Timothy Leary: @ Cornell 1989

From: The Psychedelic Salon
Guest speaker: Dr. Timothy Leary

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PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations below are by Timothy Leary.]

"The first very dangerous side effect of psychedelic drugs is long term memory gain. And the second is short term memory loss. And I forget the third."

"The time has come for us as a species, and for you all as individuals, to move into the post industrial society."

"We all create our own reality."

[Paraphrasing John Paul Sartre] "You can make up all the abstract gods or leaders that you want, and theories and so forth, but you’re just whistling in the dark. The existential facts of the matter are that you are in the nose cone of your own time ship, hurtling at the speed of light into a dark future, and you don’t have a clue or navigational map. And if you’re scared, well, grow up."

"The sillier a religion is the more passionately fanatic people will defend it, if you know what I mean. So you’d better be careful when you buy a god, because it can get you in a lot of shit."

"Quantum physics is all about loosening up your tight structure."

"Now think about jazz. What’s jazz about? Jazz is about singularity, about creating your own rhythm, improvising, doing your own riffs, innovating. Hey, that’s exactly what quantum physics is all about."

"The fact that you become an individual, and think singular thoughts, doesn’t mean you can’t be understood."

"The function of the government is simply to protect us, not from ourselves, but protect us from bad [impure] products."

"No matter how crazy, fucked-up an individual can be, he can’t be as fucked up as the Catholic Church."

"You know that collectivity lowers intelligence. No matter how dumb the individual is, there’s no dumb individual that could have caused World War II."

"Colleges, universities, are tax supported, state supported, or financed by wealthy individuals and trusts to prepare you to find your niche, your spot, your cog in the great industrial machine. This is a factory."

"Don’t decide to major until after you graduate. When you get 50 years old, select your major."

FROM: Alternative Reel

Top 10 Greatest LSD Quotes

#10 - JERRY GARCIA [1942-95]

“Nobody stopped thinking about those psychedelic experiences. Once you’ve been to some of those places, you think, ‘How can I get back there again but make it a little easier on myself?’”
—Quoted in Rolling Stone, November 30, 1989

#09 - TERENCE MCKENNA [1946-2000]

"LSD burst over the dreary domain of the constipated bourgeoisie like the angelic herald of a new psychedelic millennium. We have never been the same since, nor will we ever be, for LSD demonstrated, even to skeptics, that the mansions of heaven and gardens of paradise lie within each and all of us."

Comments by EROCx1: Terence McKenna spoke many wise words on the subject of psychedelics. I will share my two favorite McKenna LSD quotes below.

"Well at the time I thought it had to do with LSD. But at that point in my life I thought everything had to do with LSD".

Next was McKenna quoting Leary (maybe),

"well, I always thought Tim Leary said this, but when I asked him, he completely disowned this brilliant remark, which let me know he was an enlightened man cause I never would have disowned it. So, somebody said -- not Tim Leary -- "LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally cases psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it." Now many drugs are like that, and we have many psychotic people running around who have been driven mad by drugs they never took. But what they did take was your civil rights, your freedom to guide your own life, and your right to make your own decisions. This kind of thing is intolerable. If there is an iota of possibility that these substances enhance consciousness -- and remember, they used to be called "consciousness expanding" drugs (just a straight phenomenological description) -- if there's an iota of possibility that they augment consciousness, then we have to put the pedal to the metal in this matter. Because it is the absence of consciousness that is pushing us toward extinction, that is causing us to loot our children's future, that is causing us to accept the elimination of thousands of species per month without pouring into the streets to loot and smash the institutions of those who allow these kinds of atrocities to go forward. I think the era of politeness has gone on just about long enough. And there's going to have to come a moment where people stand up and are counted. We have seen our freedom taken away, we have seen our environment destroyed, we have seen our political dialogue polluted, and still we take it, and take it, and take it. You know, being counter-cultural is more than a fashion statement. I recall an obscure Chinese philosopher named Mao Tse Tung, who once said, "The Revolution is not a dinner party!" Of course, he went on to say it's an armed struggle, prosecuted by the forces of the people. I don't think we're ready to call for armed struggle, but I think it is time to call for "HANDS OFF THE AMERICAN MIND. GIVE US BACK OUR MIND." The American mind is one of the most creative minds in the world, and it is being confined, compromised, and sold down the river by people who can't think of anything better to do with the world than fabricate it into stupid products and sell it at twice its natural worth."

