to kill compassion in their children so that they don’t give it away.
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I mean, how could we own most of what is if we had compassion? So I grew up without any compassion, and 50s and 60s told that I was supposed to look for the alpha man
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and that alpha man would provide for me.
00:16:34 ►
Well, this brings up another incredible, important issue
00:16:39 ►
that really kind of just started in the 60s but kind of got rolling more in the 70s,
00:16:45 ►
and that is women’s liberation, which I’m sure you were one of the leaders of at the time
00:16:50 ►
and were very aware of all the gender imbalances in your life, everywhere you went,
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especially socially, especially from where you came from, from Europe,
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but also anywhere you went in
00:17:07 ►
the world, it was very similar. And I think that people don’t realize that the actual
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Women’s Liberation Movement began in the early 70s, and it was a really, really important
00:17:18 ►
movement that has affected all the politics of left and right.
00:17:23 ►
Very good question. I mean, I often speak with a woman who might be in her 40s or in her 30s
00:17:30 ►
and has no idea where we came from
00:17:35 ►
so that they may have a choice.
00:17:39 ►
Now, they may have the choice to stay at home
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and dedicate their life to their children,
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but they also may have the choice to live independently in the world
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and be a single mother or whatever it be.
00:17:56 ►
They don’t realize, well, the price that we paid for a certain kind of freedom to be available to women, at least in the
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Western world. I existed still in a time where I should be married in order to leave the
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home. So that is still happening in African countries.
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And I know the burden that it is to have been told
00:18:31 ►
that you should belong to a man so that you can leave home.
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I did that.
00:18:37 ►
But at the same time, I took the liberty, the freedom,
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the amazing, the amazing freedom to have abortions.
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I suffered from them very much, but yet I feel proud that I lived at a time where I could make that decision
00:19:01 ►
and not create more abused children than it’s necessary.
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You said you encountered women’s liberation.
00:19:12 ►
It’s more like I feel I’ve always been a free person inside,
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a free person inside,
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but it’s been wonderful to live at a time where I have been able to let that freedom fly,
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where it’s not necessary for me to submit to any man or any woman.
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And yes, we created that in a certain way.
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And yes, we created that in a certain way.
00:19:54 ►
Yeah, well, Joanna, let’s move to when and how did you meet Timothy Leary,
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speaking of this archetypal man.
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Tell us about how that happened.
00:20:02 ►
I believe it was in the early 70s, around 72.
00:20:07 ►
Will you tell us and start to tell us a little bit of the story, please?
00:20:09 ►
I’m dying to get into the story.
00:20:12 ►
This book is just an incredible page-turner,
00:20:14 ►
and I don’t know if our interview will do it justice,
00:20:17 ►
but please, please, begin the story a little.
00:20:24 ►
Well, I have to say that I finished Tripping the Bardo with Timothy Leary about
00:20:25 ►
four months ago
00:20:27 ►
and I just turned
00:20:30 ►
66 three days
00:20:32 ►
ago and I started
00:20:34 ►
writing this book
00:20:36 ►
when I was 31 years old
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when Timothy Leary and I broke up
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because I was sure
00:20:44 ►
from that moment on
00:20:45 ►
that that story needs to be told.
00:20:49 ►
So going back to when I was 26 years old,
00:20:53 ►
I’m looking for the alpha male.
00:20:57 ►
But yet, I’m a child of the 60s.
00:21:01 ►
And so my family tried to marry me
00:21:04 ►
to Nicky Hilton of the Hilton Hotels, tried to marry me to the Minister of Finance of Cuba, tried to marry me into the Hunt family, which at the time was like the Koch family in Texas, tried to marry me to
00:21:26 ►
one of the Hunts. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t do that. I was still enough of a non-feminist
00:21:33 ►
that I was willing to look for the great protector and provider, but I wasn’t willing to sell out to this kind of person.
00:21:47 ►
And I was very fortunate that in 1969, I took LSD.
00:21:56 ►
And that was a very big event for me
00:22:01 ►
because I had come from this place of non-compassion. I had come from this
00:22:07 ►
place of false entitlement. I had come from this place where dignity was not something
00:22:16 ►
that was afforded easily to women. And so I’m in Washington, D.C., and I take my first LSD trip,
00:22:25 ►
and I’m totally terrified.
00:22:28 ►
I mean, because I don’t know who I am.
00:22:32 ►
Today I know you can let go of who you are.
00:22:36 ►
You can let go of your ego if you have an ego,
00:22:40 ►
but if you don’t have a healthy ego, you can’t go through ego death. So I’m looking
00:22:49 ►
at myself in the mirror and I’m horrified. And I’m looking at my hands and my arms and
00:22:55 ►
I’m seeing the veins and I’m seeing the whole river system of my body. system of my body and I’m afraid I’m afraid because
00:23:08 ►
I can’t accept the human being that I am so all night I played Bob Dylan’s song
00:23:19 ►
in the early morning rain With a dollar in my hand
00:23:25 ►
I’m cold and I’m lonely here on the ground
00:23:29 ►
And it was the way I felt
00:23:31 ►
And I listened to this song
00:23:33 ►
Until at some point at dawn
00:23:36 ►
I went towards the window
00:23:39 ►
And I opened the window
00:23:41 ►
And I saw this tree And I felt that window and I saw this tree.
00:23:46 ►
And I felt that the tree saw me.
00:23:51 ►
And I felt integrated.
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And I felt whole.
00:23:56 ►
Not just as the me that I detested,
00:23:59 ►
but as a part of that tree and as a part of all there is.
00:24:05 ►
Nothing to judge, just a part of what is.
00:24:09 ►
And I felt this exquisite peace come over me.
00:24:15 ►
And then I could let the dawn,
00:24:18 ►
and some people might be upset by what I say,
00:24:22 ►
but let the exquisiteness of the coming down from an LSD trip,
00:24:29 ►
humbled but not humiliated,
00:24:33 ►
I could let that wash over me and feel grateful.
00:24:37 ►
So that’s the beginning of my search for Timothy Leary.
00:24:47 ►
So then I would hear the Moody Blues.
00:24:51 ►
I would listen to the Moody Blues a lot.
00:24:54 ►
And I would hear this song,
00:24:57 ►
Timothy Leary’s dead, no, no, no, no.
00:25:01 ►
A beautiful song.
00:25:02 ►
And I would wonder who that character was.
00:25:09 ►
And I had had such an unhappy childhood
00:25:13 ►
that the positive side of the unhappy childhood
00:25:16 ►
was that I wanted to understand what it’s all about.
00:25:24 ►
Why are we here? What is suffering?
00:25:29 ►
What is beyond that?
00:25:32 ►
And somehow I got this feeling
00:25:36 ►
that this Timothy Lurie, if he was sticking his neck
00:25:40 ►
out that far, that he was telling people to have
00:25:44 ►
the experience
00:25:45 ►
like I had
00:25:47 ►
in my first experience with LSD
00:25:50 ►
if he was doing that
00:25:51 ►
then perhaps he would have some answers
00:25:53 ►
for me
00:25:54 ►
also I became aware that he was
00:25:58 ►
a
00:25:58 ►
one of the foremost psychologists
00:26:01 ►
in the world
00:26:02 ►
and
00:26:04 ►
I thought he’d have spiritual answers,
00:26:09 ►
psychological answers,
00:26:11 ►
and also that by finding him,
00:26:15 ►
I would find myself in a social position
00:26:18 ►
that would feel comfortable to me.
00:26:22 ►
I would not be an outsider anymore.
00:26:26 ►
Or that he would make the outside acceptable.
00:26:32 ►
Yes?
00:26:35 ►
Would you like to go on?
00:26:36 ►
Yes, please go on and tell when you met him
00:26:41 ►
and what was kind of happening in the background around the world,
00:26:45 ►
not just the United States and Switzerland and Afghanistan and all these exotic places that you went with him.
00:26:51 ►
But yeah, continue on, please.
