A week or so ago, I finished rereading High Priest by Timothy Leary (Kindle edition, Ronin Publishing, Inc., 1995). I wanted to refresh my memory before I made some comments about Leary, following up on my previous post, “Some more thoughts about Alan Watts.” What to say about the experience of rereading this book? I had first read it when I was in my early twenties, after I had already had several psychedelic trips. Before rereading it, I remembered a few things about it: that his first psychedelic trip was on mushrooms, in Mexico, that there was a chapter in which he said that he had realized the paradox that the psychedelic sacrament didn’t really solve any problems, that he first experienced LSD supplied by a shady character named Michael Hollingshead. I had forgotten a great many of the details. And what an exhaustive—and sometimes exhausting—account it is, of trip after trip! I don’t mean “exhausting” as a literary criticism, but more as a description of how I would feel—that is, exhausted—in one of the many situations he describes where, once again, he and his companions decide to take another trip, at night, after a long day and, often, after drinking alcohol. It’s not that these accounts get boring. It’s just that I realize how different Leary’s personality was from mine. Above all, I am reminded of something the priest of my church, the Rev. Bill Garrison, has said. It was something like this: “Everyone you meet has a harder time than you think and has a more interesting life than you imagine.” Or, as Henry James said, “Never say you know the last word about any human heart.”
Leary has been criticized by two different groups: those who think psychedelics are dangerous and evil in all circumstances and those who think that psychedelics are safe and good when used responsibly and under controlled conditions. Some members of the second group seem to think that if only Leary hadn’t spoiled it for the rest of us by being irresponsible, members of the first group could have been persuaded that psychedelics aren’t evil and dangerous in all circumstances, and perhaps still could be so persuaded if we denounce Leary. I am all for moderation, appeal to reason, and the gentle art of persuasion, but I ask those who criticize Leary’s alleged recklessness: what exactly do you have in mind as constituting responsible use under controlled conditions, and do you think that anyone who has other ideas about how to use it should be prohibited from doing so?
Rereading High Priest has reminded me that Leary was already disillusioned with the doctor/patient, scientist/people-studied model of psychiatry and psychology before he ever partook of the sacred mushrooms that afternoon in Cuernavaca. It was his interest in “existential-transactional” methods for behavior change that had gotten him the post at Harvard in 1959. And my own psychedelic experiences tell me he was right that psychedelic “research” means taking a psychedelic trip with people you know and trust. That’s as responsible and controlled as it gets. After all, finding out in the most convincing way possible that there are important things that you aren’t in control of and never will be, and that that is fine, is what makes a psychedelic trip a religious experience. And I didn’t need to reread High Priest to remember that that is hardly a guarantee of a pleasant, unfrightening experience. Almost all of the people I know who have done it are convinced that they are better off for it, and thus should be glad that Timothy Leary, against the advice of some of his friends, did not keep it a secret among a select group of the elite, doing “research” under “controlled conditions.” I am aware that there are some people who are not glad that they ever tried it, and we who know what an ordeal, but a worthy one, the experience can be should be the last to dismiss their suffering. But as Montaigne wrote, quoting some classical author, “Nothing noble is achieved without risk.”
The risks have been well publicized, and, for all Leary’s reputation as “the Pied Piper of LSD,” he didn’t hide them in his trip accounts in High Priest. Did he achieve anything noble? In answer, let’s hear what Art Kleps says about the scene around Leary at Millbrook:
“According to my way of looking at it, it’s all that stuff between the beach party bongos and the Great Cosmic Thoughts—the games we play with each other every day—that badly need more spontaneity and wit.
“That was what I found so stunning about Millbrook: the names, rules and counters of the ordinary games being played there every day had somehow been changed and life as it was lived was better, more lively, more meaningful, funnier, happier. It was an adventure just to hang out—and so it remained, with ups and downs, until the end.
