RESPONDENT: I am writing to hear a response from both Vineeto and Richard here. I am curious if either of you have read any Timothy Leary, and more specifically his book titled ‘The Game of Life’, and if so could I get your thoughts on such if you have any. If not I would like to suggest it as possible reading material for a future discussion.

VINEETO: I typed ‘Timothy Leary site: www.actualfreedom.com.au’ into Google and came up with 12 links. Here are excerpts of three of them –

Peter: I have just finished watching a TV documentary about Timothy Leary of ‘turn on, tune in ... and drop out fame’. In the late 1960’s he was at the forefront of experimenting with and publicizing the use of LSD and other chemicals that act to interrupt and temporarily alter the fixed, robotic electro-chemical circuitry in the brain.

A few aspects of the documentary were interesting and none more so than to see a historical documentary where so many of the characters were playing themselves. Many of the main figures of the 60’s psychedelic scene were interviewed for the film and these clips were spliced with old interviews and archival footage. Someone who was now 60 or 70 years old was interviewed, juxtaposed with film of them as 20 or 30 year olds. What was revealing to see was that the naiveté of youth and the well-meaning 60’s aims of peace, love and brown rice for all, had wilted and been replaced by a turning away, a foreboding cynicism, an introverted self-love and a lust for immortality. Two of the central characters who demonstrated this best were Timothy Leary himself and Richard Alpert who is now known as Ram Das.

Both said they had taken LSD hundreds of times and both had developed different interpretations of their experiences. Richard Alpert had a taste of the Divine, an altered state of consciousness, and became a mystic, a spiritual teacher, and a full-on devotee of an Eastern God-man. His experience when in an altered state of consciousness was that he was not the body and not the mind. He described stepping out of illusion of the real world into God-Consciousness. He then talked of Timothy Leary saying ‘he wasn’t into mysticism’.

Leary’s interest remained with the brain and thinking and he believed his ‘soul’ was located in his brain, to use his words. In his last years this thought became such an obsession that he arranged for his head to be cut off after his pre-arranged death and for it to be frozen in order that his ‘soul-brain’ could be revived at some future date. It’s such a bizarre tale and I still wonder if the film of his frozen head was genuine or a hoax. Certainly in his interviews he was convinced that his soul-brain was capable of mental immortality. Unlike his spiritual contemporaries, in his altered state of consciousness he didn’t identify with who he felt he was, his affective feelings, but he identified with who he thought he was, his nonsensical thoughts. What both Alpert and Leary shared in common with all other human beings was that they desperately maintained their true self to be a disembodied alien identity. One felt he was a soul-heart, while the other thought he was a soul-brain – anything other than a mortal flesh and blood body, a cellular arrangement of finite life span.

I was curious as to how Leary had managed to put such an eccentric twist to his altered state of consciousness experiences until he recalled a story from his childhood and his memory of his grandfather’s advice – ‘Don’t be like everybody else’. While he was alive, he was exactly like everyone else who has experienced the infinitude of the physical universe in that he instinctually seized the experience for himself and sought to contrive to become that experience – to be immortal, timeless, eternal and ... disembodied. And despite his frozen head being in a glass jar in a freezer somewhere he has ended up just like everyone else – dead. Same old story, just with yet another bizarre tale to add to the long, long history of human beings inane search for immortality.

The animal survival instincts, embellished into a psychological and psychic fear of death at the core of human beings, has produced a glut of fantastic fairy stories, fervent beliefs, grotesque rituals, weird altered states of consciousness – all of them passionately fuelled by a desperate and futile urge for immortality.

So, the essential question that arises from this post is ... ‘Is there life after death for Timothy Leary’s head or is he nothing but a dead head?’

Vineeto suggested that maybe he was simply a head of his times.

It’s so good to question and investigate the Human Condition – it’s such fun once you get past the point where fear holds you back. When nothing becomes too sacred to question or investigate. Peter, The Actual Freedom Trust Mailing List, Alan (f), 4.4.2000

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Alan: The reason for this mail is that I am having an interesting discussion with someone on the OS forum, who been willing to share her ‘near death’ experience with me. Other than the obvious loss of the ‘I’, I have no idea what it means. Do you have any views? (It was sent in confidence – I have removed any identifying features).

