"I subject my awareness
to the perfection of being,
the perfection of wisdom and perfection of love,
all of these being co-present in the Vast Expanse.
I share this panorama of Being and appreciate all I can share it with...
the seamless interweaving of consciousness with each moment."
-Timothy Leary-
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Jail
Notes
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Timothy
and Rosemary Leary
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Timothy
and the DEA
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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
Photo above: 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.
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Abbie
Hoffman, Leary, Jerry Rubin-1968
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The
Brotherhood of Eternal Love
operated a psychedelics distribution network throughout the United
States, most notably in California where the organization received
large shipments of hashish from Pakistan and Afghanistan, helped by
Welshman Howard Marks (now a prominent figure in the cannabis culture).
With funds from their hashish smuggling, the organization produced
and distributed large amounts of the legendary "Orange Sunshine"
LSD. The organization was headquartered on a ranch in Garner Valley,
near Idyllwild. Members paid the Weather Underground to break Timothy
Leary out of prison. The organization evolved from Timothy Leary's
League for Spiritual Discovery. Many of the Brotherhood's members
were deeply religious people who viewed marijuana and acid as sacraments.
Many of its members were interested in peace and in ending the Vietnam
war. A 1972 Rolling Stone article dubbed them the "Hippie Mafia."
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.
Hollyweird
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 "SMI2LE"
as a succinct summary of his pre-transhumanist agenda: SM (Space Migration)
+ I2 (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.
This website (above) is not to propagandize
drugs or similar substances,
but to inform of the scientific and public activity of Dr. Timothy
Leary and his extraordinary life.
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"
, 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.
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'Legend
of a Mind' by The Moody Blues
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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.
I Have
America Surrounded: A Biography of Timothy Leary
(Hardcover)
by John Higgs
Dr. Timothy Leary was one of the most controversial and divisive figures
of the twentieth century. President Nixon called him ‘the most
dangerous man in the world.’ Hunter S. Thompson said that he
was ‘not just wrong, but a treacherous creep and a horrible goddamn
person.’ Yet the writer Terence McKenna claims that he ‘probably
made more people happy than anyone else in history,’ and William
Burroughs wrote that ‘he changed the world, but it may be another
100 years before he is accorded his rightful stature.’
Leary was a brilliant Harvard psychologist who was sacked from his
research post because of his research into LSD and other psychedelic
drugs. He went on to become the global figurehead of the 1960s drug
culture, coined the phrase “tune in, turn on and drop out”,
and persuaded millions of people to take drugs and explore alternative
lifestyles. His scandalous research led to irreversible changes in
social and cultural fields as diverse as popular music, cyber-culture,
the Mind-Body-Soul movement and clinical psychological profiling.
Yet the impact of his work has been so controversial that it has completely
overshadowed the man himself and the details of his life. Few people
realise that Timothy Leary’s life is one of the greatest untold
adventure stories of the twentieth century.
Journey on to :
Timothy
Leary Part 3
Testimonials,
Quotations, Life Work, Trippy
Links
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