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Edame gone Registered: 01/14/03 Posts: 1,270 Loc: outta here |
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I haven't had a chance to read through all of this yet, just found it on a newsgroup, thought people (especially Learyfan) might like this:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [Wilsoniacs: A transcript of a live hour-long show devoted to Uncle Tim on listener-supported Pacifica Radio station KPFK in Los Angeles, July 12, 2003. MB = Michael Benner, the host; DC = Dean Chamberlain, a younger artist-friend of Leary's; RM = Ralph Metzner, a colleague of Leary's from around 1960 or so; and MH = Michael Horowitz, Tim's archivist and good friend.] Michael Benner: Hi hello howdy! Michael Benner on KPFK till midnight tonight. This is Inner Vision now. And Inner Vision (a program heard Monday through Thursday from eleven o'clock until twelve midnight) and Thursday nights it's MY pleasure to host this program, this talk show, which is a show about consciousness, really. A program about mysticism and metaphysics and, oh I like to call it a program about identity and motive, a show about who we really are, what we're really for and why we think and feel and act the way we do. And I think that's a pretty good way of approaching the subject of consciousness. You know, many times people will say, "Oh you're on the radio! Oh yea! Where are you on the radio?" I'll say KPFK. "Oh KPFK...well, what's your program about?" And I'll say, "It's a show about consciousness." And they say, "What?" Isn't it odd we got to the year 2003 and nobody can even SPELL the word, let alone define it. We're gonna talk about consciousness tonight. We're going talk about a pioneer in the frontiers of consciousness, a fellow that I had the pleasure of interviewing...I believe more times than anybody else... except for a friend of mine who I used to have on my radio programs because he was my friend and a close personal friend...but next to that guy, I think Timothy Leary was probably my favorite guest of all. And Timothy of course has passed and we all miss him a lot, but Timothy, in his work, his large body of work, is the topic of a...well, an art exhibit really. It's almost like a MUSEUM more than an art gallery of late... In Venice... And we have some guests in studio and on the telephone tonight, as we remember Timothy Leary and his contributions to the frontiers of consciousness. First of all, I'd like to introduce my guest. It's Dean Chamberlain, right? DC: Yep. MB: I missed all my notes; I'm on the air sooner than I thought I was gonna be. Dean is with us tonight. You were on Jay's program a few weeks ago - or a couple of months ago now - when your exhibit first happened. And we chatted and thought about doing this as a follow-up program, since his show was on art and this program's about consciousness, and the exhibit at Light/Space Gallery is a little of both, really. So I thought it would be a good idea. How did you come to decide to do this exhibit around Timothy? DC: I felt very strong feelings of learning from him over the years. And I felt that he hasn't passed from being a teacher for me in any way. And I have a series of artworks that we made together and had been wanting to exhibit them while he was still here, and didn't have the time. Now we do. So the artworks became the spine, the backbone for bringing in contributions from many of his friends - 45 of them and still growing - to make a kind of a "vibrational field", if you will, to show folks that he was perhaps more evolved than he's commonly given credit for. MB: [Laughs] Well, it all depends on who you ask, of course. And Timothy was always, an "easy target" and I guess remains an easy target in that he's easy to criticize or to make fun of and he never seemed to mind that, to be a target. Hold himself up as a lightning rod and say, "Go ahead! Make fun of me! Criticize! I don't care!", you know. DC: [Laughs] MB: He once described himself in an interview I did with him - on the radio - as a "cheerleader for change." And beside the alliteration and the fact that I just like the way it feels to say "cheerleader for change" a whole bunch of times - it just tumbles off the tongue - I always thought that really did describe Timothy. You know, here he is...not standing on the sidelines, not that kind of cheerleader, but out in front, going, "Yea! C'mon! Think for yourself! Question authority!" and of course some of the other phrases we know, you know, "Turn on, tune in, drop out," which was widely misunderstood at the time and perhaps even today... Now, if we were to go into Light/Space Gallery in Venice and see this, what are we talking about? Are we talking about art that's been inspired by Timothy? that features Timothy? that's psychedelic in nature? the whole gamut? all of that and more? DC: All of that is there. MB: And some of your work, too, right? DC: One portrait I made of him and artworks by many of his friends both known and lesser-known, word contributions by friends of his known and lesser-known, lots of Tim's quotes that kind of explain the nature of what he actually meant by "Turn on, tune in, drop out," and other choice quotes that I feel help to...not settle the score, but mature the idea of who he might have been. MB: Yes. Who he might have been indeed. After all these years and all this time and now he's passed and we're still not sure who he might be. We know he's out there someplace...Timothy of course...There's the Moody Blues song about Timothy being on the outside looking in and now more than ever, I suppose, on the outside looking in...I asked him about the song on a couple of occasions. He was always proud of it. He never objected. He liked that. He thought that was cool. He thought the Moody Blues were cool. He thought the Smothers Brothers and John and Yoko...and he knew them all, of course, because of his celebrity. It's also true, is it not?...maybe you're not the right person to ask, but we have some people we're going to go to on the phone in a minute that might also know...Is it not true that some of Timothy's ashes went on the Space Shuttle and are on some sort of rocket into space? DC: Yea. Celestis sent up Gene Roddenberry's ashes and Tim's and a few other folks as well. Lipstick vials full, I'm told. They're still orbiting now, perhaps for the next ten years or so, and then they'll either burn in the atmosphere...or go elsewhere. MB: How well did he know Roddenberry, the creator of Star...I was going to say Star Wars but Star TREK? DC: I don't know...I'm sure he had full respect... MB: I've seen their names listed together. In fact, even tonight, poking around on the Internet that came up. And it caught me off guard, 'cuz I didn't know they knew