Today’s recollection from the first Summer of Love comes in the form of a talk given on January 18th, 1967, by Dr. Timothy Leary at UCLA, the University of California, Los Angeles.
Born in 1920, the clinical psychologist, Timothy Leary, was one of the leading voices of the hippy era, a proponent of consciousness expansion through the use of psychedelic drugs, combined with more conventional spiritual techniques. He drew on Tibetan mysticism, Hinduism, Yoga, Meditation and other techniques and traditions, merging them into a form of spirituality suited to the young people he taught at Harvard University and talked to elsewhere.
In 1960, he and Richard Alpert began the Harvard Psilocybin Project to research the effects of that natural hallucinogen on prisoners and on students. This was continued in the Concord Prison Experiment. They found, among other things, that recidivism rates among prisoners dropped dramatically once they had undergone psilocybin ‘trips’ in controlled conditions that encouraged them to have revelatory spiritual experiences. Leary and Alpert were both fired from Harvard in 1963. This began a long period during which various American authorities, including the CIA and the FBI, worked extremely hard to shut Leary up. He spent time in prison, escaped, fled the country, returned, got arrested some more. His life and philosophy, not surprisingly, appealed strongly to young people in the 1960s.
Personally, I found that hallucinogens can help people to, as Jim Morrison put it, “break on through to the other side.” I was, however, delighted to discover techniques such as rhythmic drumming, by which it is possible to achieve states of altered consciousness without drugs. Why? Simple. Because, as Leary admits in this talk, hallucinogens confuse the mind and the non-drug techniques don’t.
In this talk, Leary speaks engagingly, often amusingly, and in some depth about his personal history and philosophy, including his famous exhortation to young people to “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” He explains that “Dropping out means gently, invisibly, beautifully finding what’s inside and expressing it slowly in a cellular fashion around you.” I like the way he addresses his audience as “Beloved robots.” I love his advice on how to start a new religion. His is a voice that still has relevance and resonance today and it’s good that, although Timothy Leary is dead, through the magic of virtual life, he is still on the outside looking in.
Peace and love,
Greywolf /|\