Timothy Leary Quotes

Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.

Admit it. You aren’t like them. You’re not even close. You may occasionally dress yourself up as one of them, watch the same mindless television shows as they do, maybe even eat the same fast food sometimes. But it seems that the more you try to fit in, the more you feel like an outsider, watching the “normal people” as they go about their automatic existences. For every time you say club passwords like “Have a nice day” and “Weather’s awful today, eh?”, you yearn inside to say forbidden things like “Tell me something that makes you cry” or “What do you think deja vu is for?”. Face it, you even want to talk to that girl in the elevator. But what if that girl in the elevator (and the balding man who walks past your cubicle at work) are thinking the same thing? Who knows what you might learn from taking a chance on conversation with a stranger? Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others…

Think for yourself. Question authority.

You're only as young as the last time you changed your mind

LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it.

Intelligence is the ultimate aphrodisiac

I declare that The Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen.

And a new philosophy emerged called quantum physics, which suggest that the individual’s function is to inform and be informed. You really exist only when you’re in a field sharing and exchanging information. You create the realities you inhabit.

If you listen to neurologists and psychiatrists, you'd never fall in love.

The universe is an intelligence test.

Turn on, Tune in, Drop out

Grow with the flow

The PC is the LSD of the '90s.

The most important thing you do in your life is to die.

Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities, the political, the religious, the educational authorities who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing, forming in our minds their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable, open-mindedness; chaotic, confused, vulnerability to inform yourself.

Just Say Know

Timothy Leary and I kept the same hours. He believed, as I do, that “After midnight, all things are possible.

Like it or not, we are all insectoid aliens burrowing within our urbaniod bodies. -- Timothy Leary

Whether you experience heaven or hell, remember that it is your mind which creates them.

We seem to inhabit a universe made up of a small number of elements-particles-bits that swirl in chaotic clouds, occasionally clustering together in geometrically logical temporary configurations.

Any reality is an opinion-we make up our own reality

If you want to change the way people respond to you, change the way you respond to people.

Why not? Yeah

I am 100 percent in favor of the intelligent use of drugs, and 1,000 percent against the thoughtless use of them, whether caffeine or LSD. And drugs are not central to my life.

Courage is the key to creativity and to any relinquishing of ego structure.

In the information age, you don't teach philosophy as they did after feudalism. You perform it. If Aristotle were alive today he'd have a talk show.

Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition

A country run by law is a country ruined by lawyers. It is neurologically impossible for a lawyer or a military man to think creatively or to act in harmony with nature.

S.M.I.²L.E.

In the information-communication civilization of the 21st Century, creativity and mental excellence will become the ethical norm. The world will be too dynamic, complex, and diversified, too cross-linked by the global immediacies of modern (quantum) communication, for stability of thought or dependability of behaviour to be successful.

Who knows? Life may just be a Positive Conspiracy bent on putting us in the right place at the right time every living, breathing moment of the day. It just takes a certain kind of perspective to see this. Realizing this can put our "analyzer" on hold, our interpretive mind on "ga-ga" and our hearts on breathless.

The goals of an intelligent life, according to Socrates, is to pursue the philosophic quest—to increase one’s knowledge of self and world.

The level of intelligence has been tremendously increased, because people are thinking and communicating in terms of screens, and not in lettered books. Much of the real action is taking place in what is called cyberspace. People have learned how to boot up, activate, and transmit their brains. Essentially, there’s a universe inside your brain. The number of connections possible inside your brain is limitless. And as people have learned to have more managerial and direct creative access to their brains, they have also developed matrices or networks of people that communicate electronically. There are direct brain/computer link-ups. You can just jack yourself in and pilot your brain around in cyberspace-electronic space.

Emotions are the lowest form of consciousness. Emotional actions are the most contracted, narrowing, dangerous form of behavior. The romantic poetry and fiction of the last 200 years has quite blinded us to the fact that emotions are an active and harmful form of stupor. Any peasant can tell you that. Beware of emotions. Any child can tell you that. Watch out for the emotional person. He is a lurching lunatic. Emotions are caused by biochemical secretions in the body to serve during the state of acute emergency. An emotional person is a blind, crazed maniac. Emotions are addictive and narcotic and stupefacient. Do not trust anyone who comes on emotional. What are the emotions? In a book entitled Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, written when I was a psychologist, I presented classifications of emotions and detailed descriptions of their moderate and extreme manifestations. Emotions are all based on fear. [...] The emotional person cannot think; he cannot perform any effective game action (except in acts of physical aggression and strength). The emotional person is turned off sensually. His body is a churning robot. [...] The only state in which we can learn, harmonize, grow, merge, join, understand is the absence of emotion. This is called bliss or ecstasy, attained through centering the emotions. [...] Conscious love is not an emotion; it is serene merging with yourself, with other people, with other forms of energy. Love cannot exist in an emotional state. [...] The great kick of the mystic experience, the exultant, ecstatic hit, is the sudden relief from emotional pressure. Did you imagine that there could be emotions in heaven? Emotions are closely tied to ego games. Check your emotions at the door to paradise.

