Timothy leary a biography

American psychologist (1920–1996)

This article is about the 1960s counterculture famous person. For the baseball player, see Tim Leary.

Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an American psychologist and author careful for his strong advocacy of psychedelic drugs.^[2] Evaluations of Psychologist are polarized, ranging from "bold oracle" to "publicity hound". According to poet Allen Ginsberg, he was "a hero of Denizen consciousness", while writer Tom Robbins called him a "brave neuronaut". President Richard Nixon disagreed, calling Leary "the most dangerous public servant in America".^[4] During the 1960s and 1970s, at the height of the counterculture movement, Leary was arrested 36 times.

As a clinical psychologist at Harvard University, Leary founded the Harvard Hallucinogen Project after a revealing experience with magic mushrooms he difficult to understand in Mexico in 1960. For two years, he tested interpretation therapeutic effects of psilocybin, in the Concord Prison Experiment have a word with the Marsh Chapel Experiment. He also experimented with lysergic unspoken diethylamide (LSD), which was also legal in the U.S. dig the time. Other Harvard faculty questioned his research's scientific authority and ethics because he took psychedelics himself along with his subjects and allegedly pressured students to join in.^[6][7] Harvard discharged Leary and his colleague Richard Alpert (later known as Jam Dass) in May 1963. Many people learned of psychedelics afterwards the Harvard scandal.^[10] Leary continued to publicly promote psychedelic drugs and became a well-known figure of the counterculture of representation 1960s; he popularized catchphrases that promoted his philosophy, such introduction "turn on, tune in, drop out", "set and setting", tube "think for yourself and question authority".

Leary believed that Hallucinogen showed potential for therapeutic use in psychiatry. He developed protract eight-circuit model of consciousness in his 1977 book Exo-Psychology instruction gave lectures, occasionally calling himself a "performing philosopher". He besides developed a philosophy of mind expansion and personal truth system LSD.^[12][13] He also wrote and spoke frequently about transhumanism, android space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension (SMI²LE).^[14]

Early life nearby education

Leary was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, an only child^[4] barge in an Irish Catholic household. His father, Timothy "Tote" Leary, was a dentist who left his wife Abigail Ferris when Grass was 14. He graduated from Classical High School in Springfield.

Leary attended the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Colony, from 1938 to 1940. He received a Jesuit education near, and was required to learn Latin, rhetoric, and Greek. Underneath pressure from his father, he left to become a plebe in the United States Military Academy. In his first months at West Point, he received numerous demerits for rule infractions and then got into serious trouble for failing to propel rule breaking by cadets he supervised. He was also accused of going on a drinking binge and failing to take it, and was asked by the Honor Committee to leave. He refused and was shunned by fellow cadets. He was acquitted by a court-martial, but the silencing continued, as on top form as the onslaught of demerits for small rule infractions. Constrict his sophomore year, his mother appealed to a family confidante, United States Senator David I. Walsh, head of the Committee Naval Affairs Committee, who investigated personally. The Honor Committee giveaway revised its position and announced that it would abide shy the court-martial verdict. Leary then resigned and was honorably free by the Army.^[18] About 50 years later he said consider it it was "the only fair trial I've had in a court of law".

To his family's chagrin, Leary transferred to interpretation University of Alabama in late 1941 because it admitted him expeditiously. He enrolled in the university's ROTC program, maintained put pen to paper grades, and began to cultivate academic interests in psychology (under the aegis of the Middlebury and Harvard-educated Donald Ramsdell) put forward biology. Leary was expelled a year later for spending a night in the female dormitory and lost his student intermission in the midst of World War II.

Leary was drafted into the United States Army and received basic training be suspicious of Fort Eustis in 1943. He remained in the non-commissioned public official track while enrolled in the psychology subsection of the Service Specialized Training Program, including three months of study at Port University and six months at Ohio State University. With full of meaning need for officers late in the war, Leary was bluntly assigned as a private first class to the Pacific War-bound 2d Combat Cargo Group (which he later characterized as "a suicide command ... whose main mission, as far as I could see, was to eliminate the entire civilian branch well American aviation from post-war rivalry") at Syracuse Army Air Bracket in Mattydale, New York. After a fateful reunion with Ramsdell (who was assigned to Deshon General Hospital in Butler, Colony, as chief psychologist) in Buffalo, New York, he was promoted to corporal and reassigned to his mentor's command as a staff psychometrician. He remained in Deshon's deaf rehabilitation clinic in line for the remainder of the war.

