Dr. Timothy Leary takes up his part of the tale of the tribe in a Mexican hut and brings his discovery to Harvard harmoniously and there begins the political battle. Black and white magic become publicly visible for a generation. Dr. Leary is a hero of American consciousness. He began as a sophisticated academician, he encountered discoveries in his field which confounded him and his own technology, he pursued his studies where attention commanded, he arrived beyond the boundaries of public knowledge. (One might hesitate to say, like Socrates, like Galileo?)
Poor Dr. Leary! Poor Earth!
Yet here we are in Science Fiction History, in the age of Hydrogen Bomb Apocalypse, the very Kali Yuga wherein man's stupidity so overwhelms the planet that ecological catastrophe begins to rehearse old tribe-tales of Karmaic retribution, Fire & Flood & Armageddon impending.
It would be natural (in fact deja vu) that the very technology stereotyping our consciousness & desensitizing our perceptions should throw up its own antidote, an antidote synthetic such as LSD synchronous with mythic tribal Soma & Peyote. Given such historic Comedy, who could emerge from Harvard technology but one and only Dr. Leary, a respectable human being, a worldly man faced with the task of a Messiah. Inevitable! Not merely because the whole field of mental psychology as a "science" had arrived at biochemistry anyway. It was inevitable because the whole professional civilized world, like Dr. Leary, was already faced with the Messianic task of accelerated evolution (i.e. psychosocial Revolution) including an alteration of human consciousness leading to the rapid mutation of social & economic forms. This staggering realization, psychedelic, i.e. consciousness-expanding & mind-manifesting, in itself, without the use of chemical catalysts, is now forced on all of us by images of our own unconscious rising from the streets of Chicago, where city teargas was dumped on Christ's very Cross in Lincoln Park AD 1968. The drains are backing up in the cities, smog noise and physiologic poison in food turns us to insect acts, overpopulation crazes the planet, our lakes corrupt, old riverways become dank fens, tanks enter Prague and Chicago streets simultaneous, Police State arrives in every major city, starvation wastes African provinces, Chinese genocide in Tibet mirrors American genocide in Vietnam. Alarm! Alarm! howls deep as any Biblic prophecy.
Ourselves caught in the giant machine are conditioned to its terms, only holy vision or technological catastrophe or revolution break "the mind-forg'd manacles." Given one by-product of the technology that might, as it were by feed-back, correct the berserk machine and liberate the inventor's mind from captivity by robot hypnosis, Dr. Leary had in LSD an invaluable civilized elixir. For, as Dr. Jiri Roubichek observed early in Prague ("Artificial Psychosis," 1958), "LSD inhibits conditioned reflexes." And this single phrase, for rational men, might be the key to the whole gnostic mystery of LSD and Dr. Leary's role as unique, alas solitary, courageous, humane & frank public Democratic Boddhisatva-teacher of the uses of LSD in America. For he took on himself the noble task of announcing the evidence of his senses despite the scary contumely of fellow academicians, the dispraising timorous irony of scientific "professionals," the stupidity meanness self-serving cowardice and hollow vanity of bureaucratic personnel from Harvard Yard to Mexico City to Washington, from the ignorant Sheriff's office in Dutchess County NY to the inner greedy Gordon-Liddy-haunted sanctums of the US Treasury Department in D.C. , our whole "establishment" of civilization that defends us from knowledge of our own unconscious by means of policemen's clubs, and would resist the liberation of our minds and bodies by any brutish means available including teargas, napalm & the Hydrogen Bomb.
Dr. Leary conducted himself fairly & equitably, given the extraordinary nature of his knowledge; it took an innocent courage to explore his own unconditioned consciousness, to take LSD and other chemicals often enough to balance praxis with explanation, and to attempt to wed the enormity of his experience to Reason. An heroic attempt to communicate clearly and openly through civilized technologic media to his fellow citizens, despite centuries of identity brainwash accelerated now to mass neurosis and Cold War Apocalypse Paranoia required of Dr. Leary the proverbial wisdom of serpent & harmlessness of dove. . . .
Dr. Leary was jailed for theory and practice of research on LSD & Cannabis. He took the burden of giving honest public report of LSD & Cannabis in terms more accurate & harmless than the faked science of the Government Party Hacks & therefore his imprisonment was an act of insult to Science, Liberty, Common Sense, Freedom, Academy, Philosophy, Medicine, Psychology as an Art, and Poetry as a tradition of human mind-vision.
