Dr. Timothy Leary

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This is an experiment in mind formation, in-formation, forming, controlling, operating your mind and your brain, using digital techniques to overload, scramble, confuse, unfocus your mind. The natural state of the brain is chaos. Were dealing with a complexity of in-formation. The first thing to do is to overwhelm your focused mind, your linear mind, by overloading signals, digital patterns, clusters of photons and electrons which produce a pleasant state of confused chaos. This is the state of the brain when it is ready to be informed, that is, to be reprogrammed. The human brain contains one hundred billion neurons, each neuron is as powerful as a large computer, and each neuron has around ten thousand connections with other neurons. Within our foreheads there is a chaos, inside our brains there is a galaxy of information, which is incomprehensible to our linear minds. This contrasts and compares perfectly with the chaos without. Were living in a universe, which has one hundred billion galaxies, each galaxy with star systems, planets, a complexity, again, which to our minds right now is chaotic, incomprehensible. Chaos is beautiful. Now many times we are afraid because we want order. We cant deal with the confusion and disorder. We want form. We want rules. Yes, throughout human history there have been peoplereligious leaders, political leaderswho will give you order. They will give you rules and commandments. But chaos is basically good. Relax. Surf the waves of chaos and learn how to redesign your own realities. Sit back. Flow. Open your eyes. Turn off your minds. Unfocus, and let the waves of chaos roll over your brain. Float. Drift, Zoom. Design. Create new order, your order, your style from chaos. Yes. Yes. Chaos. Yes, yes, chaos . . . The aim of human life is to know thyself. Think for yourself. Question authority. Think with your friends. Create, create new realities. Philosophy is a team sport. Philosophy is the ultimate, the ultimate aphrodisiac pleasure. Learning how to operate your brain, learning how to operate your mind, learning how to redesign chaos. The religious leaders, the political leaders want to give you orders to run your life, to determine how you think. The basic goal is to operate your own mind. Think for yourself. Around three thousand years ago, a group of human beings in Athens, Greece, developed a new philosophy, a basic religion of humanity that is called humanism. Socrates said that the aim of human life is to know thyself. Create and design your own order from chaos. Socrates did not give commandments. Socrates did not impose order. Socrates asked questions. He encouraged his friends to speculate, design, to create, to interact their own versions of reality. Socrates said the way to perform philosophy is in small groups, raising questions, learning from each other, changing, changing your mind, growing together, thinking together. The religious leaders said "You cant say that, Socrates. The gods are in control. Who are you to say you have a self? How dare you think you can know? The Gods determine. Sacrifice to the gods; obey the gods." Socrates said, "No. Look within." For that, they gave Socrates the hemlock, because he dared to tell people, "Think for yourself. Question authority. To think for yourself, you must learn how to reprogram, reform, inform your own brain. To do this, to take responsibility for your brain, it is necessary to question everything that you have been taught, to question authority, to learn to take the brave step of taking responsibility for operating your brain. For designing, redesigning, reforming the chaos within. Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authoritiesthe political, the religious, the educational authoritieswho attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informingforming in our mindsTHEIR view of reality. To think for yourself, you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable open-mindedness, chaotic, confused vulnerability to inform yourself. Think for yourself. Question authority. Then came Marshall McCluhan, in the 1950's. McCluhan said, in the Socratic sense, "The medium is the message." The words you use, the modes of communication you use determine the realities you inhabit. Most of our lives, most of us live in realities determined by others, imprinted in our brains by education, by religion, by politics, by the authorities. McCluhan said, "If you want to change your mind, change the medium." Change the words you use. Change the mode of communication. If you change the medium, you change yourself. You change your society. In the 1960s, a new mode of communication developed: television. The kids growing up in the 1950s learned how to tune in, turn on, fine tune, turn off, select, determine what hits your eyeballs. You control your eyeballs and your eardrums. You direct, manage the media that program your brain. McCluhan said, "Who controls the media is programming your mind and programming your brain." We are using in this tape the new media of digital, multimedia, audiographic overload, attempting to create the state of open-mindedness, pleasant vulnerability in which we will in-form and imprint the messages of The Sponsor: "Use your head. Learn how to operate your brain." To operate your brain you must understand how to use your eyes. "Oh say, can you see?" Oh say, cant you see what is being done to your eyes? Who controls your eyeballs, controls your mind, imprints your brain. Oh say, cant you see that the messages that hit your eyeballs in modern television are creating realities, imprinting messages from the sponsors who are not usually interested in your learning how to design your own realities. Warning! Warning! Warning! Warning! Who controls your screen controls the programs in your mind. Your eyes are the windows of your brain. The eyes are extensions of the brain. The eyes are made up of hundreds of layers of neurons, rods, cones. Your eyeballs deal with one energy: Its light. Through your eyes come illumination, vision, perception, enlightenment, illumination. Your eyes are the windows of your soul. Who controls your eyeballs programs your brain. Learn how to dial, fine tune your eyeballs. Learn how to unfocus your eyes, dilate your pupils, learn how to open up to illumination and light, and then refocus and