You can be anyone this time around.

I'm looking forward to the most fascinating experience in life, which is dying.

Timothy Leary, always happy to supply a reporter with a delectably outrageous quote, was famous. He delivered a particularly choice one after the university forced him to put his supply of Sandoz psilocybin pills under the control of Health Services: “Psychedelic drugs cause panic and temporary insanity in people who have not taken them.

Every time I think of Tim Leary I get angry. He was a liar and a quack and a worse human being than Richard Nixon. For the last twenty-six years of his life he worked as an informant for the FBI and turned his friends into the police and betrayed the peace symbol he hid behind.

People ask me how many times I've taken LSD--and I don't count. But it's the same thing when they ask me how many times I've made love. The answer is, not enough.

as a guide and protection. Trust your divinity, trust your brain,

The fact of the matter is that all apparent forms of matter and body are momentary clusters of energy. We are little more than flickers on a multidimensional television screen. This realization directly experienced can be delightful. You suddenly wake up from the delusion of separate form and hook up to the cosmic dance. Consciousness slides along the wave matrices, silently at the speed of light

I predicted that if control of drugs were administered by law enforcement agencies, the result would be a black market more irrational and widespread than that of alcohol prohibition and the growth of enormous police-state repressive bureaucracy. And who, indeed, wanted that?

Thou shalt not alter thy brother's consciousness without his consent. - The Second Commandment of Leary

Whatever you believe imprisons you. Convictions create convicts.

God #1 is the Single-cell Intelligence, the collaborative brain that knows how to run a simple protozoan. The First God is the one-celled God. The First and original craft of God is Protozoan.

The old cliche must be up-dated: crime does not pay for the three victims of every crime-the victim, the tax-payer and the crook. Crime does pay, however, and handsomely, for the attorneys who produce the National Crime-Sin Show.

All deities and demons, all heavens and hells are internal.

question authority

Think for yourself. Question authority.

I only had to drop acid once to know that Timothy Leary was right about questioning authority. Motorcycling is like life. There's nothing solid about it. Something not even the asphalt under your tires. Time on a motorcycle is unlike time spent anywhere else. There are moments lost in the landscape, seconds devoted solely to balance, and long stretches spent spiraling inward.

The ocean, for me, is what LSD was to Timothy Leary. He claimed the hallucinogen is to reality what a microscope is to biology, affording a perception of reality that was not before accessible. Shamans and seekers eat mushrooms, drink potions, lick toads, inhale smoke, and snort snuff to transport their minds to realms they cannot normally experience. (Humans are not alone in this endeavor; species from elephants to monkeys purposely eat fermented fruit to get drunk; dolphins were recently discovered sharing a certain toxic puffer fish, gently passing it from one cetacean snout to another, as people would pass a joint, after which the dolphins seem to enter a trancelike state.)

I was ovulated, fertilized, and born in the 20th century. I can’t wipe out my whole personal background, or the fact that almost everyone I talk to today is brain-damaged by our education. I think American education makes us hopeless symbol addicts. It’s designed to produce docile automatons. But it’s going to take years before you can urge young people to drop out of school without appearing to be an eccentric or a mad-man.

She didn't mind the streaks of color I'd left on her fur. Unlike me, she didn't see it as a mess.

revelatory

Timothy Leary declared that personal computers had become the new LSD and years later revised his famous mantra to proclaim, “Turn on, boot up, jack in.

a man--venerable, with a white beard, or on a cross, or as a baby, or a sage seated in the full lotus position. Are these not limiting incarnations, temporary housings, of the great energy process?

There are three processes involved that every spiritual teacher has passed on to humanity for the past thousand years. First, look within, glory in the revelation. Second. then express it in acts of glorification on the outside and third, detach yourself from the current tribe.   After you turn on, don’t spend the rest of your life contemplating the inner wonders. Begin immediately expressing your revelation in acts of beauty. That’s very much a part of our religion—the glorification, the acting out, the expression of what you have learned.