“I was resolved that anything I produced would be along the same lines. Watts certainly talked a good game, but Timothy Leary, I thought, was a magician who seemed to know how to change life as it was lived.” (Millbrook: the True Story of the Early Years of the Psychedelic Revolution, Bench Press, 1977, p.33)
Art Kleps was my teacher, from 1972-1978, the way Timothy Leary had been his during the Millbrook years, and it was clear then that Art was trying to do as he said he would do in the above quotation, that is, to follow Leary’s example and to change life as it is lived. Of course, his personality was quite different from Leary’s, as he readily acknowledged in Millbrook, and so I’m sure there are significant differences between life at Millbrook and life in the Head Vortex of the Neo-American Church in the 1970s, but I think I do have a sort of second-hand feeling of what Art was talking about when he described life at Millbrook. (I wrote about my experiences in the Head Vortex in The Long Watch, Spiraling Books, 1987, but there were only 75 copies ever printed, and it is practically impossible to get a copy now.) I personally saw Timothy Leary only three times, long after the Millbrook period.
What comes across to me from rereading High Priest is that what was noble about Timothy Leary was his fearlessness in pursuit of the ultimate goal. The problem, as it was with Art also, brings us back to the question of the Great Cosmic Thoughts. That is, I have discovered over time that his, and Art’s, conceptions of the ultimate goal do not agree with mine. Leary states his conception in the following passage from High Priest:
“The psychedelic experience is indescribable, ineffable, but so is every other experience. We can build a language to get you to Yankee Stadium at 3 p.m. on a summer Sunday afternoon and teach you how to score the game. We can build a language to get you out of your twentieth-century mind and spin you back into eerie LSD landscapes and teach you how to score the game. Neither scorecard comes close to matching the intricate energy exchanges involved in the trip to the ballpark or the trip to your inner galaxies, but the goal and challenge of being a human being is to visit more and more distant ballparks and to build more accurate scorecards.” (Loc 7069)
The exact meaning of the metaphors of “building a language” and “scoring the game” are not entirely clear to me, but the continual quest for novelty he expresses here is borne out by the rest of what he writes in High Priest as well as his statements and activities during the rest of his life that I am aware of.
Later in the book he writes something different about the goal: “If the vision comes in a spiritual context to the person who is prepared to accept the naked awe-full truth then—during that exact moment one is part of the entire process—indeed, one sees that the entire process is one. That it is an N-dimensional internally unfolding process. Any point from which one sees the one-ness is a center. That one point of vision is the eye of God, seeing, glorifying, understanding the whole.
“One such moment of revelation is the only purpose of life. One such moment of vision is the end point of the five-billion-year process of evolution on this planet. One such moment makes the remaining decades of life meaningful and worthwhile.” (Loc 8467)
According to His Highness Art Kleps, the ultimate goal is the attainment of Enlightenment, which he defines as the realization that life is a dream and the externality of relations an illusion. He also calls this realization “solipsistic-nihilism.” Given what he wrote in “The Excommunication of Timothy Leary,” (Divine Toad Sweat, Dec. 7, 1973), I think he thought that Leary had been enlightened but had repressed it—or at least was saying nothing about it—and instead was promoting, at that time, the necessity of space migration as revealed by the comet Kohoutek. He charged Leary with “cometolatry” and noted with satisfaction in a postscript that the comet had flopped as the grand visual spectacle that had been predicted by astronomers. But, after rereading High Priest, I think that particular passing enthusiasm of Leary’s, along with the other causes he championed late in life, are consistent with his view that he was simply creating a comic drama on top of an underlying realization that all is illusion. Was each new comic drama also “a more distant ballpark”? Here are some passages from High Priest as evidence that he had attained Enlightenment, as defined by Art:
Leary tells of an exchange with George Litwin, another participant in that first LSD session with Michael Hollingshead: “It was straight telepathic communication. I was in his mind, he was in my mind, we both saw the whole thing, the illusion, the artifice, the flimsy game-nature of the mental universe. The Popeyed look of terror changed to mellow resignation and the Buddha smiled. He murmured the word, Harvard, smiling. I said, America. He said, Duty. And I said, Love. He flinched and then nodded, smiling sadly. Yes, love. That was the ultimate confrontation. The last shattered secret from the Buddha bag. It’s all an illusion, even love. And what’s left? The wise, cool, all-seeing eyes and the slight smile around the mouth. Acceptance, peace, resigned serenity, it’s all in your own mind, Baby, the whole bit from beginning to end. It is the spinning out of your own chessboard. Caesar, Alexander, Christ, America, Timothy Leary, George Litwin, even love—they only exist because you think them. Stop thinking them and they do not exist….
