Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
I thought this was amusing:


"On January 21, 1970, Leary received a 10-year sentence for his 1968
offense, with a further 10 added later while in custody for a prior
arrest in 1965, for a total of 20 years to be served consecutively. On
his arrival in prison, he was given psychological tests used to assign
inmates to appropriate work details. Having designed some of these
tests himself (including the "Leary Interpersonal Behavior Test"),
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, he was assigned to work as a gardener in a
lower-security prison from which he escaped in September 1970, saying
that his non-violent escape was a humorous prank and leaving a
challenging note for the authorities to find after he was gone."

He had a crazy, and probably rough, go of it on the run and in hiding
after his escape. What impact did this have on his world-view?
  

    
It's really the key to his worldview during and after prison. He
becomes very sharp and corrosive regarding "mammalian"politics and
"terrestrial" politics, however you would phrase it. 

Before that, there's  work on what we might call a charting of the
development of the arc of an ordinary human being that Leary did
throughout his career, including pre-psychedelic as a theoretical
psychologist or psychoanalyst. 

But after jail, exile, jail again and being jostled around by the feds
 he becomes sort of wickedly satirical about common patterns of human
behavior -- taboos and belief systems and "get the heretic" sorts of
stuff. That's actually some of his strongest writing, which he puts out
in the context of a sort of charting (the first four "circuits") of
stages of human development that relates pretty closely to what would
become evolutionary psychology. 

The psychodrama is deeply woven into the content he created in the mid
and late 1970s -- mainly the books he called the "Future History
Series." Those books really are best understood in the context of what
he went through, even though they're also very futurist and
proto-transhumanist... not to mention, incomprehensible to most people.
  

    
Would you say that the writing in those books is undisciplined? Naive?
I've heard it described as confused... one person reviewing the last
book in the series on Amazon says "What I find exciting about this book
is not so much the confusing writing, but within the chaos there is a
positive code that Leary is sending to all of us, possibly decoded from
his own DNA transmissions, and that code is: 'Move On!'"
  

    
Undisciplined, yes. Naive? No, very sophisticated stylistically and
very post-hippie... not a whole lot of flower power, but
overoptimistic, certainly.  Confused? Quite the opposite with most of
those books, which are
What Does WoMan Want?
Neuropolitics
Exo-Psychology
The Game of Life
The Intelligence Agents

To me, they have a kind of lucidity and clarity that's comparable to
low dose psychedelics. However, the last book, which may be the one
this person is talking about, The Intelligence Agents, is very
nonlinear and playful and there are some pretty wildly experimental
ideas, presented in fragments under pseudonyms and then being picked up
later in the book.  

Leary used to talk about spraying out ideas and if he batted 333% (as
per baseball) he was still the MVP. People get confused either by
taking them too seriously or literally or by not being able to make
that leap to the boundary between seriousness and play.
  

    
I think that, if pyschedelic drug use had been confined to legitimate
research, we might be better off today. Imagine the improved results if
psychedelics had been more widely used by, for example, physicists. 
  

    
Hmm.  That would make for a curious alternate history indeed. 
  

    
I was lucky (?) enough to do real, rx, MDMA back in the 80s and it was
not like anything sold in the 90s and later.  As a supervised drug
used in clinics by trained professionals it would have led to a very
different now.  Maybe not a *better* now, but a different one, much
the way alcohol made water safe to drink back before the 20th century.
  

    
Robin Russell... wondering how old you are. It's easy to underestimate
the reverberations of the changes in US and to a lesser extent global
culture if the democratized and, yes, excessive flowering of
psychedelic culture, out of control, hadn't occurred. I also don't
think they would have become widely used by physicians.  There's
something intrinsic in psychedelic experience that probably couldn't be
calmly integrated into US culture as a medicine. Maybe now, slowly. 
But it does make an interesting alternative narrative.  The best
outcome would have been the continuation of legal experimentation and
the emergence of the wild and wooly and necessary psychedelic
counterculture but better informed and a tad less excessive, thanks
perhaps to friendly advice from a reasonable state (Leary's 1966
suggestion of regulations are often ignored).

Jet...  I'm sure that some people get real MDMA. It's not rocket
science, as they say. But yes, a lot of people get crap because of the
illegality. And I certainly remember when it was legal in the '80s. 
  