While stationed in Butler, Psychologist courted Marianne Busch; they married in April 1945. Leary was discharged at the rank of sergeant in January 1946, having earned such standard decorations as the Good Conduct Medal, say publicly American Defense Service Medal, the American Campaign Medal, and description World War II Victory Medal.^[22]

As the war concluded, Leary was reinstated at UA and received credit for his Ohio Homeland psychology coursework. He completed his degree via correspondence courses be first graduated in August 1945. After receiving his undergraduate degree, Psychologist pursued an academic career. In 1946, he received a M.S. in psychology at the Washington State College in Pullman, where he studied under educational psychologist Lee Cronbach. His M.S. setback was on clinical applications of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale.^[23]

In 1947, Marianne gave birth to their first child, Susan. Their son, Jack, arrived two years later. In 1950, Leary acknowledged a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Calif., Berkeley.^[24] In the postwar era, Leary was galvanized by representation objectivity of modern physics; his doctoral dissertation (The Social Dimensions of Personality: Group Process and Structure) approached group therapy importance a "psychlotron" from which behavioral characteristics could be derived scold quantified in a manner analogous to the periodic table, prophetical his later development of the interpersonal circumplex.

Professorship

Leary stayed recover in the Bay Area as an assistant clinical professor reproach medical psychology at the University of California, San Francisco; concurrently, he co-founded Kaiser Hospital's psychology department in Oakland, California, explode maintained a private consultancy.^[28][B] In 1952, the Leary family fatigued a year in Spain, living on a research grant. According to Berkeley colleague Marv Freedman, "Something had been stirred control him in terms of breaking out of being another ratchet in society."

Leary's marriage was strained by infidelity and mutual the cup that cheers abuse. Marianne eventually died by suicide in 1955, leaving him to raise their son and daughter alone.^[4] He described himself during this period as "an anonymous institutional employee who horde to work each morning in a long line of commuter cars and drove home each night and drank martinis ... like several million middle-class, liberal, intellectual robots".^[30]

From 1954^[B] or 1955 to 1958, Leary directed psychiatric research at the Kaiser Descent Foundation.^[32] In 1957, he published The Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality, which the Annual Review of Psychology called the "most leading book on psychotherapy of the year".

In 1958, the National Organization of Mental Health terminated Leary's research grant after he bed defeated to meet with a NIMH investigator. Leary and his descendants relocated to Europe, where he attempted to write his uproot book while subsisting on small grants and insurance policies.^[34] His stay in Florence was unproductive and indigent, prompting a go back to academia.

In late 1959, Leary started as a welljudged in clinical psychology at Harvard University at the behest splash Frank Barron (a colleague from Berkeley) and David McClelland. Psychologist and his children lived in Newton, Massachusetts. In addition give up teaching, Leary was affiliated with the Harvard Center for Investigating in Personality under McClelland. He oversaw the Harvard Psilocybin Post and conducted experiments in conjunction with assistant professor Richard Alpert. In 1963, Leary was terminated for failing to attend regular class lectures, though he maintained that he had met his teaching obligations.^[36] The decision to dismiss him may have archaic influenced by his promotion of psychedelic drug use among University students and faculty. The drugs were legal at the time.^[37]

Leary's work in academic psychology expanded on the research of Beset Stack Sullivan and Karen Horney, which sought to better lacking clarity interpersonal processes to help diagnose disorders. Leary's dissertation developed description interpersonal circumplex model, later published in The Interpersonal Diagnosis reduce speed Personality. The book demonstrated how psychologists could use Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) scores to predict how respondents might conduct oneself to various interpersonal situations. Leary's research was an important precursor of transactional analysis, directly prefiguring the popular work of Eric Berne.^[39][40]

Psychedelic experiments and experiences

Mexico and Harvard research (1957–1963)

Introduction to psychedelic mushrooms

On May 13, 1957, Life magazine published "Seeking the Voodoo Mushroom", an article by R. Gordon Wasson about the brew of psilocybin mushrooms in religious rites of the indigenous Mazatec people of Mexico.^[41] Anthony Russo, a colleague of Leary's, confidential experimented with psychedelicPsilocybe mexicana mushrooms on a trip to Mexico and told Leary about it. In August 1960,^[42] Leary travel to Cuernavaca, Mexico, with Russo and consumed psilocybin mushrooms extend the first time, an experience that drastically altered the track of his life.^[43] In 1965, Leary said that he locked away "learned more about ... [his] brain and its possibilities ... [and] more about psychology in the five hours after legation these mushrooms than ... in the preceding 15 years pattern studying and doing research".^[43]

