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Object 1

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Iam at cause over my body. I am at cause over my imaginaiton. I am at cause over my future. My mind abounds with beauty and power. I like people, and people like me.

n. A member of certain tribal societies who acts as a medium between the visible world and an invisible spirit world and who practices magic or sorcery for purposes of healing, divination, and control over natural events.

Terence Kemp McKenna (November 16, 1946 April 3, 2000) was an American writer mainly on the subject of psychedelic drugs and their role in society, and existence beyond the physical body. He was also a public speaker, psychonaut, ethnobotanist, art historian, and self-described anarchist, antimaterialist, environmentalist, feminist, Platonist and skeptic.[1] During his lifetime he was noted for his knowledge of psychedelics, metaphysics, plant-based entheogens, shamanism, mysticism, Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, biology, geology, physics, phenomenology, and his concept of novelty theory.[2]

Biography
[edit] Early life
Terence McKenna grew up in Paonia, Colorado.[3] He was introduced to geology through his uncle and developed a hobby of solitary fossil hunting in the arroyos near his home.[4] From this he developed a deep artistic and scientific appreciation of nature. At age 16, McKenna moved to, and attended high school in, Los Altos, California.[3] He lived with family friends because his parents in Colorado wished him to have the benefit of highly rated California

public schools. He was introduced to psychedelics through The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley[3] and the Village Voice.[5] One of his early experiences with them came through morning glory seeds (containing LSA), which he claimed showed him "that there was something there worth pursuing."[3] In 1964, circumstances required McKenna to move to Lancaster, California, to live with a different set of family friends. In 1965, he graduated from Antelope Valley High School. McKenna then enrolled in U.C. Berkeley. He moved to San Francisco during the summer of 1965 before his classes began, was introduced that year to cannabis by Barry Melton[6] and tried LSD soon after. As a freshman at U.C. Berkeley McKenna participated in the Tussman Experimental College, a shortlived two-year program on the Berkeley campus. He graduated in 1969 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Ecology and Conservation.

[edit] Adult life


He spent the years after his graduation teaching English in Japan, traveling through India and South Asia collecting (endangered?) butterflies for biological supply companies.[7] Following the death of his mother in 1971, Terence, his brother Dennis, and three friends traveled to the Colombian Amazon in search of oo-koo-h, a plant preparation containing DMT. Instead of oo-koo-h they found various forms of ayahuasca (also known as "yag") and gigantic psilocybe cubensis which became the new focus of the expedition.[7] In La Chorrera, at the urging of his brother, he allowed himself to be the subject of a psychedelic experiment which he claimed put him in contact with Logos: an informative, divine voice he believed was universal to visionary religious experience.[7] The revelations of this voice, and his brother's peculiar experience during the experiment, prompted him to explore the structure of an early form of the I Ching, which led to his "Novelty Theory".[7] These ideas were explored extensively by Terence and Dennis in their 1975 book The Invisible Landscape - Mind Hallucinogens and The I Ching. In the early 1980s, McKenna began to speak publicly on the topic of psychedelic drugs, lecturing extensively and conducting weekend workshops. Though somewhat associated with the New Age or human potential movement, McKenna himself had little patience for New Age sensibilities, repeatedly stressing the importance and primacy of felt experience as opposed to dogmatic ideologies.[8] Timothy Leary once introduced him as "one of the five or six most important people on the planet".[9]
It's clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning. These are the two things that the psychedelics attack. We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it's not easy.

Terence McKenna, "This World...and Its Double", [10] He soon became a fixture of popular counterculture, and his popularity continued to grow, culminating in the early to mid 1990's with the publication of several books such as True Hallucinations (which relates the tale of his 1971 experience at La Chorrera), Food of the Gods and The Archaic Revival. He became a popular personality in the psychedelic rave/dance scene of the early 1990s, with frequent spoken word performances at raves and contributions to psychedelic and goa trance albums by The Shamen, Spacetime Continuum, Alien Project, Capsula, Entheogenic, Zuvuya, Shpongle, and Shakti Twins. His speeches were (and continue to be) sampled by many others. In 1994 he appeared as a speaker at the Starwood Festival, which was documented in the book Tripping by Charles Hayes (his lectures were produced on both cassette tape and CD).[11]

McKenna was a contemporary and colleague of chaos mathematician Ralph Abraham and biologist Rupert Sheldrake (creator of the theory of "morphogenetic fields", not to be confused with the mainstream usage of the same term), and conducted several public debates known as trialogues with them, from the late 1980s up until his death. Books which contained transcriptions of some of these events were published. He was also a friend and associate of Ralph Metzner, Nicole Maxwell, and Riane Eisler, participating in joint workshops and symposia with them. He was a personal friend of Tom Robbins, and influenced the thought of numerous scientists, writers, artists, and entertainers, including comedian Bill Hicks, whose routines concerning psychedelic drugs drew heavily from McKenna's works. He is also the inspiration for the Twin Peaks character Dr. Jacoby.[12] In addition to psychedelic drugs, McKenna spoke on the subjects of virtual reality (which he saw as a way to artistically communicate the experience of psychedelics), techno-paganism, artificial intelligence, evolution, extraterrestrials, and aesthetic theory (art/visual experience as information-- representing the significance of hallucinatory visions experienced under the influence of psychedelics). McKenna also co-founded Botanical Dimensions with Kathleen Harrison (his colleague and wife of 17 years), a non-profit ethnobotanical preserve on the island of Hawaii, where he lived for many years before he died. Before moving to Hawaii permanently, McKenna split his time between Hawaii and a town called Occidental, located in the redwood-studded hills of Sonoma County, California, a town unique for its high concentration of artistic notables, including Tom Waits and Mickey Hart.

[edit] Last interview


Erik Davis, author of the book TechGnosis, conducted what would be the last interview with McKenna in October and early November 1999. This interview was held in preparation for a profile featured in Wired Magazine in 2000, entitled "Terence McKenna's Last Trip."[13] Erik Davis later published larger excerpts from this interview at his site, techgnosis.com, and the recorded interview has also been released on CD. Commenting on the reality of his own death, McKenna said during the interview: I always thought death would come on the freeway in a few horrifying moments, so you'd have no time to sort it out. Having months and months to look at it and think about it and talk to people and hear what they have to say, it's a kind of blessing. It's certainly an opportunity to grow up and get a grip and sort it all out. Just being told by an unsmiling guy in a white coat that you're going to be dead in four months definitely turns on the lights. ... It makes life rich and poignant. When it first happened, and I got these diagnoses, I could see the light of eternity, a la William Blake, shining through every leaf. I mean, a bug walking across the ground moved me to tears.[14]

[edit] Death
A longtime sufferer of migraines, in mid-1999 McKenna returned to his home on the big island of Hawaii after a long lecturing tour. He began to suffer from increasingly painful headaches. This culminated in three brain seizures in one night, which he claimed were the most powerful psychedelic experiences he had ever known. Upon his emergency trip to the hospital on Oahu, Terence was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, a highly aggressive form of brain cancer. For the next several months he underwent various treatments, including experimental gamma knife radiation treatment. He died on April 3, 2000, at the age of 53, with his loved ones at his bedside. He is survived by his brother Dennis, his son Finn, and his daughter Klea.

[edit] The library fire


On February 7, 2007, McKenna's library of rare books and personal notes was destroyed in a fire which burned offices belonging to Big Sur's Esalen Institute storing the collection. An index maintained by his brother Dennis survives, though little else.

[edit] Ideas

There are these things, which I call "self transforming machine elves," I also call them self-dribbling basketballs. They are, but they are none of these things. I mean you have to understand: these are metaphors in the truest sense, meaning that they're lies! [...] I name them 'Tykes' because tyke is a word that means to me a small child, ... and when you burst into the DMT space this is the Aeon - it's a child, and it's at play with colored balls, and I am in eternity, apparently, in the presence of this thing.

Terence McKenna, "Time and Mind", [15] Terence McKenna advocated the exploration of altered states of mind via the ingestion of naturally occurring psychedelic substances. For example, and in particular, as facilitated by the ingestion of high doses of psychedelic mushrooms, and DMT, which he believed was the apotheosis of the psychedelic experience. He spoke of the "jeweled, self-dribbling basketballs" or "self-transforming machine elves" that one encounters in that state. Although he avoided giving his allegiance to any one interpretation (part of his rejection of monotheism), he was open to the idea of psychedelics as being "trans-dimensional travel"; literally, enabling an individual to encounter what could be aliens, ancestors, or spirits of earth.[8] He remained opposed to most forms of organized religion or guru-based forms of spiritual awakening. Philosophically and religiously, he expressed admiration for Marshall McLuhan, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Gnostic Christianity, Alfred North Whitehead, Alchemy, and James Joyce (calling Finnegans Wake "the quintessential work of art, or at least work of literature of the 20th century").[16]

[edit] The "Stoned Ape" hypothesis of human evolution


McKenna hypothesized[citation needed] that as the North African jungles receded and gave way to savannas and grasslands near the end of the most recent ice age, a branch of our tree-dwelling primate ancestors left the forest canopy and began to live in the open areas outside of the forest. There they experimented with new varieties of foods as they adapted, physically and mentally, to their new environment. McKenna also called last glacial period hominids "fruit eating" in what he calls a genderequal "paradise [...] the golden age of humanity" that he dated as ending 10,000 years ago.[17] However, the most recent ice age, also known as the Last glacial period that stretched from 110,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago, when meat-eating, biologically evolved Homo-Sapiens were already in Europe. Capability for language, present in the human FOXP2 gene was already developed. According to McKenna's hypothesis, among the new food items found in this new environment were psilocybin-containing mushrooms growing near the dung of ungulate herds that occupied the savannas and grasslands at that time. To support this hypothesis, McKenna referenced the research of Roland L. Fisher.[citation needed] The cited work by Fischer does not mention paleo-anthropology, Africa, or the ice ages.[18][19][20][21] Echoing Fisher on the effects of psychedelics, McKenna claimed that enhancement of visual acuity was an effect of psilocybin at low doses, and supposed that this would have conferred an adaptive advantage. He also argued that the effects of slightly larger doses, including sexual arousal, and in still larger doses, ecstatic hallucinations and glossolalia gave selective evolutionary advantages to members of those tribes who partook of it. There were many changes caused by the

introduction of this psychoactive mushroom to the primate diet. McKenna hypothesizes, for instance, that synesthesia (the blurring of boundaries between the senses) caused by psilocybin led to the development of spoken language: the ability to form pictures in another person's mind through the use of vocal sounds. About 12,000 years ago, further climate changes removed psilocybin-containing mushrooms from the human diet.[citation needed] McKenna argued that this event resulted in a new set of profound changes in our species as we reverted to the previous brutal primate social structures that had been modified and/or repressed by frequent consumption of psilocybin.

[edit] Novelty theory


One of McKenna's favourite topics is Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy, according to which, the universe progresses from the entropy-dominated state of disorganized complexity to the informationdominated state of organized complexity:[22][23] ...the story of the universe is that information, which I call novelty, is struggling to free itself from habit, which I call entropy... and that this process... is accelerating... It seems as if... the whole cosmos wants to change into information... All points want to become connected... The path of complexity to its goals is through connecting things together... You can imagine that there is an ultimate end-state of that processit's the moment when every point in the universe is connected to every other point in the universe. McKenna, Terence A workshop held in the summer of 1998 Entropy (disgregation) is the particle-like aspect of the universe. Information is the universe's wave-like aspect. In its wave-like phase, a quantum does not have a spatial position and exists as an omnipresent momentum identical with time itself: The imagination is a dimension of nonlocal information. McKenna, Terence A Few Conclusions About Life In sleep, one is released into the real world, of which the world of waking is only the surface in a very literal geometric sense. There is a plenumrecent experiments in quantum physics tend to back this upa holographic plenum of information. All information is everywhere. Information that is not here is nowhere. Information stands outside of time in a kind of eternityan eternity that does not have a temporal existence about which one may say, "It always existed." It does not have temporal duration of any sort. It is eternity. We are not primarily biological, with mind emerging as a kind of iridescence, a kind of epiphenomenon at the higher levels of organization of biology. We are hyperspatial objects of some sort that cast a shadow into matter. The shadow in matter is our physical organism. McKenna, Terence New Maps of Hyperspace The higher the organized complexity of a particle aggregate, the more pronounced its wave-like component: I've always felt that biology is a strategy, a chemical strategy, for amplifying quantummechanical indeterminacy into macrophysical systems called living organisms, and that living organisms somehow work their magic by opening a doorway to the quantum realm through which indeterminacy can come. And I imagine that all nature works like this, with

the single exception of human beings, who have been poisoned by language. McKenna, Terence Hazelwood House Trialogue Just like most of us enjoy a much closer relationship with our television sets than we do with our neighbours, parts of the universe become nonlocally interconnected not directly but through the Earth's biosphere, which acts as the informational hub (due to its amplified virtual, wave-like component information). When the Earth's biosphere will have accumulated the critical amount of information, the universe will become sufficiently interconnected to turn into a reality-warping Elysium. The hyperspace of the universe's nonlocal information (the "superconducting Overmind") is, by definition, in a single quantum state; in order to fuse with that single quantum state and attain absolute psychokinetic control over the universe, the human species needs to become genetically singular by being reduced to a single couple of the most imaginative people, whose tantric union is the ultimate goal of the universe's existence the Eschaton: What is happening to our world is ingression of novelty toward what Whitehead called "concrescence," a tightening gyre. Everything is flowing together. The "autopoetic lapis," the alchemical stone at the end of time, coalesces when everything flows together. When the laws of physics are obviated, the universe disappears, and what is left is the tightly bound plenum, the monad, able to express itself for itself, rather than only able to cast a shadow into physis as its reflection. I come very close here to classical millenarian and apocalyptic thought in my view of the rate at which change is accelerating. From the way the gyre is tightening, I predict that the concrescence will occur soonaround 2012 AD. It will be the entry of our species into hyperspace, but it will appear to be the end of physical laws accompanied by the release of the mind into the imagination. <...> The transition from earth to space will be a staggeringly tight genetic filter, a much tighter filter than any previous frontier has ever been, including the genetic and demographic filter represented by the colonization of the New World. <...> The object at the end of and beyond history is the human species fused into eternal tantric union with the superconducting Overmind/UFO. McKenna, Terence New Maps of Hyperspace According to McKenna, the final period of the universe's informational evolution began on 6 August 1945 and will end with a point of "maximized novelty" by 22 December 2012: Ive been talking about it since 1971, and whats interesting to me is at the beginning, it was material for hospitalization, now it is a minority viewpoint and everything is on schedule. My career is on schedule, the evolution of cybernetic technology is on schedule, the evolution of a global information network is on schedule. Given this asymptotic curve, I think well arrive under budget, on time, December 22, 2012. McKenna, Terence Approaching Timewave Zero November 1994

Quantum Resonance in the Synaptic Field

From Chapter 21: Open Ending of the audio version of True Hallucinations by Terence McKenna

Jung wrote, "Though we know from experience that psychic processes are related to material ones, we are not in a position to say in what this relationship consists, or how it is possible at all. Precisely because the psyche and the physical are mutually dependent it has often been conjectured that they may be identical somewhere beyond our present experience." Of what does this relationship consist? My own hunch, and it is only a hunch, is that an explicitly spatial dimensionof a co-dimension inclusive of our continuumallows a hologram of other realized forms of organization, far distant, to become visible at certain levels of quantum resonance in the synaptic field. These levels have been damped by selection in favor of more directly relevant lines of information relating to animal survival. Evolution does not reinforce selectively the ability of an organism to perceive at a distance since such an ability has no selective advantage, unless the information it conveys falls upon the receptors of an organism already sophisicated enough in its use of symbols to abstract concepts for later application. Thus, these quantum resonances carrying intimations of events at a distance only begin to acquire genetic reinforcement once a species has already achieved sufficient sophistication to be called conscious and mind-possessing. The use of hallucinogens can be seen as an attempt at medical engineering which amplifies, for inspection by consciousness, the quantum resonance of the other parts of the spatial continuum holographically at hand. This experience is the vision which the UFOs and psilocybin impart: visions of strange planets, life forms, perspectives and societies, machines, ruins, landscapes. The hierophanies all unfold in a "nunc-stans" that has all space standing in it, like a frozen hologram. Thus, experimentation with hallucinogens by human beings and the rise in endogenously produced hallucinogens as one advances through the primate phylogeny could both be due to a slow focusing on the phenomenon of imagination.

Imagination being the deepening involvement of the species with things beheld but not actually existing in the present at hand.

Synaptic Connections by Bernard Barnes

Summary

Terence McKenna was a psychedelic author, explorer, and showman. He was born in 1946 and grew up in Paonia, Colorado. In high school he moved to Los Altos, California and from there attended U.C. Berkeley for two years before setting off to travel. He travelled widely in Asia, South America, and Europe during his college years and his first book, co-authored with his brother Dennis McKenna, was based on their 1971 investigations of Amazonian hallucinogens. In 1975, Terence graduated from Berkeley with a degree in ecology, resource conservation, and shamanism. Soon thereafter, he and Dennis pseudonymously published one of the earliest psilocybin mushroom growing guides under the names Oss and Oeric. Terence then spent some time doing largescale farming of psilocybin mushrooms during the 1980s. In 1985, Terence co-founded the non-profit Botanical Dimensions, with Kathleen Harrison-McKenna, to collect and propagate medicinal and shamanic plants from the tropics around the world. During the 90s, he wrote and lectured widely about shamanism, ethnopharmacology, and psychoactive plants and chemicals (especially psilocybin mushrooms and DMT). His sometimes fantasic theories, lectures, and writings led some to dismiss him as a kook, some to follow him as a visionary, and others to enjoy him as an intellectual entertainer. He spent the last few years of his life living in Hawaii and died of brain cancer in 2000 at the age of 54.

The Tykes... Well, I suppose it's an invitation do describe a DMT trip, which is never to be passed up. Because I think, I think what we're talking about here is a continuum, I'm talking about a very narrow band of experience. A continuum of experience that comes through tryptamine hallucinogens: DMT, Psilocybin, and the DMT-Harmine combination... and that's it... Mescaline doesn't, isn't what I'm talking about. Ketamine certainly isn't what I'm talking about. Datura certainly isn't what I'm talking about. And some of these are plants, and some of them are synthetic drugs, but it's a very narrow spectrum of these highly visionary ones, and then the most visionary, the quintessence is DMT. I mean, I think that DMT is as intense as any drug should ever get; I don't ever want to be more loaded than that. I don't think you can be more loaded than that and come back. You know? What happens on DMT for me, and this is based on, you know, composite image of many experiences, and I've confirmed it to some degree with other people, but I was talking to somebody the other day, somebody who had just done it, and I said, "what did you think?" and they said: "It's the most idiosyncratic thing there is." and I thought, what a wonderful description, that's exactly what it is - it's pure idiosyncraticness. It's so idiosyncratic that's all there's there - it's like idiosyncracy without an object, is what DMT is. When you smoke this, the onset is very rapid. 30-45 seconds, you know? There's this feeling which comes over your body - half arousal, half anaesthesia. The air appears to suddenly have been sucked out of the room because all the colors brighten visibly, as though some intervening medium has been removed. And then there's a sound, like a piece of bread wrapper or cellophane being scrunched up and thrown away. A friend of mine says this is radio-entelechy leaving the anterior fontanelle at the top of your head. [laughter] I'm not sure I want to line up with that... but a membrane is being ripped; something is being torn. And then there is a total (what Mircea Eliade called in a wonderful phrase) "a complete rupture of the mundane plane". [laughter] You know? That's like a hit and run accident except the car came from hyperspace, you know? A complete rupture of the mundane plane. And you fall back into this hallucinogenic space, and what you see is a slowly rotating red and orange kind of thing, which, over the

years we've nicknamed, uh, 'The Chrysanthemum'. And it's.. this represents some kind of disequilibrium state that has its roots in the synapses. What's happening as you're watching this Chrysanthemum is that millions and then hundreds of millions of DMT molecules are rushing into these serotonin bond sites in the synaptic cleft and disrupting the serotonin and switching the electron spin resonance signature of these neural junctions in this 'other' direction. And this is taking, you know, 30 or 40 seconds, and there's this rising hum, this ____nnnmmmmMMMMMMMM^^^^ that rising tone; the flying saucer tone of Hollywood B movies... you actually hear this thing. And then, if you've taken enough DMT (and it has to do entirely with physical capacity: Did you take, did you cross the threshold?) something happens [clap] which... for which there are no words. A membrane is rent, and you are propelled into this 'place'. And language cannot describe it - accurately. Therefore I will inaccurately describe it. The rest is now lies. [laughter] When you break into this space, you have several impressions simultaneously that are a kind of gestalt: First of all (and why, I don't know) you have the impression that you are underground - far underground - you can't say why, but there's just this feeling of immense weight above you but you're in a large space, a vaulted dome. People even call it 'The DMT dome' I have said, had people say to me, "Have you been under the dome?" and I knew exactly what they meant. So you burst into this space. It's lit, sofeted lighting, some kind of indirect lighting you can't quite locate it. But what is astonishing and immediately riveting is that in this place there are entities - there are these things, which I call 'self transforming machine elves', I also call them self-dribbling basketballs. [laughter] They are, but they are none of these things. I mean you have to understand: these are metaphors in the truest sense, meaning they're lies! Uh, it's a jeweled self-transforming basketball, a machine elf. I name them 'Tykes' because tyke is a word that means to me a small child, and I was fascinated by the 54th fragment of Heraclitis, where he says: "The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls" ... and when you burst into the DMT space this is the Aeon - it's a child, and it's at play with colored balls, and I am in eternity, apparently, in the presence of this thing. There are many of these things, but the main thing that's happening is that they are engaged in a linguistic activity of some sort, which we do not have words for, but it's visible language. They are doing the visible language trip. When you break into the space, they actually cheer! The first thing you hear when you pass across is this 'hhhyeaaaaaayyy' - you know the Pink Floyd song? "The Gnomes have Learned a New Way to Say Hoo-Ray"? This has gotta be what these guys were talking about; how else could it be? It doesn't make any sense otherwise. [laughter] You break into this space... the gnomes say hoo-ray! And they come rushing forward and they, and, and the thing then that happens is... and people say "is there risk, to DMT? it sounds so intense. Is it dangerous?". The answer is: yes, it's tremendously dangerous; the danger is the possibility of death by astonishment. [laughter] And you must prepare yourself for this eventuality, because you are so amazed. Amazement seems to be the emotion that has torn loose and swamped everything else - I mean astounded? When was the last time you were genuinely 'ASTOUNDED'? I mean, I think you can go your whole damned life without being 'ASTOUNDED'... and this is astonishment, you know, raised to the N-th degree to the point that your jaw hangs...

I mean you're like this: And it raises issues: like you say, "Jesus, ah, huhh ... I must be dead!" And you, and the weird thing about DMT is it does not effect what we ordinarily call the mind. The part that you call "you" - nothing happens to it. You're just like you were before, but the World has been radically replaced - 100% - it's all gone, and you're sitting there, and you're saying, "Jesus, a minute ago I was in a room with some people, and they were pushing some weird drug on me, and, and now, what's happened? s s is this the Drug? Did we do it? Is this it?" And meanwhile, these things are saying: "Do not give way to amazement; Control your wonder." in other words, they try to bring you down. They say, "Don't just goof out on this; pay attention. PAY ATTENTION... to what we're doing." "OK, what're you doing?..." [laughter] Say this is what we're doing, and then they proceed to sing objects into existence. Amazing objects. Objects that are Faberge Eggs, things made of pearl, and metal, and glass, and gel, and you, when you're shown one of these things, a single one of them, you look at it an you know, without a shadow of a doubt, in the moment of looking at this thing, that if it were right here, right now, this world would go mad. It's like something from another dimension. It's like an artifact from a flying saucer. It's like something falling out of the mind of God - such objects DO not exist in this universe, and yet, you're looking at it. And they're clamoring for your attention. " 'k at this! 'ook at This! Look at THIS!" and they pull these things... and each one, you look into it and it begins to open into this wonder that you must fight. You say "No, don't look at it, look AWAY from it!" because it's so wonderful that it's swamping my objectivity and destroying my ability to function in this space. Well, then they say "do"... And the objects that they make have the peculiar ability to themselves generate this linguistic 'stuff' which condenses as other objects. So beings are making objects, showing you objects, the objects are turning into beings and making other objects, these beings and objects, they jump into your chest - and then they jump back out. They jump into your body and disappear into your body, and then they jump back out, waving these things, just throwing this stuff in all directions. They are - the word that comes to mind is: they are Zany. It's like a Bugs Bunny cartoon, uh, gone mad. And all of this energy - they are elves. This is what elves are. It's this wierd thing, where they love you - or they like you a lot, but you can tell that their sense of humor is Weird. And that you must be very careful of the deals you cut with these things. and and in fact I've spent so much time trying to understand what is this. It has different kinds of feelings about it. One is (and this really threw me for a loop when I figured this out) after many many of these trips, and analyzing this place I kept going to, I finally realized: "this place is... somebody very weird... it's their idea of a reassuring environment for a human being! It's like a playpen. It's this warm. well lit, secure, womblike environment, and when I break into it they these things, the elves and the toys, are toys! These are things to amuse me. The way you would hang, uh, cubes and blocks above a crad... a playpen, you know? Because children are supposed to coordinate shapes and bright colors. That's what these things are: they are toys to try and get me to coordinate my perception in this place. It's a holding area of some sort - someone's created this and is watching me. OK - that's one metaphor for what it is. Another metaphor is... I took this stuff to Tibetans, to the Amazon. I gave it to Tibetans, they said "this is the lesser lights, the lesser lights of the Bardo. You cannot go further into the Bardo and return. This takes you as far as you can go." When I gave it to shamans in

the Amazon, they said "It's strong - but this is, these are the ancestors. These are the spirits that we work with. These are ancestor souls. We know this place." Well then, the third and final metaphor, because when you're in that place you have such complex emotions - very complex emotions - something weird is going on with time, because you perceive your body image as infantile. You seem to have a very large head, and a very body, and very short limbs. And, you know, I dunno what that's about. But they're, uh, this... Then the last facet of it that I want to mention is: there is this 'you must be on your toes' thing - don't let these guys get behind you. They are tricky. And their elfin humor may not be your idea of a good time. [laughter] And I said to myself, where have I had, before, this feeling that I'm having now. It's a feeling of being with people that I can't trust, but who want to help me, and who seem to be trying to, uh, cut a deal. That was the word that gave me the clue: "deal". And then I remembered, "I know where I felt like this - I felt like this in the Crawford Market in Bombay when I had a kilo of Gold in my pocket and I was trying to trade it for hashish, and I was surrounded by all these Arab hash traders, and they were saying "we're your friend, just wait, don't worry..." And say "yes, I KNOW you're my friend and I'm NOT worrying, but, you know, brbrbrrr... perform!" And so then I said: "Aha the creatures in the DMT flash are Traders..." They're Traders. And that's what this weird feeling is - it's a business environment in there. [laughter] We're having a business meeting. THey're saying... and then the objects! Then I rememberedthe objects... they're trade goods! They're saying: "How about thissss! How about This!". What do they want? What do I have that they want?... They're meme traders, is what it is. And I think that what they wanted, and got, and took - without bothering to even say a word about it - was everything I knew about the "I Ching". And they're like art collectors. They say "well, the idea is primitive, and primitive in its execution, but with a certain kind of internal integrity that one really must respect..." So they're primitive art collectors, and what they left me with, then, was, uh, my own, you know, their model of time. Which is the closest thing to one of these hyperdimensional objects. The objects themselves cannot exist in this world. But the blueprints of them can. And this afternoon, if the computers are up and running, I will run through this 'time idea' with you. And I think I will be able to convince you that it has a weirdly crafted patina to it, that, the feeling is it didn't spring from human minds, it, it is a creature of another kind of mental universe. And I think, you know, aside from the crisis on this planet and our own personal difficulties this is the real challenge of the psychedelic thing; is to meet the inhabitants and trade with them. And set up a relationship. The notion traders. They can trade hyperspacial notions from across the cosmos. And this may be all the extraterrestrial contact that we're, uh, going to be vouch-safed, you know?

If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed. Human history represents such a radical break with the natural systems of biological organization that preceded it, that it must be the response to a kind of attractor, or dwell point that lies ahead in the temporal dimension. Persistently Western religions have integrated into their theologies the notion of a kind of end of the world, and I think that a lot of psychedelic experimentation sort of confirms this intuition, I mean, it isn't going to happen according to any of the scenarios of orthodox religion, but the basic intuition, that the universe seeks closure in a kind of omega point of transcendance, is confirmed,

it's almost as though this object in hyperspace, glittering in hyperspace, throws off reflections of itself, which actually ricochet into the past, illuminating this mystic, inspiring that saint or visionary, and that out of these fragmentary glimpses of eternity we can build a kind of map, of not only the past of the universe, and the evolutionary egression into novelty, but a kind of map of the future, this is what shamanism is always been about. A shaman is someone who has been to the end, it's someone who knows how the world really works, and knowing how the world really works means to have risen outside, above, beyond the dimensions of ordinary space, time, and casuistry, and actually seen the wiring under the board, stepped outside the confines of learned culture and learned and embedded language, into the domain of what Wittgenstein called "the unspeakable", the transcendental presense of the other, which can be absanctioned, in various ways, to yield systems of knowledge which can be brought back into ordinary social space for the good of the community, so in the context of ninety percent of human culture, the shaman has been the agent of evolution, because the shaman learns the techniques to go between ordinary reality and the domain of the ideas, this higher dimensional continuum that is somehow parallel to us, available to us, and yet ordinarily occluded by cultural convention out of fear of the mystery I believe, and what shamans are, I believe, are people who have been able to de-condition themselves from the community's instinctual distrust of the mystery, and to go into it, to go into this bewildering higher dimension, and gain knowledge, recover the jewel lost at the beginning of time, to save souls, cure, commune with the ancestors and so forth and so on. Shamanism is not a religion, it's a set of techniques, and the principal technique is the use of psychedelic plants. What psychedelics do is they dissolve boundaries, and in the presence of dissolved boundaries, one cannot continue to close one's eyes to the ruination of the earth, the poisoning of the seas, and the consequences of two thousand years of unchallenged dominator culture, based on monotheism, hatred of nature, suppression of the female, and so forth and so on. So, what shamans have to do is act as exemplars, by making this cosmic journey to the domain of the Gaian ideas, and then bringing them back in the form of art to the struggle to save the world. The planet has a kind of intelligence, that it can actually open a channel of communication with an individual human being. The message that nature sends is, transform your language through a synergy between electronic culture and the psychedelic imagination, a synergy between dance and idea, a synergy between understanding and intuition, and dissolve the boundaries that your culture has sanctioned between you, to become part of this Gaian supermind, I mean I think it's fairly profound, it's fairly apocalyptic. History is ending. I mean, we are to be the generation that witnesses the revelation of the purpose of the cosmos. History is the shock wave of the eschaton. History is the shock wave of eschatology, and what this means for those of us who will live through this transition into hyperspace, is that we will be privileged to see the greatest release of compressed change probably since the birth of the universe. The twentieth century is the shudder that announces the approaching cataracts of time over which our species and the destiny of this planet is about to be swept. If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed. The emphasis in house music and rave culture on physiologically compatible rhythms and this sort of thing is really the rediscovery of the art of natural magic with sound, that sound, properly understood, especially percussive sound, can actually change neurological states, and large groups of people getting together in the presence of this kind of music are creating a telepathic community of bonding that hopefully will be strong enough that it can carry the vision out into the mainstream of society. I think that the youth culture that is emerging in the nineties is an end of the millenium culture that is actually summing up Western civilization and pointing us in an entirely different direction, that we're going to

arrive in the third millenium, in the middle of an archaic revival, which will mean a revival of these physiologically empowering rhythm signatures, a new art, a new social vision, a new relationship to nature, to feminism, to ego. All of these things are taking hold, and not a moment too soon.