redesign your own inner order, your own designs, your own language. In the 60s, we said. "Power to the people." In the 90s, the digital multimedia 90s, we say, "Power to the pupil." Illuminate. Enlighten. Envision. Light waves. Sound waves. Light waves. Open eyes. Open mind. Open your brain. Learn how to send messages using electrons. Your brain loves light. Who controls your eyeballs programs your mind. We are also passing on, in this demonstration, the message of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the first and probably the greatest American philosopher who said, "Divinity lies within." Dont look to the churches or to the big marble institutions. Your divinity lies within. You must learn to operate your brain, operate your soul. Learn how to communicate brain to brain, soul to soul with other people. Your divinity lies within. The brain is designed to design realities. If you operate your own brain skillfully, you can learn to design your own realities, learn how to communicate in the language of the brain: electrons and photons. We are doing this now. We are sending messages from our brains, using the vehicle of electrons and photons, to your eyeballs. As we watch this screen, our minds are bedazzled, our minds are softened, our linear, sharp logical thinking is gentled, and we are communicating brain to brain. We are using the electron, computer circuits, to feed each others brains with light. This is the first paragraph, the first attempt, the first childs primer in how to communicate using both the orderly left brain and the chaotic, confusing language of photons and electrons. The brain is a photovore. Your brain, my brain, our brains live on light. Just as the body needs air and carbohydrates, our brains are starved for light, for illumination, for revelation. Use your head. Learn how to operate your brain. The brain is designed to design realities. Marshall McCluhan made the prophecy. He told us that the aim of evolution was to use media to create what we all want: the global village, the language, which can be understood by every human being, by every brain. The basic language of humanity, the language of the brain, lights, sounds, rhythms, pulsating your bones, moving your body. We all know this language. We can all sing and dance this language of electrons, of radio waves, of rhythms. Now we have digital communication. We can create our fantasies. We can create our rhythms, design on screen. A new language will develop, a global language, not based on letters, not based on grammars, the language which we all understand, based on clusters of waves of light and sound. We all understand. We all celebrate. We all glory in the light, the illumination, the contact, the intersection, the interaction from around the world, the language of form. We will create a language of international, global brain linkup. Anyone in any culture watching this screen will get the general picture. Its one global village. Its one global human spirit, one global human race. As we link up through screens, linked by electrons and photons, we will create for the first time a global humanity, not separated by words or minds or nationalities or religious biases. Now listen to The Message from The Sponsor: "There is one, global human race." We're just now learning to communicate brain to brain, soul to soul. ..
Get this video and more at MySpace.com taken from wikipedia 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." [edit] Biography [edit] Early life Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out (Original Movie Soundtrack)Leary was born in Springfield, Massachusetts the son of an Irish American dentist, who abandoned the family when Timothy was a teenager. Leary studied briefly at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, but reacted badly to the strict training at the Jesuit institution. He also attended West Point but was forced to resign after an incident involving smuggling liquor during a school field exercise and an extended period of a schoolwide "silent treatment." There is evidence that as one of the few Irish Catholics then attending West Point, he was made a scapegoat as his Protestant co-conspirators were allowed to continue their studies.[citation needed] He earned a bachelor's degree in psychology at the University of Alabama in 1943, 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). 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. [edit] Psychedelic exploration 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.[1] Frank Barron, 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 winter of 1959, Leary traveled to Mexico with Barron and tried psilocybin mushrooms for the first time, an experience that drastically altered the course of his life. Leary later commented that eight hours on mushrooms had taught him more about the mind and consciousness than fifteen years of clinical psychology research. Upon his return to Harvard in 1960, Leary and his associates, notably Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass), began the Harvard Psilocybin Project conducting research into the effects of psilocybin (with a synthesized version of the mushroom produced by Sandoz) and later LSD, with 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. Leary and Alpert were dismissed from Harvard in 1963. Their colleagues were uneasy about the nature of their research, and some parents complained to the university administration about the distribution of hallucinogens to their students. Leary and Alpert then founded the International Foundation for Internal Freedom in 1962 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1963 they relocated to a large mansion 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. 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). This later became The Brotherhood of Eternal Love. 