Criminals/sinners-from the Black Panthers to FBI chiefs and White House Officials-appear on the scene, make their play, and get dragged off stage, but the lawyers remain, administrating and profiting from the action and booking the next show.

Close your eyes and listen... and learn that it's the oldest message of love and peace and laughter, and trust in God and don't worry, trust in the future, and don't fight; and trust in your kids, and don't worry because it's all beautiful and right.

I believe that a new philosophy will be created by those who were born after Hiroshima which will dramatically change the human condition. It will have these characteristics: (1) It will be scientific in essence and science-fiction in style. (2) It will be based on the expansion of consciousness, understanding and control of the nervous system, producing a quantum leap in intellectual efficiency and emotional equilibrium. (3) Politically it will stress individualism, decentralization of authority, a Iive-and-let-Iive tolerance of difference, local option and a mind-your-own-business libertarianism. (4) It will continue the trend towards open sexual expression and a more honest, realistic acceptance of both the equality of and the magnetic difference between the sexes. The mythic religious symbol will not be a man on a cross but a man-woman pair united in higher love communion. (5) It will seek revelation and Higher Intelligence not in formal rituals addressed to an anthropomorphic deity, but within natural processes, the nervous system, the genetic code, and without, in attempts to effect extra-planetary communication. (6) It will include practical, technical neurological psychological procedures for understanding and managing the intimations of union-immortality implicit in the dying process. (7) The emotional tone of the new philosophy will be hedonic, aesthetic, fearless, optimistic, humorous, practical, skeptical, hip. We are now experiencing a quiescent preparatory waiting period. Everyone knows something is going to happen. The seeds of the Sixties have taken root underground. The blossoming is to come.

As for Crowley, his reputation grew and grew. His gospel of “Do what thou wilt”—modified and transformed—appealed strongly to the socially liberated sixties generation. He resurfaced as a countercultural icon; his photograph appeared on the cover of the Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and his ideas influenced everyone from Dr. Timothy Leary to the rock group Led Zeppelin. He was hailed as a prophet before his time for bringing together eastern and western esoteric traditions, and although he could never quite escape the “Satanist” tag that he had gained in the Edwardian newspapers, this ensured his present-day popularity.

Revolution without revelation is tyranny.

To fathom hell or soar angelic/Just take a pinch of psychedelic.

All of this educational work was enormously successful. Millions of Americans accepted the "head philosophy," the belief that Ego and "Social Reality" are neural fictions.

This is the oldest form of living communication; the brotherhood of breath.

The underlying solution - repeated again and again - is to recognize that your brain is producing the visions. They do not exist. Nothing exists except as your consciousness gives it life.

We were thinking far-out history thoughts at Harvard...believing that it was a time for visions, knowing that America had run out of philosophy, that a new empirical, tangible meta-physics was needed.

Just as every Hollywood picture is "put together" by producers, who are always in tight control of the enterprise and reap the lion's share of the profits, so is the Outlaw Industry managed by lawyers.

Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites and says yes. It is, in fact, the great exciter of the Yes function in man,” James wrote of the alcoholic high. “To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and of literature. . . . The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole.

Nisker wasn’t really in the mood for an LSD trip. After all, he was in a car and heading toward the Oakland–San Francisco Bay Bridge. Then Scoop started thinking to himself. Well, the guy is the “high priest of LSD.” What else can I do? When else am I going to get a chance like this? So, Nisker dropped the acid. By the time they got to the radio station Scoop was so stoned he couldn’t put two words together. But Leary sat down behind the microphone and just let out all this beautiful, flowing prose. He was his usual glib, funny self. Nisker was melting into the floor, mumbling to himself. But there was Leary, totally in charge of himself—so charismatic, so facile. What a performance!

The essence of "new" is, of course, the modern version of Roman coliseum shows and gladiator combats. American civilization, for certain explicit biblical reasons, apparently requires that its leaders, its political heroes be publicly sacrificed.

One of the many curious aspects of American culture is the absence of an "upper" class, a "high" society, an hedonic aristocracy. America since Lincoln has been a heavy, feet-on-the-ground John Wayne society. The triumph of mediocrity and practicality.

It will enable each person to realize that he is not a game-playing robot put on this planet to be given a Social Security number and to be spun on the assembly line of school, college, career, insurance, funeral, goodbye. . . . Man is going to have to explore the infinity of inner space, to discover the terror and adventure and ecstasy that lie within us all.

