Tim Leary, Robert Wilson, 90’s Psychedelia

Sound Photosynthesis presents PSYCHEDELICS IN THE 1990'S - MAPS Conference Compilation. Historical. A gathering together to discuss the fate of psychedelics in the 1990's and their possible regulation or continued prohibition, are a group of speakers with divergent views and past experiences. Nevertheless, they share a deep commitment to the development of a constructive policy towards psychedelics. They graciously agreed to speak to help raise funds for psychedelic research, a field that has been at a standstill for a generation. Participants were: Timothy Leary, Alice Agar Wittine, Ram Dass, Rick Doblin, Mark Kleiman, Robert Zanger, Terence McKenna, Emerson Jackson, Ralph Matzner, Andrew Weil, Laura Huxley, Dennis McKenna, Jerome Beck, and Bruce Eisner. This is the closest you will get if you weren't there to begin with...if you were, this is better than your memories.

Robert Anton Wilson & Timothy Leary
@ The Bridge Psychedelic Conference 1991

Sound Photosynthesis presents Robert Anton Wilson & Timothy Leary @ The Bridge Psychedelic Conference 1991. For the full length recording please contact us at www.sound.photosynthesis.com

History Channel: The Stoned Ages

THE STONED AGES explores the history of drugs. From the early cave dwellers who first stumbled upon psychedelic mushrooms to the over 6000-year-old tradition of opium cultivation in the East to a modern pharmaceutical industry with over 24,000 drugs on the market, drugs have played a role in our lives since well before recorded human history.

THE STONED AGES explores the reasons we've used drugs through the ages to heal our bodies and minds, to connect with a higher power, to feel better, for recreation, to escape, for performance enhancement, and even to prolong our lives while considering the devastating consequences that accompany the choice to use certain drugs. This fascinating, fresh, and insightful documentary will ask the question: overall, have drugs done more to help us or hurt us?

Hosted by Dean Norris, THE STONED AGES will journey through the millennia and look in on the greatest civilizations in human history to discover if drugs helped these societies flourish or fail and whether drug use was holy or hedonistic, a savior or a curse. How can drugs that are worshipped in one society be morally reprehensible and often illegal in another? And what causes some good drugs to go bad?

THE STONED AGES will interview the writers, historians, doctors, pharmaceutical reps, religious leaders, policy makers, FDA scientists, DEA representatives, and drug addicts who shape the often conflicting roles that drugs play in our lives today.

Drugs can kill and enslave, heal and provide hope, and alter our consciousness in deeply profound ways. THE STONED AGES will tell the story of how drugs have helped us become who we are.

A Conversation On LSD

A rare home movie of a conversation between early LSD pioneers Timothy Leary, Oscar Jangier, Al Hubbard, Sidney Cohen, Myron Stolaroff and Humphry Osmond & others. A must see for psychedelic historians. I believe this was filmed at Tim’s home circa 1972.Thank you Timothy Leary Archive!



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Timothy Leary Interviews

Timothy Leary on the Psychedelic Salon Podcast
Episode 284 Timothy Leary The Revolution Continues #1 Download
Episode 285 Timothy Leary The Revolution Continues #2 Download
 Episode 286 Timothy Leary The Revolution Continues #3 Download 
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On November 13, 1976 Howard Pearlstein & Henry Marshall interviewed Dr. Timothy Leary just a few months after his release from prison in 1976. It took place in Houston, Texas for the local Pacifica Station, KPFT. Unlike most radio interviews, instead of just one person asking the questions this one consisted of a panel of men who at times seemed more like a board of inquiry of some kind. However, it doesn't take long for Dr. Leary to be in full command of the situation. And for historians who are interested in whether or not Leary gave evidence against one of his attorneys, you'll be quite pleased when the questions trend in this direction. Tim defends his own sanity but quickly moves on to a preliminary discussion of Leary's 8-Circuit theories, evolution, the future, space migration, life extension & more.

Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an American psychologist and writer, known for his advocacy of psychedelic drugs. During a time when drugs like LSD and psilocybin were legal, Leary conducted experiments at Harvard University under the Harvard Psilocybin Project, resulting in the Concord Prison Experiment and the Marsh Chapel Experiment. Both studies produced useful data, but Leary and his associate Richard Alpert were dismissed from the university.

Leary believed LSD showed therapeutic potential for use in psychiatry. He popularized catchphrases that promoted his philosophy, such as "turn on, tune in, drop out ", "set and setting", and "think for yourself and question authority". He also wrote and spoke frequently about transhumanist concepts involving space migration, intelligence increase and life extension (SMI²LE), and he developed the eight-circuit model of consciousness in his book Exo-Psychology (1977).

