Timothy Leary's Ultimate Trip -- Leary Interviewed by Bruce Eisner

Timothy Leary's Ultimate Trip
-- an Interview --
by Bruce Eisner
Thursday, June 08, 1995

Note: We humbly apologize for not crediting David Banton for his transcription of Ram Dass' “Brave World or Island?” published in the last Island Views. We thank David for the transcript that follows.

My car pulled up to the large ranch house on a cul-de-sac in the Beverly Hills neighborhood -- a house that I have visited scores of times in the past 12 years -- since Timothy Leary had moved there from Laurel Canyon in 1984. In the past year, Leary has put up a web site offering a tour of this house. As you walk in, you are struck by the amounts of striking art pieces hung on the walls -- gifts Tim has received from psychedelically-inspired artists grateful for his role in their work's evolution.

In the past year, Leary has put up a web site (http://www.leary.com) which uses the house's layout as a metaphor for navigating this web site’s features: the video room for How to Operate Your Brain, Tim's great multimedia essay on the global village future, for example.

In previous visits to Timothy's home, we often sat out on the patio, which has a majestic, panoramic view of Hollywood. On his web site, you can run a video which will give you a chance to share this experience.

In the livingroom, you see some of Leary's art collection -- or can visit the Art Room, a constantly-changing gallery of art by Timothy's friends, plus a life-spanning set of photos of Leary . . . covering stages of his life from childhood, to Harvard, to the 'Sixties, all the way up to current photos from the past couple for years. Also in the livingroom, you can chat on a variety of topics with people sharing the site. Or read the Global Village Voice, edited by Zach Leary, and get the latest on developments with Tim, including his current health status.

Tim's current health is what makes made this visit so much different than all the other visits. In late 1994, Tim announced that he had prostate cancer, a cancer that had spread throughout his body. Although we have been friends for twenty years, I never asked Tim for an interview before. I decided to interview him, to get some of his last thoughts on topics of special interest to me -- areas which our readers share, and not covered by the many mainstream media interviews that have been conducted since his announcement.

Zach Leary greeted me at the door. While we waited for Tim to wake up, we sat by a familiar yellow and green Mexican table and chatted for about a half an hour. Zach told me that it was a good time to interview Timothy, because there was nobody in the house except for us -- which he told me was rare.

I had been given an old but "broadcast quality" tape recorder by a friend in Santa Cruz who produces a local interview show -- with the hope she could air the interview. I asked Tim if it was OK to interview him. He agreed and I set up the recorder and tested it. It didn't work! Nothing I could do would make it work, and I soon found myself tangled in a mass of wires from the mike and power supply.

Determined to move forward, I set off into Hollywood and returned with an inexpensive Sony recorder with built-in microphone. However, when I returned, my notes and other equipment had been scattered about -- and a cryonics freezing tank had been set up where the table had been. There were a dozen new people in the house -- including Trudy Truelove, Tim's secretary, Deane, his aide and nurse, David Prince, coauthor on a new book, Timothy Leary's Ultimate Trip, Vicki Marshal, a novelist friend of Timothy's, and three people from the cryonics company. Zach wheeled Tim out to the displaced Mexican table. Without my notes, with cryonics people pounding on hammers and installing the cryonics tank, and with half a dozen people coming in and out of the vicinity talking, joking and sporadically checking in with Tim, I turned on the tape recorder:
Bruce: First of all, I wanted to express all the love that my friends in Santa Cruz sent with me. Everybody has a great amount of gratitude for all of the things you've said and done all these years. I just want to say that at the beginning.

Leary: And I'd like to say at the beginning that I think we all know that Santa Cruz is a very special, special city on this planet. There's a higher ratio of enlightened cybernetic and psychedelic people in that area per capita than any place in the world by far, so I consider myself an honorary member of the community. I'm with you!

B: In Exo-Psychology and several other books you wrote in the late '70s to early '80s you talked a great deal about your eight-circuit theory of the brain. More recently you've been talking about the effects of computers on the culture, and the media on the culture and so forth. How do you feel about your eight-circuit theory of the brain and how would it apply to 1996?

