Timothy Leary (October 22, 1920–May 31, 1996) was an American writer, psychologist, and drug campaigner. He is most famous as a proponent of the therapeutic and spiritual benefits of LSD. During the 1960s, he coined and popularized the catch phrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out."

Dr. Leary was born in Springfield, Massachusetts to a leading New England family. Leary studied for a brief time at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, but reacted badly to the strict training at the Jesuit institution. He also attended West Point for a time but dropped out after 18 months. He earned a bachelor's degree in psychology at the University of Alabama in 1943. He eventually got a Ph.D. in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1950. He went on to become an assistant professor at Berkeley (1950-1955), a director of research at the Kaiser Foundation (1955-1958), and a lecturer in psychology at Harvard University (1959-1963). Leary later described these years disparagingly, writing that he had been

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.

While on vacation in Mexico, he tried hallucinogenic psilocybin-bearing mushrooms, an experience that would vastly alter the course of his life. Upon his return to Harvard in 1960, Leary and his associates, notably Dr. Richard Alpert (later known as Ram Dass), began conducting research into the effects of psilocybin and later LSD with graduate students.

Dr. Leary argued that LSD, used with the right dosage, set (what one brings to the experience), and setting, preferably with the guidance of professionals, could alter behavior in unprecedented and beneficial ways. His experiments produced no murders, suicides, psychoses, and supposedly no bad trips. The goals of Leary's research included finding better ways to treat alcoholism and to reform convicted 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.

Leary and Alpert were dismissed from Harvard in 1963. Their colleagues were uneasy about the nature of their research, and powerful parents began complaining to the university administration about the distribution of hallucinogens to their children. Unfazed, the two relocated to a large mansion in New York called Millbrook, and 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.

Repeated FBI raids brought an end to the Millbrook era.

Leary was convicted of a drug possession charge, fled, and was eventually imprisoned for several years. When he arrived in prison, he was given a standard psychological test that the prison used to assign inmates to appropriate work assignments. Having written the test himself, he was able to give the answers that got him a job working in the prison library.

Leary later went on to propose his eight circuit model of consciousness, in which he assumed that the human mind consisted of eight circuits of consciousness. He believed that most people only access four of these circuits in their lifetimes. The other four, Leary claimed, were evolutionary off-shoots of the first four, and were equipped to encompass life in space, as well as 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 by delving into meditation and other spiritual endeavors. 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 eight developed for life in outer space) is to allow humans to become accustomed to life in a zero or low gravity environment.

In any case, his prison stay was cut short in 1970 when, for a fee paid by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love , the Weather Underground Organization broke Leary out of jail and smuggled him and his wife Rosemary Woodruff Leary out of the US and into Algeria. A planned refuge with the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver went wrong after Cleaver attempted to hold Leary hostage and the couple fled to Switzerland.

Having separated from Rosemary, Timothy Leary was kidnapped by Interpol agents in Switzerland and extradited to the US in 1974, where he co-operated with the FBI's investigation of the Weather Underground, in exchange for a reduced sentence. He was released on April 21, 1976, by Governor Jerry Brown.

During his lifetime, Leary was the subject of the Moody Blues song "Legend of a Mind", which memorialized him with the words, "Timothy Leary's dead. No, no, he's outside looking in". Conversely, and perhaps more apposite, was the reference in the Who's song "The Seeker" of around the same time; the protagonist, looking for some kind of universal truth, declared: "I asked Timothy Leary, but he couldn't help me either".

Leary has on several occasions flirted with the occult and was a member of the magical order of the Illuminates of Thanateros.

In the months before his death from inoperable prostate cancer, Leary authored a book called Design for Dying. The book was an attempt to show people a new way of viewing death and dying.

In 1964, he co-authored a book with Ralph Metzner called "A psychedelic manual", ostensibly based upon the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In it he writes:

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 space-time 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 key - it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.

For a number of years, Leary was excited by the possibility of freezing his body in cryonic suspension. As a scientist himself, he didn't believe that he would be resurrected in the future, but he recognized the importance of cryonic possibilities and was generally an advocate of future sciences. He called it his "duty as a futurist", and helped publicize the process. Leary had relationships with two cryonic organizations, the original ALCOR and then the offshoot CRYOCARE . When these relationships soured due to a great lack of trust, Leary requested that his body be cremated, which it was, and distributed among his friends and family.

Leary's death was videotaped for posterity, capturing his final words forever. At one point in his final delirium, he spoke the words "why not." He uttered the phrase repeatedly, in different intonations and died soon after. His last word, according to Zach Leary, Leary's son, was "beautiful". The videotape was made into a movie. The movie was called Timothy Leary's Last Trip, and the filmmakers capitalised on his initial desire for cryogenic preservation by secretly creating a fake decapitation sequence without permission from Leary or his family. After the movie's release, the filmmakers declined to admit the scene's falsehood, possibly as a method to generate hype and sell tickets.

The fake was so effective that many people even question the accuracy of claims that it was faked. It has become a subject of debate where the side who claims it was faked has been unable to provide references and the truth has remained unknowable.

After his death, 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.

The term Timothy Leary tickets is an affectionate nickname given to the small squares of blotter paper to which liquid LSD has been applied. Presumably, this is because such tabs offer a "ticket" to a whole new show: a "trip" to lands hitherto unexplored.

Famous American actress Winona Ryder is Leary's God-daughter .

Published Works

• Change Your Brain. Leary, Timothy. 1988. (ISBN 1579510175)
• Your Brain is God. Leary, Timothy. 1988. (ISBN 1579510523)
• Flashbacks. Leary, Timothy. 1983. (ISBN 0874774977)
• High Priest. Leary, Timothy. 1968. (ISBN 0914171801)
• The Politics of Ecstasy. Leary, Timothy. 1968.
• Start Your Own Religion. Leary, Timothy. 1967.
• Psychedelic Prayers & Other Meditations. Leary, Timothy. 1966.
• The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Leary, Timothy and Ralph Metzner, Richard Alpert, Karma-Glin-Pa Bar Do Thos Grol. 1964. (ISBN 0806516526)
• The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality. Leary, Timothy. 1957.

See also

• Leary biscuit

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations by or about Timothy Leary

• Timothy Leary's official homepage http://www.leary.com/
• Open Directory links http://dmoz.org/Society/Religion_and_Spirituality/Esoteric_and_Occult/Personalit
  ies/Leary,_Timothy/