each other. But it appears at least they were familiar with...I think they admired each other somehow. DC: I'm sure they did. MB: Hopefully we will talk tonight - via telephone - to a couple of friends...associates...colleagues of Timothy Leary. If you're just joining us this is Inner Vision on KPFK and we're talking to Dean Chamberlain, who has a gallery in Venice called Light/Space Gallery. And also on the telephone we're going to introduce in just a minute Michael Horowitz, who is in many ways Timothy's archivist, and for many years has dedicated himself to gathering all kinds of information about Timothy. He wrote a book years ago called _The Annotated Bibliography of Timothy Leary_. We have Michael on the phone and we're also hoping to get Ralph Metzner a little bit later in the evening. We're going to be here until midnight tonight. And if we can figure out the phones we might even take some telephone calls. Not sure. We've got this whole brand new phone system here, and none of us are really geeky enough to have any idea how to work it. We need some fourteen year olds to get in here and push the buttons for us. If you see any on the street, haul them in here. [Laughs] What kind of comments are you getting about the...from people coming to see your show? DC: Oh! A lot of enthusiasm, actually. From younger folks who didn't really know too much about him, or had a read some of his books...older folks who feel the resonance that is still going on between his spirit and his guidance in their lives. There's been a lot good good good feelings coming from folks who've come in to see the show. MB: I'll bet. I'm anxious to see it myself...You know, thinking back over all the different Timothy Leary stories, I interviewed him when he was ill at his home - the last time I saw him was a few months before he died - he was receiving a lot of people at his home in those days. This is a guy who sort of opened up his house to a lot of people. He was always friendly and amiable that way...I always admired the way he got along even with people who you would think would be the _antithesis_ of his kind of thinking. Like Gordon Liddy, for example, who in a way, you know...I think they were both Irish and they both went to West Point. He used to say that a lot. And for some reason he _liked_ Gordon Liddy. You know? Even though he despised everything that the guy stood for. Somehow there was an affinity or a kinship...And umm...what it reminds me of, frankly, is...a time when I was interviewing him live on the radio, crosstown, another commercial station that will remain nameless...And I went off on a rant. I did, Dean. I went off on this rant about some right-wing - I think this was in the Reagan era, the early eighties - and I started talking about the right-wing neo-fascist this or that or the other thing, and Timothy looked at me, and actually at one point he interrupted me and he said, "Whoa! whoa! whoa!" he said, "Slow down a minute." I was like, "What? What?" Because I expected that...I was almost showing off, I guess, trying to show him what a leftie I was, or what a good liberal or progressive I was. He said, "Whoa! Whoa! Stop! Hold on a minute," he said "We NEED a few of those paranoid right-wing schizophrenics to keep the gene pool diverse! Somebody's got to keep their eye out. We just don't want 'em running the show." And I thought, "Now that's wisdom." That's the kind of wisdom that I think Timothy represented. He was never polar: all black, all white. He was never _against_ anybody. He was FOR a lot of things, but he didn't really oppose anybody. And he saw the beauty in diversity, and the need for - as he said - the gene pool to be diverse. It's one of my favorite Tim Leary stories, I think. What do you know of that tour that he did with Gordon Liddy? They were out on the road for some time. DC: They were like opposite sides of the same coin in a funny way. They're so polar that they were like brothers in spirit. MB: So in many ways...in some ways opposites, but in some ways, as you say, opposite ends of the same bar magnet. They both had a healthy disrespect for the establishment, but for different reasons. I think that might have been part of it. Oh good! We have Michael and Ralph together. Now are we gonna be able to conference these guys? Or you wanna try it? Tell me what I need to do...I don't even know what buttons to push... Lemme first of all see if I can bring Michael on...Michael you're on KPFK...can you hear me okay? Michael Horowitz: Can you hear me? MB: Yea! There! MH: Yea! Hello! MB: Michael I don't know if you heard us, but we have a new studio, new telephones, and we're still trying to figure out how to make 'em work. MH: Yea, sounds like it's working okay. MB: So far so good...Thanks for being with us. I understand that you were instrumental in helping create this exhibit, and that you're often thought of as the primary archivist of Timothy's works, for many years now. Is that right? MH: Yea. Since umm...I met him when he was first in prison in 1970. And he had all these archives up in the Berkely hills. He needed someone to look after them. So my partner and I, we were into that sort of thing anyway! So we agreed to do that. And that set me on a long adventure that lasted a couple of decades. Part of it taking care of the archives, moving them around, making sure they were safe. Then losing the archives in a dramatic confrontation with the FBI at one point. And then regaining them later and doing the bibliography. MB: Now when you say "archives" what are we talking about beside, oh...I guess the first thing I would think of what be many manuscripts and --- MH: Exactly. MB: -- and documents. But what else constitutes the Timothy Leary archives? MH: That's what you said: papers of someone who was umm, you know...deeply involved...with a PhD, read widely, traveled widely, knew everybody, was involved in all the umm, you know, confrontations of the time, and wrote lots of letters and received letters from people (of course) in return...His manuscripts, so many of them were...Tim was always...You referenced his body of work, and he wrote about thirty books. Hundreds of journal articles and magazine articles and interviews and other forms of media, too. You know, he acted in nine movies and videos and so on... MB: Did he!? Nine movies? Stop right there! You're talking about--- MH: [Laughs] Tim's movie career--- MB: [Laughs] Even if they were bit parts and cameos, what kind of movies...what movies? Name a few for us. MH: Boy, that's...