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Timothy Leary

17:42 / 14.07.04

Looked up Timothy Leary in the barbelith search engine and came up with surprisingly little so I've started this thread where we can discuss the man and his ideas. Since I've never actually read his books but know a little about him through RAW's writings what books of his have you found most (un)enjoyable/(un)readable and why?

19:13 / 14.07.04

* Flashbacks

The best of Leary's biographies. Good for an overview of the man, his life, his ideas, etc.

* The Psychedelic Experience

Technique for using excerpts from the Tibetan Book of the Dead to guide acid trips. Spent a couple of months playing with this a decade or so ago.

* Exo-Psychology (or Info-Psychology)

Leary's infamous eight-circuit model of consciousness. At least as useful as many other, more conventional occult models. Seems a bit dated now.

* The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality

Pre-psychedelic Leary. Psychological theory about how desires for acceptance, power, etc. affect relationships and interactions with other people. Shows why Leary was teaching at Harvard in the first place.

22:25 / 14.07.04

Storming Heaven ( LSD And The American Dream ) by Jay Stevens is the most balanced and best-written overview on this whole subject, I think. It takes in Huxley, the Beats, the CIA and so on, as well as Leary, who perhaps isn't someone you want to take entirely at face value, let's say, but nevertheless comes out of this as an innaresting if flawed character. So I'd read that first - Leary seems to make most sense as a historical figure, as opposed to a thinker, which when you see what happened to most of the people around him seems more than anything to be the exact opposite of what he actually was. Insofar as being a drugs animal with the constitution of an ox seems like no particular reason to try and pass yourself off as some kind of guru.

22:37 / 14.07.04

I can't resist this one...

Even more so than before:

Never trust a hippy!

22:53 / 14.07.04

<*giggle*>

The most interesting thing I know about Leary is anecdotal: one of the many times he got arrested, the prison gave him a psychiatric screening test. Which he had written. Himself. I believe it's called the Leary test, in fact. So he keeps mum, takes the test and skews it so they think he's a very low escape risk. They put him in minimum security. And then he escaped. I think they found him in Afghanistan or something.

Drugged-up hippy: 23. Prison system: 0.

02:07 / 15.07.04

i'd recommend 'high priest'. certainly the best work of his i've read. worth buying just for the trip involving burroughs as far as i'm concerned. it has a really nice layout too, images, passages from various texts in the margins along side the main text(tolkien, i-ching etc.).

14:16 / 15.07.04

Leary seems to make most sense as a historical figure, as opposed to a thinker, which when you see what happened to most of the people around him seems more than anything to be the exact opposite of what he actually was. Insofar as being a drugs animal with the constitution of an ox seems like no particular reason to try and pass yourself off as some kind of guru.

What on earth does this mean?

What happened to "most of the people around him"? Richard Alpert went to India and became Ram Dass, Ralph Metzner stayed a psychotherapist and professor, and plenty of others went on and lived their own lives quite happily. Are you referring to particular members of the Millbrook crowd? Or random teenagers who took Leary's advice to "Turn On, Tune In, and Drop Out?" And why do you think he had "the constitution of an ox"?

Storming Heaven is an excellent book on the history of LSD(so is Acid Dreams, for that matter), but I don't know if I'd call it the best perspective on Leary.

The basics: Leary was a young, up-and-coming Harvard psychology professor who encountered psychedelics and thought they held promise as tools for exploring the nature of consciousness and deconditioning people from self-destructive habits and thought patterns. He generally advocated taking psychedelics in controlled settings to accomplish particular results. Like Crowley, he was a magician, a chemical yogi. And like Crowley, he got a little too into being a guru and media figure, got tons of bad press, and eventually crashed and burned.

He was the figure probably most responsible for bringing knowledge of psychedelics to the masses. In the 70s he came up with a few ideas (like the 8-circuit model of consciousness and SMI2LE) that were interesting but now seem a bit dated. And in the early 90s he was an elder statesman for the cyberculture crowd. Wrote a few good books, lived an interesting life. And now he's dead. (Or on the outside looking in. Something like that.)

14:34 / 15.07.04

A quickie because I'm leaving work in a sec: I kind of agree with Evesig in that I like Leary for taking things to the masses. There's an interesting arguement to be had as to whether the best course for psychedelics was the controlled experimentation amongst an elite group (as advocated by Huxley et al) or the mass movement of the sixties (what actually happened). Of course, it's a bit irrelevatn now, after the event but I lean towards the latter.

14:44 / 15.07.04

Wasn't he meant to have been on the CIA payroll throughout his 60s acid guru phase, or something dubious like that. What's the deal with that? Character assasination? Urban myth? How much truth is there to those allegations? There's the whole conspiracy that Leary was complicit in persuading an increasingly politicised generation to "turn on, tune in, and drop out", thus conveniantly curbing the civil rights movement. Sounds a bit like scare-mongering, but still...

