Article

Tim Leary
​The Return of the Space Cowboy
by Rand Marsh

William S. Burroughs called him a "true visionary of the potential of the human mind and spirit."  Allen Ginsberg says he is "a hero of American consciousness." But is Timothy Leary self-confessed cyber-punk, at 72 really the last American hero?

Not everyone who knows who Tmothy Leary is would agree his contribution to the collective consciousness of this country and the world has been entirely positive.  Some of his critics see his 'turn on, tune in and drop out' as the opening salvo hearlading the beginning of the drug generation.  A generation that won't go away.

If the drugged out generation of hippies and flower children spawned a generation marked 'X'.  And if this 'X'ed out generation lost its way in tattoos and track marks, was it his fault?

It took two visits to get Tim to sit down.  The first time he ducks in and out of conversation with his secretary, friends and a young graphic artist, ever returning to his computer to spill out his latest thought.  Time doesn't like being interviewed.  He said, "This is what we'll do, I'll interview you, then you can interview me.  Do you have anything that I can read that you've written."  He began to devour the pages the moment they were in his hands, reacting to passages and asking question.  He got out a copy of his latest book Chaos & Cyber Culture (published by Ronin Publishing, Inc. Box 1035, Berkeley, Ca 94701.)  "You read this and I'll read your materials and we'll get together next week and we'll talk-you'll do your interview, I'll do mine."

When we met again, the visit was nothing short of a mind-altering experience.  When Tim turns his attention on you, with his riveting blue eyes, you feel as if you are being pulled into another dimension.  I start off by asking him the standard CV-type question:  how many books and autobiographis has he written?  We progress on to the use of mind-altering substanes and his theories on the popularity of LSD.  Was it a good or an evil thing, was it part of counter-culture or simply a new direction?  We skip subjects; his studies and subsequent rebellion at West Point, his early days of LSD research at Harvard, the dawn of a counter-culture, imprisonment in the 70s, the effect of computers on language and literature...I'll let him speak for himself.

 "I've written at least thirty books...yes, it's in the high thirties.  Each and every one of my books is an experiment in change, sabotaging the established 'Lion of Letters.'  There is a total control of literature by a literary elite who produce, promulgate works that are read by only one per cent of the population who can undertstand or care to understand them.

"In my first book that I wrote back in the 60's, it was two columns that ran side by side on a page it was the most I could get away back then.  It was before graphics but now my books are like magazines.  Magazines are designed to use as few words as possible, to hit you in the 'eye-ball'."

And what of 'Leary's Law'?

"If you write straight, you edit stoned...if you write stoned, for god's sake edit straight.  I've gotten up in the morning and read what I've written stoned the night before and boy what a mess.  I've had to rush back to my stoned mind to get what I was trying to say, the words and thoughts are usually very dramatic.  I use the word on the paper as a guide to what I was thinking.  I can usually get back in the mind of the night before and write down the ideas as clearly as I want them to be.

"In 1973 the federal drug agency established that more than seven million Americans had used LSD. When  this number of young or influential people engage in an activity passionately denounced by every respectable organ of society as dangerous, chaotic, immoral, illegal, we have a social phenomenon that is worthy of study.  Here is a fascinating development, a new sin!  A new counter-culture.  A new evil crime.

"It was just one of those times...this has happened before.  At a similar moment in history, when cultures reached similar states of national security, economic prosperity, and imperial confidence, the inevitable next step was to look within.

"The postwar, baby-boom generation that reached adolescence during the 1960's was probably the most affluent, confident, indulged crop in human history.  Man social forces conspired so this group expected and demanded more from life.

"The accumulation of psychedelic drugs by Americans in the sixties provides a powerful endorsement of religious rituals from tropical latitudes.  Psychedelic drugs are all derived from the tropics.  They produce states of possession trance, delightful chaoticness, expanded consciousness, spiritual illumination...powerful, mystical, empathizing with natural forces.

 "The so-called sixties drug culture was not a campus fad but a world-wide renaissance of the oldest relgions: paganism-nature.  the hippies intuitively sensed this as they wandered around barefoot playing flutes.  Paganislm 101 suddenly became the most popular campus elective.

"Is it entirely accidental that our own space program, booming out to the stars, occurred exactly when our LSD-inspired inner-trip was at its height? When the sense of national pride and confidence diminished during the Nixon years, both inner and outer exploration decreased.  No surprise to any student of cultural evolution.