00:26:54 ►
Yeah.
00:26:55 ►
So I’m sitting in Spain in this beautiful village.
00:27:04 ►
in Spain, in this beautiful village,
00:27:11 ►
and I’m hearing the music of Woodstock.
00:27:13 ►
I’m listening to Woodstock.
00:27:16 ►
I’m reading the magazines.
00:27:21 ►
And I know that you people over there are creating a revolution.
00:27:25 ►
And that really touches
00:27:27 ►
my heart. I really
00:27:29 ►
want to be part of this revolution.
00:27:32 ►
I feel immediately
00:27:33 ►
that
00:27:35 ►
through the music
00:27:37 ►
I know that
00:27:40 ►
I am a part of you
00:27:42 ►
over there
00:27:43 ►
in your demonstrations in over there in your demonstrations, in your dancing, in your music, in your philosophy of let it all hang out, of liberation.
00:27:58 ►
I’m with you.
00:28:01 ►
So the first time I went to the States was in 1969.
00:28:06 ►
Actually, that’s where I was able to take LSD.
00:28:10 ►
And I tell in the book how this little European debutante arrived in Washington, D.C.
00:28:17 ►
on the day of the biggest moratorium demonstration.
00:28:23 ►
I mean, I’m fresh off the plane
00:28:25 ►
I’ve never been to America
00:28:26 ►
and I go
00:28:28 ►
to the
00:28:31 ►
capital and I go to the
00:28:33 ►
what’s that big phallic symbol
00:28:35 ►
with the blinking eye
00:28:36 ►
what’s it called?
00:28:39 ►
go to the Washington Monument
00:28:41 ►
and people
00:28:43 ►
are smoking dope and they’re dancing
00:28:45 ►
and there are 300,000
00:28:48 ►
people on the street
00:28:49 ►
and I tell
00:28:52 ►
how I got
00:28:54 ►
tear gassed
00:28:55 ►
and I felt that was my
00:28:58 ►
baptism
00:28:59 ►
forget all other kinds of
00:29:02 ►
baptism, here I am
00:29:04 ►
I’ve arrived in the afternoon during this monumental demonstration.
00:29:09 ►
My eyes are stinging like crazy.
00:29:12 ►
And I am part of a generation on the move to really change everything.
00:29:21 ►
And I love it.
00:29:31 ►
So it took a couple of years. I tell the story about how I worked as a DJ and I was able to become an ordinary person by working as a waitress.
00:29:40 ►
I was working as a waitress wearing seminar on dresses. It was a weird time of transformation.
00:29:48 ►
But I tell this story and I tell how,
00:29:51 ►
which I won’t get into through an amazing, of course,
00:29:56 ►
course of synchronicities.
00:30:00 ►
I find myself, and some people will know the name,
00:30:04 ►
I find myself in Diane von people will know the name,
00:30:09 ►
I find myself in Diane von Furstenberg’s apartment in New York,
00:30:16 ►
and this man who was an arms trafficker, who had been my lover,
00:30:20 ►
tells me that he owns Timothy Leary.
00:30:23 ►
And I didn’t know what that meant, but what happened is that Timothy Leary had been convicted of possession of 0.1 grams of marijuana and had been imprisoned on a five to ten year California conviction for possession, had been in prison, had escaped from prison,
00:30:47 ►
aided by the Wetterman,
00:30:50 ►
and had been able to escape the country
00:30:53 ►
with his wife Rosemary,
00:30:55 ►
had gone to Algeria to do the revolution
00:31:00 ►
with Eldridge Cleaver,
00:31:02 ►
who was, for those who don’t remember the time, Eldridge Cleaver
00:31:09 ►
was a leader of the Black Panther movement, which was a big African-American liberation
00:31:17 ►
movement. So Timothy had escaped and had gone to be with Eldridge Giver, and then had moved on and was now living in Switzerland
00:31:28 ►
as a fugitive from American prison, from California prison.
00:31:35 ►
This man, basically this old friend of mine,
00:31:38 ►
was able to tell me where Timothy Leary was,
00:31:41 ►
and I didn’t hesitate a moment.
00:31:43 ►
I went to Switzerland, and I called Timothy Leary was and I didn’t hesitate a moment I went to Switzerland
00:31:45 ►
and I called Timothy Leary
00:31:47 ►
and I finally got on the phone with him
00:31:51 ►
and I said I wanted to meet him
00:31:54 ►
and he set an appointment
00:31:58 ►
for three days from there
00:32:00 ►
I describe all of that in the book in detail
00:32:03 ►
and if I may say so myself, it’s very amusing
00:32:07 ►
because really I didn’t know
00:32:10 ►
who Timothy Leary was. This Harvard
00:32:15 ►
professor, this
00:32:18 ►
man who was older, much older than I was
00:32:23 ►
I was 26, he was 53, was an encouragement
00:32:29 ►
for the rebelliousness of our generation, almost like someone of the next generation
00:32:40 ►
who gave their approval. I haven’t even thought about it that way
00:32:45 ►
but it was very interesting
00:32:47 ►
that he was older
00:32:49 ►
than we were
00:32:50 ►
and we got his unconditional
00:32:53 ►
approval for all the crazy
00:32:55 ►
things we were doing
00:32:56 ►
I mean
00:32:57 ►
I have to say that
00:33:00 ►
I
00:33:01 ►
like many people of my generation like you you, Hugh, because I’ve heard you talk
00:33:08 ►
about it, I always considered myself an explorer. involved in, and that was the exploration of the mind, of the heart, and how it is to be human.
00:33:48 ►
So Timothy Leary, back to him,
00:33:52 ►
I’m really glad because I’m going to meet this man
00:33:56 ►
and I know I’m going to fall in love with him.
00:34:00 ►
And I know that he has answers for me.
00:34:04 ►
and I know that he has answers for me.
00:34:11 ►
So since he did not initiate me to LSD,
00:34:16 ►
I had six tabs of clear light,
00:34:18 ►
for those who don’t know, those were tiny little transparent tabs of LSD
00:34:24 ►
tucked in my journal
00:34:26 ►
in the pages of my journal
00:34:28 ►
and
00:34:30 ►
I was together
00:34:32 ►
with this fabulous rock and roll
00:34:34 ►
lover who
00:34:35 ►
when I say rock and roll he was
00:34:38 ►
an integral part
00:34:40 ►
of the Stones entourage
00:34:42 ►
and the Stones even wrote a song
00:34:44 ►
about him, Tommy the Tumbling
00:34:46 ►
Dice. So I’m with Tommy and his kids and my kid and we show up for this appointment with
00:34:55 ►
Timothy Leary in a cafe in Switzerland. And as I sit down at the table with Timothy Leary, he looks at me and he says,
00:35:08 ►
You’ve come to free me.
00:35:13 ►
And I just took the challenge right there and then.
00:35:21 ►
Somehow it didn’t scare me.
00:35:24 ►
It didn’t scare me because I had no idea what that meant.
00:35:28 ►
None.
00:35:29 ►
But the fact that this man could recognize me
00:35:34 ►
in the way that he did,
00:35:37 ►
I felt that on a sensual level
00:35:41 ►
because I’ve always been a catalyst
00:35:45 ►
so
00:35:46 ►
it seemed that he knew me
00:35:50 ►
and
00:35:51 ►
then he said something
00:35:55 ►
so strange, he said
00:35:57 ►
and I’ve come to erase the
00:35:59 ►
memory of all these
00:36:01 ►
Middle Eastern
00:36:03 ►
mustachioed men
00:36:07 ►
who’ve taken advantage of you.
00:36:12 ►
And that was true too.
00:36:16 ►
I will not go into detail, but it’s mentioned in the book.
00:36:19 ►
And that was true too.
00:36:22 ►
And so it was like
00:36:24 ►
there was this connection, this extraordinary electronic
00:36:37 ►
connection that happened right there and there. And so he invited us back to the house where he was living.