Richard: Yes, I do have definite views: An NDE does not even indicate – let alone prove – Life After Death ... which is the conclusion most peoples jump to. You may find the following article illuminating (article made possible by: Lycaeum Drug Archives). ‘Using ketamine to induce the near-death experience: mechanism of action and therapeutic potential’. (From the ‘Yearbook for Ethnomedicine and the Study of Consciousness (Jahrbuch furr Ethnomedizin und Bewubtseinsforschung) Issue 4, 1995 (Ed.s C. Ratsch; J. R. Baker); VWB, Berlin, pp55-81 by Dr. Karl L. R. Jansen, Psychiatrist; 63 Denmark Hill London SE5 8AZ United Kingdom). I have snipped all the – academically necessary – source-references for easier reading. (…)

Ketamine: Typical Features:

Ketamine is a short-acting, hallucinogenic, ‘dissociative’ anaesthetic. The anaesthesia is the result of the patient being so ‘dissociated’ and ‘removed from their body’ that it is possible to carry out surgical procedures. This is wholly different from the ‘unconsciousness’ produced by conventional anaesthetics, although ketamine is also an excellent analgesic (pain killer) by a different route (i.e. not due to dissociation). Ketamine is related to phencyclidine (PCP). Both drugs are arylcyclohexylamines – they are not opioids and are not related to LSD. In contrast to PCP, ketamine is relatively safe, is much shorter acting, is an uncontrolled drug in most countries, and remains in use as an anaesthetic for children in industrialised countries and all ages in the third world as it is cheap and easy to use (White et al., 1982). Anaesthetists prevent patients from having NDE’s (‘emergence phenomena’) by the co-administration of sedatives which produce ‘true’ unconsciousness rather than dissociation. <SNIP> The altered state of consciousness resulting from ketamine administration is very different from that produced by psychedelic drugs such as LSD and DMT. <SNIP> As noted above, ketamine can reproduce all features of the NDE, including travel through a dark tunnel into light, the conviction that one is dead, ‘telepathic communion with God’, hallucinations, out-of-body experiences, strange noises at the beginning of the experience etc. (see ketamine references above). A consideration of some of the accounts which have been given of the effects of ketamine makes this clear. For example <SNIP>: ‘... becoming a disembodied mind or soul, dying and going to another world. Childhood events may also be re-lived. The loss of contact with ordinary reality and the sense of participation in another reality are more pronounced and less easily resisted than is usually the case with LSD. The dissociative experiences often seem so genuine that users are not sure that they have not actually left their bodies’.

Timothy Leary, who had very extensive personal experience of LSD, described his experiences with ketamine as ‘experiments in voluntary death’. Richard, General Correspondence, Page 4a

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[Vineeto to Alan]: It’s a fascinating business ‘to be or not to be’ and how to move from one to the other. When we watched the report on Timothy Leary that Peter wrote about, I could relate very well to the flavour of those times, the idealism, the peace movement and the ‘tune in, turn on and drop out’ scene. My ‘drop out’ was not into drugs, but into religion. I went to India to find God. My God was called Rajneesh and he claimed to have all the answers. I learned to be more sophisticated with my labelling, he was ‘an Enlightened Master’, the best, of course, something which every master claims to be. And if we did what he told us, surrendered and meditated earnestly, we would get to experience heaven on earth, i.e. become enlightened and thus reserve a place for our soul in Nirvana-land after death.

Doesn’t this sound very similar to the good old Christian religion of Big Daddy in the sky who knows it all and promises you heaven after death if you are good? With the only difference being that my ‘God’ was still alive and the Christian God-man had died 2000 years ago. Therefore the transition out of normal society into a spiritual community wasn’t such a big jump as I had thought at the time. Emotionally and instinctually I was still feeling safe with the higher authority of the ‘Good’ and secure with the reassuring feeling of belonging to a religious tribe.

With that understanding in mind, the report of the ‘great drop out’ of Timothy Leary, the ‘high priest of the his times’ could be seen for what it is, a ‘shifting of furniture on the deck of the Titanic’, staying safely within the parameters of the ‘self’ and of an imagined life after death for that very ‘self’. Yet I find it very serendipitous that crazy people, including myself, have experimented with all kinds of possible options of what it is to be a human being. It gives me an opportunity to study what I as well as everyone else have discovered, to investigate the uselessness of the traditionally offered solutions and to stop repeating the mistakes of the past.

That brings me back to ‘not to be’, self-immolation – the door to the actual world and the only solution I find worth pursuing after my experiments with the normal and the spiritual world. Once in a while I get hit by bouts of self-doubt with questions like ‘have I fallen off the path to freedom’, ‘have I gone comfortably numb with no emotions happening’, ‘am I overlooking something essential’, ‘how come it takes so long’ and similar mental churning. Often, after a period of a really good time without feelings or emotions, this nagging doubt appears again to drag me down. Trying to think it out leads nowhere, it only spoils the enjoyment of this moment. Having explored the doubt exhaustively before, to now go deeper into the feeling of it for exploration’s sake only leads to more doubt, guilt and pointless frustration.

