Timothy Leary's Long Acid Trip

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Psychedelics are supposed to destroy the ego, but they didn't stop LSD pioneer Tim Leary, who never lost his penchant for self-promotion.

My intersection with LSD came at a time when Dr. Timothy Leary's legacy had been watered down to near-flavorlessness. It went as follows: One tab of acid at a late-era Grateful Dead show at Soldier Field, where I hallucinated a giant eagle and got mocked by a nurse for wearing a necklace made of Fimo beads that I'd bought in Oregon; another tab two nights later, followed by eight hours of seeing vampires crawl across a leaky apartment ceiling in Evanston, Illinois; and about a quarter-tab in the spring of 1994, which led to a night of then-stereotypically freaky New Orleans French Quarter tourism. While Leary was going about the slow process of dying online in Beverly Hills, surrounded by web geeks who hadn't been born when he began to expand his consciousness, I felt like I was sucking the fumes from a bus that had long since left the station.

In these wretched drug days of widespread crystal-meth addiction, transcontinental Xanax-popping and speed-laced Mexican ditch weed posing as The Chron, it's harder than ever to swallow the idea that mind-altering drug use could transform our staggering society. That prospect becomes even harder to entertain when you consider the most famous proponent of narcotics-fueled social change. Robert Greenfield's comprehensive biography of Leary is an epically thrilling, wicked epitaph for the vain, bizarre, self-promoting guru who, depending on your perspective, either poisoned or blessed our culture with his ridiculous "turn on, tune in and drop out" mantra. As Greenfield boldly and correctly asserts, Leary was the "wrong man" to inherit the future of psychedelic research. Psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, who coined the term "psychedelic," even compared Leary to Hitler -- not for the magnitude of his crimes (which were absurd and, other than escaping from prison, arguably not even criminal) but for the transcendent quality of his sociopathic megalomania, which he parlayed into drug guru status.

This 600-page tome doesn't really begin to percolate until Leary starts taking drugs. Until then, it's standard biography: Thoughts of an absent alcoholic father traumatize an intelligent but self-absorbed West Point dropout. A sad childhood leads our protagonist down the path to unfaithful husbandry. His first wife, the mother of his two children, commits suicide. That terrible event, which would shatter an ordinary life, barely seemed to affect Leary; if psychedelics are supposed to destroy the ego, they didn't do a very good job with Tim Leary. The book quotes an anthropologist, experienced with tribal drug-taking cultures, who in the fall of 1960 said that peyote had "no place in our culture or our mythology. We don't have anything that enables us to explain or deal with this and therefore I don't think it is something we can introduce." But by then it was too late. Leary had already slipped acid into the well.

In Greenfield's telling, the great decade began as self-parody in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while Leary was still a lecturer at Harvard. More specifically, it was Halloween, 1960. Leary was conducting sleazy, absurd drug "experiments" at his house. A houseguest ingested a lot of psilocybin. Meanwhile, Leary's preteen daughter Susan was having a slumber party upstairs. The guest went upstairs and lay in the bed in the middle of the room. When Leary pulled him out, his guest referred to the girls as "middle-class bitches" who needed him to "stir them up a little." Leary almost let him, deciding at the last second that the party was Susan's "trip." He said, "You have the right to do anything you want so long as you don't lay your trip on anyone else." What Greenfield refers to as "the first commandment of the psychedelic era" was actually born as a way to keep a guy from sexually molesting a bunch of girls. I suppose Leary should, at least, get credit for preventing that.

Greenfield systematically shatters the still-self-perpetuating myths of what was once called the counterculture, portraying it as little more than a freaky mirror image of mainstream celebrity-obsessed America. He's brilliant at charting the course that self-styled 1960s rebels took toward careerism and self-aggrandisement, though certain characters, like Ken Kesey and Richard Alpert/Baba Ram Dass, come off better than others. A little more than halfway through the book, as the tumult of 1968 swirls around Leary, Greenfield pinpoints the birth of the "speaker-leader phenomenon, which made stars out of the leading counterculture figures":


Tim was a pioneer of the lifestyle. His view of what was going on in America was restricted to what he saw on his way to and from the airport, the questions he answered after his lecture, and whatever happened at the party that followed. Like a rock star, Tim appeared, performed, and then left. Between his own life and the lives of those more than twenty-five years younger than he, there was virtually no connection.

