Timothy Leary was interviewed by Paul Krassner in 1995, the year before he died. In this free wheeling interview, Leary talks about LSD, Death & Dying, the Catholic Church, the Internet, Ram Dass, G. Gordon Liddy, the Weather Underground, and more. This is an edited version excerpted from the 8 part series in Nancy Cain’s video archives.
What is a reality tunnel?
Your reality-tunnel is being constructed during the course of your life by your experiences, thoughts and belief-systems. Your thoughts and belief-systems are basically based on language. Try to think without using internal language! Thinking and all your belief-systems are hence built upon language:
The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.
(Terence Mc Kenna)
Timothy Leary coined the term reality tunnel and it was then popularised by Robert Anton Wilson. It refers to the concept that with a subconscious set of filters formed from their beliefs and experiences, everyone interprets this same world differently, hence “Truth is in the eye of the beholder”.
Is there objective truth?
This is not necessarily meant to imply that there is no objective truth; just that our access to it is mediated through our senses, experience, conditioning, prior beliefs, and other non-objective factors. The individual world each person occupies is said to be their reality tunnel. The term can also apply to groups of people united by beliefs: we can speak of the fundamentalist Christian reality tunnel, the scientific materialist reality tunnel, or the libertarian reality tunnel.
Once the fiction of one ‘reality’ dies as a concept, and the operational fact of ‘realities’ (plural) becomes generally recognized, we might all discover that human beings can actually live together without constantly making war over who has the ‘real reality’.
You create one reality-tunnel at a time out of a phalanx of possible reality-tunnels. You can learn to change your reality-tunnel. You can experience many reality-tunnels.
(Robert Anton Wilson in ‘Cosmic Trigger; Volume 2′)
Link: Reality-tunnel: How beliefs and expectations create what you experience in life
Short Interview with Timothy Leary in Prison. He is talking about LSD and his arrest
Are psychedelics good for you? Its such a hippie relic of a question that its almost embarrassing to ask. But a quiet psychedelic renaissance is beginning at the highest levels of American science, including the National Institute of Mental Health NIMH and Harvard, which is conducting what is thought to be its first research into therapeutic uses of psychedelics in this case, Ecstasy since the university fired Timothy Leary in 1963. But should we be prying open the doors of perception again? Wasnt the whole thing a disaster the first time?
Here is a very interesting article detailing Timothy Learys seemingly very erratic last few weeks alive on this earth.
“That’s probably the worst place in the house to leave that,” Tim barks at a young assistant as she clears a pile of videocassettes from the path of his oncoming electric wheelchair
“That’s probably the worst place in the house to leave those,” Tim barks at a beautiful young assistant as she clears a pile of videocassettes from the path of his oncoming electric wheelchair. Then he stops short. “What are they, anyway?”“Dead Man Walking, Nixon, Babe, some documentary…” the purple-haired girl reads off the labels on the tapes.
“Susan gave me those, you know,” Leary says, referring to longtime friend Susan Sarandon who has been smuggling him the special promotional tapes sent to Academy Members. “Take whatever you want. I’ve seen them all already.”
He stares at the writing on one of the cassettes, drifting into deep thought.
“Oliver Stone’s here,” the assistant reminds him. “Out on the back porch.”
“I know that!” Tim says, as if he didn’t care who it was. “So, let’s go.”
Very interesting article that makes a good case for the notion that Timothy Leary was actually working for the CIA.
While this article seems to make the assertion that if he wasn’t working directly for the CIA he at least was in part funded and supported by them.
Summer-bachelor Jack Kennedy stands on the Harry Truman balcony overlooking the rose-garden fountain, a soothing sight before him: prisms of lighted water shooting into darkness, the white spike of the Washington Monument, auto headlights flickering along Executive Avenue. He begins to feel a deep-seated goodness within, centered between his chest and throat. From the bedroom behind him, through white chiffon curtains in open french doors, float the chords of a Sinatra song — “All I Need is the Girl.” With strange clarity, JFK can suddenly make out every note…
Behind the curtains moves the shadow of a tall woman who is not his wife. She is deeply connected to CIA, and has just dispensed to the President of the United States a dose of LSD. In the next few hours she will be “brainwashing” him, and she will be doing so on the directions of a Harvard psychologist, Dr. Timothy Leary, whose colleagues are all taking CIA money, and who has himself designed a personality test used by CIA….
An interview with Timothy Leary & Robert Anton Wilson speculating on the subject of death ?
Time to crank up the black metal and grab a cup of coffee!
Death, being a subject that one can really only speculate on at best, is considered to be one of the great mysteries of life. It is the end for every existing creature on this planet, and neither king nor beggar is spared from its clutches.
I decided to talk to two people who I considered to be among the most intelligent living philosophers around at the time to see what their individual perspectives were on the subject. I put together a list of questions and conducted each of these interviews separately. The answers were quite interesting, to say the least.
Here is an excerpt from Politics of Ecstasy by Timothy Leary :
…it’s really quite simple. Whenever you hear anyone sounding off on internal freedom and conciousness-expanding foods and drugs, whether pro or con, check out these questions:
- Is your expert talking from direct experience, or simply repeating cliches? Theologians and intellectuals often deprecate “experience” in favor of fact and concept. This classic debate is falsely labeled. Most often it becomes a case of “experience” vs. “inexperience”.
- Do his words spring from a spiritual or mundane point of view? Is he motivated by a dedicated quest for answers to basic questions, or is he protecting his own social-psychological position, his own game investment? Is he struggling towards sainthood, or is he maintaining his status as a hard-boiled scientist or hard-boiled cop?
- How would his argument sound if it was heard in a different culture? (for example, in an African jungle hut, a ghat on the Ganges, or on another planet inhabited by a form of life superior to ours) or in a different time (for example, in Periclean Athens, or in a Tibetan monestery, or in a bull session led by any one of the great religious leaders – founders – messiahs)? Or how would it sound to other species of life on our planet today – to the dolphins, to the conciousness of the redwood tree? In other words, try to break out of your usual tribal game set and listen with the ears of another one of God’s creatures.
After hearing a few of the lectures contained in the previous post , i started remebering an m MP3 of timothy leary i had downloaded some time ago called ‘ How to operate your brain’.
A very nice piece of work , which is about 30 minutes long and has leary laying out many ideas and concepts for you to chew over, my only issue is that i only had the audio and i knew full well that it is a video presentation .
So a quick search on amazon showed that itis out of print , but a quick search on google video yielded the entire clip !
Enjoy !
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7315741545239440953
The following site has a great list of links to free MP3 audio lectures by the likes of Terrence McKenna , Alex Grey , Timothy Leary & Robert Anton Wilson .
Will give a few of the Terence McKenna lectures a listen tonight !