Granted, a lot of mentally disturbed persons took acid and then blamed the drug for their genetic instability, but there was never any comparative census count.  Now the smoke has cleared, we see that far from inducing window-jumping and self-destruction, the suicide rate for young people actually dropped during the LSD boom.  Suicide is caused by boredom and hopelessness. There are more alcoholic-induced episodes of violence in one weekend these days than in the twenty years of psychedelic drug-taking.  Acid is probably the healthiest recreational pursuit ever devised by humans. Jogging, tennis and skiing are far more dangerous. If you disagree, show me statistics.  Now, more than every before, we need to gear our brains to multiplicity, complexity, reletivety, change.  Those who can handle acid will be able to deal more comfortably with what is to come. The PC is the acid of the 1990s."

 "When we were at Harvard we were fortunate to have wonderful coaches, people like Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts.  There was a wonderful Englishman named Michael Hollingshead who had a very mischievous sense of humour.  His brain was so addled with mystical experiences he saw everything as a prank.  He was my assisstant at the time.  We were trying to test the ability of psychedelic drugs to change people's behaviour.  So we went to a prison, the obvious place to measure change; do they go back and commit more crimes or do they stay out of prison?  

"So we were taking LSD and similar drugs with maximum-security prisoners who were all volunteers.  We weren't doing it to them; we were doing it with them, taking LSD with them in prison.  The first time we did it, it seemed like the most scary, reckless, insane thing we could do; to be going our of our minds in a maximum-security prison with the most dangerous, evil, homicidal people in the world!  We psychologists were afraid of the prisoners because obviously they were dangerous maniacs.  They were afraid of us because we were crazy scientists.  Suddenly we're looking at each other, saying, 'What's happening?'  I said 'Well, I'm afraid of you,' and they all laughed, 'Well, we're afraid of you.'  then we just broke up in laughter.

"For the next two years the entire prison experiment continued (very scientific; personality tests, control,s the usual procedures), but basically everyone who was involved knew it was a big escape plot.  We were trying to help them get out of prison.  We would get them paroles, and in general help them get going in life.  The whole thing was a big joke.  It seemed too simple to rehabilitate prisoners and make it into a prank, rather than a crime and punishment saga of grand-opera criminality.  It was an experience which did in fact cut down the prisoners' recidivism rate in Concord, Massachusetts, about 75 percent. 

"Another prank we performed at Harvard was for the Divinity School.  We worked with thirty students and several professors; famous ministers, and the dean of the Boston University Chapel was involved.  It was Good Friday and
we involved.  It was Good Friday and we gave the Divinity students psylocibin mushrooms (the other half didn't take them) to see if they had mystical experiences.  It developed into an incredibly wonderful, warm, funny mystical experience, in which, in the most lighthearted way we were helping people get beyond the confines of the church
and the ritual.

When we would come back to our homes after working in prison,we were exultat.  What a wild prank!  Here we were, taking these drugs inside a prison, while the criminal-justice officials cheered us on.

 "The same thing was true after the Divinity School project.  It started out so solemn and serious with the hymn singing and the dean of the chapel giving sermons.  It ended with a tremendously life-affirming sense of joyous laughter.  It all turned out to be a human coming-together!

"Everyone's lives were changed by these trips in one way or another, but as for their behavior, well, some would leave their wives, and some would get married.  Having a revelatory or deep mystical experience is one thing.  What you do depends on an enormous number of factors.  We had three ministers quit the church, for example, go out and make an honest living.

 "I was born in West Point, New York.  My father was a military offer there.  It was a foregone conclusion I would  go to West Point.  After my first year I realized it was the ultimate brain-washing Institution.  Their main objective is to smash everyone into conformity, so they'll obey orders.  This is to smash everyone into conformity, so they'll obey orders.  This is the system that created men, women and children at My Lai, Vietnam.  The military's main objective is to produce the kind of persons who will do their killing.  (More bombs were dropped on Vietnam than in two hundred years of warfare.  Not to mention a sea of Agent Orange.)  The war machine not only kills, it produces killers.  Just like the Vietnam vets and other ex-military nuts, we see in the Oklahoma City Fed., building bombing and the like, who preach hate, anti-Semitism and race superiority.