Throughout, Leary comes off as a political flake, with the notable exception of his futile but passionate attempts to get the Yippies to call off the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests. Otherwise, he was either behind the times or way off in his assessments. He didn't attend his first peace rally until 1969. His meandering testimony in front of Ted Kennedy at the 1966 Senate LSD hearings (which Greenfield re-creates brilliantly) hurt his cause, though maybe his cause was always self-promotion anyway. He allowed the Weathermen to break him out of prison and then escaped to Algeria, where he aligned himself with a clearly insane Eldridge Cleaver.

When Leary arrives in Algeria for a period of "exile" after his dramatic California prison break, Greenfield's book really takes off. Zonked on more drugs and booze than seems humanly possible, Leary continually misread his own surroundings. In an October 1970 letter to Allen Ginsberg, he described Algeria -- an austere Muslim state ruled by a military dictatorship -- as "perfect. Great political Satori.... Socialism works here.... Young people smiling... no irritation... no money hustle, spirit of youth & growth." He started carrying guns and advocating violence, praising dynamite as "the white light, the external manifestation of the inner white light of the Buddha." He encouraged the Weathermen to start hijacking planes and kidnapping "prominent sports figures." Then the zeitgeist shifted. Leary became a bit of an underdog. The trip may be enjoyable and enlightening, but the hangover is always more dramatic.

At this point, Greenfield's portrayal softens. Leary suddenly becomes a figure of pathos, a cocaine-snorting Willy Loman who can't understand that the world has no more use for him. Under the strange thrall of an international arms dealer in Switzerland, Leary runs into Andy Warhol at a party. "There are only three real geniuses in America," Greenfield quotes him as saying to Warhol. "You and me, and the third changes all the time." Less true words were never spoken.

No scene in the book captures that lost hope better than an encounter between Leary and Charles Manson, who occupied an adjacent room in solitary confinement at Folsom Prison in the mid-1970s. Compared with Manson, Timothy Leary was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The transcription of their conversations comes from Leary's own writings and therefore isn't particularly reliable, but it still illuminates.

Manson: "We were all your students, you know. You had everyone looking up to you. You could have led the people anywhere you wanted.... And you didn't tell them what to do." Leary: "I didn't want to impose my realities. The idea is that everybody takes responsibility for his nervous system, creates his own reality. Anything else is brainwashing." Manson: "That was your mistake. No one wants responsibility. Everyone wants to be told what to do, what to believe, what's really true and really real."

More than anyone else, Leary embodied the mixed-up dreams of the '60s. It's sad that Charles Manson saw into the American psyche more accurately than he did. If Leary's ideals got flushed away so quickly, like a stash in an airport bathroom, he couldn't possibly have been right.

Leary's life was one of those rare American ones with a second act. After the 1970s he moved to Beverly Hills, went on a political minstrel-show lecture tour with G. Gordon Liddy, snorted coke in the Playboy Mansion with Hugh Hefner and hung out at the Viper Room. He also developed some of the earliest interactive computer games. What lessons are we to learn from such a life? Obviously, the specifics don't apply to us ordinary mortals. And we certainly don't want to follow Leary's lead in terms of family life. As Greenfield painstakingly details, he was a serially bad husband and an even worse father. Leary's careerism, while quintessentially American, was corrosive and destructive, another warning siren against the false promises of celebrity-obsessed modernity.

Yet his life contained surprising pockets of peace, extraordinary grace notes. When Leary's famous commune in Millbrook, New York, wasn't being raided by local authorities or invaded by trashy jet-setting hipsters, people achieved transcendence there, or at least had a lot of fun. As Greenfield writes, "When Charlie Mingus heard the tap in the sink yowling, followed by banging noises, he took out his bass and began playing counterpoint." Of all the crazy scenes in the book, that's the one I would have most liked to see, though I also enjoyed the one where Leary's wife attempts a seduction of Jerry Brown in order to blackmail Leary out of prison.

Used in the right doses by the right people, under controlled circumstances, certain drugs have creative potential. Despite Leary's many ego-fueled missteps, his ideas about the transformative powers of psychedelic drugs still hold some water. In his mind-bending book Breaking Open the Head, Daniel Pinchbeck -- who is rapidly becoming our generation's foremost proponent of controlled psychedelic experimentation--called Leary the "central villain in the psychedelic saga...naïve, charismatic, sloppy, self-promotional and out of control." It's hard to argue with that assessment, but in later interviews, Pinchbeck softened this view, saying that Leary was a product of his time, a temporal blip in human understanding of psychedelic substances.