During the 1960s and 1970s, Leary was arrested regularly and was held captive in 29 different prisons throughout the world. President Richard Nixon once described Leary as "the most dangerous man in America". Leary was released from prison on April 21, 1976 by Governor Jerry Brown.

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

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

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

"I spent four years in 29 jails and prisons on four continents."

“Looked at it pragmatically, the trick of taking intelligence tests is to get the highest score possible in terms of intelligence as defined by middle class intellectuals who designed the test.”

“It’s the nature of the game that a philosopher who’s proposing radical new ideas will be opposed by 80% of society.”

“My responsibility is to the genetic process and evolutionary process as I see it.”

“We have to be gentle with each other because we are going through a period of mutations.”

“I think, though, that there has never been a cultural change in history that was as profound, as pervasive, and as bloodless as the cultural revolution of the Sixties. By and large it was a smiling revolution.”

“By and large I’m very proud of what happened in the Sixties, every aspect of our culture was reformed and revised and reviewed and improved.”

“Now, LSD is a dangerous drug because it’s basically a post-terrestrial experience. And for caterpillars to start taking a butterfly drug, it gives you perspectives, and forecasts what’s to come.”

“There’s perhaps less than ten percent of the population who should even consider, under the best circumstances of disciplined control, to take this drug, because LSD is not a hedonistic, laid-back, multi-orgasm drug. It really isn’t. It’s a neurological experience. It’s a sixth circuit neuroelectric experience, and it’s basically preparation for post-terrestrial life.”

“To summarize, I’m an evolutionary agent using electromagnetic energies to broadcast evolutionary signals. The signals are ‘leave the planet’, ‘get smarter’, and ‘learn how to live as long as you want’.”

Leary makes a point about President Kennedy attempting to turn the solution to a bad economy away from war and into space.

Further information may be found at:
FREE Mp3 recordings are featured on the Psychedelic Salon Podcast
Dr. Timothy Leary on Wikipedia
The Timothy Leary Movie Archive
www.EROCx1.com

Timothy Leary archive sold to NY Library

On June 16, 2011 the New York Public Library announced that it has acquired the Timothy Leary archive for $900,000. The well organized, invaluable collection contains >335 well organized boxes equivalent to 412 linear feet of letters, manuscripts, research documents, notes, legal and financial records, printed materials, photographs, video and audio tapes, CDs and DVDs, posters and flyers, and artifacts, dating from Leary’s youth in the 1920s until his death in 1996.

William Stingone, curator of manuscripts at the library acknowledged Tim as one of the most influential figures of the 20th century and predicts the collection will help researchers get beyond the “myth making” around ’60s figures and “Hopefully we’ll be able to get to some of the truth of it here”. It will no doubt be of great resource for the recent resurgence of psychedelic research by Charlie Grob, Rick Strassman, Roland Griffiths and organizations such as Heffter Research Institute & MAPS.

The complete documentation from Leary’s early psychotropic drug experiments are in tact. Thomas Lannon, the library’s assistant curator for manuscripts and archives explained that much of the archive includes legitimate scientific research performed prior these substances being made illegal. Leary kept meticulous records at many points during his life. There are comprehensive research files, legal briefs, budgets and memos about the many institutes and organizations he founded, but there are also notes and documents from when he was on the run after escaping from a California prison with help from the Weather Underground. A folder labeled as notes from his “C.I.A. kidnapping” in 1973 is full of cryptic jottings recounting the details of his arrest in Afghanistan, at an airport in Kabul, after he fled the United States.

Partial list of items in the archive purchased from the Leary Estate include:

• Thousands of letters to Leary, many from luminaries of the 1960s era, including Aldous and Laura Huxley, Gerald Heard, Alan Watts, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Peter Orlovsky, Charles Olson, Arthur Koestler, Huston Smith, Walter Houston Clark, Walter Pahnke, Humphry Osmond, Al Hubbard, Oscar Janiger, Cary Grant, Charles Mingus, Maynard Ferguson, Michael Hollingshead , Robert Anton Wilson, Gordon Wasson, Ken Kesey and Augustus Owsley Stanley. Other correspondence is with his family – including letters to and from his mother, his wives and his children – as well as publishers, attorneys, politicians and his numerous adversaries, including G. Gordon Liddy and law enforcement figures from local sheriffs to Drug Enforcement Agency and Central Intelligence Agency operatives.
• Professional and research papers, which will provide scholars a unique opportunity to study Leary’s clinical work from graduate school through his years at Millbrook, including hundreds of reports documenting the psilocybin-induced experiences Harvard graduate students and faculty, creative artists, prisoners at the Massachusetts State Prison at Concord, and theology students.
• Files and correspondence detailing Leary’s experience at Harvard University, including his initial acceptance, the university’s eventual resistance to his research, his controversial research methods and his eventual dismissal. These files depict the evolution of Leary’s studies from rigorous, empirical research into more free-flowing, scientifically problematic exploration, as well as the promotion of psychedelics.
• The complete records of the organizations Leary formed to continue his research after leaving Harvard, including the International Federation for Internal Freedom, Castalia Foundation and the League For Spiritual Discovery. These files, like those from Leary’s research at Harvard, include session reports, completed questionnaires, and letters describing the mushroom and LSD induced experiences of many notable cultural figures and Leary’s associates, such as Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) and Ralph Metzner. Letters among Leary and his research partners also document their turbulent and intense personal and professional relationships.
• Extensive correspondence, legal briefs, prison writings, letters of support and petitions sent to and produced by the four Leary defense funds during his time in prison after his arrest in 1973. There are also materials connected to his exile period in Algeria and Switzerland, including correspondence, notebooks, statements, letters and manuscript material.
• Copies of government documents, released to Leary under the Freedom of Information Act, pertaining to various agencies’ surveillance of Leary, as well as his arrest. Leary’s cooperation with the authorities, still considered by many as a betrayal of the counterculture, is also well documented.
• Computer generated text, correspondence and material relating to the computer revolution, the Biosphere project, space colonies, cryogenics and more from his time in Los Angeles.
• More than 300 videotapes and 300 audiotapes featuring Leary, including about 50 early lectures. A large portion of these tapes are noncommercial and probably represent the only copies in existence.
• Manuscripts of published books and articles, as well as a substantial number of unpublished works, some book length. Scores of unpublished essays on a variety of subjects, unproduced movie scripts, fiction and poetry are also included.

The archive is currently sitting in a storage complex in Long Island, waiting to be sorted and processed over the next 18 - 24. It is my hope that it will soon be digitized for the world to access online similar to Hofmann.org. A portion of the sale is being donated back to finance the processing of the material. When Tim announced his illness, he attempted to comfort us by saying something to the effect of “I will live forever, spreading through the WWW like a virus corrupting the minds of young people.” It has been heart breaking to see his website dead all these years and will be awesome to see Leary’s wish come full circle. I believe letters of support to the New York Public Library are appropriate, they may be contacted HERE. A big thank you to all who helped make this happen!

Further information may be found at:
FREE Mp3 recordings are featured on the Psychedelic Salon Podcast
NYT Article on TimothyLearyArchives.org
The Timothy Leary Movie Archive
www.EROCx1.com

Timothy Leary: From Mind to SuperMind - Mp3

FROM: The Psychedelic Salon #244: 
 Timothy Leary: From Mind to Supermind

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Date: January 28, 1985
Location: Santa Barbara, CA
Speaker: Timothy Leary

“More changes have taken place in the last twenty five years, unquestionably, than in any period of human history. Just as I said an hour on the Greenwich map is a century, a decade these days seems to be a century. Can you remember the ancient history of the 1960s?”

“If you change the techniques of child rearing, if you change the very philosophy and techniques in the daily, moment to moment way that children are brought up, hey, listen, never mind university, you’ve changed that culture.“

“The average post-1946 kid by the age of five had experienced a hundred times more realities, more dramas, more history, more geography, more hype, more propaganda, you name it, than the wisest, oldest, most traveled human beings of the past.”

“To a ‘factory philosopher’ a machine to think is a machine to perform many repetitious tasks.”

“Information, information is the air and the water and the bread and the shoes of the future.”

www.PsychedelicSalon.org

LSD: The Beyond Within

This full length BBC documentary takes a fascinating look into the world of Lysergic Acid Diethylamide LSD

 
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Long before Timothy Leary urged a generation to “tune in, turn on and drop out,” lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, was being used by researchers trying to understand the human mind. This documentary is a fascinating look at the story of “acid” before it hit the streets.

Discovered in 1943 by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, LSD was hailed as a powerful tool to treat alcoholism and drug addiction and to provide a window into schizophrenia and other mental illnesses. While researchers were establishing the medical benefits of LSD, others, such as Brave New World author Aldous Huxley, promoted the drug as a powerful tool for mental exploration and self understanding. At Harvard, Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Ram Dass (then known as Richard Alpert) became popular heroes after the university canceled their research project into psychedelics.

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You may also find Electric kool-aid:
LSD and the 60s psychedelic revolution of interest.