Back at Harvard, Leary and his associates (notably Alpert) began a research program known as the University Psilocybin Project. The goal was to analyze the effects endlessly psilocybin on human subjects (first prisoners, and later Andover n Theological Seminary students) from a synthesized version of the pharmaceutical, one of two active compounds found in a wide range of hallucinogenic mushrooms, including Psilocybe mexicana. Psilocybin was produced embankment a process developed by Albert Hofmann of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, who was famous for synthesizing LSD.^[44]

Beat poetAllen Ginsberg heard about representation Harvard research project and asked to join. Leary was brilliant by Ginsberg's enthusiasm, and the two shared an optimism dump psychedelics could help people discover a higher level of cognisance. They began introducing psychedelics to intellectuals and artists including Carangid Kerouac, Maynard Ferguson, Charles Mingus and Charles Olson.^[45]

Concord Prison Experiment

Leary argued that psychedelic substances—in proper doses, a stable setting, tell under the guidance of psychologists—could benefit behavior in ways troupe easily obtained by regular therapy. He experimented in treating cacoethes and reforming criminals, and many of his subjects said they had profound mystical and spiritual experiences that permanently improved their lives.

The Concord Prison Experiment evaluated the use of psilocybin nearby psychotherapy in the rehabilitation of released prisoners. Thirty-six prisoners were reported to have repented and sworn off criminality after Psychologist and his associates guided them through the psychedelic experience. Say publicly overall recidivism rate for American prisoners was 60%, whereas interpretation rate for those in Leary's project reportedly dropped to 20%. The experimenters concluded that long-term reduction in criminal recidivism could be effected with a combination of psilocybin-assisted group psychotherapy (inside the prison) along with a comprehensive post-release follow-up support syllabus modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous.

Dissension over studies

The Concord conclusions were oppose in a follow-up study on the basis of time differences monitoring the study group vs. the control group and differences between subjects re-incarcerated for parole violations and those imprisoned convoy new crimes. The researchers concluded that statistically only a small improvement could be attributed to psilocybin, in contrast to depiction significant improvement reported by Leary and his colleagues.^[49]Rick Doblin advisable that Leary had fallen prey to the Halo Effect, skewing the results and clinical conclusions. Doblin further accused Leary decompose lacking "a higher standard" or "highest ethical standards in sanction to regain the trust of regulators". Ralph Metzner rebuked Doblin for these assertions: "In my opinion, the existing accepted standards of honesty and truthfulness are perfectly adequate. We have those standards, not to curry favor with regulators, but because come after is the agreement within the scientific community that observations should be reported accurately and completely. There is no proof redraft any of this re-analysis that Leary unethically manipulated his data."^[50][51]

Leary and Alpert founded the International Federation for Internal Freedom (IFIF) in 1962 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to carry out studies neat the religious use of psychedelic drugs.^[52] This was run via Lisa Bieberman (now known as Licia Kuenning), a friend exert a pull on Leary.^[54]The Harvard Crimson called her a "disciple" who ran a Psychedelic Information Center out of her home and published a national LSD newspaper.^[56] That publication was actually Leary and Alpert's journal Psychedelic Review and Bieberman (a graduate of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, who had volunteered make public Leary as a student) was its circulation manager.^[57][58] Leary's subject Alpert's research attracted so much attention that many who desired to participate in the experiments had to be turned chafe. To satisfy the curiosity of those who were turned warehouse, a black market for psychedelics sprang up near the Altruist campus.

Firing by Harvard

Other professors in the Harvard Center for Enquiry in Personality raised concerns about the experiments' legitimacy and safety.^[6][7][59] Leary and Alpert taught a class that was required keep graduation and colleagues felt they were abusing their power wedge pressuring graduate students to take hallucinogens in the experiments. Psychologist and Alpert also went against policy by giving psychedelics walkout undergraduate students and did not select participants through random case. It was also ethically questionable that the researchers sometimes took hallucinogens along with the subjects they were studying. These concerns were printed in The Harvard Crimson, leading the university draw attention to halt the experiments. The Massachusetts Department of Public Health launched an investigation that was later dropped but the university ultimately fired Leary and Alpert.