 
#08 - STEVEN WRIGHT [1955- ]

"If God dropped acid, would He see people?"

 
#07 - BILL HICKS [1961-94]

"Always that same LSD story, you've all seen it. 'Young man on acid, thought he could fly, jumped out of a building. What a tragedy.' What a dick! Fuck him, he’s an idiot. If he thought he could fly, why didn’t he take off on the ground first? Check it out. You don’t see ducks lined up to catch elevators to fly south—they fly from the ground, ya moron, quit ruining it for everybody. He’s a moron, he’s dead—good, we lost a moron, fuckin’ celebrate. Wow, I just felt the world get lighter. We lost a moron! I don’t mean to sound cold, or cruel, or vicious, but I am, so that’s the way it comes out. Professional help is being sought. How about a positive LSD story? Wouldn't that be news-worthy, just the once? To base your decision on information rather than scare tactics and superstition and lies? I think it would be news-worthy. 'Today, a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration. That we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. There is no such thing as death, life is only a dream and we're the imagination of ourselves' . . . 'Here's Tom with the weather.'"

#06 - JIM MORRISON [1943-71]

"In the beginning we were creating our music, ourselves, every night . . . starting with a few outlines, maybe a few words for a song. Sometimes we worked out in Venice, looking at the surf. We were together a lot and it was good times for all of us. Acid, sun, friends, the ocean, and poetry and music."

#05 - KEN KESEY [1935-2001]

"I believe that with the advent of acid, we discovered a new way to think, and it has to do with piecing together new thoughts in your mind. Why is it that people think it's so evil? What is it about it that scares people so deeply, even the guy that invented it, what is it? Because they're afraid that there's more to reality than they have confronted. That there are doors that they're afraid to go in, and they don't want us to go in there either, because if we go in we might learn something that they don't know. And that makes us a little out of their control."
—Quoted in the BBC documentary, "The Beyond Within: The Rise and Fall of LSD," 1987

#04 - TOM WOLFE [1931- ]

“The Pranksters had what looked like about a million doses of the Angels’ favorite drug—beer—and LSD for all who wanted to try it. The beer made the Angels very happy and the LSD made them strangely peaceful and sometimes catatonic, in contrast to the Pranksters and other intellectuals around, who soared on the stuff . . . The Angels were adding LSD to the already elaborate list of highs and lows they liked, beer, wine, marijuana, Benzedrine, Seconal, Amytal, Nembutal, Tuinal. Some of them had terrible bummers—bummer was the Angels’ term for a bad trip on a motorcycle and very quickly it became the hip world’s term for a bad trip on LSD. The only bad moment at Kesey’s came one day when an Angel went berserk during the first rush of the drug and tried to strangle his old lady on Kesey’s front steps. But he was too wasted at that point to really do much.”
—The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 1968

#03 - TIMOTHY LEARY [1920-96]

"'Turn on' meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. 'Tune in' meant interact harmoniously with the world around you—externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. Drop out suggested an elective, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. 'Drop Out' meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean 'Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity.'"
—Flashbacks, 1983

#02 - HUNTER S. THOMPSON [1937-2005]

“That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip. He crashed around America selling ‘consicousness expansion’ without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him too seriously . . . All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create . . . a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody—or at least some force—is tending the Light at the end of the tunnel.”
—Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, 1971

#01 - ALBERT HOFMANN [1906-2008]