L: Well, number one, anytime you set up a classification system it has to be open to change. By definition, we have to revise it.

B: Yeah, you started with seven levels, and then you got to eight circuits.

L: Yeah, and I hope we get to 12! There's nothing sacred. Now, what is the eighth circuit?

B: The eighth is the neurological fusion with the . . .

L: Is it? My memory was that the fifth had to do with the sensual, right, and the sixth was --

B: Neuroelectric . . .

L: Yeah, that's cybernetic.

B: So we're moving from that . . .

L: And the seventh is genetics, where you're getting into genes, implanting, and changing there and see, it moved away from electricity and into the real situation which is genes . . . and after that we talked about all the systems of the Orientals, Asians, and Western, like the Harvard salons of William James, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Reich was very big there. So, it's been taken around the ultimate point of, sort of flash light illumination, and now we can do that, because we have the technological equipment and we can do that. I have a painting here in this house which was done with a flashlight, which is a first eighth-circuit expression, work of art. The guy's using a flashlight and going around pointing it around and taking pictures of where his flashlight lands, where his light lands.

B: In one of your most recent books, Chaos and Cyberculture, you characterize the last millennium as the Christian millennium.

L: Starting when?

B: Starting 1,000 years ago -- perhaps it might be more like 2,000 years ago when it started?

L: The idea of feudalism started somewhere about 500 BC. Basically they say that feudalism went until Gutenberg, the 15th Century, and that's where the feudal is: basically hand mediate, lift that bale, lift that pyramid stone, and all that. It moved into the mechanical, and then every kid could have a book, and every kid has the power to read and write, and it was the invention of that technology that made that possible. So the new era started with Gutenburg and the industrial, and it goes up to the 20th century when you got radio, television. Now it's digital and . . .

B: You called the next millennium the “millennium of the new paganism.”

L: Well, that's a bumpersticker.

B: A bumpersticker -- just a catch-all?

L: I have to preface this interaction with the statement that don't believe anything I say, I'm throwing ideas out there to look at. The last thing I want is someone taking notes while I lecture. I long for an interaction back and forth. That goes way back, basically to the psychology of Harry Stack Sullivan in the '50s and '60s, interpersonal. And that goes back to quantum physics where they say it's all a field and no electron can live by hirself, it has to have another electron to send and receive, so it's always being back and forth. We were applying this at Harvard, in the interpersonal stuff at Kaiser, the principles of quantum physics, field stuff, getting interactions from everybody, everybody's rating everybody else, that's how psychologists interpret things.

B: Before that everybody just looking at the individual . . .

L: You had the doctors who were looking, and the rest of us were listening. I'm exaggerating too, that's part of the profession.

B: Let's move 100 ahead, to 2096. How do you think that people are going to be living differently, how is all of this going to impact ordinary lives?

L: I think it’s futile to make such a long range prediction, so much is going to happen. It's the next 10 years that are going to be clearly important, I think.

B: Just the next ten?

L: What is developing right now, is it all goes back to McLuhan, I'm rolling out a big banner now which says “Viva McLuhan.” He predicted it all, he talked about the global village, meaning the kid in Kyoto would be on-line with the kids in Paris and Mississippi.

I want to tell you a little story. Last night, in my bedroom studio, for six hours we had a television screen showing, uh, beamed in from Tokyo. I was watching this studio of my friends in Tokyo, and our partner Chris [editors note: Christopher Gray, of the video production company Retinalogic, and Tim's webmaster] is there, he s waving and we fooled around for awhile and then we'd go away. It was going for six hours, and it's no big deal. Tokyo is on my screen live, and every now and then somebody'd come over and I'd take my flashlight and point it at him and make myself disappear, and then I would talk back and forth. Now that's the future.

B: CU-C-ME? Is that what it was?

L: Yeah. And you'll explain to your wise readers what that is.

B: I certainly will. [See Sidebar]

L: They even have a picture of how it looks. Now that's thrilling. I mean, it's one of the first times that a private citizen is allowed to have a 60 minute -- an hour -- open-line video phone.

B: Well, the World Wide Web is beginning to really open things up, empowering people to broadcast their own versions of what is, rather than having to rely on the networks and mainstream media.

