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Timothy Leary
For the American baseball player use Tim Leary (baseball player)

Timothy Francis Leary, Ph.D. (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an American writer, psychologist, computer software designer, and advocate of psychedelic drug research and use. As a 1960s counterculture icon, 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

Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out (Original Movie Soundtrack)

Leary was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, an only child and the son of an Irish American dentist who abandoned the family when Timothy was 13. Leary attended three different colleges and was disciplined in each. He studied for two years at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts and was known for cutting classes, drinking, and chasing girls. He transferred to West Point to please his mother but was forced to resign after an incident involving smuggling liquor during a school field exercise. An extended period of a schoolwide "silent treatment" followed.

He earned a bachelor's degree in psychology at the University of Alabama in 1943. An obituary of Leary in The New York Times said he was a "discipline problem" there as well and "finally earned his bachelor's degree in the Army during World War II."

His education also included a master's degree at Washington State University in 1946, and a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1950. During World War II, Leary served in the U.S. Army, as a sergeant in the Medical Corps. He went on to become an assistant professor at Berkeley (1950-1955), director of psychiatric research at the Kaiser Foundation (1955-1958), and a lecturer in psychology at Harvard University (1959-1963).

In 1955, his first wife, Marianne, committed suicide, leaving him a single father with a son and daughter.

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...

Psychedelic experiments and experiences

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. Anthony Russo, a colleague of Leary's, had recently taken the psychedelic (entheogen), Psilocybe mexicana during a trip to Mexico, and shared the experience with Leary. In the summer of 1960, Leary traveled to Mexico with Russo and after drinking several shots of Tequila tried psilocybin mushrooms for the first time, an experience that drastically altered the course of his life. (Ram Dass Fierce Grace, 2001, Zeitgeist Video). In 1965 Leary commented that he "...learned more about...(his)brain and its possibilities....(and) more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than...(he)had in the preceding fifteen years of studying doing (sic) research in psychology..." (Ram Dass Fierce Grace, 2001, Zeitgeist Video). Upon his return to Harvard that fall, Leary and his associates, notably Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass), began a research program known as the Harvard Psilocybin Project. The goal was to analyze the effects of psilocybin on human subjects using a synthesized version of the drug--one of two active compounds in the so-called Mexican mushroom--that was produced according to a recipe concocted by Albert Hoffman, a research chemist at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals. The experiment later involved giving LSD to graduate students.

Leary argued that LSD, used with the right dosage, set and setting, and with the guidance of professionals, could alter behavior in unprecedented and beneficial ways. His experiments produced no murders, suicides, psychoses, and 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.

It wasn't long before any pretense to scientific detachment fell away and controlled experiments were chucked in favor of missionary zeal and contempt for all mundane exigencies. Chaotic tripping parties ensued, involving students, under "spiritual" or "philosophical" pretexts.

In 1963, Leary and Alpert were dismissed from Harvard after college authorities confirmed that undergraduates had shared in the researchers' stash. According to another account, Leary was fired for not showing up to his classes while Alpert was fired for giving psilocybin to an undergraduate in an off campus apartment. 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 students. To further complicate matters their research attracted a great deal of public attention. As a result, many people wanted to participate in the experiments but were unable to do so because of the high demand. In order to satisfy the curiosity of those who were turned away a black market for psychedelics formed near the Harvard University Campus. Sensing the growing opposition to their research Leary and Alpert founded the International Foundation for Internal Freedom in 1962 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Leary's activities attracted siblings Peggy, Billy and Tommy Hitchcock, heirs to the Mellon fortune, who in 1963 helped Leary and his associates acquire the use of a rambling mansion on an estate near Poughkeepsie, New York in a town 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.

Later the Millbrook estate was described as "the headquarters of Leary and gang for the better part of five years, a period filled with endless parties, epiphanies and breakdowns, emotional dramas of all sizes, and numerous raids and arrests, many of them on flimsy charges concocted by the local assistant district attorney, G. Gordon Liddy."

It was in Millbrook, that Leary's son and daughter, "Susan and Jack, who had been dragged through so much, beginning with their mother's death, and had been neglected and passively abused for many years, began to fall apart. (In 1988 Susan shot her boyfriend, and eventually killed herself in jail; Jack managed to repair himself, but has avoided publicity ever since.)" 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:

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.