00:36:48 ►
And I have to say that as I got to that house,
00:36:52 ►
I had experienced practically no love in my life.
00:36:57 ►
And certainly not the kind of love
00:37:02 ►
that is shared
00:37:06 ►
by a community of people
00:37:08 ►
and that again
00:37:09 ►
is a social phenomenon
00:37:12 ►
that
00:37:13 ►
existed in the 60s
00:37:15 ►
and that today
00:37:17 ►
has grown
00:37:19 ►
and has spread
00:37:22 ►
groups of people
00:37:24 ►
group consciousness of people that expresses love.
00:37:30 ►
So there were perhaps six or seven people at his house,
00:37:35 ►
and I just felt this exquisite feeling of a different kind of love than sexual love.
00:37:44 ►
I had no idea that that could happen.
00:37:49 ►
It’s not so much that people would be nice to each other.
00:37:52 ►
It was just this experience of group awareness,
00:38:02 ►
group awareness of one another
00:38:05 ►
and group awareness of each other as one.
00:38:12 ►
And so I was enthralled.
00:38:13 ►
I knew that I was in the presence of something I’d been looking for.
00:38:22 ►
And I didn’t know if it originated with this man, but it was definitely
00:38:28 ►
there and then that I realized that love was much broader, like my encounter with the tree,
00:38:35 ►
that love was much broader than the sexual love that I had experienced. So that very night, we took LSD, the whole group, together.
00:38:50 ►
And a few hours later,
00:38:54 ►
Timothy asked me if I wanted to go and have breakfast with him.
00:38:59 ►
And he had a yellow Porsche, 911 Targa.
00:39:11 ►
And I got in the car with him, and I was really intensely tripping. And so was he, and he conveyed to me that he was a political outlaw,
00:39:27 ►
that he was being trapped like a hunted animal,
00:39:34 ►
and that we were in a crucial time politically
00:39:39 ►
for the world, just like now.
00:39:46 ►
And that I should participate in his liberation
00:39:52 ►
because it would be my way to participate
00:39:57 ►
in a greater social liberation.
00:40:01 ►
And again, I had no idea what he meant.
00:40:03 ►
and again I had no idea what he meant and we went and we had a lovely breakfast
00:40:10 ►
I couldn’t touch the eggs
00:40:12 ►
they looked like some sort of oozing sunshine or something
00:40:19 ►
but he ate voraciously
00:40:22 ►
and then we admitted to each other that we were each other’s perfect love.
00:40:31 ►
I was in no state to question that.
00:40:36 ►
And I was in no state to ask questions about it.
00:40:44 ►
I just, I believed it.
00:40:48 ►
I believed it.
00:40:49 ►
And I believed that I had arrived
00:40:52 ►
where I wanted to be forever
00:40:54 ►
since I was a child.
00:40:58 ►
So after that,
00:41:02 ►
I sent my boyfriend away.
00:41:07 ►
This is described in more details.
00:41:12 ►
And sadly, I sent my child away because I knew this was going to be the rollercoaster of rollercoasters.
00:41:19 ►
I didn’t know how, but I knew that.
00:41:24 ►
And so Timothy and I continued to take LSD every day.
00:41:29 ►
We drove around in the yellow Porsche.
00:41:32 ►
We went to Austria,
00:41:36 ►
because he was to make a film against drug addiction.
00:41:44 ►
Strange, because another reason both of us liked each other very much
00:41:48 ►
is that we loved to drink together.
00:41:52 ►
We loved to get drunk.
00:41:55 ►
And we were taking cocaine and we were taking LSD
00:42:01 ►
and there he was making this anti-addiction film
00:42:06 ►
for this commune in Vienna.
00:42:10 ►
And it was all unbelievably paradoxical to me.
00:42:20 ►
That’s where…
00:42:24 ►
I mean, I had lived paradox to the extreme
00:42:27 ►
because to be a child and to be abused
00:42:30 ►
and to be physically abused and to be sexually abused
00:42:33 ►
is the greatest paradox one can live.
00:42:37 ►
But when I started to travel with Timothy Leary,
00:42:42 ►
it was like turning up paradox to the max.
00:42:49 ►
And then he says to me,
00:42:52 ►
we should go to Afghanistan.
00:42:56 ►
And by then,
00:42:58 ►
I had drank water from the Ganges
00:43:00 ►
that his daughter brought back from India
00:43:03 ►
and contracted jaundice and hepatitis to the max.
00:43:11 ►
And I was in no situation to argue with the decision to go to Afghanistan.
00:43:19 ►
I didn’t even know why we were going to go to Afghanistan,
00:43:24 ►
except that he said that there was a great hash dealer there,
00:43:29 ►
which you could see how that could be,
00:43:33 ►
who was going to provide for us and give us a beautiful life
00:43:37 ►
and that the Americans would never get taken back to America
00:43:43 ►
because there was no extradition between Afghanistan
00:43:47 ►
and the United States. So he said that we were going to live like poets on the beach
00:43:59 ►
with flowers in our hair, making love day and night, and we’d have beautiful babies. And I thought,
00:44:07 ►
well, that’s great. Let’s go. So we get on the plane to Afghanistan, to Kabul, Afghanistan.
00:44:26 ►
and this is the crucial moment.
00:44:31 ►
I’m skipping over some amazing things that are told in the book,
00:44:34 ►
but as we exit the plane,
00:44:41 ►
he had, for some reason, he had his passport in the name of Timothy Leary.
00:44:45 ►
I’m not quite sure how that happened,
00:44:51 ►
because since he had traveled to Europe as an escapee on a false passport,
00:44:56 ►
I don’t know who it was or how it was that he was in possession of his passport.
00:45:00 ►
But we walked into the Kabul airport,
00:45:04 ►
and I’ll never forget, as long as I live live this little man in a suit with a moustache
00:45:08 ►
came up to Timothy and snatched both our passports out of his hand
00:45:14 ►
and Timothy turned to me and he said I’m being returned to the United States
00:45:23 ►
And I had no idea what that meant.
00:45:30 ►
And we went up to the passport control,
00:45:33 ►
and the Afghani said,
00:45:35 ►
well, we can’t let you into the country because you don’t have any passports.
00:45:39 ►
Catch-22 or what?
00:45:42 ►
Or first extraordinary
00:45:45 ►
rendition
00:45:47 ►
illegal
00:45:48 ►
no extradition papers
00:45:52 ►
extraordinary rendition
00:45:54 ►
in the history of the
00:45:56 ►
United States
00:45:57 ►
I still get really choked up
00:46:02 ►
when I think about that
00:46:04 ►
because we were then taken to an abandoned hotel in Kabul
00:46:12 ►
that was in ruins.
00:46:14 ►
We were locked up together in a room
00:46:17 ►
with about 20 Afghani soldiers guarding the door.
00:46:22 ►
Afghani soldiers guarding the door and
00:46:23 ►
fear entered me
00:46:26 ►
fear
00:46:28 ►
entered me
00:46:30 ►
like only people
00:46:32 ►
who have been kidnapped
00:46:34 ►
by the United States government
00:46:36 ►
know
00:46:37 ►
you cannot know that fear
00:46:40 ►
unless you are
00:46:42 ►
being kidnapped by the law
00:46:44 ►
outside the law.
00:46:48 ►
It’s, again, rising paradox.
00:46:52 ►
It’s a paradox.
00:46:53 ►
I mean, if you are being kidnapped by the law, outside the law,
00:46:58 ►
there is no recourse.
00:47:00 ►
None.
00:47:02 ►
You are now in total no man’s land.
00:47:07 ►
So Timothy and I were left to rot in this horrible room with a mattress,
00:47:17 ►
with these Afghani soldiers guarding the door.
00:47:21 ►
There was a toilet, but it was unbelievably disgusting. We were interrogated. The interrogation
00:47:31 ►
didn’t make any sense. I hadn’t committed a crime anywhere, or officially hadn’t committed
00:47:37 ►
a crime, having taken what they call drugs.