“It has been five years since that first LSD trip with Michael Hollingshead. I have never forgotten it. Nor has it been possible for me to return to the life I was leading before that session. I have never recovered from that shattering ontological confrontation. I have never been able to take myself, my mind, and the social world around me as seriously. Since that time five years ago I have been acutely aware of the fact that everything I perceive, everything within and around me is a creation of my own consciousness.
“From that day in November 1961 until this moment, sitting in the sun at Millbrook, dictating these words, I have never quite lost the realization that I am an actor and that everyone and everything around me is stage prop and setting for the comic drama I am creating. LSD can be a profoundly asocial experience.” (Loc 6584)
Except for the part about telepathic communication, Leary here describes the train of thought that Art called “solipsistic-nihilism.” That everything around me is a creation of my own consciousness is the thesis of solipsism. It is inconsistent with the reality of telepathic communication, which would require another consciousness independent of mine, but it is consistent with the illusion of telepathy, just as it consistent with the illusion of ordinary communication through visual and auditory signs. And if I am creating myself, then I am just as insubstantial and unreal as everything else, hence solipsism immediately yields nihilism. Nihilism is commonly taken to imply a repudiation of meaningfulness, but Art made it clear that what he meant by solipsistic-nihilism was that life is a dream, and in a dream, he said, everything is meaningful.
While I was a loyal follower of His Highness Art Kleps, this is what I believed, or tried to believe, but is it true? I no longer think so. Here’s why. If I am interpreting a dream from which I have awakened, I assume that everything in the dream is meaningful to me now in my present waking state. That is, it tells me something about my mind. Why did I dream those particular details? But if I do away with the distinction between dreaming and waking by claiming that everything is a dream, that everything is a creation of my own consciousness, the meaning of what I am saying or thinking is no longer clear. What makes it my own consciousness, if there is no other consciousness? What does “my” mean in a situation where there are no others? And what is a dream from which it is impossible to awaken because everything is a dream? That would be no different from a situation in which everything is a waking state because nothing is a dream.
Furthermore, it simply isn’t true that everything is a creation of my own consciousness. Thoughts that I formulate, things that I imagine, decisions that I take, things that I deliberately do or make, and the like, are creations of my own consciousness, and reveal something about the workings of my unconscious mind as well. If I hadn’t consciously thought those thoughts, imagined those things, made those decisions, done those deeds and made those things, they wouldn’t have happened. Other people’s thoughts, things that I perceive, decisions that other people make, things that other people or animals do or make, and the like, are not creations of my own consciousness. It’s true that if I’m not aware of them, then I’m not aware of them; but it doesn’t follow that when I am aware of them, they are creations of my own consciousness. I didn’t do them, and yet they happened. At most, one could claim that they are products of my unconscious mind, as in a dream, and the other people are characters I am dreaming up; but then we are back to the meaninglessness of saying that it is my unconscious mind if there are no others. Or, what makes it a dream if there is no waking state relative to which it is a dream?
What about the clause that says that the externality of relations is an illusion? When Mary Jo and I were still living in Long Beach, before we moved to Vermont to join what Art then called Head Quarters and later renamed the Head Vortex, one of the things we got in the mail from the Neo-American Church, along with other membership material, was a bumper sticker with the words “I deny the externality of relations” in yellow letters on a black background, and in smaller type underneath, “The Neo-American Church,” with its PO Box address and the church’s logo of a smiling three-eyed toad. I proudly applied it to the bumper of our ‘65 Mustang. Later, after we had moved to Vermont and were living in South Hero and working in Burlington, there was a construction project behind a wooden wall on Church Street, and one of the other church members found out that for a paltry sum we could purchase a section of the wall for advertising space. We did this, and hired someone to paint a greatly enlarged replica of the bumper sticker on it. So, this was a pretty important piece of church doctrine, and yet there is only one time I remember it being discussed.
