Timothy Leary and Paul Krassner
A Game of Mind Tennis with Timothy Leary
PAUL KRASSNER
So, Tim, here’s a toast to thirty years of friendship.”
“And still counting. We’ve been playing mind tennis for thirty years. Isn’t that great?”
“The one thing in countless conversations we’ve had that sticks out in my mind is something you once said, that no matter what scientists do, they can decodify the DNA code, layer after layer, but underneath it all, there’s still that mystery. And I’ve enjoyed playing with the mystery. Are you any closer to understanding the mystery, or further from it?”
“Well, Paul, I watch words now. It’s an obsession. I learned it from Marshall McLuhan, of course. A terrible vice. Had it for years, but not actually telling people about it. I watch the words that people use. The medium is the message, you recall. The brain creates the realities she wants. When we see the prisms of these words that come through, we can understand. Do I understand the mystery?”
“I guess the ultimate mystery is inconceivable by definition. But have you come any closer to understanding it?”
“Understand? Stand under! I’m overstood, I’m understood.”
“The older I get, the deeper the mystery is.”
“Let’s get to a specific mystery. The mystery of you. Because everybody sees you through their own perceptions. How do you think you have been most misunderstood?”
“Well, Paul, everyone gets the Timothy Leary they deserve. Everyone has their point of view. And everyone’s point of view is absolutely valid for them. To track me, you have to keep moving the camera, or you’ll have just one tunnel point of view. Sermonizing there. Don’t impale yourself on your point of view.”
“Some people know you only through that ’60s slogan, ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out.’ I think a lot of people don’t really understand what you meant by dropping out.”
“Everybody understood. Just look at the source.”
“All right, here’s words. Fifteen years ago at a futurist conference you called yourself a Neo-Technological Pagan. What did you mean by that?”
“Neo has all the connotations of the futurist stuff that’s coming along. Technological denotes using machines, using electricity or light to create reality. There are two kinds of technology. The machine—diesel, oil, metal, industrial technology. And then the neo-technology, which uses light. Electricity. Photons. Electrons. Pagan is great. I love the word. Pagan is basically humanist. I grew up in a Catholic zone, and pagan was the worst thing you could say. Of course, I’d never met a pagan in Springfield, Massachusetts, going to a Catholic school. ‘Where do these pagans hang out? I wanna be one.’”
“Was there any specific thing that made you turn from Catholicism?”
“Yeah, Paul, there was a period, I know exactly what it was, I was fifteen or sixteen, I was being sexually molested in my high school and actually totally seduced by a wonderful, sexy girl, much more experienced than I. And, whew! She opened it up! The great mystery of sex. Wow! At that time I was going routinely to confession on Saturday afternoon. But I had a date with Rosemary that night. Sitting there in the dark, absolutely, totally hypocritical! They want you to confess and repent while I have every intention in the world of being seduced by this girl tonight.”
“The glands overshadowed the philosophy.”
“The glands? Shit, Paul, that statement is very mechanical.”
“I’m a recovering romantic.”
“Because you used the word gland? Glands are very interesting. People don’t talk about glands very much.”
“Talk about machines then. What’s the relationship between acid and technology?”
“Well, LSD is one of the many drugs which are based on neuroactive plants. Peyote and [fungus] on rye. Those crazed experiences which happened in the Middle Ages, what did they call them? The madness of crowds, simply because of some plant they had chewed. The point is that the human brain is equipped with these receptor sites for various kinds of vegetables that alter consciousness. So our brains evolving over fifty million years have these receptor sites. The reason why certain people like to take these drugs is because these receptor sites activate pleasure centers. Now this was not a mistake. The DNA didn’t fuck up. The devil didn’t do it. There was obviously some reason for those receptor sites that would get you off on peyote, psilocybin. And there are dozens of compelling receptor sites and drugs we don’t even know about.”
“In the changing counterculture, then, do you see a continuity from psychoactive drugs to cyberspace?”
“Of course. It’s a fact. Every generation developed a new counterculture. In the Roaring ’20s, jazz, liquor. In the ’60s, the hippies with psychedelics.”
“The counterculture now, it’s not either/or, it’s not necessarily drugs or computers. I’m sure some do them simultaneously. But how do you think that the drug experience has changed the computer experience?”