Repeated FBI raids ended the Millbrook era. Regarding a 1966 raid by G. Gordon Liddy, Leary told Paul Krassner, "He was a government agent entering our bedroom at midnight. We had every right to shoot him. But I've never owned a weapon in my life. I have never had and never will have a gun around."

On September 19th 1966, Leary founded the League for Spiritual Discovery, a religion with LSD as its holy sacrament (by doing this, he hoped to legalize LSD based on a "freedom of religion" argument). Although The Brotherhood of Eternal Love would subsequently consider Leary their spiritual leader, The Brotherhood did not evolve out of IFIF.

File:Tim leary.jpeg
Tim Leary 1969
By Robert Altman


During late 1966 and early 1967, Leary toured college campuses to spread the psychedelic gospel by presenting a multi-media performance called "the Death of the Mind" which attempted to artistically replicate the LSD experience. Leary said the League for Spiritual Discovery was limited to 360 members and was already at its membership limit, but he encouraged others to form their own psychedelic religions. He published a pamphlet in 1967 called Start Your Own Religion to encourage people to do so (see below under "writings").

On January 14, 1967, Leary spoke at the Human Be-In, a gathering of 30,000 hippies in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and uttered his famous phrase, "Turn on, tune in, drop out."

The phrase came to him in the shower one day after Marshall McLuhan suggested to Leary that he come up with "something snappy" to promote the benefits of LSD.

At some point in the late Sixties, Leary moved to California. He made a number of friends in Hollywood. "When he married his third wife, Rosemary Woodruff, in 1967, the event was directed by Ted Markland of 'Bonanza.' All the guests were on acid."

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Leary formulated his eight circuit model of consciousness, in which he claimed that the human mind/nervous system consisted of eight circuits which when activated produce eight levels of consciousness. The model bears a superficial resemblance to and could be regarded as an elaboration of the Hindu system of chakras; not coincidentially, the concept drew its birth pangs from discussions with an Indian swami who visited Millbrook.

Leary believed that most people only access the first four of these circuits ("the Larval Circuits") in their lifetimes. The second four circuits ("the Stellar Circuits"), 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 such as yoga as well as by taking psychedelic drugs. 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.

The model was first unveiled to the world in the rare 1973 pamphlet Neurologic (written with Joanna Leary while he was in prison) but was not exhaustively formulated until the publication of Exo-Psychology (by Leary) and Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger in 1977. Wilson contributed significantly to the model after befriending Leary in the early 70s and has used it as a framework for further exposition in his Prometheus Rising, among other works.

Trouble with the law

DEA agents Don Strange (r.) and Howard Safir (l.) arrest Leary in 1972

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 Fifth Amendment. The Supreme Court concurred. In 1969, the Marijuana Tax Act was declared unconstitutional, and Timothy Leary's conviction was quashed.

In 1970, Leary received a ten-year sentence for possessing two roaches of marijuana, which he claimed were planted by the arresting officer. 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.

As a result, Leary was assigned to work as a gardener in a lower security prison, which made escape possible. Leary claimed his non-violent escape was 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.

In 1971 the couple fled to Switzerland, "where they were sheltered and effectively imprisoned by a large-living arms dealer, Michel Hauchard, who claimed he had an 'obligation as a gentleman to protect philosophers,' but mostly had a film deal in mind."(Luc Sante, New York Times Book Review, June 24, 2006)

In 1972, Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, convinced the Swiss government to imprison Leary, which they did for a month, but the Swiss refused to extradite him back to the US.

In that same year, Leary and Rosemary separated. After a brief spell with heroin addiction, Leary became involved with French-born socialite Joanna Harcourt-Smith. Leary "married" Harcourt-Smith in a pseudo-occult ceremony at a hotel two weeks after they were first introduced; she would use his surname until their breakup in early 1977. They travelled to Vienna, then Beirut and finally went to Kabul, Afghanistan in 1973. "Afghanistan had no extradition treaty with the United States, but this stricture did not apply to American airliners," Luc Sante wrote in a review of a biography of Leary. That interpretation of the law was used by U.S. authorities to capture the fugitive. "Before Leary could deplane, he was arrested by an agent of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs."

At a layover in the United Kingdom, as Leary was being flown back to the United States, he requested political asylum from Her Majesty's Government, to no avail. He was then held on five million dollars bail ($21 mil. in 2006), the highest in U. S. history to that point ; President Richard Nixon had earlier labeled him "the most dangerous man in America."