The Psychedelic Transhumanists

The Psychedelic Transhumanists
By: Michael Garfield
From: h+ Magazine Fall 2009, Page 50-56
Download this complete issue in PDF: HERE

Transhumanism in a fortune cookie: the familiar human world is just one point along a continuum of evolution, and we have an unprecedented capacity to participate in that process. And yet, the future being as slippery as it is, there are as many visions for how this might occur as there are visionaries to guess at it. Computer scientists tend to have one transhumanism; genetic engineers, another. However, coherent themes emerge for those who have taken it upon themselves to make a sweeping survey of human inquiry, integrating a keen reading of the vectors of our technology with postmodern insight into the nature of mind. Some of these thinkers have been catalyzed by the psychedelic experience — in a way, the most informative window into a world beyond the human that we have yet discovered. They understand the message of psychedelics and the message of technology to converge on the horizon of a deeper reading of reality that recognizes mind and matter as dimensions of the same truth — a truth for which language has ill-prepared us.

Among the ranks of these “psychedelic transhumanists” are legendary rebels like Timothy Leary, wise fools like Terence McKenna, cultural commentators like Erik Davis and Mark Pesce and avantpsychopharmacologists like David Pearce. Hailing from disparate knowledge domains, they all share a hyperliterate intelligence that is, in its own way, rigorous. Their arguments are not necessarily subject to the conventional scientific method, but they are not so easily refuted. Their common vision shares much with the rest of the transhuman community, including an embrace of technology and science as both potent and inevitable; an evolutionary model of the universe and humanity; a sense of the human organism as something that can be tinkered with and expanded; a recognition of drugs as a technology that can dramatically reinvent identity, and a playful challenging of fixed boundaries. In many ways they demonstrate the seed of transhumanism in this moment by exemplifying self-revision and the reevaluation of assumptions as an open ended and ongoing process. And along the way, they tatter the mechanistic control fantasies we have held onto in spite of our most sophisticated inquiries.

Among these visionaries, we find a general agreement on the emergence of machine intelligence, but from a less dualistic perspective than most in the transhuman sphere — leaning towards a deeper and more balanced recognition of both inner and outer realities. They tend to critique philosophies that consider mind a mere epiphenomenon, or that fail to recognize the role of the speculator in speculation.

They see technology as ideas, and ideas as technology. They question our fanatical efforts at control via the runaway complexity of progress, and remind us of the stubborn persistence of the unconscious, the body and the other. They remind us to see the evolution of humanity and beyond as much in terms of qualia as quanta, and paint the future as more sensitive to psychological, spiritual, ethical, and biological concerns than those on the hardboiled tech edge.

The distinctions between this vision and the more common idea of a technological singularity are easily distilled. In their own words, presented as a “virtual conversation” of transcripts and correspondences, here are the core messages of a transhumanist vision informed by the psychedelic experience…

{READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON H+}

h+ Magazine Fall 2009, Page 50-56. You can download the electronic version or PDF from the h+ website, or wait until later this month and find it on newsstands.

The origin of the 60’s: Alan Watts & friends Houseboat Summit

This fascinating recording is of a meeting held in 1967 between Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder planning & discussing the future of psychedelic culture. Its offers a very unique & insightful perspective on the creation of would later be known as the “60’s”.

From: The Psychedelic Salon
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PROGRAM NOTES:

"The Houseboat Summit" was held in February 1967, and has been documented in several places on the Web. In addition to the quotes below, which are from this podcast, you can read a more complete transcript of this historic meeting here.

"I think that, thus far, the genius of this kind of underground that we’re talking about is that it has no leadership." -Alan Watts

"What we need to realize is that there can be, shall we say, a movement, a stirring among people, which can be organically designed instead of politically designed." -Alan Watts

"My historical reading of the situation is that these great monolithic empires developed, Rome, Turkey, and so forth, and they always break down when enough people, and it’s always the young, the creative, and minority groups drop out and go back to a tribal form." -Timothy Leary

"Our educational system in its entirety does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don’t learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life." -Alan Watts

"That society is strong and viable which recognizes its own provisionality." -Alan Watts

"And so when the essential idea of love is lost there comes talk of fidelity. Actually, the only possible basis for two beings, male and female, to relate to each other is to grant each other total freedom." -Alan Watts

"Increasingly, we’re developing all kinds of systems for verifying reality by echoing it." -Alan Watts.