“I did not imply that you can’t do both. The brain is equipped to be altered by these receptor sites. So we can see these receptor sites overwhelm the mind. The word processing system. Then suddenly you can take psychedelic plants that put you in different places. I’m being too technical. But there’s an analogy between receptor sites for marijuana and for LSD or opium, which activate the brain and the way we can boot up different areas of our computers. Back in the 1960s we didn’t know much about the brain. I was saying back in 1968, ‘You have to go out of your mind to use your head.’ But ‘head’ simply is an old-fashioned way of saying ‘brain.’ We didn’t know about brain receptor sites. But now, we can use biochemicals to boot up the kind of altered realities you want in your brain. So you smoke marijuana because it gets you in a mellow mood. Grass is good for the appetite. That’s operating your brain. But now it’s specific: ‘Use your head by operating your brain.’ That’s the new concept. Use your head! That’s hot. Operate your brain because the brain designs realities.”
“Do you see a connection between the war on drugs and the attempt to censor the Internet?”
“Oh, absolutely, yes, Paul. The censors want to control. We have to have people to impose to keep any society going. I don’t knock rules, ritual. We have to have them. The controllers censor anything that gives the power to change reality to the individual. You can’t have that happen.”
“My theory is that the UFO sightings and all the people who claim to have been abducted by aliens are really just a cover-up for secret government experiments in mind control.”
“That’s a very popular theory, Paul. I get like ten mimeographed letters a day about UFOs and the government. Boy, the governments are really fucking busy, trying to program our minds.”
“And of course those UN soldiers in Bosnia can hardly wait to get back in their black helicopters so they can attack Michigan and Arizona.”
“I’m happy about the UFO rumors. I’m glad because at least people are doing something on their own. The sixty-year-old farm wife in Dakota thinks she’s been taken up and serially raped by UFO people. Wow! They came all the way from another planet a thousand light years away to get this lovely grandmother and pull her socks and have an orgy with her. Wow!”
“Or at least an anal probe. To your knowledge, is the government still doing experiments in mind control? We know they used to, with the MKULTRA programs and all. Do you know if they’re still at it? I can’t imagine they would’ve stopped.”
“G. Gordon Liddy would give you the current CIA line. Liddy says: ‘Yes, it is true. When we learned that the Chinese Communists were using LSD, the CIA naturally cornered the whole world market from Sandoz LSD. They didn’t realize that LSD comes in a millionth of a gram. The CIA found LSD to be unpredictable.’ Well, no shit, Gordon! Can you name one accurate CIA prediction? The fall of the Shah? The rise of the Ayatollah?”
“What did you think of Liddy getting that free speech award from the National Association of Talk Show Hosts after he said that if the ATF comes after you, they’re wearing bulletproof vests so you should aim for the head or groin?”
“That’s pure Liddy. He’s basically a romantic comedian.”
“When you were debating him, if you had listened to his advice retroactively when he led the raid on Millbrook, then later you would’ve been on stage debating yourself, because he would’ve been shot in the head and groin by somebody, if his advice had been followed.”
“He was a government agent entering our bedroom at midnight. We had every right to shoot him. But I’ve never owned a weapon in my life. And I have no intention of owning a weapon, although I was a master sharpshooter at West Point on the Garand, the Springfield rifle and the machine gun. I was a Howitzer expert. I know how to operate these lethal gadgets, but I have never had and never will have a gun around.”
“But when you escaped from prison, you said, ‘Arm yourselves and shoot to live. To shoot a genocidal robot policeman in defense of life is a sacred act.’”
“Yeah! I also said ‘I’m armed and dangerous.’ I got that directly from Angela Davis. I thought it was just funny to say that.”
“I thought it was the party line from the Weather Underground.”
“Well, yeah, I had a lot of arguments with Bernadine Dohrn.”
“They had their own rhetoric. She even praised Charlie Manson.”
“The Weather Underground was amusing. They were brilliant, brilliant, Jewish, Chicago kids. They had class and dash and flash and smash. Bernadine was praising Manson for sticking a fork in a victim’s stomach. She was just being naughty.”
“She was obviously violating a taboo. What are the taboos that are waiting to be violated today?”
“There is one taboo, the oldest taboo and the most powerful—I’ve been writing about it and thinking about it for thirty years. The concept of death is something that people do not want to face. The doctors and the priests and the politicians have made it into something terrible, terrible, terrible. You’re a victim! If you accept the notion of death, you’ve signed up to be the ultimate victim.”