Her Highness Joan Kleps was telling someone she had met about what we Neo-Americans believed. I was there, and she asked me to explain what it meant to deny the externality of relations. I tried saying something about what I remembered of the distinction between internal and external relations, but didn’t get very far before being interrupted by something and trailing off. So, I’ll try to explain it now with some examples, because it is another line of thought that was important to Art in addition to saying that life is a dream.
We seem to be able to make a distinction between a relation that is internal to the things that it relates to each other and one that is external to them. Mathematical relations are good examples of relations that are internal. For example, seven is greater than four. Can we imagine seven being equal to or less than four? No. We can say the words, but we don’t know what they mean. That is because the relation “greater than,” which seven bears to four, is internal to both seven and four. Seven couldn’t still be seven if it didn’t stand in that relation to four. And four wouldn’t be four if seven weren’t greater than it. Spatio-temporal relations, by contrast, are good examples of what at least seem to be external relations. For example, I am inside my house now, but I could go outside without ceasing to be me. The relation “inside of,” which I bear to the house, is external to me. It is also external to the house. It is still the same house whether I’m in it or not. To deny the externality of relations, or to say that the externality of relations is an illusion, is to say that all relations, even seemingly external ones like spatio-temporal ones, are actually like the relation of seven to four. I think I can imagine going outside the house while still being the same person I was when I was inside, but in fact that change would set off a chain reaction of other changes so that I don’t really know what it would mean to say that the me that was outside the house was the same person who had been inside the house. And it wouldn’t be the same house either.
When I first encountered Art’s denial of the externality of relations, I recalled a lecture I had heard when I was an undergraduate student of philosophy, in which the professor had talked about F. H. Bradley’s argument for monism based on the argument that the assumption that any relation is external is incoherent. If I correctly recall the professor’s exposition of Bradley’s argument, it would go like this: Suppose the relation of my being inside the house is external. That supposition introduces a new relation. The first relation was my relation to the house, i.e., my being inside it. When I say it is an external relation, I am now saying something about my relation to that relation, i.e., that that relation is external to me. But this new relation, that relates me to my relation to the house, is itself either internal or external. It is hard to see how it could be internal without the original relation between me and the house also being internal. But if it is external, then that introduces yet again a new relation, this time between me and my relation to the relation between me and the house, and so on, in a vicious infinite regress that shows me that I can’t really understand my relation to the house (being inside it) as external to me. I can never get to the bottom of what it means to think that a relation is external.
The problem, though, is that it is also hard to understand how all relations can be internal, how every detail can be freighted with such significance that anything I do, any seemingly trivial move I make, results in my going out of existence and being replaced by someone else. Novelty is refreshing, but if everything at every moment is absolutely unprecedented, because nothing can remain what it was when its relations with other things change, I can’t really formulate a thought that isn’t invalidated before it is completed, in the onrush of events. Or, does it mean that the opposite of this is true: that nothing is new, that it is always the same old rat race, and the novelties are cheap and tawdry attempts to disguise this fact? Time stands still. There is no onrush of events because there is no motion. Space-time is given all at once. Every event has its location in space-time, and nothing is really happening, ever. Different stages of me exist at different slices of space-time, but they aren’t really slices, because there is nothing continuous to slice. Nothing travels from one space-time location to another. Nothing is ongoing. Is reality ever-changing with no unchanging substances (Heraclitus, the Buddha), or is reality unchanging with all change and motion being illusory and unintelligible (Parmenides, Plato)?
One can confront in the most vivid way either of these extreme conceptual possibilities on an LSD trip. One of Timothy Leary’s mottoes was, “You have to go out of your mind to come to your senses.” But one’s mind in the sense of abstract reasoning is just as lit up by LSD as one’s senses. The LSD experience tends to force one to live out to its extreme logical conclusion any given set of premises, and that is why it can be either the paradise that is better than anything one had ever imagined or the hell that one dreaded and pushed away. And either way, it can lead to the depth of wisdom that only experience can bring. But only if it is integrated back into one’s life and the world as it is when not on an LSD trip.
For instance, given the premise that everything is a creation of my own consciousness, it follows inexorably that love is an illusion, because there is nobody for me to love—not even myself, since I am just as much an illusion as anything else. But the fact that that premise, and its logical consequences, may have occurred to me on an LSD trip doesn’t prove it is true. It needs to be tested against further thoughts and experiences.