The judge remarked, "If he is allowed to travel freely, he will speak publicly and spread his ideas." Facing a total of 95 years in prison, Leary was put into solitary confinement in Folsom Prison, California, where at one point he was in a cell immediately adjacent to Charles Manson. Manson had difficulty understanding why Leary didn't try to control people when he gave them LSD (like MK-ULTRA attempted to do). "They took you off the streets," Manson allegedly said, "so that I could continue with your work."

Leary cooperated with the FBI's investigation of the Weathermen and radical attorneys, and soon the underground became aware that he had become an informant, implicating friends and helpers in exchange for a reduced sentence. Leary would later claim no one was ever prosecuted based on any information he gave to the FBI (as noted in an Open Letter from the Friends of Timothy Leary:

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."

While this claim evidently discounts the documented involvement of Leary in the set-up of Brotherhood of Eternal Love attorney George Chula and ignores his repeated attempts to set-up his fugitive ex-wife Rosemary, it should also be pointed out that Leary's affidavits and archives provided the government with a significant amount of intelligence on the American left and drug scenes and the lack of convictions directly based on Leary's testimony does not mean that his information did not strengthen the government's hand considerably.

The testimony, which had been primarily instigated by Joanna, served as a controversial rallying point for the declining American counterculture. Many of his oldest friends, including Ken Kesey, Paul Krassner, Allen Ginsberg, Jerry Rubin, and Ram Dass, were openly contemptuous of Harcourt-Smith and felt that she had "lead him by his dick" (in the words of Krassner) into serving as a traitorous pawn in a vast governmental conspiracy against the left wing. These sentiments were echoed at a rally against the "new" Leary organized by Kesey at Stamford University.

While imprisoned Leary remained a productive writer, sowing the seeds for his incarnation as a futurist lecturer with the StarSeed Series. In Starseed (1973), neurologic (1973), & Terra II: A Way Out(1974), Leary transitioned from Eastern philosophy and Aleister Crowley to outer space being a medium for spiritual transcendence as his principal frame of reference. Neurologic also added the idea of "time dilation/contraction" available to the activated brain through the cellular, DNA, or atomic level of reality. Terra II is his first detailed proposal for space colonization.

Hollywood

Leary was released from prison on April 21, 1976 by Governor Jerry Brown. The image of his ostensible betrayal still fresh in the eyes of most of his old base, he briefly contemplated a return to mainstream academia, but his applications were ignored, ushering in a period of despondent alcoholism and bitter fighting with Joanna. After briefly relocating to San Diego, he left Joanna after she became pregnant with what may or may not have been his child (she professed to sleeping with another man earlier on the day of conception; Leary refused to take a paternity test).

Loading his few possessions into a Ford Pinto, Leary established residence in Laurel Canyon and commenced the final phase of his career as a lecturer and (by his own terminology) "stand up philosopher". In 1978, he married filmmaker Barbara Blum and raised her young son as his own; they would divorce in 1993.

Leary cultivated a friendship with former foe G. Gordon Liddy. At the time, both men were near financial insolvency, and in 1982 they toured the lecture circuit as ex-cons debating the soul of America. The tour generated massive publicity and considerable funds for both figures. Along with the personal appearances, a successful documentary that chronicled the tour and the concurrent release of the wildly inaccurate autobiography, Flashbacks helped to return Leary to the spotlight.

While his stated ambition was to eventually cross over as a mainstream Hollywood personality, reticent studios and sponsors ensured that this never occurred. Nonetheless, constant touring ensured that he was able to maintain a very comfortable lifestyle by the mid-1980s, while his colorful past made him a desirable guest at A-list parties throughout the decade. He also attracted a more intellectual crowd which counted Robert Anton Wilson, David Byrne, science fiction wunderkind William Gibson, and Norman Spinrad amongst its ranks.

Leary's lecture remained fairly static throughout the era. While he continued to frequently use drugs on a private basis, rather than evangelizing and proselytizing the use of psychedelics as he had in the 1960s, the latter day Leary emphasized the importance of space colonization and an ensuing extension of the human lifespan while also providing a detailed explanation of the eight-circuit model of consciousness. He adopted the acronym "SMILE" as a succinct summary of his pre-transhumanist agenda: SM (Space Migration) + I (intelligence increase) + LE (Life extension).