"Drop out of the public schools. The public schools cannot be compromised with." -Timothy Leary

"What are we saying when we say now, something is holy? That means you should take a different attitude to what you are doing than if you were, for example, doing it for kicks." -Alan Watts

"Half the things I’ve done are wrong, mistakes [unintelligible]. The moratorium on pot and LSD a year ago is ridiculous. I shouldn’t have done that. I make a blunder at least one out of two times I come to bat." -Timothy Leary

"In other words, when there is a game going on that’s on a collision course, and that this game obviously is going to lead to total destruction, the only way of getting people out of a bad game is to indicate that the game is no longer interesting. See, we’ve left this game and it bores us." -Alan Watts, February 1967

The Psychedelic Salon

Dr. Timothy Leary on VH1 Aug 13th!

There is a VH1 series called “Lords of the Revolution” with episode #104 featuring Dr. Timothy Leary. Its scheduled to air on Vh1 August 13th @ 8PM.

Below is the summary:
[From the moment Harvard professor Timothy Leary ate magic mushrooms in 1960, his life would never be the same. Advocating the use of LSD and other mind altering drugs to expand consciousness, Leary transformed himself from an eccentric Harvard professor into the leader of the 1960s psychedelic counter-culture movement. Leary's influence helped shape the music, fashion and politics of a new generation. He defied authority and fought the government at every turn, earning the title, in President Nixon's words, as "the most dangerous man in America."]

Link: Lords of the Revolution » Ep. 104

This series also features Cheech & Chong

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

Dr. Timothy Leary: The Intelligent Use of Drugs

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PROGRAM NOTES:

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

 "We represent the aristocratic, exploring elite of our species, and we always have."

"The purpose of human life is to go within and find out who you are. The purpose of human life is to grow."

"American history is filled with people who knew how to use drugs intelligently."

"He [William James] later wrote the book "Varieties of Religious Experience", in which he said over and over again, no attempt at the metaphysical quest, no attempt to probe the philosophic wonders of the cosmos can be undertaken by those who don’t have some experience with chemicals. In his case it was peyote and nitrous oxide."

"The ‘original’ sin was the intelligent use of drugs in the garden of Eden."

"The problem with drugs is that stupid people use drugs stupidly."

"As more and more people learn how to use drugs intelligently in the next twenty years, and get back to their microscopes and DNA mock-ups, we may have some more information on exactly how evolution got started."

"All of you in this room have experienced more realities, more crisis, more of life, you’ve seen more than the wisest sultans and philosophers in the past."

"The generation you belong to is of key importance."

"Nobody died for my sins, man. I did my time for ‘em."

"Let me give you an example of set and setting. If you take LSD under the following conditions: you’ve just escaped from prison where they want to put you in the gas chamber, and you find yourself in a hotel in Palm Springs where the FBI is having its local convention, that is bad set and bad setting."

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The Timothy Leary Internet Archive Party Videos

Recorded Sunday, February 8, 2009
San Francisco, CA
From: SMI²LE.com

Brian Shields from KRON Channel 4 News covers the launch of the Leary Archive event interviewing Brewster Kahle, John Perry Barlow, Ralph Metzner, and Michael Horowitz.

Timothy Leary archives

It is very exciting to see so much of Tim's archives finally becoming available for to the citizens of the online world to access. The fact that this archive even exists is a small miracle considering Tim's frequent moves and numerous arrests (40 on four continents), Dr. Leary managed to keep together practically all of his papers and recordings. It is good to know that it has been well preserved and that good people are working hard to digitize everything before the quality deteriorates or worse. A lesson learned from the tragic loss of the Terence McKenna archives.

I was incredibly disappointed how Dr. Leary's web site had disappeared from the net around 6 years ago (for reasons still not made very clear). At any rate the past is the past & what's important is that the archive has been progressively making its way online over a decade after Tim had passed away.

First were some great audio recordings by way of Bruce Damer & my friend Lorenzo via episodes of Psychedelic Salon podcasts. Lorenzo began sharing these talks about a year ago.

Around the same time, videos began appearing on the Internet Archive.

Next http://www.timothylearyarchives.org/ emerged onto the net and now seems to be running full speed.

Last but not least Leary.com changed from the single closed for renovation page (that appeared every time I was hoping to see it back online) to a unique full page video welcome screen. That so far I haven't been able to navigate past. I hope the sudden resurfacing of the archive is not only an only an attempt to sell it. But is a genuine effort to digitize and share the archive freely to anyone who seeks it as soon as possible.

Daniel Terdiman has written an excellent article on the Leary archive for CNET. Below is a small excerpt:

“Leary, as you probably know, was famous for his decades of experimental research into and promotion of the effects of hallucinogens, and over the years became as well known as many of the celebrity artists, writers, thinkers, and performers he hung out with.