At the end of time -- Dec. 21, 2012, didn't you know? -- psychedelic guru and author/theorist Terence McKenna will be camped out at a Mayan temple somewhere in Central America. Stoned on psilocybin as usual, McKenna, with the help of his alien buddies, will cross an inter-dimensional bridge to higher consciousness. And if you believe that, has McKenna got a $150 two-day Q&A session for you! Not only is Dec. 21, 2012 the day Mayan astronomers considered the end of time, but it is the moment that our Sun eclipses the galactic centre -- a chance chaotic event that only happens once. McKenna the "Altered States"-man's belief in this date is the result of a computer program he dreamed up that describes the movement of time based on the resonance of fractals and the rhythm of the I Ching. In his psychedelic rapture McKenna will have fulfilled his life's work, as mapped out in books like True Hallucinations and on recordings with English rave bands like The Shamen. "The sober men of science are saying the universe sprang from nothing for no reason," he says with Buddhistic non-attachment. "This is the limit test for credulity! Science is saying give us one free miracle and we'll explain the rest. I'll take mine at the end, thank you. They have the big bang, I have the big surprise." McKenna believes that it's not the monolith of 2001: A Space Odyssey that guided our planetary birthing, but the consciousness- expanding hallucinogen psilocybin. From the plains of Africa to 2012's hyperdimensional gateway, McKenna thinks psilocybin has influenced our mammalian evolution. "If you were really looking for an alien artefact you would look for a molecule like psilocybin with no near relatives in the ecosystem. It occurs in only 12 species of mushrooms. It is the only fourphosphorolated indole on this planet. The mushroom spore can survive the conditions of interstellar space. It lives off dead matter, which is the most karma-free position in the universe's food-chain. Compared to that vegetarianism is an orgy of slaughter." This unlikely prediction has been brewing in McKenna since the mid- '60s when as a Berkeley student he explored the world in a transcendental quest for The Other. It started to get interesting when Amazonian witch doctors were willing to share their psycho- pharmacological key to the Logos. In a potent liquid made from the ayahuasca vine (or yage, as described by William Burroughs) McKenna was introduced to DMT, the most powerful of the naturally occurring psychedelics, which participates in human metabolism during deep dream. His experiences in the jungle of Colombia at La Chorrera led him to insights into time and evolution. "Apply psychedelics and the mind re-crystallizes on another plane. It shows you a much broader swath of reality. The shamen have a different relationship to the future by dissolving the three- dimensional spacetime matrix. Traditionally they have used this to predict the weather, find game and cure illness." The personal obsession of this self-described "paranoid, double Scorpio and hermit" led to him being selected by an angel of gnosis to approach the essentially unsolvable questions of our planetary crisis. His wired visions foretold the upcoming union of spirit and matter, the event prophesied by the Hopi,

Tibetans, Mayans and many others. During trips on five grams of stropharia cubensis mushrooms McKenna encounters The Other. "I evoke it. I said, 'Show me what you are for yourself.' All the daisies and happy elves come to a full stop and the temperature drops five degrees in the room. These black curtains begin to be lifted like on a stage and you begin to see into it. After 45 seconds of that you say, 'Enough, thank you!' And you realize it's filtering itself for you and it's coming very gently because it understands you can't handle it." McKenna is a mesmerizing talking machine. His whiny nasal mantras draw from eclectic sources of physics, psychology, evolution, language, geology and better living through chemistry. Proof of his invisible landscapes are not asked for -- or given. McKenna avoids the question of believability by comparing quantum apples and oranges. "Materialists sneer at psychedelics because they say it's just a perturbation of the brain and anyway hallucinations aren't real, but this point of view has taken some real body blows. The dirty little secret among quantum physicists is that the concept of materiality leads to the appalling conclusion that there ain't no such things." McKenna thinks that his high-dosage drug epiphanies are real because he is experiencing things that he claims he couldn't imagine. "I'm an hallucination chauvinist. To see something that you could not imagine proves you are in the presence of The Other." If you can buy that, then his oxymoronically titled book True Hallucinations may be a clue to our nonmaterial future, and not the real lies of a science fiction fanatic. Cracks in McKenna's story appear when he "runs out of time" to explain how he generated the points on "his best trick," the Time Wave Zero program. Like a paranoid stock report, this computer program covers all the novel points in a U.S.-centric history, from the development of cell membranes to the Gulf War. And -- step right up! -- for the very material price of $50 U.S. (and don't forget that $150 two-day session) you can buy his software with its explanatory introduction. "What I'm saying is grist for the mill of every screwball, messianic, apocalyptic-arian rap on the market. From David Koresh to you name it ." he says ironically, as his eyes bulge with an other-worldly intensity. "They got it wrong because it's all seen through the filter of somebody else's illusions. Christ, Nostradamus, J.G. Bennett, God knows who." McKenna's fantastic hokum is lucrative entertainment. A library of cassettes and video tapes can be collected to explain his books, making his "chrono-synclastic" delusions the centre of a subscription cult. But like his favored drug trips, his line on the end of time is destined to bum out. Avoid his psychonaut enterprise like a flesh-eating virus. Chris Twomey is heard on CIUT FM, Sundays 8:30 to 10:30 p.m.

Terence McKenna's Last Trip


The "altered statesman" emerged from Leary's long shadow to push a magical blend of psychedelics, technology, and revelatory rap. He had less time than he knew.
By Erik Davis

In May 1999, the psychedelic bard Terence McKenna returned to his jungle hideaway on Hawaii's Big Island after six weeks on the road. He was relieved to be home. Since claiming the mantle of Tripster King from Timothy Leary, McKenna has earned his keep as a stand-up shaman on the lecture circuit, regaling groups of psychonauts, seekers, and boho intellectuals with tales involving mushrooms, machine consciousness, and the approaching end of history. Weird stuff, and wonderfully told. But the teller was getting tired of the routine. A recluse at heart, McKenna wanted nothing more than to surf the Web, read, polish up some manuscripts, and enjoy the mellow pace of Hawaii with his new girlfriend, Christy Silness, a kind young woman he had met the year before at an ethnobotanical conference in the Yucatn. Soon after McKenna arrived home, however, he was hit with ferocious headaches. He'd long suffered from migraines, but nothing in his 52 years could match the ice picks now skewering his skull. On May 22, after dragging himself to the john to vomit, McKenna's mind exploded. Hallucinations cut in like shards of glass; taste and smell were bent out of shape; and he was swallowed up by a labyrinth that, as he later put it, "somehow partook of last week's dreams, next week's fears, and a small restaurant in Dublin." Then his blood pressure dropped and he collapsed, the victim of a brain seizure. When McKenna came to, he was flat on his back, staring at the ceiling as his extremely agitated girlfriend called 911. Then he swooned again. In addition to being much younger than McKenna, Silness is also much shorter, but somehow she managed to load his lanky, 6'2" frame into their truck and drive down the mountain to meet an ambulance. To keep McKenna awake, she coaxed him into reciting a poem his grandfather used to chant, "The Cremation of Sam McGee." But then a grand mal hit, and McKenna was out cold. The ambulance guys knew McKenna's rep and were convinced he had OD'd. But a CAT scan in Kona revealed the presence of a walnut-sized tumor buried deep in McKenna's right frontal cortex. The growth was diagnosed as a glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), the most malignant of brain tumors. To McKenna's amazement, his doctor described the thing as a "fruiting body" that sent "mycelia" throughout the surrounding tissue - mycological lingo straight out of theMagic Mushroom Grower's Guide that McKenna had published in 1975 with his brother, Dennis, an ethnobotanist. The rest was less amusing: Without treatment, McKenna would die within a month. With treatment, the prognosis was six months. "No one escapes," said the doctor. McKenna was facing something that no shaman's rattle or peyote button was going to cure. With barely time to breathe, he had to choose from among chemotherapy, radiation treatment, and the gamma knife - a machine that could blast the tumor with 201 converging beams of cobalt radiation. At the same time, friends and comrades were stalking more ethereal treatments. On the Big Island, Hali Makua, a Grand Kahuna of Polynesia, hiked up the side of the Mauna Loa volcano. He meditated about McKenna and was illuminated with a handful of Hawaiian power words, words that he later phoned in to his ailing friend. From the wilds of Nevada, paranormal radio jock Art Bell was planning a different kind of intervention. Bell went on the air and asked his 13 million listeners to participate in "great experiment no. 8." At 2 pm Pacific time on Sunday, May 30, Bell's listeners sent McKenna a mass blast of good vibrations. "It's not something I really believe in," says McKenna. "But I am much more sympathetic to the idea of a huge morphogenetic field affecting your health than the idea that one inspired healer could do it." Even after he went under the gamma knife, McKenna couldn't quite believe what was happening to him. "There are only about 1,000 of these GBMs a year, so it's a rare disease. I never won anything before - why now?" Like everybody else, he suspected a lifetime of exotic drug use may have been to blame. "So what about it?" he asked his doctors. "You wanna hammer on me about that?" They assured him there was no causal link. "So what about 35 years of daily dope smoking?" he asked. They pointed to studies suggesting

that cannabis may actually shrink tumors. "Listen," McKenna told them, "if cannabis shrinks tumors, we would not be having this conversation." Word of McKenna's condition spread like taser fire through the listservs that are the backbone of the psychedelic community. The suddenness of his illness freaked these folks out. "It was almost like the night when Howard Cosell came onMonday Night Football and said John Lennon had been shot," says Jordan Gruber, an attorney who works at NASA and the founder of Enlightenment.com, a Web site devoted to spiritual psychology. "It was a similar sort of terrible shock to the nervous system." Within 36 hours of his seizure, 1,400 messages poured into McKenna's email box. (A typical missive: "I love you for who you are and are becoming and all of what you have meant to so much of humanity.") Over the next week, almost 1,000 emails came in each day. This flood of digital well-wishing is testament to McKenna's stature in the world of psychedelics, a largely underground realm that includes the ravers, old hippies, and New Agers one might expect, but also a surprising number of people who live basically straight lives, especially when compared with the users of the '60s. Psychedelics are far more controversial than Prozac or even pot - LSD and mushrooms are illegal, of course, and the government regulates them as closely as it does heroin and cocaine - but they have nonetheless wormed their way into many mainstream lives. According to Scott O. Moore, CEO of Slam Media and managing editor of the psychedelic journalThe Resonance Project, "Today's users are surgeons, bankers, physicists, computer programmers. They are productive members of society. You can't point your finger at them and say they've dropped out."

A good interview with Terence McKenna was published today in the San Francisco Chronicle/Examiner Sunday Magazine. The cover title is "Apocalypse Soon: Psychedelic Anthropologist Terence McKenna Takes on the Brave New World" but the article itself is titled "Millenium Witness." For those who are interested but can't manage to look up a copy, here are some of the juicier quotes gleaned from the interview: "Drugs are about dulling perception, about addiction and about behavioral repetition...What *psychedelics* are about is pattern- dissolving experiences of an extraordinarily high or different awareness. They are the exact opposite of drugs. They promote questioning , they promote consciousness, they promote value examinations, they promote the reconstruction of behavioral patterns." "The important thing about cannabis is its consciousness-altering efffect, and I think the Establishment is perfectly aware that that's the issue. They're keeping cannabis illegal because it causes people to question the social values that they're being programmed with." "Bill Clinton is an international corporatist, exactly as George Bush was an international corporatist. There is only one agenda for the American Establishment - that is to dominate the world and wring its resources from it in order to create an unconscionable amount of wealth for a tiny number of people.That's the game that's being played even as the signs accumulate that this will ruin the planet. The great struggle that looms ahead ...(unless) we die under anesthesia from 700 channels of MTV ... is the struggle between capitalism and ecological values: Do we turn everything into products? Do we destroy all resource bases in order to deliver junk to people who are made unhappy by it? Or do we begin to limit

consumption, redefine what an upper-class lifestyle really means and attempt to get hold of ourselves?" "Nobody ever went to hell on psychedelics, or very *few* people. (For) hardcore dissipation ... you go to Jack Daniels, methedrine, coke, junk (heroin), and pills." "I founded (with my ex-wife in 1985) ... a botanical preservation project designed to locate rare, endangered plants with a history of shamanic usage and preserve them all in a botanical garden in Hawaii." Q: Why? "To cut the costs and research cycle for drug companies. In other words, drug companies will not have to mount an Amazon expedition. They can simply order 100 kilos of this plant from us for lab analysis."

There is, of course, much more about cosmic giggles, plant gnosis, and the evolution of the human brain and civilization as hinging on the effects of psilocybin-containing mushrooms, etc. Personally, I have mixed feelings about Terence. In many ways I agree with his critiques of the economic and political order and I am sympathetic to his calls for an "archaic revival." On the other hand, alot of his cosmic mushroom theorizing strikes me as the ravings of a guy who is tripping hard and trying to convince me that his hallucinations are "real". Also, I detect a bit of self-contradiction (perhaps hypocrisy?) as evidenced in the quotes above. In one, Terence decries the turning of everything in the world into marketed products while at the same time he is commodifying the most sacred shamanic plants in order to assist drug companies in their pursuit of profit. Is't he "selling out" to the "Establishment" he so vilifies or is he just being realistic? Oh, by the way, Terence predicts that the world as we know it will be massively transformed in the year 2012. We only have to wait 18 years to find out whether he's a visionary or just another crackpot!

Did hallucinogens play a crucial role in human evolution? Terence McKenna has devoted most of his life to exploring this question. A specialist in the ethnomedicine of the Amazon Basin, McKenna along with his partner Kat Harrison McKenna founded Botanical Dimensions, a nonprofit foundation devoted to rescuing Amazonian plants that have a history of shamanic uses. They move the plants to a 19-acre site in Hawaii and preserve the details of the plant's uses by storing the information in a computer database. In addition to preserving these important plants, as a nonprofit organization, Botanical Dimensions solicits donations to publish a newsletter and to aid in carrying out the preservation of the folk knowledge of the peoples native to the Amazon area. The combination of McKenna's academic approach -he has a BS from the University of California at Berkeley with a distributed degree in ecology, resource conservation and shamanism -- his vast travel experiences, and uniquely visionary perspective, combine to make him a most sought-after speaker and author. His newest books include Food of the Gods (Bantam) and The Archaic Revival (Harper/ San Francisco) -- in which an abridged version of this interview appears. A slightly different version of this interview will also appear in a soon-to-be-published book by David Jay Brown

and Rebecca McClen called Voices of Vision. HIGH TIMES: Tell us how you became interested in shamanism and the exploration of consciousness. Terence McKenna: I discovered shamanism through an interest in Tibetan folk religion. Bon, the preBuddhist religion of Tibet, is a kind of shamanism. In going from the particular to the general with that concern, I studied shamanism as a general phenomenon. It all started out as an art historical interest in the pre-Buddhist iconography of thankas. HT: This was how long ago? TM: This was in '67, when I was just a sophomore in college. And the interest in altered states of consciousness came simply from -- I don't know whether I was a precocious kid or what -- but I was very early into the New York literary scene. Even though I lived in a small town in Colorado, I subscribed to the /Village Voice/, and there I encountered propaganda about LSD, mescaline, and all these experiments that the late beatniks were involved in. Then I read /The Doors of Perception/ and /Heaven and Hell/, and it just rolled from there. That was what really put me over. I respected Huxley as a novelist, and I was slowly reading everything he'd ever written, and when I got to /The Doors of Perception/ I said to myself, "There's something going on here for sure." HT: Recently you addressed close to 2,000 people at the John Anson Ford Theatre in Los Angeles. To what do you attribute your increasing popularity, and what role do you see yourself playing in the social sphere? TM: Well, without being cynical, the main thing I attribute to my increasing popularity is better public relations. As far as what role I'll play, I don't know. I mean I assume that anyone who has anything constructive to say about our relationship to chemical substances -- natural or synthetic -- is going to have a social role to play, because this drug issue is just going to loom larger and larger on the social agenda until we get some resolution of it. By resolution I don't mean suppression or just saying no. I anticipate a new open-mindedness born of desperation on the part of the Establishment. Drugs are part of the human experience, and we have got to create a more sophisticated way of dealing with them. HT: You have said that the term "New Age" trivializes the significance of the next phase in human evolution and have referred instead to the emergence of an archaic revival. How do you differentiate between these two expressions? TM: The New Age is essentially humanistic psychology '80s-style, with the addition of neo-shamanism, channeling, crystal and herbal healing. The archaic revival is a much larger, more global phenomenon that assumes that we are recovering the social forms of the late neolithic, and reaches far back in the 20th century to Freud, to surrealism, to abstract expressionism -- even to a phenomenon like National Socialism -- which is a negative force. But the stress on ritual, on organized activity, on race/ancestorconsciousness -- these are themes that have been worked out throughout the entire 20th century, and the archaic revival is an expression of that. HT: From your writings I have gleaned that you subscribe to the notion that psilocybin mushrooms are a species of high intelligence -- that they arrived on this planet as spores that migrated through outer space, and are attempting to establish a symbiotic relationship with human beings. In a more holistic perspective, how do you see this notion fitting into the context of Francis Crick's theory of directed panspermia, the hypothesis that all life on this planet and its directed evolution has been seeded, or

perhaps fertilized, by spores designed by a higher intelligence? TM: As I understand the Crick theory of panspermia, it's a theory of how life spread through the universe. What I was suggesting -- and I don't believe it as strongly as you imply -- is that intelligence, not life, but intelligence may have come here in this spore-bearing life form. This is a more radical version of the panspermia theory of Crick and Ponampurama. In fact I think that theory will probably be vindicated. I think in a hundred years if people do biology they will think it quite silly that people once thought that spores could not be blown from one star system to another by cosmic radiation pressure. As far as the role of the psilocybin mushroom, or its relationship to us and to intelligence, this is something that we need to consider. It really isn't important that I claim that it's an extraterrestrial, what we need is a body of people claiming this, or a body of people denying it, because what we're talking about is the experience of the mushroom. Few people are in a position to judge its extraterrestrial potential, because few people in the orthodox sciences have ever experienced the full spectrum of psychedelic effects that are unleashed. One cannot find out whether or not there's an extraterrestrial intelligence inside the mushroom unless one is willing to take the mushroom. HT: You have a unique theory about the role that psilocybin mushrooms play in the process of human evolution. Can you tell us about this? TM: Whether the mushrooms came from outer space or not, the presence of psychedelic substances in the diet of early human beings created a number of changes in our evolutionary situation. When a person takes small amounts of psilocybin visual acuity improves. They can actually see slightly better, and this means that animals allowing psilocybin into their food chain would have increased hunting success, which means increased food supply, which means increased reproductive success, which is the name of the game in evolution. It is the organism that manages to propagate itself numerically that is successful. The presence of psilocybin in the diet of early pack- hunting primates caused the individuals that were ingesting the psilocybin to have increased visual acuity. At slightly higher doses of psilocybin there is sexual arousal, erection, and everything that goes under the term arousal of the central nervous system. Again, a factor which would increase reproductive success is reinforced. HT: Isn't it true that psilocybin inhibits orgasm? TM: Not at the doses I'm talking about. At a psychedelic dose it might, but at just slightly above the "you can feel it" dose, it acts as a stimulant. Sexual arousal means paying attention, it means jumpiness, it indicates a certain energy level in the organism. And then, of course, at still higher doses psilocybin triggers this activity in the language-forming capacity of the brain that manifests as song and vision. It is as though it is an enzyme which stimulates eyesight, sexual interest, and imagination. And the three of these going together produce language-using primates. Psilocybin may have synergized the emergence of higher forms of psychic organization out of primitive protohuman animals. It can be seen as a kind of evolutionary enzyme, or evolutionary catalyst. HT: There is a lot of current interest in the ancient art of sound technology. In a recent article you said that in certain states of consciousness you're able to create a kind of visual resonance and manipulate a "topological manifold" using sound vibrations. Can you tell us more about this technique, its ethnic origins, and potential applications? TM: Yes, it has to do with shamanism that is based on the use of DMT in plants. DMT is a near- or pseudo-neurotransmitter, that when ingested and allowed to come to rest in the synapses of the brain, allows one to see sound, so that one can use the voice to produce, not musical compositions, but pictoral

and visual compositions. This, to my mind, indicates that we're on the cusp of some kind of evolutionary transition in the language-forming area, we are going to go from a language that is heard, to a language that is seen, through a shift in interior processing. The language will still be made of sound, but it will be processed as the carrier of the visual impression. This is actually being done by shamans in the Amazon. The songs they sing sound as they do in order to look a certain way. They are not musical compositions as we're used to thinking of them. They are pictoral art created by audio signals. HT: You're recognized by many as one of the great explorers of the 20th century. You've trekked through the Amazonian jungles and soared through the uncharted regions of the brain, but perhaps your ultimate voyages lie in the future, when humanity has mastered space technology and time travel. What possibilities for travel in these two areas do you forsee, and how do you think these new technologies will affect the future evolution of the human species? TM: I suppose most people believe space travel is right around the corner. I certainly hope so. I think we should all learn Russian in anticipation of it, because apparently the US government is incapable of sustaining a space program. The time travel question is more interesting. Possibly the world is experiencing a compression of technological novelty that is going to lead to developments that are very much like what we would imagine time travel to be. We may be closing in on the ability to transmit information forward into the future, and to create an informational domain of communication between various points in time. How this will be done is difficult to imagine, but things like fractal mathematics, superconductivity, and nanotechnology offer new and novel approaches to the realization of these old dreams. We shouldn't assume time travel is impossible simply because it hasn't been done. There's plenty of latitude in the laws of quantum physics to allow for moving information through time in various ways. Apparently you can move information through time, as long as you don't move it through time faster than light. HT: Why is that? TM: I haven't the faintest idea. What am I, Einstein? [Laughter.] HT: What do you think the ultimate goal of human evolution is? TM: Oh, a good party.... [Laughter.] HT: Have you ever had any experiences with lucid dreaming -- the process by which one can become aware and conscious within a dream that one is dreaming -- and if so, how do they compare with your other shamanic experiences? TM: I really haven't had experiences with lucid dreaming. It's one of those things that I'm very interested in. I'm sort of skeptical of it. I hope it's true, because what a wonderful thing that would be. HT: You've never had one? TM: I've had lucid dreams, but I have no technique for repeating them on demand. The dream state is possibly anticipating this cultural frontier that we're moving toward. That we're moving toward something very much like eternal dreaming, going into the imagination, and staying there, and that would be like a lucid dream that knew no end, but what a tight, simple solution. One of the things that interests me about dreams is this -- I have dreams in which I smoke DMT, and it works. To me that's extremely interesting, because it seems to imply that one does not have to smoke DMT to have the experience. You

only have to convince your brain that you have done this, and it then delivers this staggering altered state. HT: Wow. TM: How many people who have had DMT dream occasionally of smoking it and have it happen? Do people who have never had DMT ever have that kid of an experience in a dream? I bet not. I bet you have to have done it in life, to have established the knowledge of its existence, and the image of how it's possible, but then this thing can happen to you without any chemical intervention. It is more powerful than any yoga, so taking control of the dream state would certainly be an advantageous thing and carry us a great distance toward the kind of cultural transformation that we're talking about. How exactly to do it, I'm not sure. The psychedelics, the near death experience, the lucid dreaming, the meditational reveries ... all of these things are pieces of a puzzle about how to create a new cultural dimension that we can all live in a little more sanely than we're living in these dimensions. HT: Rupert Sheldrake has recently refined the theory of the morphogenetic field -- a nonmaterial, organizing, collective-memory field which affects all biological systems. This field can be envisioned as a hyperspatial information reservoir which brims and spills over into a much larger region of influence when critical mass is reached -- a point referred to as morphic resonance. Do you think this morphic resonance could be regarded as a possible explanation for the phenomena of spirits and other metaphysical entities, and can the method of evoking beings from the spirit world be simply a case of cracking the morphic code? TM: That sounds right. If what you're trying to get at is do I think morpho- genetic fields are a good thing, or do they exist, yes, I think some kind of theory like that is clearly becoming necessary. And that the next great step to be taken in the intellectual conquest of nature, if you will, is a theory about how out of the class of possible things, some things actually happen. HT: How do you view the increasing waves of designer psychedelics and brain enhancement machines in the context of Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morpho- genetic fields? TM: Well I'm hopeful, but somewhat suspicious. I think drugs should come from the natural world, and be use-tested by shamanically-oriented cultures, then they have a very deep morphogenetic field, because they've been used for thousands and thousands of years in magical contexts. A drug produced in the laboratory, and suddenly distributed worldwide simply amplifies the global noise present in the historical crisis. And then there's the very practical consideration that one cannot predict the long term effects of a drug produced in a laboratory. Something like peyote, or morning glories, or mushrooms have been used for vast stretches of time without detrimental social consequences. We know that. As far as the technological question is concerned -- brain machines and all -- I wish them luck. I'm willing to test anything that somebody will send me, but I'm skeptical. I think it's somehow like the speech-operated typewriter. It will recede ahead of us. The problems will be found to have been far more complex than first supposed. HT: Don't you think it's true that the designer psychedelics and the brain machines don't have any morphogenetic field, so in a sense one is carving a new morphogenetic field with their use. Consequently, there would be more possibilities for new things to happen -- unlike the psychoactive substances which you speak of that have ancient morphogenetic fields, and are much more entrenched in predictability and pattern -- and therefore not as free for new types of expression? TM: Possibly, although I don't know how you grab the morphogenetic field of a new designer drug. For

instance, I'll speak of my own experience, which is ketamine. My impression of ketamine was -- it's like a brand new skyscraper, all the walls, all the floors are carpeted in white, all the drinking fountains work, the elevators run smoothly, the fluorescent lights recede endlessly in all directions down the hallways. It's just that there's nobody there. There's no office machinery, there's no hurrying secretaries, there's no telephones -- it's just this immense empty structure waiting. Well I can't move into a 60-story office building. I have only enought stuff to fill a few small rooms, so it gives me a slightly spooked-out feeling to enter into these empty morphogenetic fields. If you take mushrooms, you know, you're climbing on board a starship manned by every shaman who ever did it in front of you, and this is quite a crew, and they've really pulled some stunts over the millenia, and it's all there, the tapes, to be played, but the designer things should be very cautiously dealt with. HT: It's interesting that John Lilly had very different experiences with ketamine. Do you think that there's any relationship between the self- transforming machine elves that you've encountered on your shamanic voyages and the solid-state entities that John Lilly has contacted in his inter- dimensional travels? TM: I don't think there is much congruence. The solid state entities that he contacted seem to make him quite upset. The elf machine entities that I encounter are the embodiment of merriment and humor, but I have had a thought about this recently which I will tell you. One of the science fiction fantasies that haunts the collective unconscious is expressed in the phrase "a world run by machines." In the 1950s this was first articulated in the notion, "perhaps the future will be a terrible place where the world is run by machines." Well now, let's think about machines for a moment. They are extremely impartial, very predictable, not subject to moral suasion, value neutral, and very long-lived in their functioning. Now let's think about what machines are made of, in the light of Sheldrake's morphogenetic field theory. Machines are made of metal, glass, gold, silicon, plastic -- they are made of what the earth is made of. Now wouldn't it be strange if biology is a way for the earth to alchemically transform itself into a selfreflecting thing. In which case then, what we're headed for inevitably, what we are in fact creating, is a world run by machines. And once these machines are in place, they can be expected to manage our economies, languages, social aspirations, and so forth, in such a way that we stop killing each other, stop starving each other, stop destroying land, and so forth. Actually, the fear of being ruled by machines is the male ego's fear of relinquishing control of the planet to the maternal matrix of Gaia. Ha. That's it. Just a thought. [Laughter.] HT: The recent development of fractal images seems to imply that visions and hallucinations can be broken down into a precise mathematical code. With this in mind, do you think the abilities of the human imagination can be replicated in a super-computer? TM: Yes. Saying that the components of hallucinations can be broken down and duplicated by mathematical code isn't taking anything away from them. Reality can be taken apart and reduplicated with this same mathematical code -- that's what makes the fractal ideal so powerful. One can type in half a page of code, and on the screen get river systems, mountain ranges, deserts, ferns, coral reefs, all being generated out of half a page of computer coding. This seems to imply that we are finally discovering really powerful mathematical rules that stand behind visual appearances. And yes, I think supercomputers, computer graphics and simulated environments, this is very promising stuff. When the world's being run by machines, we'll be at the movies. [Laughter.] Oh boy. HT: Or making movies. TM: Or being movies.

HT: I've thought at times that what you view as a symbiosis forming between humans and psychoactive plants may in fact be the plants taking over control of our lives and commanding us to do their bidding. Have you any thoughts on this? TM: Well symbiosis is not parasitism, symbiosis is a situation of mutual benefit to both parties, so we have to presume that the plants are getting as much out of this as we are. What we're getting is information from another spiritual level, their point of view -- in other words -- is what they're giving us. What we're giving them is care, and feeding, and propagation, and survival, so they give us their elevated higher dimensional point of view. We in turn respond by making the way easier for them in the physical world. And this seems a reasonable trade-off. Obviously they have difficulty in the physical world, plants don't move around much. You talk about Tao, a plant has the Tao. It doesn't /even/ chop wood and carry water. [Laughter.] HT: Future predictions are often based upon the study of previous patterns and trends which are then extended like the contours of a map to extrapolate the shape of things to come. The future can also be seen as an ongoing dynamic and creative interaction between the past and the present -- the current interpretation of past events actively serves to formulate these future patterns and trends. Have you been able to reconcile these two perspectives so that humanity is able to learn from its experiences without being bound by the habits of history? TM: The two are antithetical. You must not be bound by the habits of history if you want to learn from your experience. It was Ludwig von Bertalanffy, the inventor of general systems theory, who made the famous statement that "people are not machines, but in all situations where they are given the opportunity, they will act like machines," so you have to keep disturbing them, 'cause they always settle down into a routine. So, historical patterns are largely cyclical, but not entirely, there is ultimately a highest level of the pattern, which does not repeat, and that's the part which is responsible for the advance into true novelty. HT: The part that doesn't repeat. Hmm. The positive futurists tend to fall into two groups. Some visualize the future as becoming progressively brighter every day and that global illumination will occur as a result of this progression, others envision a period of actual devolution -- a dark age through which human consciousness must pass, before more advanced stages are reached. Which scenario do you see as being the most likely to emerge, and why do you hold this view? TM: I guess I'm a soft Dark Ager. I think there will be a mild Dark Age. I don't think it will be anything like the Dark Ages which lasted a thousand years -- I think it will last more like five years -- and will be a time of economic retraction, religious fundamentalism, retreat into closed communities by certain segments of the society, feudal warfare among minor states, and this sort of thing. I think it will give way in the late '90s to the actual global future that we're all yearning for. Then there will be basically a 15-year period where all these things are drawn together with progressively greater and greater sophistication, much in the way that modern science, and philosophy has grown with greater and greater sophistication in a single direction since the Renaissance. Sometime around the end of 2012, all of this will be boiled down into a kind of alchemical distillation of the historical experience that will be a doorway into the life of the imagination. HT: Rupert Sheldrake's morphic resonance, Ralph Abraham's chaos theory, and your time wave model all appear to contain complementary patterns which operate on similar underlying principles -- that energy systems store information until a certain level is reached and the information is then transduced into a larger frame of reference, like water in a tiered fountain. Have you worked these theories into an all-

encompassing metatheory of how the universe functions and operates? TM: No, but we're working on it. [Laughter.] Well it is true that the three of us, and I would add Frank Barr in there, who is less well known, but has a piece of the puzzle as well. We're all complementary. Rupert's theory is -- at this point -- a hypothesis. There are no equations -- there's no predictive machinery -- it's a way of speaking about experimental approaches. My time wave thing is like an extremely formal and specific example of what he's talking about in a general way. And then what Ralph's doing is providing a bridge from the kind of things Rupert and I are doing back into the frontier branch of ordinary mathematics called dynamic modeling. Frank is an expert in the repetition of fractal process. He can show you the same thing happening on many many levels, in many many different expressions. So I have named us Compressionists, or Psychedelic Compressionists. Compressionism holds that the world is growing more and more complex, compressed, knitted together, and therefore holographically complete at every point, and that's basically where the four of us stand, I think, but from G&Z: Why did you write Food of the Gods ?

