President
Nixon called him the most dangerous man in America,
while Terence McKenna believed he made more people happy than anyone
else in history.
Few People have divided opinion as strongly as Dr. Timothy Leary.
Leary, a brilliant behavioral psychologist, persuaded millions to
tune in, turn on, and drop out.
His influence was so wide-ranging that he had enormous impact on shaping
the post-modern 21st century world.
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Harvard
Professor
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Timothy
with Richard Alpert (Ram Dass)
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Portrait
of a Boy
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Timothy Francis Leary, Ph.D.
October 22, 1920 – Forever
Timothy Leary was an American writer, psychologist, computer software
designer, and advocate of psychedelic drug research and use. As a
1960s counterculture icon, he is most famous as a proponent of the
therapeutic and spiritual benefits of LSD. During
the 1960s, he coined and popularized the catch phrase
"Turn on, Tune in, Drop out."
Springfield, Massachusetts, an only child and the son of an Irish
American dentist who abandoned the family when Timothy was 13. Leary
attended three different colleges and was disciplined in each. He
studied for two years at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester,
Massachusetts and was known for cutting classes, drinking, and chasing
girls. He transferred to West Point to please his mother but was forced
to resign after an incident involving smuggling liquor during a school
field exercise. An extended period of a schoolwide "silent treatment"
followed.
He earned a bachelor's degree in psychology at the University of Alabama
in 1943. An obituary of Leary in The New York Times said he was a
"discipline problem" there as well and "finally earned
his bachelor's degree in the Army during World War II."
His education also included a master's degree at Washington State
University in 1946, and a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of
California, Berkeley in 1950. During World War II, Leary served in
the U.S. Army, as a sergeant in the Medical Corps. He went on to become
an assistant professor at Berkeley (1950-1955), director of psychiatric
research at the Kaiser Foundation (1955-1958), and a lecturer in psychology
at Harvard University (1959-1963).
In 1955, his first wife, Marianne, committed suicide,
leaving him a single father with a son and daughter.
Leary later described these years disparagingly,
writing that he had been:
"I was an anonymous institutional
employee who drove to work each morning in a long line of commuter
cars and drove home each night and drank martinis ... like several
million middle-class, liberal, intellectual robots... "
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Psychedelic
Coloring Book
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Albert
Hoffman and Tim Leray
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Politics
of Ecstasy
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Psychedelic Experiments and
Experiences
On May 13, 1957, Life Magazine published an article
by R. Gordon Wasson that documented (and popularized) the use of entheogens
in the religious ceremony of the indigenous Mazatec people of Mexico.
Anthony Russo, a colleague of Leary's, had recently taken the psychedelic
(entheogen), Psilocybe mexicana during a trip to Mexico, and shared
the experience with Leary.
In the summer of 1960, Leary traveled to Mexico with Russo and after
drinking several shots of Tequila tried psilocybin mushrooms for the
first time, an experience that drastically altered the course of his
life. (Ram
Dass Fierce Grace, 2001, Zeitgeist Video). In 1965 Leary commented
that he "...learned more about...(his)brain and its possibilities....(and)
more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms
than...(he)had in the preceding fifteen years of studying doing research
in psychology..." (Ram Dass Fierce Grace, 2001, Zeitgeist Video).
Upon his return to Harvard that fall, Leary and his associates, notably
Richard Alpert (later known as Ram
Dass), began a research program known as the Harvard Psilocybin
Project. The goal was to analyze the effects of psilocybin on human
subjects using a synthesized version of the drug--one of two active
compounds in the so-called Mexican mushroom--that was produced according
to a recipe concocted by Albert
Hoffman, a research chemist at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals.
The experiment later involved giving LSD to graduate students.
Leary argued that LSD, used with the right dosage, set and setting,
and with the guidance of professionals, could alter behavior in unprecedented
and beneficial ways. His experiments produced no murders, suicides,
psychoses, and no bad trips. The goals of Leary's research included
finding better ways to treat alcoholism and to reform convicted criminals.
Many of Leary's research participants reported profound mystical and
spiritual experiences,
which they claim permanently altered their lives in a very positive
manner.
"It wasn't long before any pretense to
scientific detachment fell away and controlled experiments were chucked
in favor of missionary zeal and contempt for all mundane exigencies.
Chaotic tripping parties ensued, involving students, under "spiritual"
or "philosophical" pretexts."
-Tim Leary-
Harvard
Psilocybin Project
The Albert Hofmann
Foundation
Dr. Albert Hofmann, on the occasion of celebrating
the 50th anniversary of his famous bicycle ride:
"You, my dear friends, and millions
all over the world who now commemorate the 50th birthday of ergot's
child, we all testify gratefully that we got valuable help on the
way to what Aldous Huxley said is the end and the ultimate purpose
of human life--enlightenment, beatific vision, love. I think all these
joyful testimonies of invaluable help by LSD should be enough to convince
the health authorities, finally, of the nonsense of the prohibition
of LSD and of similar psychedelics."
Dr. Albert Hofmann celebrated his 100th birthday on
January 11th, 2006!
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A.
Ginsberg/Tim Leary/ L. Ferlinghetti-1963
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Still
at Harvard?
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Millbrook
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In 1963, Leary and Alpert were
dismissed from Harvard after college authorities confirmed that undergraduates
had shared in the researchers' stash. According to another account,
Leary was fired for not showing up to his classes while Alpert was
fired for giving psilocybin to an undergraduate in an off campus apartment.