Less well known, however, is that Leary, who died in 1996 of prostate cancer, became a serious techie in his later years. He put up a very early Web site, co-produced a late-’80s video game for Electronic Arts, worked on a series of the latest and greatest computers, and, it is said, updated his era-defining catchphrase for the digital age to reflect a newfound belief that computers were the LSD of the ’90s: “Turn on, boot up, and jack in.”

Today, addiction to technology is probably even more prevalent than devotion to drugs was in the ’60s, and most people probably can’t even imagine what the physical archives of someone like Leary would look like. After all, isn’t everything digitized and online these days?

On Thursday, however, I had the chance to spend some time with a small piece of Leary’s 400-carton-large archives–which is housed in a storage facility here–and I was in danger of getting seriously sucked in. In box after box, I found a true treasure trove of letters, photographs, posters and yes, computer equipment and discs.”

The entire article is available on CNET.

Last I heard, my friend Bruce Eisner was also planning on attending the celebration of Tim's life in San Francisco this past Sunday. I am looking forward to hearing about his visit. He has already made one post about the archive in his blog.

Michael Horowitz - also posted his annotated Bibliography of Timothy Leary.

Dr. Timothy Leary: Evolution of Intelligence

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PROGRAM NOTES:

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

"The evolution of intelligence: Now this is a very interesting idea. It means that the way not just to survive but to evolve is to get smarter.

"I think it’s time to dust off the word pagan again. The word pagan seems to mean one who loves life. A pagan is someone who loves humanity and would never dream of oppressing humanity with Original Sins and other life sentences, which distract from self-esteem and courage and self-confidence."

"We were not descended from chimpanzees or apes, we are teenage, juvenile chimps or apes that didn’t grow up and develop tails and swing around in trees. . . . In many aspects, the human species is an immature species. We haven’t committed ourselves to a final form, and therein, perhaps, lies our great usefulness to the DNA code and the biological wisdom."

"If you want to increase your intelligence, if you want to evolve, and grow, and go through the changes, the many changes that are possible, at all costs avoid terminal adulthood."

"If you stay in the same place, you tend, obviously, to not be exposed to new challenges, and you’re not going to be under pressure to grow. Although, it is well known though, that if you migrate, if you want to change, if you want to grow, if you want to develop, if you want to reach a higher level, a standard genetic tactic, and a standard human tactic, is to migrate to a new frontier where you have a chance to develop and grow."

"People born in the same generation share an unspoken sense of reality throughout the world."

"DNA uses juvenilization, mutation and change in the young, only when there’s a challenge that the old way can’t face."

"The last fifty years of the twentieth century in this country are simply the history of the baby boom moving like a pig through a python through American culture."

"If you find yourself in a generation that is pretty stuffy, migrate! A generation is an island in time. … You’re as old as the people you hang out with."

"The intelligent evolutionary tradition has always been intelligent skepticism of authority."

"Throughout human history, those in power have been wrong 99% of the time."

---

More about Mary Pinchot Meyer

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Panel discussion: Leary, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Hoffman, Corso, Di Prima + McKenna

From: The Psychedelic Salon

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Guest speakers: Terence McKenna, Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Abbie Hoffman, Gregory Corso, and Diane Di Prima

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PROGRAM NOTES:
"There are no bad drugs. There are simply people who don’t know how to use them. Intelligent people use drugs intelligently, and stupid people are going to abuse drugs the way they abuse everything else. And our function is to raise the level of intelligence. We have to have a program of drug education." –Timothy Leary

"I don’t think there’s any problem with advancing consciousness and becoming more and more aware of the struggle, not with the world, not to convince other people to do anything. The really interesting think is the struggle with the self, and the relation with the self, and there is no end to the improvement that can be done there, the discoveries that can be made." –Allen Ginsberg

[NOTE: The following quotes are all by Terence McKenna.]

"To contact the cosmic giggle, to have the flow of casuistry begin to give off synchronistic ripples, whitecaps in the billows of the coincidental ether, if you will. To achieve that, a precondition is a kind of unconsciousness, a kind of drifting, a certain taking-your-eye-off-the-ball, a certain assumptions that things are simpler than they are, almost always precedes what Mircea Eliade called ‘the rupture of plane’ that indicates that there is an archetypal world, an archetypal power behind profane appearances." –Terence McKenna

"It occurs to me that at any given moment, because of the way the planet is as a thing, some percentage of human beings are asleep, always, and many are awake. And so if the world soul is made of the collective consciousness of human beings, then it is never entirely awake. It is never entirely asleep. It exists in some kind of indeterminate zone."