Also, that whole story about him having written the tests that allowed him to escape from prison... Did that actually happen? It sounds like such urban myth material that I have trouble accepting it. Is there a plausible source for that story?

15:33 / 15.07.04

Leary talks about the prison test in Flashbacks. I don't have the book handy, but I seem to remember that the test was partially based on his research, not actually written by him. He did know the best way to answer the questions to appear harmless. And he did escape from prison and flee to Algeria with the help of the Weather Underground.

Lots of people have accused Leary of being a CIA agent (or, oddly enough, a British intelligence agent) during his time as an acid guru. Distracting the masses with acid, depoliticizing the hippies, spying on Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria, etc. It's possible but I doubt it. It is clear, however, that after he was kidnapped in Switzerland and returned to prison he gave the FBI information on the Weather Underground and his escape. Some of the FBI files are on the Smoking Gun website.

15:41 / 15.07.04

or, oddly enough, a British intelligence agent

"The name's Leary. Timothy Leary."

"How would you like your Hallucinogenic Martini, Mr Leary?"

"Shaken, not stirred."

17:37 / 15.07.04

It may very well be a legend, GL. If so, it's one Leary started himself, but it's not as if he was above a bit of self-aggrandizing P.R. or anything...

Timothy Leary: "I would say, that one of the greatest pranks that I enjoyed was escaping from prison. I had to take a lot of psychological tests during the classification period, and many of the tests I designed myself, so I took the tests in such a way that I was profiled as a very conforming, conventional person who would not possibly escape, and who had a great interest in gardening and forestry. So they put me in a place where it was easier to escape. And it was a very acrobatic and dangerous escape, because it was under the lights of sharpshooters and so forth. And when I hit the ground and ran out and got picked up by the car, I wanted to be able to get out at least to the highway. If they caught me after that, at least I had made that much of an escape..."

I think the rest of the story is that his wife picks him up, the Weather Underground spirits him to Algeria, and eventually the Feds catch up to him and kidnap him in Afghanistan. He lands back in prison - maximum security this time - and spends lots of time chained to a wall and/or in solitary confinement. All this, if I'm not mistaken, for marijuana possession or something equally inane. Anecdotal and possibly apocryphal story, but one of those things that gets dragged out a lot in anti-war-on-drugs circles as proof of the Feds' unreasoning persecution of drug users and promoters and anyone who runs against the establishment status quo.

18:46 / 15.07.04

The story about him being a CIA agent is IIRC rumour put about by the political right to discredit him. I think it's pretty silly and I discount it, personally.

06:33 / 16.07.04

I feel that Uncle Tim, in all of his masks, played a very important role in human evolution. He was the archetypal Trickster. His work defined a great social utopia unfettered by the darkness and madness so profound in the last 100 years. May his legacy live on.

Let me recount a personal anecdote.

Many years ago in college I was a very active member of a campus group called Millbrook West. As the name suggests we were focused on the phenomenon of entheogens. In our 2 year duration we managed to bring most of the top heads in the field to speak at UCSC. Among them was Dr. Leary who spoke in the Porter dining hall.

After the lecture we went to Bruce Eisner's house. He lived in Santa Cruz and was one of our champions at the time. Myself and about 6 or 7 close friends were all in Bruce's study with Tim, passing around my chillum filled with herb grown by my hands (a bit of gloating here). Now mind you this was about the peak of my psychedelic days so things were often profoundly fluid and meaningful. As we sat smoking my friend Marc looked at Brandy and saw a large yellow-banded garden spider crawling in her hair. He was shocked and checked with Jody next to him, Ashen, she had seen it to. They looked at Tim and he was staring straight at them with this manic smile. They looked back at Brandy and the spider was gone.
The Good Doctor got up, turned off the lights and proclaimed, "And now... I leave you in the light!", and flipped the switch back on, exiting the room.

And that's my Tim Leary story.

farseer /pokes out an i

17:38 / 16.07.04

I first read Leary with "Info-Psychology: A Revision of Exo-Psychology", now out of print (as far as I can tell.) It was an interesting read, introduced me to the 8 circuits-etc of human brains/evolution theory, and that sparked an interest in meta-programming in general that hasn't ever ebbed. Some folks think the book is dated, but I'm still amused by it. Pretty short. And has diagrams you're instructed to color/draw in, which was my first experience with an 'interactive book' besides coloring books...

I think that I dig the most the later-on Leary, when he embraced the Internet as revolutionary tool of idea-sharing and etc. etc. www.leary.com had some good resources- some of his writing, speeches, and whatnot, but it's down for 'renovation'...

21:58 / 17.07.04

theres a neat cd called "beyond life with timothy leary" some very chill indian esque tracks, blissful, but also some cheesy raver friendly junk

23:09 / 17.07.04

Fans of T Leary should check out 7-Up, which he did with Ash Ra Tempel in the early 70's, while on the run from the feds and so on, hanging out with The Panthers, who'd got him out of prison. As with a lot of T Leary's stuff, it sounds much better than it actually is.