It isn’t that everything is a creation of my own consciousness. It’s that being conscious and experiencing the world from my own first-person perspective is a wonderful gift. I didn’t consciously decide to become conscious. You can see how that wouldn’t be possible. And it just is obvious to me that other people and animals also have their own first-person perspectives on the world, and that they know what that is like by direct experience, just as I do. But I didn’t create their first-person perspectives. I didn’t even create my own first-person perspective. It is just a given fact that I am the person who I am, and likewise for you and every other subject of experience. Who, or what, is the giver of the wonderful gift of being conscious, of being someone in particular? I don’t think this ultimate fact that makes the world personal can be given by an impersonal nature. That is why I believe in God, who is also someone in particular, but someone who, unlike us, is in control of everything he chooses to be in control of. I would say that the ultimate goal is being in the right relationship with God, that is, following what Jesus said was the greatest commandment, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind,” and the one that he said was like it, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Another way to say it is that the ultimate goal is to be in the kingdom of God or to see that it is already here.
In another passage from the chapter on his first LSD trip, Leary writes: “I suddenly knew that everything is a message from the impersonal, relentless, infinite, divine intelligence, weaving a new web of life each second, bombarding us with a message. Don’t you see! You’re nothing! Wake up! Glorify me! Join me!” (Loc 6384) Well, he claimed to know this. He thought he knew it, but did he really? Was he really nothing? If so, how could he know anything? Was the divine intelligence really impersonal? I don’t think so. I don’t think God believes Timothy Leary, or me or you or anybody, is nothing. I think God loves you and me and everybody with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his mind. It follows that we aren’t just creations of his consciousness, as if he is dreaming us and might wake up. Since God loves us, we must be as real as he is. He must have given us a reality that is immune to going out of existence.
In the last chapter of High Priest Leary reflects back on his encounters with some of the theology students in the Good Friday experiment: “I was shaken up by the struggles of our springtime religious revival. I was disturbed by the heavy Christian structure, perplexed by the holding back. The inhibiting, social strength of the Christian Church, and its power to bind. Religion. Their fear of God and their fear of God’s voice and their fear and guilt of breaking loose and their fear of suspending, even for a few minutes, the middle-class television set.” (Loc 8093)
LSD not only lights up one’s abstract reasoning powers and one’s sensory experiences, it also lights up one’s emotions. Confronting the hell most dreaded may come before the arrival at the paradise that is greater than the one previously imagined. Who doesn’t dread and fear losing one’s mind? And who in his or her right mind wouldn’t harbor such a fear when considering taking a powerful mind drug for the first time, and really for any time after that, too? After all, the “Pied Piper of LSD” himself said that you have to go out of your mind to come to your senses, and he described paranoid and hellish thoughts even while also describing sensory experiences of heightened beauty and intellectual breakthroughs in his accounts of psychedelic experiences in his book, High Priest. He also describes emotional experiences of connections with other people, including his children, and of guilt and anxiety about being corny and middle class. As for “the inhibiting social strength of the Christian Church,” that can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on what is being inhibited and how coercive the application of that social strength is. I am not deterred by those Christians who denounce me for having a good word to say about psychedelics and who claim I am “preaching another gospel,” but I am dismayed that they so misunderstand me. But the fear of being corny and middle class is just as much a product of social pressure as the fear of being considered disreputable by churchgoers. In contrast, the Christian paradox of being told that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” and that you should “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (how can I love what I fear?) is a wonder to contemplate and has nothing to do with the social pressure and threat of fearful punishment that has always been used by human beings in their attempts to control the actions of others.
I believe that I am loved, and that I have life everlasting. I have tried to explain why in Dreams and Resurrection and Psychedelic Christianity. I don’t believe that Enlightenment as defined by Art Kleps and as described by Timothy Leary in High Priest is the truth about life and its purpose. Nevertheless, both of these men are like spiritual fathers to me, and comparing them in this way to my actual father, I want you to know, is high praise. All right, maybe “spiritual uncles” would be better. And no, fellow Christians, that doesn’t mean I think they are saints or equals to Jesus. But they weren’t like the hypocritical scribes and Pharisees, either, and in my estimation, that counts for a lot.