"Of greatest significance to me has been the insight that I attained as a fundamental understanding from all of my LSD experiments: what one commonly takes as 'the reality,' including the reality of one's own individual person, by no means signifies something fixed, but rather something that is ambiguous—that there is not only one, but that there are many realities, each comprising also a different consciousness of the ego. One can also arrive at this insight through scientific reflections. The problem of reality is and has been from time immemorial a central concern of philosophy. It is, however, a fundamental distinction, whether one approaches the problem of reality rationally, with the logical methods of philosophy, or if one obtrudes upon this problem emotionally, through an existential experience. The first planned LSD experiment was therefore so deeply moving and alarming, because everyday reality and the ego experiencing it, which I had until then considered to be the only reality, dissolved, and an unfamiliar ego experienced another, unfamiliar reality. The problem concerning the innermost self also appeared, which, itself unmoved, was able to record these external and internal transformations. Reality is inconceivable without an experiencing subject, without an ego. It is the product of the exterior world, of the sender and of a receiver, an ego in whose deepest self the emanations of the exterior world, registered by the antennae of the sense organs, become conscious. If one of the two is lacking, no reality happens, no radio music plays, the picture screen remains blank."
—LSD: My Problem Child, 1980

 

I think Robert Anton Wilson should have made this list, he must have some how been over looked by the author.

So I am adding #11 below.

"imagine gigabytes of information entering your brain not in two years, but in two nanoseconds, and radiating not just from this page but from the fruit on the table, the wall paint, the pencil, the cars passing in the street..... and the furthest stars.

That's why LSD has altered the world for so many of us in the last 60 years. Like English poet William Blake we have found "infinity in a grain of sand" and the deeper we look, the deeper the abyss grows. And like Nietzsche, we often suspect that as we gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into us......

LSD seems to suspend the imprinted and conditioned brain circuits that normally control perception/emotion/thought, allowing a flood -- an ocean -- of new information to break through. The experience will seem either very frightening or exhilaratingly educational, depending on how rigidly you previously believed your current map contained "all" the universe. Since I learned that no model equals the totality of experience long before I tried LSD, I never had a bad trip; but I have seen enough anxiety attacks and downright wig-outs in cases of the naive and dogmatic that I have never favored or advocated LSD's promiscuous use by the general population. As J.R. "Bob'' Dobbs says, "You know how dumb the average citizen is? Well, mathematically, by definition, half of them are even dumber than that."

While splashing about and trying not to drown in this ocean of new information, you generally experience a second LSD surprise: an explosion of newfound energy within your own body. Whether you call this kundalini or bio-electricity or orgone or libido or Life Force, it can trigger muscle spasms, unbridled Eros or just "warm and melting" sensations -- or all three in succession, or all three almost simultaneously -- usually followed by something loosely called "near-death experience" or "out of body experience." Again, this can seem either psychotically terrifying or "religiously" ecstatic, and can imprint short-or--long-term tendencies toward paranoia ["everything wants to destroy me"] or metanoia ["everything wants to help me."] In either case, one tends to retain a heightened awareness of those peculiar coincidences that Jung called synchronicities and Christian conspiracy buffs attribute to hostile occult forces.

In my case, after a few years I found myself seemingly forced to choose, not between paranoia and metanoia -- both by then appeared pitiful oversimplifications -- but between mysticism and agnosticism. I solved that problem, for myself anyway, by choosing agnostic mysticism in the tradition of Lao-tse:

Something unknown, unspeakable,
before Earth or sky,
before life or death,
I do not know what to call it
So I call it Dao

What do I think we should do with Dr. Hoffman's "problem child"? Well, no commodity becomes safer when its manufacture, sale and distribution all fall into the hands of professional criminals; and prohibition, of alcohol and all other drugs, inevitably has that effect, followed by police corruption and public cynicism. Maybe governments should leave this arena entirely and let professional scientists, medical and otherwise, write the guidelines? - Robert Anton Wilson

2 interviews with Dennis McKenna, Ph.D

Gnostic Media Research and Publishing’s
Podcast #26
April 12, 2009
Direct Mp3: Download
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Guest: Dr. Dennis McKenna

In this episode Jan and Dennis discuss oo-koo-he, ayahuasca, habit and novelty theory, Terence McKenna, plant communication and the future of psychedelic research. For the last thirty years, Dennis McKenna has pursued the interdisciplinary study of ethnopharmacology and plant hallucinogens.