    
It was meant to be truth within a joke, ALL legitimate research of any
ilk. I guess I am old enough to know better.

I don't blame Leary for letting the genie out of the bottle, and, to
the extent he was responsible, I think it was a good thing. While
Huxley, had he lived to see the mass breakout of LSD use, would
probably have been in "tut, tut, I told you so" mode, I think the
pschedelic counterculture uncovered more interesting possibilities a
lot faster than would and possibly could have been achieved by
laboratory research.

Leary's emphasis on set and setting as key parameters was a
particularly worthwhile contribution. 
  

    
thanks for clarifying, Robin
  

    
I always thought Cary Grant let the genie out of the bottle. That's
how I first heard about psychedelics, a news article about Cary Grant's
therapeutic experiences with LSD. Here's a Grant quote:

"I have been born again. I have been through a psychiatric experience
which has completely changed me. I was horrendous. I had to face things
about myself which I never admitted, which I didn't know were there.
Now I know that I hurt every woman I ever loved. I was an utter fake, a
self-opinionated bore, a know-all who knew very little. I found I was
hiding behind all kinds of defenses, hypocrisies and vanities. I had to
get rid of them layer by layer. The moment when your conscious meets
your subconscious is a hell of a wrench. With me there came a day when
I saw the light."

I often wondered whether it was the Grant story that led Leary and
Alpert to their first trips?
  

    
Wasn't it mushrooms in Mexico?
  

    
The genie was destined to escape the Klein bottle. In some ways, it
all started with the VP of J.P. Morgan, R. Gordon Wasson, who
experienced magic mushrooms in Mexico and then wrote it up in a most
pleasant but distant combination of white anthropologist studying
curious customs of the primitives and real person having an amazing
experience —- for Life magazine in 1957. So psychedelics entered
mainstream American media culture as neither a therapeutic tool or
something for outsider bohos but as a curiosity. 

The publishers of Life, Henry and Clare Booth Luce -- among other
things, promoters of Ronald Reagan, were both enthusiastic about
psychedelics in the 1950s, including LSD. So, in some ways,
psychedelics in America started off as a plaything of ruling circles
(giving birth to many many many conspiracy theories after it became a
counterculture thing that the whole psychedelic counterculture was an
intentional ruling class plot). 

A curious note: in the early '70s, Abbie Hoffman had the occasion to
ask Clare Booth Luce, at a party, what she thought about LSD now. She
said "We wouldn't want people to have too much of a good thing," at
which point Abbie stopped accepting invitations to elite parties. (He
was THAT famous at the time.) 
  

    
Clare Booth Luce's elitist attitude was shared by many in that circle.


Aldous Huxley's 'The Doors of Perception' and 'Heaven and Hell'
alerted me to the psychedelic world in the late 1960s, well before I
had heard of Tim Leary. Huxley mixed in that group. Possibly he thought
the hoi polloi wouldn't be reading his monographs.

I reckon it would be a bold ruling class that thought turning on the
massses to LSD would serve their interests, and there certainly seems
to have been a lot of effort devoted to putting the genie back in the
bottle.
  

    
The 8-circuit model of consciousness is one that was widely advocated
by both Leary and Wilson. You have stated, here and elsewhere, that the
first 4 circuits anticipate--or at least adopt--findings from
evolutionary psychology. That seems largely true. To be sure, Leary
deserves special credit for acknowledging how clearly one can perceive
and understand mammalian politics when psychedelicized [especially at a
time when "sociobiology" (cf. Edward O. Wilson) was openly scorned by
more idealistic, left-wing, politically-correct circles].

Nonetheless,the transcendent circuits (the upper 4) seem theorized for
future use. Now, how does that square with Leary's overall worldview?
He seems to propose a mild scientism at times (e.g., denigrating the
use of "mind" now that "brain" is available), yet his 8-circuit model
of consciousness and its attendant propositions seem entirely
anti-Darwinian (insofar as Leary has a teleological framework).

Is there a way to draw the line between his scientism and his
mysticism? Does he anywhere articulate his agreements or disagreements
with Darwinism? Does he ever seriously endorse theism?

P.S. R.U. Sirius, you're a perennial fixture of the psychedelic
community--from my teens to my late 20's now, you have been a
reasonable and articulate voice, and I thank you.
  

    
Thanks for the question and the praise.