[Laughs] Frankly they're mostly forgotten. MB: Yea, well, but--- MH: He did one with Cheech and Chong called _Nice Dreams_ in which he played a mad scientist. MB: Well, that's perfect. MH: He loved to spoof himself. And umm...Tim was a great satirist. I mean, his hero - one of his heroes - was Mark Twain. And he loved the political games that were going on. One of the things I miss most about Tim is reading the newspaper with him or getting a phone call when he read something in the paper that day, that he needed to talk about. Tim always had some great insights into what was really going on...And like you say, he recognized the gene pool that exists. And the evolutionary leaps that some people take, and some people take _backward_? But he recognized, and he kind of laughed, in a way, at things that were happening, and always threw some new light on things. Just his way of looking at things was - as you say - very diverse. And very wide and expansive. MB: Another Timothy Leary yarn from my experience with him: I asked Timothy once on the radio, live, in a situation very much like this, "Are you a positive thinker?" And he looked at me like I was from Mars. And he said, "Well of course! What CHOICE do I have?" MH: [Laughs] He always saw the best in things. Even like...you know, dark political stuff that was going on. And of course he was quite a victim of that...those forces. For many years. But he came out. And it made him stronger. And he never lost his wit and his sense of satire. He always figured you could learn...you had to, like, understand, you know, the realities that were in front of you. So that you could, you know, you weren't controlled BY them. But that you could control them and design them for the greater good. MB: I want to talk more about your reference to the run-in with the FBI and their attempt to get those archives from you, and the story that just doesn't seem to die about Timothy being an FBI informant...which has a...certainly a GRAIN of truth to it but is taken out of context too often. And his relationship with the CIA, and the escape from prison, but I'd like to go all the way back here to Harvard and bring Ralph in, so...you'll stay with us, won't you? MH: Absolutely. MB: All right. And if it works...if this phone thing works, we'll all be one big happy family on the telephone. Let's see if Ralph Metzner is with us. Hello Ralph? Ralph Metzner: Yes, I can hear you. I've been listening in. MB: Good. Very well. And Michael, you're still here?...Did we lose Michael? We may have, but we'll get him back. Well Ralph, thank you very much and welcome to Inner Vision on KPFK. I appreciate you being here. RM: Glad to be here. MB: I'm sorry that I haven't had a chance to meet you in the flesh. I hope to have you on the radio program in studio one day when you're in Los Angeles. RM: All right. That would be great. MB: Now, you go back to the Harvard days with Timothy and Richard Alpert and this whole amazing--- RM: I was his graduate student research assistant. MB: Yea. Talk about the story. For those who -- RM: I have a story of him and Gordon Liddy that you'd like. MB: Oh, start with that then. RM: Umm...which was really at a period when I had very little contact with him, but I heard this one story. You know, Liddy used to tell about his life and boast about how he made himself overcome his sqeamishness by eating a rat when he was a teenager-- MB: Right. RM: --You know, toughen himself up. So then, Tim finally hit on this thing...and Tim kept saying, "You know, Gordon, if you're going to understand what this drug thing is about you've got to try pot at least." So then he finally said, "Okay Gordon. I'll make a deal with you. If you'll smoke a joint I will eat a rat." [Laughter] RM: But Gordon was too chicken, you know, to take him up on it. MB: So Timothy probably would've had a rat burger, but -- RM: Yea! MB: There was no way Gordon was -- RM: Tim might have done it!..I mean it was just... that kind of zany... ingenuity...and just the ability to...More than anyone I ever met he had the amazing ability to take a fun and funny and positive...he was like committed to that, you know, try to see the humor in everything. Even the most horrible circumstances. But an amazing gift. I mean, he smiled...I don't remember who it was, maybe Michael knows. Somebody asked him how he felt when he was ushered into Folsom, you know, the Hole of the hole, the worst prison system in the country, and the worst part of it, after being caught and then being escaped - because the Feds don't like it if you escape from their prisons, you know they get really pissed! [Laughs] - MB: Yea, right. RM: -- So they brought him into the hallway, you know, and it was like your worst nightmare, your worst paranoid hallucinations made reality. And a friend asked him, you know, "What do you do?" and he said, "I laughed." You know, what else can you do? MB: Yea, well...Ya know, I find all of you to be quite courageous people. If I go back to the 1960s - when I was in college - and I don't think people...unless they were around in those days or have read books like _Acid Dreams_...are aware of the fact that the LSD on campuses in those days was CIA acid. They made a mistake and ordered way too much! Do you remember the story or is that a true tale about -- RM: I don't know. We never were very successful at obtaining quantities of LSD you know. [Laughs] Our project wrote a check for ten thousand dollars to Sandoz while we were still at Harvard, to order a million doses. MB: Well I had read some-- RM: Sandoz, by that time, checked with Harvard to make sure it was fine. [Laughs] Harvard was not at all in agreement with that idea. Plus the check bounced anyway! [Laughs] MB: Oh my. RM: So we never got it. MB: Oh that's unfortunate -- RM: So were trying to work with morning glory seeds and kinds of poor substitutes. MB: Well the story I remember reading was that, whoever was doing the mind control experiments at the CIA - the MK-ULTRA and all of that? They just presumed the dose was in MILLIGRAMS. They didn't understand it was really MICROGRAMS... RM:[Laughs] MB: -- And they ordered a thousand times too much, so they ended up giving it away to college professors and -- RM: Oh really? MB: --And the military researchers. RM: [Laughs] I think that's a wonderful urban legend-- MB: It may not be true, huh? RM:--I doubt very much that that's true. I certainly never saw any of it. I just remember us being really hard-up. MB: Well not what about this-- RM: It wasn't much later until, you know, we in various ways moved to the west coast where there were people like Owsley and you know, others who were producing LSD. MB: Right. RM: And Nicky... DC: Sand. RM: Scully. Nicky Scully...Not Scully...I forget what his name was. MB: Was it Sand? RM: Tim Scully...and Nick Sand. MB: Right...Well what about the stories of you guys taking liquid LSD by the quart container and just guzzling it? RM: [Laughs] Yea, I don't know how those stories arise. MB: Really. RM: There was a period at