Anyone want to work on a Leary thread?

['Gear]

He was mostly a bullshitting super cowboy but he said some interesting shit.

Did you know he wrote the psych test they gave him when they were trying to classify him in the prison subsequently escaped from?

"Turn on' meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. 'Tune in' meant interact harmoniously with the world around you—externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. Drop out suggested an elective, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. 'Drop Out' meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean 'Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity.'"

 

[jack]

"I've left specific instructions that I do not want to be brought back during a Republican administration. "

Timothy Leary

 

[jack]

"There are three side effects of acid: enhanced long-term memory, decreased short-term memory, and I forget the third."

 

[jack]

You ever see this Gear?

 

[jack]

 

[jack]

 

[Ilyanna]

I don't know about his bullshitting. I am aware that he doesn't seem to have minded the hype about him, and I am certain he said some wacky things (or, at least, strange to people not on the same wave-length than he was). Still, he was a very, very intelligent, insightful man looking for and, at least for some people, finding answers to matters of the mind and consciousness. He also is one of the most misunderstood- intentionally and unintentionally - people in that field of research

"If you don't like what you're doing, you can always pick up your needle and move to another groove."

Of course he propagated LSD usage for mind-expanding experiments to the point of being careless, but he also wrote

"Acid is not for every brain - only the healthy, happy, wholesome, handsome, hopeful, humorous, high-velocity should seek these experiences. This elitism is totally self-determined. Unless you are self-confident, self-directed, self-selected, please abstain."

Did you know he wrote the psych test they gave him when they were trying to classify him in the prison subsequently escaped from?

lol, yeah. IIRC, he even pointed out that him undergoing that particular test would be completely useless, but they still insisted...

The most influential thing for me is his Eight Circuit Model of Consciousness. I think I already posted it at TKR at one point (A lot of RA Wilson's work was based on that), but here's a link for anybody interested (go to His Works, it's the second link under "major works"):
http://www.timothyleary.us/

 

[jack]

Wow, I remember that Ily.

Great thread Gear.

 

['Gear]

This is an interesting Hofmann quote. I didn't feel like starting a Hofmann thread so I'm putting here.

"Of greatest significance to me has been the insight that I attained as a fundamental understanding from all of my LSD experiments: what one commonly takes as 'the reality,' including the reality of one's own individual person, by no means signifies something fixed, but rather something that is ambiguous—that there is not only one, but that there are many realities, each comprising also a different consciousness of the ego. One can also arrive at this insight through scientific reflections. The problem of reality is and has been from time immemorial a central concern of philosophy. It is, however, a fundamental distinction, whether one approaches the problem of reality rationally, with the logical methods of philosophy, or if one obtrudes upon this problem emotionally, through an existential experience. The first planned LSD experiment was therefore so deeply moving and alarming, because everyday reality and the ego experiencing it, which I had until then considered to be the only reality, dissolved, and an unfamiliar ego experienced another, unfamiliar reality. The problem concerning the innermost self also appeared, which, itself unmoved, was able to record these external and internal transformations. Reality is inconceivable without an experiencing subject, without an ego. It is the product of the exterior world, of the sender and of a receiver, an ego in whose deepest self the emanations of the exterior world, registered by the antennae of the sense organs, become conscious. If one of the two is lacking, no reality happens, no radio music plays, the picture screen remains blank."

 

[Ilyanna]

'Gear (and anyone else following this), are you familiar with the works of Stanislav Grof?

 

[jack]

Never heard of him but I'm getting glimmer quickly. tyvm

"An important consequence of freeing oneself from the fear of death is a radical opening to spirituality of a universal and non-denominational type."

 

['Gear]

Give me a minute.

Edit: No. Not yet.

 

[Ilyanna]

He's one of the first psychiatrists who used LSD as a means to treat schizophrenia and other psychological conditions, until it became illegal. He's a good read, and the stuff TM writes reg. shamanism and schiziphrenia reminds me of his early work.
He later developed the technique of holotropic breathwork, which, as far as I remember, can tap into a similar process as the usage of psychedelics to reach the unconscious parts of the mind.

His website: http://www.stanislavgrof.com/

 

[jack]

Cool, the guy I started VitaFlex with, his dad was part of the original group that took LSD with Oscar Janiger in the mid fifties.