00:47:47 ►
But I had never officially committed a crime or been arrested anywhere in the world.
00:47:50 ►
I had a raging hepatitis.
00:47:54 ►
And these men with German accents
00:47:59 ►
were interrogating us about things that were total nonsense.
00:48:07 ►
And all they gave us was chai,
00:48:11 ►
which was a good thing because we had the kind of appetite
00:48:14 ►
and I couldn’t have eaten anything.
00:48:18 ►
And after three days they came and they said,
00:48:22 ►
get up, oh, they confiscated our clothes. And after three days they came and they said get up or they confiscated our clothes
00:48:25 ►
and after three days
00:48:27 ►
they came and they said get up you have been
00:48:29 ►
returned to the United States
00:48:31 ►
and they escorted us to a
00:48:35 ►
plane and
00:48:38 ►
as Timothy and I were walking up
00:48:40 ►
the steps to the plane
00:48:42 ►
this man
00:48:44 ►
tanned
00:48:46 ►
with a beard
00:48:48 ►
said,
00:48:50 ►
I’m Terence Burke,
00:48:55 ►
dopes the game,
00:48:59 ►
and I’m returning you
00:49:00 ►
to the United States.
00:49:03 ►
And there were three
00:49:04 ►
agents dressed in suits,
00:49:09 ►
and I could not make sense of what was going on.
00:49:13 ►
I could not. I mean, there was no way I could put…
00:49:18 ►
Any bad trip I ever had on any so-called run could not measure up in any
00:49:28 ►
way
00:49:28 ►
to the absolute
00:49:31 ►
non-sense
00:49:33 ►
of what was going on
00:49:37 ►
and the fear with that
00:49:40 ►
was absolutely
00:49:41 ►
who are they, where are they
00:49:43 ►
taking me, why are they? Where are they taking me? Why are they taking me?
00:49:48 ►
So I sat with Timothy and he kept saying,
00:49:51 ►
on the plane and he kept saying,
00:49:52 ►
fear not, it’s all right.
00:49:55 ►
You know, it’s not a wonder that I remember
00:49:58 ►
every single minute of that.
00:50:01 ►
And they say LSD will blow your mind.
00:50:04 ►
Well, again, I’ll say being kidnapped by the United LSD will blow your mind.
00:50:08 ►
Well, again, I’ll say being kidnapped by the United States government will blow your mind in a way that…
00:50:12 ►
And so it was a passenger plane,
00:50:16 ►
and it was going to Tehran first, which was interesting,
00:50:22 ►
but the Shah was still in power,
00:50:21 ►
first, which was interesting,
00:50:24 ►
but the Shah was still in power and
00:50:25 ►
they surrounded us
00:50:28 ►
so we wouldn’t get off the plane at the first
00:50:30 ►
stop. And then
00:50:32 ►
they said the plane was going to Paris.
00:50:36 ►
So
00:50:36 ►
I wrote
00:50:38 ►
little pieces of paper,
00:50:40 ►
little pieces of paper,
00:50:42 ►
we are being kidnapped,
00:50:44 ►
please advise the police at Paris Airport
00:50:49 ►
when we disembark.
00:50:52 ►
And we are asking for proper extradition.
00:50:56 ►
And I dropped these little pieces of paper
00:50:58 ►
on the lap of people on the plane.
00:51:01 ►
I walked down the aisle.
00:51:04 ►
And about 10 minutes later, there was an announcement down the aisle. And about ten minutes later there was an
00:51:06 ►
announcement on the plane and they said, for reasons, for technical reasons, this
00:51:13 ►
plane has been deviated, it will no longer land in Paris, it will land in
00:51:19 ►
Frankfurt and arrangements will be made for people to fly to Paris.
00:51:28 ►
And the level of fear I felt
00:51:29 ►
just increased
00:51:30 ►
because it’s
00:51:33 ►
unbelievable
00:51:34 ►
that
00:51:37 ►
government can have such
00:51:39 ►
power over you.
00:51:45 ►
So the plane landed in Frankfurt.
00:51:48 ►
We were taken to a special lounge,
00:51:53 ►
and about 15 to 20 agents joined the agents
00:51:57 ►
that were already escorting us.
00:52:00 ►
And all the while, Timothy was telling me,
00:52:02 ►
you know, I’m a fugitive from prison,
00:52:06 ►
and it suits them at this moment to do this
00:52:08 ►
and don’t worry it will be alright
00:52:10 ►
I mean
00:52:11 ►
you know
00:52:13 ►
how could it be alright in the Twilight Zone
00:52:16 ►
I would have been better off in a
00:52:18 ►
flying saucer
00:52:19 ►
it would have been less scary to me
00:52:22 ►
you know
00:52:23 ►
and the next day we were flown to London on the heavy escort.
00:52:31 ►
I have an English passport, so in London they asked me if I wanted to stay.
00:52:36 ►
I said, no, I want to go with him.
00:52:38 ►
At that point, it was obvious to me that I was, like I said, on the roller coaster of roller coasters,
00:52:45 ►
and I was going to do whatever it took to get this man out of prison.
00:52:50 ►
There wasn’t a shadow of a doubt in me.
00:52:52 ►
I was going to come up on what was crushing me, whatever I needed to do, 26 years old, 100 pounds, foot 2 I was going to come up against that
00:53:06 ►
thousand
00:53:08 ►
million pound gorilla that
00:53:10 ►
was trying to crush me and my man
00:53:12 ►
you know
00:53:13 ►
and so we got
00:53:16 ►
on a Pan Am flight
00:53:17 ►
Pan Am for the younger ones
00:53:20 ►
doesn’t exist anymore but we got on
00:53:22 ►
to this 747
00:53:23 ►
flight to California. I had never
00:53:27 ►
been to California. I did not understand what a Timothy Leary was. And at this point, I
00:53:36 ►
want to say very clearly, because it’s been 40 years that some people have been saying that I sold him down the river, that I worked for
00:53:46 ►
the CIA.
00:53:49 ►
I was nothing but a woman in love
00:53:52 ►
and who
00:53:54 ►
was used as a pawn
00:53:55 ►
to
00:53:57 ►
return this man to the
00:53:59 ►
United States.
00:54:02 ►
And a very interesting fact
00:54:04 ►
that I want to point out here is that we landed
00:54:10 ►
in the States two days before Nixon’s second inauguration. I want to remind everybody that
00:54:18 ►
Richard Nixon ran on a law and order ticket on the same day as we returned to the United States,
00:54:29 ►
a very, very, very famous gangster,
00:54:33 ►
whose name is Mayor Lansky,
00:54:37 ►
was returned to the United States from Cuba as well,
00:54:41 ►
kidnapped in the same way.
00:54:43 ►
Cuba as well, kidnapped in the same way.
00:54:53 ►
Our return to the United States made the front pages of every newspaper in the world.
00:55:00 ►
They used me as a pawn because it was a great image.
00:55:02 ►
You see that image in the book.
00:55:08 ►
Timothy Leary and his paramour being returned to the United States.
00:55:14 ►
The plumbers, the Watergate plumbers, Gordon and Vivian, his gang,
00:55:23 ►
were being charged that same week for the break-in at the Democratic convention offices. And they were being charged the same week
00:55:28 ►
and I know that this was engineered
00:55:31 ►
to hijack the front pages of the newspapers
00:55:34 ►
so that the Gordon Lee Diplomas
00:55:37 ►
would not make the front page.
00:55:40 ►
And I know that because later on
00:55:43 ►
in Timothy’s lawyer’s office
00:55:45 ►
I saw a memo
00:55:47 ►
from Haldeman and Ehrlichman
00:55:51 ►
to their aides
00:55:55 ►
saying find out the whereabouts of Timothy Leary
00:55:58 ►
and bring him back by all means
00:56:01 ►
by any means
00:56:02 ►
so
00:56:04 ►
Timothy Leary might have justifiably been
00:56:09 ►
brought back to the United States,
00:56:12 ►
but I was used as a pawn.