Millbrook where there were some subgroups... I don't know, I wasn't one of them, and Tim never really was either, but Alpert may have been involved with a group of people who, for a while they were sort of taking LSD out of a mayonnaise jar, like in sort of a paste, they had a kind of a paste. And they did this experiment where they wanted to see if they could just stay high by taking it every day, or three times a day, or whatever. MB: I think that's-- RM: Of course that's a waste because you build up tolerance so fast you have to keep taking more and more and more. MB: Ahh...I never heard that. Tolerance? Really? RM: Plus, you know, what's the point? I mean, the point is not to stay at that level. The point is to be able to FUNCTION at a higher level of consciousness! [Laughs] So you have to come back down from the kind of more unitive state and engage in the world. In whatever way. MB: Indeed. Like any good mystical contemplation there's a point where you open your eyes, move out in the world and put into effect - ideally - what you've gained. RM: Exactly. You go back to chopping wood and-- MB: And carrying water, yea. RM: Of course Tim was sort of ambiguous about that idea, because he was saying that once you get the realization you should just "drop out", meaning drop out of the system that keeps you trapped in your mind. He didn't necessarily mean "quit your job" [Laughs] Although I guess it sounded like that! [Laughs] Or drop out of school. You know, he meant more like "mentally detach" from the political game. But, you know, he LIKED the ambiguity of it, too. And he liked to be provocative. I remember at one point I suggested to him, "Shouldn't we add a fourth thing, like 'Turn on, tune in, drop out... and come back?'" And he looked at me like I was deranged! [Laughs] He said, "Well, that's YOUR thing!" MB & RM: [Laughter] RM: "That's not MY thing!" [Laughs] MB: He had no desire to come back. RM: Right, right. MB: I want to make sure that Michael's back. MH: Do you hear me? MB: Yea. MH: Yea, I like that. I think everybody should add another two words to "Turn on, tune in, and drop out." You know, that was-- RM: Michael's voice is very faint now. I can barely make it out. MH: [Laughs] Ralph's is pretty good...But I think everybody should think about that one, you know...Tim would love that. He always thought that, you know, literature should be improved. RM: Right. MB: For those who may be just joining us you're listening to KPFK in Los Angeles. This is Inner Vision 'till midnight tonight. My name's Michael Benner. With me I have Dean Chamberlain in studio and on the telephone Michael Horowitz and Ralph Metzner. We're talking about Timothy Leary and an exhibit that's running at the Light/Space Gallery in Venice, California. And we'll have more details on that and get you more information on how you can visit this exhibit, which, again, is part art show, part museum...archives. Because this is a program about consciousness and we're talking about the psychedelic frontiers of consciousness tonight and Timothy's contribution...Ralph, if you don't mind I'd like to again go back to the Harvard days, to Millbrook, to the Merry Pranksters...I think in those days there must have been, from what I've read certainly, I wasn't there, and followed a few years later as a college student, but...a HOPE that, if acid wasn't...if LSD and psychedelics was not the MEANS by which to create a whole cultural revolution, that it could be the opening VOLLEY, so to speak, or the CUTTING EDGE of a cultural revolution. Do you think in fact it was? RM: Well, that's right. But it wasn't planned, you see. We had no idea, nobody had any idea it was going to turn out that way. It was like you find yourself riding a wave and the wave keeps getting bigger and bigger. So more and more people joined this movement. Which it was. It was like a movement, a sociocultural movement that went through the whole culture in an explosive way. And it would be just awesome because music and everything else was a part of that. I often say you have all these...you know just like when an individual takes a psychedelic, like an LSD, it's like a life-changing experience, you know, your whole worldview, your whole attitude toward life kind of can change. And then the culture went through a similar kind of thing. Because, when you look at it, then, there was, for example, the modern environmental movement started around the same time. Rachel Carson wrote _The Silent Spring_ in 1962. I'm not saying Rachel Carson took LSD. But what she did was trigger an expanded consciousness. An expanded perspective. You expand your consciousness and then you look around and you say, "Well wait a minute! I don't want to be fouling the water and the air." You know, we want to eat nutritious organic food and stuff like that. And you had the hippies....went back to the land. And you had Vietnam War and the anti-war movement and civil rights movement. The same idea: people looking at television images of white race confrontations in the South and then saying, "What? Now wait...this is not what we want to be doing!" you know? And the same with the women's movement. They talked about consciousness RAISING. The women got together and talked about what it's like to be a woman, apart from being somebody's wife or daughter or mother. And that was revolutionary. And we talked about these consciousness-expanding experiments...So in all these areas: in sexuality, in culture, in arts, in music and visual arts...all these movements. There was that similar expansion of consciousness going beyond...the sort of conventionally accepted points of view... By the way: In terms of slogans? You know, there's another slogan of Tim's that I like actually better than the "Turn on" one. Which he used a lot in the Harvard days and them afterwards, too. And that was, "You have to go out of your mind to come to the senses." MB: Ohhhh... RM: You have to go out of your mind to come to your senses. Meaning...which is a psychedelic experience! You know, you go out of your conventional mind, your conventional mental thinking. Your conditioned mental thinking patterns, and go back to actually perceiving what is actually happening, with expanded perception. MB: Well it begs the question of WHICH senses, because it seems clear, especially at this point in time, having learned what we've learned from psychedelic experimentation and mysticism in general...that beyond the _physical_ senses, beyond physical sensation, there are INNER senses--- RM: Right. Exactly. That's part of the meaning "becoming aware." Or I would put it slightly differently, but it's the same idea: That the senses that we have can be oriented inwardly or outwardly. So, you know, through the eyes, and touch, and sense, and