Leary's colonization plan varied greatly throughout the years. According to his initial plan, 5,000 of Earth's most virile and intelligent individuals would be launched on a vessel (Starseed 1) equipped with luxurious amenities. This idea was entirely plagarized from the plotline of Paul Kantner's concept album Blows Against The Empire, which in turn was derived from Robert A. Heinlein's Lazarus Long series. In the 1980s, he came to embrace NASA scientist Gerard O'Neill's more realistic and egalitarian plans to construct giant Eden-like orbiting mini-Earths using existing technology and raw materials from the Moon.

By the early 1980s, Leary had begun to incorporate computers, the Internet, and virtual reality into his aegis of thought. In spite of establishing one of the earliest sites on the World Wide Web and his oft-quoted insight that the Internet was "the LSD of the 1990s", Leary essentially remained computer illiterate and required assistance in checking his email.

In 1989 Leary's eldest daughter, Susan, committed suicide after years of mental instability. Relations between the two had been tenuous for years, with the younger woman often casting her father as a negligent alcoholic and drug fiend responsible for her mother's death. Leary had not spoken to son Jack on a regular basis since the early 1970s.

After splitting from Barbara Leary in 1992, Leary began to ensconce himself with a much younger, artistic, and tech-savy crowd that included his granddaughters, stepson, author Douglas Rushkoff, publisher Bob Guccione, Jr., and goddaughter Winona Ryder. He was frequently spotted at raves and alternative rock concerts, including a memorable mosh pit experience at an early Smashing Pumpkins concert. Attempting to maintain the pace of the average twentysomething in his early seventies, Leary began to develop poor eating habits and steadily abused cocaine and prescription medication. This culminated in a likely overdose in late 1993 that was misdiagnosed at the time as double pneumonia.

Aging perceptibly after his hospitalization, he nonetheless managed to fufill his unceasing schedule of public apperances in 1994 while continuing to frequent the LA club scene at a slightly decelerated pace. He drank heavily and seemed prone to bouts of senility for the first time in his life, but as one friend pointed out in Robert Greenfield's biography of Leary, "there were always three to four hours per day of the lucid Tim". Later that year, Leary was arrested for the final time with girlfriend Aileen Getty, charged with illegally smoking in the baggage claim area of an Austin airport. Leary hoped that this would result in endorsement deals from the tobacco industry, but nothing materialized.

Death

In early 1995, Leary discovered that he was terminally ill with inoperable prostate cancer. Uncharacteristically, he chose not to reveal the condition to the press upon diagnosis, but capitulated after the death of Jerry Garcia in August.

Leary authored an outline for a book called Design for Dying, which attempted to show people a new perspective of death and dying. "The most important thing you do in your life is to die" he claimed happily, welcoming death with the same energetic excitement he had welcomed most other challenges in his life. Unwilling to flesh out his outline, the book was delegated to another author. Leary's de facto "family"--his staff of technophilic Gen Xers--updated his website on a daily basis as a sort of proto-blog, noting his daily intake of various illicit and legal chemical substances, with a prediliction for nitrous oxide, cigarettes, his trademark "Leary biscuits" (see below), and eventually heroin and morphine. His sterile house was completely redecorated by the staff, who had more or less moved in, with an array of surreal ornery.

In his final months thousands of visitors, well wishers and old friends visited him in his California home. An attempt at reconcilation with Jack proved to be a failure when Leary spent their alotted time conferring with Ram Dass and two of the ex-convicts from the Harvard psilocybin experiment. Until the final weeks of his illness, Leary gave many interviews discussing his new philosophy of embracing death.

For a number of years, Leary was reported to have been excited by the possibility of freezing his body in cryonic suspension. As a scientist, he didn't believe that he would be resurrected in the future, but he recognized the importance of cryonic possibilities. He called it his "duty as a futurist," and helped publicize the process. Privately he dismissed cryonics as "a joke" and did not seem to regard the process with much seriousness. Leary had relationships with two cryonic organizations, the original ALCOR and then the offshoot CRYOCARE. A cryonic tank was delivered to Leary's house in the months before his death, but 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. He briefly considered suicide, ultimately relenting at his granddaughter's bequest, and also contemplated ingesting LSD in his final hours (á la Aldous Huxley).