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 14th, 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." Leary in the late 1960's and early 1970's formulated his eight circuit model of consciousness (based on his psychedelic experiences at the Millbrook estate) in which he claimed that the human mind/nervous system consisted of eight circuits which, when activated, produce eight levels of consciousness. He 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 eight circuit model of consciousness was exhaustively formulated for the first time in Leary's 1977 book, Exo-Psychology. [edit] Trouble with the law DEA agents Don Strange (r.) and Howard Safir (l.) arrest Leary in 1972Leary'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 considered his non-violent escape to be a humorous prank and left a challenging note for the authorities to find after he was gone. For a fee paid by The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the Weathermen smuggled Leary and his wife Rosemary Woodruff Leary out of the United States and into Algeria. The couple's plan to take refuge with the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver failed after Cleaver attempted to hold Leary hostage. Leary described his expectation of reasonableness from a black militant as "naive." The couple fled to Switzerland. 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, and Leary became involved with a groupie by the name of Joanna Harcourt-Smith. They travelled to Afghanistan, and in January 1973, Leary was "unlawfully captured" by U. S. government agents (some would say "kidnapped" as the United States had no extradition treaty with Afghanistan at the time and U. S. agents had no legal authority on Afghani soil) at an airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, and then flown to the United States. At a layover in the United Kingdom 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 soon rumours began to spread around the underground that he had become an informant, implicating friends and helpers in exchange for a reduced sentence. However, no one was ever prosecuted based on any information Leary gave to the FBI, as noted in an Open Letter from the Friends of Timothy Leary: 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." Leary appears to have been smart and audacious enough to have played along without compromising those who had helped him. This sort of escapade is in line with others throughout his life, such as his manipulation of psychological test responses that enabled him to get into a prison from which he could engineer his escape, and his confrontation of FBI agents who were terrifying an innocent young Hispanic woman during the Millbrook bust (led by G. Gordon Liddy), which was described in an eye-witness interview in the "Timothy Leary's Dead" (TLD) movie DVD (see below). Leary was released on April 21, 1976, by Governor Jerry Brown. At that time, Leary had spent more time for Cannabis possession than anyone else in USA history. Further evidence of Leary's savvy was his cultivation of a friendship with former foe G. Gordon Liddy (whose former boss, Richard Nixon, had ordered him to destroy Leary), after his release from prison. At the time, both men were near financial insolvency, and in 1982, they earned money touring the lecture circuit as ex-cons debating the soul of America. [edit] Death In the months before his death from inoperable prostate cancer, Leary authored a book called Design for Dying, which attempted to show people a new perspective of death and dying. "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. In his final months thousands of visitors, well wishers and old friends visited him in his California home. For a number of years, Leary was excited by the possibility of freezing his body in cryonic suspension. As a scientist himself, he didn't believe that he would be resurrected in the future, but he recognized the importance of cryonic possibilities and was generally an advocate of future sciences. He called it his "duty as a futurist," and helped publicize the process. Leary had relationships with two cryonic organizations, the original ALCOR and then the offshoot CRYOCARE. When these relationships soured due to a great lack of trust, Leary requested that his body be cremated, which it was, and distributed among his friends and family. Leary's death was videotaped for posterity, 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 without permission from Leary or his family, or so some claim. After the movie's release, the filmmakers declined to admit the scene's falsehood, possibly as a method to generate hype and sell tickets. 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. [edit] Miscellaneous pursuits [edit] Other interests Leary on several occasions flirted with the occult and was a member of the magical order of the Illuminates of Thanateros. Leary also believed that advances in technology could provide insights similar to those of psychedelic drugs, and lectured in the early 1990's on virtual reality. Leary's final forecast for the future was encompassed in the acronym "SMI2LE" standing for "space migration", "intelligence increase" and "life extension." [edit] Influence on others Leary's book "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 the hit "Come Together," which Lennon later reclaimed for himself. 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. 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." 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 university lecture circuit, promoting NASA scientist Gerard O'Neill's innovative plans to build giant Eden-like orbiting mini-Earths using existing technology and raw materials from the moon. Tim Leary and Friends Recording Give Peace A Chance Photo By Roy KerwoodA number of other musical groups have admired and been influenced by Leary, including the progressive metal band Tool, the metal band Nevermore, Marcy Playground, 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). 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 took just as much from Wilson. Wilson's book 'Prometheus Rising' was an in depth, highly detailed and inclusive work documenting Learys eight circuit model of consciousness. 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". Timothy Leary and his endorsement of LSD usage is also reflected upon in 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." [2] [edit] 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. Film rights for a biography of Leary were bought by Miramax in April 2006. A feature film is now in development. Leary was the godfather of Winona Ryder, Uma Thurman (daughter of his ex-wife Nena), Joi Ito, and Caresse and Genesse P-Orridge, daughters of Genesis P-Orridge. Timothy Leary is mentioned in The Magnetic Fields song "Technical (You're So)" off the album "The House of Tomorrow." ..
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May 25, 2006