Dennis has authored numerous scientific articles and books, including co-authoring the book The Invisible Landscape with his brother Terence McKenna. McKenna spent a number of years as a senior lecturer for the Center for Spirituality and Healing, part of the Academic Health Center at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He is now a senior research scientist for the Natural Health Products Research Group at the British Columbia Institute of Technology in the Vancouver area. McKenna received his Master's degree in botany at the University of Hawaii in 1979. He received his Doctorate in Botanical Sciences in 1984 from the University of British Columbia, where he wrote a dissertation entitled Monoamine oxidase inhibitors in Amazonian hallucinogenic plants: ethnobotanical, phytochemical, and pharmacological investigations. His research has included the pharmacology, botany, and chemistry of Ayahuasca and oo-koo-hé, the subjects of his master's thesis. He has also conducted extensive fieldwork in the Peruvian, Colombian, and Brazilian Amazon. He is the Co-founder and Director of Ethnopharmacology at the Heffter Research Institute.  For a more complete biography and list of publications please visit: www.heffter.org

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The second interview

From: realitysandwich.com
By: Alexander Price
March 11, 2007

Dennis reflects on the events that took place in 1971 at La Chorerra as described in True Hallucinations: An account of the Author's Extraordinary Adventures in the Devil's Paradise. He also tells us about some of his other early field work in the Amazon basin. Dennis shares some personal memories about experimenting with the I Ching, the development of Time Wave Zero and co-authoring The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching along with some more recent thoughts and discoveries on the topic. This interview has a great ending with Dennis sharing his unique perspective of being Terence McKenna's brother:

Terence is so persuasive and he is such a good talker and he says ... he could say complete nonsense in the most lovely way that most people never questioned it at all. He didn't actually like me to come to his seminars or his lectures because I was the only one who ever argued with him. Everyone else was sort of sitting there taking it all in – 'Oh wow man isn't this cool,' you know – and I would actually stand up and say, 'Well now wait a minute, what you said makes no sense. It's a total crock of shit and not only that but it contradicts what you said twenty minutes ago that also didn't make any sense.'

And he would of course dismiss that and say, 'Well, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds...' The guy was a fucking genius... I think that he did a service with the way he was able to get people to question their assumptions or to entertain ideas that never in a million years would they entertain. He presented them in such a way that they seemed to make sense at the time, and it's only a few days later when you think about it that it's like, 'What was this guy saying?'” Dennis laughed.

“I'm critical but I admire him. He was great. There will never be another like him.

Portugals Drug decriminalization saves lives, improves public health & saftey!

April 7, 2009

By Brian Vastag

From: Scientific American

5 Years After: Portugal's Drug Decriminalization Policy Shows Positive Results

Street drug related deaths from overdoses drop and the rate of HIV cases crashes!

In the face of a growing number of deaths and cases of HIV linked to drug abuse, the Portuguese government in 2001 tried a new tack to get a handle on the problem—it decriminalized the use and possession of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD and other illicit street drugs. The theory: focusing on treatment and prevention instead of jailing users would decrease the number of deaths and infections.

Five years later, the number of deaths from street drug overdoses dropped from around 400 to 290 annually, and the number of new HIV cases caused by using dirty needles to inject heroin, cocaine and other illegal substances plummeted from nearly 1,400 in 2000 to about 400 in 2006, according to a report released recently by the Cato Institute, a Washington, D.C, libertarian think tank.

See Rachel Oswald's outstanding article: Portugal's drug decriminalization 'bizarrely underappreciated'

See the numerous world news bulletins now calling for drug reform:

Mass. voters OK decriminalization of marijuana
Argentine president calls for decriminalization of drug use
Canadian government tries anew to decriminalize marijuana
Bill introduced to overhaul America’s criminal justice system
Obama administration to stop raids on medical marijuana dispensers