Leary's death was videotaped for posterity at his request, capturing his final words forever. This video has never been publicly seen but will be included in a documentary currently in production. At one point in his final delirium, he said, "Why not?" to his son Zachary. He uttered the phrase repeatedly, in different intonations and died soon after. His last word, according to Zach Leary, was "beautiful". With the movie Timothy Leary's Dead, filmmakers capitalised on his initial desire for cryogenic preservation by secretly creating a fake decapitation sequence.

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. A Pegasus rocket containing their remains was launched on February 9 1997, and remained in orbit for six years until it burnt up in the atmosphere.

Influence on others

The Psychedelic Experience was the influence for John Lennon's song "Tomorrow Never Knows" on The Beatles' album Revolver. Leary once recruited John Lennon to write a theme song for his California gubernatorial campaign (which was interrupted by his prison sentence), inspiring Lennon to come up with "Come Together", based on Leary's theme and catchphrase for the campaign. Leary was also present when Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono recorded Give Peace A Chance during one of their bed-ins in Montreal, and is mentioned in the lyrics of the song. (Lennon later denounced Leary, calling The Psychedelic Experience "that stupid book", but credited Leary's role in his life.)

Leary was the explicit subject of the Moody Blues song "Legend of a Mind", which memorialized him with the words, "Timothy Leary's dead. No, no, no, no he's outside looking in" (a lyric later incorporated into the Bongwater's cover version of the Moody Blues song "Ride My Seesaw"). At first, Leary detested the line, but later found the sense of humor to adopt "Legend of a Mind" as his theme song when he hit the lecture circuit.

John Lennon,Timothy Leary and Friends Recording Give Peace A Chance
Photo By Roy Kerwood

A number of other musical groups have admired and been influenced by Leary, including the progressive metal band Tool, the metal band Nevermore, Marcy Playground, new wave band Devo (Leary even appearing in one of their films), and Dog Fashion Disco. Nevermore mentions Leary in their lyrics, and titled one of their albums "The Politics of Ecstasy" (after Leary's book by the same name). Also, on Nevermore's self entitled album there is a song named "Timothy Leary". The Psychadelic Trance band Infected Mushroom uses a soundclip of Leary saying "Tune in, turn on, and drop out" in a song. Leary made a cameo appearance in "STUFF," a short film directed by Johnny Depp and Gibson Haynes about the Red Hot Chili Peppers guitar player John Frusciante. He also appears on 'Gila Copter' off the 'Linger Fickin Good' album by the Revolting Cocks and also appears in the video for 'Cracking Up'. Leary also appears as the father in the Suicidal Tendencies video "Possessed to Skate". He is also mentioned in the song "The Seeker" by The Who: "I asked Timothy Leary/ But he couldn't help me either".

In the movie, The Ruling Class, the character, Jack Gurney (played by Peter O'Toole), who thinks he is Jesus, claims that the voice of "Timothy O'Leary" told him he was God (see film clip here).

Timothy Leary's ideas also heavily influenced the work of Robert Anton Wilson. This influence went both ways and Leary admittedly took just as much from Wilson. Wilson's book Prometheus Rising was an in depth, highly detailed and inclusive work documenting Leary’s eight circuit model of consciousness. Although the theory originated in discussions between Leary and a Hindu holy man at Millbrook, Wilson was one of the most ardent proponents of it and introduced the theory to a mainstream audience in 1977's bestselling Cosmic Trigger. In 1989, they appeared together on stage in a dialog entitled The Inner Frontier in Cleveland, Ohio hosted by the Association for Consciousness Exploration. Wilson and Leary conversed a great deal on philosophical, political and futurist matters and became close friends who remained in contact through Leary's time in prison and up until his death. Wilson regarded Leary as a brilliant man and often is quoted as saying (paraphrase) "Leary had a great deal of 'hilaritose', the type of cheer and good humour by which it was said you could recognise a deity".

