Timothy Leary

Dr. Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an American writer, psychologist, campaigner for psychedelic drug research and use, 60s counterculture icon and computer software designer. He is most famous as a proponent of the therapeutic and spiritual benefits of LSD. During the 1960s, he coined and popularized the catch phrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out."

Biography

Early life

Leary was born in Springfield, Massachusetts the son of an Irish American dentist, who abandoned the family when Timothy was a teenager. Leary studied briefly at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, but reacted badly to the strict training at the Jesuit institution. He also attended West Point but was forced to resign after an incident involving smuggling liquor during a school field exercise and an extended period of a schoolwide "silent treatment." There is evidence that, as one of the few Irish Catholics then attending West Point, he was made a scapegoat as his Protestant co-conspirators were allowed to continue their studies.

Related Topics:
Springfield, Massachusetts - Irish American - College of the Holy Cross - Worcester, Massachusetts - Jesuit - West Point - Irish Catholic - Protestant

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He earned a bachelor's degree in psychology at the University of Alabama in 1943. He received a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1950. He went on to become an assistant professor at Berkeley (1950-1955), a director of research at the Kaiser Foundation (1955-1958), and a lecturer in psychology at Harvard University (1959-1963). Leary later described these years disparagingly, writing that he had been an anonymous institutional employee who drove to work each morning in a long line of commuter cars and drove home each night and drank martinis .... like several million middle-class, liberal, intellectual robots.

Related Topics:
Bachelor's degree - Psychology - University of Alabama - Ph.D. - University of California, Berkeley - Kaiser Foundation - Harvard University - Martini

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Exploration of psychedelics

On May 13, 1957, Life Magazine published an article by R. Gordon Wasson that documented (and popularized) the use of entheogens in the religious ceremony of the indigenous Mazatec people of Mexico.http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/life.htm Influenced by Wasson's article, Leary traveled to Mexico, where he tried psilocybin mushrooms, an experience that drastically altered the course of his life. Upon his return to Harvard in 1960, Leary and his associates, notably Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass), began the Harvard Psilocybin Project conducting research into the effects of psilocybin and later LSD with graduate students.

Related Topics:
Life Magazine - R. Gordon Wasson - Entheogens - Mazatec - Mexico - Psilocybin - Mushroom - 1960 - Ram Dass - Harvard Psilocybin Project

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Leary argued that LSD, used with the right dosage, set and setting, and preferably with the guidance of professionals, could alter behavior in unprecedented and beneficial ways. His experiments produced no murders, suicides, psychoses, and supposedly no bad trips. The goals of Leary's research included finding better ways to treat alcoholism and to reform convicted criminals. Many of Leary's research participants reported profound mystical and spiritual experiences, which they claim permanently altered their lives in a very positive manner.

Related Topics:
Set and setting - Alcoholism - Criminal - Mystic

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Leary and Alpert were dismissed from Harvard in 1963. Their colleagues were uneasy about the nature of their research, and some parents complained to the university administration about the distribution of hallucinogens to their children. Unfazed, the two relocated to a large mansion in New York called Millbrook and continued their experiments. Leary later wrote, We saw ourselves as anthropologists from the twenty-first century inhabiting a time module set somewhere in the dark ages of the 1960s. On this space colony we were attempting to create a new paganism and a new dedication to life as art. Repeated FBI raids ended the Millbrook era.

Related Topics:
1963 - New York - FBI

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In 1964, Leary co-authored a book with Ralph Metzner called The Psychedelic Experience, ostensibly based upon the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In it he writes:

Related Topics:
Ralph Metzner - Tibetan Book of the Dead

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A psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness. The scope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of space-time dimensions, and of the ego or identity. Such experiences of enlarged consciousness can occur in a variety of ways: sensory deprivation, yoga exercises, disciplined meditation, religious or aesthetic ecstasies, or spontaneously. Most recently they have become available to anyone through the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, etc. Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key - it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.

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Leary later went on to propose his eight circuit model of consciousness, in which he claimed that the human mind consisted of eight circuits of consciousness. He believed that most people only access four of these circuits in their lifetimes. The other four, Leary claimed, were evolutionary off-shoots of the first four and were equipped to encompass life in space, as well as expansion of consciousness that would be necessary to make further scientific and social progress. Leary suggested that some people may shift to the latter four gears by delving into meditation and other spiritual endeavors. An example of the information Leary cited as evidence for the purpose of the "higher" four circuits was the feeling of floating and uninhibited motion experienced by users of marijuana. In the eight-circuit model of consciousness, a primary theoretical function of the fifth circuit (the first of the four developed for life in outer space) is to allow humans to become accustomed to life in a zero or low gravity environment.

Related Topics:
Eight circuit model of consciousness - Marijuana

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Trouble with the law

Leary's first run in with the law came in 1965. During a border crossing from Mexico into the United States, his daughter was caught with marijuana. After taking responsibility for the controlled substance, Leary was convicted of possession under the marijuana tax act and sentenced to 30 years in jail. Soon after, however, he appealed the case, claiming the marijuana tax act was in fact unconstitutional, as it required a degree of self-incrimination. Leary claimed this was in stark violation of the 5th amendment. The supreme court concurred, and in 1969 the marijuana tax act was declared unconstitutional, and Timothy Leary's conviction was quashed.