Music brought the war in Vietnam right into our bedrooms. Songs we heard from America made us interested in politics; they were history lessons in a palatable, exciting form. We demonstrated against the Vietnam and Korean wars, discussed sexual liberation, censorship and pornography and read books by Timothy Leary, Hubert Selby Jr (Last Exit to Brooklyn) and Marshall McLuhan because we'd heard all these people referred to in songs or interviews with musicians. [...] Music, politics, literature, art all crossed over and fed into each other. There were some great magazines around too [...] Even though we couldn’t afford to travel, we felt connected to other countries because ideas and events from those places reached us through music and magazines.

By the time I first encountered Jung, as a teenager in the early 1970s, this was certainly happening. Jung may not have been accepted by mainstream intellectuals—Freud was their psychologist of choice—but he had certainly been adopted by the counterculture. When I first read Memories, Dreams, Reflections—his “so-called autobiography”—Jung was part of a canon of “alternative” thinkers that included Hermann Hesse, Alan Watts, Carlos Castaneda, D. T. Suzuki, R. D. Laing, Aldous Huxley, Jorge Luis Borges, Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary, Madame Blavatsky, and J. R. R. Tolkien, to name a few. That his face appeared on the cover of the Beatles’ famous Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album, in a crowd of other unorthodox characters, was endorsement enough.

Thanks to anti-Leary books such as Robert Greenfield’s Timothy Leary: A Biography (2006), psychedelic research currently follows a ‘blame Leary’ narrative. The negative public perception of psychedelics and psychedelic researchers, this argument goes, is solely down to the terrible irresponsible behaviour of this one man. If it wasn’t for Leary, psychedelics would be a respected form of academic study and the drugs would be legally used in therapeutic situations. When Leary’s ideas are utilised, such as his crucial theory of set and setting, he is typically not credited. The positive cultural aspects of the 1960s psychedelic explosion are ignored, and so is the issue of how many of these psychedelic researchers would have even heard of these drugs had it not been for Leary’s evangelical crusade.

When longing overtook them, they drew together and made the most intense and tender love Sarah had ever known. She was a freshly exposed nerve in the bleeding heart of Christ. He was devout in his reverent passion as her healer. Their love was a hallelujah chorus, a quiet prayer of exaltation, a holy union in the moonlight before dawn. It was here in this crystalline space that Sarah and Johnny took each other the true way to God, or they found God in each other, whichever it was.

Today, reality is created mainly by television and movies. The media producers have become a priest-caste who guide, direct, and manage reality. "I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more . . . " "Don't follow leaders! Watch your parking meters!" When Bob Dylan sang these lines in the 1960s, he was performing philosophy, transmitting powerful new ideas for which his mass audience was ready. Dylan thus triggered off heretical, sinful acts of resistance to authority, rejection of militarism, refusal to join the mechanical factory culture.

Timothy Leary was not so wide of the mark when he said that we must go out of our minds (abstract values) to come to our senses (concrete values). For coming to our senses must, above all, be the experience of our own existence as living organisms rather than “personalities,” like characters in a play or a novel acting out some artificial plot in which the persons are simply masks for a conflict of abstract ideas or principles. Man as an organism is to the world outside like a whirlpool is to a river: man and world are a single natural process, but we are behaving as if we were invaders and plunderers in a foreign territory. For when the individual is defined and felt as the separate personality or ego, he remains unaware that his actual body is a dancing pattern of energy that simply does not happen by itself. It happens only in concert with myriads of other patterns—called animals, plants, insects, bacteria, minerals, liquids, and gases. The definition of a person and the normal feeling of “I” do not effectively include these relationships. You say, “I came into this world.” You didn’t; you came out of it, as a branch from a tree. So

So Harry Haller, the Steppenwolf, had his psychedelic session, discovered instead of one reality, infinite realities within the brain. He is admitted into the select group of those who have passed through the verbal curtain into other modes of consciousness. He has joined the elite brotherhood of the illuminati. And then what... Throughout the ages mystical groups have formed to provide social structure and support for transcendence. The magic circle. Often secret, always persecuted by the sleepwalking majority, these cults move quietly in the background shadows of history. The problem is, of course, the amount of structure surrounding the mystic spark. To much to soon, and you have a priesthood ritual on your hands. And the flame is gone. To little, and the function is lost; the interpersonal unity drifts into gaseous anarchy. The bohemians. The beats. The lonely arrogates.

impersonal, slowly swelling movement

TIMOTHY LEARY AND THE INTERPERSONAL CIRCUMPLEX

It is my obligation as a gentleman to protect philosophers.