"Technology, or the historical momentum of things, is creating such a bewildering social milieu that the monkey-mind cannot find a simple story, a simple creation myth, or redemption myth, to lay over the crazy, contradictory patchwork of profane techno-consumerist, post McLuanist, electronic, pre-apocalyptic existence."

"I believe that the truth of the matter is far more terrifying [than conspiracy theories]. The real truth that dare not speak itself is that no one is in control. Absolutely no one!"

"The global destiny of the [human] species is somehow unfolding with the logic of a dream."

"The carrier of the field of the cosmic giggle in most people’s lives is love. Love is some kind of output which messes with the entropic tendency toward probabilistic behavior in Nature."

"The primary contribution of 20th century thinking, if you will, is to have understood, finally, that information is primary. That this world, this cosmos, this universe, this body and soul are all made of information. … The implication for the digerati is that reality can therefore be hacked."

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Robert Forte: Cultural Healing Lecture

 

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Guest speaker: Robert Forte

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Robert Forte studied the history of religion with Mircea Eliade at the University of Chicago, and the psychedelic experience with Stanislav Grof at Esalen.  He has worked for two decades to help western society understand and benefit from the fruits of psychedelic mysticism.   A former lecturer on psychology and religion at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and former director of the Albert Hofmann Foundation.

• He is the editor of Entheogens and the Future of Religion (Entheogen Project Series, Number 2)
• Timothy Leary: Outside Looking In: , (1998) a memorial volume for Timothy Leary. Appreciations, Castigations, and Reminiscences by Ram Dass, Andrew Weil, Allen Ginsberg, Winona Ryder, William Burroughs, ... Huston Smith, Hunter S. Thompson, and Others.
• The 1998 & 2008 editions of The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries , by R.G Wasson, Albert Hofmann, and Carl Ruck.

PROGRAM NOTES:

"Every revolution is followed by a counter-revolution, and the pendulum keeps swinging back and forth. No lasting change is effected by politics; it has to come from within." –Nina Graboi

"How is it that people fail to see that when the stream dies we die. We are that stream." –Robert Forte

As presented at the 4th International
Amazonian Shamanism Conference:
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---

Links:

• Psychedelics, Science, and WTF (Robert Forte blog entry)
• Operation Mockingbird
• Project MKULTRA 

Book list:

9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press
David Ray Griffin shows that the official story about 9/11 is riddled with internal contradictions. Two contradictory statements cannot both be true. These contradictions show, therefore, that individuals and agencies articulating the official story of 9/11 have made many false statements. Congress and the press clearly should ask which of the contradictory statements are false and why they were made.

This book is purely factual, simply laying out the fact that these internal contradictions exist. As such, the book contains no theory. Politicians and journalists who deal with the issues raised herein, therefore, will not be giving credence to some "conspiracy theory" about 9/11. They will simply be carrying out their duty to ask why the official story about 9/11, arguably the most fateful event of our time, is riddled with so many contradictions.

The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Expose
Griffin has now written The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, which provides a chapter-by-chapter updating of the information provided in that earlier book. It shows that the case against the official account constructed by independent researchers - who now include architects, engineers, physicists, pilots, politicians, and former military officers - is far stronger than it was in 2004, leaving no doubt that 9/11 was a false flag operation, designed to give the Bush-Cheney administration a pretext to attack oil-rich Muslim nations. 
 
The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11
Taking to heart the idea that those who benefit from a crime ought to be investigated, here the eminent theologian David Ray Griffin sifts through the evidence about the attacks of 9/11 - stories from the mainstream press, reports from abroad, the work of other researchers, and the contradictory words of members of the Bush administration themselves - and finds that, taken together, they cast serious doubt on the official story of that tragic day.

9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out, Vol. 1
Practically from the moment the dust settled in New York and Washington after the attacks of September 11, a movement has grown of survivors, witnesses, and skeptics who have never quite been able to accept the official story. When theologian David Ray Griffin turned his attention to this topic in his book The New Pearl Harbor (2003), he helped give voice to a disquieting rumble of critiques and questions from many Americans and people around the world about the events of that day. Were the military and the FAA really that incompetent? Were our intelligence-gathering agencies really in the dark about such a possibility? In short, how could so much go wrong at once, in the world’s strongest and most technologically sophisticated country?

Both the government and the mainstream media have since tried to portray the 9/11 truth movement as led by people who can be dismissed as "conspiracy theorists" able to find an outlet for their ideas only on the internet. This volume, with essays by intellectuals from Europe and North America, shows this caricature to be untrue. Coming from different intellectual disciplines as well as from different parts of the world, these authors are united in the conviction that the official story about 9/11 is a huge deception manufactured to extend imperial control at home and abroad.