If you recall the 1970s material, he embraced the broad outline of
Darwinian evolution but suspected a Lamarckian effect... acquired
characteristics and so forth. He also referenced the "higher
circuits"as post-Darwinian, in a few spots. Humans would be taking
control of and programming the next stages of (our) evolution
ourselves... this is another way in which he hit on themes that would
later be taken up by transhumanism.

Also, during that time, the '70s, he seems to believe that the
biological code (DNA etc.) must be a conscious creation of a higher
intelligence (or simply is a higher intelligence) and that the stages
of evolution that he notes — and, in the future sections, predicts --
are inevitable and are probably repeated across the galaxies... so
there's a sort of soft predestinarianism in there. 

At the same time, there's an acknowledgment that all these ideas may
just be wild pitches.

He sort of backs away from the higher intelligence/mystical stuff in
the '80s and then, sometimes picks it up again and sometimes puts it
back down again. If we're looking for consistency with Leary, we'll
probably only find it in the application of antiauthoritarianism to
whatever field he's working in. 

On the whole, I think the "higher circuits" really come from trying to
think about psychedelic experience in a Darwinian/post-Darwinian
manner, i.e. what the hell are these substances good for, anyway?  And
he concludes that they are good for a post-terrestrial or posthuman or
post-Darwinian species.

I think the main key to Leary's neuropolitics are probably related to
the at that time novel idea that there are reward circuits built in the
brain. And (darwinian) neurology at that time (and now) could
understand how the brain gets pleasurably rewarded for victory and
accomplishment and aggression (also triggered by cocaine) and for
sharing and nurturing and being nurtured, but why ecstasy, rapture,
agape? Why should this onrush of too many signals and deep visual
patterns and odd personal insights be accompanied by these rapturous
exhalted feelings? So Leary figured that these were circuits that
corresponded to the conditions of an accelerated post-Darwinian
species... us in the future.   
  

    
You observe that "As with many psychedelic spokespeople, one of
Leary’s flaws was that he assumed that just about everybody would have
the same experience he did." Yet Leary conducted professional
psychedelic experiments with dozens of different subjects and doubtless
tripped with dozens more in less structured settings.

Is it possible that Leary believed that psychedelics opened the door
on aspects of reality that were not normally apparent, that is, that
the psychedelic voyager was visiting and revisiting something that was
separate from their personal consciousness? Much like the DMT dimension
that Terry McKenna describes revisiting?
  

    
In the '60s and '70s he seemed to mainly believe that psychedelics tap
the individual into a vast nearly unfathomable informational space
that contains all of evolution, but he seems to believe that all of
this resides in each individual's nervous system or deep mind or... 
R.A. Wilson saw this as Jung's akashic records... although Jung, I
don't think, thought of this "collective unconscious" as residing in
each person's deep brain structures/nervous system, etcetera.  But, you
know, with Leary, if you told him you thought this informational space
was outside of the individual but rather something other that you
could tap into, he would probably shrug (or more likely smile) and not
be too concerned with that detail (however large it may appear to
someone like Terence McKenna, who felt that he had contacted Others at
the operational controls of the universe, etc.)

Of course, I'm sure we could find some passages that contradict this,
in which Leary talks about all this as something exterior to the
individual that psychedelics can tune you in to. 

It's hard to say because in the last couple of decades of his life, he
didn't really concern himself with epistemology and related topics in
a sort of hyperintellectual way.  By the '90s, he's sort of
cyber-Taoist about all this... chaos and going with the flow. So he
never really summed up.
  

    
Could it be that he dispensed with theory (and epistemology) because
it was so inadequate to the scope and complexity of the reality that
blasted through is head when he was tripping? I mean, you can get to
that point without psychedelics: to a realization that scientific
discipline, while necessary for one very disciplined level of
knowledge, is too inherently self-constrained to approach whatever
higher levels might be accessible to puny humans. 
  

    
Unless, of course, the universe has modelled itself on our
mathematics.
  

    
Jon, sorta like that. And more that that, maybe a sense that whatever
is going on at the quantum level or any other invisible or meta level
is manifest in life itself and in these electronic digital tools
particularly that we were just forming a relationship with... so it was
kind of the hands-on imperative.  I think hanging out more with
engineers and hackers and scientists in the '80s and '90s made him
realize how much he didn't know... and how much was still unknown...
and it made him a bit cautious... maybe even a bit intimidated by
hardheaded reductionist science... not wanting to be TOO foolish.