hearing...People call that "clairvoyance", for example, or "clairaudience", meaning clear seeing, clear hearing-- MB: Right. A quality of LUCIDITY-- RM: Yes. That sees MORE. It's not illusory. It's not a hallucination, where you see something in a distorted way, because...you see the chair, but you see all kinds of things about the chair that you didn't see before. Like its history and how it was made and associations about significance of "chair" and chairmanship, and you know, all these kinds of mythical and symbolic clouds of associations-- MH (Talks but RM obviously can't hear him): Aldous Huxley talked about the "reducing valve." RM:--There's a term that we didn't use but I've recently...kind of...come to like that describes it. It's called "apperception." It's like perception with an _understanding_ of the context and the comprehension of what it is that you're perceiving. MB: Michael, you were...you did the same thing I did, I think, when Ralph was talking about "chair" you tripped onto Huxley's _Doors of Perception_. MH: Ah yes. Yes I did. MB: Do you want to talk about that? MH: Yea. That book had a tremendous influence on Tim and Ralph and Richard Alpert...They invited Huxley, who was a guest at MIT. That was in 1960, I guess. And Huxley was giving a lecture there and they invited him over to take part in their psilocybin project. And he was most happy to do that. I mean, they had read _Doors of Perception_. That's really the book that started the psychedelic age. I mean, the book that kind of, you know, made it _known_ to at least a small group of intellectuals...And of course Huxley was a celebrity himself. MB: Indeed. MH: They were most happy to have him in this program. And he umm...I think a lot of the ideas in _Doors of Perception_ were validated by the research of the Harvard group...So there's one...Alan Watts was another. Allen Ginsberg and...the Beats were very interested in these mind-changing substances. These things repeat themselves throughout history. You know, during the Romantic movement, you know...nitrous oxide - or laughing gas - was a drug that attracted a lot of people. Coleridge and De Quincey, and so on...And there was the Hashish Club and so on, but the Harvard group...They were really scientists. They were social scientists and they devised some incredible experiments. Really groundbreaking stuff. Astonishing. And yet they were, you know, kind of..._forced out_ of academia. Which Tim was fine with. He realized he'd sort of outgrown it. MB: Huxley's book _Doors of Perception_ was a very profound book for me...the way he describes - again - the chair, will live with me forever. But even though I was interested in such things, and a child of the 60s, an experimenter and a journalist, it was many years later that I found out that Huxley was...really quite the _mystic_, having written a wonderful book called _The Perennial Philosophy_. And so, Huxley was really knitting together age-old mysticism with this brand new explosion of consciouness via the psychedelic drug. MH: LSD was like instant mysticism for the masses. MB: [Laughs] There you go! MH: Allen Ginsberg said it was like God in a pill. And a lot of, you know, people objected to the idea...[Laughs]...like most of _the world_, but you know, that's technology! And just as...I was just thinking what Tim did add: Buddha...And this evolutionary leap which took place continued and really manifested in the 90s with the rave generation and the personal computer. And this suppression that's come down! The Anti-Rave Act was recently passed. This is like burning rock and roll records in the 50s and just like suppressing the youth movement in the late 60s and early 70s... Tim saw, was aware, of a lot of what was going on in the 90s. And he used the term "cybernaut" or "cyberpunk" to describe this new breed of individual. He always looked to the young people for the...energy. But you know, not everybody. And he was actually quite cautious about young people turning on. But he saw that the computer was the LSD of the 90s. And rave music was the acid rock of the 90s. And then, just like back in the 60s the government has stepped in to...you know...anti-hedonic and anti-arts and personal liberties and so on. Tim was, in a way, an early victim of that kind of thing. But he was an UNUSUAL one. I mean [Laughs] he was a Harvard professor! And a towering intellectual figure... MB: Ralph let me -- RM: Michael I wonder if there's a way that your engineer can...I can _barely_ make out Michael Horowitz's voice...umm...and I can hear yours fine, but Michael Horowitz's is very very very faint. MH: I can hear Ralph. MB: Okay, we'll see what we can do...Ralph, let me ask you about...You teach still, I believe, at the Center For Integral Studies in the Bay Area. RM: Right. MB: You must see that interface between what psychedelia, what the psychedelics did, and the impact on our current area and the way that interfaces with mysticism from time out of mind. Do you have a comment about that? RM: Well, yes. What people discover, who go into it with an open mind is to realize that this is an historical tradition, you know, usually connected with shamanism. Shamanism is a tradition of going into altered states of consciousness, or what they call "journeys", for the purposes of healing and obtaining knowledge. And drugs - psychoactive drugs - is one of the two main technologies...PLANTS, really...I shouldn't say...plants and mushrooms are one of the two main technologies for doing that kind of shamanic journey work. The other being rhythmic drumming. And the psychoactive plants being more widespread in the tropics of South America and Africa and Asia, and the drumming more widespread in the Northern Hemisphere, Asia, Europe and North America...But the idea being the same: that these are used for healing and spiritual divination, meaning for seeing the future and seeing probabilities, and obtaining guidance from the spirit world. And in these cultures everything is seen as animated by spirits so the plants...it's not really the _plant_ as a biological substance so much that's teaching you; it's the _spirit_ of the plant. So when people take ayahuasca or, you know, like that in the shamanic culture, or mushrooms, they _call_ the spirits through their songs. And then the spirits are the ones that they'd acquired a relationship with. And there are spirits of plants, of animals, spirits of rivers and mountains...spirits of place...and spirits of deceased ancestors, probably the most important spirits that anyone have. Guides...that's not ancestor _worship_. It's recognizing that the ancestors are in the spirit world and you can communicate with them. MB: There's a Chinese tradition of ancestor worship even. RM: Well, yea. You revere the ancestors. They're