Timothy Leary (1920 – 1996)
American writer, psychologist, campaigner for psychedelic drug research and use, 1960s counterculture icon and computer software designer.
There's one uneasy borderline between what is external and what is internal, and this borderline is defined exactly by the sense organs and the skin and the introduction of external things within my own body. Consciousness is altered by physical events and physical objects, which impinge upon my sense organs, or which I introduce into my body.
Now the name traditionally given to external objects or processes which change you internally is sacrament. Sacraments are the visible and tangible techniques for bringing you close to your own divinity.
At one point consciousness-altering devices like the microscope and telescope were criminalized for exactly the same reasons that psychedelic plants were banned in later years. They allow us to peer into bits and zones of Chaos.
We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. They are a hundred times better educated than their grandparents, and ten times more sophisticated. There has never been such an open-minded group. The problem is that no one is giving them anything fresh. They've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.
LSD is a drug that causes insanity in people who have not taken it.
Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.
Science is all a metaphor.
Leary can get a part of my mind that's kind of rusted shut grinding again, just by being around him and talking, 'cause that's where he works. He knows that area of the mind and the brain, and he knows the difference between the two areas. He's a real master at getting your old wheel squeaking again. … When we first broke into that forbidden box in the other dimension, we knew that we had discovered something as surprising and powerful as the New World when Columbus came stumbling onto it. It is still largely unexplored and uncharted. People like Leary have done the best they can to chart it sort of underground, but the government and the powers do not want this world charted, because it threatens established powers. It always has.
Monotheism is the primitive religion which centers human consciousness on Hive Authority. There is One God and His Name is _______ (substitute Hive-Label). If there is only One God then there is no choice, no option, no selection of reality. There is only Submission or Heresy. The word Islam means "submission". The basic posture of Christianity is kneeling. Thy will be done.
Art's certainly made a lot of money, and got on a lot of shows — he got himself into the Nixon White House riding on the death of his daughter. And I think that's ghoulish! That's ghoulish.
I have always considered myself, when I learned what the word meant, I've always considered myself a Pagan.
That intermediate manifestation of the divine process which we call the DNA code has spent the last 2 billion years making this planet a Garden of Eden. An intricate web has been woven, a delicate fabric of chemical-electrical-seed-tissue=organism=species. A dancing, joyous harmony of energy transactions is rooted in the 12 inches of topsoil which covers the rock
Actions which are conscious expressions of the turn-on, tune-in, drop-out rhythm are religious.
The wise person devotes his life exclusively to the religious search — for therein is found the only ecstasy, the only meaning.
Anything else is a competitive quarrel over (or Hollywood-love sharing of) studio props.
Timothy Leary's dead.
No, no no no, he's outside, looking in.
He's basically a romantic comedian. …. 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 both 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.
That’s the left wing of the CIA debating the right wing of the CIA.
"Turn on" meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers that engage them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. "Tune in" meant interact harmoniously with the world around you — externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives. Drop out suggested an elective, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. "Drop Out" meant self-reliance, a discovery of one's singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean "Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity."
The language of God is not English or Latin; the language of God is cellular and molecular.
The mark of a basic shit is that he can’t mind his own business.
If you want to change the way people respond to you, change the way you respond to people.
If you are serious about your religion, if you really wish to commit yourself to the spiritual quest, you must learn how to use psychochemicals. Drugs are the religion of the twenty-first century. Pursuing the religious life today without using psychedelic drugs is like studying astronomy with the naked eye because that's how they did it in the first century A.D., and besides telescopes are unnatural.