NINA GRABOI
My friendship with Timothy Leary began in 1966 when I gave him my paper called Evolution in Search of a New Breed of Man (unpublished). “We’ve seen the same thing,” he said when he handed it back. What we had both seen was that humanity was presently making a giant leap forward in evolution, and that the spiritual element plays a leading role in this leap. Like myself, Timothy leaned strongly toward Eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism.
In those days, that is, the ’60s, Timothy, the High Priest of psychedelics, was surrounded by an aura of almost saintly proportions. The hippies saw him as their prophet—the prophet of a New Age without wars, hype, cruelty, and deception, and they were inspired by his emphasis on the spirit. When he appeared on stage, his white-clad figure evoked awe, reverence, and love in his young audience whom he told to think for themselves and to ignore authority. To them, his voice seemed to come directly from God. There was a driven aspect to his heroic stance. Undoubtedly he knew that he was playing with fire, but he seemed to have to do what he did.
Shortly after I met him, I became a regular weekend visitor at Millbrook. While I shared his optimism about the future, I was ambivalent about the value of his widely broadcast message regarding the use of LSD. Though he never failed to add a warning in his lectures, I was appalled by some cases of genuine mental breakdowns due to the use of psychedelics. My own inclination lay much more in the direction of Huxley, Heard, Osmond, and others who wanted to see their use confined to an elite of artists, writers, scientists, and theologians. But if, as Timothy believed, LSD was a tool of evolution, then the occasional victim was regrettable, but unavoidable. So when Timothy asked me to head the New York Center for the League of Spiritual Discovery, I accepted because I felt that the Center, by offering information and education about the use and misuse of psychedelics, could minimize their ill effects.
Timothy took a lively interest in the Center and gave free weekly talks to an avid audience. We developed a pleasant working relationship and became good friends.
Shortly after the Millbrook community dispersed in the spring of ’67, the Center closed its doors due to lack of funds. I moved to Woodstock and lost contact with Timothy and his lovely wife Rosemary.
After my move to California in the late ’70s, I saw Timothy again quite frequently. By then he had disowned his earlier Hindu and Buddhist leanings and was striving to be the scientist again. He took up space migration, computers, cryogenics, and nanotechnology, but his abiding passion was the brain. Despite my often-expressed objection to his concept that the flesh-and-blood brain is the seat of all mental activity and not, as I see it, merely the instrument of a nonmaterial mind, the love, respect, and regard that we had for each other never diminished.
The letter that follows expresses my thoughts about his ideas on spiritual matters.
Dear Tim,
Finding myself in disagreement with some of the opinions you expressed in your last lecture, I can’t resist writing you.
You say that all occult and spiritual metaphors are pre-scientific and assume that all intelligence is static. But “the path,” as it appears to me, is an ever ascending spiral leading to greater and greater understanding and mastery over the material and nonmaterial world (an arbitrary distinction, since they are both one). If this is not intelligence increase, I don’t know what is. However, our definitions of intelligence probably differ.
You call the desire for utopia childish and infantile; I believe that it is part and parcel of the human psyche and will eternally find expression, here or in space. It can no more be called infantile than the thrust into space itself; the archetypal longing for a state of harmony with self, fellow beings, and environment seems to me to be genetically programmed into us, or perhaps less mechanistically, to refer to a reality we once knew and forgot.
I admire your courage and infallible intuition for the next step in evolution. But your put-down of all you call “pre-scientific” appears to me as narrow as Ram Dass’s adherence to traditional Eastern thought. What I find interesting is that you seem unaware that today’s advanced science is merging into the ancient wisdom; occultism, mysticism, and physics are coming up with the same findings in many areas. It seems clear to me that the present era is above all characterized by the synthesis that is taking place between East and West, left brain and right brain, male and female, past and future, heart and mind, and that the exclusive focus on either polar extreme is unbalanced. When I last saw you, you laughingly rejected any talk of an apocalypse. In my view, the signs of impending global disaster are too clear to be overlooked. This is not necessarily a pessimistic view, for it seems clear to me that there is a direct connection between this and your genetically programmed thrust for space. What happened to our hope of the 1960s to be liberated from the robot aspects of the psyche? Are we to become merely better robots in the Brave New Space World you foresee?
My respect for your intelligence is enormous. If I can take issue with your so firmly stated views, it is because I can’t really believe your wholesale rejection of the wisdom embedded in the “naive” metaphors of mysticism. Has science come up with a simpler and more elegant statement than AS ABOVE, SO BELOW?
The influence of the psychedelic ’60s on today’s culture can hardly be overlooked. Yoga, meditation, vegetarianism, ecology—these and many other features that were introduced by the hippie subculture of the ’60s have gone mainstream by the ’90s. I believe that Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, aka Ram Dass, were the two most important men of the twentieth century, just as the ’60s was its most important decade. Thanks to Timothy, an unprecedented number of people worldwide experienced nonordinary realities and had a glimpse of eternity. And then Ram Dass came and taught them the ancient wisdom he had learned from his guru in the East. Between them, they opened wide the doors of perception that had been closed so long. I believe that they were spearheads, messengers, vanguards of a higher, better, kinder, more evolved human race.