Leary's endorsement of carefree LSD usage is also reflected upon in a more negative light in the concluding chapter of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

World religion scholar Huston Smith was turned on by Leary after the two were introduced to one another by Aldous Huxley in the early 1960s. The experience was interpreted as deeply religious by Smith, and is captured in detailed religious terms in Smith's later work Cleansing of the Doors of Perception. This was Smith's one and only entheogenic experience, at the end of which he asked Leary, to paraphase, if Leary knew the power and danger of that with which he was conducting research. In Mother Jones Magazine, 1997, Smith commented:

"First, I have to say that during the three years I was involved with that Harvard study,

LSD was not only legal but respectable. Before Tim went on his unfortunate careening course, it was a legitimate research project. Though I did find evidence that, when recounted, the experiences of the Harvard group and those of mystics were impossible to tell apart -- descriptively indistinguishable -- that's not the last word. There is still a

question about the truth of the disclosure."

Trivia

  • The term "Timothy Leary tickets" is an affectionate nickname given to the small squares of blotter paper to which liquid LSD has been applied. Presumably, this is because such tabs offer a "ticket" to a whole new show: a "trip" to lands hitherto unexplored.
  • Leary appeared at the Starwood Festival in 1991 and 1992. In front of hundreds of Neo-Pagans in 1991, he declared, "I have always considered myself, when I learned what the word meant, I've always considered myself a Pagan."
  • Leary biscuits are crackers topped by a piece of cheese, butter, or other fatty topping, covered in turn with a bud of marijuana and microwaved briefly.
  • The rock band Tiamat named a song "Four Leary Biscuits" on their album "A Deeper Kind of Slumber".
  • In World War I Leary's father, "Tote" Leary, was drafted as a dental surgeon into the U.S. Army (commissioned a first lieutenant, then promoted to captain just before the war ended in 1918) and assigned to West Point, where he

consorted with fellow officers and gentlemen such as General Douglas MacArthur, then the superintendent of West Point; Captain Omar Bradley; and Lieutenant George Patton. It was at West Point on January 17, 1920, on the day after Prohibition became the law of the land, that Tim Leary was conceived. Abigail would later recall that during her pregnancy, the smell of distilling moonshine and bathtub gin hung over officers' row like a "rowdy smog." Tote once told his son that while Prohibition itself was bad, it was not nearly as bad as no booze at all. At 10:45 A.M. on October 22, 1920, seven days before his father's thirty-second birthday, Timothy Francis Leary was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. Once Abigail gave birth to a son, General MacArthur, who had also been raised on an army post, took a special interest in the family.

-- "Timothy Leary" a biography by Robert Greenfield, Chapter 1."