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Dr. Timothy Leary: The League for Spiritual Discovery

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Jan 1966 Radio interview with Dr. Timothy Leary and Elsa Knight Thompson.

PROGRAM NOTES:

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

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

"Man’s attempt to turn on just staggers the imagination. There’s hardly anything that hasn’t been used one time or another, or in one culture or another, to get this [psychedelic] experience."

"We don’t care what method people use [to turn on]. We treasure and glorify any method that can get you high, that can turn you on. But we also insist that no one tell us that we can’t use our sacraments that seem to work for us."

"We’re convinced, and I think it wouldn’t be hard to prove my point, that most Americans are involved in a meaningless, robot, assembly-line series of activities. They don’t really know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, but they’re just pushed off to this assembly-line and off they go."

"[By drop out] we mean drop out of the meaningless and tune in to the productive."

"You have to go out of your mind to come to your senses."

"There’s no more room for mythological, supernatural religious teachers."

"We use this word ‘psychosis’ the way we used the word ‘devil’ or ‘devil-possession’ or ‘witchcraft’ two or three or four or five hundred years ago."

"When the time comes, let your kids turn you on. That’s my message to the middle-age, middle-class, whiskey-drinking American suburban family."

"So jail to us is not a middle class disgrace. Here I am, a former Harvard professor, I’ve been arrested three times in the last year. Isn’t that disgraceful? To me that just means I’m doing my job. And if I don’t get the establishment a little worried, I wonder if my message is not getting through."

www.PsychedelicSalon.org

Timothy Leary's 1961 letter to Arthur Koestler

Dr. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert aka Ram Dass

An interesting letter [Circa 1961] from Dr. Timothy Leary describing his new found enthusiasm for psychedelics.

Dear Arthur,

Things are happening here which I think will interest you. The big, new, hot issue these days in many American circles is DRUGS. Have you been tuned in on the noise?

I stumbled on the scene in a most holy manner. Spent last summer in Mexico. Anthropologist friend arrived one weekend with a bag of mushrooms. Magic mushrooms. I had never heard of them, but being a good host joined the crowd who ate them. Wow! Learned more in six hours than in the past sixteen years. Visual transformations. Gone the perceptual machinery which clutters up our view of reality. Intuitive transformations. Gone the mental machinery which slices the world up into abstractions and concepts. Emotional transformations. Gone the emotional machinery that causes us to load life with our own role-ambitions and petty desires.

Came back to the USA and have spent last six months pursuing these matters. Working with Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, Allen Ginsberg the poet. We believe that the synthetics of peyote (mescalin) and the mushrooms (psilocybin) offer possibilities for expanding consciousness, changing perceptions, removing abstractions.

For the person who is prepared, they provide a soul-wrenching mystical experience. Remember your enlightenments in the Franco prison? Very similar to what we are producing. We have had cases of housewives understanding, experiencing satori describing it --who have never heard of Zen.

There are inevitable political-sociological complications. The expected groups are competing to see who should control the new drugs. Medicine and psychiatry are in the forefront. Psychiatric investigators (hung up as they are on their own abstractions) interpret the experience as PSYCHOTIC- and think they are producing model-psychosis. Then too, the cops and robbers game has started. Organized bohemia (and don't tell me it ain't organized, with rituals as rigid as those of the Masoic order) is moving in. There is the danger that mescalin and psilocybin will go the way of marijuana ( a perfectly mild, harmless, slightly mind-opening substance, as you know). And of course the narcotics bureau hopes that it will go the same way--so they can play out their side of the control game.

We are working to keep these drugs free and uncontrolled. Two tactics. We are offering the experience to distinguished creative people. Artists, poets, writers, scholars. We've learned a tremendous amount by listening to them tell us what they have learned from the experience.

We are also trying to build these experiences in a holy and serious way into university curricula. I've got approval to run a seminar here--graduate students will take the mushrooms regularly and spend a semester working through, organizing and systematizing the results. Its hard for me to see how anyone can consider himself a theologian, psychologist, behavioral scientist if he had not had this experience.

So how does it sound? If you are interested I'll send some mushrooms over to you. Or if you've already been involved I'd like to hear about your reaction. I'll be in London around June 8th and would like to tell you more about the cosmic crusade.

The memory of our weekend last winter remains as an intellectual and emotional highspot.

Best Regards to you,
T.L

From the Letters collection on Leary.ru
Also see Tim Leary Correspondence on Archive.org