Their colleagues were uneasy about the nature of their research, and
some parents complained to the university administration about the
distribution of hallucinogens to their students. To further complicate
matters their research attracted a great deal of public attention.
As a result, many people wanted to participate in the experiments
but were unable to do so because of the high demand. In order to satisfy
the curiosity of those who were turned away a black market for psychedelics
formed near the Harvard University Campus. Sensing the growing opposition
to their research Leary and Alpert founded the International
Foundation for Internal Freedom in 1962 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Leary's activities attracted siblings Peggy, Billy and Tommy Hitchcock,
heirs to the Mellon fortune, who in 1963 helped Leary and his associates
acquire the use of a rambling mansion on an estate near Poughkeepsie,
New York in a town called Millbrook and continued their experiments.
Leary later wrote:
"We saw ourselves as anthropologists from the twenty-first century
inhabiting a time module set somewhere in the dark ages of the 1960s.
On this space colony we were attempting to create a new paganism and
a new dedication to life as art."
Later the Millbrook estate was described as "the headquarters
of Leary and gang for the better part of five years, a period filled
with endless parties, epiphanies and breakdowns, emotional dramas
of all sizes, and numerous raids and arrests, many of them on flimsy
charges concocted by the local assistant district attorney, G.
Gordon Liddy."
It was in Millbrook, that Leary's son and daughter, "Susan and
Jack, who had been dragged through so much, beginning with their mother's
death, and had been neglected and passively abused for many years,
began to fall apart. (In 1988 Susan shot her boyfriend, and eventually
killed herself in jail; Jack managed to repair himself, but has avoided
publicity ever since.)
International
Foundation for Internal Freedom
Leary
described the program and conception of his research nearly a year
ago in a lecture to the Social Relations colloquim entitled "New
Methods for Behavior Change." His talk last Sunday supplied further
details on IFIF and his research last summer in Mexico.
In his speech in December 1961, Leary examined "the internal
politics of the nervous system." The goals of external politics,
he said, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; the internal
analogs of these goals are consciousness, freedom, and "fun-love,"
respectively. Behavioristic psychology, he said, has focused on what
is important to the observer, omitting what is important to the consciousness
of the subjects. Leary's concern is to help people attain their inner
goals" freedom from their verbal learned past, and an all-encompassing
unity and love which transcends ego-identity. He chooses to use consciousness-expanding
drugs.
Leary conceives erternal behavior as games, involving roles, rules,
rituals, goals, values, and language. External happiness, he says,
depends on playing these games successfully. In playing, the mind
rules the cortex like a tyrant. (Sunday evening he referred specifically
to the mid-brain as the censoring agent.) Internal happiness, however,
he considers strictly non-game; it is equivalent to the brain without
the mind's control--"physiological freedom."
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Millbrook
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Tim
Leary at 1967 S.F. Human Be-In
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LSD
in it's many forms :)
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In 1964, Leary
co-authored a book with Ralph Metzner called The
Psychedelic Experience, ostensibly based upon the Tibetan Book
of the Dead. In it he writes:
"A psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness.
The scope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic
features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of space-time dimensions,
and of the ego or identity. Such experiences of enlarged consciousness
can occur in a variety of ways: sensory deprivation, yoga exercises,
disciplined meditation, religious or aesthetic ecstasies, or spontaneously.
Most recently they have become available to anyone through the ingestion
of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, etc.
Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience.
It merely acts as a chemical key - it opens the mind, frees the nervous
system of its ordinary patterns and structures."
Repeated FBI raids ended the Millbrook era. Regarding a 1966 raid
by G. Gordon Liddy, Leary told Paul
Krassner, "He was a government agent entering our bedroom
at midnight. We had every right to shoot him. But I've never owned
a weapon in my life. I have never had and never will have a gun around."
On September 19th 1966, Leary founded the League for Spiritual Discovery,
a religion with LSD as its holy sacrament (by doing this, he hoped
to legalize LSD based on a "freedom of religion" argument).
Although The Brotherhood of Eternal Love
would subsequently consider Leary their spiritual leader, The Brotherhood
did not evolve out of IFIF.
During late
1966 and early 1967, Leary toured college campuses to spread the psychedelic
gospel by presenting a multi-media performance called "the Death
of the Mind" which attempted to artistically replicate the LSD
experience. Leary said the League for Spiritual
Discovery was limited to 360 members and was already at its
membership limit, but he encouraged others to form their own psychedelic
religions. He published a pamphlet in 1967 called Start
Your Own Religion to encourage people to do so.
On January 14, 1967, Leary spoke at the Human
Be-In,
a gathering of 30,000 hippies in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco
and uttered his famous phrase,
"Turn on, Tune in, Drop out."
The phrase came to him in the shower one day after Marshall
McLuhan
suggested to Leary that he come up with "something snappy"
to promote the benefits of LSD.
http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/
The
1967 San Francisco Human Be-In Tribute
Journey
on to :
Timothy
Leary Part 2
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Disneyland
Memorial Orgy
In 1967, Paul Krassner published Mad artist Wally Wood’s
parody as a centerspread for his satirical magazine, The Realist,
and then as a poster.
Paul
Krassner's Blog
"The Legacy of Timothy Leary'
See
the Poster's Larger View HERE!
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The
Tao of Guides and Teachers
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Law Guest Artist Gallery
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