Creative works

Writings

  • The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality. Leary, Timothy. 1957.
  • The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Leary, Timothy and Metzner, Ralph, Alpert, Richard, Karma-Glin-Pa Bar Do Thos Grol. 1964. (ISBN 0-8065-1652-6)
  • Psychedelic Prayers & Other Meditations. Leary, Timothy. 1966. (ISBN 0-914171-84-4)
  • Start Your Own Religion. Leary, Timothy. 1967. (ISBN 1-57951-073-6)
  • The Politics of Ecstasy. Leary, Timothy. 1968. (ISBN 0-914171-33-X)
  • High Priest. Leary, Timothy. 1968. (ISBN 0-914171-80-1)
  • Confessions of a Hope Fiend. Leary, Timothy. 1973.
  • Mystery, magic & miracle: Religion in a post-Aquarian age, (A Spectrum book). Heenan, Edward F. and Jack Fritscher, Timothy Leary. 1973. Prentice-Hall. (ISBN 0-13-609032-X)
  • What Does WoMan Want?: Adventures Along the Schwartzchild Radius. Leary, Timothy. 1976. Describes techniques of "Hedonic Engineering" (Leary's name for tantric sex).
  • The Periodic Table of Evolution. Leary, Timothy. 1977
  • Exo-Psychology: A Manual on The Use of the Nervous System According to the Instructions of the Manufacturers. Leary, Timothy. 1977. Starseed/Peace Press.
  • Changing My Mind Among Others. Leary, Timothy. 1982. Prentice Hall Trade. (ISBN 0-13-127829-0)
  • Flashbacks. Leary, Timothy. 1983. Tarcher. (ISBN 0-87477-177-3)
  • Flashbacks. Leary, Timothy. 1983. (ISBN 0-87477-497-7)
  • What Does Woman Want. Leary, Timothy. 1987. New Falcon Publications. (ISBN 0-941404-62-5)
  • Info-Psychology. Leary, Timothy. 1987. (ISBN 1-56184-105-6)
  • Info-Psychology: A Revision of Exo-Psychology. Leary, Timothy. 1988. Falcon Pr. (ISBN 0-941404-60-9)
  • Change Your Brain. Leary, Timothy. 1988. (ISBN 1-57951-017-5)
  • Your Brain is God. Leary, Timothy. 1988. (ISBN 1-57951-052-3)
  • Game of Life. Leary, Timothy. 1989. New Falcon Publications. (ISBN 0-941404-64-1).(Original Edition Published in 1977)
  • Uncommon Quotes: Timothy Leary. Leary, Timothy. Audio tape. 1990. Pub Group West. (ISBN 0-929856-01-5)
  • Chaos and Cyber Culture. Leary, Timothy and Michael Horowitz, Vicki Marshall. 1994. Ronin Publishing. (ISBN 0-914171-77-1)
  • HR GIGER ARh+. Giger, H. R. (foreward). 1994. Benedikt Taschen Verlag. (ISBN 3-8228-9642-X)
  • Surfing the Conscious Nets: A Graphic Novel. Leary, Timothy and Robert Williams. 1995. Last Gap. (ISBN 0-86719-410-3)
  • The Lost Beatles Interviews Leary, Timothy (Afterword) and Geoffrey Giuliano, Brenda Giuliano. 1996. Plume. (ISBN 0-452-27025-1)
  • Intelligence Agents. Leary, Timothy. 1996. Ronin Publishing. (ISBN 1-56184-038-6)
  • Concrete & Buckshot: William S. Burroughs Paintings. Leary, Timothy and Benjamin Weissman. 1996. Smart Art Press. (ISBN 1-889195-01-4)
  • Design for Dying. Leary, Timothy, with Sirius, R. U. 1997. HarperCollins Publishers Inc. ISBN 0-06-018700-X (cloth); ISBN 0-06-092866-2 (pbk.); ISBN 0-06-018250-4 (intl).
  • El Trip de La Muerte. Leary, Timothy. 1998. Editorial Kairos. SPANISH. (ISBN 84-7245-408-8)
  • The Delicious Grace of Moving One's Hand: The Collected Sex Writings Leary, Timothy. 1999. Thunder's Mouth Press. (ISBN 1-56025-181-6)
  • Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out. Leary, Timothy. 1999. Ronin Publishing. (ISBN 1-57951-009-4)
  • Politics of Self-Determination (Self-Mastery Series). Leary, Timothy. 2001. Ronin Publishing. (ISBN 1-57951-015-9)
  • The Politics of Psychopharmacology. Leary, Timothy. 2001. Ronin Publishing. (ISBN 1-57951-056-6)
  • Musings on Human Metamorphoses. Leary, Timothy. 2002. Ronin Publishing. (ISBN 1-57951-058-2)
  • Evolutionary Agents. Leary, Timothy and Beverly A. Potter. 2004. Ronin Publishing. (ISBN 1-57951-064-7)
  • Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality: A Functional Theory and Methodology for Personality Evaluation. Leary, Timothy. 2004. Resource Publications. (ISBN 1-59244-776-7)(Original Edition Published in 1957)

Partial Discography

  • L.S.D. (1966)
  • Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out (The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (1967)
  • You Can Be Anyone This Time Around (1970)
  • The Inner Frontier with Robert Anton Wilson (1989)
  • From Psychedelics to Cybernetics (1989)
  • Origins of Dance (1990)
  • How to Operate Your Brain (1992)
  • Right to Fly (1996)
  • Beyond Life With Timothy Leary (1996)
  • Timothy Leary Live at Starwood (2001) recorded in 1991
  • Timothy Leary: A Cheerleader for Change (2001) ACE/Llewellyn Collection - Recorded in 1985
  • The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on Tibetan Book of the Dead (with Richard Alpert & Ralph Metzner) (2003)

Also Appears On:

  • Seven Up - Ash Ra Temple (1972)
  • Trance-Techno Express: From Detroit to Berlin & Back - Various (1993)
  • Ancient Lights and the Blackcore - with Scorn, Seefeel, Yanomami Shamans from the Amazon, and DJ Cheb I. Sabbah (1995)
  • Krautrock - Various (1997)
  • Sub Rosa Underwood, Vol. 3: A Sampler - Various (1998)
  • Intermenstral - Various (2001)

Multimedia performances

The progressive rock band Tool used a sample of Leary's speech for the intro to their song Third Eye as heard live on the Salival CD. The short excerpt started with the repeating phrase "Think for yourself; question authority."