“Is that why you’ve announced publicly that you have inoperable prostate cancer? Friends knew it but . . .”
“I actually have been planning my terminal graduation party for twenty years. Of course, I’m a follower of Socrates, who was one of the greatest counterculture comic philosophers in history. He took hemlock.”
“The Hemlock Society was named after that.”
“I’ve been a member of the Hemlock Society for many years. They talk about self-deliverance. That’s the biggest decision you can make. You couldn’t choose how and when and with whom you were born.”
“Although there are people who say you can.”
“All right, well, go for it. But for those of us who don’t have that option . . .”
“Ram Dass even once said that a fetus that gets aborted knew it didn’t want to be born so it chose parents who wouldn’t carry it to term.”
“Richard’s so politically correct. Isn’t that fabulous?”
“Are you planning to do what Aldous Huxley did, which was to make the journey on acid?”
“That’s an option, yeah.”
“Do you believe in any kind of afterlife?”
“Well, I have left an enormous archive covering sixty years of writing, around three hundred audio-videos. It’s being stored away. And I belong to two cryonics groups, so I have the option of freezing my brain.”
“By afterlife, I didn’t mean the products of your consciousness so much as your consciousness itself.”
“My consciousness is a product of my brain. How can I know about my mind unless I express thought?”
“Obviously there are people who believe in the standard Heaven and Hell and Purgatory. I’m assuming that you don’t believe in that kind of afterlife.”
“They’re useful metaphors. I must be in Purgatory now, huh?” Occasionally I have a pop of Heaven. That’s not a bad metaphor. Of course we realize that Hell is totally self-induced.”
“On earth, you mean.”
“Well, wherever you are. What do you think about that? Do you believe in life after death and all that? What’s your theory?”
“That you are eaten by worms and just disappear, or you’re cremated and your ashes . . .”
“Wait, now, Paul, you have your choice of being eaten by worms or barbecued. Or you can be frozen. You don’t have to be eaten by worms. You don’t have to be microwaved. I’m going to leave some drops of my blood, which has my DNA, in a lot of places. I’ll leave my brain with them. Why not try all these things? Not that I care, Paul, believe me. I have no desperate desire to come back to planet Earth. I think that I have lived one of the most incredibly funny, interesting lives. I’m fascinated to see what’s gonna happen in the next steps. But I have no desire to come back. Most nonscientists don’t realize that in scientific experiments you learn more from your mistakes. So I hope that I will leave a track record of making blunders about the most important thing in life: How to preserve your DNA. I hope someone learns from my mistakes.”
“Are there regrets that you have? Things that you would have done differently, knowing what you know now?”
“I’d play the whole game differently, sure. About a third of the things I’ve done have been absolutely stupid, vulgar, gross. About a third have been just banal. But a third have been brilliant. Like baseball, one out of three, you lead the league. MVP. Most Valuable Philosopher.”
“When I first met you in 1965 you were talking about baseball—and games in general—as a metaphor. How would you describe your game in life? It’s been a conscious game. You didn’t just fall into a pinball machine and get knocked around. Although that happened too.”
“Well, I identified with Socrates at a very young age. The aim of human life is to find out about yourself and know who you are. The purpose of life is to discover yourself.”
“With these big media mergers going on now, giants, Time-Warner-Turner here, Disney-ABC there, how do you think the individual can best fight that?”
“Why fight it? Like Southern railroad merges with Pennsylvania Railroad, so what?”
“But you said before they’re trying to control, so aren’t they trying to control the information?”
“You can’t control information if its packaged in light, in photons and electrons. You simply can’t control digital messages. Zoom, I can go to my Web site and put some stuff up there. Immediately my messages are accessed by people around the world. Not just now but later. The nice thing about cyber communication is that counterculture philosophers who learn about technology can work together, can be faster than committees, politicians, and the like. So I have great confidence. You have to learn to play their game. That’s why I went to West Point and that’s why I went to the Jesuit school, and learned enough so I could play the mindfuck game. I understood and I moved on.”
“Do you mean you knew before you went to West Point, before you went to Jesuit school, that you wanted to learn their tools?”
“I didn’t want to go to either. My parents insisted on that.”
“So you went with that attitude?”