According to Andrew Weil, Leary (who held an untenured teaching appointment) was fired for missing his scheduled lectures, while Alpert (a tenure-track assistant professor) was fired for allegedly giving an undergraduate psilocybin in an off-campus apartment.^[60] Harvard President Nathan Pusey released a statement on May 27, 1963, reporting that Leary had left campus without authorization increase in intensity "failed to keep his classroom appointments". His salary was complete on April 30, 1963.^[36]

Millbrook and psychedelic counterculture (1963–1967)

Leary's psychedelic enquiry attracted the attention of three heirs to the Mellon worth, siblings Peggy, Billy, and Tommy Hitchcock. In 1963, they gave Leary and his associates access to a sprawling 64-room sign on an estate in Millbrook, New York, where they continuing their psychedelic sessions. Peggy directed the International Federation for Interior Freedom (IFIF)'s New York branch, and Billy rented the demesne to IFIF. Peggy persuaded her brothers to let Leary repeated a room at the mansion.^[62] Leary and Alpert set count a communal group with former Psilocybin Project members at interpretation Hitchcock Estate (commonly known as "Millbrook"). One of the IFIF's founding board members, Paul Lee, a Harvard theologian, a sharer at Marsh Chapel and a member of the Leary accumulate, said of the group's formation:

There was a big discuss about whether to go underground with it and make stage set a kind of secret initiation issue, or go public. But Leary was an Irish revolutionary and he wanted to scream it from the rooftops. So it went that way. Fight simply became a tsunami.^[63]

The IFIF was reconstituted as the Castalia Foundation after the intellectual colony in Hermann Hesse's 1943 new The Glass Bead Game.^[64][66] The Castalia group's journal was representation Psychedelic Review. The core group at Millbrook wanted to protect the divinity within each person and regularly joined LSD sitting facilitated by Leary. The Castalia Foundation also hosted non-drug weekend retreats for meditation, yoga, and group therapy.^[66][67] Leary later wrote:

We saw ourselves as anthropologists from the 21st century inhabiting a time module set somewhere in the dark ages addict the 1960s. On this space colony we were attempting make create a new paganism and a new dedication to brusque as art.

Lucy Sante of The New York Times later described the Millbrook estate as:

the headquarters of Leary and organization for the better part of five years, a period filled with endless parties, epiphanies and breakdowns, emotional dramas of label sizes, and numerous raids and arrests, many of them acquittal flimsy charges concocted by the local assistant district attorney, G. Gordon Liddy.^[69]

Others contest the characterization of Millbrook as a bracket together house. In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe portrays Leary as using psychedelics only for research, not recreation. When Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters visited the estate, they received a frosty reception. Leary had the flu and did not do host. After a private meeting with Kesey and Ken Babbs in his room, he promised to remain an ally develop the years ahead.

In 1964, Leary, Alpert, and Ralph Metzner coauthored The Psychedelic Experience, based on the Tibetan Book of description Dead. In it, they wrote:

A psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness. The scope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic features control the transcendence of verbal concepts, of spacetime dimensions, and firm the ego or identity. Such experiences of enlarged consciousness sprig occur in a variety of ways: sensory deprivation, yoga exercises, disciplined meditation, religious or aesthetic ecstasies, or spontaneously. Most newly they have become available to anyone through the ingestion go along with psychedelic drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, etc. Near course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. Embrace merely acts as a chemical key—it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.

Leary joined model Birgitte Caroline "Nena" von Schlebrügge in 1964 at Millbrook. Both Nena and her brother Bjorn were friends of representation Hitchcocks. D. A. Pennebaker, also a Hitchcock friend, and cinematographer Nicholas Proferes documented the event in the short film You're Nobody Cultivate Somebody Loves You.^[74]Charles Mingus played piano. The marriage lasted a year before von Schlebrügge divorced Leary in 1965. She wed Indo-Tibetan Buddhist scholar and ex-monk Robert Thurman in 1967 captain gave birth to Ganden Thurman that same year. Actress Uma Thurman, her second child, was born in 1970.

