Owsley’s Leary
AN INTERVIEW WITH OWSLEY STANLEY
BY ROBERT FORTE
RF: I just noticed that it was April 17 that we began this conversation—right in the middle of the anniversary of the discovery of LSD—about Timothy Leary. He’s been enjoying a bit of upswing of late. Though pretty much confined to a wheelchair, he has incredible energy and good humor, acting like an adolescent prankster in a seventy-five-year-old decrepit body. He’s beautiful and tormented at the same time. Razor wit. Glad to have this chance to discuss him with you.
Bear: I’m not really sure just what I could say about him that others haven’t already said. We have hung out a bit over the years, but I have always felt that he was so intent on bullshitting me about this or that, that I never saw the guy’s real self. Sorry, but that’s the truth.
Some people are saying that Tim is planning to commit suicide live via his Web site. If this is true, then he has abandoned any pretense of dignity in his pursuit of celebrity. In the Australian newspaper weekend edition today I read an article by Philip Adams who makes mention of the notion that sustained celebrity status has, as its inevitable consequence, permanent brain damage. I’m inclined to agree, and Tim is making an excellent case in point.
RF: Well, he is a public figure, a celebrity. There are certain liabilities of that position. What’s that saying? “The farther the monkey climbs up the tree, the more you can see his ass.”
When he first announced his plan to have his body cryonically preserved he added, “I just want to keep my options open and when it comes down to it I may decide to fuck this freezer business and have them stick me in the blender.” He’s actually becoming more private now, but a few press releases make it seem like an all-day party. It’s really more like an eight-hour party.
Bear: I am pleased to learn that the article about dying on the Internet is fiction. It really doesn’t suit anyone with any degree of enlightenment. The only thing that a man truly owns in this existence is his honor, and a major part of the nature of honor is dignity. All that is the work and is the personal creation of each one of us. Perhaps the greatest work of art, the highest challenge facing an artist in this life, is the work to create himself, and the honor that may become a part of consciousness. I think that is the unconscious goal everyone starts out with, but some of us sorta lose the plot along the way.
RF: Timothy Leary?
Bear: In fact he has, in my estimation, been one of the most destructive actors to appear on the scene since the discovery of the psychedelic effect of the peyote plant by Havelock Ellis and its introduction to Western culture in the 1890s.
RF: He was so vocal and antagonistic. Seems like the whole psychedelic effort has to first clean up after Leary.
Bear: I agree with that, and a mess it has been. An unnecessary effort. I wish that Tim had been able to open up to me. I always approach everyone with a “tabula rasa” in order to learn about them. I guess I wasn’t patient enough.
Maybe I’m a bit strong in my statements about Tim and all the things he has done. I don’t hate him. Actually I am rather fond of him, or at least of whom I feel or hope him to be. I was disappointed in my inability to penetrate the mask he held up to me. I don’t dislike him as a person, I only have a difficult time coming to grips with his motivations. I think of him mostly as a guy who has just missed the bus, and is running around trying to figure out where it has gone. He seemed to come upon where we had just been and think that was “it.” Here’s an example:
One day a few years ago I was in L.A. and I called him up and dropped by. He was distracted and didn’t want to hang out that day because he was in the middle of working on a computer game. “What sort of game?” I wanted to know.
“State of the art,” he said. “It will get people really sucked in and turned on.”
I had a look at what he was doing with the computer nerd he had as an assistant. The screen was filled with text. “Tim,” said I, “computer games aren’t text-based any more, they’re graphics-oriented.”
“Not at all,” said Tim. “Everyone will love this game.”
This was early in his contact with computers, and the standards for games had already gone far beyond the text-intensive sort that he was writing. Nothing ever came of that game, but I couldn’t convince him at the time that the idea was cool but he needed to make something which really was in sync with the “state of the art.” A day late and several dollars short. Sad.
I kept getting the vague feeling that he was being a “hail fellow, well met” sort of person in my presence, and that he really wasn’t all that interested in who I was, or particularly interested in what I had to say. I felt that he was not opening himself much in the interaction. I definitely got the impression, on several occasions when I had a limited amount of time that I could spend with him, that there were more interesting things that he was into doing during that time.
I was born in the year of the Dog in the Chinese cycle, and I do indeed have a strong need to be friends with the people I know. I form attachments. I have a need to do that. I felt that wasn’t all that important to Tim. I could be wrong, I could have misread him; I am quite willing to admit to that. The urge I feel is always toward forming friendships in my life. Can’t help it.