While I find Leary's writing bloated, self-absorbed and, let's face it, hippy-dippy and dated, Pinchbeck makes a far more persuasive, modern case for psychedelics. Breaking Open the Head is The Doors of Perception written from a skeptical East Village perspective. Pinchbeck's latest book, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, expands on his thesis, arguing that psychedelics may be opening a portal to a transformation of consciousness that has the potential to change the world forever. I can't say whether I believe that or not, and I certainly hope the Phoenix Suns win an NBA title before this evolution happens, but Pinchbeck's skeptical, analytic reportorial approach to the subject appeals to my brain far more than Leary's musty counterculture rhetoric.

It was, in fact, Pinchbeck who led me to start experimenting with psychedelic drugs again last year. I had neither the time, the resources nor the physical energy to go on an acid trip again, and I didn't have much interest, either. But I was really into the idea of trying something called Salvia divinorum. Salvia is a branch of the sage family that has long been known to have psychotropic qualities. According to Pinchbeck, the trips are short, pleasant and revelatory (though not to be taken lightly), and they don't cause much of a hangover. Salvia visions tend to center around a whimsical spirit that appears to be half-woman, half-plant. She occupies a domain that appears as a combination of fairy garden wonderland and surrealist painting. That sounded interesting to me.

I did some research and found the dosage I thought would suit me best. Though the drug is still legal where I live, it's sold in some pretty sketchy stores. I found one and made the buy. Later that night, I settled into my easy chair with a big cup of water by my side and smoked a bowl. Immediately, I felt myself being pressed back into my chair, and then I closed my eyes. I traveled through a series of doors that slammed behind me as I passed them, while hearing a strange, but not scary, rhythmic chant, something along the lines of "welcome, welcome," and then I was hurtling through space. I landed in a garden, and sure enough I met the spirit. She showed me around for a couple of minutes, and then I opened my eyes. The trip was over.

About ten days later I went on another voyage, which proved pretty similar. Another night I smoked the Salvia; it seemed to have little effect. I fell asleep instead of tripping. In the middle of the night, I perceived that a flash of light had filled the room, though it didn't wake up my wife. I heard, and even felt, an enormous thud. A squat, thick stone warrior was standing at the foot of my bed, unmoving, unspeaking. It was like he'd been sent to me as a gift or an offering, or maybe a warning.

Dude. That was freaky.

Salvia has definitely altered my perception of the world. I now walk around wondering if there really are other dimensions out there, untouched and unnoticed by our under-used brains. Timothy Leary would have been proud. But if we can learn anything from Leary's experience, it's that we don't need drug prophets, and that collective tripping isn't going to transform reality; it's just going to shift our present reality around a little. I share my experience because I think it's interesting, not because I recommend it. This is my trip, and I'm not going to lay it on anyone else.

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Timothy Leary's Long Acid Trip
By Neal Pollack, The Nation. Posted July 29, 2006.
http://www.alternet.org/drugreporter/39626/
 
In his mind-bending book Breaking Open the Head, Daniel Pinchbeck -- who is rapidly becoming our generation's foremost proponent of controlled psychedelic experimentation...

If anything, this article's writer is the one who's full of it. Pinchbeck isn't much to speak of. There are plenty of far better reaching sources on psychedelics.
 
It's so easy to bash leary, but the fact is he had great things to say. I believe he just got caught up in the roll.

But he was never realy that great of a person, it can be argued taht he drove his wife to suiside (she baked him a cake on his birthday befor she kileld her self....)

what leary seemed to promote was possibility and teh freedom to express it in any way you deemed fit as long as it didnt stop someone else from doing the same.


his best lines ever were, "question authority, think for your self" this is the truest thing that can ever be said. authority is anything there to explain anything/everything. question it and coem to your own truths from doing so. dont allow someone else to tell you how things are because the zero point of all knowledge is based off of nothing. knowledge is in fact fake, it is made up, its not real. It is only a fraction of the evereything which is everything molded into a form to which we can seemly understand. but to understand the understanding of this allows it to crumble back into the "everything". this is teh message I got from leary, when I questioned his authorty. this is my own truth.
 
reviewing author is a cunt, even if leary is too

vampires and giant eagles? wtf?
 