00:56:17 ►
And then the rumor was circulated
00:56:21 ►
that I had organized the kidnapping in Afghanistan.
00:56:30 ►
So that it became a total fog.
00:56:34 ►
What happened, the extraordinary rendition,
00:56:38 ►
was completely hidden by a fog of disinformation.
00:56:44 ►
I’m going to turn it back
00:56:46 ►
to you, Stuart.
00:56:47 ►
Well, it all sounds so 60s
00:56:49 ►
with all this
00:56:51 ►
so similar to so many of the
00:56:53 ►
assassinations, and it really
00:56:55 ►
strikes a chord to me about
00:56:57 ►
what is
00:56:59 ►
viable in the 60s in our lives
00:57:01 ►
today, and here we just last
00:57:03 ►
week or the week before was passed
00:57:06 ►
the new law that allows
00:57:07 ►
President Obama
00:57:09 ►
to arrest any American citizen
00:57:11 ►
at any time with just the
00:57:14 ►
suspicion that they’re a terrorist
00:57:15 ►
and they can rendition them to any jail
00:57:18 ►
anywhere in the world they want. Now it’s
00:57:20 ►
legal, Joanna, and
00:57:21 ►
what the 60s now
00:57:23 ►
and then is like, it’s it was this it’s still
00:57:26 ►
the same there’s so many similarities politically and socially between the 60s and now and I think
00:57:33 ►
that it’s really amazing that in the book that you contrast the the persona of Tim Larry and his
00:57:41 ►
the social phenomena that he was the crest of the wave that he was riding,
00:57:45 ►
that he was often kind of our champion surfboard master
00:57:49 ►
and was a very adequate spokesman for this wave, this movement,
00:57:57 ►
this liberation wave that came in the 60s and unfortunately didn’t come to fullness,
00:58:04 ►
but it’s still happening as as we’ve mentioned, up until today.
00:58:09 ►
And before we go on into the sordid history of the prisons
00:58:13 ►
and the Gulag USA,
00:58:17 ►
I’d just kind of like to ask a couple of things.
00:58:21 ►
Did you do mushrooms?
00:58:24 ►
Did you do peyote, did you do other psychedelics
00:58:27 ►
I’m sure it was
00:58:28 ►
primarily LSD at the time but
00:58:30 ►
did you ever have the opportunity
00:58:32 ►
to do other psychedelics
00:58:34 ►
with Timothy Larry
00:58:36 ►
at that time
00:58:37 ►
indeed
00:58:40 ►
he and I
00:58:42 ►
smoked a lot of
00:58:44 ►
dope and for 49 days, this is how long I knew him before we landed in LAX.
00:58:55 ►
We were landed in LAX. We did LSD every day for 49 days.
00:59:03 ►
That’s why I called the book Tripping the
00:59:05 ►
Bardo with Timothy Leary.
00:59:08 ►
No, I didn’t
00:59:09 ►
do other
00:59:11 ►
substances with him.
00:59:14 ►
But during the three and a half
00:59:16 ►
years he was in prison,
00:59:18 ►
I was introduced to peyote
00:59:19 ►
and I was introduced to
00:59:21 ►
mushrooms.
00:59:23 ►
And
00:59:23 ►
I would consider these substances great teachers.
00:59:34 ►
And in my case, at the time,
00:59:39 ►
they were mostly teachers that deprogrammed me slowly
00:59:48 ►
from the arrogance that I had been taught.
00:59:52 ►
So they were very humbling teachers.
00:59:56 ►
And for that, I’m immensely grateful.
01:00:01 ►
Another interest that I had that I didn’t really understand
01:00:05 ►
and maybe you could help clarify for me
01:00:07 ►
I want to get
01:00:09 ►
into some of the things that
01:00:11 ►
Alan Genberg said when he bathed
01:00:13 ►
Matthew and we’ll specifically talk
01:00:15 ►
a little bit more about that but
01:00:17 ►
why did Timothy Leary
01:00:19 ►
abandon
01:00:21 ►
his psychology
01:00:23 ►
his role as a psychologist,
01:00:25 ►
because at one point, as you mentioned earlier,
01:00:27 ►
he was an eminent psychologist,
01:00:29 ►
and he seemed to sort of abandon psychology,
01:00:32 ►
and that never was clear to me what that was about.
01:00:36 ►
Could you speak a little bit about that?
01:00:38 ►
I think that, and I was not with Timothy at the time,
01:01:11 ►
as he became acquainted with LSD, as he became acquainted with suicide, he realized that what society lacked most of all, and especially after the two world wars, was a feeling and awareness of pleasure, that as long as we did not experience pleasure, as long as it was all suffering, we would continue to do horrifying things.
01:01:26 ►
So he became much more interested in speaking to people about feeling ecstasy
01:01:34 ►
than actually studying their own history.
01:01:41 ►
Now, let’s not forget that Timothy Leary
01:01:44 ►
is one of the inventors of group therapy.
01:01:50 ►
Let’s not forget that Timothy Leary’s test of personality was used on him when he was
01:01:58 ►
incarcerated and was used on prisoners all over the country for a very, very long time.
01:02:06 ►
His psychological testing is still used in many places.
01:02:10 ►
But I think that he wanted to do something really useful for humanity
01:02:16 ►
and that he realized that our greatest problem was our lack of pleasure,
01:02:26 ►
our lack of understanding of how beautiful and exquisite our world can be.
01:02:34 ►
So that’s why he turned his emphasis.
01:02:37 ►
And also by studying Eastern religions, Buddhism.
01:02:44 ►
Remember, it was the beginning of Buddhism.
01:02:47 ►
Some of these people,
01:02:49 ►
including Timothy, went to India
01:02:51 ►
and had very profound revelations.
01:02:57 ►
Timothy used to say,
01:02:59 ►
jump swiftly, swiftly from rock to rock
01:03:04 ►
before it sinks with courage and a smile.
01:03:09 ►
So if that’s not the opposite of psychology,
01:03:15 ►
go ahead, smile.
01:03:19 ►
Beautiful, Joanna, thank you.
01:03:22 ►
Now back to an issue that I just want to clear up once and for all here
01:03:27 ►
about some of the things Alan Ginsberg said
01:03:30 ►
and kind of your dilemma that actually did occur,
01:03:34 ►
your sort of Sophie’s Choice, this place where you were boxed in with,
01:03:38 ►
where the man that you loved was incarcerated
01:03:40 ►
and they were torturing and messing with your mind
01:03:43 ►
in despicable, just disgusting
01:03:46 ►
ways, and your bodies.
01:03:49 ►
And, you know,
01:03:50 ►
what was this horrible
01:03:51 ►
ordeal that the prison,
01:03:54 ►
that the Gulag USA that you
01:03:56 ►
experienced, that
01:03:58 ►
began after you returned to L.A.?
01:04:01 ►
And I want to
01:04:04 ►
specify that
01:04:05 ►
I’m still taking a risk here
01:04:09 ►
and
01:04:10 ►
but
01:04:13 ►
if I wanted to be
01:04:19 ►
absolutely precise I would say
01:04:21 ►
that my
01:04:24 ►
life today is dedicated to love because it suits me.
01:04:35 ►
It’s the most pleasurable feeling that I can share with people.
01:04:41 ►
And to go back to this notion of pleasure, I want to feel pleasure. You
01:04:46 ►
know, can’t buy me love, but can create it, produce it, participate in it with every person
01:04:54 ►
every day if possible. And then the second thing that’s most important for me in my life is to tell this story. I mean, I am totally passionate
01:05:06 ►
and dedicated to telling this story.
01:05:12 ►
Because, for one,
01:05:15 ►
I want people to know what I went through
01:05:18 ►
and how it carved me,
01:05:22 ►
how it chiseled me,
01:05:24 ►
how fortunate I am that it chiseled me into who I am today.
01:05:30 ►
I’m glad to live with myself.