Finally it dawned on me that this self-doubt, like other repetitive feelings before, is simply a bad habit and needs to be treated as such – not to be given any attention at all. Gee, it took some repetition to find out that one! to Alan (d), 5.4.2000

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To sum up my thoughts – he had nothing of substance to offer with regard to actualizing peace on earth when he was alive let alone as a dead head in a glass jar.

24.5.2006

RESPONDENT: I am writing to hear a response from both Vineeto and Richard here. I am curious if either of you have read any Timothy Leary, and more specifically his book titled ‘The Game of Life’, and if so could I get your thoughts on such if you have any. If not I would like to suggest it as possible reading material for a future discussion.

VINEETO: I typed ‘Timothy Leary site: www.actualfreedom.com.au’ into Google and came up with 12 links. Here are excerpts of three of them – <snip> To sum up my thoughts – he had nothing of substance to offer with regard to actualizing peace on earth when he was alive let alone as a dead head in a glass jar.

RESPONDENT: I had no idea that he was a dead head in a glass jar, however the knowledge of such is quite amusing to me now. When I read Timothy Leary’s book ‘The Game of Life’ it was this reading that first brought me to the realization that indeed we are mortal and that what we have here is what we are here for and that the moment is all we really have. I did notice his obsession with breaking the DNA code to achieve immortality in this body in this life, however I never realized that he took it to such an extent. Interesting stuff though, as he was for my knowledge anyway one of the first to bring to the publics attention the fact that there is no ‘Big Daddy’ in the sky watching over us.

In realizing the moment is all we really have one has to keep in mind that we do have the ability to plan, and anticipate as well as work towards the future. Having a mind to think with, and emotions to feel with is a fact.

VINEETO: ‘Having a mind to think with, and emotions to feel with’ is only a fact for a feeling identity who inhabits the flesh-and-blood body pretending to be running the show. When the identity is in abeyance such as in a pure consciousness experience, I am the eyes seeing, the ears hearing and the brain thinking (or not thinking) and ‘emotions to feel with’ are nowhere to be found.

RESPONDENT: Understanding the reasoning and working of our emotions is vital to achieving freedom for oneself no doubt, however I don’t see that losing oneself is the way to go. After all I am an individual here, in a relationship with reality as it is. In having a thinking reasoning mind it is in my ability to choose what kind of relationship I want with reality as it is. With this in mind intent becomes very crucial, as it has been my experience that the world and reality is a bit like a mirror, in that what one reaps what one sows so to speak.

VINEETO: If you prefer to remain a ‘self’ ‘in a relationship with reality as it is’ then that is of course your business. Actualism offers an alternative for those who are fed up with being an identity, weary of being driven by their instinctual passions and dissatisfied of being shackled by their social identity and who are no longer content with merely moving deckchairs on the Titanic.

RESPONDENT: Another concept I picked up from Leary was this, we are in time, it does have past present and future, and we experience the passage of such. Now in time we also have evolution, I use the term here to represent the experiencing of learning and of adding to our knowledge base, it’s something Leary called the billions year old tide of evolution. I certainly don’t think anyone knows where it goes exactly, however perfection would be its only sustainable state. I think I was going to try and make a point here, so I’ll just say that the mind should be used, and the self should be enjoyed, however learning to enjoy oneself truly is a process in time.

VINEETO: If you think ‘the self should be enjoyed’ then you have come to the wrong mailing list. Actualism is for those intrepid pioneers who want more from life than a being stuck with a self ‘in a relationship with reality’ – who want to become free from being a ‘self’.

RESPONDENT: At this point I would like to offer a website for further research, review and enjoyment to our readers :) and it is: www.localgroup.net. Cheers Vineeto and I would like to hear your opinions on this site,

VINEETO: The topics at the link you provided are ‘Power, Politics, Prosperity, Money, Riches, Wealth, Success, Opulence and Immortality’. One doesn’t need to do any further reading to understand that the author, David Hunter, is a thorough going materialist, a follower of Liberalism and a fantasist to boot. As such his writings have nothing at all in common with an actual freedom from the human condition and have equally nothing to contribute to peace on earth.

RESPONDENT: ... here’s to the future, Gooday!

VINEETO: What future?

Didn’t you affirm you have realized that this moment is the only moment one can experience being alive?

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