I thought the review was well written, and I agree that Timothy Leary was an asshole but that shouldn't condemn his research. He had some valuable revelations and good research, but took it out of control and got caught up in the atmosphere. Leary's actions truly did bring about the death of psychedelic research, but if drug prohibition ends and this field of research is ever opened up, some of his research may be viable.
 
otacon451 said:
imho, isnt it basically Leary's fault there hasnt been any significant research on psychedelics in the last 4 decades, excluding Strassman's basic work and a few others?
that is the most ridiculous unfounded statement. if anything (this is very very loosly said) you could blame The Merry Pranksters, for dosing people w/o there own knowledge of what they are taking. or you could blame the media who butchered the image of psychadelics..i guess you could blame the people that couldnt handle it and talked bad about it...or maybe the government for dosing people w/o the people knowing it, or making it illegal. BUT thats like blaming video games for people getting shot and cars getting stolen. leary was eccentric and was taped saying things like "there are two kinds of people, ones who have eaten lsd, and ones who havent" which singled people out. to see this crazy old guy that got kicked out of harvard saying that everything they know is false to me isnt that crazy (ive eaten lsd, and understand the context to why these events occured) to someone who hasn't its kind of unsettleing. it was completly inevitable that psychadelics became illegal, so blaming anything/anyone would be ridiculous and unfounded.
 
cornollio said:
that is the most ridiculous unfounded statement. if anything (this is very very loosly said) you could blame The Merry Pranksters, for dosing people w/o there own knowledge of what they are taking. or you could blame the media who butchered the image of psychadelics..i guess you could blame the people that couldnt handle it and talked bad about it...or maybe the government for dosing people w/o the people knowing it, or making it illegal. BUT thats like blaming video games for people getting shot and cars getting stolen. leary was eccentric and was taped saying things like "there are two kinds of people, ones who have eaten lsd, and ones who havent" which singled people out. to see this crazy old guy that got kicked out of harvard saying that everything they know is false to me isnt that crazy (ive eaten lsd, and understand the context to why these events occured) to someone who hasn't its kind of unsettleing. it was completly inevitable that psychadelics became illegal, so blaming anything/anyone would be ridiculous and unfounded.

I agree, he took psychedelics out of the labrotory and onto the streets. thousands, if not millions of people would ahve never had teh plessure of experiencing something as beautiful as the LSD experienc if it wasnt for leary. He just got caught up in it, society, human nature in general may enver be ready for what it was he spoke of. To many people are too closed minded to fully udnerstand teh possibility of the mind as he saw it. ANYTHING is possible.
 
Youkai and Cornollio, read Aldous Huxley then read some Leary and see if you can't tell the difference. As I said earlier, some of his research is valid, but going on television or even on record and telling kids to drop out of school is stupid. He went from doing controlled experiments to holding tripping parties with freaks and artists to being a cultural figure proposing mass use of LSD. Acid is a very special and unique thing, and psychedelics in general create an interesting and engaging field of research. Timothy Leary invalidated this by supposing that anyone who took acid would have a sublime experience and revolutionize society, and then when he failed he became a novelty, just another burnt out celebrity of the acid culture clinging to some fleating notoriety.
 
BHN said:
...going on television or even on record and telling kids to drop out of school is stupid.

I really don't believe Leary was suggesting that kids drop out of school. I think that to interpret "Turn on, tune in, drop out" that way is taking it wildly out of context.

According to the Wikipedia:
Leary later explained in his 1983 autobiography Flashbacks: "'Turn on' meant go within to activate your neutral 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.'"
 
I'm not referring to Turn on, tune in, drop out. This a seperate incidence where Leary actually told kids explicity to drop out of school because it was useless. It was in "The Drug Years." I'll see if I can find an internet source. I understand it was just polemics, but it's still irresponsible.
 
I see now that that was pretty unclear, though. My fault:)
 
BHN said:
I'm not referring to Turn on, tune in, drop out. This a seperate incidence where Leary actually told kids explicity to drop out of school because it was useless. It was in "The Drug Years." I'll see if I can find an internet source. I understand it was just polemics, but it's still irresponsible.

why not? fuck school, bunch of brain washing. indepent learning is far suppierer. but even that useless. we developed fake knowledge. leary understood that you cant understand. everything is like this its fucking insane. seriously, you dont even know anything, neigher do I, its all fake but still real as real can be, but then real cant be what ever it is.

we are born to believe we have dominion, this is a falsehood created our of fear. not flight or fright fear but fear of sanity. true sanity is slight comatose.
 
BHN said:
I'm not referring to Turn on, tune in, drop out. This a seperate incidence where Leary actually told kids explicity to drop out of school because it was useless. It was in "The Drug Years." I'll see if I can find an internet source. I understand it was just polemics, but it's still irresponsible.


could this be what you were refering to?

