Flashbacks by Timothy Leary

I’m ingesting Justin Smith–Ruiu on drugs (On Drugs)

and feel inspired by his judicious opening apotropaisms — his get thee behind mes to Timothy Leary and Hunter S. Thompson — to reproduce a review from 42 years ago:

Flashbacks by Timothy Leary Review by Galen Strawson Times Literary Supplement November 25 1983

Timothy Leary, born an Irish Catholic New Englander in 1920, is today a great big bouncing baby, a self-made neotenic neuronaut who publishes articles on ‘exo-psychology, neurologic, sociobiology, neuro-politics, Gaia theory, re-juvenilization, neuro-geography, neo-LaMarckianism, personal evolution and development, biocomputer theory, experimental dying, neuro-ecology, migratory demographics, and the liberating advantages of word processors and video games’. This month he attains his Grand Climacteric (the age of 63). Like any other juvenile, he is unutterably fascinated and delighted by himself.

Timmy Leary love to tumble with the girls. They have silky thighs and saucy breasts, and they love to tumble with him. Sometimes they are wise and beautiful too, like Leary’s present wife Barbara. Leary says that he finds this hard to describe, but that Barbara is in his ‘scientific estimation … the sexiest, smartest, funniest woman’ in Hollywood. Sex has been good to Leary, but he’s not as adaptable as some, and so when he’s in prison (forty jails on four continents) he just lifts off on a ‘celibacy-high’, and writes and writes and writes—in between the escape plans, escapes, prison politics, handball, Danish pastries, sunbathing, tennis, and yoga.

Timmy loves to pile his beakers high. He loves to list and count and classify. Socrates was a ‘juvenilization’ agent, and so is Leary. Socrates had his system, Leary has his. Consider ‘The Four Generations Inhabiting America’, ‘The Eight Levels of Consciousness’, ‘The Eight Technologies of God’, ‘The Twenty-Four Stages of Evolution’. Check yourself out on Timothy Leary’s Evolution Quotient, or ‘E.Q.’:

E.Q., Timothy Leary: 53 homes/50 years = 1.06

E. Q., Average American: 10 homes/40 years = 0.25

E.Q., Aunt Mae: 01 homes/80 years = 0.01

Anyone scoring less than 0.1 (a home a decade) is still bogged down in the protozoic ooze with Aunt Mae. Even the Average American is as Australopithecus africanus next to Leary the Eugenic, Homo Sapientissimus, Multiple Reality Man. ‘I had blasted beyond the gravitational pull of the past and into a post-terrestrial relativistic lifestyle’.

Sometimes he makes his overarching systems sound as disposable as paper knickers— ‘a week later, while editing my newest complete system of philosophy, I was ordered to report to the custody department’—but certain themes recur, if you’re prepared to listen out for them. I haven’t kept up. I haven’t read Confessions of a Hope Fiend (1973), Neurologic (1973), Starseed (1973), The Curse of the Oval Room (1974), Terra II (1974), What Does WoMan Want? (1976), Communication with Higher Intelligence (1977), Exo-Psychology (1977), Neuropolitics (1977), Intelligence Agents (1979), The Game of Life (1979), or Changing My Mind—Among Others (1982). (I have to report that the Bodleian Library has not kept up either—although they do have a copy of Leary’s acclaimed textbook The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, 1957, the most recent edition of which appeared only last year.) But Leary is clearly fond of his Twenty-Four Stages, first presented in 1964, and these Flashbacks give us no reason to think that he has abandoned them. Some are familiar: toddling (4), walking-running (5), climbing (6). But the future of the human race is, like, elsewhere—though Leary is tentative about the details. There’ll be electronic-psychedelic reality invention at level 17; unicellular consciousness and passive enjoyment of DNA-knowledge up at 18; inter-species linkage, participation in Gaia intelligence (21); nuclear particle awareness, ability to ‘think’ like nuclear/atomic particles (22); and Out-Of-Body linkage with other O-O-B entities (24).

Leary is not mad—after all, this sort of stuff is really pretty routine in California, and it can’t all be put down to LSD. Leary may think you can fix a life like a broken-down car; but that’s a view he appears to share with millions of his compatriots. Old Europe may shudder, but there it is. He is a charmin’, selfish, Utopian optimist, rubber-bumpered with impact-resistant naiveté and powered by a good supply of strictly short-range intellectual zip. And, when he’s not white-rabbiting on about multiple realities, his story is extremely readable.

Best of all are the descriptions of his various confinements. The first was at West Point in 1940–1, where he was court-martialled after a drinking incident. Surprisingly, he was acquitted, but the West Point ‘Honor Committee’, an ‘officially sanctioned clique’, had already ‘silenced’ him—no one was to communicate with him in any way. Leary endured this for nine months, while the Honor Committee devised a new plan to get rid of him: ‘I would be demerited out.’

At every formation cadet officers swarmed around me, examining my grooming with microscopic care. I was written up for ‘untrimmed hairs in nostrils’. A shaving cut was cited as ‘careless injury to government property’. Without notice my assignment in ranks was changed, and for lining up in the old slot I was gigged for ‘incorrect formation’.

But Leary won out in the end. In summer camp the silencing system began to crack, as the new first-year ‘plebes’ arrived. The Honor Committee was forced to do a deal—to make a public statement of Leary’s innocence in return for his departure. He left a hero.

