Forked Thread: Was Leary Right? (TIME Magazine Asks!)

[Isaiah Mpski]

I'mom going to lose a few of you here and gain some others.
Leary introduced a new language.Basically that language was based on ten and thus he helped set up the following conversion factors with Christ.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 alpha....omega
johndonaldson=55

A B C D E F G H I J
K L M N O P Q R ST
U V W X Y Z

If you climb enough pyramids you might find something to eat.

Mpski 2007


Old pond,new frog.Old frog,new pond.Splash.


Forked from: Was Leary Right? (TIME Magazine Asks!) (http://www.breakingopenthehead.com/forum/showpost.php?postid=29928)

...Timothy Leary's dead.No,,oh,no,he's on the outside looking in...



Whata ya gonna do when the lights go out?

[Isaiah Mpski]

Despite his shortcomings Dr Leary is a hero.
The government really went after him and he proved to be a creditable witness for truths.To bad he wasn't an MD.

[JackTheTripster]

Despite his shortcomings Dr Leary is a hero.
The government really went after him and he proved to be a creditable witness for truths.To bad he wasn't an MD.

A hero? I would say he was more of a pioneer. But his own shortcomings undid what he was trying to do, which was to help people reach a higher consciousness through catalysts like lsd. Not everyone is ready or approaches entheogens with the right attitude and intent. He made it "the cool thing to do," which was really a detriment because it made EVERYBODY want to try it, as opposed to cultivating enlightenment among the few that were ready for it. Precipitating a counterpunch of widespread panic and drug hysteria, Leary irresponsibly promoted the use of this substance to all. Not everyone is ready but that didn't stop anybody, and that was his greatest mistake. In his defense however, he was the first to explore this space and promote its use to gain enlightenment. He bravely tread the path that we must follow and showed us some traps along the way by falling into them himself. He did have some great techniques in his books though, and the way he actually took lsd was the approach he should have been promoting feverishly. In The Kool Aid Acid Test it mentions Leary and Alpert and their ritualistic approach, albeit briefly.

[stfrequency]

Kesey was just as egalitarian in his methods, and he rarely gets the flak that Leary does... I think it has more to do with the High Priest's ego-driven demagoguery that he has been villified by history.

;)
st

[suebee]

i taped a documentary on hoffmann and his 'psychedelic' contemporaries on the sundance channel i think but didnt finalize it and it wont play now, and i cant recall the name but when i do i'll post it here - it was current interviews with these men (mostly men, mostly doctors) and they are mostly in their 80's or older now and they were elegant and rather bemused in a way people just arent anymore. i wish i could tame my impatience.

[stfrequency]

Awesome.

http://www.bruceeisner.com/new_culture/2007/04/when_the_elite_.html

John Cloud is at it again. Having heaped his oddly reasoned form of ridicule on Timothy Leary in his last TIME magazine op/ed, he is now doing the same for LSD.

Not coincidently this short but rambling piece uses the same Robert Greenfield bio Timothy Leary: A Biography as a "source"which he used for his earlier scantly documented article about Leary.

After reading this short article after the last short piece about Timothy Leary, I asked myself (and Google) who is John Cloud?

It turns out that his main claim to fame (aside being a TIME staff writer) is that he wrote the Time Magazine cover story puffing Ann Coulter. Cloud became the subject of scrutiny in an article on Media Matters about the Coulter story. In fact, Cloud has gained somewhat of a reputation as this post John Cloud: Today's Most Dissed Person in the Blogosphere.

These two article leave me wondering. Is this a preemptive strike by the Newt Gingrich crowd against the possibility that somehow the Sixties counterculture might reemerge? Despite the unhappy fact that LSD has been illegal for 40 years now and therefore impossible for most people to get, they fear that somehow, someway that what they perceive as a threat against their fundamental values and way of life might return.

This kind of "historical revisionism" was described in the fictional dystopia 1984. Wikipedia describes it this way:

In George Orwell's 1984, the government of the main character's country, nominally led by the enigmatic Big Brother, is constantly revising history to be in harmony with the current political situation. For instance, if the country is at war with another, then the official position is that they have always been at war with that country. If the situation changes, the civilians are brainwashed accordingly. In this novel, historical revisionism is one of the main policies of the propaganda arm ("Ministry of Truth") . . .

Its not 1984 but 2007 and our "Minster of Truth" writes for Time Magazine.

[suebee]

i felt compelled to write time mag re mr.cloud and his 'facts' on his three 'articles' on psychedelics (4/19; 4/30; and the web). maybe they will offer me his job. :p

[stfrequency]

I love the fact he wrote the Coulter cover story, then got lambasted for it. I'd wondered wtf his m.o. was... crystal clear now.

;)
st