L: Everything that we do -- we have a whole list of priorities and we're working in many media. We have eight basic media that we work through. ut the goal and the aim of everything is the Web. We have what's called leary.com" on the Web, and I'm pouring all my thoughts into the Web right now. All of my books, one by one, we're putting up there, and you can play the book.
The first screen of my book, say Flashbacks, comes on-line, and on the same page there's another copy of it, and I edit that. So if it's, "In the beginning was the word," I could say on the other side, "In the beginning was the bird," or "the turd." And that comes in color, so you can see in a glance how I've changed my original.
The performer out there can do the same thing. SHe can build up hir own library of living books and sHe can have hir diary there, and people can help edit and re-edit, so it's the concept of the living book.

B: On my Web site we have a Web-chat area when people can keep posting words and images . . . .
You've been called a Cheerleader for Change, and during your life you've espoused a number of different new ideas: the sacramental use of psychedelics, life extension and cryonics, space migration, computers, virtual reality, a whole variety of new ideas. Which one had the most passion for you?

L: You're trying to make invidious comparisons, They're all stages I go through. I love being a teenager, but then it's time to move on. I can always go back.

B: Currently you're working on a number of new projects -- the CD-ROM, and a film?

L: No, there's been a lot of talk about a film being made, and it’s been bantering around the top studios, and top crooks of Hollywood are talking about it. I expect there will be one made, but I have no lust. The ultimate masturbation in Hollywood -- who's gonna play me?
My answer to that is Grace Jones. Grace Jones is a Harvard professor in drag, and she dresses up like a guy, and she seduces all those graduate students to turn on and tune in the world. Me and Grace!

B: Tell me a little bit about the CD-ROM. That one's solid, right?

L: What do you mean by solid?

B: I mean it's gonna be Timothy Leary's house . . . or?

L: Yeah, we have that down. I've already got pages and pages of it.

B: I've seen that on the Web. Is that going to be a CD-ROM as well?

L: No, see, you click into my house, and you click around the house, you can click into my art room, my library room, you can click into my music room, my video room, my cyber room. In each of these rooms for the Web, there's a featured artist of the month, of the week. We save everything that goes on the Web, and it's stored on the CD-ROM. You continually replay, and store, the CD-ROM is a storage library that you can get stuff and access, and then use it for anything you want.

We're not selling the product like a CD-ROM game, although you can play it like a game, clicking around the house. You can click and see what kind of drugs I've done all day, or yesterday. What I had to eat, and who these great guys who come by are, like Mr. Rand here (referring to Leary's novelist friend who was sitting with us).

B: If you were to have your life to live all over again, is there anything you would do differently, or would you do it all the same?

L: How could I do it all the same? How could I?

B: I mean, knowing what you know now, if you had it all stored in memory and you could live your life again, what would you do differently?

L: I say I couldn't, because what I know now is what's happening right now and tomorrow, so I'm involved in that.

B: So it's all perfect?

L: I didn't say that. And, by the way, I did nothing -- I just surfed the wave. I didn't start the interest in drugs. If anything, it was hot in the '50s, it was the beatniks that beat that drum. Kerouc and Ginsburg, and Burroughs, the great father of us all. So, I didn't start this, it was there. I'm a very skillful communicator and I'm a very enthusiastic person. I like to be involved and engaged. It's been just perfect for me.
But I didn't lead, I didn't want followers. I was moving along with it. I've always, well, more and more I've hung out with people who are younger than me. The people I work with are always between the ages of 25 and 35, always! And they keep changing.
Just last week we had a reunion of five Harvard graduate students who worked with me then. I want to tell you that they are five of the most good-looking, sophisticated, intelligent psychologists. Not one of them became a faculty chairman. They learned to apply what they learned to, uh . . . Gunther Weil is the Dean of the East-West Foundation. It's a wonderful thing, but its not what a psychologist used to do, and right down the line they had something special, and they were good-looking men of dignity and fun. It was a really proud moment for all of us.

B: And Metzner was another one?