As with A Crowley, ( though Leary isn't really fit to clean the guy's shoes, )the life's more the thing than the art.

Although, having said that, anyone who's got anything bad to add about A Crowley can probably meet me in a car park some....

I've said too much.

" Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah 'nagl fhtagn. "

Basically, I have to try and cope with these Wels....

Transmission ended. We understand that these people were lost, by the end

06:34 / 18.07.04

Fnarg'n nyarylothep!! Aknul C'thell!

07:42 / 20.07.04

I like Leary

Robert Anton Wilson described Leary as the most intellignet person he had EVER met (whether that still stands, you wil have to ask Bob)

That alone is impressive enough in my book. I really like the idea that LSD and carefully controlled therapy can achieve change in an individual very rapidly

Leary claimed that with the correct Set and Setting and a suitably qualified therapist, Imprints (deeper than conditioning, sort of meta rules of the mind) could be accessed and reframed and as such, therapy was speeded along and highly successful. I have no idea about the validity of this claim and admittedly, Leary was a great self promoter but it is interesting that the Federal US Government subsequently banned LSD therapy and research.
I am a terrible conspiracy theorist and to me, I believe he may have been onto something. The last thing any Government wants is a populace that can think for itself and have access to such wonderful technology of mind control

Then again, I am a locked coffee container, paranoid nut job so what fo I know

10:19 / 20.07.04

i think leary is one of the very worst writers ever to try to describe non-ordinary consciousness and its effects. hippy rollocks and baseball metaphors bloody everywhere. (that's right, baseball! rounders for cavemen! way to get your message to the world tim). the quasi-cybernetic california-speak that stereotypifies(nice) the aquarian bullshitter finds its apotheosis in leary's own writings. to get the point stick with wilson who has a far finer pen imo.

the only books by leary (and friends) that i own is called the intelligence agents, with contributions from bob the bearder and thomas pynchon's wife, among others. the politics can only be described as right-wing and deeply biased towards american social models. he claims that the further east you are, the less evolved you are, and that at the time of writing (seventies) the tip of human evolution all lived and grooved in california, implying and explicitly stating an innate deficiency in russians and asians. not the kind of rhetoric that ensures against holocausts, and a very foolish (i.e linear, unidirectional) model to try to apply to geographic expansion of wealth and knowledge, given that we live on a sphere. by the time i read the intelligence agents it was clear that california was in what's perhaps describable as late-imperial capitalist malaise and that the advance-guard of wealth/intelligence had migrated west and jumped to the asian pacific rim some time earlier. the book has a good bit about models of human migration from africa, kind of stating that civilisation started just east of africa because, due to the direction of the earth's spin, 'east' is 'downhill' (although by the Ctwentieth this 'retrograde' aspect to the world's spin nurtures communism, the anti-groove, those who won't smI2le enough), and hence easier to make the effort to get to.

10:41 / 20.07.04

Yeah I think Wislon even mentioned that Westward Wealth thing in one of his books. He mentioned how wealth started in Rome, went to London, then hopped the Atlantic to New York and then to the West Coast before looking westwards to the Tiger Economies

No One said that Leary was perfect but I still believe he was onto to something important (at least in the asrly days) of the use of psychadelics

Sadly, any good he may have achieved has been watered down by the grinning media fool he later portrayed but in his day, he was a very clever and remarkable scientist/therapist (imo) and it is a shame that the Medical Establishment is no longer able to explore the possibilities of psychadelics in treating neurotic and psychotic disorders

10:52 / 20.07.04

yup fo sho, the banning of LSD as a therapeutic tool when the early results seemed so positive (90% success rate in curing alcoholism was it?) is one of the worst things

THE CONSPIRACY

has done to modern medecine i reckon.

11:21 / 20.07.04

sadly it still goes on today. What is the name of that plant extract that some Africans use?

It is a psychadelic that has been shown to have remarkable success at helping get people off opiates. If it cannot be made into an expensive drug that the pharmaceutical companies can peddle, how ling will it be before it is made illegal?

Another topic that might be of interest is this

Do a websearch for Joe Vialls and Potassium

Vialls is a bit of an anti semitic nut job but he writes reasonably well on health issues. If you can ignore his politics, then he has written good articles on vitamin B17 (LAETRILE) as an anti cancer agent

and about how Sodium Chloride (salt) is poisonous to the human body and we should all revert to Potassium Chloride. What I like about his article on Potassium is he even admits his lack of credentials but states that his worsening Angina became better when he switched his salt intake

It might all be bullshit and I myself am in no way qualified to offer a valid opinion but some of the points he makes about the drug companies are well worth noting and his writing is good enough to make it interesting if you have a few minutes to spare

keywords

Vialls+potassium

Vialls+canver+b17