TM: I felt if I could change the frame of the argument and get drugs insinuated into a scenario of human origins, then I would cast doubt on the whole paradigm of Western Civilization, in the same way that realizing that we came from monkeys did a great deal to re-set the dials in the 19th Century Victorian mind. If you could convince people that drugs were responsible for the emergence of large brain size and language, then you could completely re-cast the argument from: "Drugs are alien, invasive and distorting to human nature" to: "Drugs are natural, ancient and responsible for human nature". So it was consciously propaganda, although I believe all that and I believe it's going to be hard to knock down. G&Z: Who is your target audience? TM: The target audience will be the converted first of all, but my hope is that the engines of public relations and publicity will move it much more into the mainstream. The 18-25 year old group that is drug-friendly but has no rationale except that it's a good time. This book is what I want every co-ed next Fall to be carrying to Anthro 101 to beard the professor with. You've heard me talk about meme wars, and how, if we could have a level playing field, these ideas would do very well. The theory I'm putting forth_to disprove it you would have to get your feet wet and get stoned. Anybody who doesn't want to do that should rule themselves off the case. So that presents academic types with a real problem. G&Z: If you're going to challenge the conclusions you must come to grips with the empirical facts of being high. TM: That's right. It's not a metaphysical argument, or an emotional plea; it's an argument on their own terms. Can they do better? What was happening? I think we should look at the impact of diet and realize that what you eat changes the parameters of the environment that is selecting you. I found no discussion of the impact of diet on human evolution, and yet at the very moment that the great [primate] evolutionary leaps were being made, there was a transformation of the diet towards omnivorousness-meat-eating, predation-away from the fructarian

original state. I'm not saying that civilization fucked up what was otherwise a naturally-occurring politically correct situation. There was a period when, because of the presence of psilocybin in the diet, the natural tendency to male dominance hierarchies was interrupted. It was in that moment that community values, altruism, language, long-term planning, awareness of cause and effect, all the things that distinguish us were established. Then, as the mushroom became less available due to climatological factors, after 15,000 years of this human-mushroom quasi-symbiosis, the old dominance hierarchy hard-wiring re- asserted itself in the ancient Middle East with the invention of agriculture, the need to become sedentary in order to carry out agriculture, the need to defend surplus, the establishment of kingship. These are a re-assertion of an older pattern that had been interrupted by a factor in the diet which basically made people mellow. G&Z: Did that interruption occur throughout the entire human genome, or are there areas which would have been outside the mushroom Garden? TM: People have been migrating out of Africa during each interglacial. I think the mushroom was having an effect in Africa over the last three million years, but what really kicked the process into high gear was that during the last interglacial, true pastoralism evolved. All previous migrations out of Africa were the migrations of hunter/gatherers. The migration that began at the melting of the last glaciation about 18,000 years ago, were the first herders out of Africa. It's the cattle/human /mushroom triad that reinforces the partnership, non-dominant, orgiastic style. I talk in the book about how apparently at a certain point in the evolution of human cognition, cause removed from effect became something that people noticed. At the very moment that men were realizing that the consequences of sex were children 9 months later, women were realizing that the consequences of tossing trash onto middens was food availability in those very spots 12 months later. This ability to correlate a cause with a delayed effect indicates a certain level of neurological processing that sets the stage for the suppression of orgy. Because the suppression of orgy is linked to a concern for male paternity. Before you know that sex leads to children, all children are the tribe's children. Women know who their children are, but for men, children are group resources. Once you put the male paternity thing together, the notion of ownership soon follows. The idea is that psilocybin is an egolytic compound, that orgies every new and full moon, everybody screwing in a heap, makes it impossible to form these notions of my women, my children, my weapons, my food, and so forth. G&Z: What do you mean by the term ego? TM: I'm assuming a Jungian vocabulary. The ego is not the self. The ego is a nexus of strategies for short-term gain at the expense of group values and even long-term personal gain. G&Z: If for the North African herders the primate hierarchical programs were broken down by mushrooms, would it be correct to say that the European Paleolithic hunters on the edge of the ice sheet @20,000 B.C. would still have the primate hierarchical programs because they had no access to mushrooms? TM: Right. Basically, this mellowness was an African style, and it could only sustain itself as long as there was a plentiful supply of mushrooms and a religious institution that insisted on it being used. Here's the scenario: You have this climax Edenic partnership society based on orgies and mushrooms and herding, and the drying continues. The mushroom becomes less plentiful. It becomes localized. It

becomes seasonal. The mushroom festivals become further and further apart. Eventually this is recognized; there is an anxiety to preserve the mushroom. The obvious strategy then is to put it into honey. But honey itself has the capacity to turn into a psycho-active substance, mead, a crude alcohol. So what begins as a mushroom cult, through a sincere effort to preserve the mushroom cult, turns into a mead cult a few thousand years later. Because the mushrooms are spread thinner and thinner, and the honey is more and more the focus. But look at the consequences of an alcohol cult. Alcohol lowers sensitivity to social cueing while it increases a false sense of verbal facility. So, it sets the stage for boorish behavior. From that comes the suppression of women as part of this bronze-tipped spear/grain surplus/city-building kingship/standing armies/turf-defending mentality that we find in the so-called proto-civilizations. G&Z: OK, we've had first-hand experience with the tryptamine linguistic phenomena, so your language acquisition hypothesis is certainly as plausible as any other theory, more so, since it can point to a mechanism. Otherwise you have to take on faith that some miracle happened to create self-reflection and linguistic capabilities. What evidence is there for the orgiastic, cooperator model? Certainly the ecological catastrophe when the last glaciers retreated made war a survival skill. In Northern Europe when all the game was hunted out, the skilled hunters started hunting the people on the other side of the hill. In the MIddle Esast it was agriculture and grain surplus, as you say. So why hierarchy and violence become successful strategies is very clear. What is the evidence for the Edenic partnership model, and is such an extreme position necessary for your theory? TM: Well, the evidence is two-fold: first of all, the kind of attitudes you find in African nomadic herders today; for instance, the only time anybody ever offered me his wife was when when I stayed with the Masai. Good hospitality dictates that the youngest wife spend the night with the guest. G&Z: But these are wives owned by a particular husband. TM: That's right. But still there is clearly a different attitude toward these women. They are not exclusively accessed by the husband. [no, he can hand them around to other men - is this a partnership mode of behavior? -G] The other thing is the great horned Goddess, found throughout Paleolithic history_why horned? Cattle are the key, because cattle establish the presence of the mushroom. Cattle-based nomadism and horsemounted nomadism are absolutely antithetical, because horse-mounted nomadism is based on an economy of plunder. Cattle-based nomadism is based on establishing a stable environment that is moving over a large area. G&Z: Does that necessitate a partnership society as opposed to any other kind of social organization? It's the black and white dichotomy we're having trouble with. TM: Well, it probably was not as black and white as I paint it because there must have been residual carry-over from this early level of primate programming. That's why I think a key feature is the mushroom religion and the frequency of these practices. Because I think the ego will begin to form in the personality very quickly in the absence of psilocybin. You have to keep re-inoculating yourself against what is essentially an anti-social idea in those contexts. It's amazing to me that the male love of nookie would stand aside for the male love of property and dominance. That orgies were ever suppressed shows how strongly that must have been felt. They said, "A good time is fine, but the really important thing is to

control women and property." G&Z: There are two things that I would disagree with there. You assume that men make all the sexual decisions, not taking into account how much women choose their mates, even in a hierarchical society. And I'm not sure I see the direct connection between psilocybin use and orgiastic sexuality. TM: Psilocybin creates arousal. So in a society exempt of Christian paranoia this group arousal would just naturally turn into orgy. If you're getting people together at every new and full moon and getting them loaded, they're going to fuck. G&Z: OK, but why in orgies? TM: Basically, because it's a boundary-dissolving stimulant. It would be interesting to give chimpanzees mushrooms and see whether they go into the corner of their cage and turn their faces away or whether they all jump each other. G&Z: Is there a dosage issue here also? TM: Well, there's a series of ascending doses. At very low doses you get measurable increases in visual acuity. This is the foot in the door from which all other consequences flow. Because that will select against non-psilocybin using members of the population, because they are less successful at hunting, less successful at feeding their offspring and bringing them to reproductive age. So on the next level you get arousal and sexual activity: a second factor selecting against non-using members of the population because they are fucking less, presumably. G&Z: But at visionary doses you don't want to do anything but watch. TM: At visionary doses you become subject to glossolalia and language-forming activities. It's possible to imagine all three of these things happening to a single individual in a single afternoon. You take it at 4:00pm. In the first hour, you kill an antelope that you have keenly observed; in the next hour you eat it with your mate and have great sex; and following that you're swept away by a psychedelic experience. That's a little extreme, but you can see how this could be happening on all levels. G&Z: There's still a leap of faith in your description of the cultural complex. As psychedelic pagans in a long-term, sexually open, partnership relationship, we're close to your audience in many respects. But the discussion about dominator and partnership cultures reads like dogmatic preaching about good vs. bad cultures. TM: Well, not good cultures and bad, but adaptive and mal-adaptive. Pastoral nomadism is clearly a viable, open-ended strategy. [until you overgraze the grasslands and the desert advances -G.] The dominator thing can't be run for more than 3 or 4,000 years before you are where we are: with limited resources, aggression carried beyond any reasonable level_It may be dogmatic_ G&Z: What is the dominator thing? Why not use existing terminology: authoritarianism, uptightness, sexual repression, totalitarianism, violence, etc. I guess that reading the book it's very hard for me to understand how I distinguish between Joe Stalin and John Kennedy. TM: I think by this theory these guys are comrades-in-arms.

G&Z: That's where I have a problem. What have we done right in the last 10,000 years, as opposed to what is wrong and should be thrown away? TM: Well, the answer is very little, consciously. It's almost as though we have designed culture as a suicide machine of some sort. G&Z: Would you include Galileo, Locke, Voltaire and Jefferson in that? TM: Yes and no. It depends on the frame. In the European Enlightenment, these are the heroes. But the Enlightenment is a necessary response to medievalism and the Christian eschaton. So there has been progress, but always within the terms of the dominator culture. There's always been a fifth column, or a critical community or an underground. But notice how hard it is to push this agenda forward. You couldn't get people to sign on to the Bill of Rights right now. G&Z: You couldn't get people to sign on to the Bill of Rights the first time. It was pushed through by an intellectual lite. TM: Who were probably homosexuals, and therefore infected with this unconscious feminizing element. G&Z: So the Bill of Rights is not an artifact of dominator culture but a resistance to it? TM: Freeing slaves, the universal rights of man are feminist attitudes. So is anything that erodes the idea that the king at the center of the mandala city is the absolute arbiter of what should happen. The fall away from the Edenic state in Africa didn't end at Sumer or Greece or Rome or Paris in the 1760's. It's still going on. So we're still losing touch even as we're reaching out to gain touch again. I think that the endpoint of male dominance is not even fascism but Naziism, where there's a racial element as well. Fascism, the only authentic political philosophy adumbrated in the 20th Century, is the greatest distance from what we're trying to get to. I think society will definitely embrace fascism if it feels threatened by a return to Gaianic style. G&Z: You're talking in terms of we and it and society. What happens to the individual? There is a difference between Napoleon and John Stuart Mill. But your book bashes Western Civilization without making clear which concepts are the "ideals of a democratic society going forward into the future", and which are characteristic of a dominator culture. TM: I guess the difference that we're uncovering here is that it sounds like you think it's 50/50, and I'm saying 95% of it was bunk. [We think 99% of human history was horrifying, but that key ideas and concepts were developed that are absolutely necessary to bail us out, including the scientific empirical foundation for Terence's ideas-G&Z] I think that anything that went on under the aegis of monotheism is horseshit. G&Z: Most definitely. However, you point out that the polytheistic Hindus have a more feminist religion, yet in terms of the individual behavior of individual people towards women in that society_I sure won't sign up for that gig. TM: Well, their problem is not monotheism. There's more than one way to fuck yourself up. Their problem is essentially a phonetic alphabet. The phonetic alphabet empowers a distancing and an abstracting from natural phenomena that is probably equal in power to what happens in monotheism. It's

just that in the case of the West, we got a full dose of both. There are non-phonetic ways to create sophisticated data bases_the Chinese_ G&Z: Is the high Chinese culture a partnership society? TM: More so than the West. If you look at the structure of Chinese marriage in the Tang dynasty, there's definitely male dominance, but on the other hand, shadow institutions were created to mitigate that dominance that we would never tolerate in the West. For instance, concubinage was tolerated in China, but the price paid for it was the right of inheritance of the primary wife and her control of the household. So there were trade-offs. G&Z: Would it be fair to say that the biochemical matrix in which any human culture swims is shiftable by ideas, by ingestibles-food or drugs-and that there is a shifting center? TM: Yeah, and it's not randomly driven. A lot of this stuff is dictated by the vicissitudes of botany. The fact that the European continent was so poor in boundary-dissolving hallucinogens allowed the phonetic alphabet and the city-building kingship style to never really be challenged [except in 1600, 1789, 1848, 1918, 1991? -Z]. The Maya, for example, are a different situation. They clearly had to accommodate to living in tropical rain forests replete with hallucinogenic drugs. They were still able to organize slave labor and have kingship and warfare. But the very baroque, ritual nature of it_the way that Venus regulated their warfare up until the collapse of the Proto-Classic phase_meant that other factors were mitigating these tendencies. And I'm sure that it was probably the dependency of the lite on hallucinogens. The level of adornment in these vase paintings indicates to me that the lite was probably homosexual in style and thereby feminized. And there are many powerful women in the lineage of the Mayan royalty. All of these societies that have arisen in the context of what we call civilization are not models for what we want to do. It's an incredibly radical rejection to say everything from Sumer, essentially all of history, is a mistake. History itself is a mistake. The archaic revival, if carried out to any degree at all, would mark the most radical reconstruction of civilization that's ever taken place. G&Z: Do you propose giving up science and technology and the few accomplishments of history? Would you would be happiest going back to being a Paleolithic pastoralist? TM: No, I think it's a forward escape. With 3-5 billion people on the earth we are not going to return to pastoral herding on the plains of anywhere. What can we take from that model and preserve? My idea of the perfect future is: The scene opens on a world that appears totally primitive. People are naked, people are orgiastic, people are nomadic. But when they close their eyes there are menus hanging in space. Culture has been internalized. Culture is supposed to be internalized. All this talk about virtual reality_people don't seem to notice_this is a virtual reality. These are all ideas_ideas that have been forced into matter so that we could live in a reconstruction of our imagination. And de-constructing these virtual realities in which we live is the only way to get back to some sort of baseline of what it is to be human. And then you can carry culture with you. Culture was never meant to be materially realized. Culture is an intellectual object like a philosophy or a belief system. G&Z: The ultimate Platonistic statement there.

TM: Well, it's an attractor around which we orbit. G&Z: Let's just concede that we disagree about anthropology and history. But we both agree we're in a mess. How do we go forward from here? We have 5 to 7 billion human beings; we have a stable hightech culture; the optimistic projection is that there will be 12 to 15 billion human beings in 2050. How do we get from here to there? How many people get to go? TM: I was challenged by someone who said, "Well, you're always talking to these mushrooms. Why don't you ask them how to save the world?" The next time I was stoned I asked, "How can we save the world?" And the mushroom said, "Each woman should bear only one natural child." It didn't hesitate for a moment. If every woman were to have but one natural child, the population of the earth would drop by 50% in the next 45 years. Without warfare, without migration, without artificially created epidemic diseases, or relocation and horror on a massive scale. Now, someone will say, "But how are you going to convince women in Bangladesh to limit their reproductive activity?" Good point, but a woman who has a child in Malibu_that child will have 800 to 1000 times more negative impact on resources than a child born to a woman in Bangladesh. We're crazy to preach limited reproduction to women in the Third World when, if you convert one woman in Malibu to the idea of not having a child, it's like converting 1000 women in the back streets of Dakka. Now, this woman in Malibu is very probably college-educated, completely media-sophisticated, and open to all the arguments and styles of persuasion to which we are familiar. In other words, she's the easy person to convince. She doesn't argue that she is Hindu or Catholic and can't go along with it. G&Z: Forty years from now you've got North American and European population decreasing. I still don't see how you have Asia's population decreasing. TM: Well, in South East Asia, if they expect to maintain the newly-emerging higher standard of living, they must educate their people, and with that process of education is going to come a natural reluctance to have children. G&Z: Then your argument, and my argument as a developmental capitalist, is essentially the same. TM: Why is this not being preached everywhere? It's because nobody has figured out how you make a buck in a situation of retreating demographics. G&Z: The drive to reproduce-socio-biologically entrained in the wetware-is generally reinforced by most social belief systems, economic theories, religions, etc. Isn't it time to re-think our relationship with our unconscious drive to reproduce? TM: One of the things that fascinates me about this idea of one woman/one child is that here's a plan to save the world, the implementation of which would rest in the hands of women. Women have been squawking that they are powerless, they are imprisoned within a set of male dominator conceptions that make it impossible for them to do anything. [Some of us haven't, like the Mondo matriarchy-G] You could go to a woman on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and say, "How would you like to have more leisure time? How would you like to increase your income? And how would you like to move to the forefront of political heroism by these acts?" Finally we have a solution which simultaneously appeals to people's most venal drives, and the political consequences of it are correct.

G&Z: I would have agreed with that 20 years ago. Propagandizing for one or fewer children would certainly help women, who have had to swim upstream against social pressure; social pressures which are more powerful in poor and traditional societies. Right now, increasing affluence reduces fertility. As long as they have contraceptive techniques and they don't have authorities like the Catholic Church or their parents or their husbands blocking them_they will be receptive to your propaganda, and not just in the First World. If it weren't for the traditions forbidding frank and scientifically accurate talk about sex, you could broadcast this message-not only to educated and affluent women, but illiterate and poor ones, tooeveryone reachable by what, in the book, you call the TV drug. TM: Well, you have capitalism and the Church and tradition generally all mitigating against this. These things have to be consciously denounced. Hitler was an amateur at the creation of human misery_compared to the role that the Catholic Church is playing. G&Z: What do you mean by capitalism? TM: Well, capitalism requires consumers. In a retreating demographic situation it's hard to see_every capitalist wants to expand his market share. How can he do this if there are fewer and fewer consumers? G&Z: The Economist and the Wall Street Journal suggest that smaller families with higher standards of living are the only way to save the world, and that is good for business. TM: But they don't conclude how small the family should be. What is currently thought by people who don't think much about it is that it's good to have two children. No one who is ecologically sensitive wants to have three or four, so if you explain to them that two is no longer politically correct. . . So, women taking control, having only one child, then a de-materialism of culture. And somehow capitalism, if it's truly the system under which we are all going to live, has to carry out a complete critique of its premises, and we have to learn how to sell something other than objects. G&Z: That's happening. TM: I think it's happening. I am not a catastrophist at all. I think that the trends are in place to create the kind of world that we can all put up with. But it will be, consciously or unconsciously, a neo-Archaic world. It's going to be nomadic; it's going to de-emphasize material culture; it's going to be erotically permissive; it's going to de-emphasize having large numbers of children. I don't think I'm discovering the answers. G&Z: That's our vision of a more perfect future, too, at least on this planet. TM: This is why virtual reality, hokey and bizarre as it is, is interesting, because what it clearly is, is an effort to sell something which is nothing. With virtual reality, if you want to live in the Frank Lloyd Wright Waterfall House, it's $895 off the shelf. G&Z: And Disneyland is ecologically less destructive than having people trekking all over the wilderness all over the planet. TM: I think that capitalism should be intelligent enough to de-materialize itself. I mean, capitalism is not necessarily a materialistic theory, it's just that on the crude level of culture the only thing you can sell are things.

G&Z: During this current recession, companies selling high-tech things are doing very badly. Companies selling high-tech concepts are doing very well. There's definitely a move towards selling abstract embodiments of ideas - call them intellectual property processes - 21st Century capitalism. TM: Virtual reality, if perfected, would allow the energy of capitalism to flow entirely into this virtual realm. Then if people wanted to live in outrageously gaudy and over-done environments, at least let them be virtual. G&Z: Going back to Dakka, where they're still selling women into slavery_you have to reach at least a late 19th Century North American level of development before the propaganda you're talking about is going to work. You have to get that far out of traditional culture. TM: To do this you have to back away from the male dominant paradigm of military defense. Why is no one saying, "Let's negotiate an international agreement that no army shall be more than 200,000 men."? Then no one can claim threat, and armies all over the world can be reduced, but to a level such that they can still carry out a fair defense if necessary. G&Z: What about radical Islam, my favorite 21st Century military problem? TM: Radical Islam could be unplugged by putting in place a set of international agreements of such strength that we can say, "Have any kind of government you want. But when you start building weapons of mass destruction, the cops will come knocking on your door to take them away." G&Z: You'd be surprised how many of your ideas are getting currency in The Economist. TM: Europe is way out front on all this. The United States is essentially in a reactionary stance. We are passionately anti-internationalist, and we have a dream of world dominance that is inapporpriately 19th Century. G&Z: What practical steps would you suggest to convince the people and the government of democracies such as the United States to legalize drugs? TM: Well, I laid out a 10-point program in the book. If people are informed of the facts, that's all that has to be done. Facts such as the true dangers of heroin relative to alcohol. The true facts concerning government connivance in promoting sugar, alcohol, tobacco and caffeine over other drugs. G&Z: The relative harmlessness of the psychedelics in a social context_ TM: Yeah. Basically, we're living inside a reality created by master propagandists. The media is too much a tool of the Establishment. More so than ever in my lifetime. I hope my book and some of the other things going on in society will break this down. Statistics such as that the United States is the number one builder of prisons and incarcerator of people in the world - people should have that in their faces every day. When the myth of the danger of drugs becomes too expensive to support, it will be abandoned and tossed away. Part of the problem is that people are easily manipulated and led because they have no information to base any resistance on. The word 'drug' has been so totally corrupted by the forces in control that you can't even have a rational discussion with people. So if the playing field were leveled and I think circumstances are leveling the playing field-solutions will come.

different points of view. Robert Anton Wilson (born Robert Edward Wilson, January 18, 1932 January 11, 2007), the American author of 33 influential books, became, at various times, a novelist, philosopher, psychologist, essayist, editor, playwright, futurist, polymath, civil libertarian[1] and self-described agnostic mystic. Recognized as an Episkopos, Pope, and a Saint of Discordianism, Wilson helped publicize the group through his writings, interviews, and strolls. Wilson described his work as an "attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models or maps, and no one model elevated to the truth".[2] His goal being "to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything".[3] 13 External links

[edit] Early life


"Is", "is." "is"the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is"; I only know how it seems to me at this moment. Robert Anton Wilson, The Historical Illuminatus, as spoken by Sigismundo Celine. Wilson, born Robert Edward Wilson in Methodist Hospital, in Brooklyn, New York, spent his first years in Flatbush, and moved with his family to Gerritsen Beach around the age of 4 or 5, where they stayed until he turned 13. He suffered from polio as a child, and found generally effective treatment with the Kenny Method (created by Elizabeth Kenny) which the American Medical Association repudiated at that time. Polio's effects remained with Wilson throughout his life, usually manifesting as minor muscle spasms causing him to use a cane occasionally until 2000, when he experienced a major bout with postpolio syndrome that would continue until his death. Wilson attended Catholic grammar school, most likely the school associated with Gerritsen Beach's Resurrection Church. He attended Brooklyn Technical High School to remove himself from the Catholic influence. While working as an ambulance driver Wilson attended New York University, studying engineering and mathematics. He worked as an engineering aide, a salesman, a copywriter, and as associate editor of Playboy magazine from 1965 to 1971. Wilson adopted his maternal grandfather's name, Anton, for his writings, at first telling himself that he would save the "Edward" for when he wrote the Great American Novel and later finding that "Robert Anton Wilson" had become an established identity. In 1979 he received a Ph.D. in psychology from Paideia University in California,[4] an unaccredited institution that has since closed.[5][6] Wilson reworked his dissertation, and it found publication in 1983 as Prometheus Rising. Wilson married freelance writer and poet Arlen Riley in 1958; they had four children. Their youngest daughter Lunabeaten to death in an apparent robbery in the store where she worked in 1976 at the age of 15became the first person to have her brain preserved by the Bay Area Cryonics Society.[7] Arlen Riley Wilson died in 1999 following a series of strokes.[8][9]

[edit] The Illuminatus! Trilogy


Main article: The Illuminatus! Trilogy The Eye in the Pyramid, first volume of the first edition of Illuminatus!, 1975 Among Wilson's 35 books,[10] and many other works, perhaps his best-known volumes remain the cult classic series[11] The Illuminatus! Trilogy (1975), co-authored with Robert Shea. Advertised as "a fairy tale for paranoids," the three books--The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, and Leviathan, soon offered as a single volumephilosophically and humorously examined, among many other themes, occult and magical symbolism and history, the counterculture of the 1960s, secret societies, data concerning author H.P. Lovecraft and author and occultist Aleister Crowley, and American paranoia about conspiracies. Wilson and Shea derived much of the odder material from letters sent to Playboy magazine while they worked as the editors of the Playboy Forum.[12] The books mixed true information with imaginative fiction to engage the reader in what Wilson called "guerilla ontology" which he apparently referred to as "Operation Mindfuck" in Illuminatus! The trilogy also outlined a set of libertarian and anarchist axioms known as Celine's Laws (named after Hagbard Celine, a character in Illuminatus!), concepts Wilson revisited several times in other writings. Among the many subplots of Illuminatus! one addresses biological warfare and the overriding of the United States Bill of Rights, another gives a detailed account of the John F. Kennedy assassination, in which no fewer than five snipers, all working for different causes, prepared to shoot Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, and the book's climax occurs at a rock concert where the audience collectively face the danger of becoming a mass human sacrifice. Illuminatus! popularized Discordianism and the use of the term "fnord". It incorporates experimental prose styles influenced by writers such as William S. Burroughs, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound.[13] Although Shea and Wilson never partnered on such a scale again, Wilson continued to expand upon the themes of the Illuminatus! books throughout his writing career. Most of his later fiction contains crossover characters from "The Sex Magicians" (Wilson's first novel, written before the release of Illuminatus!, which includes many of his same characters) and The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Illuminatus! won the Prometheus Hall of Fame award for science fiction in 1986, has many international editions, and found adaptation for the stage when Ken Campbell produced it as a ten-hour epic drama. It also appeared as a Steve Jackson role-playing card game called Illuminati and a trading-card game called Illuminati: New World Order. Eye N Apple Productions and Rip Off Press produced a comic book version of the trilogy.

[edit] The Schrdinger's Cat Trilogy, The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, and Masks of the Illuminati
Main articles: Schrdinger's Cat Trilogy, The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, and Masks of the Illuminati Wilson wrote two more popular fiction series. The first, a trilogy later published as a single volume, was Schrdinger's Cat. The second, The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, appeared as three books. In between publishing the two trilogies Wilson released a stand-alone novel, Masks of the Illuminati (1981), which fits into, due to the main character's ancestry, The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles' timeline and, while published earlier, could qualify for the fourth volume in that series.

Schrdinger's Cat consists of three volumes: The Universe Next Door, The Trick Top Hat, and The Homing Pigeons. Wilson set the three books in differing alternative universes, and most of the characters remain almost the same but may have slightly different names and different careers and background stories. The books cover the fields of quantum mechanics and the varied philosophies and explanations that exist within the science. The single volume describes itself as a magical textbook and a type of initiation, and implies that some people have gone slightly insane just by reading it. The single-volume edition omits many entire pages and has many other omissions when compared with the original separate books. The Historical Illuminatus Chronicles, composed of The Earth Will Shake (1982), The Widow's Son (1985), and Nature's God (1991), follows the timelines of several characters through different generations, time periods, and countries. The books cover, among many other topics, the history, legacy, and rituals of the Illuminati and related groups.

[edit] Plays and screenplays


A play by Wilson, Wilhelm Reich in Hell (published as a book in 1987 and first performed at the Edmund Burke Theatre in Dublin (music for the production was written by The Golden Horde[14]), in San Francisco, and in Los Angeles) included many factual and fictional characters, including Marilyn Monroe, Uncle Sam, and Wilhelm Reich himself. Wilson also wrote and published as books two screenplays, not yet produced: Reality Is What You Can Get Away With: an Illustrated Screenplay (1992) and The Walls Came Tumbling Down (1997).

[edit] The Cosmic Trigger series and other books


In the nonfiction and partly autobiographical Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977) and its two sequels, as well as in many other works, Wilson examined Freemasons, Discordianism, Sufism, the Illuminati, Futurology, Zen Buddhism, Dennis and Terence McKenna, Jack Parsons, the occult practices of Aleister Crowley and G.I. Gurdjieff, Yoga, and many other esoteric or counterculture philosophies, personalities, and occurrences.

Wilson advocated Timothy Leary's eight circuit model of consciousness and neurosomatic/linguistic engineering, which he wrote about in many books including Prometheus Rising (1983, revised 1997) and again in 1990 with Quantum Psychology (which contain practical techniques intended to help one break free of one's "reality tunnels"). With Leary, he helped promote the futurist ideas of space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension, which they combined to form the word symbol SMILE. Wilson's 1986 book, The New Inquisition, argues that whatever reality consists of it actually would seem much weirder than we commonly imagine. It cites, among other sources, Bell's theorem and Alain Aspect's experimental proof of Bell's to suggest that mainstream science has a strong materialist bias, and that in fact modern physics may have already disproved materialist metaphysics. Wilson also supported the work and utopian theories of Buckminster Fuller and examined the theories of Charles Fort. He and Loren Coleman became friends,[15] as he did with media theorist Marshall McLuhan and Neuro Linguistic Programming co-founder Richard Bandler, with whom he taught workshops. He also admired James Joyce, and wrote extensive commentaries on the author and on two of Joyce's novels, Finnegans Wake and Ulysses, in his 1988 book Coincidance.[16] Although Wilson often lampooned and criticized some New Age beliefs, bookstores specializing in New Age material often sell his books. Wilson, a well-known author in occult and Neo-Pagan circles, used Aleister Crowley as a main character in his 1981 novel Masks of the Illuminati, included some elements of H. P. Lovecraft's work in his novels, and at times claimed to have perceived encounters with magical "entities" (when asked whether these entities seemed "real", he answered they seemed "real enough," although "not as real as the IRS" but "easier to get rid of", and later decided that his experiences may have emerged from "just my right brain hemisphere talking to my left").[17] He warned against beginners using occult practice, since to rush into such practices and the resulting "energies" they unleash could lead people to "go totally nuts".[18] Wilson also criticized scientific types with overly rigid belief systems, equating them with religious fundamentalists in their fanaticism. In a 1988 interview, when asked about his newly-published book The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science, Wilson commented: "I coined the term irrational rationalism because those people claim to be rationalists, but they're governed by such a heavy body of taboos. They're so fearful, and so hostile, and so narrow, and frightened, and uptight and dogmatic... I wrote this book because I got tired satirizing fundamentalist Christianity... I decided to satirize fundamentalist materialism for a change, because the two are equally comical... The materialist fundamentalists are funnier than the Christian fundamentalists, because they think they're rational! ...They're never skeptical about anything except the things they have a prejudice against. None of them ever says anything skeptical about the AMA, or about anything in establishment science or any entrenched dogma. They're only skeptical about new ideas that frighten them. They're actually dogmatically committed to what they were taught when they were in college..."[19]

[edit] Probability reliance


In a 2003 interview with High Times magazine, Wilson described himself as a "Model Agnostic" which he said "consists of never regarding any model or map of the universe with total 100% belief or total 100% denial. Following Korzybski, I put things in probabilities, not absolutes... My only originality lies in applying this zetetic attitude outside the hardest of the hard sciences, physics, to softer sciences and then to non-sciences like politics, ideology, jury verdicts and, of course, conspiracy theory".[20] Wilson claimed in Cosmic Trigger: Volume 1 "not to believe anything", since "belief is the death of intelligence".[21] He described this approach as "Maybe Logic." Wilson wrote about this and other topics in articles for the cyberpunk magazine Mondo 2000.[22]

[edit] Economic thought


Robert Anton Wilson favored a form of Basic Income Guarantee; synthesizing several ideas under the acronym RICH. His ideas are set forth in the essay "The RICH Economy" found in The Illuminati Papers.[23]

[edit] Other activities


Robert Anton Wilson and his wife Arlen Riley Wilson founded the Institute for the Study of the Human Future in 1975. In 1976 Robert Anton Wilson founded the Starflight Network[citation needed], a society to propagate the philosophy of Dr. Timothy Leary. The group met at Wilson's home in Berkeley, California[citation needed]. Discussions at the group centered on how to practically implement the futurist ideas of space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension (SMILE)--the three central concepts of Leary's philosophy[citation needed]. Activities of the group included setting up and manning tables to sell Leary's and Wilson's books at Star Trek conventions[citation needed] and distributing a chart called The Periodic Table of Evolution (by Leary) and a diagram by Wilson called "The Octave of Energy", both summaries of the eight circuit model of consciousness[citation needed].[24] From 1982 until his death, Wilson had a business relationship with the Association for Consciousness Exploration, which hosted his first on-stage dialogue with his long-time friend Timothy Leary.[25] entitled The Inner Frontier.[26][27][28] Wilson dedicated his book The New Inquisition to A.C.E.'s codirectors, Jeff Rosenbaum and Joseph Rothenberg.

Wilson speaking at the Phenomicon Wilson also joined the Church of the SubGenius, who referred to him as Pope Bob.[29] He contributed to their literature, including the book Three-Fisted Tales of "Bob", and shared a stage with their founder, Rev. Ivan Stang, on several occasions. Wilson also founded the Guns and Dope Party and its corresponding Burning Man theme camp[citation needed]. As a member of the Board of Advisors of the Fully Informed Jury Association, Wilson worked to inform the public about jury nullification, the right of jurors to nullify a law they deem unjust.[30] He supported and wrote about E-Prime, a form of English lacking all "be" verbs (words such as "is", "are", "was", "were" etc.), and preferred the term "maybe logic".[31] Wilson coined a new word, sombunall (some but not all),[32] which caught on quite well to sumbunevry1. In response, he coined another word, mosbunall (as in "mosbunall humans wouldn't know an awesome new word if it bit them in the ass.").[citation needed] This word caught on even less. A decades-long researcher into drugs and a strong opponent of what he called "the war on some drugs", Wilson participated as a Special Guest in the week-long 1999 Annual Cannabis Cup in Amsterdam,[33] and used and often promoted the use of medical marijuana.[34]

Wilson co-founded and became the primary instructor of the Maybe Logic Academy, named for his agnostic approach to all knowledge. Fellow instructors include Patricia Monaghan, Rev. Ivan Stang, Philip H. Farber, Antero Alli, Peter J. Carroll, Starhawk, R. U. Sirius, Douglas Rushkoff, Erik Davis, Lon Milo Duquette, and David Jay Brown.

[edit] Death
On June 22, 2006, Huffington Post blogger Paul Krassner reported that Robert Anton Wilson was under hospice care at home with friends and family.[35] On October 2, 2006 Douglas Rushkoff reported that Wilson was in severe financial trouble.[36] Slashdot, Boing Boing, and the Church of the SubGenius also picked up on the story, linking to Rushkoff's appeal.[37][38] As his webpage reported on October 10, these efforts succeeded beyond expectation and raised a sum which would have supported him for at least six months. Obviously touched by the great outpouring of support, on October 5, 2006, Wilson left the following comment on his personal website, expressing his gratitude: Dear Friends, my God, what can I say. I am dumbfounded, flabbergasted, and totally stunned by the charity and compassion that has poured in here the last three days. To steal from Jack Benny, "I do not deserve this, but I also have severe leg problems and I don't deserve them either." Because he was a kind man as well as a funny one, Benny was beloved. I find it hard to believe that I am equally beloved and especially that I deserve such love. Whoever you are, wherever you are, know that my love is with you. You have all reminded me that despite George W. Bush and all his cohorts, there is still a lot of beautiful kindness in the world. Blessings, Robert Anton Wilson[39] On January 6, Wilson wrote on his blog that according to several medical authorities, he would likely only have between two days and two months left to live.[40] He closed this message with "I look forward without dogmatic optimism but without dread. I love you all and I deeply implore you to keep the lasagna flying. Please pardon my levity, I don't see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd." He died peacefully five days later, on January 11 at 4:50 a.m. Pacific time.[41] After his cremation on January 18, and his family-held memorial service on February 18, 2007, his family scattered most of his ashes at the same spot as his wife's - off the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk in Santa Cruz, California.[42][43] A tribute show to Wilson, organized by Coldcut and Mixmaster Morris and performed in London as a part of the "Ether 07 Festival" held at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on March 18, 2007, also included Ken Campbell, Bill Drummond and Alan Moore.[44]

. . . as Einstein once said quoted by Korzybski in Science and Sanity "Insofar as the laws of mathematics are certain, they do not refer to reality; and insofar as they refer to reality, they are not certain." In daily life and in "common sense," we use this agnostic caution most of the time and, "expect the unexpected" and "keep our eyes and ears open," etc. We only rush to judgement when we are under timepressure to make a quick decision or when our prejudices are involved, as in political and religious controversy. When there is no existential pressure for quick decisions, only prejudice asserts certitude. The following diagram is adopted from Professor O. R. Bontrager of the University of Pennsylvania Department of Psychology and from the general principles in Blake's anthology, Perception, University of Texas, 1952.

