Timothy Leary - Your Brain Is God

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Table of Contents

Live your highest vision

Timothy Leary

Introduction

I n 1966, the Harvard-Millbrook psychedelic researchers decided to exploit the religious metaphor in order to encourage people to take charge of their own brain functions. I was uneasy about failing back on the religious paradigm. For 40 years I had been conditioned to respond negatively to the word God. Any time someone started shouting about God, I automatically expected to be conned or threatened by some semiliterate hypocrite.

I was uneasy about failing back on the religious paradigm.

We tried to avoid this insidious buzzword. God knows, at one point we talked about LSD as a brain vitamin or dietary supplementbut this more accurate label sounded dodgy in those dayswho knows, perhaps it would fly today in this age of mega-suppliments, smart drugs and life-extension. However, self-control of ones diet was not to become respectable until the holistic medicine of the 1970s.

Our own commitments and role-models were always scientific. For example, we succeeded in training illiterate prisoners to perform the functions ofand to talk likepsychologists. And our summer training camps in the Hotel Catalina in Zlhuatenjo, Mexico, effectively taught a wide range of intellectuals how to reimprint their own brain programs.

Our logic seemed clearbrain-activating drugs expose people to powerful, mind-blowing experiences that shatter conventional ideas about reality. If left alone by society, our International Foundation for Internal Freedom (IFIF) would have succeeded in training several thousand neurologicians who, in their own communities, could have trained hundreds of thousands of Americans to use their own heads.

But wisely or foolishly, we got scared off this scientific approach. After being expelled from Harvard, Mexico, Antigua, and Dominica in the late Spring of 1963, we cravenly decided that the authorities were not ready for the 21st Century concept Every Citizen a Scientist. So we fell back to the familiar historical turf upon which most earlier freedom movements had fought the battlereligion.

Most freedom movements fought the battle on religious turf.

Activating the Divinity Within

Though it might be against the law for responsible American citizens to use psychoactive plants and drugs to change their brains, surely 400 years of Western civilization must support the right of Americans to worship the divinity within, using sacraments that worked for them. We studied the meaning of the word sacrament usually defined as something that relates one to the divinity. One of the most offensive, flaky characteristics of 1960s acid-users was their compulsion to babble about new visions of God, new answers to the Ultimate Secret of the Universe.

For thousands of years individuals whose brains were activated had chattered about ultimate secrets in the context of mystical-personal religious revelation. We were forced to recall that for most of human history, science and philosophy were the province of religion. And most specifically, all references to what we would now call the psycho-neurological were described in religious terms.

Throughout history, individuals with activated brains have chattered about ultimate secrets in the context of mystical-personal religious revelation.

Our political experiences at Harvard also pushed us in the direction of the religious metaphor. When it became known on campus that a group of psychologists was producing revelatory brain-change, we expected that astronomers and biologists would come flocking around to learn how to use this new tool for expanding awareness. But the scientists, committed to external manipulations, were uninterested. Instead we were flooded by inquiries from the Divinity School.

Brain Change Taboo

Our problemtypical of time-travel agents dealing with primitive cultureswas that a dramatic change in neurology must be gently introduced in the language a culture traditionally uses for those mysterious, unknown, higher powers which its science has not yet explained. A review of 20th Century literature showed that there was obviously a strong taboo against brain-change. By 1960, indeed, the brain had replaced the genitals as the forbidden organ that must not be touched or turned on by the owner. The only way in which consciousness-change experiences could be discussed was in terms of philosophic-religious. Even Buddhism, an atheist method of psychological self-control, allowed itself to be classified as a religion.

Back to the Wisdom of the East

So religion it was. I recall the moment of decisionDuring a wild, all-night LSD session in our mansion in the Boston suburbs, Richard Alpert came up to me, eyes popping, and announced, The East! We must go back to the wisdom of the East! Go back?

The East! We must go back to the wisdom of the East! Richard Alpert announced.

The lawyers agreed. There is apparently nothing in the Bill of Rights to protect scientific freedom. The Constitution was written in a horse-and-buggy pre-technological era. But there was a First Amendment protection of Freedom of Religion. After all, Catholic priests were allowed Communion wine during Prohibition. So I agreed to the religious posturewith conditions.There was to be no kneeling down, no dogmas, no holy men, no followers, no churches, no public worship, no financial offerings....

There was to be no kneeling down, no dogmas, no holy men, no followers, no churches, no public worship, no financial offerings....

Chapter 1

Do-It-Yourself Theology

F our months after my being fired from Harvard University the Association of Lutherans Psychologists invited us to make an address at the 1963 American Psychological Association. In the 1950s I had administered psychological screening tests for most of the younger ministers in the Lutheran Church, and so I wondered if my contributions to the faith were, perhaps, being recognized. The address was an attempt to scientize myth and mythologize science. We were trying so romantically to heroicizesanctify our lives, their lives, life itself.

I wanted to scientize myth and mythologize science.

An essay describing my summa theology was widely reprinted in several languages and probably contributed to the blossoming of young visionary scientists who, in the 1980s aged 30 to 45, were pushing out the frontiers of physics, chemistry, and biology. I had been working on the translation of classic issues of theology into the language of modern science for the previous 18 years, refining and updating. It was my summa theology and may have been the first comprehensive philosophy to deal with evolution, both species and individual, both past and future.

It is safe to estimate that over a hundred young physicists and a like number of biologists read that first paper at some point along the way. Imagine yourself an impressionable, brilliant college student, circa 1964-70, searching, experimenting, dreaming the dreams of grandeur and idealism and splendor that characterized that more utopian optimistic period.

I had awakened from a long ontological sleep.

Activist Theology

This is an activist, do-it-yourself theology. God is defined in terms of the technologies involved in creating a universe and engineering the obvious stages of evolution. Anyone interested in playing the God-game is given suggestions for activating the various levels of intelligence in hir own brain and DNA and expressing them through the tools of modern science. Any human being who wishes to accept the responsibility is offered the powers traditionally assigned to divinity.

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