like your grandparents! You know, you revere them, and you go to them for counsel and advice. And especially if they're in the spirit world [Laughs], because they know even more in the spirit world than they did when they were, you know, still alive. MB: I remember Terence McKenna talking on this station not so long ago - he too has passed now, unfortunately, but -- RM: Who? MB: Terence McKenna. RM: Yes, yes. MB: --Talking about the way - in Central and South America - the medicinal applications of plants were discovered by the shaman taking something like ayahuasca and ASKING the plant! A plant! [Laughs] What are you good for? How can you help me? And the plant of course answers. RM: Right. Or plants like ayahuasca would function like a gatekeeper to other medicines, you know. The guy...there was an autobiography written by this one guy who was abducted by tribal indians and he gave them ayahuasca and then he introduced - in the ayahuasca scene - he would introduce him to the flora and fauna of the rainforest in the visionary state. And then he would take them out and say there's that tree and there's this tree, and like that...So, talk about developing ecological consciousness, that's living it and passing it on as a direct experience. And I think that's why people are attracted to that way of _being_, because they feel disconnected from the natural world and the want to re-feel that connection. It's the same reason why people are drawn to organic foods and natural herbal medicines rather than high-tech interventions. MB: Exactly. And we were talking about "Drop Out" before and the real meaning of "Drop Out" and today the phrase is "voluntary simplicity." RM: Yes! Exactly! MB: But it's the same thing. People are finding...looking for a BALANCE. yea, let's get the high-tech and the low-tech and...in Jerry Brown's day we used to call it "appropriate tech." RM: Right. Exactly. Appropriate tech...Drop out of the rat race! MB: Exactly! RM: Don't drop out of the human race. On the contrary. But who wants to be rats in the fast lane? MB: Now we're back to Gordon Liddy's rats. Michael you tried to jump in there a second ago. Go ahead. MH: Well yea I had a few thoughts. I was thinking about...getting back to Tim the cheerleader. MB: Yea. MH: Tim liked...One of Tim's phrases for himself, and the title of one of his books was called...well he considered himself a "hope fiend." And he always put the positive spin on stuff. I mean, Ralph referred to how he managed to survive in prison for four and a half years actually, and some years in exile. And he always figured this was a test or challenge and he could...this was _supposed_ to happen to him and what could he get from it? And he saw himself, you know, that it was a game. Almost like a SPORT. Life was "The Game of Life." And for that reason he came out stronger and he continued to evolve. We've been talking about Tim in the 60s and 70s and 90s, but like, if Tim were around now...Tim is like the ancestor that Ralph was just referring to, the spirit ancestor-- RM: Absolutely. Right. MH: --of OURS now. And I try to channel him sometimes! To try to imagine what he would make of things. But he has left behind a tremendous body of work and books and a digital body of work - leary.com - and he's like one of those people who, as time goes on he'll be more and more recognized and his ideas will have more and more...[Laughs] They won't be laughed at like they used to be. RM: Yea, you know it's interesting. I can't think of any other public figure - or even in history...maybe there are some - where there's this ENORMOUS discrepancy-between the people who _knew_ him-- MH: Good point. RM:--let's say a million people or something, who knew him directly and who like, you know, let's say - close to - REVERE him, or at least admire him and LOVE him for the kind of human being he was, and got inspired by him, and the vast majority of the population who only have heard of him secondhand through the media or whatever...They think he's a criminal and a lunatic! MB: Yea. RM: Who gave students drugs and they threw him in jail because of that, and you know, this kind of zany, crazy, completely absurd picture that has-- MH: But Tim said he wasn't surprised-- RM:--no relation to reality-- MH:--that that happened. You know, he was like-- RM:--Yea, how is that even possible? I mean it's very strange! MB: Also, the fact that, at this late date, we're still talking about marijuana as a narcotic? [Laughter] And grouping "drugs"...If they're not medicines...You know, heroin, LSD, what difference does it make, right? And it's ridiculous! MH: Tim would say it's the last struggle of a dying evolutionary breed. RM: Marijuana has that same dualistic thing, you know. For people who use it it's life-saving medicine! MB: Right. RM: And for other people it's like a political football that they kick around and don't have a clue as to what to do with it, except they don't like it! MB: And the potential, again, of a psychoactive drug - whatever it happens to be: LSD, mescaline, peyote, psilocybin - these organic, naturally occurring compounds to just BLOW OPEN the filters of the brain and allow us to have instant mystical experiences...to compare that to a DOWNER or to methamphetamine or something is just... RM: Right...or alcohol or any of those things-- MB: Yea! It's just absurd! RM: Yea, we must be doing something right as a culture that we have them at all, I figure. A psychic that we know we once asked about the history of these things in civilization and she said, "Well, you know, as long as people use them in a respectful way they've always been our allies. But when people misuse them or treat them disrespectfully they kind of disappear." Meaning the knowledge of them was lost. And that was the case with mushrooms, you see. The knowledge of the mushrooms of ancient Mexico, which was the central sacrament in their culture, went completely underground to the point where science thought oh, it never existed, or they thought it was just uhh...[Laughs] you know, MADE UP! Until Wasson rediscovered it and found a living practitioner of the ancient shamanic tradition that's still alive after 500 years of colonialism, and published it in Life magazine. And lo and behold they came...And now there's _so many_ drugs being rediscovered all the time...and plants! New plants...People have found species of acacia in Australia that are rich in tryptamines and Australian hippies are learning how to trip out on these natural plant substances that have never been - as far as we know - been used in shamanic traditions. But are there! So it's like nature is reaching out to us, too. MB: Toad-licking even. [Laughs] RM:[Laughs] Yea, toad-licking as well. Which is actually a misconception. You don't lick the toad. You squeeze the-- MB: Gland RM: --juice out of the gland and smoke it. MB: On the forehead, right? RM: No, you smoke it...Oh! The gland yea. The parotid gland there, kind of in the crook of the arm, of the shoulder...in the armpit, basically. MB: Hey Dean, do you want to-- RM: Or the neck. MB: Oh I see. MH: Hey Michael this is the first show where toad licking is being discussed. MB: The first one this week. [Laughs] MH: I hope the FCC...