A cheerleader for evolution |
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‘Your role is quite simple. Become a cheerleader for evolution. That’s what I did and my grandfather before me. These brain-drugs, mass-produced in the laboratories, will bring about vast changes in society. This will happen with or without you or me. All we can do is spread the word. The obstacle to this evolution, Timothy, is the Bible.’ |
The raise of the Anti-Christian sentiment |
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‘[W]e had run up against the Judeo-Christian commitment to one God, one religion, one reality, that has cursed Europe for centuries and America since our founding days. Drugs that open the mind to multiple realities inevitably lead to a polytheistic view of the universe. We sensed that the time for a new humanist religion based on intelligence, good-natured pluralism and scientific paganism has arrived.’
— Timothy Leary[3]
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Think for yourself |
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‘The message is simple: think for yourself, and question authority. Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities, the political, the religious, the educational authorities who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing, forming in our minds their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable, open-mindedness; chaotic, confused, vulnerability to inform yourself.'’[4] |
Timothy Leary (1920 – 1996) was a psychologist who researched psychedelic drugs which change the activities of the brain—especially LSD—and promoted their use. He became the roving Hippie, the sage of Aquarius, the 1960s icon who promoted peace and love through psychedelic drugs to a nation divided over the rise of the hippie counterculture, as Leary tried to avoid arrest and prison. Leary coined the slogan, "Turn on, tune in, drop out."
Professors at Harvard led the attack on the wayward lecturer, warning that experimental drugs like LSD should be administered by physicians in controlled medical settings, not by psychologists at late-night parties. Leary responded that "control of the mind through drugs, which we call internal politics, will be the leading civil rights issue in the coming decades." He claimed, "LSD use is a sacramental ritual." In 1963, he was fired from Harvard on a technicality- he was assigned zero courses to teach for a semester, then fired for having an inadequate number of students.
Harvard's action made him immensely popular in the dropout world, despite repeated reports of "bad trips" and psychological damage to drug users. Despite repeated arrests he avoided prison until 1970. The terrorist group the Weather Underground helped him escape, but in 1973 he was apprehended trying to enter Afghanistan. Leary returned to prison until paroled in 1976. Leary continued his advocacy lectures across the country from his base in Hollywood. He married five times, twice to one woman. The first of his spouses committed suicide, as did his only daughter.
He died of cancer, but remains an iconic hero to the surviving addicts he introduced to dangerous drugs.