Now I know I use the term “revolution” cavalierly and I do not mean to diminish true revolutions like the American, Cuban, or Chinese revolutions. After all our leaders were Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey and Wavy Gravy, not exactly in the same league as George Washington, Che Guevara and Mao Tse Tung. Our revolution was not against oppression and poverty but rather for paradise. Also to ask a revolutionary to put everything at risk and fight, perhaps to their death, for freedom is quite different than the sacrifices we were asked to make. We were asked to drop out of the work world, travel around unfettered, take consciousness-altering drugs, and make love to a lot of people. This was not a hard revolution to join.

The Weather Underground's revolution is sputtering. ... All they managed to do is blow up a bunch of government commodes. FBI agents are laughing at them, calling them "the terrible toilet bombers." There is even a mocking ditty: "Weatherman, Weatherman, what do you do? Blow up a toilet every year or two.

You are a ghost, like you were a ghost before because you were never here, but everywhere at once, i wish i could talk like my eyes can see, word you with what i smell, knock your socks off with aromas of a tiny metropolis tourists only catch glimpses of at the Wharf. A thousand LSD trips and middle-aged folks remembering Timothy Leary playing like a Pied Piper leading them all off to jump off the pier.

Megalomania is a common reaction to extensive LSD use, for once you are aware that your reality was created by yourself for your own benefit, it is hard to avoid getting a God complex.

As Baba Ram Dass (his ‘spiritual name’), Richard Alpert explained human attachment as a ‘clue that there’s work to be done’ – meaning that territoriality was remastered by him as dysfunctional and primitive, and as requiring the curative attentions of a guru, ordinarily an older man.

The culturally facilitated association of femininity with masochism was celebrated during the Psychedelic Revolution.

El ácido lisérgico, descubierto en Suiza por Albert Hofmann y propagado por el resto del mundo por un profesor de Harvard, Timothy Leary, ya estaba prohibido, pero seguía siendo indetectable.

The handbook for dropping acid then was The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, by Harvard professors Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner.

Clark suggests that saint, at least as William James defines the word, may be a better label for Timothy Leary. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, James speaks of saints having “a feeling of being in a wider life than that of this world’s selfish interests; and a conviction, not merely intellectual, but as it were sensible, of an Ideal Power.

Leary’s first psychedelic trip, on psilocybin, occurred in Mexico in 1960, as he approached his fortieth birthday. Returning to Harvard, he changed the subject of his research from interpersonal communication and what he termed “existential transactions” to an exploration of the possible uses of psychedelics for transforming personality and behavior.

quantifiable, and rational modes of thought has profoundly alienated us from the directly sensorial and mimetic forms of knowing and relating maintained by indigenous cultures, allowing us to treat the natural world as something separate from ourselves. The entheogenic experience can temporarily reconnect the modern individual with lost participatory modes of awareness that may induce a greater sensitivity to his or her physical surroundings, beside raising a psychic periscope into the marginalized realms of mythological archetype and imaginative vision.

You are only as young as the last time you changed your mind.’—Timothy Leary.

At the sensory level I am the divine receiving station...a two-legged, trembling-tissue, Jodrell Bank radar telescope, dancing, grumbling, sniffling Geiger counter" "But there's an added feature. Each generation, I...return. Each time carried onstage, blinking, puking, bawling, bewildered by the bizarre novelty of each new drama, untutored in the language of the new script (did she say her name was Mommie?)

the free consciousness has only to hear and remember the teachings in order to be liberated. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is ostensibly a book describing the experiences to be expected at the moment of death, during an intermediate phase lasting forty-nine (seven times seven) days, and during rebirth into another bodily frame.

If I were fashioning my own killer argument against the digital revolution, I’d begin with the observation that both Newt Gingrich and Timothy Leary are crazy about it.

Eastern psychology, by contrast, offers us a long history of detailed observation and systematization of the range of human consciousness along with an enormous literature of practical methods for controlling and changing consciousness.

Judged against the criterion of the use of available fact, the greatest psychologists of our century are William James and Carl Jung.5 Both of these men avoided the narrow paths of behaviorism and experimentalism. Both fought to preserve experience and consciousness as an area of scientific research. Both kept open to the advance of scientific theory and both refused to shut off eastern scholarship from consideration.