[Laughs] RM: I don't think you'd get anything from just licking the toad. MB: Okay, well... RM: You'd have to volutize the exudate. MB: I see. Dean's in studio here with us. You wanted to jump in on this? DC: One of Tim's quotes in relationship to the ingestion of substances was, "The more conscious and intelligent you become the more conscious and intelligent you WANT to become." RM: Exactly. You use discretion and selectivity in selecting exactly the right nutrients for your body and your brain and your nervous system that will get you where you want to be. And I think it's important...I like to make the distinction between substances that will help you _function_ and those those that are _experiential_ and produce an experience. And we know that, for example, you compare tobacco and alcohol. Well, people function with tobacco. You know, it gives them - the people who use it - it gives them a feeling of uplift and functioning is not impaired. But alcohol, we all recognize, you don't function on alcohol...in fact it's a legal...and we rightly...everybody AGREES with that! That's not a problem for our culture to identify. You can't drink and drive and you don't sell to minors, and all that. So people...I don't think people need to be AFRAID of something that's an unusual experience. We already HAVE those! Except the one we have makes you _stupid_, you know, and contracts your awareness. It's a downer. MB: Yea. And those of course are the ones that are legal, the ones that make you dull and dumb and-- RM: Yea! Exactly! We ended up with the worst psychoactive we could've picked! MB: Of course. RM: [Laughs] You know, out of all the possibilities, we ended up...It didn't used to be that way, according to the historians. MB: Let me ask you about...Again, going back to the early days, Ralph. Timothy came up with this "dose" "set", and "setting" idea. Dose speaks for itself. Set: who you're with. And setting. RM: Well "set" is more like your expectation, your inner attitude, and personality and motivation. And your intention. MB: Ahh! RM: Primarily your intention. Setting includes the physical and the social environment, who gives it and you know, that kind of thing. MB: You answered my...because my question was going to be, "Where does _intention_ fit in to that?" RM: Yea, intention is _set_, basically. That's what it is. MB: I see. RM: When I teach a course at the Institute on altered states of consciousness I use that model for _all kinds_ of altered states, whether it's dreaming or hypnosis or shamanic drumming or whatever it is...Where there are these different CATALYSTS, like the drug is a catalyst, or the hypnotic induction is a catalyst, or fasting alone in the wilderness is a catalyst for an altered state. And the set and the setting are always the relevant variables that you want to look at. In a way, it's kind of common sense. You know, it's like the inner and the outer: what else is there? [Laughs] Like right now, our set and setting is influencing our experience, right? We have a certain intention and set to come together and talk and have a dialogue and we have a context of the phone, and all that. So, umm...and RITUAL, you see, is only the conscious intentional purposeful _arranging_ of set and setting - particularly setting - for the purposes for which you want it. So if you're doing a healing session, you have doctors or a healing situation, with a therapist or whatever it may be. If your intention or your set is creativity, then you arrange the setting appropriately. Or in that study that Michael was talking about, the Good Friday study, which was designed to test the set-setting hypothesis by taking people who had a religious set - seminary students - and in a religious setting (during a service), and gave them double blind placebo-controlled study of psilocybin, or a placebo, and found that, lo and behold they all had religious experiences. MB: Yea. There was also the Prison Project, where Timothy was hoping to rehabilitate selfish or self-centered or cruel people. MH: Look at the prison problem we have today. RM: Yea, well, that's how I got involved with it. Because I volunteered to work on that, and I did work on that. Tim said, "Let's see if we can turn the prisoners into Buddhas." MB: [Laughs] Exactly! RM: Which was a little bit overly optimistic, I think. Because once you get into it you realize there's a lot more to changing people's behavior than just just giving them a few positive experiences. However positive that may be! [Laughs] Not that anybody complained. MB: I had a similar experience on a smaller scale. A number of us in the human potential movement in the mid-seventies worked with parolees here in LA thinking we were going to teach them to meditate and overnight they'd be reformed. And of course they were working a con on us the whole time! Like, "We're gonna take these hippies for a RIDE, man!" RM: [Laughs] Right, right. MB: But since we just have limited time, and for those are just joining us we have on the telephone Michael Horowitz and Ralph Metzner. We have in studio Dean Chamberlain. And Dean and his wife Stacy are hosting an _exhibit_ about Timothy Leary, and the explosion of interest and research in the frontiers of consciousness that came about in the 1960s, at their gallery in Venice called the Light/Space Gallery. Stay tuned. We'll give you the details on that. It's running through the end of next month and you're going to want to see this. But as we round third and head for home this hour here I want to give each of you an opportunity to talk about this story that doesn't seem to want to go away, and in some ways has reared its head, about Timothy as part of that...escape from prison and working with the CIA and FBI...uhhh...being a snitch. And being an FBI informant. And while, as I said earlier in the show there's a grain of truth to Timothy working with these guys, to call him a "snitch" or an "informant" is not really accurate. So, why don't we...Michael start with you and your understanding of what that story's all about and why it just doesn't seem to want to go away. MH: Well you know here, there's just not enough time. There's just not enough time to go into all the nuances of that story. But yea, what you said is essentially correct, and there's a tremendous...you have to look at the _context_ of what was happening at the time. And what the fallout was. And the fallout wasn't bad at all. It was like, you know, there was a lot of reaction. And some paranoia. And some questioning. But, you know, it didn't really...You know, Tim didn't really do a lot of damage. Or he didn't do ANY! Except, you know, in terms of shaking people up. And he got himself out of prison. Again, the context is really...You know he {dealing?