Stage I represents an energy-event in the space-time continuum, in the Einsteinian sense. This can be a subatomic process, a horse running in a field, a Laurel and Hardy movie projected on a screen, the nuclear engine called "the sun" transmitting light and heat to us across 93,000,000 miles, or any other kind of event possible in space-time. This is called Etic Reality, or non-verbal Reality. The first arrow represents part (not all) of the energy in the original energy-event traveling toward some perceptor organ belonging to you or me or some critter like us. Stage II represents the activity of the perceptor organ after being "hit" or tickled or somehow excited by the part of the energy that reaches said organ. Please note that all of the energy is not absorbed by the organ even in the most extreme cases - e.g. when we are hit by a hammer, we still do not absorb all the energy in the hammer. Even at this stage - even if nothing further was required for perception - we would still be dealing with part, not all; we would be dealing with abstraction, uncertainty, and fallibility. The second arrow indicates part of what happens after the perceptor organ is stimulated, by part of the energy flowing to us from the space-time event. In this arrow we are representing very, very many signals traveling to many parts of our organism. Stage III represents this organismic reaction, which can be quite complex. For instance, if the energy-packet happens to be the signal, "Your mother has been raped and murdered by terrorists," the stomach and tear-ducts and heart at least will be involved in processing the signal, as well as the neural and neuro-endocrine systems. Try to imagine, for instance, some of the probable organismic reactions, including bile and adrenalin production, in those Fundamentalist Christians who have been hardy enough to have workedtheir way through the first few pages of this opus; or in a Feminist confronted with the signal, "No woman has ever written a first-rate symphony," or in a Marxist listening to a Margaret Thatcher speech; or in a midget reading a collection of midget jokes which are "really" quite funny - to non-midgets; or in a Jewish scholar trying to read objectively through the writings of those Revisionists who claim the Holocaust never happened. It is obvious that along with subtraction (or abstraction: receiving part not all of the external energy), perception also involves a kind of addition of pre-existing emotions, which is what Freud meant by "projection." The next arrow indicates the transmission of all this to the brain. Obviously, what the brain receives is already highly colored by the subtractions and additions we have indicated; but the brain itself, except perhaps in the newborn infant, already has a set of programs, or a "filing system" for classifying such incoming signals. Stage IV indicates the "percept" as it is usually called, the mental "image" or "idea" that emerges after the brain has processed the original energy plus additions and minus subtractions. The final, two-way arrow indicates the most subtle and nefarious stage of this neurological programming, the

feedback between the incoming energy (plus additions and minus subtractions) and the language system (including symbolic, abstract languages like mathematics) which the brain happens to use habitually. The final precept in humans is always verbal or symbolic and hence coded into the pre-existing structure of whatever languages or systems the brain has been taught. The process is not one of linear reaction but of synergetic transaction. This finished product is thus a neurosemantic construct, a kind of metaphor. This discovery that language is basically metaphoric, which emerged gradually in the early 19th Century, inspired Emerson's famous dictum that we speak to each other in "fossil poems." Thus, to want something is to be empty - want and vacant come from the same root. Speaking of all desires as "appetites" brings us back to the same metaphor. Even "to be" - the most abstract word in normal use - comes from an Indo-European root which evidently meant becoming lost in the woods. That was as abstract, I guess, as an early human could feel; when no longer lost, when other people were found again, he or she would no longer simply "be" abstractly but become embroiled again in a more complex state, namely social existence and its Game Rules. A villain is a person without property (and Marxists should have given us many more exegeses on the class-bias in our languages). Man is the general human being, as Femisists keep telling us, because of the gender-bias in our language. A humorous story of sexual nature is a "dirty joke" because ascetics and puritans have left their own programs embedded in our speech; but Saxon words for body functions are "dirtier" than Norman words because of a plurality of puritan-economic-racial prejudices. Even "the" is a metaphor - it assumes the world is divided the same way our minds divide it - and seems to have been a very hypnotic metaphor indeed. In terms of human tragedy and suffering, think of what has been provoked by generalizations about "the Jews" and "the blacks." More subtly, remember that "the length of the rod" seemed to be a perfectly meaningful and "objective" phrase until Einstein demonstrated that a rod has various lengths -- length1, length2, etc - depending on its velocity and depending also on the relative velocity of the galoot who is trying to measure it. And what about "is" in the sense of Aristotelian identification - as in A is a B? This appears very useful mathematically, because the members of a methematical set exist abstractly, i.e. by definition, but what happens when we appoly it to non-mathematical, sensory-sensual events? Consider such pronouncements as "This is a great work of art," " This is meaningless driviel," This is Communism," "This is sexism," "This is fascism." To reflect the currently acceptable principles of neurology, such statements whould be a bit more complicated - e.g. "This seems like a great work of art to me," "This seems like meaningless drivel to me," "This seems like Communism to me," " This seems like sexism to me," "This seem like fascism to me." Of course, if some pedantic bastard like me points this out, people will say that the latter formulations are what they really mean and that the Aristotelian "is" was used only for convenience or brevity. But if you observe people carefully, you will note that language does indeed have hypnotic effects, and that one who has said, "This is Sacred" will treat the non-verbal event as if it really is Sacred, and those who say "This is Crap" will act as if the event really is Crap. Roger Jones's Physics as Metaphor spends most of its time trying to make clear to the reader the transactional or poetic element in so seemingly factual a statement as This table is three meters long. In case Dr. Jones's point still seems obscure or excessive, consider the celebrated "cock-eyed room" designed by Dr. Alber Ames. This is discussed in Blake's Perception mentioned above and has often been shown on

educational television. This room is designed so that the brain, using its ordinary programs and metaphors, will classify it as an ordinary room. It is not ordinary, however: it has walls and ceiling and floor designed at odd angles which optically produce in educated humans the same signals as a "normal" room. (Some evidence suggests that children under 5 years of age are not taken in by this illusion." Something very amusing and instructive happens - something which may relate, I think, to UFOlogy and other "crazy" topics - if two men of the same size enter the cockeyed room and walk to opposite walls. What the brain "sees" is that one man "miraculously" grows taller, becomes a virtual giant, while the other man "shrinks" down to a dwarf. The brain, it seems, having classified the room as normal, stubbornly clings to that program, even at the cost of having to classify new signals into a virtually supernatural event. Incidentally, Right Where You Are Sitting Now The Jumping Jesus Phenomenon Our psychic universe is expanding even more rapidly than the physical universe. Let us define the measurement of known scientific facts in the year 1 A.D. as "one jesus," using the name of the celebrated philosopher born that year. Before going any further, let us ask how long it took to arrive at one jesus. One way of estimating is to take the estimated age of homo sapiens, in which case it took 40,000 to 100,000 years. How long did it take to double this accumulation of knowledge, to achieve two jesuses? It required 1500 years - until 1500 A.D. How long did it take to double again and obtain four jesuses? It required 250 years, and we had four jesuses in our larder by 1750. The next doubling took 150 years, and by 1900 A.D. humanity had eight jesuses in our information account. The next doubling took 50 years, and by 1950 we had 16 jesuses. The next, ten years, and by 1960 we had 32 jesuses. The next doubling took seven years, and by 1967 we had 64 jesuses. And the next doubling took 6 years; by 1973 we have 128 jesuses. There is no reason to imagine that the acceleration has stopped. Thus, we almost certainly reached 256 j around 1978-79 and 512 j in 1982. In short, we are living in a mental transformation space; that is, an omnidimensional halo expanding toward infinity in all directions. And the electronic center of this halo of mentation is possibly everywhere. It is all available to you right where you are sitting now. Just plug in a terminal. The machine doesn't care who or what you are.

The Persecution and Assassination of the Parapsychologists as Performed by the Inmates of the American Association for the Advancement of Science

under the Direction of the Amazing Randi The Novelist was working on a huge, Cyclopean sword-and-sorcery epic set in 18th Century Europe, full of duels and seductions and revolutions and a cast that included such egregious gentry as Napoleon and the Marquis de Sade. It promised to be a rather juicy bit of work; and then High Times called and asked if he would attend the 1980 San Francisco meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and write an article about it... The Novelist was not at all sure he wanted to be dragged out of the Novel while it was going well. But High Times hooked him, not just with SSSS but with the proposal that they wanted him to observe how the parapsychologists were handled, or manhandled, this time around. You see, at the last AAAS meeting, in Houston in 1979, Dr. John Archibald Wheeler, who is to physics what Paul McCartney is to Rock, had damned and blasted the parapsychologists from here to Hell and back. Dr. Wheeler is a real Heavy; his contributions to quantum theory, gravitational geometry and other arcane branches of physics are literally cosmic in import. He also has the distinction of sometimes being called the Father of the Hydrogen Bomb, except in those circles where Dr. Edward Teller is called the Father of the Hydrogen Bomb; why anybody would claim paternity in such a case is a mystery to the uninitiate. The Novelist would personally rather be dubbed the Father of the Bubonic Plague; but you know, different strokes for different folks, different scenes for different genes, etc. Wheeler has another distinction, for which the Novelist loves him dearly. In a weak moment, or a whimsical moment, or maybe after sniffing too much glue while pasting up his press clippings, Wheeler put his name on a paper with two other physicists named Everett and Graham, in which they proposed that everything that can happen, in effect, does happen; that there are literally millions of millions of millions of universes, each as vast in space and time as this one, in which slightly distorted xerox copies of each of us are going through variations of the life-scripts we are going through here. Concretely, that seems to mean that in the universe next door, Dr. Wheeler never put his name on such a bizarre speculation; and in the universe two jumps away, he never became a physicist at all, but is a ballet dancer perhaps; and further over he was never born because his mother had an abortion or never met his father; and so on, and on, through all possible permutations. If this makes you dizzy, take comfort in the thought that it only includes possible universes. The EverettWheeler-Graham Model, or EWG as it's called for short, does not say that copies of you are wandering around in totally impossible universes. Very few physicists take this model seriously (and it is rumored that they are all acid-heads) but the Novelist loves it because, as literature, it's superb. And yet, in 1979, Dr. Wheeler, the man who loaned his prestigious name to this enormous katzenjammer, denounced the parapsychologists for being weird. It was like Salvador Dali complaining Picasso wasn't realistic....

Malthus, Machiavelli, and Pop-Ecology [True] Ecological science, like all science, is relativistic, evolutionary, and progressive; that is, it regards all generalizations as hypothetical and is always ready to revise them. It seeks truth, but never claims to have obtained all truth. Pop ecology, or ecological mysticism, is the reverse in all respects. It is absolutist, dogmatic, and fanatical. It does not usually refer its arguments back to ecological science (except vaguely and often inaccurately); it refers them to emotions, moral judgements, and the casual baggage of ill-assorted ideas that make up pop culture generally. Ecological mysticism, in short, is only rhetorically connected with the science of ecology, or any science; it is basically a crusade, a quasi-religion, an ideology .....It is my suspicion that the usefulness of the ideology to the ruling elite is no accident....The tax-exempt foundations which largely finance Pop Ecology are funded by the so-called Yankee Establishment -- the Eastern banking-industrial interests of whom the Rockefellers are the symbols. If this Yankee financing is not "coincidental" and "accidental" (based on purely disinterested charity)--if the ecological-mystical movement is serving Yankee Banker interests--a great deal of current debate is based on deliberately created mutual misunderstanding ...Consider the following widely-published and widely believed propositions: "There isn't enough to go around." "The Revolution of Rising Expectations, since the 18th Century, was based on fallacy." "Reason and Science are to be distrusted; they are the great enemies." "We are running out of energy." "Science destroys all it touches." "Man is vile and corrupts Nature." "We must settle for Lowered Expectations." Whether mouthed by the Club of Rome or Friends of the Earth, this ideology has one major social effect: people who are living in misery and deprivation, who might otherwise organize to seek better lives, are persuaded to accept continued deprivation, for themselves and their children. That such resignation to poverty, squalor, disease, misery, starvation, etc. is useful to ruling elites has frequently been noted by Marxists a propos pre-ecological mysticism; and, indeed, people can only repeat the current neo-puritan line by assuming that the benefit to the Yankee oligarchy is totally accidental and not the chief purpose of the promulgation of this ideology. "I don't think humanity deserves to survive," stated one letter to Co-Evolution Quarterly. ....The only rationale for continuing the neo-puritan Lowered Expectations, in the light of these data, would be (a) to prove that Fuller, Gabel and their associates have been fudging or corrupting their figures--a demonstration none of the eco-puritans have attempted; or (b) a blunt assertion that most of humanity deserves to live in misery. ...For perspective,it should be remembered that the ideology of Lowered Expectations arrived on the historical scene immediately after the upsurge of Rising Expectations. That is, after the Utopian hopes of the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, almost as if in reaction, an employee of the British East India Company, Thomas Malthus, created the first "scientific" argument that the ideals of those documents could never be achieved. Malthus had discovered that at his time world population was growing faster than known resources, and he assumed that this would always be true, and that misery would always be the fate of the majority of humanity. The first thing wrong with Malthus's science is that "known resources" are not given by nature; they depend on the analytical capacities of the human mind. We can never know how many resources can be obtained from a

cubic foot of the universe: all we know is how much we have found thus far, at a given date. You can starve in the middle of a field of wheat if your mind hasn't identified wheat as edible. Real Wealth results from Real Knowledge, which is increasinng faster all the time. Thus the second thing wrong with Malthus's scenario is that it is no longer true. Concretely, more energy has been found in every cubic foot of the universe than Malthus ever imagined; and, as technology has spread, each nation has spontaneously experienced a lowered birth rate after industrializing. Unfortunately, between the 28th century inventory of Malthus and the 20th century inventory of Fuller et al., the Malthusian philosophy had become the pragmatic working principle of the British ruling class, and a bulwark against French and American radicalism. Malthusianism-plus-Machiavellianism was then quickly learned by all ruling classes elsewhere which wished to compete with the British for world domination. This was frankly acknowledged by the "classical" political economists of that period, following Ricardo, which led to economics being dubbed "the dismal science" Benjamin Jowett, an old-fashioned humanist, voiced a normal man's reaction to this dismal science: "I have always felt a certain horror of political economists since I heard one of them say that he feared the famine of 1848 [in Ireland] would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good." In fact, the English rulers allowed the famine to continue until it killed more than two million. In the 1920's, Karl Haushofer studied Malthusian-Machiavellian political economy in England with Prof. H.J. Mackinder--whose coldblooded global thinking coincidentally inspired Bucky fuller to begin thinking globally but more humanistically. Haushofer took the most amoral aspects of Makinder's geopolitics, mingled them with Vrill Society occultism, and forged the philosophy of Realpolitik, which Hitler adopted as part of the official Nazi ideology. the horror of the Nazi regime was so extreme that few ruling classes dare express the Malthusian-Machiavellian philosophy openly anymore, although if is almost certainly the system within which they do their thinking. As expressed openly by British political economists in the 19th century, and maniacally by the Nazis, Realpolitik says roughly,"Since there isn't enough to go around, most people must starve. In this desperate situation, who deserves to survive and live in affluence? Only the genetically superior. We will now demonstrate that we are the genetically superior, because we are smart enough and bold enough to grab what we want at once. Since the fall of Hitler, this combination of Malthus and Machiavelli is no longer acceptable to most people. A more plausible, less overtly vicious Malthusianism is needed to justify a system in which a few live in splendor and the majority are condemned to squalor. THIS IS WHERE POP ECOLOGY COMES IN. The pop ecologists now state the Malthusian scenario for the the ruling elite, since it sounds self-serving when stated by the elite. There is an endless chorus of "There isn't enough to go around...Our hopes and ideals were all naive and impossible... Science has failed...We must all make sacrifices," etc., until Lowered Expectations are drummed into everybody's head. Of course, when it comes time to implement this philosophy through action, it always turns out that the poor [those making $200,000 or less] are the ones who have to make the sacrifices, not the elite. But this is more or less hidden, unless you are watching the hands that moves the pea from cup to cup, and if you do notice it, you are encouraged to blame "those damned environmentalists." Thus, the elite gets what it wants, and anybody who doesn't like it is maneuvered by the media into attributing this to the science of ecology, the cause of environmentalism, or Ralph Nader." "The Ultimate implications of eco-mysticism are explicitly stated in

theodore Roszak's "Where the Wasteland Ends". Roszak argues that science is phychologically harmful to anybody who pursues it and culturally destructive to any nation which allows it. In short, he would take us back, not just to a medieval living standard, but to a medieval religious tyranny where those possessing what he calls gnosis -- the Illuminati -- would be entirely free of nagging criticism based on logic or experiment. The Inquisition would not try Galileo in Roszak's ideal eco- society; a man like Galileo simply would not be allowed o exist. the similarity to the notions of Haushofer and the Vril society is unnerving." "(On the Vril Society, see L. Pauwels and J. Bergier, "Morning of the Magicians". On the parallels between the Vril society and Roszakian pop ecology, see the excellent novel, "The Speed of Light", by Gwyneth Cravens.) Or consider this quotation from Pop Ecologist Gary Snyder, 'But what I'm talking about is not what critics immediately call 'the Stone Age.' As Dave Brower, the founder of Friends of the Earth, is fond of saying, 'Heck, no, I'd just like to go back to the 20's.' Which isn't an evasion because there was almost half the existing population then, and we still had a functioning system of public transportation." ("City Miner", spring 1979) In short, Snyder wants to "get rid of" two billion people. Those who believe that none of the Pop Ecologists realize that their proposals involve massive starvation for the majority should consider this question profoundly. Benjamin Jowett, who experienced horror at the deliberate starvation of one million Irishmen, would have no words to convey his revulsion of this proposed genocide of millions. In this context, note that the only ideology opposing eco- puritanism usually well-represented by the mass media is that of the Cowboys-new Western wealth, which is still naive and barbaric in comparison to the Yankee establishment. the cowboy response to Pop Ecology, as to any idea they don't like, is simply to bark and growl at it; their candidate, now in the White House, is famous for allowing vast destruction of California's magnificent redwoods on the grounds that "if you've seen one redwood, you've seen them all." Other and more intelligent criticisms of Pop Ecology, such as have come form some Marxists and some right-wing libertarians, are simply ignored by the media, with the consequence that ecological debate--as far as the general public knows it--is, de facto, debate btween the Yankees and the Cowboys. Once again, it may be "happy coincidence" that keeps the debate on that level is just what the elite wants, or it may be more than a "happy coincidence." "George Bernard Shaw once noted that an Englishman never believes anybody is moral unless they are uncomfortable. To the extent that Pop Ecology shares this attitude and wishes to save our souls by making us suffer, it is just another of the many forms of puritanism. To the extent, however, that it insists that abundance for all is impossible (in an age when, for the first time in history, such abundance is finally possible) it merely mirrors ruling class anxieties. "The ruling class elite shares the "robin Hood" myth with most socialists; they do not think it is possible to feed the starving without first robbing the rich. Perhaps these ruling class terrors and the supporting cult of Pop Ecology will wither away when it becomes generally understood that abundance for all literally means abundance for all; that, in fuller's words, modern technology makes it possible to advantage everybody without disadvantaging anybody. In this context, look for a minute at some very interesting words from Glenn T. Seaborg, representative Yankee bureaucrat, former chairman of the Atomec Energy Commission. "American society will successfully weather its crises and emerge in the 1990's as a straight and highly disciplined, but happier society. Today's violence, permissiveness and self-indulgence will disappear as a result of a series of painful shocks, the first of which is the current energy crises . . . Americans will adjust to these shortages with a quiet pride and a spartan-like spirit." Is it necessary to remark that phrases like "highly disciplined" and "spartan-like" have a rather sinister ring

when coming from ruling class circles? Does anybody think it is the elite who will be called upon to make "spartan" sacrifices? Is it not possible that the eco-mysticism within this call for neofascism is a handy rationalization for the kind of authoritarianism that all elites everywhere always try to impose? And is there any real world justification for such medievalism on a planet where, as Fuller has demonstrated, 99.99999975 percent of the energy is not yet being used? We live in an age of artificial scarcity, maintained by ignorance and fear. the government has been paying farmers not to grow food for fifty years--while millions starve. Labor unions, business and government conspire to hold back the microprocessor revolution - because none of them know how to deal with the massive unemployment it will cause. (Fuller's books could tell them.) The utilities advertise continually that "solar power is at least forty years in the future" when my friend Karl Hess, and hundreds of others already live in largely solar powered houses. These propaganda advertisements are just a delaying action because the utilities still haven't figured out how to put a meter between us and the sun. And Pop Ecology, perhaps only by coincidence, keeps this madness going by insisting that scarcity is real, and nobody wonders why the Establishment pays the bill for making superstars of these merchants of gloom. Cosmic Trigger Volume II: Down to Earth EVERYBODY GETS A CAR By 1900, when my father was 8 years old, information had doubled again. The process had only taken 150 years this time. That year Max Planck published his first paper on quantum mechanics, beginning the process by which science in this century would gradually abandon Aristotelian logic and evolve in a non-Aristotelian, almost Buddhist direction. We were learning that the "one" "objective" Aristotelian "real world" previously posited by all Western thought existed only as a concept in our linguistic structures: that the only worlds we knew were plural and created by our senses and scientific instruments, all of them uncertain to some degree and all of them given structure by the inbuilt hardware and software of our senses and instruments. The Boer war was raging in South Africa, as the English and Dutch fought over which of them should govern and exploit the native Black population. In China, the Boxer Rebellion represented another of the countless efforts by Third World peoples to throw off dominations of any and all white conquerors, British, Dutch, whoever. In 1900 also the king of Italy was assassinated by idealists who thought the liberation of the workers could be achieved by murdering the Masters one by one. In Russia, Lenin returned from 3 years exile in Siberia, and went on plotting to liberate the workers by organized world revolution. The International Ladies Garment Workers Union was formed in New York by those who thought the workers could be liberated by forming coalitions and bargaining collectively with the Masters. All of this followed, inevitably, from the general increase in living standards throughout the Industrial world. In the new Second Wave civilizations, the ruling class was living maybe 100 times better than the ruling class of ancient Rome; the middle classes were living better than ever before; and the idea that even the lower order had the right to a decent life, formualated by the most radical thinkers of the 18th century, continued to reassert

itself, in dozens of forms now forgotten in addition to the two forms we all know. 1. the Democratic Socialism which by learning to co-exist with free enterprise, has permanently improved life in Europe, Canada and most of the industrial world, outside the U.S.; and 2. the Totalitarian Socialism of Marx, which has recently collapsed after making a mess of all its Utopian dreams. Also in 1900... Major Walter Reed discovered that yellow fever was not contagious by persuading volunteers to sleep with blankets taken from fever victims who had died, and then he correctly deduced and later proved that the fever was spread by a mosquito. Mendel's great essay on genetics, ignored for 35 years, was suddenly rediscovered by the scientific community. Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams. Human life span in the U.S. had quantum-jumped to 47 years. For the first time in history, a newborn human had a good chance of living longer than 30 years. Also in 1900.... the U.S. Navy bought its first submarine, and the Kodak company sold its first camera. Only one U.S. home in seven had a bathtub. As Sinclair Lewis records, the Reagan-Bush mentalities of the period often said, "Why give bathtubs to the poor? They'll only put coal in them." Brooks Adams had already published The Law of Civilization and Decay, in which the Westward movement of Capital throughout history was documented for the first time. Adams did not realize that this trajectory was, more fundamentally, a movement of information -- capital being the fruit of technology, i.e., of information that is totally accurate -- but he did see that, if the trend continued, the English Empire would collapse by about 1950 and be replaced by an American Empire.

THE MANDELBROT SET? War is a crime. Ask the infantry. Ask the dead. -- Ernest Hemingway According to computer scientist Dr. Jacques Vallee, information is now doubling every 18 months. Nearly four billion years of evolution to get to the first tool. Almost four million years to arrive at the information density of Rome in 1 A.D. Only one-and-a-half thousand years for information to double and for the West to arrive at Leonardo, the high point of Renaissance and the dawning of Protestantism. Two-and-ahalf centuries for the next doubling, the rise of Industrialism, the birth of Democracy -- and the radical suprademocratic heresies of socialism, anarchism, feminism... Only six years for the doubling of information between 1967 and 1973. Even then, nobody I knew personally had a home computer. Today everybody I know has a home computer. We are in what Alvin Toffler calls the Third Wave -- Information Civilization. If Vallee is right about

information doubling every 18 months, and Gordon is right about fractals increasing where information flow increases, then everything must become steadily more unpredictable from here on -- more "chaotic" in the mathematical sense. That "chaos" may be expressed as breakdown and violence, such as we are seeing in the current rumble [Persian Gulf War, 1991] between Goddam Insane and Huge Berserk Rebel Warthog. In the doubling of information between 1900 and 1950, we went through a World Depression and two World Wars. The "chaos" may, however, be expressed instead as a rapid acceleration toward a more stable and coherent world. After the democratic Revolutions of the late 18th Century, Europe settled into peace and steady progress for nearly a hundred years. The "chaos" is most likely leading us to social transformations that none of us can foresee with more than foggy approximation. I think it will include economic collapse and economic recovery, space colonization, longevity, Bucky's World Energy Grid, and breakthroughs in nanotechnology that will literally make the most advanced scientific gadgets "as cheap as dirt." Is this information-acceleration a Mandelbrot fractal, as Terrence McKenna claims? Will we reach a point in 2012 where information doubles a million times a second? I don't know. But, just as the Persian Gulf War was an awful shock for those of us who dare to dream of a better world, I think there are other shocks ahead that will be even more disconcerting -- to those who think they can still "govern" the world by violence. In the first month of this war there has been more anti-war protest, world-wide, than any year of the Vietnam war... I don't know. I have no infallible crystal ball -- but the day I decided not to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge in 1955, I committed myself to going along for the ride, however rough it gets. I also try, within my limits, to make a contribution that will add to the probability of Utopia and decrease the probability of Oblivion, for us all. Cosmic Trigger: Volume 3: My Life After Death I GOT RUN OVER ON THE INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY In Which the Author Learns of His Own Death and We Begin to Look Behind the Masks of Art and Magick This is not a normal world. -- Batman "Maybe" is a thin reed to hang your whole life on, but it's all we've got. -- Hannah and Her Sisters According to reliable sources, I died on February 22, 1994 -- George Washington's birthday. I felt nothing special or shocking at the time, and believed that I still sat at my word processor working on a novel called Bride of Illuminatus. At lunch-time, however, when I checked my voice mail, I found that Tim Leary and a dozen other friends had already called to ask to speak to me, or -- if they still believed in Reliable Sources -- to offer support and condolences to my grieving family. I quickly gathered that news of my tragic end had

appeared on Internet, one of the most popular computer networks, in the form of an obituary from the Los Angeles Times: "Noted science-fiction author Robert Anton Wilson was found dead in his home yesterday, apparently the victim of a heart attack. Mr. Wilson, 63, was discovered by his wife, Arlen. "Mr Wilson was the author of numerous books....He was noted for his libertarian viewpoints, love of technology and off the wall humor. Mr Wilson is survived by his wife and two children." This L.A. Times obit originally got on the net via somebody in Cambridge, Mass. I thought immediately of the pranksters at M.I.T. -- the Gremlins of Cyberspace, as somebody called them. I admired the artistic versimilitude of the Gremlin who forged that obit. He mis-identified my ouvre. (Only 6 of my 28 books could possibly get classified as science-fiction, and perhaps 3 more as science-faction.) He also, more clumsily, stated my age wrong by one year and the number of my surviving children wrong by one child. Little touches of incompetence and ignorance like that helped create the impression of a real, honest-to-Jesus L.A. Times article -- just as creeking chairs, background coughs, overlapping dialogue, scrupulously "bad" sound quality etc. make the bogus newsreels in Orson Welles's two greatest movies, Citizen Kane and F For Fake, seem "just like the real thing." The forged L.A. Times obituary may not rank with Welles's most monumental hoaxes -- e.g. his prematurely Deconstructionist "war of the worlds" radio show, where bland music and increasingly ominous newsbreaks thoroughly confused a mass audience about the borderline between "art" and "reality." But the Times forgery, if not of Wellesian heft, certainly contained a Wellesian blend of art and magic: in retrospect, it even reminds me, a little, of the 1923 Surrealist art show, in which the audience first encountered a taxi-cab in the garden -- a cab which had rain falling inside but not outside -- and then confronted a sign telling them gnomically: DADA IS NOT DEAD WATCH YOUR OVERCOAT I always think that double dip of guerilla ontology (by Dali and Breton, respectively) carried the baffled audience beyond surrealism into post-modernism, i.e. Total Agnosticism and/or terminal bewilderment. Certainly, art and life, and art and magick, have never gotten clearly disentangled again to the satisfaction of all observers. In this struggle to knock down the Iron Curtain between creativity and "reality," I tend to see the Wellesian men-from-Mars hoax as the second major step after surrealism and, ahem, I sometimes immodestly consider my own works a third step. But the Gremlin who killed me on February 22 carried the "transformation of mind and all that resembles it" (Breton) one quantum jump further than I ever had. He caused real grief and shock, if not Wellesian mass panic. One friend told me that the first bulletin he saw, on Compuserve, just quoted the alleged LA obit and then added, "This is as bad as learning that Zappa died. I think I'm going to meditate a bit, in his memory." Another networker, female, keyboarded in a whole chapter of Ecclesiastes in my memory -- "For everything there is a season, a time for every matter under the sun: a time to be born, a time to die" etc. -- and then added "Now get out there and PARTY LIKE HE'D WANT YOU TO!" One bulletin from "The House of Apostles of Eris, San Francisco" said that "attempts to contact Robert Anton

Wilson have been unsuccessful" -- hmmm? -- but nevertheless reassured all that "RAW is alive and busy with religious works." I think the author of that bulletin intended to sound unconvincing, especially to the initiates of my Classic Novels (Erisian "religious works" consist of mind-fucks or "shocks " in the strict Masonic sense). He or she certainly cast contagious suspicion on the other denials being posted on the nets by various friends who had managed to contact me. Certainly, the conspiracy buffs who have followed my career ever since Iluminatus will not believe a report that includes the suspicious admission that nobody could find me .... Many contributions to the alive-or-dead controversy seemed unsure whether I had died (or hadn't died) in Los Angeles or San Francisco. The funniest one of all claimed I survived, but in Howth (County Dublin, Ireland) -where I lived during most of the 1980s: "Contacted at his home in Howth Castle, Wilson said 'The reports of my death have been slightly exaggerated. I can still totter about a bit and even crack a weak joke occasionally.'" To which some wit, recognizing the Joycean jest, replied: "Shouldn't that be Howth Castle and Environs?" The Howth legend continued to circulate from one net to another, and soon included the news that I had taken over management of the Committee for Surrealist Investigation of Claims of the Normal (CSICON) after the death of its founder, Prof. Timothy F.X. Finnegan, of Trinity College, Dublin, and that CSICON still offers $100,000 to any "normalist" who can produce "a perfectly normal person, place or thing -- or even an ordinary sunset. Or an average day." Of course, Finnegan and CSICON exist in some sense, like Howth Castle, as readers of my works know by now -- not quite in the sense in which the Statue of Liberty exists, but not entirely in the metaphoric sense in which the National Debt and the Holy Trinity "exist" either. But the result of all this was beginning to make me wonder if I only exist in some semiotic or metaphoric sense myself, sort of like an elderly male Madonna. I mean, like, man, do I exist the way the Howth Castle in Dublin exists, or the way the Howth Castle and Environs in Finnegans Wake exists? I remembered a Spiritualist treatise I had once read. (I skim all sorts of weird literature, which keeps me from believing totally any of the stuff we get told as Official Truth by the major media). This ghostly tome claimed that we poor spectres often do not know we've died until some medium "contacts" us and explains why people have started treating us so rudely lately -- e.g., why even our wives and children ignore us outright unless we knock over the lamps or rap in code on the tables. I had also read Jonathan Swift's hilarious "pamphlet war" with the astrologer Partridge about whether Partridge had or had not died on the day predicted by a rival astrologer, Isaac Bickerstaff. ("Bickerstaff" sounds a lot like Swift himself, operating behind a Mask as usual, just as Lemuel Gulliver, the scientific world traveler, also sounded curiously like Swift; we shall learn much about Reality and Masks in this enquiry.) Although Partridge insisted vehemently on his continued vitality, Swift's argument, a model of Celtic subtlety, held that just because a man claims he hasn't died and may even believe it himself, this does not logically require us to credit his unsupported testimony. This left poor Partridge floundering -- (never argue with a Dublin intellectual) -and now I felt myself floundering a bit also. Obviously, my testimony on the matter would not convince Swift, when he decided to play the Scientific Skeptic, and I wondered if it would convince CSICOP --the group opposing CSICON. CSICOP (Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) believes that the "normal" actually exists somewhere, and not just in some Platonic spook world. They claim it exists everywhere, and

that nothing else at all exists anywhere. (If you see any of the 10100 not-normal things in this world, they will claim you had a hallucination.) As a famous bard wrote: He thought he saw a banker's clerk descending from a bus He looked again and saw it was a hippopotamus I remembered a Phil Dick novel, Ubik, about a bunch of dead people who don't know they have died and think the universe has slowly started turning into shit. If that happened to me, I would not and could not know about it -- by definition. Thoughts like that can really unsettle your mental architecture, especially if you wasted a lot of your life on epistemological philosophy, and on cannabis extracts. I, alas, have indulged both those vices on many occasions, and I fear that I have become a horrible example of Aggravated Existentialism. Worse yet: I have also heard Albert Rosenfeld, a distinguished M.D., lecturing on "clinical death," say, "We have come a long way from the day when Marshall Dillon lifts the sheet and says, 'He's dead, all right.' Now it takes a committee to decide." But these ontological doubts got pushed aside when the C.I.A. entered the Trip, playing the Wrathful Demons of this bardo. Somebody (signing her/him/itself as "Anon.") logged the following into several computer bulletin boards: "THE C.I.A. KILLED ROBERT ANTON WILSON... "Wilson did not die of natural causes. He was assassinated. Earlier on that day, Wilson was injected with a time-delay poison based on shellfish toxin, by agents of the CIA's special SUPER SECRET BLACK OPERATIONS SQUAD, using a special microscopic needle made of a plastic which dissolves in the body without a trace. Wilson's body had immediately been taken and cremated and the usual step of an autopsy had been bypassed, BY ORDERS FROM ABOVE. "It is clear why the power$ that be wanted Wilson dead. Wilson was a dangerous element; the government can only govern if the majority does not question the system (whoever currently "rules" does not matter.) The troublesome minority can be dealt with discreetly, by means of EXECUTIVE ACTION (assassination), which is what happened with Wilson.... "Earlier the same agencies (CIA, NRO, DEA and CFR/TLC/Bilderberger BOLSHEVIK SHADOW GOVERNMENT) had LSD advocate Timothy Leary neutralized with a neurotoxin which DESTROYS THE MIND and ARTIFICIALLY INDUCES A STATE SIMILAR TO SENILITY... "Dissemenation of this information is encouraged. MAKE 30 COPIES." Cute as a shit-house rat, I thought, when I read this. Now, whenever Tim tells people I haven't died, that will furnish further evidence of his "senility." Of course, I also enjoyed the idea that somebody, somewhere, might consider me important enough to terrorize the C.I.A. and call out their SUPER SECRET BLACK OPERATIONS SQUAD to terminate me. Since CLASSIFIED represents the rating directly below SECRET in government security manuals, I wondered how the CLASSIFIED BLACK OPERATIONS SQUAD spends its time -- giving housemaid's knee or genital warts to editorial cartoonists? Others grew more eldritch:

"Maybe the government has installed a VIRTUAL RAW in his place to allay people's fears. Oh, sure, he can respond all he wants, but I know it's not the real RAW." But my favorite contribution of the Wilson Mythos was logged by somebody using the monicker, The Green One: "There is no toxin. There is no needle. You have not heard of a toxin. You have not heard of a needle. They were not tools of the conspiracy. There is no conspiracy. The toxin and the needle, which do not exist, played no part in the conspiracy, which does not exist. Fnord. Repeat after me. There is no toxin..." What can I add to that bit of guerilla ontology, except to say "Fnord indeed?"

