Timothy Leary has passed...

I was born too late to really be part of the 60's. My awareness of them only came years later, during college and afterwards when I became intrigued by the psychedelic culture of the 60's and started to learn about it and Timothy Leary.

For some people, Leary was a psychedelic guru; for others, he was a dangerous, threatening man. The popular conception of him looks at him as an irresponsible charlatan. For me, he represented individual empowerment at a very high (no pun intended) level.

I formed my view of Leary as I learned more about him and his philosophies. To me, he chiefly represents the ideas that you have the right to do as you will with your body and mind, that you have the right and ability to change your mind as you will, and that you can have direct experience of the divine and do not require a mediator.

Having the right to do what you will with your body and mind means that it's you who determines what you eat, what you wear, your physical condition, what you ingest, who you fuck, what happens to you as a biological result of doing so. Society has no right to make these determinations for you. If you want to end your life, you may. If you want to get high, it's your choice. If you want to see visions, go for it. If you want to smoke a weed or put a little piece of paper under your tongue or snort a line or inject the purified seed of the poppy, it's your right to do so, and no individual or group of people has the right to stop you.

However, having the right to do as you will with your body and mind doesn't excuse you from doing it responsibly, something that Leary may not always have done. I can't determine this for myself; the lense of the media provides an unreliable view of history. I'd like to think that he tried.

Having the right to do so also doesn't mean that other people have an obligation to help you. For instance, I believe strongly in freedom of speech: you should be allowed to say whatever you want. However, I have no obligation to help you say what you want using my resources. But, just as I have an obligation not to try to stop you from saying what you want, other people have an obligation not to try to strip you of the right of doing as you will with your mind and body.

Further, none of these topics must be taboo. If it makes you uptight to talk about them, then it's probably a very healthy thing to explore them, gingerly if necessarily. "Freedom of speech" is one of the core principles of the United States' charter. Speech can be a threatening thing. Some belief systems have a hard time withstanding free communication. Some flourish. The basic guarantee of freedom of speech in the US is frequently ignored and often fought against by people who feel threatened by it.

Having the right to change your mind as you will means that you should be the one to choose your belief system. You should be the one to choose your reactions and your emotions. This can be difficult, because to some extent, by the time you're mature enough to start both making and realizing those decisions you've already had a certain amount of framework laid for you by your family, your society and your biology.

Having the ability to change your mind as you will means that you can overcome the framework that your family and society have created for you, and to some undetermined extent you may be able to overcome that which your biology has determined. There are a variety of techniques possible for helping you to realize the changes to your consciousness that you desire. Not all of them work for all people. Not all of them are wielded by truthful or responsible people. Not all of them are 100% safe. Some involve drugs, meditation, prayer, coercion, therapy, trauma or gentle thought. In general our society discourages the practice of self-dermination. I have to wonder why.

A final lesson from Leary is that your experience of the divine does not have to be mediated by a priest or other go-between. It must seem very powerful to be in the position of mediating divine experience for the masses of people who think they cannot practice spirituality on their own. I don't doubt that some people are not seduced by that power, just as I don't doubt that some are. Leary taught new and old ways to be more directly in touch with divinity and helped to popularize some eastern religious thought to the west which can help people seeking spirituality to more directly experience it.

I'd like to have thanked Timothy Leary for his in these directions. Knowing he was dying, I'd been thinking on and off during the last few months about something to do, some way to say 'thank you', maybe as simple as a letter or flowers or some exotic object. Now that he's gone, this page will have to do.

Timothy Leary Resources on the net

31 May 1996 - John Romkey

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Last modified: Wed Mar 29 00:13:33 EST 2006