 "The system creates them, then lets them loose on the population.  that's Why has no one in the media jumped on that fact.  Killers in the name of Christ.  The Christian Church and Islam are the two most evil organizations on earth.  Now I've said that, I guess I'll have 3 billion people trying to kill me.

"I was a bit of a rebel at West Point, they wanted me to resign.  but I wouldn't.  I wanted to fuck them by staying there in their faces.  I got myself silenced, no one could talk to me or fuck with me then.  After my second year of hell I resigned.

 "Before going to West Point I was at a Jesuit University, another brain washing Institution.  After 'the Point' I went Berkeley, t to the University of Alabama.  Why there?  Well because there were women and it was warm.  From there I went to the University of Washington, then to Berkeley.  I had my Ph.D. and was teaching at Berkeley, when I was invited to come to Harvard.  I never expected to stay there.  Harvard asked me to leave, feeling my presence (my research into drug use, they were all legal then) was bringing
too much attention to the school.  I was a well-known and published psychologist who
had developed a group approach to therapy.  the patients (I don't like that term patient) not only evaluate their own progress but evaluate the both the treatment and the treators.

 "When I was arrested and thrown in prison during the 70's, I was almost fifty-years old.  they wanted to put me away for fifty years for two roaches of marijuana, planted by the police, in a car I was travelling in.  the car wasn't even mine.

"When in jail I was in a cell next to Charley Manson another product of a corrupt prison system.  He was raised in prison, no wonder he turned into what he is."  Tim raises his glance to a point on a ridge just above the house where a new grandiose villa is being built.

"That's where Sharon Tate and the others were killed.  He (Charles Manson) used the mind control used on him in prison - to control them, those kids.  All of Charles' so called women are still in jail.  I don't know whey they don't let them out.  They're middle aged now...they can do no harm to anybody...it's the same type of mind control that was used on Patty Hearst by the SLA.  Prison is the ultimate controlling system for the population.  When I was in prison I missed the connection with the rest of the world.  I couldn't even watch the news on TV.  Do you know more inmates are killed in fights about TV than any other reason, except maybe sex?  I escaped prison with the help of the Weathermen.  'want to be' Black Panthers and ended up in Algeria with Eldridge Clever.  He's another story."

On the subject of how computers affect literature and language:  "The same aesthetic trends the computer creates in other parts of culture appear in English literature.  Next time you boot up your Mac, be grateful to Emerson, Stein, Yeats Pound, Huxley, Beckett, Orwell, Burroughs, gysin.  They succeeded in loosening social, political religious insecurities, encouraging subjectivity and the innovative reprogramming of chaotic realities.

"Imagine what Joyce could have done with MS Word, a CD-ROM graphic system or modern data base!  We don't have to imagine the managed to do it using his own brain-ware.  the most influential literary work of this period was produced by James Joyce.  In Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake, Joyce fissioned and sliced the grammatical structure of language into thought bytes.  Joyce was not only a writer he was also a word-processor, a protohacker.  He reduced complex ideas to elemental units and endlessly recombined them at will.  He assembled and reassembled thoughts into fugal, repetitious and contrapuntal patterns.  The fact that he was semi-blind and dyslexic also helped.

 "Personal computer owners are discovering that the brain is the ultimate organ for pleasure and awareness.  An array of one hundred billion microcomputers are waiting to be booted up; to be activated stimulated, and programmed.  They wait impatiently for the arrival of software, head-ware and 'thought-ware that pays respect to its awesome potential.  This makes possible electronic Internet linkage with other brains.

 "Human society has now reached a turning point in the operation of the digital programs of evolution, a point at which the next evolutionary step of the species becomes apparent to us, to surf at will.  The sanctity of our body images along with the irrational taboo about sex and death, seems to be one of the most persistent anachronisms of thought in the industrial age.  The human being of the future may be a bio-computer hybrid of any desired form or an 'electronic entity' in the digital information universe."

If these  last thoughts of Dr. Timothy Leary are to be seen as an exploration into the future, he very well may not only be the last American Hero but also the last completely Human Hero.
​
No matter how we view Timothy Leary, we can be sure that nothing happens before its time.  And if Tim hadn't led the charge into the counter culture the 'times' would have sent someone else to the forefront to do the job.