PAINTER JAILED FOR COMMITTING MASTERPIECES "Logic!' cried the frog. "There is no logic in this!" -- Mr. Arkadin I can live without God. I can't live without painting. -- Vincent and Theo In August 1968 the Spanish government imprisoned a man on the island of Ibiza for creating a long series of sketches and paintings -- beautiful, intensely lyrical works that Art Experts had universally proclaimed as masterpieces. The imprisonment of this Maker of Masterpieces did not represent censorship in the ordinary erotic or religious sense. Nobody even accused the artist of Political Incorrectness. He got jugged for a technical matter -- namely, that he had signed the wrong name to his works... or several wrong names, in fact. Names like Picasso and Van Gogh and Modigliani and Matisse, for instance. Not that anybody knew then, or knows now, what name the man should have signed. Generally, when the case gets recalled at all, people refer to the prisoner of Ibiza as El Myr or Elmyr de Hory, but neither of those titles have any claim to special eminence among his many aliases. In his long career, the painter had used both of those names, but he had also used Baron Elmyr von Houry, Elmyr Herzog, Louis Cassou, Baron Elmyr Hoffman, Joseph Dory, E. Raynal, Joseph Dory-Boutin and quite a few others -- perhaps as many as a hundred pseudonyms, according to Francois Reichenbach, an alleged Expert on this case. One trouble with Reichenbach as an Expert: he admits to buying and selling some of "Elmyr's" forged paintings. Another problem: he later collaborated (with Orson Welles, no less) on a film -- F For Fake -- that either exposed "Elmyr" totally or created a whole new set of myths about "Elmyr," depending on which other Experts you choose to believe. (Welles himself has said -- in the documentary "Orson Welles: A Life in Film," BBC-TV -- that "Everything in that movie was a fake." But to post-modernism, all art constitutes fake, or mask, in the Aristotelian sense of an imitation, or counterfeit of something else, and in a new non-Aristotelian sense we will explore as we advance

deeper into the murk. We need to think slowly before deciding whether Welles spoke literally or metaphorically in describing F For Fake as itself a fake.) Whatever the facts -- if we still dare to speak of "facts" in this age of situationism and deconstructionism -- we will, as a matter of typographical convenience, hereafter refer to the prisoner of Ibiza as Elmyr without dubious quotes and without any guessing about his last name -- if he had a last name, like ordinary humans, and didn't arrive here by spaceship...."Elmyr" he preferred in his last years, and Elmyr we shall call him. And, for those who don't like to repeatedly see words they can't sound out in their heads, the Hungarian "Myr" rhymes with "deer," and "Elmyr" has the same beat approximately as "cold beer" or "my ear." Just say "cold beer, my ear, shake spear, Elmyr" and you'll have no further sounding problems as you read. Elmyr served only two months in jail and then the Spanish further expressed displeasure with his chosen profession by expelling him from their country for one year, because he also had a reputation as an flamboyant homosexual, or in pop argot, an aging fairy godmother. But meanwhile, he had told his story to a young American writer, Cliff, who became his official biographer. According to Fake!, the deliberately outrageous biography concocted together by Cliff and Elmyr, this man of variable names, wobbly gender and multiple styles had committed many more masterpieces than those for which he had gotten jailed. In fact, Fake! says Elmyr had painted over a thousand of the classics of modern art. Every time you walk through a museum and see a Picasso or a Matisse that you particularly like, you should stop and ask, "Now did Picasso or Matisse do that, or did Elmyr do it?" Sort of changes your whole view of what critics call "the canon," doesn't it? The canon -- a term borrowed from the theologians (which should make us suspicious at once: can we borrow anything of value from a corporation widely suspected for about 200 years now of intellectually bankruptcy?) -- designates those works of art and literature which have achieved the rank of Masterpieces. When does a work achieve this canonicity? When the Experts say it does, of course. But the Elmyr case, far more than Deconstructionist philosophy, indicates that the Experts do not always know shit from shinola. Of course, not everybody believes that Elmyr committed quite as much great art as he gleefully confesses in the biography. Many Experts claim Fake! (a title to ponder, and ponder again) engaged in shameless bragging and exaggeration, to make Elmyr seem cleverer than the facts warrant. Unfortunately, these Experts had -- many of them -- authenticated some of the fakes that Elmyr undoubtedly did paint. As Elmyr's co-author, Cliff, says, these Experts do not want their cover blown -- they don't want us to know how often, and how easily, they have gotten duped by Elmyr and other skilled forgers. According to Cliff, all Experts operate largely on bluff. Some of the Experts, however, have counter-attacked by suggesting that this alleged "co-author," Cliff, may himself have functioned even more as a co-conspirator. And, in fact, the same co-author, Clifford Irving to give him his full name, subsequently became even more famous, and much more infamous, for persuading a New York publisher to give him a $750,000 advance for an authorized biography of Howard Hughes, i.e. a biography in which Hughes himself would talk, for the record, about all the financial, political, conspiratorial* and sexual scandals in his Faustian career. $750,000 had a value, in 1969, of about $5 million now, but the publishers shelled out happily. Irving had shown them a contract and various notes in Hughes's own handwriting. .... You see, even though Cliff Irving had already written Fake!, a textbook on forgery, including charming details

on forged signatures as well as counterfeit paintings, he had a boyishly sincere manner and a wickedly scintillating personality. Like all good con-men. He and Hughes had met on a pyramid in Mexico, Irving said with a straight face.* In the dead of night, of course....(It would make a wonderful surrealist painting, if Elmyr ever did a Dali: The ambitious young Irving and the rich old lunatic with matted hair and fingernails -- or claws -- like Bigfoot .... signing a contract on a pyramid .... under, I presume, a full moon...) Handwriting Experts later testified in court, after Irving's own veracity came under suspicion. They said absolutely that Howard Hughes himself, and nobody else, had written the signature and notes produced by Irving. At this point, alas, many people began to share Irving's (and Elmyr's) low opinion of Experts, and soon the biography of Hughes got cancelled. Hughes himself speaking over a phone (he never did come out of seclusion...) denounced Irving as a fraud; but, of course, some say that the voice emanated from a Virtual Hughes -- a double who had impersonated Hughes for years. The Mafia had bumped off the real Hughes, these conspiracy nuts claim, many years earlier. Had Irving faked a meeting with a man already dead and gotten "exposed" by another faker impersonating the dead man? As Swift proved to Partridge, we cannot decide matters of life and death on mere allegation. But we will deal with that kind of conspiracy later. Right now we only confront the problem of "the canon" itself as a kind of conspiracy. We simply do not know the extent to which Elmyr has entered the canon. Maybe 2 per cent of the masterpieces in modern museums emanated from his wizard's brush, as virtually everybody now admits. Maybe the figure (at least for post-impressionism, fauvism and early cubism, Elmyr's specialities ) runs as high as 25 per cent, or 50 per cent.... An ouvre of "more than a thousand" paintings might make up something in that percentage range of canonical 20th Century Classics. These implications appear heavily suggested in Irving's Fake! and even more stressed in the Welles-Reichenbach film .... Well, then, we must re-examine the canonicity of art as skeptically as the 18th and 19th Centuries re-examined religion. Religious canonicity survived (in the Occident) only as long as the Pope qualified as the world's leading Expert. When other Experts arose, with their own cults, religious canonicity became ambiguous and controversial. What happens when the Art Experts face a similar challenge? Some Radical Feminist critics have already begun such a "Protestant heresy" , and have dumped such Dead White European Males (DWEMs, in fashionable jargon) as Dante, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, etc. and replaced them with a new canon featuring a lot of long-forgotten ladies whose work, frankly, seems dreadfully inferior to me, and to most art critics. For instance, Susan McClary has found Beethoven's Ninth Symphony a musical hymn to rape, which will no doubt surprise all those with less androphobic ears, who hear something quite different in it, something of cosmic grandeur.. Says McClary, "The point of recapitulation in the first movement of the Ninth is one of the most horrifying moments in music....which finally explodes in the throttling, murderous rage of a rapist..." Sounds almost as bad as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, doesn't it? Although I write a lot of satire, I didn't make this up. You can find McClary's analysis in Minnesota Composers' Forum Newsletter, January 1987. She also doesn't like Western classic music in general, because of its "phallic violence" and "pelvic pounding." I insist I did not invent McClary or any of her ravings. Honest

to God. Some Femigogues just happen to sound like satire when you quote them verbatim. As for the female masterpieces set against old Ludwig, they only appear inferior, the Feminist revisionists say, because all of us have had our perceptions warped by the "patriarchal brainwashing" of our "phallocentric" culture. ("All of us" includies many female art critics, like Camille Paglia, who angrily claims this argument has crossed the line to an idiot caricature of Feminism) Maybe we all need a long de-programming at a Feminist re-education camp. Then we will realize that Hildegarde of Bingen not only outclassed Beethoven but wrote more first-rate music than Mozart, Bach and Scott Joplin together, and without any rape fantasies creeping in. Third World revisionists have raised similar objections to the canonical centrality of DWEMs. They ask us, not too gently, do we really believe that all the great art of humanity came out of one sub-continent, created by white males only? Hmmm? Do we trust these revisionists or do we trust our own sensibilities? After Elmyr, do we dare trust anybody? As a famous bard wrote He stood in his socks and he wondered, he wondered He stood in his socks and he wondered At the end of Welles's F For Fake, after we have suffered prolonged doubt about how many Picassos should get reclassified as Elmyrs, one character cries passionately "I must believe, at least, that art is real!" -- a noble thought with which I might finish this chapter... But this voice of Faith and Tradition belongs to another art forger, one who allegedly faked even more of the canonical Rennaisance masterpieces than Elmyr had faked of the canonical Moderns. We cannot have faith in this faker's faith....

THE ASTONOMER WHO ABOLISHED GRAVITY The normal is what everybody else is and you're not. -- Star Trek: Generations My mind is going. I can feel it, Dave. -- 2001: A Space Odyssey If anybody possesses all the qualifications necessary for a fully ordained Expert in America today, Carl Sagan certaintly has that dizzying eminence. Through frequent appearances on TV and in Parade (a news magazine circulated through hundreds of newspapers in their jumbo Sunday editions), Dr. Sagan has issued Expert verdicts on every possible controversial issue in science, and in politics, and even in theology, for three decades now. And, like the Experts who authenticated hundreds-to-thousands of Elmyrs, he has never once

admitted he ever made a mistake. You may wonder how a man who only has qualifications in astronomy can also function as an Expert on everything in general. Well, I think it requires Sagan to have a lot of raw courage, in the first place, and a strong, well-founded confidence that those who don't believe his dogmas have much less access to the media than he does; if they answer him back, however effective their arguments, very few of his large, gullible audience will ever hear about it. Let us see how Expertese works, by examining Dr. Sagan's long series of polemics against Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky. First of all, in every page Sagan has written about Velikovsky, he never once calls him "Dr. Velikovsky" as I just did. Thus, most people who know Velikovsky only through Sagan's attacks have never learned that Velikovsky had scientific training. The contest thus seems a struggle between "Dr." Sagan, the learned scientist, and "Mr." Velikovsky, the ignorant layman. Little tricks like that go a long way in deluding the naive, and Sagan never fails to use every dirty trick he knows. In what follows, I reverse this process, just for the hell of it. Sagan I will call Sagan and Dr. Velikovsky I will call Dr. Velikovsky. Sauce for the goose can serve, after all, as sauce for the gander. Sagan continually states bluntly, and falsely, that Dr. Velikovsky intends his cosmic catastrophe theory to revive the old-time religion.: "It is an attempted validation of religion"....." Velikovsky attempts to rescue not only religion but also astrology." (Brocca's Brain, p 126) We can only conclude that Sagan either reads very carelessly or engages in deliberate lying. Any close reading of Dr. Velikovsky shows numerous expressions of skepticism about both religion and astrology. In addition, Dr. Velikovsky's theory of cometary near-collisions offers a naturalistic, scientific explanation for many events or alleged events in ancient history, which the religious prefer to explain supernaturally, as miracles. Nobody who suggests a natural explanation for allegedly supernatural events offfers real support to religion, in either the judgement of the religious themselves or of those of us with agnostic disposition. Only Sagan -- and a few others, who seem to never have read Dr. Velikovsky and obtained their "knowledge" about his works from Sagan -- think of the comet model as "validating" religion, since Dr. Velikovsky uses a hypothetical comet to replace a hypothetical god in explaining huge reported floods, and other catastrophes. Most of us think of Dr. Velikovsky's theory as one which, if proven, would knock one more leg from under the edifice of Bible Fundamentalism. Nobody seems likely to worship Dr. Velikovsky's comet, but millions still worship the Bible's god. In the 30 years or more that Sagan has engaged in diatribes against Dr. Velikovsky, somebody must have pointed out this fundamental confusion to him -- mis-identifying a naturalistic theory with a supernatural theory. Evidently, he has a lot of trouble hearing or remembering such corrections. You become a leading Expert by acting as if everybody else's opinion deserves no attention and never even deserves the courtesy of an answer. For instance, to leave Dr. Velikovsky for a moment, consider Sagan's hilarious theory of "nuclear winter."* Briefly, Sagan's theory holds that nuclear war could result, not just in the horrors we all know, but in a freeze that would probably abolish all life on this planet. (He published this notion in Parade, where his mass audience could see it and gasp.) His refusal to accept valid criticisms of this sci-fi story led to the following

summary in Science, official journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, "News and Comments" section, Jan 16, 1987: Sagan's refusal to acknowledge merit in the NCAR [National Center for Atmospheric Research]'s analysis -- known as "nuclear autumn" -- sends some people up the wall. One wall-climber is George Rathjens, professor of political science at M.I.T...."(Sagan's) claim that the original nuclear winter model is unimpeached [he says]...is the greatest fraud we've seen in a long time"....Russell Seiz, a fellow at the Harvard Center for International Affairs...gibes at [Sagan and his co-authors] for mixing physics and advertising. Most scientists I have spoken to about Sagan share this dim view of his use of publicity to represent his pet notions as Scientific Truth even when -- or especially when -- a large segment of the scientific community has severe doubts about these notions. (Similarly, in Brocca's Brain, Sagan rejects data on so-called "out of body experiences" among near-dead patients because -- he says -- nobody in that state has reported anything they couldn't have heard while unconscious. But the literature of OOBE has hundreds of cases of such reports, including numerous incidents in which the subjects reported things in rooms far away from the operating room. Once again, we can only wonder if Sagan habitually lies through his teeth or just doesn't read any of the literature on the subjects upon which he claims Expertese.) But returning to Dr. Velikovsky, and Sagan's crusade against his ideas: Sagan likes to quote a "distinguished professor of Semitics" who told him no Semitic scholars take Dr. Velikovsky seriously. Like the "intelligence officer" who told Newt Gingrich about dope in the White House, this "distinguished professor" remains anonymous, and thus Sagan's hearsay about him would get thrown out of any civilized court. Three distinguished professors of Semitic studies, however, have all shown cordial support for Dr. Velikovsky: Prof. Claude F.A. Schaeffer, Prof. Etiene Droiton, and Prof. Robert Pieffer. Look them up in any Who's Who of Semitic studies, archeology and Egyptology. They have a lot more prestige in those fields than Sagan's Prof. Anonymous, who doesn't have a single entry under his name anywhere in the scholarly journals (although elsewhere he receives credit for many olde ballads and almost all bawdy limericks.) Another choice bit of Sagan's Expert testimony: he accuses Dr. Velikovsky of believing that ancient cultures had a calendar of ten months of thirty days each and 360 days in the year. Of course, 10 x 30 = 300, and this gives Sagan a chance to gibe at Dr. Velikovsky's inability to handle simple arithmetic. Very good, wouldn't you say? The only trouble with this brillaint analysis consists of the simple fact that, once again, Sagan has either consciously and deliberately lied or accidentally revealed again that he doesn't read carefully. Dr. Velikovsky says specifically "the month was equal to thirty-six days" (Worlds in Collision, p. 344.) 10 months of 36 days each = 360. See? According to Dr. Velikovsky's model, the year changed to 365 days (plus a few hours) after the cometary nearcollision. Whether he has proven that or not, he did not make a crude mistake in arithmetic. Sagan either made a crude mistake in reading, or followed Elmyr's formula for Expert-ness: "sheer bluff." Consider next the high temperature of Venus (4800 C.) As Dr. Roger Wescott and others have pointed out, Dr. Velikovsky predicted a temperature in this range for Venus when astronomical orthodoxy believed that planet much, much colder. Sagan tries to avoid giving Dr. Velikovsky credit for this confirmation of his model by

claiming "many" had predicted a high temperature before the Venus flyby. Actually, he only names one other who had made such a prediction, Dr. Rupert Wildt, and Wildt's work did not win general acceptance. (Others try to get around Dr. Velikovsky's correct estimate in this and other instances by describing him as a "lucky guesser." That seems mere cage-rattling to me. One could as well call any scientist who made many correct predictions a "lucky guesser".....) As Harry H. Hess, president of the American Geoligical Society wrote in a published letter to Dr. Velikovsky: Some of these predictions were said to be impossible when you made them. All of them were made before proof that they were correct came to hand. Conversely, I do not know of any prediction you made that has since been proven to be false. But the final joker came on page 153 of Brocca's Brain where Sagan writes (and this really deserves caps): ONE NOW FASHIONABLE SUGGESTION I FIRST PROPOSED IN 1960 IS THAT THE HIGH TEMPERATURES ON THE SURFACE OF VENUS ARE DUE TO A RUNAWAY GREENHOUSE EFFECT. (all emphasis added, and deserved) First, Sagan claims that Dr. Velikovsky does not deserve credit for predicting high temperatures on Venus because everybody knew it, although historical fact shows that only Dr. Wildt had made the same prediction before Dr. Velikovsky. Then Sagan either tells a double lie or else suffers an alarming memory lapse that may require neurological consultation, claiming that neither Dr. Wildt nor Dr. Velikovsky had made this prediction (which they had, and he had noted earlier) -- and then he brazenly claims he had originated it himself. Quite a performance, wouldn't you say? Now do you know how to become an Expert? Keep a straight face and make sure the mass media gives you more coverage than it gives those who try to correct your mis-statements. I could go on and on, for hundreds of pages, but instead I refer you to Ginethal's book listed at the end of this chapter. Ginethal does spend hundreds of pages documenting one fallacy after another -- literally dozens and dozens of them -- in Sagan's smear campaign against Dr. Velikosky. I will conclude only with the most dramatic, and funniest, of Sagan's goofs: In several places, Sagan has published a mathematical proof that several near collisions between a comet and a planet have odds against them of "a trillion quadrillion to one." (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1.) Sounds pretty damned improbable, doesn't it? The problem here lies in the fact that Sagan considers each near-collision as an isolated or haphazard event, thereby ignoring gravity. In fact, any two celestial bodies, once attracted to each other, will tend to contine to approach each other periodically, according to Newtonian laws unmodified by Einstein. This periodicity will continue until some other gravitational force pulls one of the bodies away from the gravitational attraction of the other. Ask any physics or astronomy professor about this, if you think I'm pushing too hard here. As Dr. Robert Jastrow of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies wrote (New York Times 22 Dec 1979) Professor Sagan's calculations, in effect, ignore the law of gravity. Here, Dr. Velikovsky was the better astronomer.

Robert Bass wrote, even more harshly, This Sagan assumption [ignoring gravity] is so disingenuous that I do not hesitate to label it a deliberate fraud on the public or else a manifestation of unbelievalbe incompetence or hastiness combined with desperation (cited by Ginenthal.) Well, I always had doubts about Sagan's ability to pronounce verdicts outside astronomy. When he does calculations inside astronomy and then ignores or forgets gravity, I begin to wonder about his competence in general.... Ishtar Rising or, Why the Goddess Went to Hell and What to Expect Now That She's Returning From the Introduction to the Falcon Press Edition (1989) Cary Grant was once told, "Every time I see you on the screen, I think, 'I wish I was Cary Grant.'" He replied, "That's just what I think!" I've been repeating that story ever since I first heard it, and it never fails to amuse audiences, all of whom seem to understand it immediately. Everybody groks that Archie Leach, the poor boy from Liverpool who became "Cary Grant" never fully believed in "Cary Grant," since Cary was, after all, his own invention. On the other hand, here's a similar story, which I also like to tell, that produces very mixed reactions, with some people laughing and others looking puzzled or slightly offended. An art dealer once went to Pablo Picasso and said, "I have a bunch of 'Picasso' canvasses that I was thinking of buying. Would you look them over and tell me which are real and which are forgeries?" Picasso obligingly began sorting the paintings into two piles. Then, as the Great Man added one particular picture to the fake pile, the dealer cried, "Wait a minute, Pablo. That's no forgery. I was visiting you the weekend you painted it." Picasso replied imperturbably, "No matter. I can fake a Picasso as well as any thief in Europe." Personally, I find this story not only amusing but profoundly disturbing. It has caused me to think, every time I finish a piece of writing, "Is this a real Robert Anton Wilson, or did I just fake a Robert Anton Wilson?" Sometimes, especially with a long novel, I find it impossible to convince myself that I know the answer. After all, as Nietzche said, "there are no facts, only interpretations"...... This book, frankly, got written originally because an editor at Playboy Press asked me if I could write a whole book on the female breast. "Sure," I said at once. I would have said the same if he had asked me if I could write a book on the bull-elephant's toenails. I was broke that month and would have tried to write anything, if somebody would pay me for it. When I got the contract and the first half of the advance money, I sat down and asked myself what the hell I would put in the damned book. I decided to write a treatise on the relationship of the breast to the rise and fall of Goddess religions, and -- to keep myself amused, and thereby speed the writing so I could get the second half of the advance quickly -- combine this with a basic introduction to Taoist philosophy.... This book contains some churlish grumbling against the Women's Liberation movement as it was in 1972

(when the book was being written.) I have revised some passages a bit, but allowed others to remain as historical curiosities. The early 70s were the days when all the survivors of the Sixties went a bit nuts, and the Women Lib nuttiness, in retrospect, was no weirder than the other screwball ideas of the time....The charm of this book would be spoiled, I think, if I updated it too much, so I have retained much of my snide humor about the sexism of the alleged anti-sexists. The first time I saw a nipple in an American movie, I was jarred. It was as if I had acquired a part-time schizophrenia which only went into operation on entering a movie theater. Women, of course, had nipples in real life, in Playboy, in European movies, in pornography, in the National Geographic; but in Hollywood, I had been trained to half-believe, they had all been born with a piece of fabric that could never be removed, not even by the greatest surgeon in the cosmos. And yet here they were on the screen; it was Hawaii, and the bare bosoms were well-justified -- oh, very carefully justified -- by historical accuracy, and yet I remembered when Cardinal Richelieu had mysteriously changed to Prime Minister Richelieu (in the Gene Kelly version of The Three Musketeers ) to avoid offending papist pride, just as history changed in 1984 to save the party's credibility. (And how many times had we seen actors who were notorious rakes and actresses who were renowned for randiness playing Roman or Greek pagans or even pirates yet still compelled to speak dialogue that had been tailored to sound as if they had been raised in Catholic convents, as if -- and this was the great unspoken myth in all American movies until the mid-1960's -- everybody everywhere had been raised in convents, and nobody had ever doubted the peculiar sexual notions of the Council of Cardinals?) And yet there were nipples, real live nipples on the screen, and I knew that an era had ended. It was like Roosevelt's death when I was 13; until then, I had half-believed that there would never be another President. Until those nipples appeared in Hawaii, I thought I would never see an American movie that wasn't implicitly a Roman Catholic movie. Of course, the Catholic Hierarchy had been inteligent (and by their own lights, right) all along: Repression is never a static process, but must always be dynamic, either moving forward toward total control or retreating backward as the floodgates open to that force which French intellectuals quite correctly capitalize: Desire. Shakespeare asked how Beauty could survive, being no stronger than a flower, and Tennessee Williams answered (in Camino Real) that the flowers in the mountains always break through the rocks. The cry of "Flower Power" in the 1960's might as well have been Nipple Power. Once those gentle buds had crashed through the rocks of repression, Desire was free and the walls of the cities began to shake. Real language began to be heard on the screens of movie houses; other parts of the body, one by one, crept out of the darkness of shame and concealment; topless clubs appeared with bottomless clubs soon after; Blacks rebelled against poverty, students against monotony, even straight citizens raised their voices against a war that made no sense (but when had straight citizens ever objected to a war on those grounds before?); the Indians emerged from the depression that had crushed them since their last defeat at Wounded Knee and began to agitate again; eventually there were mutinies in prisons, in armies, on ships, even among Air Force officers. In Frederick Perl's terminology, people had stopped harboring their resentments and began to make demands -- and a large number of them were proclaiming, in loud voices, that they would use any means necessary to get what they wanted. By the end of the decade, the Jesus Freaks, the women's liberationists and the silent majority were all in a panic, trying desperately to rebuild at least some of the walls of repression which traditionally have kept civilized humanity from attempting to immanentize the eschaton. This phrase is from conservative historian Kurt Vogelin and refers, in technical theological language, to the heresy of the Gnostics, who wished to produce heaven on this earth instead of postponing it until after death. Vogelin says this heresy underlies all forms of radicalism and rebellion, and he is probably right. Modern history is a war between Authority and Desire, and if Authority must demand submission, Desire will settle for nothing less than the attainment of its gratification.

In contrast to our deliberately optimistic sketch of the future, the latest Supreme Court rulings on "obscenity" are a backward swing of the pendulum, just as cynics have long been predicting. Once again we are told that parts of our bodies must remain dirty little secrets and that the state will use its powers of coercion to enforce this code upon us. To a rationalist, it is as if the hightest court had ruled that we must all believe, or pretend to believe, in the doctrine of the Trinity. Some people can believe in a three-in-one divinity, and some can believe that the human body is foul; others can no more believe these propositions than they can accept the tenets of the snake-handling cult in Georgia which we mentioned earlier. It doesn't matter what rationalists believe; they must not get caught exercising their disbelief. The only consolation is that things would be even more absurd if it were the snake handlers and not the sexophobes who were in power in Washington. There is, in fact, no reason why the notions of the snake handlers could not be enforced on the rest of us if they did get their crowd into high office, for as Mr. Justice Burger said in a recent decision (Paris Adult Theatre): But it is argued there is no scientific data which conclusively demonstrates that exposure to obscene materials adversely effects men and women or their society. It is urged on behalf of the petitioners that, absent such a demonstration, any kind of state regulation is "impermissible." It is not for us to resolve empirical uncertainties underlying state legislation save in the exceptional case where that legislation plainly impinges upon rights protected in the Constitution itself... although there is no conclusive proof of a connection between anti-social behavior and obscene materials, the legislature of Georgia could quite reasonably determine that such a connection does or might exist. In deciding Roth, this Court implicitly accepted that a legislature could legitimately act on such a conclusion to protect "the social interest in order and morality".... From the beginning of civilized societies, legislatures and judges have acted on various unproven assumptions. In short, there is no need to prove that an act is harmful to prohibit it. If the legislators choose to prohibit it, the citizenry must acquiesce -- or go to jail. As Wayland Young had pointed out: But it is difficult or even impossible to argue that the accepted limits of obscenity should themselves be redrawn without actually infringing them in the process, and having to defend one's argument agains a charge of obscenity. In this case, one would have to prove affirmatively that a discussion of the public interest was in the public interest, which is a startling thing to have to prove in a democracy. The effect is naturally that the present conception of the public interest becomes sacrosanct. If I merely say, speaking generally, "We call too many things obscene, we are too restrictive in our definitions," nobody will pay any attention, and our conception of the public good will remain unchanged. If, on the other hand, I give examples, saying: "Consider these," and give my reasons for thinking they ought not to be held obscene, my book may be suppressed for obscenity before anybody has had time to consider it, and our conception of the public good will still remain unchanged. Our society has painted itself into a corner... the law of obscenity has the indirect effect of perpetuating itself. You cannot argue with it without breaking it. [Italics in

original.] This is all very absurd, because within the criteria used in modern science and modern semantics the concept of "obscenity" must be regarded as a delusion. That is, it is a nonoperational concept, one which cannot be utilized in making measurements of the physical world -- there is no "obscenometer" which point at a book or painting or a song or a film and take a reading showing how many ergs or ounces of "obscenity" it has in it. There is no "obscenity" in any of these things, in fact; the "obscenity" is in the mind of the person passing judgements. It is, in Freudian terms, a projection, in which the mind imagines that its own contents are outside itself in the external universe; or, in semantic terms, a "confusion of the levels of abstraction," in which the mind's own machinery is identified with the non-mental things it is attempting to understand. The man or woman who believes there is something called "obscenity" out there in the external world is thus in precisely the same state of delusion as those who imagine that gods or demons or strange voices out there are communicating with them. As psychologist Theodore Schroeder insisted, the belief in external "obscenity" is the modern form of the witchcraft delusion. Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 May 31, 1996) was an influential American psychologist and writer known in later life for advocating research into psychedelic drugs. A hugely controversial figure during the 1960s and 1970s, he encouraged the use of the drug LSD for its therapeutic, emotional and spiritual benefits, and popularized the phrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out", both of which proved to be hugely influential on the 1960s counterculture. Largely due to his influence in this field, he was attacked by conservative figures in the United States, and described as "the most dangerous man in America" by President Richard Nixon.

Early life
Leary was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, the only child[1] of an Irish American dentist who abandoned his wife Abigail Ferris and the rest of the family when Leary was thirteen.[citation needed] Leary graduated from Springfield's Classical High School. In 1940, Leary enrolled as a cadet in the United States Military Academy at West Point. In his first months he acquired numerous demerits for rule infractions and then got into serious trouble for a bout of drinking and failing to be forthright about it. For violating the Academys honor code, the Honor Committee asked him to resign. When he refused, he was "silenced," that is, shunned and ignored by his co-cadets as a tactic to pressure him to resign. Though acquitted by a court-martial, the silencing continued as well as an onslaught of demerits for minuscule infractions of the rules. When the treatment continued in his second year, his mother appealed to a family friend, U.S. Senator David I. Walsh, head of the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, who conducted a personal investigation. Behind the scenes, the Honor Committee revised its position. The Honor Committee announce that it would abide by the courtmartial verdict and then Leary resigned and received an honorable discharge.[2] Almost fifty years later, Leary said that it was "the only fair trial I've had in a court of law".[3] Leary spent two years at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, transferred to University of Alabama where he received a bachelor's degree in psychology in 1943. His obituary in the New York Times said he "finally earned his bachelor's degree in the U. S. Army during World War II,"[1]

when he was a sergeant in the Medical Corps. He received his master's degree at Washington State University in 1946, and his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1950.[4] The title of Leary's Ph.D. dissertation was "The Social Dimensions of Personality: Group Structure and Process." He became an assistant professor at Berkeley (19501955), director of psychiatric research at the Kaiser Family Foundation (19551958), and a lecturer in psychology at Harvard University (1959 1963). He was fired from Harvard for failing to conduct his scheduled class lectures,[5] though he claimed that he had fulfilled all of his teaching obligations. The decision to dismiss him was allegedly influenced by his role in the popularity of then-legal psychedelic substances among Harvard students and faculty members.[6] Leary's early work in psychology expanded on the research of Harry Stack Sullivan and Karen Horney regarding the importance of interpersonal forces in mental health. Leary focused on how the interpersonal process might be used to diagnose disorders and patterns found in human personalities. He developed a complex and respected interpersonal circumplex model, published in The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality,[7] which offered a means by which psychologists could use MMPI scores to determine a respondent's characteristic interpersonal modes of reaction. Leary married Marianne Busch in 1945, who gave birth in 1947 to their first child, Susan, while he was working on his PhD at the University of California at Berkeley. Susan was followed two years later by a son, Jack. In 1952 the Leary family spent a year in Spain, subsisting on a research grant awarded to Leary. A Berkeley colleague of Learys, Marv Freedman, later recounted that Something had been stirred in him in terms of breaking out of being another cog in society.[8] In 1955, Leary's wife committed suicide, leaving him to raise their son and daughter alone.[1] When Leary was 35 years old he described himself as "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."[9][10]

[edit] Psychedelic experiments and experiences


On May 13, 1957, Life magazine published an article by R. Gordon Wasson that documented the use of psilocybin mushrooms in the religious ceremony of the indigenous Mazatec people of Mexico.[11] Anthony Russo, a colleague of Leary's, experienced psychedelic (or entheogenic) Psilocybe mexicana mushrooms during a trip to Mexico, and related the experience to Leary. In August 1960,[12] Leary traveled to Cuernavaca, Mexico with Russo and ate psilocybin mushrooms for the first time, an experience that drastically altered the course of his life.[13] In 1965, Leary commented that he "learned more about... (his) brain and its possibilities... (and) more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than... (he) had in the preceding fifteen years of studying and doing research in psychology."[13] Upon his return from Mexico to Harvard in 1960, Leary and his associates, notably Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass), began a research program known as the Harvard Psilocybin Project. The goal was to analyze the effects of psilocybin on human subjects (in this case, prisoners, and later, students of the Andover Newton Theological Seminary) using a synthesized version of the then-legal drugone of two active compounds found in a wide variety of hallucinogenic mushrooms including Psilocybe mexicana. The compound was produced according to a process developed by Albert Hofmann of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, famous for synthesizing LSD. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg asked Leary to participate in the experiments after hearing about the Harvard research project. Leary was inspired by Ginsberg's enthusiasm and the two shared an optimism in the benefit of psychedelic substances to help people turn on (discover a higher level of consciousness).

