LEARY
One letter to a newspaper from 1995 about the drug guru Timothy Leary
18 Dec 1995
Sir
I was very interested to read Kevin Toolis’ article
about Timothy Leary in the Weekend section of The Guardian 2-12-95.
However, I feel several important points about Leary’s activities in the
late 60’s drug culture were ignored, downplayed or crassly misinterpreted.
While it is probably true that Leary now stands out to some as a good
example of what destructive damage drugs can do to the mind and body,
Kevin Toolis fails dismally to separate the underlying or inner purpose of
the sixties drug culture from its outer political manifestations, with
which he seems so infatuated.
A main driving force behind that culture was to produce
heightened states of consciousness that are not normally achieved by
individuals except in trance and near-death experiences or during extreme
starvation and sleep deprivation. It is this that caused the fully
justified interest of psychologists like Leary in psychotropic drugs in
the first place. Such experiences are not only very rare to most people,
confined to mystics and shamans, but also reveal a lot to serious
psychological investigators about the nature of mind. That was after all
Leary’s prime interest in the subject. The political aspects in my view
were a secondary and subsequent matter.
Furthermore, the mind-expanding nature of drugs like
Mescaline, Psilocybin and LSD were only a live issue, because like so many
sixties phenomena, they made such rare experiences cheaply and
conveniently available to any person for the very first time. As a
potential mass movement, that was revolutionary. That is still
revolutionary and Leary should get much more credit for that than the
savage and inelegant criticism Kevin Toolis cruelly heaps upon him. Much
of the article was hysterical and over-the-top smear journalism of the
most vicious kind. The excessively colourful language in it was
deliberately offensive. Why bother to interview someone if you hate them
that much, Kevin? Oh, you did it just for the money. Silly me.
Of course, all this is linked to the drug issue in
society generally. But drugs have always been used by people to obtain
states of heightened awareness and that is a spiritual event, whether
Kevin Toolis chooses to ignore it or not. There is not a culture on earth
that does not use drugs to en- hance ecstatic states of mind for spiritual
or recreational purposes. While Leary was certainly highly politicized, as
were most of his contemporaries, I think the article completely fails to
present a balanced account of that generation and what they were trying to
achieve. Again, Toolis entirely sidesteps the bigger and much more
important ‘internal agenda’ of Leary, Ginsberg et al, concentrating
exclusively on the political shenanegans – interesting though they were.
I would not claim that drugs are necessarily a good or
a bad thing per se, but I agree with Leary that the intelligent use of
mind-expanding substances is useful to the spiritually inquisitive. It
carries a risk of course, but so does crossing the road. While I can see
why it has become fashionable to rubbish the late sixties era in toto, as
sheep-like Toolis also does, yet probably nothing as fertile or nutritious
in art, society or culture has appeared since. And everything that does
happen in art, society and culture
is automatically measured against the sixties. Rightly
so, it was an amazing decade.
A more sensitive and informed approach to this subject
might have revealed that drugs of all types can initiate some fundamental
insights about mind or consciousness. Placing the sleazy though absorbing
politicization of that to one side, we can surely see that at its most
negative that can then lead people either to sink ever deeper into a
wretched life of hedonism and sense-indulgence (as Toolis clearly feels
Leary did) or, as a positive, to find for themselves paths that lead to
greater peace, tranquillity, dignity, wisdom and happiness – hopefully
without the need for drugs of any kind. Psychedelic drugs can therefore be
seen as a valid if temporary stepping-stone into more benign spiritual
paths. That is certainly the route taken by many of that generation.
Seen in this light, psychedelic drugs can open up for
people a genuine interest in understanding fundamental aspects of the mind
and existence. That is just as revolutionary now, post-Thatcher, as it was
in Nixon’s America or swinging sixties London. This is a fundamental
problem that will never go away; people are perfectly justified in wanting
to experience these states of heightened awareness. Whether as escapism
from the harsh realities of the outer physical world or retreats for
spiritual practice, drugs have this mind-altering quality which provide
people with a view of existence at odds with the mundane outer world. That
was Leary’s main message, hammered out in detail in ‘The Politics of
Ecstasy’. On this basis Leary could be seen therefore as more of a
hero-figure, a liberator who facilitated greater spiritual awareness and
evolution.
I realise this to be a very unpopular view in some
quarters, especially with the recent Ecstasy tragedy still fresh in our
minds. Yet in essence any experimentation with drugs can be seen as a
natural extension of our innate curiosity and desire for hopefully
pleasant sensations. What is perhaps unfortunate is that Leary did promote
somewhat over-vigorously and indiscriminately their mass use – the social
effects of which could well have been catastrophic. Few can condone
excesses of that kind, but I think it is more helpful if people are
presented with a more balanced account of where he was actually coming
from. The article is a complete demolition job on the man and his work and
dismally fails to peel away a few layers of hysteria to even try to see
what he was saying or why. He may have been naive but he was not an evil
or wicked person.
The article also seems to strongly imply a loathsome
connection between the sorry state of the man and his lifestyle today with
his activities 30 years ago. This is a wicked and scurrilous smear for
which there is not a shred of evidence. Indeed, Leary has led a
comparatively sane, peaceful and happy life for the last 20 years, in
spite of the numerous and dire predictions at the time of the long term
effects of his habits on his mental and physical health. For example,
Frank Zappa died of prostate cancer last year and he famously never
touched a drug in his life.
Much of the vitriolic cant poured forth about the
sixties is, of course, delivered chiefly by those who did not live through
it and experience it personally. Or lived through it blindfolded and
experienced none of its uplifting joy. So I think Toolis will have to do
much better than this in order to convince those who did live through that
exciting era, that Leary and Co were madmen. Divine madmen perhaps, but
not utterly raving as carica- tured in this frothy, scathing and utterly
unworthy portrait of a great man close to death. There was no compassion
in this jagged and painful article.
And what on earth did Leary’s dog and lawn have to do
with any of it? Crass irrelevancies cruelly flooded with trite, pejorative
language and sniggering schoolboy commentary into a `major 5-page piece’.
And he has the gall to call this a `quality newspaper’ !
yours sincerely
Peter Morrell