RF: He calls you “God’s Secret Agent” in The Politics of Ecstasy. Says you’re a good bet for “romantic immortality,” a “folk hero of the twenty-first century”: “He was spinning us along an epic poem trip through the levels of creation. He can really tell it. I’ve studied with the wisest sages of our time—Huxley, Heard, Lama Govinda, Sri Krishna Prem, Alan Watts—and I have to say that AOS.3 . . . has the best up-to-date perspective of the divine design I’ve ever listened to.” Says you’re “a mad saint” and writes about you with great passion: “AOS.3 is that rare species, a realized, living, breathing, smelling, bawling, laughing, working, scolding man. A ridiculous, conceited fool, God’s fool, dreaming of ways to make us all happy, to turn us all on, to love us and be loved.”
Bear: That chapter in The Politics of Ecstasy is a fictionalized account produced as a sort of extract of a lot of meetings, a sort of digest in the terms of what he was trying to say in that particular book. It does show his attitude toward me, however. I though it a bit of somewhat self-serving fiction at the time that I read the book.
RF: A healthy society needs people like Leary to incite chaos, break down dysfunctional patterns.
Bear: I don’t disagree with you about Tim’s compulsive iconoclastic bent, but I differ with you about the reasoning behind it. I don’t see any purpose in being in constant conflict with everything, and espousing nothing. The impression that it leaves me with is that he will do anything to attract attention to himself: a full-tilt run at celebrityhood. Not because he actually believes that whatever his object of the moment is, is important.
RF: The people at Sandoz and the Swiss Academy of Medicine, among many others, think Leary ruined the chances of this phenomenally important drug, LSD, to work in society.
Bear: This is the “official” stance of the Swiss establishment. Albert Hofmann is ecstatic about the way that acid has spread throughout the world. He was the original Psychedelic Ranger, and he had to work through the scientific community with which he was associated. He was in no way offended by the “esoterics and hippies” using LSD, his only concern was that people not use it to make a lot of money. Later, when the use started to move out into the community at large, the scientific and M.D. people were upset, and still are, because the stuff was no longer the exclusive privilege of their elite group.
The medical and scientific community have only themselves to blame for the loss of access to experimentation with the psychedelics. They stood on the sideline when Senator Tom Dodd and his weasle friend Art Linkletter forced through the legislation. William O. Douglas, too, was taken in by Linkletter. The M.D.’s thought that it would just clean up the streets, but they forgot the lesson of cannabis, didn’t they? Nuts to them! They still would rather whine and act righteous than take any real action to return the class of substances to legality.
The effects that Leary produced were of a minimal value to the psychedelic community as a whole. I don’t agree with the old saw that there is only good publicity. I don’t think that his in-your-face, fuck you kind of approach has put us in a better position today than we would have been if he had been a bit more circumspect. We are much the worse for his actions.
He never seemed to care about the damage that he was doing, even when we told him, which we did on numerous occasions. He always appeared to favor iconoclasm as an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. He certainly is one of those directly responsible for the rapidity with which the laws progressed to the draconian state that we now find them. Perhaps without all his shouting from the rooftops in the loudest voice he could find, things wouldn’t have gotten quite so bad. I am referring to things like the practice of sentencing people on the weight of the filler materials in the doses as if it were all active drug. Such things belong to the realm of emotions, not justice, and the fact that they came to be indicates a very unthinking reaction to the scene. We all knew that the advent of psychedelics was important, but we were also aware of the words of the Kybalion: “The lips of knowledge are closed except to the ears of understanding”—a warning similar to the old saying about pearls and swine.
RF: He cast those pearls everywhere. I saw a cartoon of two pigs looking at some pearls while one of them is saying, “Oh my, what exquisite pearls.”
Bear: Was it a string of pearls?
RF: No, there were just a few scattered on the ground.
Bear: Exactly my point. I think Leary might have done a lot of damage to a lot of kids, not because he said “take acid” and they did, but because the ways in which he did it caused the laws to be written which have locked them up for life.
RF: He was busted for a few joints’ worth of low-grade pot and twice sentenced to multiyear sentences.
Bear: The fall Tim took was entirely of his own doing. There’s an old saying, “If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.” I don’t expect you to point out to me that his “crime” was his big mouth, because I know that full well.
Psychedelics are a part of religion or knowledge, not the weapons of war and confrontation. It only destroys things to expose them. Everyone who needs to know will be told. The media and the government didn’t need to have been involved.