“Yeah. They took me around to about ten Catholic universities and colleges in New England. None of them would accept me because of my high school track record. I was the editor of the school newspaper and I made it a scandal sheet exposing the principal. I had a great uncle who was a big shot in the Catholic Church. He had pull in the Vatican, and he pulled some strings so I got into Jesuit school. I just watched, repelled but fascinated.”
“I don’t believe in reincarnation, but if I did, I would think I knew you in a previous life. But that’s only a metaphor, I don’t believe in it. Do you believe in that concept?”
“In the time of Emerson, the 1830s, there was a counterculture very similar to ours. Self-reliance. Individuality. Emerson took drugs with David Thoreau. Margaret Fuller went to Italy and got the drugs. Later, William James started another counterculture at Harvard. Same thing. Nitrous oxide. Hashish. The Varieties of Religious Experience.”
“Well, have the medial people given you a prognosis on this life, of how many years you have left?”
“I’m seventy-five, and I’ve smoked and lived an active life but not the most healthy life. So my prognosis would be like two to five years. Jeez, I’ll be eighty by then.”
“Are there specific things that you want to accomplish during this period?”
“Our World Wide Web site is a big thing. We’re putting books up there on the screen. You can actually play or perform my books. You can read the first page and my notes. And you can revise my text. We call them living books. As many versions as there are people that want to perform ‘book’ with me. True freedom of the press. The average person can’t publish a book. This way they can.”
“Do you think it’s destiny or chance that one becomes in a leadership position—a change agent, as you call it?”
“Well, destiny implies that you were created that way. No, I think that the individual person has a lot to do with it. Thousands of decisions you make growing up in high school and college to get to a point where you have constructed your reality. You can be a judge or . . .”
“A defendant.”
“I think one of the good side effects of the Simpson trial is that people understand how totally evil lawyers are.”
“You mean defense lawyers and prosecutors?”
“Yes.”
“A friend of mine was scheduled to be on jury duty and they asked him what he thought of prosecutors, and he said, ‘Cops in suits.’ Are you optimistic about the future, even though there’s creeping fascism?”
“The future is measured in terms of individual liberation. You have politicians. And the military wants to hurt other people. That’s all about control. They have to devise excuses for victimizing people. The new generation growing up now uses electronic media. A twelve-year-old kid now, in Tokyo or in Paris, or here, can move more stuff around on screen. She is exposed to more RPM, Realities Per Minute! A thousand times more than her grandfather. There is going to be big change. The greatest thing that’s happening now is the World Wide Web. Signups zoom like this. The telephone is the connection. The modem is the message! You can explore around. If you’re a left-handed, dyslexic, Lithuanian lesbian, you can get in touch with people in Yugoslavia or China who are left-handed, dyslexic lesbians. It’s great! Its gonna break down barriers, create new language. More and more graphic language. And neon grammatics. Anything that’s in print will be in neon.”
“Well that really brings us full cycle. We started talking about words, and now they’ve become neonized.”
“Consider, Paul, death with dignity, dying with elegance. It’s wonderful to see it happening. I talk about orchestrating, managing, and directing my death as a celebration of a wonderful life! That touched a lot of people. They say: ‘My father went through this whole thing. He wanted to die.’ Amazing.”
Timothy Leary and Paul Krassner
“So the response has been that people are glad to know that they aren’t the only ones who are thinking about death.”
“Yeah. People are thinking about dying with class, but we’re afraid to talk about it.”
“What do you want your epitaph to be?”
“What do you think? You write it.”
“Here lies Timothy Leary. A pioneer of inner space. And an Irish leprechaun to the end.”
“Irish leprechaun? You’re being racist! Can’t I be a Jewish leprechaun? What is this Irish leprechaun shit?”
“Okay. Here lies Timothy Leary, a Jewish leprechaun.”
Postscript: Although Leary had decided in 1988 to have his head frozen posthumously, he became disillusioned with cryonics officials shortly before his death, and changed his mind.
“They have no sense of humor,” he said. “I was worried I would wake up in fifty years surrounded by people with clipboards.”
Instead he chose to be cremated and have a small portion of his ashes rocketed into outer space to orbit the Earth. I asked him if the remainder of his ashes could be mixed with marijuana and rolled into joints so that his friends and family could smoke him.
“Yeah,” he replied. “Just don’t bogart me.”