Together they began a campaign of introducing other intellectuals and artists to psychedelics.[14] Leary argued that psychedelic substances, used at proper dosages, in a stable set and setting could, under the guidance of psychologists, alter behavior in beneficial ways not easily attainable through regular therapy. Leary's research focused on treating alcoholism and reforming 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. According to Leary's autobiography, Flashbacks, LSD was given to 300 professors, graduate students, writers and philosophers and 75 percent of the test subjects reported the experience as one of the most educational and revealing experiences of their lives. The Concord Prison Experiment was designed to evaluate how the effects of psilocybin combined with psychotherapy would rehabilitate prisoners upon being released. After being guided through the psychedelic experience ('trips') by Leary and his associates, 36 prisoners allegedly repented and swore to give up future criminal activity. For prisoners in USA, the average recidivism rate is 60 percent; the recidivism rate of the subjects involved in Leary's project dropped to 20 percent. The Concord Prison experiment demonstrated that long-term reduction in overall criminal recidivism rates could be achieved with a combination of psilocybin-assisted group psychotherapy (inside the prison) along with a comprehensive post-release follow-up support program modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous. The study concluded that psilocybin-assisted group psychotherapy and a post-release program would significantly reduce recidivism rates. No further study or experiment took place as psilocybin was declared to be a dangerous substance with no medical benefits by the Drug Enforcement Agency of USA.[15] Leary and Alpert founded the International Foundation for Internal Freedom in 1962 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This was run by Lisa Bieberman (now known as Licia Kuenning),[16] a disciple of Leary[17] and one of his many lovers.[18][19] Their research attracted a great deal of public attention and, as a result, many people wanted to participate in the experiments, but were unable to do so because of the high demand. In order to satisfy the curiosity of those who were turned away, a black market for psychedelics developed near the Harvard University Campus.[20] According to Andrew Weil, Leary was fired for not showing up to his lecture classes, while Alpert was fired for allegedly giving psilocybin to an undergraduate in an off-campus apartment.[20][21] This version is supported by the words of Harvard President Nathan M. Pusey, who, regarding Leary's termination, released the following statement on May 27, 1963: "On May 6, 1963, the Harvard Corporation voted, because Timothy F. Leary, lecturer on clinical psychology, has failed to keep his classroom appointments and has absented himself from Cambridge without permission, to relieve him from further teaching duty and to terminate his salary as of April 30, 1963."[5] Leary's activities interested siblings Peggy, Billy and Tommy Hitchcock, heirs to the Mellon fortune, who in 1963 helped Leary and his associates acquire the use of a rambling mansion on an estate in the town of Millbrook (near Poughkeepsie, New York), where they 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."[22] Later, the Millbrook estate was described by Luc Sante of The New York Times as: "the headquarters of Leary and gang for the better part of five years, a period filled with endless parties, epiphanies and breakdowns, emotional dramas of all sizes, and numerous raids and arrests, many of them on flimsy charges concocted by the local assistant district attorney, G. Gordon Liddy."[23]

Others contest this characterization of the Millbrook estate; for instance, in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe portrays Leary as only interested in research, and not using psychedelics merely for recreational purposes. According to "The Crypt Trip" chapter of Wolfe's book, when Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters visited the residence, the Pranksters did not even see Leary, who was engaged in a three-day trip. According to Wolfe, Leary's group even refused to give the Pranksters acid. In 1964, Leary co-authored a book with Alpert and Ralph Metzner called The Psychedelic Experience, based upon the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In it, they wrote: "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 spacetime 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 keyit 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 author and Prankster 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 19, 1966, Leary founded the League for Spiritual Discovery, a religion declaring LSD as its holy sacrament, in part as an unsuccessful attempt to maintain legal status for the use of LSD and other psychedelics for the religion's adherents, based on a "freedom of religion" argument. (Although The Brotherhood of Eternal Love would subsequently consider Leary their spiritual leader, The Brotherhood did not evolve out of IFIF International Foundation for Internal Freedom.) On October 6, 1966, LSD was made illegal in the United States and controlled so strictly that not only were possession and recreational use criminalized, but all legal scientific research programs on the drug in the US were shut down as well. In 1966, Folkways Records recorded Leary reading from his book The Psychedelic Experience, and released the album, The Psychedelic Experience: Readings from the Book "The Psychedelic Experience. A Manual Based on the Tibetan...".[24] During late 1966 and early 1967, Leary toured college campuses presenting a multi-media performance "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"). Leary was invited to attend the January 14, 1967 Human Be-In by Michael Bowen the primary organizer of the event.[25] Leary spoke at the Human Be-In, a gathering of 30,000 hippies in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and uttered the famous phrase, "Turn on, tune in, drop out". In a 1988 interview with Neil Strauss, Leary stated that slogan was "given to him" by Marshall McLuhan during a lunch in New York City. Leary added that Marshall, "was very much interested in ideas and marketing, and he started singing something like, 'Psychedelics hit the spot / Five hundred micrograms, thats a lot,' to the tune of a Pepsi commercial. Then he started going, 'Tune in, turn on, and drop out.'" [26] At some point in the late 1960s, Leary moved to California. He made a number of friends in Hollywood. "When he married his third wife, Rosemary Woodruff in 1967, the event was directed by Ted Markland of Bonanza. All the guests were on acid."[1]

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Leary (in collaboration with the writer Brian Barritt) formulated his circuit model of consciousness, in which he claimed that the human mind/nervous system consisted of seven circuits which, when activated, produce seven levels of consciousness (this model was first published as the short essay, "The Seven Tongues of God"). The system soon expanded to include an eighth circuit; this version was first unveiled to the world in the rare 1973 pamphlet "Neurologic" (written with Joanna Leary while he was in prison), but was not exhaustively formulated until the publication of Exo-Psychology (by Leary) and in Robert Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger in 1977. Wilson contributed significantly to the model after befriending Leary in the early 1970s, and has used it as a framework for further exposition in his book Prometheus Rising, among other works. Leary believed that the first four of these circuits ("the Larval Circuits" or "Terrestrial Circuits") are naturally accessed by most people in their lifetimes, triggered at natural transition points in life, such as puberty. The second four circuits ("the Stellar Circuits" or "Extra-Terrestrial Circuits"), Leary claimed, were evolutionary off-shoots of the first four that would be triggered at transition points that we will have when we evolve further, and would equip us to encompass life in space, as well as the 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" (i.e. trigger these circuits artificially) by utilizing consciousness-altering techniques such as meditation and spiritual endeavors such as yoga, or by taking psychedelic drugs specific to each circuit. 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.

[edit] Legal troubles

BNDD agents Don Strange (right) and Howard Safir (left) arrest Leary in 1972 Leary's first run-in with the law came on December 20, 1965. Leary decided to take his children and Rosemary to Mexico for an extended stay to write a book. During a border crossing with his girlfriend Rosemary Woodruff and two children Jack and Susan from Mexico into the United States, marijuana was found in his daughter Susan's underwear. They had crossed into Laredo, Mexico in the late afternoon and discovered they would have to wait until morning for the appropriate visa for an extended stay. They decided to cross back into Texas to spend the night and were on the bridge when Rosemary remembered she had a very small amount of marijuana in her possession. It was impossible to throw it out on the bridge so Susan put it in her underwear.[27] After taking responsibility for the controlled substance,

Leary was convicted of possession under the Marihuana Tax Act on March 11, 1966, and sentenced to 30 years in jail, given a $30,000 fine and ordered to undergo psychiatric treatment. Soon after, however, he appealed the case, claiming the Marihuana 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. On December 26, 1968, Leary was arrested again, in Laguna Beach, California, this time for the possession of two roaches of marijuana, which Leary claimed were planted by the arresting officer. He was later convicted of this offense. On May 19, 1969, The Supreme Court concurred with Leary in Leary v. United States. The Marihuana Tax Act was declared unconstitutional, and his 1965 conviction was quashed. On the day his conviction was overturned, Leary announced his candidacy for Governor of California, running against Ronald Reagan. His campaign slogan was "Come together, join the party." On June 1, 1969, Leary joined John Lennon and Yoko Ono at their Montreal Bed-In and Lennon subsequently wrote Leary a campaign song called "Come Together".[28] On January 21, 1970, Leary received a ten-year sentence for his 1968 offense, with a further ten added later while in custody, for a previous arrest in 1965, twenty years in total to be served consecutively. When Leary arrived in prison, he was given psychological tests that were used to assign inmates to appropriate work details. Having designed some of the 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.[29] As a result, Leary was assigned to work as a gardener in a lower security prison, and in September 1970 he escaped. Leary claimed his nonviolent escape was a humorous prank, and left a challenging note for the authorities to find after he was gone. For a fee, paid by The Brotherhood of Eternal Love, the Weathermen smuggled Leary and his wife, Rosemary Woodruff Leary, out of the United States and into Algeria. He sought the patronage of Eldridge Cleaver and the remnants of the separatist USA Black Panther partys "government in exile." After staying with them for a short time, Leary claimed that Cleaver attempted to hold him and his wife hostage. In 1971, the couple fled to Switzerland, "where they were sheltered and effectively imprisoned by a large-living arms dealer, Michel Hauchard, who claimed he had an 'obligation as a gentleman to protect philosophers,' but mostly had a film deal in mind."[23] In 1972, President Richard Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, persuaded the Swiss government to imprison Leary, which it did for a month, but the Swiss refused to extradite him back to the U.S. In that same year, Leary and Rosemary separated. Leary became involved with Swiss-born British socialite Joanna Harcourt-Smith, a stepdaughter of financier rpd Plesch. Leary "married" Harcourt-Smith at a hotel two weeks after they were first introduced; she used his surname until their breakup in early 1977. They traveled to Vienna, then Beirut and finally went to Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1973. "Afghanistan had no extradition treaty with the United States, but this stricture did not apply to American airliners," Luc Sante wrote in a review of a biography of Leary.[23] That interpretation of the law was used by U.S. authorities to capture the fugitive. "Before Leary could deplane, he was arrested by an agent of the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs."[23] At a layover in the United Kingdom, as Leary was being flown back to the United States, he requested political asylum from Her Majesty's Government, but to no avail. He was then held on five million dollars bail ($21.5 mil. in 2006). President Richard Nixon had earlier labeled him "the most dangerous man in America."[1] The judge at his remand hearing remarked, "If he is allowed to travel freely, he will speak publicly and spread his ideas."[30] Facing a total of 95 years in prison, Leary hired criminal defense attorney Bruce Margolin and was put into solitary confinement in Folsom Prison, California.[31] Leary made somewhat of a pretense of cooperating with the FBI's investigation of the Weathermen and radical attorneys, by giving them information that they already had or that was of little consequence; in response, the FBI gave him the code name "Charlie Thrush".[32]

Leary would later claim, and members of the Weathermen would later support, that no one was ever prosecuted based on any information he gave to the FBI. "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.'"[33] While imprisoned Leary remained a productive writer, sowing the seeds for his incarnation as a futurist lecturer with the StarSeed Series. In Starseed (1973), neurologic (1973), & Terra II: A Way Out (1974), Leary transitioned from Eastern philosophy and Aleister Crowley to a belief that outer space was a medium for spiritual transcendence as his principal frame of reference. Neurologic also added the idea of "time dilation/contraction" available to the activated brain through the cellular, DNA, or atomic level of reality. Terra II is his first detailed proposal for space colonization. Learys muse peaked with Exo Psychology, Neuropolitics, and Intelligence Agents.

[edit] Last two decades


Leary was released from prison on April 21, 1976, by Governor Jerry Brown. After briefly relocating to San Diego, Leary established residence in Laurel Canyon and continued to write books and appear as a lecturer and (by his own terminology) "stand-up philosopher." In 1978, Leary married filmmaker Barbara Blum, also known as Barbara Chase, sister of actress Tanya Roberts. Leary adopted Blum's son and raised him as his own. Leary and Blum divorced in 1992. Leary cultivated a friendship with former foe G. Gordon Liddy, the notorious Watergate burglar and conservative radio talk-show host. They toured the lecture circuit in 1982 as ex-cons (Liddy having been imprisoned after high-level involvement in the Watergate scandal) debating about the soul of America. The tour generated massive publicity and considerable funds for both figures. Along with the personal appearances, a successful documentary called Return Engagement that chronicled the tour, and the concurrent release of the autobiography Flashbacks, helped to return Leary to the spotlight. While his stated ambition was eventually to cross over as a mainstream Hollywood personality, reluctant studios and sponsors made certain that it would never occur. Nonetheless, constant touring ensured that he was able to maintain a very comfortable lifestyle by the mid-1980s, while his colorful past made him a desirable guest at A-list parties throughout the decade. He also attracted a more intellectual crowd, which included John Frusciante (Leary appeared in Johnny Depp's and Gibby Haynes' 1994 film Stuff which showed the squalid conditions that Frusciante was living in at the time), Robert Anton Wilson, David Byrne, science fiction wunderkind William Gibson, and Norman Spinrad amongst its ranks. While he continued to use drugs frequently on a private basis, rather than evangelizing and proselytizing the use of psychedelics as he had in the 1960s, the latter day Leary emphasized the importance of space colonization and an ensuring extension of the human lifespan while also providing a detailed explanation of the eight-circuit model of consciousness in books such as Info-Psychology, among several others. He adopted the acronym "SMILE" as a succinct summary of his pre-transhumanist agenda: SM (Space Migration) + I (intelligence increase) + LE (Life extension). Leary credited L5 co-founder Keith Henson with helping develop his interest in space migration. Leary's colonization plan varied greatly throughout the years. Because he believed that he would soon migrate into space, Leary was opposed to the ecology movement. He dismissed many of Earths

problems and labeled the entire field of ecology a seductive dinosaur science. Leary stated that only the larval, intellectually and philosophically backward humans, would choose to remain in the fouled nest. According to his initial plan to leave the planet, 5,000 of Earth's most virile and intelligent individuals would be launched on a vessel (Starseed 1) equipped with luxurious amenities. This idea was inspired by the plotline of Paul Kantner's concept album Blows Against The Empire, which in turn was derived from Robert A. Heinlein's Lazarus Long series. In the 1980s, he came to embrace NASA scientist Gerard O'Neill's more realistic and egalitarian plans to construct giant Eden-like High Orbital MiniEarths (documented in the Robert Anton Wilson lecture H.O.M.E.s on LaGrange) using existing technology and raw materials from the Moon, orbital rock and obsolete satellites. By the mid 1980s, Leary had begun to incorporate computers, the Internet, and virtual reality into his aegis of thought. Leary established one of the earliest sites on the World Wide Web, and was often quoted describing the Internet as "the LSD of the 1990s."[34] He became a promoter of virtual reality systems, [35] and sometimes demonstrated a prototype of the Mattel Power Glove as part of his lectures (as in From Psychedelics to Cybernetics). Around this time he cultivated friendships with a number of notable people in the field, including Brenda Laurel, a pioneering researcher in virtual environments and human computer interaction. With the rise of cyberdelic counter-culture, Leary became a consultant to Billy Idol in the production of the latter's 1993 album, Cyberpunk.[36] In 1990, Leary's daughter, Susan, committed suicide after years of mental instability. After separating from Barbara Leary in 1992, Leary began to associate with a much younger, artistic and tech-savvy crowd that included people as diverse as actors Johnny Depp, Susan Sarandon and Dan Aykroyd, and his granddaughters, Dieadra Martino and Sara Brown; grandson, Ashley Martino; son, Zach Leary; author Douglas Rushkoff, publisher Bob Guccione, Jr., and goddaughters: actress Winona Ryder and artist/music-photographer Hilary Hulteen. In spite of his declining health, Leary maintained a regular schedule of public appearances through 1994. From 1989 on, Leary had begun to reestablish his connection to non-mainstream religious movements with an interest in altered states of consciousness. In 1989 he appeared with friend and book collaborator Robert Anton Wilson in a dialog entitled The Inner Frontier for the Association for Consciousness Exploration, a Cleveland-based group that had been responsible for his first Cleveland, Ohio appearance in 1979. After that, he appeared at the Starwood Festival, a major Neo-Pagan event run by ACE, in 1992 and 1993[37] (though his planned 1994 WinterStar Symposium appearance was cancelled due to his declining health). In front of hundreds of neo-pagans in 1992, he declared, "I have always considered myself, when I learned what the word meant, I've always considered myself a Pagan."[38] He also collaborated with Eric Gullichsen on Load and Run High-tech Paganism: Digital Polytheism.[39]

[edit] Death

etoy agents with mortal remains of Timothy Leary 1997 In early 1995, Leary discovered he was terminally ill with inoperable prostate cancer. He did not reveal

the condition to the press upon diagnosis, but did so after the death of Jerry Garcia in August. Leary authored an outline for a book called Design for Dying, which attempted to show people a new perspective of death and dying. Leary's de facto "family"his staff of technophilic Gen Xersupdated his website on a daily basis as a sort of proto-blog, noting his daily intake of various illicit and legal chemical substances, with a predilection for nitrous oxide, cigarettes, his trademark "Leary Biscuits" (a snack cracker with cheese and a small marijuana bud, briefly microwaved), and eventually heroin and morphine. His sterile house was completely redecorated by the staff, who had more or less moved in, with an array of surreal ornamentation. In his final months, thousands of visitors, well wishers and old friends visited him in his California home. Until the final weeks of his illness, Leary gave many interviews discussing his new philosophy of embracing death.

Movie poster for Timothy Leary's Dead For a number of years, Leary was reported to have been excited by the possibility of freezing his body in cryonic suspension, and Leary publicly announced in September 1988 that he had signed up with Alcor. [40] Leary had appeared at Alcor's grand opening a year previously.[40] He did not believe that he would be resurrected in the future, but he believed that cryonics had important possibilities and stated the chance was "one chance in 1,000".[40] He called it his "duty as a futurist," and helped publicize the process and hoped it would work for his children and grandchildren if not for him, although he said he was "light-hearted" about it.[40] Leary had relationships with two cryonic organizations, originally Alcor and then CryoCare, which delivered a cryonic tank to Leary's house in the months before his death. However, Leary subsequently requested that his body be cremated, which it was, and distributed among his friends and family. Leary's death was videotaped for posterity at his request, capturing his final words. During his final moments, 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 Zachary Leary, was "beautiful." The film Timothy Leary's Dead (1996) contains a simulated sequence in which Leary allows his bodily functions to be suspended for the purposes of cryonic preservation, and his head is removed and placed on ice. At the end of the film is a sequence showing the creation of the artificial head used in the film. 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 April 21, 1997, and remained in orbit for six years until it burnt up in the atmosphere.

[edit] Influence
Leary is often considered one of the most prominent figures during the counterculture of the 1960s, and since those times has remained incredibly influential on pop culture, literature, television, film; and especially music. Timothy Leary's ideas heavily influenced the work of Robert Anton Wilson. This influence went both ways and Leary admittedly 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. Although the theory originated in discussions between Leary and a Hindu holy man at Millbrook, Wilson was one of the most ardent proponents of it and introduced the theory to a mainstream audience in 1977's bestselling Cosmic Trigger. In 1989, they appeared together on stage in a dialog entitled The Inner Frontier[41] in Cleveland, Ohio hosted by the Association for Consciousness Exploration,[42] (the same group that had hosted Leary's first Cleveland appearance in 1979[43][44]). 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 'hilaritas', the type of cheer and good humour by which it was said you could recognise a deity". Owsley Stanley, one of the pioneers of the era, would later write of him: "Leary was a fool. Drunk with 'celebrity-hood' and his own ego, he became a media clown and was arguably the single most damaging actor involved in the destruction of the evanescent social movement of the '60s. Tim, with his very public exhortations to the kids to 'tune in, turn on and drop out,' is the inspiration for all the current draconian US drug laws against psychedelics. He would not listen to any of us when we asked him to please cool it, he loved the limelight and relished his notoriety... I was not a fan of his." [45] Author and Merry Prankster Ken Kesey remained a supporter and admirer of Leary throughout his career, "Leary can get a part of my mind that's kind of rusted shut grinding again, just by being around him and talking." 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 paraphrase, 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 indistinguishablethat's not the last word. There is still a question about the truth of the disclosure." [46]

The slogan, "Turn on, tune in, drop out", signified a conceptual way of thinking wherein a person would turn on to their own way of thinking, tune in to themselves, and drop out of society. This constituted a concept of inward self reliance.

[edit] In popular culture


[edit] Music The Psychedelic Experience was the inspiration for John Lennon's song "Tomorrow Never Knows" on The Beatles' album Revolver.[23] 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 "Come Together", based on Leary's theme and catchphrase for the campaign. Leary was also present when Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono recorded Give Peace a Chance during one of their bedins in Montreal and is mentioned in the lyrics of the song. He appears in the world television broadcast of "All You Need is Love" as well. While in exile in Switzerland, Leary and British writer Brian Barrett collaborated with the German band Ash Ra Tempel, and recorded the album Seven Up. He is credited as a songwriter, and his lyrics and vocals can be heard throughout the album. For some reason he left this experience out of his autobiography.[47] Leary was the explicit subject of the Ray Thomas-written 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" (a lyric later incorporated into the Bongwater's cover version of the Moody Blues song "Ride My SeeSaw"). 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 lecture circuit. Another Moody Blues song "When You're a Free Man" was written by Mike Pinder, and it detailed Leary's imprisonment, while also showing concern for his family ("How are the children, and Rosemary?).

Leary, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and others recording "Give Peace A Chance". Timothy Leary also worked with new wave band Devo, appearing as Dr. Byrthfood in a segment of their 1985 home video We're All Devo!. This segment would appear on The Complete Truth About DeEvolution as "Kindred Spirit". Leary and Devo also worked together on a planned video game adaptation of Neuromancer, though plans fell through. A number of other musical groups have admired and been influenced by Leary, including: The song "Voyage 34" by Porcupine Tree which periodically has a snippet of a monologue by

Timothy Leary. The song "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out With Me," by the alternative rock band Cracker, paraphrases one of Leary's catchphrases in a song about physically escaping mainstream culture (from the album "Sunrise in the Land of Milk and Honey" (2009)). The song "Timothy Leary" by the alternative rock band Guster was on their 2007 release of Satellite EP as well as on the "Rock the Net" multi-artist compilation (2008). The progressive rock band Tool sampled one of his monologues during the opening of their live performances of the track "Third Eye" from the album nima, as heard in the live album Salival, released in 2000. More recently, a sample of one of Leary's monologues has been used right before the band takes the stage on their 2010 summer tour. The metal band Nevermore mentions Leary in their lyrics, and titled one of their albums "The Politics of Ecstasy" (1996) (after Leary's book of the same name). Also, on Nevermore's self-titled album (1995), there is a song named "Timothy Leary". The song "Texan Book of the Dead" by Clutch, released in 1995 on their self-titled album, mentions Leary in a round-about way. "Be leery of Timothy, Clear light and all that. If you want light go stare at the sun. Hell, that boy don't know crap." The Psychedelic Trance band Infected Mushroom uses a sound clip of Leary saying "Turn on, tune in, and drop out" in the song "Drop Out". Leary made a cameo appearance in "Stuff" (1993), a short film directed by Johnny Depp and Gibby Haynes about the Red Hot Chili Peppers' guitar player John Frusciante. Leary is also mentioned in the song "The Seeker" by The Who (1970): "I asked Bobby Dylan/ I asked the Beatles/ I asked Timothy Leary/ But he couldn't help me either", placing him among several other leading figures of '60s pop culture. References to Leary appear in the iconic counter-culture piece "Hair" in the lyrics to "Let the sunshine in" ("Singing our space songs on a spider web sitar / Life is around you and in you / Answer for Timothy Leary, dearie"), and in the song "Manchester England, England" [Now that I've dropped out/Why is life dreary, dreary?/Answer my weary query/Timothy Leary, dearie]. Also the song "Hare Krishna" has a small reference to Leary's catch phrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out": ("...Love / Love / Love / Love / Drop out / Drop out / Drop out / Drop out / Be in/ Be in/ Be in/ Be in"). Leary waxed poetic about helicopters on "Gila Copter," the first track of the 1993 album "Linger Ficken' Good" by The Revolting Cocks, and also appeared in the music video for "Crackin' Up" from the same album. Tim played the father of Mike Muir in the music video "Possessed to Skate" from the album Join the Army by Suicidal Tendencies. UK electronic dance group, The Grid, sampled Leary in their 1990 track "Origins of Dance". Leary appeared in the 1995 video for the Blind Melon song "Galaxie". Leary is mentioned in the Dog Fashion Disco song "The Acid Memoirs" The song "Flash Delirium" by MGMT paraphrases Leary's catchphrase with the lyrics "So turn it on/ Tune it in/ and stay inert." Leary is mentioned in the Dungen song "Satt Att Se" Leary is mentioned in the Butthole Surfers song "Weird Revolution" Leary is mentioned in the Marcy Playground song "It's Saturday"

[edit] Television and film Leary was the inspiration for the character "Brother William" in a 1968 episode of Dragnet. In the

episode entitled "The Big Prophet," Jack Webb's character, Joe Friday, along with his partner Bill Gannon visit Brother William's home and spend the entire episode debating the consequences of using LSD and other drugs. Friday famously tells Brother William, "Marijuana is the flame, heroin is the fuse, LSD is the bomb." At the end of the episode Brother William is found guilty of selling narcotics to minors. 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.[48] Leary also appeared in Cheech and Chong's Nice Dreams (1981) as a benevolent psychiatrist administering LSD to mental patients. Leary had a brief voice-over appearance on the American sitcom Frasier in the episode "The Show where Lilith Comes Back" as Hank, a man with an overeating disorder who called into The Dr. Frasier Crane Show. In Across the Universe (film), Bono (playing the character of "Dr. Robert") refers to Dr. Frank Geary, who is apparently an allusion to Dr. Timothy Leary. In Warehouse 13 Timothy Leary's glasses are an artifact in the Warehouse which cause hallucinogenic visions when worn; the longer they are worn, the less the user wants to take them off. While wearing them, Agent Pete Lattimer sees his superior with a walrus head surrounded by bubbles. A knock-off pair were made by rogue agent James MacPherson to reveal the entrance to his underground hideout. Had a cameo appearance in Abbe Wool's Roadside Prophets (1992), where he played the character "Salvadore," helping the two main characters fix a motorcycle and offering some insight into selfenlightenment. Was interviewed on Cartoon Network's Space Ghost Coast to Coast in 1994 (episode 3, "Elevator"). Leary made a cameo in the 1989 film Rude Awakening. In the 2009 film The Men Who Stare at Goats (film) Bill (Jeff Bridges) awakes from a dream, or possible telepathic vision, and claims that he saw Timothy Leary, to which Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor) replies "Timothy Leary's dead." Leary is mentioned in the book "Packing for Mars" by Mary Roach in reference to his ashes in space.

[edit] Works
The Declaration of Evolution by Timothy Leary, PhD When in the course of organic evolution it becomes obvious that a mutational process is inevitably dissolving the physical and neurological bonds which connect the members of one generation to the past and inevitably directing them to assume among the species of Earth the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature's God entitle them, a decent concern for the harmony of species requires that the causes of the mutation should be declared. We hold these truths to be self evident: That all species are created different but equal; That they are endowed, each one, with certain inalienable rights; That among them are Freedom to Live, Freedom to Grow, and Freedom to pursue Happiness in

their own style; That to protect these God-given rights, social structures naturally emerge, basing their authority on the principles of love of God and respect for all forms of life; That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and harmony, it is the organic duty of the young members of that species to mutate, to drop out, to initiate a new social structure, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its power in such form as seems likely to produce the safety, happiness, and harmony of all sentient beings. Genetic wisdom, indeed, suggests that social structures long established should not be discarded frivolous reasons and transient causes. The ecstasy of mutation is equally balanced by the pain. Accordingly all experience shows that members of a species are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, rather than to discard the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, all pursuing invariably the same destructive goals, threaten the very fabric of organic life and the serene harmony of the planet, it is the right, it is the organic duty to drop out of such morbid covenants and to evolve new loving social structures. Such has been the patient sufferance of the freedom-loving peoples of this earth, and such is now the necessity which constrains us to form new systems of government. The history of the white, menopausal, mendacious men now ruling the planet earth is a history of repeated violation of the harmonious laws of nature, all having the direct object of establishing a tyranny of the materialistic aging over the gentle, the peace-loving, the young, the colored. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to the judgement of generations to come. These old, white rulers have maintained a continuous war against other species of life, enslaving and destroying at whim fowl, fish, animals and spreading a lethal carpet of concrete and metal over the soft body of earth. They have maintained as well a continual state of war among themselves and against the colored races, the freedom-loving, the gentle, the young. Genocide is their habit. They have instituted artificial scarcities, denying peaceful folk the natural inheritance of earth's abundance and God's endowment. They have glorified material values and degraded the spiritual. They have claimed private, personal ownership of God'd land, driving by force of arms the gentle from passage on the earth. In their greed they have erected artificial immigration and customs barriers, preventing the free movement of people. In their lust for control they have set up systems of compulsory educationto coerce the minds of the children and to destroy the wisdom and innocence of the playful young. In their lust for power they have controlled all means of communication to prevent the free flow of ideas and to block loving exchanges among the gentle. In their fear they have instituted great armies of secret police to spy upon the privacy of the pacific. In their anger they have coerced the peaceful young against their will to join their armies and to wage murderous wars against the young and gentle of other countries. In their greed they have made the manufacture and selling of weapons the basis of their economies. For profit they have polluted the air, the rivers, the seas. In their impotence they have glorified murder, violence, and unnatural sex in their mass media.

In their aging greed they have set up an economic system which favors age over youth. They have in every way attempted to impose a robot uniformity and to crush variety, individuality, and independence of thought. In their greed, they have instituted political systems which perpetuate rule by the aging and force youth to choose between plastic conformity or despairing alienation. They have invaded privacy by illegal search, unwarranted arrest, and contemptuous harassment. They have enlisted an army of informers. In their greed they sponsor the consumption of deadly tars and sugars and employ cruel and unusual punishment of the possession of life-giving alkaloids and acids. They never admit a mistake. They unceasingly trumpet the virtue of greed and war. In their advertising and in their manipulation of information they make a fetish out of blatant falsity and pious self-enhancement. Their obvious errors only stimulate them to greater error and noisier selfapproval. They are bores. They hate beauty. They hate sex. They hate life. We have warned them from time to time to their inequities and blindness. We have addressed every available appeal to their withered sense of righteousness. We have tried to make them laugh. We have prophesied in detail the terror they are perpetuating. But they have been deaf to the weeping of the poor, the anguish of the colored, the rocking mockery of the young, the warnings of their poets. Worshipping only force and money, they listen only to force and money. But we shall no longer talk in these grim tongues. We must therefore acquiesce to genetic necessity, detach ourselves from their uncaring madness and hold them henceforth as we hold the rest of God's creatures - in harmony, life brothers, in their excess, menaces to life. We, therefore, God-loving, peace-loving, life-loving, fun-loving men and women, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the Universe for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the Authority of all sentient beings who seek gently to evolve on this planet, solemnly publish and declare that we are free and independent, and that we are absolved from all Allegiance to the United States Government and all governments controlled by the menopausal, and that grouping ourselves into tribes of like-minded fellows, we claim full power to live and move on the land, obtain sustenance with our own hands and minds in the style which seems sacred and holy to us, and to do all Acts and Things which independent Freemen and Freewomen may of right do without infringing on the same rights of other species and groups to do their own thing. And for the support of this Declaration of Evolution with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, and serenely confident of the approval of generations to come, in whose name we speak, do we now mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.

PROGRAMMED COMMUNICATION DURING

EXPERIENCES WITH DMT


by Timothy Leary, Ph.D.