01:05:33 ►
But also in terms of the fact that I don’t think it’s well known enough
01:05:37 ►
what Timothy Leary went through for being called by the government an ideological trafficker. It wasn’t the dope,
01:05:50 ►
and I’m still very emotional about this, it wasn’t the dope, it wasn’t the parties,
01:05:58 ►
it wasn’t… What it was was that Timothy Leary put out the message that we have the right to change our consciousness
01:06:07 ►
and that nobody has the right to mess with us
01:06:11 ►
if we want to change our consciousness.
01:06:16 ►
And I truly believe that up till that time,
01:06:20 ►
only mystics and eastern teachers
01:06:26 ►
and yogis and so on
01:06:28 ►
who changed their consciousness
01:06:30 ►
saints, whatever you want to call them
01:06:33 ►
but now because
01:06:36 ►
he had the courage to come forward
01:06:38 ►
and say
01:06:39 ►
human beings have the right
01:06:42 ►
to change their consciousness
01:06:44 ►
just like a lot of animals chew on leaves and certain things that change their consciousness,
01:06:52 ►
human animals and human beings have the right to change their consciousness.
01:06:58 ►
And it is unconscionable and absolutely wrong for any government or any person
01:07:07 ►
to stand in the way of someone choosing to change their consciousness.
01:07:16 ►
He had the courage to say that.
01:07:19 ►
And just like many people I know,
01:07:22 ►
I’m not the person I was programmed to be
01:07:26 ►
and that’s astonishing
01:07:30 ►
and it’s not told enough
01:07:33 ►
I mean we gather in small groups
01:07:35 ►
and we love each other
01:07:36 ►
and we appreciate the fact
01:07:38 ►
that our awareness
01:07:41 ►
has expanded from the place that we were programmed to be.
01:07:49 ►
But it’s not spoken about enough, and it will never be spoken about enough,
01:07:56 ►
that our hearts and minds have expanded tremendously since the 60s. So anyway, I was saying I want to tell this story
01:08:09 ►
and I want to go back to the political situation
01:08:12 ►
and thank you for remembering the detail about Sophie’s Choice.
01:08:17 ►
And I want to remind people that Sophie’s Choice was a film
01:08:20 ►
in which the woman played by Meryl Streep comes up to the Nazis
01:08:26 ►
and she has her daughter and her son with her as she’s taken into the camp.
01:08:33 ►
And this torturer says to her,
01:08:38 ►
you must choose between your daughter and your son,
01:08:42 ►
the seven-year-old and the eight-year-old.
01:08:45 ►
And she agonizes and she agonizes
01:08:49 ►
and she chooses the boy.
01:08:55 ►
And we are put into situations many times
01:09:01 ►
that are inhuman choices.
01:09:06 ►
Many, many of us.
01:09:09 ►
And what decision will you make
01:09:11 ►
when you are put in front of an inhuman choice?
01:09:17 ►
Are you going to say,
01:09:19 ►
I can’t choose, I’m going to kill myself?
01:09:22 ►
Or are you going to go into a terrible schizophrenic bind that
01:09:28 ►
will make you make a choice that seems insane to everybody else? So this is what I experienced
01:09:38 ►
when the paradox continued, let’s put it that way, the extreme madness, the paradox continued,
01:09:49 ►
I mean, one is brought up to think that there is some justice in the world.
01:09:56 ►
Somehow, I mean, I’m sure even the cat over there thinks there is some justice.
01:10:02 ►
thinks there is some justice.
01:10:12 ►
But when I experienced the absolute madness of injustice,
01:10:19 ►
of taking this Timothy Lear that I’d experienced as a kind, loving man who had not killed anybody or hurt anybody
01:10:23 ►
but had been convicted for smoking dope,
01:10:29 ►
when I saw him being taken into the bowels of Folsom Prison,
01:10:34 ►
into the most inhuman solitary confinement conditions,
01:10:44 ►
no lights
01:10:45 ►
or lights all the time
01:10:47 ►
stuck in the cell
01:10:50 ►
next to Charles Manson
01:10:52 ►
who was threatening him
01:10:54 ►
no light of day
01:10:57 ►
they call it the fourth tier below
01:10:59 ►
no light of day
01:11:01 ►
and I got to
01:11:03 ►
go to the visiting room
01:11:05 ►
and I witnessed that
01:11:06 ►
and I wasn’t like the other wives
01:11:09 ►
I wasn’t let through into the visiting room
01:11:13 ►
I was stripped
01:11:14 ►
I was cavity searched
01:11:16 ►
I was mocked
01:11:18 ►
I was mocked for my gender
01:11:20 ►
I was mocked for my accent
01:11:22 ►
I was mocked for being Timothy Leary’s girlfriend or common-law
01:11:27 ►
wife, wife, as he called me. I was searched by men, so in other words, I was sexually
01:11:35 ►
molested and abused. When I witnessed what they were doing to him and to me,
01:11:44 ►
When I witnessed what they were doing to him and to me,
01:11:47 ►
it never crossed my mind to abandon him. I mean, I had sex with other people because it was the 60s,
01:11:56 ►
and again, it was a relief for me to share a desire with someone else
01:12:08 ►
and the relaxation of sex.
01:12:13 ►
But it never crossed my mind to abandon him.
01:12:17 ►
All I thought about day and night and day and night and day and night
01:12:20 ►
is how will I get this man out of prison, this gentleman, this gentleman, out of the claws,
01:12:31 ►
out of the terrible claws.
01:12:33 ►
I mean, I was followed.
01:12:35 ►
I was stopped.
01:12:36 ►
I was made to walk the line a million times.
01:12:43 ►
My phones were tapped.
01:12:56 ►
You know, why? times. My phones were tapped. Why? Why? Because we were dangerous. We were very, very dangerous.
01:13:11 ►
But I want to say that so were you. You see, every one of us was incredibly dangerous. And the seeds of this dangerousness are blossoming today. They’re blossoming. Look at the Occupy movement. Look at all the
01:13:20 ►
beautiful people who live in their communities and communities. Look at how many people, whether
01:13:25 ►
they are now individuals
01:13:28 ►
in their own little piece of property
01:13:30 ►
growing food
01:13:31 ►
and not accepting
01:13:34 ►
the tainted
01:13:36 ►
genetic food of the big
01:13:38 ►
corporations. When you yourself
01:13:40 ►
share the food that you grow with me.
01:13:42 ►
I mean, that’s dangerous.
01:13:45 ►
So we were dangerous, and we were tortured for being dangerous.
01:13:52 ►
And I was going to find a way to unlock that door.
01:13:56 ►
I was drunk.
01:13:58 ►
I was drug addict.
01:14:01 ►
But this little tiny little person that I was
01:14:05 ►
was going to find a way to force that door open.
01:14:07 ►
He had legally 106 years over his head
01:14:14 ►
between a federal sentence, the escape sentence,
01:14:19 ►
a sentence in California,
01:14:21 ►
and once the American prison
01:14:25 ►
system has you in
01:14:28 ►
their clutches,
01:14:30 ►
and they don’t even, I mean, look at
01:14:32 ►
Julian Assange.
01:14:34 ►
They only have a bracelet
01:14:36 ►
around his leg,
01:14:38 ►
and it’s in England,
01:14:41 ►
but this,
01:14:41 ►
what is it? It’s been over a year
01:14:43 ►
that this guy can go nowhere
01:14:45 ►
nowhere
01:14:46 ►
once the system has you
01:14:49 ►
in their clutches
01:14:51 ►
there are no
01:14:53 ►
laws, so in other words
01:14:55 ►
when you cross in
01:14:56 ►
to be captured by the law
01:14:59 ►
you are outside the law
01:15:01 ►
and I’ve never
01:15:03 ►
said this, but this is how it is.
01:15:05 ►
And this is how frightening it is.
01:15:08 ►
So, to answer
01:15:10 ►
your question,
01:15:12 ►
the way I look at it,
01:15:18 ►
Timothy Leary was
01:15:19 ►
a philosopher.