Leary: Yes...it's exactly there that, I think, a clear-cut statement is needed. The American educational system is a narcotic, addictive process...

Watts: Right!

Leary: ...and we must have NOTHING to do with it. Drop out of school, drop out of college, don't be an activist...

Watts: But we've got to do something else.

Leary: Drop OUT of school...

Ginsberg: Where are you gonna learn engineering, or astronomy, or anything like that?

Leary: The way men have always learned the important things in life. Face to face with a teacher, with a guru. Because very little...

Ginsberg: What about astronomy...like calculation of star rations...things like that?

Leary: If any drop-out wants to do that, he can do it...I can tell him how to do it.
 
so your telling me, that when leary gave lsd to prison inmates in an attempt to re-sew the fabric of their moral values, that he wasnt doing valid research?! EVERY trip they did is recorded piece of history and has some redeeming value to it. now im not saying that he was an angel, but saying that he was the death of research? IT WAS INEVITABLE, and atleast this way there is a foundation for counter culter for years to come. because RESEARCH isnt only in a lab. its inside you, and thats what leary wanted. he was what 60 years old when he turned on, he felt that if it impacted his life so much why shouldnt everyone else get this opportunity. blame society if your looking for a scape goat, pointing fingers at leary is cheap and easy. leary spent alot of time trying to get legislation passed for responsible drug use, something alot of people were afraid to do, and he paid the price for being in the spotlight. the fact that youve fed into what society thought of leary and his image is fucked up. becuase his intentions were pure, just misdirected.
 
cornollio said:
so your telling me, that when leary gave lsd to prison inmates in an attempt to re-sew the fabric of their moral values, that he wasnt doing valid research?! EVERY trip they did is recorded piece of history and has some redeeming value to it. now im not saying that he was an angel, but saying that he was the death of research? IT WAS INEVITABLE, and atleast this way there is a foundation for counter culter for years to come. because RESEARCH isnt only in a lab. its inside you, and thats what leary wanted. he was what 60 years old when he turned on, he felt that if it impacted his life so much why shouldnt everyone else get this opportunity. blame society if your looking for a scape goat, pointing fingers at leary is cheap and easy. leary spent alot of time trying to get legislation passed for responsible drug use, something alot of people were afraid to do, and he paid the price for being in the spotlight. the fact that youve fed into what society thought of leary and his image is fucked up. becuase his intentions were pure, just misdirected.

it was psilocin thatw as given to the inmates, mightw ant to freshen' up on your psychedelic history.
 
I think a large amount of Leary's research is valid and viable, but the tripping parties he held in upstate New York and all of his self-important speaches on this and that were complete drivel. I happen to think that "The Psychedelic Experience" is one of the greatest tripping guides out there, but that doesn't validate all of his rhetorical, bullshit research. I don't think that the death of psychedelic research was inevitable in the least bit, if done responsibly and scientifically there would've been no reason to outlaw it. I'll grant you that Leary wasn't solely responsible for the death of psychedelic research, but him and his learyist cohorts spelled the death of the movement. If Timothy Leary was truly interested in giving everyone the oppurtunity to have a sublime spiritual trip, he would've used society against itself, rather than waging war on society. His intentions may have been somewhat pure in the beginning, but he became caught up in the fame and celebrity status he gained. I still read Leary, I still respect many of his opinions but that doesn't validate his outrageous public image, or his irresponsible use of his fame. And Youkai, I understand and respect your opinion but that's kind of a philosophical loophole, nothing could ever be resolved. Finally, theseeker, that looks familiar but I'm not exactly sure if it's the one I'm talking about.
 
BHN said:
And Youkai, I understand and respect your opinion but that's kind of a philosophical loophole, nothing could ever be resolved.
thats the point. nothing is ever resolved, because there is nothing to resolve. Though there is somthing I am looking for, and I feel I cannever find it. this angers me but I ultimately must let it go, there is nothing to it but to do it.
 
I like that. I mean it's an interesting philosophy. But I guess the point I'm trying to make, to you at least, is that Leary may have understood that you can't understand, but he spoiled this revelation for the rest of us by trying to create a counter culture to take over society. Maybe some of his intentions were good, but it seems apparent that he enjoyed basking (sp?) in his celebrity status and acted as such. He had some good ideas, and some good research but he fucked up horribly, and fucked everything up for the rest of us.
 
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