Beverly Jean Jenden-Riedlinger, Timothy Leary, and Thomas Riedlinger, 1995
Farewell/Greetings to Timothy Leary
THOMAS RIEDLINGER
Dear Timothy:
Yesterday I heard again that song which says you’re not dead but only “outside looking in.” In truth you’ve been dead now for over a year. Since I know that you didn’t believe that your personal consciousness was going to survive your body’s death, it would seem that the Timothy Leary game has finally come to an end without entering overtime. Yet here I am, writing this letter to you on a lovely clear morning in early December 1997. I’m sitting alone on a beach near Olympia, Washington, my back against a driftwood log with Puget Sound glittering blue straight ahead and an evergreen forest behind me. It is warmer than normal for this time of year, with a gentle breeze rising and falling like breath all around. There is a pleasant smell of moss and leafy loam and mushrooms mingled with the salt sea tang. In this cradle of peace and contentment I let my mind wander, remembering you.
“Let’s have some fun,” you used to say at the start of new projects. I distinctly remember the fun that we had in July 1993 at the annual conference of the Association for Humanistic Psychology in San Diego, when you and I and two of the students who worked with you at Harvard, George Litwin and Gunther Weil, presented a panel discussion on your early work in psychology. Afterward, back at your home in Beverly Hills, I asked if it really were true, as you’d written in Changing My Mind, Among Others, that your life had been “a faithful, dutiful follow-up” to the work of Gustav Theodor Fechner. You answered yes, for the reason that Fechner, a nineteenth-century physics professor in Germany, had pioneered the scientific field of psychophysics, which inspired your own work in neurophysics. Furthermore, Fechner, like you, had a midlife mystical experience that altered his view of the world forever. But while yours was induced by ingesting sacred mushrooms, his resulted from infirmity. Almost blinded by an optical experiment in 1840, Fechner languished for over a year with his eyes bandaged in a darkened room. One afternoon in October 1842 he impulsively tore off the bandages, rose from his bed, and went outside into his garden. What he saw there seemed, he later wrote in Nanna, or the Soul-Life of Plants,
like a glimpse beyond the boundary of human experience. Every flower beamed upon me with a peculiar clarity, as though into the outer light it was casting a light of its own. To me the whole garden seemed transfigured, as though it were not I but nature that had just arisen. . . . I thought I saw an inward light as the source of the outward clarity of the flowers, and within that the spiritual production of colors which in the flowers were merely outwardly translucent. I had no doubt then that I saw the shining of the plant souls, and I thought: So it must seem in the garden which lies behind the walls of this world; and all the earth as well as each body in the earth, is a fence which separates outsiders from this garden.
I asked your opinion of Fechner’s most popular book, On Life After Death. To my surprise you said you’d never read it. On returning home to Boston I sent you a copy. What you thought of it I never heard. But when I and my future wife, Beverly, stopped by to see you in November 1995, about six months before your death, I noticed it shelved with a few other books within reach of your work station. The letter I sent you along with that book included the following passage from William James’s introduction to an English edition of On Life After Death in which he describes Fechner’s afterlife theory:
Movements can be superimposed and compounded, the smaller on the greater, as wavelets upon waves. This is true in the mental as well as the physical sphere. Speaking physiologically, we may say that a general wave of consciousness rises out of a subconscious background, and that certain portions of it catch the emphasis, as wavelets catch the light. The whole process is conscious, but the emphatic wavetips of the consciousness are of such contracted span that they are momentarily insulated from the rest. They realize themselves apart, as a twig might realize itself, and forget the parent tree. Such an insulated bit of experience leaves, however, when it passes away, a memory of itself. The residual and subsequent consciousness becomes different for its having occurred. On the physical side we say that the brain process that corresponded to it altered permanently the future mode of action of the brain.
Now, according to Fechner, our bodies are just wavelets on the surface of the earth. We grow upon the earth as leaves grow upon a tree, and our consciousness arises out of the whole earth-consciousness, just as within our consciousness an emphatic experience arises, and makes us forget the whole background of experience without which it could not have come. But as it sinks again into that background it is not forgotten. On the contrary, it is remembered and, as remembered, leads a freer life, for it now combines, itself a conscious idea, with the innumerable, equally conscious ideas of other remembered things. Even so is it when we die, with the whole system of our outlived experiences. During the life of our body, although they were always elements in the more general enveloping earth-consciousness, yet they were themselves unmindful of the fact. Now, impressed on the whole earth-mind as memories, they lead the life of ideas there, and realize themselves no longer in isolation, but along with all the similar vestiges left by other human lives, entering with these into new combinations, affected anew by experiences of the living, and affecting the lives of the living in their turn.
Fechner’s afterlife theory evolved from his concept of souls. By his definition, a soul is “a unified being which, in our case as in every other, is evident only to itself, luminous to itself, to every other eye obscure, including in itself at least sense perceptions, above which, in proportion as it rises in the scale of consciousness, higher and higher relations develop.” (This and all following Fechner quotes are from On Life After Death.) The soul of a human being is “the conscious principle and bond of a circle of bodily activities which . . . [in] sleep sink below the threshold above which consciousness shines,” and on waking “rise above it.” It is not strictly identical with consciousness but rather appears to experience consciousness differently above and below the threshold. Below the threshold it participates with all other terrestrial souls, including those of plants and animals as well as human beings, in comprising the soul of the earth. In Fechner’s opinion, the souls of human beings when their bodies die disperse into the earth soul. Echoing through nature as a kind of spiritual waveform, they induce new relationships with other souls living and dead by intersecting them and causing what today we know as interference patterns, a component of holography. In this state, according to Fechner, we achieve immortality. For in life a man (or woman) experiences nature “through the windows of his senses, and draws fragmentary knowledge of it as in little buckets.” But after death,
when his bodily frame sinks into decay, the spirit, fettered and encumbered no longer, will roam throughout nature in unbound liberty. Then he will feel the waves of light and sound not only as they strike his eyes and ears, but as they glide along in the oceans of air and of ether; he will feel not only the breathing of the wind and the heaving of the sea against his body bathing in them, but float along through the air and sea himself; he will no longer walk among verdant trees and fragrant meadows, but consciously pervade the fields, and forests, and men as they walk about them.
James’s own thoughts on the subject appear in his book-length essay Human Immortality. In it he acknowledges Fechner’s great influence on him, as you did in Changing My Mind, Among Others. Others haven’t been so generous. Many Fechnerian concepts have been surfacing in recent years without being credited to him, in areas such as consciousness theory, morphogenetic field theory and especially the Gaia theory of planetary consciousness. Sooner or later these oversights are bound to be corrected. I’ll leave that for others to do, as it remains for future scholars to investigate and deconstruct the basic correspondence between Fechner’s psychophysical ideas and your neural circuit theory.
In the meantime, Fechner’s writings are sufficient in themselves to help alleviate my sadness at your death. That is why I came here, to this beautiful place on a beautiful day, my heart open to nature, to experience your presence in the earth soul as it penetrates my own. As Emerson put it so well in his infamous Harvard Divinity School Address of 1838: “We mark with light in the memory the few interviews we have had . . . with souls that made our souls wiser; that spoke what we thought; that told us what we knew; that gave us leave to be what we inly were.”
So farewell, Timothy—and greetings! Our paths will intersect again, I’m sure.