I also think he decided that figuring why and how everything is...
wasn't his job anymore. 

You can see the tendency to want to be the guy who figures everything
out and communicates it to the people even in the 1950s. At that time,
it wasn't ridiculous to think that someone working in psychology would
become an important philosophical thinker, since the examples of Freud
and Jung were still vital. 

And then when you toss in the questions and inputs raised by initial
psychedelic experiences and you toss in becoming famous and infamous
and controversial and a target for your ideas and beliefs and how you
express them; and then you toss in the intensity of cultural and
political disaffection and expectation that emerged in the'60s and '70s
and you have a fair number of people now expecting you to have "the
answer" (If you lived through the '60s, you know that there was this
ridiculous idea that you could search for and find "the answer")... and
then finally you add in the
prison/exile/prison/compromise-with-authority ordeal... you can sort of
forgive the guy for thinking he's the one who has to be, in Leary's
own mid-'70s words, "the only one offering a hopeful and forward
looking eschatology"... I mean, at the culmination of all this, he
almost HAS to be doing the most important transformative work in all
the cosmos to justify himself.  So he takes all this as far as he can
in the '70s.

And then, suddenly, that sort of apocalyptic period in which people
are expecting instant transformation or revolution comes to an end,
he's out of prison, the smoke clears and there's less damage and he's
not as screwed as it must have seemed he was, and he's able to live and
have a family and a career being Timothy Leary... suddenly he doesn't
have to be that guy with the Most Transformative Cosmology Ever
anymore.  

So he starts to bite off smaller issues, for example showing the
relationships between the scientific paradigms, technologies and medias
and cultural trends and beliefs of each decade of the 20th Century,
for example, to impress on people the nature of accelerating change as
we entered the "information age"... and that is largely where we end
up, until it's time to die... at which point it seems to become about
modeling how to die having fun, how not to be humorless and uptight
about dying.

Ummm, that's my late night ramble anyway.
  

    
Aha.  You bring an endearing empathy to your task.  It's not so much a
dissection under a sharpened blade, which will be part of what will
divide your readers into fans and critics.  

Did you think about that while writing -- say, about engaging the
empathy of the reader?


 
  

    
I felt that, among my jobs, in writing the book, I was correcting or
at least balancing out the historical record and public misconceptions,
so I was definitely trying to reach out to anyone with an open mind.
Part of that involved not being overly worshipful or uncritical. I
don't know that I took enough space to actually evoke empathy with Dr.
Leary, but I seem to be sort of doing that in interviews about the
book, for some reason.  Or are you asking about empathy with me as a
writer?  I certainly wasn't trying to reach out to anyone with a
strongly critical view, although I think I maybe would try to do that
in a longer book that would not necessarily be for the Leary estate.  I
can certainly understand some of the harsher critics, to a degree.
  

    
I think you did achieve a nice balance, and made it quirky enough to
be interesting as well.

One of the most interesting questions you raise is this:

"Why did Leary and Ginsberg and their magic pills fail to ignite
a wave of advocacy among Ginsberg’s friends in the intellectual
cognoscenti of the early 1960s? On the one hand, we could decide that
the intellectuals were correct. The mind magic supplied by the pills
simply was not the great thing Timothy and Allen thought it was. On
the other hand, we might conclude that successful intellectuals who
were already pretty well defined publicly by their philosophic views
and their mental perceptions might have had something to lose in
letting the psychedelic experience divert them too far from their hard
earned paths."

In saying that maybe the intellectuals were correct, the implication
is that intellectuals who were turned on by Leary and Ginsberg were
making a case that LSD (or psylocybin) were not effective in changing
consciousness, or that the changes were unremarkable. Both Burroughs
and Kerouac did come out with negative assessments, but Kerouac was a
juicer and Burroughs a junkie, and maybe defending their own choices.
Were there a bunch of other intellectuals who tried psychedelics and
found them wanting?
  

    
Off the top of my head, Arthur Koestler and Robert Lowell come to
mind. More generally, over the long years, I think a lot of
intellectuals probably tried it and found it wanting, although few come
to mind. Frank Zappa tried it twice and wasn't impressed, but he
blatantly wanted to be unimpressed. Hmmm