L: Metzner, oh yeah. Ralph was a very, very brilliant, brilliant British experimentalist, objective right down the line, and he's beautiful because he managed to maintain his integrity as an academician, and at the same time, taking LSD on the flat of his back in a maximum security prison with the most dangerous prisoners in Massachusetts. Now, that's a jump for a sedate Englishman. But he did it, with courage. And they all have a nice little twinkle in their eye, which I love.
They taught me. They knew about drugs before I did. Metzer and others would come and tell me about drugs, and I didn't like drugs, because in those days, in the '50s , the psychiatrists were drugging everybody with Valium and all that stuff, and the libertarian view then was, don't get involved in those doctors’ drugs, because they are going to tranquilize you into loving Eisenhower.

B: I remember I was on a panel with you once, actually I had put it together, and . . .

L: Where?

B: It was at Stanford, at the Bridge Conference. We ended up having about four or five doctors on the panel with you, and I think you expressed the sentiment that you would rather not see the psychedelics with the medical profession with all this experimentation, that you thought it was out in the world doing it, you know, with your lover or with . . .

L: That sounds pretty babbling, but, yes, I agree!

B: Maybe you could tell us a little about this cryonics process. As I'm sitting here, I'm watching them set all of this up, and uh . . .

L: As I approach my dying, which includes the possibility of self, uh, suicide, I've got all charts and diagrams and rating scales so when it gets to a point where when I'm immobile and can't talk, and all these ratings go below what I'd like, then my executors are commanded to help me hit a button so that I will be through the transition. This is classic stuff, it's been others uh . . .

B: Do you have any last things you'd like to say to our readers? This is going into our first magazine issue of Island Views, and you know that Island is an organization that's looking to create a new culture based on new ideas. We're trying to take new ideas from Huxley and bring them into the 21st century, the idea of transforming our culture through all the new ideas . . .

L: Well, number one, Aldous Huxley was one of the most magical people I ever
met in my life. He came to Harvard while we were there, and he coached us
and guided us, and he was way ahead. He'd written a classic book, Doors of
Perception. Heaven and Hell was about, actually, suicide, remember, and
the book Island . . .

B: Well, Island was about transitions.

L: Yeah, anyway it turns out that after all these years, Laura Huxley
lives almost in the same canyon, she's my closest neighbor, and she comes
down often. She was there when Aldous passed on, and she was the one who
handed Aldous the pills that he used -- or it was actually Dr. Sidney Cohen
who did it -- and it gives me a great, great honor that she is now kind of
guiding me, and I'm just the luckiest guy.
The point there is we always had a team, there was always a group of us working together. In this house, there is a team of us. Everybody who works now at this house with
me, last night I even burst out into tears thinking about it, Bruce. Their lives are going to be changed forever, when you think about it, going through this experience, and that's not something you do lightly, you know.
It's a new social organization in a way, with total honesty and openness, and it's thrilling, and I'm glad that you're a part of it, and I would invite you to communicate to and fro with our friends in Santa Cruz area, the Holy Cross, the Cross of Light.

OK, stay in tune!

Postscript: My role as interviewer ended. I spent the rest of the day with Timothy. I sat at his bedside as he bantered with an official from the cryonics group that was contracted to freeze his brain after his death -- along with a doctor and a nurse. Their relationship was strained and at one point, Timothy remarked to the official: "If I have to wake up in 50 years with you standing over me with a clipboard, I don't want to wake up!"
In early May, he issued the following announcement:
“Due to recent events and personal decisions, Dr. Leary has decided to terminate all relationships and contracts with Cyrocare, Inc. and all other cryonic organizations. Dr. Leary is now energetically exploring all other options regarding his ‘designer’ dying and all other post-mortum details including conventional plans such as cremation and burial. Because of the recent media attention regarding his planned suicide on the World Wide Web, Dr. Leary also wants to make it very clear that no date has been set for any suicide whatsoever. Dr. Leary's updates regarding his medical condition and dying can be obtained on a regular basis at http://leary.com.”

Comments

[Colron]

I don't see a cu-c-me sidebar. Someone care to explain this concept to me?

[Bruce Eisner]

The sidebar was on Timothy Leary's original site at leary.com which is gone now