During the first two years of the Harvard Psychedelic Research Project rumors circulated about a powerful psychedelic agent called dimethyltryptamine: DMT. The effect of this substance was supposed to last for less than an hour and to produce shattering, terrorizing effects. It was alleged to be the nuclear bomb of the psychedelic family. The Hungarian pharmacologist, Stephen Szara, first reported in 1957 that N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) and N,N-Diethyltryptamine (DET) produced effects in man similar to LSD and mescaline. The only difference was in duration: whereas LSD and mescaline typically last 8 to 10 hours, DMT lasted from 40 minutes to 1 hour and DET from 2 to 3 hours. The higher homologues, dipropyltryptamine and dibutyltryptamine, were also said to be active but less potent. The parent substance, tryptamine, by itself has no effect. Chemically, DMT is closely related to psilocybin and psilocin (4-hydroxy-Ndimethyltryptamine), as well as to bufotenine (5-hydroxy-Ndimethyltryptamine). The mechanism of action of DMT and related compounds is still a scientific mystery. Like LSD and psilocybin, DMT has the property of increasing the metabolic turnover of serotonin in the body. An enzyme capable of converting naturallyoccurring tryptamine to DMT has recently been found in some

mammalian tissue; this suggests that mechanisms may exist whereby the body converts normally-occurring substances to psychedelic compounds. (1-5) DMT has been identified as one of the ingredients in the seeds of Mimosa hostilis, from which the Pancaru Indians of Pernambuco, Brazil, prepare an hallucinogenic beverage they call vinho de Jurumena. It is also, along with bufotenine, one of the ingredients in the seeds of Piptadenia peregrina, from which the Indians of the Orinoco Basin and of Trinidad prepare an hallucinogenic snuff they call yopo. (6) William Burroughs had tried it in London and reported it in the most negative terms. Burroughs was working at that time on a theory of neurological geography -- certain cortical areas were heavenly, other areas were diabolical. Like explorers moving into a new continent, it was important to map out the friendly areas and the hostile. In Burroughs' pharmacological cartography, DMT propelled the voyager into strange and decidedly unfriendly territory. Burroughs told a gripping tale about a psychiatrist in London who had taken DMT with a friend. After a few minutes the frightened friend began requesting help. The psychiatrist, himself being spun through a universe of shuttling, vibratory pigments, reached for his hypodermic needle (which had been fragmented into a shimmering assemblage of wave mosaics) and bent over to administer an antidote. Much to his dismay his friend, twisting in panic, was suddenly transformed into a writhing, wiggling reptile, jewel-encrusted and sparkling. The doctor's dilemma: where to make an intravenous injection in a squirming, oriental-martian snake? Alan Watts had a DMT story to tell. He took the drug as part of a California research and had planned to demonstrate that he could maintain rational control and verbal fluency during the experience. The closest equivalent might be to attempt a moment-to-moment description of one's reactions while being fired out the muzzle of an atomic cannon with neon-byzantine barreling. Dr. Watts gave an awefull description of perceptual fusion. In the fall of 1962, while giving a three-day series of lectures to the Southern California Society of Clinical Psychologists, I fell into discussion with a psychiatrist who was collecting data on DMT. He

had given the drug to over a hundred subjects and only four had reported pleasant experiences. This was a challenge to the set-setting hypothesis. According to our evidence, and in line with our theory, we had found little differentiation among psychedelic drugs. We were skeptically convinced that the elaborate clinical differences allegedly found in reactions to different drugs were psychedelic folk tales. We were sticking to our null hypothesis that the drugs had no specific effect on consciousness but that expectation, preparation, emotional climate, and the contract with the drug-giver accounted for all differences in reaction. We were eager to see if the fabled "terror-drug," DMT, would fit the set-setting theory. A session was arranged. I came to the home of the researcher, accompanied by a psychologist, a Vedanta monk and two female friends. After a lengthy and friendly discussion with the physician, the psychologist lay down on a couch. His friend's head rested on his chest. I sat on the edge of the couch, smiling in reassuring expectation. Sixty mg of DMT were administered intramuscularly. Within two minutes the psychologist's face was glowing with serene joy. For the next twenty-five minutes he gasped and murmured in pleasure, keeping up an amused and ecstatic account of his visions. "The faces in the room had become billion-faceted mosaics of rich and vibrant hues. The facial characteristics of each of the observers, surrounding the bed, were the keys to their genetic heritage. Dr. X (the psychiatrist) was a bronzed American Indian with full ceremonial paint; the Hindu monk was a deep soulful middle-easterner with eyes which were at once reflecting animal cunning and the sadness of centuries; Leary was a roguish Irishman, a sea captain with weathered skin and creases at the corners of eyes which had looked long and hard into the unseeable, an adventurous skipper of a three-masted schooner eager to chart new waters, to explore the continent just beyond, exuding a confidence that comes from a humorous cosmic awareness of his predicament -- genetic and immediate. And next to me, or rather on me, or rather in me, or rather more of me -- Billy. Her body was vibrating in such harmony with mine that each ripple of muscle, the very coursing of blood through her veins was a matter of absolute intimacy ... body messages of a subtlety and tenderness both exotically strange and deliciously familiar. Deep within, a point of

heat in my groin slowly but powerfully and inevitably radiated throughout my body until every cell became a sun emanating its own life-giving fire. My body was an energy field, a set of vibrations with each cell pulsing in phase with every other. And Billy, whose cells now danced the same tune, was no longer a discrete entity but a resonating part of the single set of vibrations. The energy was love." Exactly twenty-five minutes after administration, the psychologist smiled, sighed, sat up swinging his legs over the side of the couch and said, "It lasted for a million years and for a split-second. But it's over and now it's your turn." With this reassuring precedent, I took up position on the couch. Margaret sat on the floor holding my hand. The psychologist sat at the foot of the couch, radiating benevolence. The drug was administered. The First DMT Experience My experience with DMT occurred in the most favorable setting. We had just witnessed the ecstatic experience of my colleague and the radiance of his reaction provided a secure and optimistic background. My expectations were extremely positive. Five minutes after i.m. injection, lying comfortably on the bed, I felt typical psychedelic onset symptoms -- a pleasant somatic looseness, a sensitive tuning-in to physical sensations. Eyes closed ... typical LSD visions, the exquisite beauty of retinal and physical machinery, transcendence of mental activity, serene detachment. Comforting awareness of Margaret's hand and the presence of friends. Suddenly I opened my eyes and sat up ... the room was celestial, glowing with radiant illumination ... light, light, light ... the people present were transfigured ... godlike creatures ... we were all united as one organism. Beneath the radiant surface I could see the delicate, wondrous body machinery of each person, the network of muscle and vein and bone -- exquisitely beautiful and all joined, all part of the same process. Our group was sharing a paradisial experience -- each one in turn was to be given the key to eternity -- now it was my turn, I was

experiencing this ecstasy for the group. Later the others would voyage. We were members of a transcendent collectivity. Dr. X coached me tenderly ... handed me a mirror where I saw my face, a stained-glass portrait. Margaret's face was that of all women -- wise, beautiful, eternal. Her eyes were all female eyes. She murmured exactly the right message. "It can always be this way." The incredible complex-unity of the evolutionary process -staggering, endless in its variety -- why? Where is it going? etc., etc. The old questions and then the laughter of amused, ecstatic acceptance. Too much! Too great! Never mind! It can't be figured out. Love it in gratitude and accept! I would lean forward to search for meaning in Margaret's china-flecked face and fall back on the pillow in reverent, awed laughter. Gradually, the brilliant illumination faded back to the three-d world and I sat up. Reborn. Renewed. Radiant with affection and reverence. This experience took me to the highest point of LSD illumination -- a jewel-like satori. It was less internal and more visual and social than my usual LSD experiences. There was never a second of fear or negative emotion. Some moments of benign paranoia -- agent of the divine group, etc. I am left with the conviction that DMT offers great promise as a transcendental trigger. The brevity of the reaction has many advantages -- it provides a security in the knowledge that it will be over in a half hour and should make possible precise exploration of specific transcendental areas. The Set And Setting For The Programmed Experience Immediately after my first DMT voyage the drug was administered to the Hindu monk. This dedicated man had spent fourteen years in meditation and renunciation. He was a sannyasin, entitled to wear the sacred saffron robe. He has participated in several psychedelic drug sessions with extremely positive results and was convinced that the biochemical road to samadhi was not only valid but perhaps the most natural method for people living in a technological civilization.

His reaction to DMT was, however, confusing and unpleasant. Catapulted into a sudden ego-loss, he struggled to rationalize his experience in terms of classic Hindu techniques. He kept looking up at the group in puzzled helplessness. Promptly at twenty-five minutes he sat up, laughed, and said, "What a trip that was. I really got trapped in karmic hallucinations!" The lesson was clear. DMT, like the other psychedelic keys, could open an infinity of possibilities. Set, setting, suggestibility, temperamental background were always there as filters through which the ecstatic experience could be distorted. On return to Cambridge, arrangements were made with a drug company and with our medical consultant to run a systematic research on the new substance. During the subsequent months we ran over one hundred sessions -- at first training exercises for experienced researchers and then later trials with subjects completely inexperienced in psychedelic matters. The percentage of successful, ecstatic sessions ran high -- over ninety percent. The set-setting hypothesis clearly held for DMT in regard to positive experiences. But there were certain definite characteristics of the DMT experience which were markedly different from the standard psychedelics -- LSD, psilocybin, mescaline. First of all, the duration. The eight-hour LSD transformation was reduced to around thirty minutes. The intensity was greater as well. This is to say, the shattering of learned form perception, the collapse of learned structure was much more pronounced. "Eyes closed" produced a soft, silent, lightning fast, whirling dance of incredible cellular forms -- acre upon acre, mile upon mile of softly-spinning organic forms. A swirling, tumbling, soft rocket-ride through the factory of tissue. The variety and irreality of the precise, exquisite, feathery clockwork organic machinery. Many LSD subjects report endless odysseys through the network of circulatory tunnels. Not with DMT, but rather a subcellular cloud-ride into a world of ordered, moving beauty which defies external metaphor. "Eyes open" produced a similar collapse of learned structure -- but this time of external objects. Faces and things no longer had form but were seen as a shimmering play of vibrations (which is what they are). Perception of solid structures was seen to be a function of visual nets,

mosaics, cobwebs of light-energy. The transcendence of ego-space-time was most often noticed. Subjects frequently complained that they became so lost in the lovely flow of timeless existences that the experience ended too soon and was so smooth that landmarks were lacking to make memory very detailed. The usual milestones for perception and memory were lacking! There could be no memory of the sequence of visions because there was no time -- and no memory of structure because space was converted into flowing process. To deal with this problem we instituted programmed sessions. The subject would be asked every two minutes to respond, or he would be presented with an agreed-upon stimulus every two minutes. The landmarks would, in this way, be provided by the experimenter -- the temporal sequence could be broken up into stages and the flow of visions would be divided into topics. As an example of a programmed session using DMT, let us consider the following report: The plan for this session involved the experiential typewriter. This device, which is described in a previous article (7) is designed to allow non-verbal communication during psychedelic sessions. There are two keyboards with ten buttons for each hand. The twenty keys are connected to a twenty-pen polygraph which registers an ink mark on a flowing roll of paper each time a key is struck. The subject must learn the codes for the range of experience before the session and is trained to respond automatically, indicating the area of his consciousness. In this study it was agreed that I would be questioned every two minutes, to indicate the content of my awareness. The session took place in a special session room, eight-by-twenty, which was completely covered, ceiling, walls and floor, by warm, colorful India prints. The session followed the "alternating guide" model: another researcher, a psychopharmacologist, was to act as interrogator for my session. The pharmacologist was then to repeat the session with Leary as interrogator.

At 8:10 p.m. I received 60 mgs of DMT. The Second DMT Experience Lay back on mattress, arranging cushions ... relaxed and anticipatory ... somewhat amused by our attempt to impose timecontent mileposts on the flow of process ... soft humming noise ... eyes closed ... suddenly, as if someone touched a button, the static darkness of retina is illuminated ... enormous toy-jewel-clock factory, Santa Claus workshop ... not impersonal or engineered, but jolly, comic, light-hearted. The evolutionary dance, humming with energy, billions of variegated forms spinning, clicking through their appointed rounds in the smooth ballet ... MINUTE 2. TIM: WHERE ARE YOU NOW? Ralph's voice, stately, kind ... what? where? You? ... open eyes ... there squatting next to me are two magnificent insects ... skin burnished, glowing metallic, with hammered jewels inlaid ... richly costumed, they looked at me sweetly ... dear, radiant Venutian crickets ... one has a pad in his lap and is holding out a gem-encrusted box with undulating trapezoidal glowing sections ... questioning look ... incredible ... and next to him Mrs. Diamond Cricket softly slides into a lattice-work of vibrations ... Dr. Ruby-emerald Cricket smiles ... TIM WHERE ARE YOU NOW ... moves box towards me ... oh yes ... try to tell them ... where ... At two minutes, the subject was smiling with eyes closed. When asked to report he opened his eyes, looked at the observers curiously, smiled. When the orientation question was repeated he chuckled, moved his finger searchingly over the typewriter and (with a look of amused tolerance) stabbed at the "cognitive activity" key. He then fell back with a sigh and closed his eyes. Use mind ... explain ... look down at undulating boxes ... struggle to focus ... use mind ... yes COGNITIVE ... there ... Eyes close ... back to dancing workshop ... joy ... incredible beauty ... the wonder, wonder, wonder ... thanks ... thanks for the chance to see the dance ... all hooked together ... everything fits into the moist, pulsating pattern ... a huge grey-white mountain cliff, moving, pocked by little caves and in each cave a band of radar-antennae, elf-like insects merrily working away, each cave the same, the grey-white wall endlessly parading by ... infinity of life forms ... merry erotic energy nets ...

MINUTE 4. TIM, WHERE ARE YOU NOW? Spinning out in the tapestry of space comes the voice from down below ... dear kindly earth-voice ... earth-station calling ... where are you?... what a joke ... how to answer ... I am in the bubbling beaker of the cosmic alchemist ... no, now softly-falling star dust exploding in the branches of the stellar ivory birch tree ... what? ... open eyes ... oh dear lapidary insect friends ... Ralph and Susan beautiful orange lobsters watching me gently ... faces shattered into stained-glass mosaic ... Dr. Tiffany Lobster holds out the casket of trapezoidal sections ... look at glowing key ... where is Venutian ecstasy key? ... where is key for the stellar explosion of the year 3000? ... EXTERNAL PROCESS IMAGES ... yes ... hit the key ... tumble back to Persepolic pulse ... At four minutes the subject was still smiling with eyes closed. When asked to report, he opened his eyes and laughed. He looked at the observers with twinkling eyes, studied the keyboard of the experiential typewriter and pressed the EXTERNAL PROCESS IMAGE key. He then fell back and closed his eyes. How nice... they are down there... waiting ... no words up here to describe ... they have words down there ... see rolling waves of colored forms whirling up, bouncing jolly ... where do they come from ... who is architect ... merciless ... each undulating dancing factory devouring other ... devouring me ... pitiless pattern ... what to do ... terror ... ah let it come ... eat me ... whirl me up in the ocean of snowflake mouths ... all right ... how it all fits together ... auto-pilot ... it's all worked out ... it's all on auto-pilot ... suddenly my body snaps and begins to disintegrate ... flow out into the river of energy ... goodby e... gone ... I that was is now absorbed in electron flash ... beamed across star space in orgasm pulses of particle motion ... release ... flashing light, light, light... MINUTE 6. TIM, WHERE ARE YOU NOW? Earth voice calling ... you there, meson hurdling in nuclear orbit ... incorporate ... trap the streaking energy particle ... slow down ... freeze into body structure ... return ... with flick of open eye the nuclear dance suddenly skids into static form ... see two clusters of electrons shimmering ... the Ralph galaxy calling ... the Mrs. Ralph galaxy smiling ... the energy dance caught momentarily in friendly robot form ... hello ... next to them a candle flame ... center of million-armed web of light beams ... the room is caught in a lattice of light-energy ... shimmering ... all vision is light ... there is nothing to see but light waves ... photons reflected from Ralph's quizzical smile ... awaits the answer ... photons bouncing

off the quivering keys of the typewriter ... how easy to beam a radio message down ... finger taps EXTERNAL PROCESS IMAGES ... At six minutes the subject had just finished frowning in what seemed like a passing fear or problem. When contacted to report, he glanced around the room and without hesitation pressed the EXTERNAL PROCESS KEY. He then closed his eyes. Eyes closed but after-image of candle-flame remains ... eyeballs trapped in orbit around internal light center ... celestial radiance from the light center ... light of sun ... all light is sun ... light is life ... live, lux, luce, life ... all is a dance of light-life ... all life is the wire ... carrying light ... all light is the frail filament of the light ... solar silent sound ... beamed out from sun-flare ... light-life ... MINUTE 8. TIM, WHERE ARE YOU NOW? In the heart of the sun's hydrogen explosion ... our globe is light's globe ... open eyes drape curtain over sun flare ... open eyes bring blindness ... shut off internal radiance ... see chiaroscuro God holding shadow box ... where is life? ... press WHITE LIGHT KEY. At eight minutes the subject, who had been lying motionless against the cushions, opened his eyes. His expression was dazed, surprised. Without expression he pressed key for WHITE LIGHT. Keep eyes open ... fixed ... caught ... hypnotized ... whole room, flowered walls, cushions, candle, human forms all vibrating ... all waves having no form ... terrible stillness ... just silent energy flow ... if you move you will shatter the pattern ... all remembered forms, meanings, identities meaningless ... gone ... all is a pitiless emanation of physical waves ... phenomena are television impulses crackling across an interstellar program ... our sun is one point on an astrophysical television screen ... our galaxy is a tiny cluster of points on one corner of the TV screen ... each time a supernova explodes it is simply that point on the screen changing ... the ten billion year cycle of our universe is a millisecond flash of light on the cosmic screen which flows endlessly and swiftly with images ... sitting motionless ... not wishing to move, to impose motion on the pattern ... motionless in speed-of-light motion ... MINUTE 10. TIM, WHERE ARE YOU NOW? Ground-tower beaming up navigational query ... flood of amazed love that we can contact each other ... we do remain in contact ... where was that cluster then ... hallucinating ... science-fiction metaphors ... where is

key ... there ... EXTERNAL HALLUCINATIONS ... From eight to ten minutes the subject sat motionless, eyes open in a trance-like state. There was no attempt to communicate. When contacted he moved slowly but surely and pressed the EXTERNAL HALLUCINATIONS KEY. Quotes from the Research Questionnaire filled out after the session: loss of space-time ... merging with energy flux ... seeing all life forms as physical waves ... loss of body ... existence as energy ... awareness that our bodies are momentary clusters of energy and that we are capable of tuning in on patterns of non-organic patterns ... certainty that life processes are on "auto-pilot" ... there is nothing to fear or worry about ... a feeling of freedom to go back and "freeze" the energy process momentarily in the old ego-robot ... a reminder of the infinite unfolding complexity and endlessness of the life process ... sudden understanding of the meaning of terms from Indian philosophy such as "maya," "maha-maya," "lila" ... insight into the nature and varieties of transcendental states ... the void-white-light-content-less, meta-lifeinorganic ecstasy ... the Kundalini-life-force-biological-squirmingmoist-sexual organic ecstasy ... the singing-genetic-code-blueprinttemporary-structuring-of-form ecstasy and the ... MINUTE 12. TIM, WHERE ARE YOU NOW? Open eyes ... laugh ... caught by vigilant ground-tower while orbiting around earthy-mindfigure-it-out area ... where is key for thinking earth-word thoughts ... hallucinations ... no, the thinking game ... press COGNITIVE KEY ... From the tenth to twelfth minute the subject sat looking blankly and without motion at the wall of the room. When contacted he smiled and pressed the COGNITIVE key. Above head is light bulb covered with scalloped light blue shade ... circling up to the glowing shade are ribbons of waves ... silent ... beckoning ... inviting ... join the dance ... leave your robot ... a whole universe of delightful, aerial choreography awaits ... yes join them ... suddenly, like smoke rising from a cigarette, consciousness circled up ... swooping graceful gull-paths up to light source and, soundlessly, through into another dimension ... from the research questionnaire: a description of the level reached is a prose yoga beyond present attainment ... there were billions-of-file-cards, helical in shape, which, flicked through, confronted me with an endless library of events, forms, visual perceptions, not abstract but all experiential ... a billion years of coded experience, classified, preserved in brilliant, pulsating,

cool clarity that made ordinary reality seem like an out-of-focus, tattered, jerky, fluttering of peep-show cards, tawdry and worn ... any thought once thought, instantly came alive and flicked by the shuttered aperture of consciousness ... but at the same time there was no one to observe ... I ... he ... the one-aware ... all humming in electronic, technicolor SEE! vision for one who has been centuries blind ... MINUTE 14. TIM, WHERE ARE YOU NOW? Oh, where are we now? ... oh listen, here's where we are ... once there was a glowing electric dot, a flash reflected from the heart of a cut diamond which, oh there, now, caught the light of sun flame and glittered ... sudden flash in pre-cambrian mud ... the dot stirs and quivers with tremblestrain-exultant-singing-throbbing-shuddering twist upwards and a serpent began to writhe up and through the soft, warm silt ... tiny, the size of a virus ... growing ... the enormous length of a microscopic bacillus ... flowing exultantly, always singing the Hindu flute-song ... always bursting out, enfoliating ... now the size of the moss root, churning through fibred-cunt-mattress-moist-spasm churning ... growing ... growing ... ever exfoliating its own vision ... always blind except for the forward point of light-eye ... now belts of serpent skin, mosaic-jeweled rhythmically jerking, snake-wise forward ... now the size of a tree-trunk, gnarled and horny with the sperm-sap moving within ... now swelling, tumescent into Mississippi flood of tissue writhing ... pink, silt current of singing fire ... now circling globe, squeezing green salt oceans and jagged brown-shale mountains with constrictor grasp ... serpent flowing blindly, now a billion-mile endless electric-cord vertebrated writhing cobra singing Hindu flute-song ... penis head throbbing ... plunged into all smells, all color tapestry of tissue ... blind writhing, circled tumescent serpent blind, blind, blind, except for the one jeweled eye through which, for one frame's flickered second each cell in the advancing parade is permitted that one moment face-to-face, eyeball to solar flame insight into the past future ... TIM, TIM, WHERE ARE YOU NOW? La Guardia tower repeats request for contact with the ship lost out of radar scope ... where? ... I am eye of the great snak e... a fold of serpent skin, radiating trapezoidal inquiry swims into focus ... register conscious content ... where are you? ... here ... INTERNAL HALLUCINATIONS. From minute twelve to fourteen the subject sat silent with eyes closed. When contacted he failed to respond and after thirty seconds was

contacted again. He then pressed EXTERNAL HALLUCINATION key. The session continued with two minute interruptions until the twentieth minute in the same pattern: timeless flights into hallucinatory or pure energy vibration fields with sudden contractions to reality in response to the observer's questions. The session report filled out the next day contained the following comments about this method of session programming. This session suggested some solutions about the problem of communicating during psychedelic experiences. The person "up there" is being whirled through experiences which spin by so rapidly and contain structural content so different from our familiar macroscopic forms that he cannot possibly describe where he is or what he is experiencing. Consider the analogy to the pilot of a plane who has lost his bearings who is talking by radio to La Guardia tower. The pilot is experiencing many events -- he can describe the cloud formations, lightning flashes, the etching of ice on the plane window -- but none of this makes any sense to the tower technicians who are attempting to plot his course in the three-dimensional language of navigation. The person "up there" cannot provide the categories. The ground control personnel must radio them "up." 'Cessna 64 Bravo, our radar scopes show you are fifteen miles southwest of International Airport. The red glow you see is the reflection of Manhattan. To head on a course for Boston you must change your course to 57 degrees and maintain an altitude of 5500.' But the language of psychology is not sophisticated enough to provide such parameters. Nor are there experiential compasses to determine direction. What we can do, at this point, is to set up "flight plans." The subject can work out, before the session, the areas of experience he wishes to engage; and he can plan the temporal sequence of his visionary voyage. He will not be able, during the flight to tell "ground control" where he is, but ground control can contact him and tell him where to proceed. Thus, during this session, when Ralph asked, WHERE ARE YOU NOW?, I could not respond. I had to descend, slow up the flow of experience and then tell him where I ended up.

When the contact question came I would be hurtling through other galaxies. In order to respond, I had to stop my free rocketing, tumbling flight, return near the earth and say: "I am over New Haven." This session was a continual, serial "come-down." I repeatedly had to stop the flow in order to respond. My cortex was receiving hundreds of impulses a second, but in order to respond to ground control's questions I had to grind the ship to a slow stall to say, at that moment. "I am here." This session suggests that a more efficient way to chart psychedelic experiences would be to: 1) memorize the keyboard of the experiential typewriter so that communication down to ground control could be automatic, and 2) plan the flight in such a way that the ground control would not ask unanswerable questions -- "Where am I indeed!" but would tell the subject where to go. Then the communication task of the voyager would be to indicate if he were on course, i.e., that he was or was not following the flight instructions radioed up by ground control. Ground control should send up stimuli. Suggestivity is wide open. La Guardia tower directs the flight. Did you learn anything of value from this session? If so, please specify: "Session was of great value. I am clearly and strongly motivated to work out methods of ground control and planned flights." Approximately how much of the session (in % of time) was spent in each of the following areas? A. Interpersonal games 10% (fondness for observers) B. Exploring or discovering self, or self games 0% C. Other games (social, intellectual, religious) 70% (intellectual, struggling with problem of communication) D. Non-game transcendence 20% (continually by questions)

1st circuit: Comfort foods- sugar, dairy products. Sedatives may deaden alarm sensations and produce a sense of security - alcohol, for example. 2nd circuit: Stimulants in general, as well as alcohol in large amounts (the classic aggressive drunk) 3rd circuit: Stimulants, possibly, and no doubt 'Smart drugs' would fit here. 4th circuit: Ecstasy, as well as many others - generally any drug which defeats social inadequacy programming. 5th circuit: Sex is the big one, when it goes from being mere satisfaction of physical drives and becomes oceanlike ecstasy. Otherwise, marijuana, and most hallucinogens in moderate doses. 6th circuit: LSD 7th circuit: Psilocybin, Peyote, possibly LSD, many of the natural psychedelics. 8th circuit: Ketamine? Excessive doses of many drugs may produce this, as well as those which produce near-death experiences.

Two Heads Talking David Byrne in conversation with Timothy Leary date unknown TIMOTHY LEARY: I was fascinated when you said that when you were young you wanted to be an artist or a scientist. Later you said that both were manipulated by greater powers. What do you mean by that? DAVID BYRNE: At a certain point I went through a period of being disillusioned. When I was younger in school I had this indoctrinated idea of science being this noble calling_ all just wonderful ideas and great inventions. And the same with art. They both seemed to be in the realm of creation and incredible ideas and exploration. And later on you find out that they're being manipulated by whatever-all kinds of politics-whether it's art politics or government or economic politics or whatever_ TL: I agree. I'm pretty cynical after 71 years of living and 5 years in prison. But I've been shocked to really confront the articulate engineer/philosophers like Prof. Marvin Minsky of MIT who arrogantly flaunt their lust for control and power. Their admitted goal is to reduce human beings to robots. Because machines are efficient. Is that what you were getting at_ that you were running into that disillusionment? DB: In a way. And also that the kinds of investigations and experimentation wasn't free- flowing. It was directed in some ways and it was subtly nudged in ways that people hoped would produce desired results. TL: Absolutely, no question of that. Behind it is the Newtonian notion that there is an objective fact, whereas quantum mechanics, quantum physics: it's all movie; it's cast is changing, it's re-forming, it comes in clusters, it's not linear. And you don't study anything_ you set up a situation and you record it_ DB: And you follow the pattern. People now are accepting that, but as you said the language and the

ingrained ways of thought and dealing with things are based on quantification of everything and everything being mechanistic. TL: The nice thing about art though is this: In the evolution of human culture that it's the artists that push the envelope and innovate and create the future. DB: The artists are always the ones to show a precursor of what's to come. They always know what's going on ahead of time_ every big movement it seems. TL: Most scientists today are grimly Newtonian. These MIT engineers don't practice Einsteinian or relativistic or quantum psychology. They are the most manipulative group of people in the world. TL: So the higher power you thought about back then-when, like me, you were idealistic-was that these scientists were pursuing truth at all costs. Like Galileo they'd face the inquisition and go down; like Bruno they'd burn at the stake. Bullshit. I went through that. They are agents of the Military Industrial Complex that runs and ruins America. DB: But I suppose like artists there are a few like that few and far between. It's the exceptional ones that push into something else where they don't know where they're going. TL: And it's so tied to getting grants and institutional power. Government and University politics_ DB: That sounds true for a lot of artists too, unless they're someone who works just on paintings or something they create themselves. If they want to do something larger that requires more people or more money, they're tied to grants and institutions and they have to go through all that rigmarole. TL: So what are you doing these days? DB: I've finished this record. It incorporates more of the stuff I did with Talking Heads and everything I've done since then, and I think I've pulled all that together in a kind of organic way and put it in one record. TL: It's a tremendous record. For those readers who haven't heard it yet, it includes everything that is bouncy and cool and fresh about the Talking Heads. And then there's the Latin beat. And the voice changes you go through. You also manifest a sure command and magisterial control. Much confidence. Elegant and funny. DB: You can get a lot across with a little taste of humor. MONDO 2000: With this turn in your music which really impresses me is the diversity of all your previous works, from early Talking Heads to late Talking Heads to The Last Emperor soundtrack to this Brazilian stuff_it's hard to read what's coming up next with you. How do you decide what mood you're in every time you put an album out? DB: I guess it's intuitive_what seems to be there_what's in the air and available. There doesn't seem to be any plan. TL: I mention you in every lecture I give, because you represent the 21st century concept of international global coming together through electronics. How did you get into that?

DB: You mean working with different cultures? TL: You produce Brazilian and World Beat albums. You win an Oscar for a Chinese soundtrack. You compose a symphony, The Forest. DB: It seems that post-WW2 with television and movies and records being disseminated all over the globe, you have instant access to anything anywhere almost. But you have it out of context, free-floating. And , people in other parts of the world_India, South America, Russia_they have access to whatever we're doing. And they can take what they need and leave the rest. They can play around with it, they can misinterpret it or re- interpret it. And we're free to do the same thing. It seems to be a part of the age we live in, that that's a unique thing about this period, that there is that kind of communication, even though it's not always direct communication with people in different places_it can lead to direct communication if you follow through. TL: The young Japanese particularly. Read those Tokyo youth magazines! They pick up on everything. Rolling Stone is like a little village publication compared to these Japanese mags. DB: They're very Catholic in that sense. M2: If you look at the most popular teen music magazines, 90% of it is all international_from America, Germany, England, it's amazing how well they can sense what's going on in the world. TL: What is your image in the Global New Breed culture? How are you seen in Brazil? DB: I think I'm seen mainly as a musician who some people have heard of_not a lot, but some_but who they discover has an appreciation and a love of what the Brazilians are doing. And sometimes it's kind of confusing for them, because some of the things I like are not always the things that the critics like. For instance, some of the records I put out on this little label_like a fojo(sp?) record, music from the Northeast, and even some of the Samba stuff, is considered by the middle and upper class and intelligentsia to be lower class music. It would be like listening to Country and Western or rap or something like that here. And they find it a surprise that this quote sophisticated guy from New York might like this lower class music instead of their fine art music. But sometimes it works in a strange way; it makes them look again at their own culture and appreciate it where they'd ignored it before. I guess in a way that the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton and all those people made a lot of young Americans look at Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf and those people. It makes them look in their own backyard and see what they've got there. I'm not doing that intentionally, but it has that effect. TL: The Europeans did that for jazz too. DB: Right. A lot of jazz musicians can make a living, can gig and play in Europe where they can't find a place to play here. TL: The sixties with rock n' roll was very hard on jazz musicians, and I spent quite a bit of time in voluntary and involuntary exile in Europe, and it was filled with jazz musicians who were able to gig and to be admired there more than here. What music do you listen to? Who are your favorite musicians now? DB: I remember the last Public Enemy record I heard was just amazing_ just this dense collage with a lot of real thinking and philosophy there. And I listened to the last Neil Young record; I have some records

from Japanese groups, and Brazilian stuff and Cuban stuff_all the stuff we've been putting out on the little label. TL: Tell us about this label: Luaka Bop. DB: I put together a compilation of songs by important Brazilian artists a couple of years ago, and after I started with that I thought, This could be an ongoing thing. And I thought, Well I may as well have an umbrella that it goes under so that people might start to see the label and identify it and make them check out what it is. It was kind of a practical thing in that way. And then we're slowly getting into a greater range of things. In the future we're going to release a record_ soundtracks for Indian movies, and an Okinawan pop group, and a duo from England that sings in English_ that will be one of our few releases where the lyrics are actually in English. TL: How many records have you produced on this label? DB: Six or seven. Not that many. I'm actively involved in their coordination, but as of yet I haven't really been involved in the recording of the music. For the most part it's been presenting things that are already done that are languishing somewhere. TL: Marshall Macluhan would be very happy with that too-globalization. So what about your symphony, The Forest? DB: It was originally done for a Robert Wilson piece, and the hope had been-it didn't come to pass-that we would take the same story and he would interpret it for stage in his own way, and I would do it as a film. We would use the same music that I had done_and the hope was that we present them in the same city at the same time. So you could see two vastly different interpretations of re-interpreted ancient legend. It was updated in this case to the industrial revolution in Europe. The story was partly the Gilgamesh legend. I found that it is the oldest story we know. TL: Cosmology and immortality. DB: And it was written in the first cities that were ever built. And, oddly enough, it deals with the same questions that came up today and that came up in the industrial revolution when cities were expanding at a phenomenal rate, and industry_it deals with what it means to be in the city, in the country, what it means to be civilized versus natural_not in an overt way, but in a story kind of way it brings up those kinds of things. So it seemed to have a resonance that seemed really current, but it's old as you can get. TL: And yet you got the industrial stuff there and that's very modern_ DB: Yeah, it seemed you could throw it all into the same pot and it all fit. TL: The older I get, the more I see everything in stages: I have to start with the tribe and then the feudal and then the Gilgamesh and then the industrial_but that's what impressed me about the sounds of yours. There's always the body African beat there. DB: It's part of our culture now, it's not something foreign now. It's something we have been inundated with. The Africans that have been forcibly brought here have in a way colonized us with their music, with their sensibility and rhythm. They've colonized their oppressors.

TL: Michael Ventura explains how the Voodoo tradition came from Africa says the same thing. And I wrote an article about the Southern vegetables and us going into the Southern cultures and grabbing the sugar and coffee and bananas_the industrial people go down there and build factories, and they get counter-colonized by the music and the food and the psychoactive vegetables. That happened with the British in India_ DB: In a subtle way it changes people's ways of thinking; it changes the possibilities of what they could think about, what they could feel. And they're not always initially aware of what's happening to them. TL: What happened to the plan of the two performances? DB: Wilson had the money in place to do the theatre project, so that happened, but the film when I did a budget of it ended up being too expensive. But we got the music done and that was fun. TL: And where was it performed? DB: In Berlin, New York once, and Munich, maybe a week. TL: Where did you do the New York one? DB: At BAM, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 88 or 89. But the music was not performed live. It was done on tape. There was more music than what I released. So I went back and re-edited it and squashed it down and made it so it would stand on its own rather than being background. I need a little bit of distance from it to be able to do that. TL: I spent some time today watching your video, Ileayie_ DB: It's about an Afro-Brazilian religion called Candomble. Ileayie in Uruba, an African language, roughly translates as the house of life or the realm that we live in. M2: The Biosphere I_ DB: Yeah, the dimension that we live in rather than the other possible existing dimensions. It was done in Bajia(sp?) in the city of Salvador, on the coast of Northeastern Brazil. It's mainly about an African religion that's been existing there since slavery times and has mutated and evolved over the years to the extent that now it could be called an Afro- Brazilian religion that contains a lot of African elements. The ceremonies, the rituals consist of a lot of drumming, people occasionally go into trance, offerings are made, occasional sacrifices are made, altars are made_it's an ecstatic religion, it feels good, it's for the most part joyous. TL: I've never seen so many dignified, happy human beings in any place at any time. For over 90 minutes the screen is filled with these stately, queenly, older black women_ DB: Yeah, it's very joyous and regal in a way. When the drums kick in and the dancing kicks in it's like a really hot rock or R&B show. When the music hits that level where everybody tunes into it, it's the same kind of feeling. TL: That's what religion should be. That's the essence we want religion to be. And it's not all joyous. At times there's a sternness, and at times a sphynx-like trance to it.

DB: It deals with acknowledging and paying homage to the natural forces. And some of those are deadly and some are joyous and some are dangerous and some are life-giving. That's the flux of nature, and to me the religion acknowledges both the ups and downs of it. TL: Also you said that the aim of these ceremonies is to bring the orixas_deities who serve as intermediaries between mortals and humans and the supreme force of nature. Tell us about that. DB: When the vibe is right somebody gets possessed by one of the gods. There's a pantheon of gods like in ancient Greece or Rome. The god is said to be there in the room, in the body_so you can have a conversation with him, you can dance with him_so god isn't up there unreachable, untouchable_it's something that can come right down into the room with you and you can dance with it or ask questions directly to the god. TL: The great thing about the Greek gods is that they had human qualities_ DB: These as well_they can be sexy, jealous, vain, loving, whatever_all the attributes of people. TL: William Gibson has written about Voodoo. And he has many of his Voodoo people talking about the human being as a horse, and that the god comes down and rides the human being_ DB: That's the Haitian metaphor_the horse_it's the same idea. TL: The healer, the warrior, the mother bubbling_one after another these archetypes of characters or natural forces_basic human situations, roles_ DB: The nurturing mother or the warrior man or woman, the sexy coquette_ TL: The wind seductive female warrior_ that's Yarzan_to tell you readers about the tape, David and the editors have every now and then English sub-titles so you know what god or goddess is being evoked. You must have had many shoots. DB: Yeah, we cheated and shot a lot of stuff and put it together to make one ceremony that presented as much as possible. TL: You couldn't have all those gods in the same room! The Shango justice woman with the axe would be going after the_it's obvious you put it together that way. DB: Yeah, it was a film device to show a little bit of everything. TL: It worked very well. Then you would have small screen, partial screen clips. DB: That was a way of showing simultaneous things from another time. Like if you saw an offering being made, we could show in a little corner of the screen what went into the basket. Or if you saw one thing happening there we could cut to something that was kind of the equivalent in a box, and you could see them simultaneously and maybe kind of intuitively pick up some of the connections without someone coming on the screen and telling you. You can just pick it up in the same way you do with music. You lose some things, you don't get everything, but you get the feel of it. That was the intention anyway.