  • In 1966 he recorded an album "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out" (Original release: Mercury 21131 (mono) /61131 (stereo), US 1967) which was ostensibly a "user manual" for a self-guided LSD "trip". While the album did poorly in general release, it has become one of the rarest "memorabilia" and prized of possessions of many Leary collections. One track, "All The Girls Are Yours" has been performed repeatedly by others, and was even re-recorded in 2004.
  • In 1973 he recorded the album "Seven Up" with the German band Ash Ra Tempel.
  • He was also mentioned in the musical Hair in the two songs Manchester, England and The Flesh Failures.
  • In 1981, he had a cameo in Cheech and Chong's film Nice Dreams, wherein he played a doctor who had "the key" to Cheech's escape from a mental hospital. Rather than giving him the key to his straightjacket, however, he gives him a dose of LSD.
  • In 1984, The Wooster Group created a controversy when it juxtaposed Leary and his work with excerpts from Arthur Miller's play The Crucible in their ensemble performance piece L.S.D. (... Just the High Points...)
  • In 1990 he recorded the album "The Origins of Dance" with The Grid.
  • In 1993 he was credited with the opening track "The Incredible Lightness Of Being Molecular" on the "Fifty Years of Sunshine," a CD that celebrated the invention of LSD. Recorded in Los Angeles by Genesis P-Orridge and Doug Rushkoff on March 14, 1993. Written by Dr. Timothy Leary for the special publication Lysergic Times, edited by Michael Horowitz to commemorate 50 years of LSD, and launched on April 16th 1993 in San Francisco, USA.
  • He appeared as guest vocalist on the opening track Gila Copter of the Revolting Cocks 1993 album Linger Ficken' Good... and Other Barnyard Oddities.
  • He is also mentioned in The Magnetic Fields song "Technical (You're So)" ; "You dance like a Hindu deity/Best friends with Timothy Leary"
  • He is also mentioned in The Who song "The Seeker" ; "I asked Bobby Dylan, I asked The Beatles/I asked Timothy Leary, but he couldn't help me either."
  • He is the subject of "Legend of a Mind" by the Moody Blues
  • His speech appears on a song called "Left Handshake" by Skinny Puppy. cEvin Key tried to obtain the permission to put his speech on that track, but he didn't because of copyright terms. Also, the same speech was used for a Nine Inch Nails track called "Fixed".
  • The phrase "turn on, tune in, drop out" appears on the Gil Scott Heron song "The Revolution will not be televised".
  • A song called "Timothy Leary" appears on the 1995 album "Nevermore" by the band Nevermore, lamenting his persecution by authorities. The following album was also entitled "The Politics of Ecstasy" the title of a book written by Timothy Leary in 1968.
  • A South African hardcore/punk band is named "timothylearyisinnocent" after him. However the name is more of a joke than an actual testament to Timothy Leary. The band can be found at www.myspace.com/wefuckingrockdotcom
  • He is mentioned in the fact track on the DVD of Blow
  • Cameo appearance in 1992's "Roadside Prophets" where he educates Adam Horwitz's (Beastie Boys) character on existentialism.
  • He is mentioned on a track of Daniel Tosh's CD, "True Stories I Made Up", where he states "I believe the act of non-doing is the most important act of all. Thanks Uma's Dad!" - Referring to Leary as Uma Thurman's father

Games

  • Equal parts party game, roleplaying game and social simulation, Timothy Leary's Mind Mirror was released for Commodore 64, Apple II, and MS-DOS computers by Electronic Arts in 1985. The game was a digital reinterpreting of Leary's doctoral thesis.

He later stated that he had plans to release an updated version of the program with advanced graphics (including Apple Macintosh and Amiga versions), but that never occurred.

TV appearances

References

  1. ^ "Timothy Leary, Pied Piper Of Psychedelic 60's, Dies at 75," obituary, New York Times Book Review, June 1, 1996
  2. ^ "The Nutty Professor," by Luc Sante, New York Times Book Review, June 24, 2006, review of "Timothy Leary: A Biography," by Robert Greenfield
  3. Recipe from erowid.org
  4. ^ Greenfield, Robert, "Timothy Leary" a biography, as excerpted on the web site for The New York Times

See also

External links

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