RF: Can you really blame Tim for this? Psychedelics have been forbidden in Western Christian society since the beginning.
Bear: You’ve got to be kidding! It’s obvious where the blame lies.
RF: This history is too complex to lay it all on one man.
Bear: That’s like saying the match that burned Chicago wasn’t the only reason it burned. No one else was talking Tim’s talk.
RF: Listen to you! Legend has it that you are the one who fed the hungry masses.
Bear: I guess you’re making an attempt at humor here. In three years I made less than 500 grams of LSD.
RF: A mere five million doses.
Bear: Wrong again, we dosed high, and the fact is there were only a little over a million doses, spread over three years, half of which were given away and the others sold to support the trip. Nowadays those who make it run batches of 10 to 20 kilos at a time. You suffer from an overdose of media. Our thing was small and intermittent, as I was not at that time entirely sure if it was okay for the community in the long view. I wanted to be sure that it was a good thing; it is indeed powerful. Also we made the doses a bit too strong. That was a mistake.
RF: Everybody was just learning.
Bear: We didn’t figure out for a long time that the doses weren’t conducive to the quiet growth of the scene. It was for those who followed me on the Path to figure that one out. I always was in favor of the cosmic experience. Perhaps that is what a person with a big, strong ego needs, but it’s not cool on the street. Most people never take only half of a dose, but they will take several if they feel the need, so our tack wasn’t the best one.
RF: How did you get involved with psychedelics? Was it through Kesey and the Dead?
Bear: I heard about the Leary/Alpert scene before I was aware of Kesey. In 1963 I became involved with a scene in Berkeley. I suppose it was an extension of the scholastic movement which must have started with Hofmann, except there were students who were cooking up the acid, rather than professors obtaining it from Sandoz. None of the doses were of a very high grade. I had some of the genuine Sandoz material given to me by an old attorney friend who in turn had gotten it from a fellow in Mexico. The real stuff was quite a revelation. I determined to discover how to make it, since no one else seemed to be able to do it right. And so it went.
RF: I gather you had a circle growing quietly underground.
Bear: We weren’t exactly underground, but we weren’t out in the streets waving flags either. Like rock and roll, there are the ones who are in-your-face like my pal Paul Kantner, and there are those like Jerry Garcia, who just smiled and sang his songs. Who do you think had the greater influence? Perhaps that isn’t really fair since Paul is still around, but I think that the point is there. Life is a form of art. There is beautiful art and there is the ugly kind. Why make something which is ugly, no matter how “artistic” it may be?
RF: Do you see anything redeemable about Leary’s popularizing, or as Ginsberg called it, “democratizing” the psychedelics?
Bear: Leary had relatively little to do with “democratizing” the use of acid, as we already had it done by the time he was being heard. I think he was more like “surfing” on the waves that we found. Of the two, the path taken by Ram Dass has seemed more significant, at least to me.
I am not critical of the spread of the use and knowledge, only the rude, rough, and wholly unnecessary way Tim went about using the thing publicly for his own ego-gratification. Be assured, there are many of us who were appalled by the things some people, including Tim, were up to. Don’t confuse me with the elitists, either.
RF: Though now I feel I’m lauding Leary in defense of your negative view, he may have done society a great service by praising the virtues of psychedelics and thereby turning on millions of people. Ram Dass was just one of them. Maybe he would have picked it up somewhere else down the line, but he was an uptight, dysfunctional man—by his own admission—before he met Leary. Probably lots of people fit that description.
Ram Dass says he was a “rascal in training.” Its kind of funny that he is known as the saintly one now. Lots of folks deplore Leary’s reckless ways but I didn’t expect to hear many of the same critiques from you, of all people. Thanks for keeping this adventure unpredictable.
Bear: Maybe the critiques are valid, but the motivations are different for presenting them. I want to see the psychedelics become a regular way of life for people—they want to preserve the status quo. The point is: Leary’s way was wrong. The damage has been done, and I for one am not going to celebrate the destruction of a city just because, perhaps, it may rise from the ashes renewed. There’s even further to go now, as you yourself admit, than there was then.
RF: You don’t value his role as a teacher at all.
Bear: There is no teacher. All such are frauds, especially those who proclaim that status. Find the truth yourself. It’s all around you all the time. Once you have acquired the key, you will find you have all the pieces already. Psychedelics are the key. Find the Kybalion; it’s got all the information you need.