Related Topics:
Mexico - Marijuana tax act - Self-incrimination - 5th amendment - Supreme court

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In 1970, Leary was again convicted of possession of marijuana and was sentenced to jail. When Leary arrived in prison, he was given psychological tests that were used to assign inmates to appropriate work details. Having designed many of the tests himself, Leary answered them in such a way that he seemed to be a very conforming, conventional person with a great interest in forestry and gardening.

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As a result, Leary was assigned to work as a gardener in a lower security prison, which made escape possible. Leary considered his non-violent escape to be a humorous prank and left a challenging note for the authorities to find after he was gone. For a fee paid by The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the Weathermen smuggled Leary and his wife Rosemary Woodruff Leary out of the United States and into Algeria. The couple's plan to take refuge with the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver failed after Cleaver attempted to hold Leary hostage. Leary described his expectation of reasonableness from a black militant as "naive." The couple fled to Switzerland.

Related Topics:
The Brotherhood of Eternal Love - Weathermen - Rosemary Woodruff Leary - Algeria - Black Panther - Eldridge Cleaver - Switzerland

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In 1974, having separated from Rosemary, Timothy Leary was illegally kidnapped by Interpol agents at an airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, and then transported to the United States. (Afghanistan had no extradition treaty with the US.) He was then held on five million dollars bail, the highest in US history; President Richard Nixon had earlier labeled him "the most dangerous man in America." He cooperated with the FBI's investigation of the Weathermen, becoming an informant who implicated friends and helpers in exchange for a reduced sentence. However, no one was ever prosecuted based on any information Leary gave to the FBI, as noted in an Open Letter from the Friends of Timothy Leary:

Related Topics:
Interpol - Kabul - Afghanistan - Richard Nixon - Weathermen

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The Weather Underground, the radical left organization responsible for his escape, was not impacted by his testimony. Histories written about the Weather Underground usually mention the Leary chapter in terms of the escape for which they proudly took credit. Leary sent information to the Weather Underground through a sympathetic prisoner that he was considering making a deal with the FBI and waited for their approval. The return message was "we understand."

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Leary appears to have been smart and audacious enough to have played along without compromising those who had helped him. This sort of escapade is in line with others throughout his life, such as his manipulation of psychological test responses that enabled him to get into a prison from which he could engineer his escape, and his confrontation of FBI agents who were terrifying an innocent young Hispanic woman during the Millbrook bust (led by G. Gordon Liddy), which was described in an eye-witness interview in the "Timothy Leary's Dead" (TLD) movie DVD (see below). Leary was released on April 21, 1976, by Governor Jerry Brown.

Related Topics:
G. Gordon Liddy - Jerry Brown

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Further evidence of Leary's savvy was his cultivation of a friendship with former foe G. Gordon Liddy (whose former boss, Richard Nixon, had ordered him to destroy Leary), after his release from prison. At the time, both men were near financial insolvency, and Leary correctly guessed that they could make a small fortune touring the country as ex-cons debating the soul of America.

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Death

In the months before his death from inoperable prostate cancer, Leary authored a book called Design for Dying, which attempted to show people a new perspective of death and dying.

Related Topics:
Prostate cancer - Death - Dying

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For a number of years, Leary was excited by the possibility of freezing his body in cryonic suspension. As a scientist himself, he didn't believe that he would be resurrected in the future, but he recognized the importance of cryonic possibilities and was generally an advocate of future sciences. He called it his "duty as a futurist," and helped publicize the process. Leary had relationships with two cryonic organizations, the original ALCOR and then the offshoot CRYOCARE. When these relationships soured due to a great lack of trust, Leary requested that his body be cremated, which it was, and distributed among his friends and family.

Related Topics:
Cryonic suspension - ALCOR - CRYOCARE

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Leary's death was videotaped for posterity, capturing his final words forever. At one point in his final delirium, he said, "Why not?" to his step-son Zachery. He uttered the phrase repeatedly, in different intonations and died soon after. His last word, according to Zach Leary, was "beautiful." The death/suicide video was the culmination of the movie, Timothy Leary's Dead, and the filmmakers capitalised on his initial desire for cryogenic preservation by secretly creating a fake decapitation sequence without permission from Leary or his family, or so some claim. After the movie's release, the filmmakers declined to admit the scene's falsehood, possibly as a method to generate hype and sell tickets.

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The fake was so effective that many people even question the accuracy of claims that it was faked. It has become a subject of debate where the side who claims it was faked has been unable to provide references and the truth has remained unknowable. To complicate the matter further, the final credits of the film are interspersed with explicitly clear scenes of Leary cooperating with specialists as they make a mold of his head (using the same technique and material that is used by dentists to make castings of teeth and for Hollywood special effects), ostensibly to make the fake head used in the decapitation scenes. Or, was this sequence filmed precisely to make it impossible to tell that the decapitation was real, in order to protect Leary's family, friends, and the filmmakers from prosecution?

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After his death, seven grams of Leary's ashes were arranged by his friend at Celestis to be buried in space aboard a rocket carrying the remains of 24 other people including Gene Roddenberry (creator of Star Trek), Gerard O'Neill (space physicist), Krafft Ehricke (rocket scientist), and others.

Related Topics:
Celestis - Buried in space - Gene Roddenberry - Star Trek - Gerard O'Neill - Krafft Ehricke

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