01:15:21 ►
Or at least the way
01:15:23 ►
I’d known him. And I visited him almost every single
01:15:29 ►
day. They kept moving him from one prison to the next because they didn’t want him
01:15:36 ►
to have an influence in the prison. To me, Timothy Leary was a philosopher, similar to Socrates and others.
01:15:50 ►
And what I couldn’t understand is why couldn’t he explain to the government that he was not a dope dealer, but that he was a philosopher, and that philosophers are important in the community,
01:16:08 ►
in a community that we need to have philosophers.
01:16:14 ►
But, of course, I didn’t understand that that was even more dangerous,
01:16:18 ►
that him being a philosopher was even more dangerous to them
01:16:23 ►
than whether he was a dog dealer or
01:16:26 ►
whether he had influenced the dog dealer in California for the last hundred years.
01:16:31 ►
He was much more dangerous than he was a philosopher. But it was suggested to him that if he turned on his friends in the counterculture,
01:16:52 ►
in other words, if he cooperated with state and federal authorities,
01:16:58 ►
he might be able to get out of prison.
01:17:02 ►
Get out of prison.
01:17:04 ►
Get out of this
01:17:05 ►
unbelievable nightmare.
01:17:08 ►
That’s why I talked about Sophie’s
01:17:10 ►
choice.
01:17:11 ►
The choice that was offered
01:17:14 ►
was an inhuman choice.
01:17:17 ►
The man had been in
01:17:18 ►
prison for two and a half years in the
01:17:20 ►
most horrendous
01:17:21 ►
conditions. Now,
01:17:24 ►
if you ask me, and for these archives,
01:17:28 ►
I will say to you that I also think that
01:17:30 ►
they tampered with his mind.
01:17:35 ►
Whether it was chemical lobotomy,
01:17:38 ►
or any other kind, or simply torture,
01:17:43 ►
or simply torture,
01:17:50 ►
or simply the personality that he used to have,
01:17:54 ►
the spirituality that he used to have, scared to death out of him.
01:18:02 ►
I don’t know the details, but I know that I saw this man changing enormously,
01:18:05 ►
and I know that when he got out he wasn’t the person he did not have
01:18:07 ►
this spiritual loving atmosphere
01:18:12 ►
that I recognized when I met him
01:18:14 ►
we know now
01:18:16 ►
that they can’t get to you
01:18:17 ►
they can’t get to you
01:18:19 ►
and there were times where he told me
01:18:21 ►
I’m being drugged, I’m being drugged, I’m being drugged
01:18:24 ►
and his eyes were so red and he didn’t mean the drugs And there were times where he told me, I’m being drugged, I’m being drugged, I’m being drugged.
01:18:31 ►
And his eyes were so red, and he didn’t mean the drugs that are in all prisons,
01:18:35 ►
that you can probably get easier than even outside.
01:18:38 ►
But he would tell me, I’m being drugged. And he was sluggish, and red-eyed, and he was in bad shape.
01:18:43 ►
and red-eyed and he was in bad shape.
01:18:49 ►
So this choice was offered to him and after two and a half years
01:18:53 ►
he asked me to send a telegram to the FBI
01:18:58 ►
and tell them that he was willing to cooperate.
01:19:03 ►
Once again, I had no idea what that meant.
01:19:09 ►
None.
01:19:10 ►
All I saw in my tunnel vision was that
01:19:13 ►
maybe my man will get out,
01:19:17 ►
maybe they will understand that he’s not who they think he is.
01:19:23 ►
That was my insanity, my innocence,
01:19:25 ►
my complete lack of political savvy.
01:19:30 ►
I had no idea what that entailed.
01:19:34 ►
But by then he was 58 years old
01:19:38 ►
and he had lived a lifetime of being a political
01:19:42 ►
and a counterculture figure
01:19:45 ►
and he probably knew
01:19:47 ►
he knew
01:19:48 ►
but he was broken
01:19:50 ►
that’s my opinion
01:19:52 ►
so
01:19:55 ►
he was
01:19:57 ►
airlifted out of the prison in a
01:19:59 ►
helicopter
01:20:00 ►
they landed him on a bank
01:20:03 ►
building in LA
01:20:04 ►
they mean the federal marshals they landed him on a bank building in LA they
01:20:07 ►
mean the federal marshals
01:20:09 ►
the FBI, the DEA
01:20:11 ►
the
01:20:12 ►
the
01:20:14 ►
United States
01:20:17 ►
Attorney, the California States
01:20:19 ►
Attorney
01:20:19 ►
were all in this big conference
01:20:23 ►
room
01:20:23 ►
they took me there.
01:20:26 ►
And from that day on, until he got out,
01:20:31 ►
they never let me be without being at my door
01:20:35 ►
or surrounding me wherever I went.
01:20:39 ►
So they took me hostage,
01:20:42 ►
and they took him out of prison,
01:20:44 ►
and they took him to this conference room,
01:20:47 ►
and they asked him what he could give them.
01:20:52 ►
Basically, what he told them that he could give them was me.
01:20:58 ►
You will dress up this little girl sexy.
01:21:03 ►
You will plant microphones on her
01:21:05 ►
and you
01:21:08 ►
will send her up
01:21:09 ►
send her out to the
01:21:11 ►
guided missile and
01:21:13 ►
we will have her bust people
01:21:16 ►
counterculture lawyers
01:21:18 ►
dope dealers
01:21:19 ►
and every time she
01:21:23 ►
does one of these matahari feats,
01:21:26 ►
I’ll get this time in prison.
01:21:32 ►
So he gave me to the lions,
01:21:39 ►
threw me to the lions,
01:21:42 ►
and there starts an episode that I regret.
01:21:49 ►
I regret deeply.
01:21:53 ►
But I also have quite great compassion for myself.
01:22:00 ►
I know what it is to be insane.
01:22:03 ►
I was insane.
01:22:05 ►
I had become insane. I was insane. I had become insane.
01:22:07 ►
I was an insane alcoholic.
01:22:10 ►
And I played that role as well as I could.
01:22:14 ►
Because by then, I had nothing left.
01:22:17 ►
The counterculture people had never accepted me.
01:22:21 ►
For them, I was the imposter.
01:22:23 ►
Rosemary Leary was the wife. I was the European
01:22:28 ►
imposter. They had never really, except for Ken Kesey, given me any shelter or help. My
01:22:38 ►
family had abandoned me. The society I came from had abandoned me. I had nothing but this man.
01:22:46 ►
I could not reach, physically could not reach him.
01:22:50 ►
I had nothing but that.
01:22:52 ►
So I played not only reference to what was going on with Mata Hari,
01:22:58 ►
I only had that point of reference.
01:23:02 ►
I didn’t know what the hell was going on.
01:23:07 ►
I had to stand by your man and serve your man.
01:23:11 ►
And also, I’m sure a great part of arrogance that, you know, I’m going to do this thing.
01:23:17 ►
I’m going to do it.
01:23:20 ►
And, you know, the only tunnel I could see was get Timothy Leary out of prison.
01:23:28 ►
So, yeah.
01:23:31 ►
Yeah, whatever it is, I did it.
01:23:34 ►
I did it.
01:23:38 ►
But I did it because I had no choice.
01:23:42 ►
None whatsoever.
01:23:43 ►
I was perhaps even more in prison than he was
01:23:48 ►
because I was in the prison of
01:23:51 ►
of my own
01:23:53 ►
unknowledge
01:23:55 ►
unknowing
01:23:57 ►
Wow
01:24:01 ►
well Joanna I’d really
01:24:03 ►
kind of like to ask you to fast forward with me right now and and to tell me
01:24:10 ►
and refer back to anything you want but i’d really like to know who you are today and how
01:24:18 ►
you’ve come to be this even the most amazing woman one of the most amazing women I know.
01:24:27 ►
And how you survived this,
01:24:30 ►
how you took this in to make yourself stronger and more open and more vulnerable at the same time.