-rmjon23} the archives for his freedom, but the archives were...You know, I thought he played the game, and was one step ahead, and came out of it, you know, relatively okay. But there are some people who, you know, just glommed onto that...you know... the easy reaction to what he did. But I wanted to actually...in my last moment here...Something should be said about the _amazing_ way that Timothy created his dying process. He never stopped contributing. And even in the sad last months of his life he had a party around him, and he made dying...he brought something to it. And it was like a _recreational_ idea. The idea of doing it at home with your friends and believing that that was like the most amazing thing you could do. The most important thing is how you died. And you had an opportunity to make a statement that way...and if you had a consciousness...what would happen to consciousness in those moments? And so his last words were, "Why not?" And he WENT OUT as a cheerleader for change. With those words, "Why not?" MB: That's great. I hadn't heard that story. Ralph, could you speak in the last minute and half or two about the charges that Timothy-- RM: Yea, I wasn't that much in touch with Tim during that phase. Michael knows much more about that than I do. But Tim's story was that - he's written about it - he didn't tell the FBI anything they didn't already know, you know? But he said them so that he could convince them that he was telling them stuff. So he could get out of jail. I mean, for example The Weathemen. So he told them about The Weathermen. But The Weathermen had already publicly announced it! They held a press conference that they were the ones that sprung him from jail. Everybody knew who they were! You know, so Tim described, you know, them, who they were. But they knew that all already! MB: Yea. This was not a secretive guy. RM: No! He did what he did to get out of jail! I mean, I don't think any of us...It's all very well to sit in judgement of somebody, but would we do it any differently? You know, if you know how to get out of jail? And uhh-- MB: Ralph I've got to-- RM:--what I understand there's one lawyer who spent some time in jail for passing hashish...uhhh...that was the direct result of what Tim might've said. That's what I heard, but that's-- MB: Okay, well. I want to thank you both. Ralph Metzner and Michael Horowitz for being with us. Thank you so much, gentlemen. RM: You're very welcome. MH: Thank you. It was a pleasure. MB: And I hope we can do this again sometime as we explore consciousness on KPFK. I like the Ken Kesey quote about this. We're gonna go out with this quote from Ken, who said, "Those who want to gnaw on Timothy's bones never knew his heart." And that's what I remember about Tim. Not just a wonderful mind and a brilliant mind, but a man with a beautiful beautiful heart. And a loving, kind intention. Timothy Leary! You can see 23 Drawings by Timothy Leary and other works at the Light/Space Gallery all this month and through July, actually. You've extended the run, so to speak, right? Dean Chamberlain, thank you. And Stacy for being with us tonight. The Light/Space Gallery is on Abbot-Kinney Boulevard in Venice. -------------------- The above is an extract from my fictional novel, "The random postings of Edame". In the beginning was the word. And man could not handle the word, and the hearing of the word, and he asked God to take away his ears so that he might live in peace without having to hear words which might upset his equinamity or corrupt the unblemished purity of his conscience. And God, hearing this desperate plea from His creation, wrinkled His mighty brow for a moment and then leaned down toward man, beckoning that he should come close so as to hear all that was about to be revealed to him. "Fuck you," He whispered, and frowned upon the pathetic supplicant before retreating to His heavens.
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Learyfan It's the psychedelic movement! Registered: 04/20/01 Posts: 34,558 Loc: High pride! Last seen: 6 hours, 36 minutes |
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Thanks Edame! I liked it a lot. It took a while to read, but I read it. It was really cool to read everything Ralph Metzner had to say about Tim. Ralph seems like a really great guy that i'd love to meet.
AislingGheal burned me a 3 cd set from Pacifica recently which is great. He also burned me four Alan Watts cds which are cool as well. Pacifica has loads of cool spoken word cd's available. They even have one more Leary disk with Ram Das(Richard Alpert) that we don't have yet. When he ordered from Pacifica he had some problems however. They took a long time to come through with the disks for some reason. But once they got to him, he forgot about that because of how much he enjoyed the disks. My personal favorite disk is the one that has "The Problem Of Expanded Consciousnss" and "Turn On Tune In Drop Out"(not the soundtrack or the other record of the same name). -------------------- -------------------------------- Mp3 of the month: Tony Church & The Crusade - Love Trip
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Anansi ------------ Registered: 04/13/03 Posts: 312 Last seen: 17 years, 9 months |
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That was a great read, thank you very much for posting that. I am currently reading High Priest and would venture to say it is one of the most powerful pieces of literature I have read to date. Leary was an intelligent and insightful man that I have learned much from through his literature and such.
Learyfan, do you know where you could download those audio bits? I am very interested in those as I was unaware they existed.
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Learyfan It's the psychedelic movement! Registered: 04/20/01 Posts: 34,558 Loc: High pride! Last seen: 6 hours, 36 minutes |
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Which ones, the Pacifica cd's that I was just talking about or the Mp3's that I posted in the other thread?
I doubt that you will find the Pacifica cd's online anywhere in Mp3 form. You'd probably have to order the cd's. Look on soulseek though. -------------------- -------------------------------- Mp3 of the month: Tony Church & The Crusade - Love Trip
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