TL: There was one powerful moment that confused me. That's when a man dressed as a Catholic priest came and was almost violent in saying something about false prophets. DB: The African religion is periodically being persecuted by the Catholic Church, by the Protestant Church, by the government. They go through waves of being recognized and persecuted and going underground and coming back up again and being recognized and pushed down again_ TL: That's happened to all of us; I know the cycle well. DB: So that was a scene from a fictional film there dramatizing the persecution by orthodox religion. TL: You wrote it in_ DB: It was something I found in a Brazilian film. It was an example of recent persecution, so I thought, Let's throw this in_ TL: That's a very powerful moment because I felt that you didn't orchestrate that_it was authentic, as your friend here would say. [points to a book] Would you comment on this book? DB: The guy who organized this was an artist named Joseph Kosuth who's most well- known for art that looks like your shirt. TL: The shirt I'm wearing, is Anarchic Adjustments. The front reads: "Ecstasy." And on one arm it's got Egos In, Egos Out. DB: Joseph Kosuth would have a definition of a word and just frame that. He invited me to be part of this exhibition in Japan where the idea was to create art with a fax machine. I thought that sounded like fun. I did something sort of the equivalent of the seven deadly sins. It didn't exist; I collaged it, sandwiched it in the fax machine, and it came out the other end. And then they took the fax and blew it up giant-size, the size of a painting. What happened when it was transmitted, rather than receiving it on paper they received it on acetate. So the acetate then became a photo negative. They have fax machines that can receive on other materials, and then they can blow it up to whatever size they like. TL: Yours is upside down (off the record) and you've got all these collaged bodies with arms and legs and tits, and I couldn't figure it out until I turned it rightside up. M2: So were you sent two different faxes and they just merged them together? DB: Yes, I put the characters on top of a photographic image and sandwiched them together and sent it into the machine. TL: You said in your autobiographical note here that you're gradually emerging from racism. Do you want to comment on that? DB: After years of telling myself I'm not a racist, I'm a liberal, I'm free-thinking, I started to acknowledge that I have these reactions that I'm not aware of, that I didn't look at before; things that have been bred into me, not necessarily by my parents_maybe by the society, by the system, by television_and that it's a real job to get rid of it. You can't just blissfully say, Everybody's equal, everybody's nice. The conditioning is so powerful that you have to work all the time_

TL: It's invisible; racism is the water through which we swim. DB: And you have to tread water to stay up there; otherwise you're in it. You have to go against the flow to rise above it. So it's acknowledging that in some ways I'm trying to deal with it, but it's not going to happen overnight. It's not something you can announce to yourself and all of a sudden you're clean and pure. TL: It's continued awareness and reminding yourself. It's interesting that this comment of yours comes at a time when politics in this country is totally racist. The Republican party is now flat-out the white middle class party. The Willie Horton advertisements, the nomination of Thomas_they're all just straight out Apartheid. They hardly deny it anymore. They trumpet their racism. How do you account for that? Why is this happening in America? M2: I think Reagan had a lot to do with it. DB: He got elected by a landslide, and I wonder what buttons was he pushing? TL: The racism was there; he just pushed the button. The KKK fellow, Duke_55% of the white people in Louisiana voted for him. Another landslide. White people would have elected him. DB: Although he didn't get elected, at the same time it says there are an awful lot of people who would have elected him, and it's gonna make a lot of tension there. In a cynical way I kind of welcome it. It's going to polarize things and show things for what they really are. So there's not going to be this bland face_ (end of side 1) DB: There's this Herzog documentary, Herdsmen to the Sun, where he did a thing about an African tribe where the young men come of age. They compete with one another for girls and for honor, and the way they do it is they get themselves up in what we would call drag: eye make-up and lipstick and the whole deal, not Revlon #5 or anything, but their own version of that. And they pose and primp and it's kind of beautiful ritual and very confusing to us who have rigid ideas about what it means to be a man_ TL: The North/South dimension has been very important in your life. There's this concern with East/West-America vs. Russia, and now America vs. Japan. But North/South is the basic genetic_ DB: You mean, it's the HAVES and the HAVE-NOTS_ TL: But as you say, most intelligent, thoughtful Northerners understand that we pay dearly in losing what the Blacks preserve. Your videos catch the richness of life and nature and animals and the flow and the contact with the gods. DB: It's something we all need to work out. I mean they'd love a VCR and a car with a cassette player. There's a balance somewhere. TL: Well, I see the industrial age as a stage, a very tacky, messy awkward stage of human evolution. We had to have the smoky factories, and we must mature beyond them. I was very touched by your comments about your symphony, The Forest. You were trying to acknowledge the romance and the grandeur of the factory civilization even though it was fucking everything up.

DB: My up-bringing and my instinctual reaction says that this stuff sucks. This has created the mess that we're in. But you're never going to find your way out of the mess unless you can somehow, like the Samurai, identify with your enemy. And become one with your enemy, and understand it, or you won't be able to truly find your way out of the maze. TL: The Soviet Union is a great teacher about the horrors of fire power machine tech. You see those grizzled old miners and the smog_they come out of the deep, sooty, hellhole mines with their faces black_On the other hand, there was a grandeur to it, and you simply cannot cut the industrial part of our nature out because it has brought us to this room where we can use machines to record our conversation. That's something that I find interesting in Japan, which is the perfect machine society. There's not much pollution there; you never see any filth on the street. DB: No, it's cleaned up pretty quickly. You get scolded for tossing a can out your car window_I've seen people get scolded for not washing their car! It's a matter of honor or face. M2: And nothing is old there. I didn't see one car that was more than 4 years old or with a dent in it. DB: That's taking LA one step further. TL: OK. Cut! Change subject. When are you going to make another movie? DB: I'm having the ubiquitous LA meetings. M2: How about more True Stories? DB: No, John Goodman's on to other things now. I have a few ideas that I've been talking to people about. TL: That was a great achievement that movie. It was a very original eccentric film. I remember the opening scenes of the highway. Again, your performance is authentic. You've got a lot of fans of that movie. DB: It was fun to blend fact and fiction. TL: Have you experienced Virtual Reality? DB: No. TL: But you've heard about it. How does it strike you? DB: It strikes me as being not another reality, but maybe a kick in the head that will turn you around a bit, a perceptual twist that will give you a new way of looking at things. TL: I'm very involved in it. Basically, the average American household passively watches television 40 or 50 hours a week. These talk shows and the prime time programs are more real to more Americans than the day-to-day realtime flesh and blood. DB: Maybe it's myself or my friends but you sit in front of the TV and if you're not watching a video you've rented or something else, you're zapping it. And sometimes people keep their finger on the zap

button, and it's like they're editing together a program that is comprised of everything that is on television at that particular moment. So there's an impulse to interaction. On a primitive level people want to talk back in a way. I guess what I was saying, without having experienced anything, the goggles seem like an incredible tool in the same way that any other way of altering your perception is a tool_jumping off a diving board towards something else. But I'm speaking from ignorance. TL: How did you get involved in The Last Emperor? DB: Bernardo, the director, came and saw Stop Making Sense. He saw it in a theatre in Rome and he was knocked out. He liked the film and the performance, but the audience got involved in the film. They got up and danced, they jumped up on the stage, they sang along and whooped and hollered. And he saw people reacting to cinema_it wasn't passive. So he didn't forget me. So years later he phoned up and asked if I wanted to do some music. And I was in the middle of something or another, and I said, I can spare a few weeks. So I could only do a little bit and Ri Wichi(sp) could only do a little bit, and the other stuff was source music. But it worked out great and it was fun to do. He's had a record of doing some pretty good soundtracks: The Last Tango soundtrack_ TL: Bernardo is pretty clever about getting good photographers too. I have a funny question I want to ask you. When you consider what you have done. How many students from the Rhode Island School of Design have won an Oscar? DB: Gus Van Zandt will probably get an Oscar soon. TL: If you had been a scientist_you say you didn't want to be a scientist because you liked the graffiti on the walls of the art department. If you had been a scientist what kind of scientist would you have been? DB: I guess at the time what seemed like pure science: physics_where you could speculate and play around and be creative. That seemed like the absolute equal to being an artist. And it still does. If you get the chance, the opportunity, and the cards fall right, there's no difference. The kind of intellectual play and the spirit is the same. TL: Nature is that way; it's basically playful. Murray Gelman, who is one of America's greatest quantum physicists, used the word quark to describe the basic element from a funny line from James Joyce, "three quarks from Meister Mark" or something like that. DB: I had a math teacher in high school who included Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland in his higher math studies. I thought, This guy knows what he's doing. TL: Well, the guy Dodgson who wrote it knew what he was doing. That metaphor of through the looking glass on the other side of the screen. Talk about your Uruba gods and goddesses. Talk about Yarzan and Shango. Alice is the Goddess of the Electronic Age. M2: Are there any more Talking Heads projects ever again? DB: We put together one of those box set things. I guess it'll come out some time next year. There are 3 or 4 unfinished songs and some old demos that we finished up and wrote words where there were missing words. We're still on good terms but I think it's had its day for the time being. TL: Barbara and I saw an I-MAX version by Julian Temple of the Rolling Stones. It's really insanely

powerful. DB: It's not frightening? TL: It is in a sick way_seeing Mick Jagger's face enlarged_ DB: I think it would be_seeing Keith Richard's face twenty stories tall and being able to inspect the damage of the years. I know that's not the point_ TL: Seeing Keith's face magnified and enlarged is beautiful. You don't realize this when you're sitting in the audience, but he drops this little smile that's millimeters, but he's communicating. And the projector is as big as a Volkswagon. DB: Do you see a lot of the set? M2: You see a lot of the set_the whole industrial complex_during Honky Tonk Woman these ten story dolls inflate and dance. TL: Have you been to the Soviet Union? DB: Very briefly, only twice. Only to Moscow and to a very small town on the border of Finland. And fairly recently. I hope they can get things sorted out because there's an incredible creative energy there. Music and film and poetry, and it's just been bubbling under, and the steam is getting ready to blow itself off the kettle. TL: That was a great discovery for me to realize that behind the Brezhnev iron mask there were lots of turned-on, sophisticated, international, cosmopolitan, intellectual, educated people. But we never heard about them. DB: So, alternative reality in a way. TL: Interestingly enough, it was the children of KGB agents, who were more ready for the open society because they have been exposed to the video and the West. DB: Yeah, I meet musicians and artists in places like Yugoslavia that were more attuned to the good stuff that was happening here than a lot of people in New York or LA. They'd focused themselves and decided what they liked and what was really happening. And it was amazing that some of the stuff that I like had some relevance over there. TL: In defense of America_I'm not an American and I'm working ceaselessly to dissolve, disrupt, derail, destroy the American government and get it decentralized_but America is the breeding grounds for new ideas and we're so over- stimulated, jaded in a sense. Imagine what it would be like living under Brezhnev in the Soviet Union compared to the way it was here in the 60s and 70s in the sense of the available options. DB: Now we're coming to terms with the fact that the new ideas are sometimes coming from elsewhere and that we can use them, accept them, they're available to us. TL: What do you think is going to happen in America?

DB: To be honest I think America's going to go through a rough period of losing pride and ego, because I think the country's going to be cut down to size economically. Which might be a good thing. It might force people to look and see where our real strengths lie, where our assets are, and where our real creative forces are, rather than being in some imaginary area. TL: I'm very alarmed by the passionate revival of bitter, cruel, Christian fundamentalism in this country which is mirroring the fundamentalist Islamic thing. That's spreading from Morocco to South East Asia. DB: I assume that here as there, it's because people are confused, the values are undercut, everything they see makes people wonder what life is about. TL: Have you seen My Own Private Idaho? DB: Yeah, I liked it a lot. There was a real quick shot of a house falling out of the sky_this orgasm at the same time. TL: You did the score for Married To the Mob_ DB: Jonathan Demme used a lot of rock n' roll stuff in there. I just did a lot of conventional scoring: saxophones and strings, but it was a lot of fun to do. TL: Did you ever imagine you'd be doing symphonies ten years ago? DB: No, that's the fun, that you don't know what you're going to get into. You kind of leave it open. TL: Of course, what I heard on The Forest album is symphonic but it wanders off into a lot of other things too. DB: Yeah, there's a lot of other stuff thrown in there. I think it all hangs together but it sure isn't all regular symphonic stuff. TL: There are many moving moments of authenticity. And on that note, let us suspend this pleasant moment of authentic conversation. Thank you, David. I was driving in traffic along West Temple on a hot Summer afternoon, when I felt the marquis outside of the Zephyr Club grinning down at me like some kind of self-satisfied voyeur--an unsettling experience that I hoped might finally be one of the "flashbacks" I'd always heard about, but which had never seemed to manifest in my own body chemistry. The sign announced an upcoming visit with none other than Timothy Leary; and having just spent a mad weekend on Ken Kesey's farm the previous month, I wasn't about to trifle with the Lords of Karma: I was riding a lucky streak. I also owned Leary's phone number from a 1990 interview I had done with the Mad Doktor. Leary remembered that phone conversation and agreed immediately to dinner. From an elevator inside Salt Lake City's historic Peery Hotel, Leary emerged looking like some kind of harlequin jester. The shockingly bright checkerboard shirt under a purple vest, which bore the insignia "Anarchic," must have been a calculated media ploy, I reasoned. He was tanned to the point of sunburn and wore, as always, a thousand-watt smile and a pair of white, high-top tennis shoes. Between quick, nervous puffs on his Benson & Hedges, we discussed the new face of electronic stimulation, the novel as

an archaic art form--the possibility of fucking giving way to the sperm bank--revealing why the graying Pied Piper of the Sixties is still very much in demand in the Nineties. INTERVIEW (Salt Lake City, Utah, September 28, 1992) Fahey: What have you been doing these days? What's your schedule? Leary: Well, I give about ten to fifteen radio and television interviews and press interviews a week, and I give, oh, five or six performances a month. I'm involved with helping develop methods of electronic communications, which I will demonstrate tonight at the Zephyr Club--brain activating techniques using electrons--and I'm developing computer programs that allow you to design your own hallucinations and to operate your own brain. And I spend most of my time hanging out with the most interesting people in the world, from whom I learn things. Fahey: Who do you see as the most important neuronauts of the last 50 years? Leary: What do you mean by the word "neuronauts"? Fahey: Well, people who have been involved in the consciousness-expanding frontier in the last 50 years. Leary: Oh, that's a good question. The 20th century has been, historically, has been the century in which the basic philosophic and scientific principles which run the universe--which is quantum physics--have been popularized, humanized, disseminated, domesticated, so that people can learn how to communicate with their brains, and not just with status symbols. And learn how to operate their brains. All this comes directly from the principles of Einstein and Heisenberg, who said, `the observer creates the universe that he or she interacts with.' So, I say the great neuronauts would be Einstein and Heisenberg and Bohr, and people like that--the people that have applied brain-change techniques. You start with, of course, the modern artists, the surrealists who totally destroyed reality. It's all an attempt to...the 20th century, and the neurological task of our species is to somehow be able to get out of your left brain, out of your mind, precisely, under control, and access the rest of your brain; and then, of course, to be able to go right back to your left brain any time you want to. So, the modern artists did this; they were able to put incredible hallucinations on canvas and still operate very successfully. The literature of the 20th century that I prize has been totally right-brain, that is fuzzing up literate grammar; of course, we'll start with James Joyce, and then with William Burroughs and Brion Gyson who cut the word line and destroyed grammar; I would include people like Thomas Pynchon and William Gibson in the current generation. Certainly, music of the 20th century is quantum physics, emphasizing innovation and improvisation, and, of course, jazz. And rock music--definitely out to destroy left-brain mind focus and to expand consciousness. The philosophy of the 20th century--again, its language, linguistic--is based upon quantum physics. The psychology of the 20th century, starting in the 1960s is, again, designed to activate brains and to allow us to operate our brain, both the left brain and the right brain. That covers it: we have science, linguistics, philosophy, art, music, literature [laughs]. Excuse me [heads off to find a match]. Fahey: To what extent do the psychedelics factor into this equation? Leary: [Laughs] Well, of course, one thing I omitted in my litany of brain-changing techniques is the use of drugs, which became popularized in the Sixties, but they trace back to the early 20th century [sic]. It's the socialization and popularization of the notion that you can change your brain, change your mind, change your mood, boot up, turn on, turn off, drop out, turn in, drop in [trademark Leary grin]. It is interesting that I omitted psychedelic drugs in that list of... Fahey: Maybe that shows where you've evolved at this certain state in your life.

Leary: Well, no, I just take that for granted. I think we have to give a lot of credit to the pharmacologists and the psychedelic philosophers like Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, our wonderful group at Harvard, and the dedicated LSD wizards like Stanislav Grof and Sasha Shulgin--the great designer drug wizard from Berkeley... Fahey: Abram Hoffer. Leary: And, of course, Hoffer. And the group around Al Hubbard, who was the great, enigmatic tripleagent. Fahey: We could talk about the Sixties all day long, but it wouldn't serve much of a purpose. To what extent, within this "reality smashing"... Leary: Well, the word "reality smashing" is very tricky. What is real is what your neurons are processing. And hallucinations are just as real as anything on the outside. There's an external reality and internal reality. Inner reality is certainly more important than the outer reality. It is the outer reality that we have to talk about, agree upon, fight over and organize in order to survive. But this notion that the outer, for example that the foreign policy of the Reagan and Bush is somehow reality, more real than, uhh [fades off]. It's very complicated, and I object to anyone grabbing the term "reality"... Fahey: What I was getting at was, to what extent are the psychedelics today even a part of any movement to get beyond what we know as our day-to-day sense? Are psychedelics minor, compared to the computer applications that are going on today? Were psychedelics a launching point? Are they a thing of the past? Leary: We're talking about the brain. And unless you have some way of really activating the brain, people are going to use electrons as simply as external devices for power, control and money. So, yes, unless someone has had psychedelic experiences, they simply don't understand how to operate or use electronic devices except for materialistic reasons. It's no accident that the people who popularized the personal computer were Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, both barefoot, longhaired acid-freaks. It's no accident that most of the people in the software computer industry have had very thoughtful, very profitable and creative psychedelic experiences. Bill Gates, rumor has it, was a very active psychedelic proponent when he was at Harvard, before he, uhh... Fahey: Founded Microsoft. Leary: Yeah. So, you could go right down the line of the people who are the...it's well-known that the software, not the hardware, but the software so-called industry is saturated with people who have been turned on profitably, respectably and creatively by LSD. *** Fahey: Is there any future for the psychedelics, in either medical research or social applications? Or do you see any in the future? Leary: Well, I think the medical profession, we all know that, is totally corrupt. Every doctor now is a corporation. And medical research in this country is government-sponsored and government-funded or funded by large drug companies. I think that government corporations should fucking keep their hands off the brain-change substances. The idea of a government-sponsored, authorized, doctor giving LSD to mess around with people's brains is the ultimate Orwellian nightmare. The operational access to and use of your own mind and brain is a highly individual choice. Just as the right-wing government and politician's religions want to control women's reproductive organs, they want to control brains. The key, here, is that...the adult American should be able to do with their mind or their body what she wants to. So, I'm bored with discussions of the social, because it's highly individual--it's not just individuals, it's individuals in small groups. Because individuals, by themselves, taking psychedelics are alienated, lost,

fucked up; you've got to do it in small groups. That's the basic shamanic [pause], which Socrates taught us, and which Aldous Huxley taught us at Harvard. Small groups. *** Fahey: Do you run into [Augustus Stanley] Owsley [the Sixties' Robin Hood of LSD]? Leary: I see Owsley every time I go to a Grateful Dead concert. He's there backstage. He's selling jewelry, which you have to look at through a magnifying glass; incredibly talented miniature, almost molecular jeweler now. Fahey: His days of production are over, I assume. Long over. Leary: [shrugs] None of my business. Fahey: Where are we in the process of expanding our horizons? What do you see as the next wave, or the current wave? Leary: By "we," I assume you mean the human race; which always means individuals. The use of multimedia electronic software--CDROM discs, audiovisual disks--will put into the hands of every Third World kid, every inner-city kid in America the ability to boot up, activate, turn on their right brain, to reprogram their left brain. The use of electrons for brain-change and for brain-fucking and brainreprogramming has been perfected in the form of the television commercial. And I totally admire a thousand years of the Catholic Church, using jewels, organs, rose windows and that sort of stuff to, uhh [pause]. What we're understanding now is that the human brain is a photovore. That means that the human brain lives on light. Fahey: How so? Explain that to someone having difficulty understanding the concept. Leary: Every metaphor approximating the visionary experience is optical: illumination, revelation, insight, perspective, reflection. Right down the list. I'm too senile to remember all of them, but punch "illumination" up into your computer thesaurus, and you'll get [laughs, nods, fades]. Light has always been the statement of the ultimate brain experience: Tibetans talk about the White Light of the Void. Dante's Heaven was total white...the Egyptian religions, sun. These are primitive anticipations of what we now have available. The human brain is starved for electronic stimulation; the human brain is addicted to light. We can't control the sun, but through diamonds and rose windows [interrupted by waitress; Leary orders cup of coffee]. Leary: ...we're now using electrons to create what's called "virtual reality," electronic realities, which mean brain realities of course, because for the brain to use the body to communicate in terms of words-nine muscles of your vocal chords to create the words that I am now, or printing presses to print out book--is extremely crude, when you consider the human brain can deal with a hundred and fifty million signals a second. We use oral and hand tools, mechanical forms of communication, basically for material purposes; but we're now into the concept of direct brain exchange or brain communication, on screens. I think perhaps as important as LSD is a new device called the video projector; and what this means is that you have a small hand-held device that you can plug in a videotape, anywhere you go--which means you can bring one, I can bring one, and on our wall we can mix our electronic environments: you can have George Bush giving a speech on your projector, and I can be putting in Madonna taking off her clothes. I'm kidding, of course [winks]. The video projector is an extraordinary empowerment of the individual. We can no longer sit in front of the television screen like ameboids, just sucking up what they're putting there. We can now move around and put on the walls what we have stored in our CDROM computers. The empowerment of the individual implied in video projectors, of course, was not understood by the

engineers who designed it; but it is thrilling. And in retrospect, you see, it was entirely predictable. Forty years ago, you had to go to a theater to see electrons sprayed on a big screen. Then you had television, and you could sit in your livingroom and you could have your own little screen. Now, with the multiplication of cable and the clicker, you can lie in bed and change your screen; now, with wall-sized screens, operating on a hand-held projector is just the ultimate empowerment of the individual to communicate brain-to-brain. Fahey: Do you think psychedelics can be replaced by other experiences, or will there always be a need for an internal ingestion of something to... Leary: That's like saying, will fucking be replaced as a form of sperm/egg interaction by sperm banks and egg banks. It's all up to you. [pause] We are told by the ethnobotanists and by the neurologists that there are probably seventy or eighty or more receptor sites in the brain for seventy or eighty different kinds of drugs, all, by the way, coming from plants. And we discovered maybe the twentieth now: the coca leaf, the marijuana leaf, the poppy seed, the ergot on rye, which is LSD; but there are at least fifty plant products that we are going to be using in the next twenty years, so tough shit, Nancy--we've hardly begun this game. [laughter on both sides]. Fahey: Have you read Ken Kesey's new novel yet? Leary: Huh-uh, did you? Fahey: I've gotten through chapter eight or nine of it. I think it's a brilliant piece of work. Leary: Good. I love Ken Kesey. I don't think the novel, just as letters mass-produced in printing presses is the real way to communicate now. Anyone who writes a book now, half of it should be a videoed, multimedia book. But I adore Ken Kesey, and I'm sure that what he produced, there, is something that could be enjoyed as an archaic form of art, just as Picasso's [pause]; I just honor and adore Ken Kesey. I should also say that Ken Kesey is spending more of his time making films than he is writing books. Fahey: Right now he is? Currently? Leary: Oh, for the last five or six years he has. People criticize Ken because he hasn't been writing books, but I endorse the fact that he's been doing both. Fahey: So you don't consider his attempt to videotape or tape his whole Bus experience a waste of time, like so many other people did? Leary: Well, the literary mafia running out of New York City considers anything that substitutes for printed letters on wood pulp, anything less than that is an inferior product. I credit Kesey for doing both. No reason why you can't do both. Also, I wanted to point out that Ken Kesey taught a course at the University of Oregon, in which the computer was basically like a videotelephone, the mind-link; and he had a group of student using computers to link their minds to write a group book, which was one of the most brilliant uses of computers ever performed. And I honor Ken Kesey for that. Fahey: Caverns. Leary: McLuhan said, 'the medium is the message.' You can argue about how great that computer book is, as compared to Proust or Hemingway; that's not the issue. The fact that a group did it together--and presumably other people can add to it--is introducing medium. And Kesey will be probably as famous for that as for anything else he did. Fahey: Even if people don't see it now. Leary: Well, nobody ever understands what a pioneer is doing. And the people who believe in the literal

sanctity and holiness of the printed word hate the idea that Kesey is having a group of people come together using computers to produce a group thing; the fact that they're literally threatened by being put out of business. If they don't oppose you, you're in trouble. So it was inevitable that Kesey would not be honored for that. It was a great act of courage on Kesey's part to do that, because he is not basically an electronic, cybernetic person; he's a people person. And he understood, intuitively, that the computer could be used as a group party-line telephone: a mind-phone. [Phone call for Dr. Leary interrupts conversation] *** [Leary reenters with KUED television reporter] Leary: We're about finished, aren't we? Fahey: Yeah, we are. Leary: [Archly] More wisdom has poured out in the last ten minutes...[laughs]. It would take a hundred books to reel in what we've gone over, here. Fahey: Let me ask you one last question. Leary: Sure. Fahey: If you had to do it all over again, is there anything you would do differently, substantially? Leary: Damn right! I would have fucked more, taken more psychedelic drugs and spent more time with my family [laughter all around]. *** [Leary begins talking about Rolling Stone magazine; Fahey turns tape back on ] Leary: Jann Wenner has an editorial, full page, endorsing Clinton; and the last line of it [fades]. I've known Wenner since he was an eighteen-year old kid stringer for Ramparts magazine. `The day Clinton is elected President will be the greatest moment of our lives.' [hysterical laughter from Leary] Unidentified Camera Man: Wennerlogic. Leary: Yeah, exactly. You know, I personally don't like Jann; nobody likes him. But I've got to admire his insipidity; he's so self-centered and so narcissistic. Jann Wenner is the essence baby-boomer. He was born in January 1946: the first month [bangs fist on table ] of the baby boom. He's always been the leader of it. Timothy Leary Quotes Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top. Timothy Leary I've left specific instructions that I do not want to be brought back during a Republican administration. Timothy Leary If you don't like what you're doing, you can always pick up your needle and move to another groove. Timothy Leary In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show.

Timothy Leary Learning how to operate a soul figures to take time. Timothy Leary My advice to people today is as follows: if you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out. Timothy Leary Science is all metaphor. Timothy Leary The universe is an intelligence test. Timothy Leary There are three side effects of acid: enhanced long-term memory, decreased short-term memory, and I forget the third. Timothy Leary Think for yourself and question authority. Timothy Leary Turn on, Tune in, Drop out. Timothy Leary We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. But they've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go. Timothy Leary Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition. Timothy Leary You can always pick up your needle and move to another groove. Timothy Leary You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind. Timothy Leary

Terence McKenna > quotes


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"The ufo is nothing more than an assertion of herself by the Goddess into history, saying to science and paternalistically governed and driven organizations: You have gone far enough. We are going to turn the world upside down. Your science is going to be shown up for what it is, nothing more than a pleasant metaphor usefully extrapolated into have to create of toys don't watch TV, don't read what science is good listen "We the production culture, for healthy children. That's magazines, don't evenfor. to add this quote It is not some meta-theory at whose feet every space and time where you are NPR. Create your own roadshow. 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That is all to dress likeMcKenna gaian-mind,This is shit-brained, this clenchesufo, western-culture to my profile have people "If the words 'life, and what of control." existance is defined in termsis real is you and your friends and your the2right to liked it cultural diversion, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness' don't includeassociations,likedit add this quote 21 people your experiment orgasms, Terence with your own consciousness, then the Declaration of Independence isn't highs, your McKennayour hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're to my profile ert Anton Wilson Quotes we'rewas written on." their own get a job, get a this, get chaos, control, ego add this quote "Only psychos worth the hemp it shamans create unimportant, and peripheral. 'Get a degree, reality" tags: a that.' And then Terence McKenna you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to 15 people liked it to my profile reclaim your "Even as get it out of the hands of the come to grips with the want to 13 peopledescent mind and the nineteenth century had to cultural engineers who notion of human into a it add this quote turn you liked from apes, moron consuming all terms with the being manufactured out stoned apes." to my profile half-baked we must now come tothis trash that's fact that those apes wereof the bones onopoly on the a dyingstructure that is erected by a neuroticSearch for theprecisely than the celebrated Marxian quote "Ego is a McKenna (Food may define ruling elite more Original Tree of Terenceworld." of means of communication of the Gods:aThe individual who is a memberof a add this mula of monopoly in the means of production. of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an neurotic culture against Knowledge) Terence McKenna the facts to my profile ert Anton Wilson creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination behaviors are of it add this quote "The overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort ofinspirational, life, ocean tags: consumerism, culture, neurotic into the tv, wisdom 12 people liked chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas. acceptable." 32 people liked it to my profile ue initiation never have to take seriously the notion that understanding the universe is your "You ends. Terence McKenna add this quote ert Anton Wilsonthe night sea journey, the lone fisherman on athe universe that will bepeople likedlet to my profile responsibility, because the only understanding of tropical sea with his 9 useful you it It is nets, and to you "Television understanding." is your own is by sometimes, something tears through them that leaves them in these nets down -nature the dominator drug par excellence. Control of content, shreds add this quote phenomena are real in some sense, unreal in put your head under it inevitably asense, real and meaningless in profile uniformity McKenna you just row for shore, and some content make your bed and tool andTerence of content, repeatability ofsense, meaningless in some pray. of coersion, to my some e, unreal andbrainwashing,in now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active sense.liked it add this quote meaningless and manipulation." 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It is add this quote Enlightened Master is ideal only the World's Soul into all of Benighted Slave. ifcan actually bring home a us." your goal is to become something that is food, food for the literally a decent of Terence McKenna But, sometimes, you 8 people liked it to my profile ert Anton Wilson community that we can sustain ourselves onhead go forward." 5 people liked it add this quote "Western Terence McKenna human civilization is a loaded gun pointed at the and of this planet." Terence McKenna tags: divine, human, imagination, soul, world to my profile mals outline their have to create culture, creative, tags: earth, human, imagination, by5ink excretionsit paper. quote humans outline magazines, don't even metaphor, "We territoriescommunity, don't watch TV, don't readtheir territories journey,listen to on add this tags: chaos, with their excretions,fisherman, gun, sustainability, western-civilization people liked ert Anton Wilson create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where youpeople likedthe to my profile NPR; 5 are net, ocean now is it "The imagination is the goal of history. I see if you're worrying to literally realize ourit most immediate sector of your universe, and culture as an effortabout Michael Jackson add this quote 8 people liked ef is the death of intelligence. somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to my profile collective dreams." or Bill Clinton or ert Anton Wilson will perfect matter." "Time Terence McKenna to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress add this quote Terence McKenna like X or have lips like Y. tags: collective, culture, dreams, history, imagination to my profile ond a certain"It is not easy to measure the ocean, a continuous process of initiation. 4 people liked it add this quote point, the whole universe becomes but we can be measured by it, confront it, and be in ert Anton Wilson is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real to my profile it." This "Human history is a Gaian your associations, Terence McKenna (The Archaic is you and your friends anddream." Revival) your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, add this quote itude belongs exclusively to those who onlyare told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral.liked a to my profile Terence your fears. your plans, McKenna And we own one encyclopedia. 3 people 'Get it ert Anton Wilson voice speaking is a monkey's mouth making littletags: dream, gaia, history,to even add this quote "My degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're mouth noises don'tare carrying a player, you that want human agree-upon game. You want to reclaim that mind and get it the meaningpeople liked it play in that meaning, and it is meaning yourmatters. Withoutout of the hands of theonly to my profile 3 one has sciousness itself iscostinfinite regress. This explains coincidences. alienation"consuming all this an ofnoiseswho want to turn you into alevel of little mouth sanity in cultural engineers " this society, is a certain half-baked moron add this quote "The ert Anton Wilson that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world." Terence McKenna (The Archaic Revival) trash to my profile Terence McKenna 3 people liked it add this quote tags: ics regarded everybody as equally corrupt... Idealists regarded everybody as equally5corrupt, liked it themselves. 3 people except to my profile ert Anton Wilson self discoveries make us each a microcosm of the larger pattern of history. The "...our add this quote inertia of introspection leads toward recollection, for only through memory is the past to my profile is a social fiction selfwhich understood. at athe factmicrocosm of theand making the present, we are "Our for discoveries make In time of all the blame. recaptured and one person us each agets experiencing larger pattern of history. The add this quote ert Anton Wilson of introspection leads toward recollection, for only through memory is the past inertia all actors." to my profile recaptured McKenna (True Hallucinations) Terence and understood. In the fact of experiencing and making the present, we are ry war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war2 people likedpublic by is sold to the it all actors." essional liars Terence McKenna (True Hallucinations)Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a 1 person liked it ert Anton Wilson

ryone look around and see if you can spot the NARCS. They're the ones who look like hippies.

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