After ‘permanently damaging’ his brain reading Ulysses, Leary went on to the University of Alabama, chose to read psychology, and did well despite changing his major to girls. Copulation with coeds was grounds for expulsion, and Leary was duly expelled in 1942, losing his draft deferment. He became an army psychologist, and in 1944 married Marianne, his first wife, who committed suicide in 1955. After the war he acquired a PhD in psychology from Berkeley, and rose to be the successful and disillusioned Director of Psychological Research at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland, California, in 1959. Chance meetings then led to a post at the Harvard Center for Personality Research in January 1960, where Richard Alpert was already Assistant Professor. By now Leary was into ‘existential transaction’, and he ‘got off to a fast start on the Harvard academic track’.

But then—summer of 1960—hallucinatory mushrooms in Mexico. Very interesting. Back in Harvard, Leary read William James on nitrous oxide, Aldous Huxley on mescaline and LSD. The idea of controlled examination of altered states of consciousness was understandably attractive to the serious psychologist in Leary, and an on the whole admirably carefully devised programme of psilocybin-based research was soon instituted. Volunteers were plentiful; academic jealousies were aroused. Huxley came. Koestler had a go, and hated it (‘pressure-cooker mysticism’). The project was carried into the churches and the prisons. It was clean-cut and respectable, despite the canonical weirdos who had begun to stop by—Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, William Burroughs, Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac.

But then Michael Hollingshead arrived, in the spring of 1962, with 10,000 doses of LSD which he had originally obtained with the intention of studying its effects on the web-spinning of spiders. He had mixed it with sugar, and—so the story goes—licked the spoon. He had lost interest in the spiders.

Hollingshead heaped the spoon for Leary, and the medicine went down. His acid years began. A psychedelic summer camp in Mexico; an ‘honorable dissociation’ from Harvard, where pressure was rising; plans to change the world; and a new drug research project, IFIF—The International Foundation for Internal Freedom. In 1963 a large country estate in Millbrook, New York, was loaned to Leary, Alpert, and Ralph Metzner so that they could pursue their researches in comfort. But the level of psychedelic gunk was rising fast. The Eight Technologies of God were in the air. The Tibetan Book of the Dead was rewritten as The Psychedelic Experience. There were famous people everywhere.

In the winter of 1964-5 Leary married a model called Nanette and took off to India, a country to which he reacted with extreme vulgarity. He returned with a broken marriage. The beautiful Rosemary moved into Millbrook and the research went on, acquiring multicoloured inverted commas in the process. Disappointingly, Flashbacks contains little description of the nature of life on LSD, no serious attempt to give either a theoretical or a phenomenological account of what ‘multiple realities’ might be, or might be like. Nor is any real sense of the great beauty of certain hallucinatory states conveyed.

In 1965 Leary was caught with a minute quantity of marijuana on the Mexico border. Later he was caught again, with two ‘roaches’—cardboard filters from marijuana cigarettes. He spent quite a lot of the next ten years appealing, on bail, on trial, in prison, or on the run. During this time the American legal system, in all its manifestations, apparently behaved quite disgracefully. But prison didn’t begin in earnest until 1970, and in between times Leary was able to ingest a great deal more LSD, cheerlead the ‘Summer of Love’, about which he has very little to say, fraternize with the hip aristocracy, and encouraged everyone to turn, tune and drop on, in and out respectively.

In 1970 he finally got ten years for the two cardboard ‘roaches’—an idiotic sentence. By September he had been sprung from prison by the left-wing militant Weathermen. Headline news. He was on the run for two years and four months—out through Canada as a bald businessman, on to Paris, Algeria with the Black Panthers, Switzerland, Austria and Afghanistan. Recaptured in January 1973 he was retried for escaping from prison, sentenced to up to twenty-five years and despatched to the deepest, darkest dungeon of the meanest, nastiest, ugliest prison of them all: 4-A in Folsom Prison. Charles Manson was down there too, mainly for his own protection, smiling sweetly and reading the Bible in the lotus position. But Leary soon rose up again from that dark place, and entered mainstream ‘slammer’ society on the ‘main line’, where he was a great success, and throve mightily.

He continued to intrigue the FBI, though, who then spent two years shunting him round the prison system trying to pump him on the Weathermen and related issues. By the summer of 1976 the FBI were friendly enough with Leary to let him go, although he claims he told them almost nothing. The legal status of his release is not made clear, but the whole episode clearly left Leary feeling quite affectionate and protective towards the police. They treated him like he was someone really important.

Flashbacks ends with an embarrassing epilogue. Leary tells us about his new wife, about what all his old friends are doing now. The vigour of his accounts of prison life, from West Point to the Metropolitan Correction Center in San Diego, is suddenly and sadly dissipated. He has written six books and over fifty articles since he’s been out, but somehow it isn’t the same. Still, he’s researching into Life Extension—‘Few subjects are of greater personal interest to me at this moment than this’—and Space Migration, and he has certainly achieved one thing—Rejuvenilization.

And although Timothy Leary isn’t in charge, the future is really bright:

If I were in charge of evolutionary matters on this planet, I would, at this precise moment, flood the place with advanced humans wired to take over peacably and initiate the necessary changes.

And behold! This is exactly what DNA seem to have done. Just when the situation looked hopeless, here came 76 million post-War Americans—40 million more than we expected—fresh, confident programmed for innovation.

Clearly it is all about to be beautiful.