01:24:38 ►
Thank you for asking this question.
01:24:41 ►
I want to say,
01:24:44 ►
Timothy Leary got out of prison
01:24:47 ►
in April 1976, I think.
01:24:56 ►
I’ve been seven.
01:24:59 ►
I have a good memory.
01:25:02 ►
He got out of prison and we were only together for about five months after that.
01:25:14 ►
And he chose to tell people that I made him do it and his allies from the past.
01:25:27 ►
And like this woman asked me the other night,
01:25:29 ►
how did he succeed in doing that?
01:25:33 ►
And that’s something I want to stress very strongly here,
01:25:38 ►
and that is that a lot of time, myth, myth, myth
01:25:47 ►
is stronger than reality
01:25:49 ►
the mythological story endures
01:25:53 ►
the personal story
01:25:56 ►
doesn’t really make it
01:25:59 ►
and some people are myths
01:26:02 ►
in their own lifetime
01:26:04 ►
and Timothy Leary is one of these people and the people around him And some people are myths in their own lifetime.
01:26:06 ►
And Timothy Leary is one of these people.
01:26:13 ►
And the people around him preferred to keep the mythology alive and to ignore a young woman with her whole life ahead of them.
01:26:23 ►
They preferred to keep the mythology alive
01:26:26 ►
than to know what really, really happened.
01:26:32 ►
I think that what really happened is extremely poignant
01:26:37 ►
and in a sense extremely beautiful and important.
01:26:44 ►
I mean, do you know, do we know how many people
01:26:49 ►
in families were turned against each other?
01:26:53 ►
The brother arrested, the other brother made,
01:26:57 ►
asked to testify against his friend or his brother, his family.
01:27:04 ►
This bargain happens all the time.
01:27:09 ►
And families are broken, friendships broken,
01:27:12 ►
because the prison system is so horrid and horrible.
01:27:16 ►
And the prison convictions for drugs are so horrible
01:27:21 ►
that many people break.
01:27:25 ►
Many people break. How could you not be broken
01:27:28 ►
by a machine
01:27:29 ►
that cruel, and I’m here to tell you
01:27:32 ►
that cruel, that
01:27:34 ►
dehumanizing
01:27:35 ►
so in a sense
01:27:37 ►
I want people to know Timothy’s
01:27:39 ►
story because I want
01:27:41 ►
people to know that there are people
01:27:44 ►
rotting in prison today and those there are people rotting in prison today
01:27:46 ►
and those who are
01:27:48 ►
not rotting in prison because they
01:27:49 ►
turned against their allies
01:27:51 ►
and who don’t have a life
01:27:53 ►
because they’re not mythological figures
01:27:56 ►
they don’t have a life, they don’t have
01:27:58 ►
a family, they don’t have friends
01:27:59 ►
they’re in fear of their life constantly
01:28:01 ►
because so
01:28:03 ►
they could escape that crushing
01:28:05 ►
machine of justice.
01:28:09 ►
They have done
01:28:10 ►
what Timothy Leary did.
01:28:12 ►
It’s
01:28:12 ►
not right. It’s terrible.
01:28:17 ►
so anyway,
01:28:20 ►
Timothy Leary managed to put his
01:28:22 ►
his mythological
01:28:26 ►
life back together
01:28:27 ►
to tell you the truth
01:28:31 ►
I mean I’ve said enough about how grateful
01:28:33 ►
I am to Timothy Leary for
01:28:35 ►
coming forth
01:28:37 ►
and a passion that he told
01:28:40 ►
about why
01:28:41 ►
I admire him and thank him
01:28:44 ►
you’re listening to the psychedelic salon about why I admire him and thank him.
01:28:49 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:28:53 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:28:59 ►
Well, I hope that now you have a little better idea of some of the events surrounding the capture and imprisonment of Dr. Leary,
01:29:04 ►
who actually may be the only person of the 20th century to have fully lived a life that Joseph Campbell would call a hero’s journey.
01:29:13 ►
But as you’ve heard, even our heroes have feet of clay.
01:29:18 ►
Thinking back to the interview with Joanna that we just heard,
01:29:25 ►
with Joanna that we just heard, do you remember where she was describing her arrival in the United States, which coincided with a big demonstration in Washington, D.C.? And she
01:29:31 ►
said that for the first time, she felt that she was part of a generation on the move to
01:29:37 ►
really change everything. Well, when I heard her say that, and since I am more or less also a part of that generation,
01:29:46 ►
even though I’m a few years older, my first cynical reaction was,
01:29:51 ►
yeah, and so then how did we blow it, because things are even worse now than they were back then.
01:29:57 ►
But after giving that thought a little time to roam around and gather up a few other thoughts,
01:30:03 ►
I want to say that while I still feel that we haven’t even come close
01:30:07 ►
to changing the world like we thought we could,
01:30:10 ►
nonetheless, the young people of the 60s and their protests
01:30:14 ►
actually did force some considerable changes to be made.
01:30:19 ►
You know, unless you grew up in the 1940s and 1950s,
01:30:22 ►
it’s very hard to imagine how screwed down life was back
01:30:26 ►
then when Joanna first came to the United States. Now, I’m talking about pre-Elvis, pre-Beatles,
01:30:33 ►
pre-rock and roll America. And while today I see us living in a militarized, locked down,
01:30:39 ►
fascist nation, the difference back then was that the screwheads in charge didn’t have to resort to
01:30:45 ►
highly militarized police forces and surveillance cameras everywhere. Back then, people self-policed
01:30:51 ►
and generally kept their emotions and opinions to themselves. You know, we just silently kept
01:30:57 ►
ourselves in our own mental prisons. So, what things have changed for the better since then?
01:31:03 ►
So, what things have changed for the better since then?
01:31:10 ►
Well, the young people who came of age during the 60s helped to bring about an end to the military draft,
01:31:15 ►
which is a really big deal that’s almost impossible to explain today.
01:31:21 ►
You know, my entire life was shaped by that horrible threat hanging over my head as I grew up.
01:31:25 ►
As a child, even grade school, high school,
01:31:27 ►
we thought about the draft, talked about the draft.
01:31:32 ►
You just have no idea how much damage the draft did to young people back then,
01:31:33 ►
and myself included.
01:31:38 ►
Besides ending the draft, forced segregation was brought out into the open and is now gradually sliding away,
01:31:41 ►
although there’s still far too much discrimination taking place.
01:31:46 ►
At least it’s no longer as well protected by the law.
01:31:49 ►
Then there’s the fact that the student demonstrations in the 60s
01:31:52 ►
were also largely responsible for ending the American war in Vietnam.
01:31:57 ►
And need I point out that the American war on Afghanistan
01:32:01 ►
has now lasted longer than our war on Vietnam.
01:32:04 ►
So those are a few of the
01:32:06 ►
big things that were accomplished. But to me, the biggest accomplishments of the generation
01:32:12 ►
of young people Joanna spoke about is what we helped to invent. Two things that really did
01:32:18 ►
change everything. And I mean everything. I’m sure that you already know what I’m talking about.
01:32:26 ►
mean everything. I’m sure that you already know what I’m talking about. Rock and roll and the internet. Granted, it was the next generation of tech heads who did the heavy lifting and building
01:32:31 ►
the net, but it was the 60s generation who approved the budgets and bought into the ideas that have
01:32:37 ►
led to the highly interconnected world that we live in today. And as for what rock and roll did
01:32:43 ►
for the world, well, I’ll leave those thoughts to you, but
01:32:46 ►
from where I sit, that was actually the beginning of a huge change in global consciousness.
01:32:53 ►
So that now ends my little rant, mainly to myself, of course, that yes, we did set out to change
01:33:00 ►
things. And while we failed miserably on the political front,
01:33:10 ►
on the social and cultural side of things, well, the world since the 1950s has changed.
01:33:13 ►
Changed utterly, as the poets say.
01:33:18 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
00:00:00 ►
Be well, my friends.