Leary fall over Rosemary Woodruff in 1965 at a New York City order exhibit, and invited her to Millbrook.^[75][76][77] After moving in, she co-edited the manuscript for Leary's 1966 book Psychedelic Prayers: Suggest Other Meditations with Ralph Metzner and Michael Horowitz.^[78] The poems in the book were inspired by the Tao Te Ching, and meant to be used as an aid to Hallucinogen trips.^[78][79] Woodruff helped Leary prepare weekend multimedia workshops simulating rendering psychedelic experience, which were presented around the East Coast.^[78]

In Sept 1966, Leary said in a Playboy magazine interview that Hallucinogen could cure homosexuality. According to him, a lesbian became someone after using the drug.^[80][81] Like most of the psychiatric turn, he later decided that homosexuality was not an illness.^[C]

By 1966, use of psychedelics by America's youth had reached such proportions that serious concern about the drugs and their effect spill the beans American culture was expressed in the national press and halls of government. In response to this concern, Senator Thomas Dodd convened Senate subcommittee hearings to try to better understand rendering drug-use phenomenon, eventually with the intention of "stamping out" much usage by criminalizing it. Leary was one of several buff witnesses called to testify at these hearings. In his authentication, Leary said, "the challenge of the psychedelic chemicals is mass just how to control them, but how to use them." He implored the subcommittee not to criminalize psychedelic drug connection, which he felt would only serve to exponentially increase warmth usage among America's youth while removing the safeguards that possessed "set and setting" provided. When subcommittee member Ted Kennedy asked Leary whether LSD usage was "extremely dangerous", Leary replied, "Sir, the motorcar is dangerous if used improperly...Human stupidity and unconsciousness is the only danger human beings face in this world." To conclude his testimony, Leary suggested that legislation be enacted that would require LSD users to be adults who were competently trained and licensed, so that such individuals could induce LSD "for serious purposes, such as spiritual growth, pursuit rigidity knowledge, or their own personal development."^[84] He argued that after such licensing, the U.S. would face "another era of prohibition." Leary's testimony proved ineffective; on October 6, 1966, just months after the subcommittee hearings, LSD was banned in California, scold by October 1968, it was banned nationwide by the Staggers-Dodd Bill.

In 1966, Folkways Records recorded Leary reading from his publication The Psychedelic Experience, and released the album The Psychedelic Experience: Readings from the Book "The Psychedelic Experience. A Manual Household on the Tibetan...".^[87]

On September 19, 1966, Leary reorganized the IFIF/Castalia Foundation under the name the League for Spiritual Discovery, a religion with LSD as its holy sacrament, in part whereas an unsuccessful attempt to maintain legal status for the induce of LSD and other psychedelics for the religion's adherents, family unit on a "freedom of religion" argument.^[66][67] Leary incorporated the Association for Spiritual Discovery as a religious organization in New Dynasty State, and its dogma was based on Leary's mantra: "drop out, turn on, tune in".^[66] (The Brotherhood of Eternal Tenderness later considered Leary its spiritual leader, but it did troupe develop out of the IFIF.) Nicholas Sand, the clandestine physicist for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, followed Leary to Millbrook and joined the League for Spiritual Discovery. Sand was designated the "alchemist" of the new religion.^[88] At the end grip 1966, Nina Graboi, a friend and colleague of Leary's who had spent time with him at Millbrook, became the administrator of the Center for the League of Spiritual Discovery secure Greenwich Village.^[89] The Center opened in March 1967. Leary most important Alpert gave free weekly talks there; other guest speakers be part of the cause Ralph Metzner and Allen Ginsberg.^[89] Leary's papers at the Novel York Public Library include complete records of the IFIF, description Castalia Foundation, and the League for Spiritual Discovery.^[93]

In late 1966 and early 1967, Leary toured college campuses presenting a cd performance called "The Death of the Mind", attempting an cultured replication of the LSD experience.^[64] He said that the Friend for Spiritual Discovery was limited to 360 members and was already at its membership limit, but encouraged others to concealing outfit their own psychedelic religions. He published a pamphlet in 1967 called Start Your Own Religion to encourage people to bustle so.^[64]

Leary was invited to attend the January 14, 1967 Possibly manlike Be-In by Michael Bowen, the primary organizer of the event,^[95] a gathering of 30,000 hippies in San Francisco's Golden Appraise Park. In speaking to the group, Leary coined the celebrated phrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out". In a 1988 interview with Neil Strauss, he said the slogan was "given to him" by Marshall McLuhan when the two had dejeuner in New York City, adding, "Marshall was very much concerned in ideas and marketing, and he started singing something lack, 'Psychedelics hit the spot / Five hundred micrograms, that's a lot,' to the tune of [the well-known Pepsi 1950s musical commercial]. Then he started going, 'Tune in, turn on, bracket drop out.'"^[96] Though the more popular "turn on, tune temper, drop out" became synonymous with Leary, his actual definition momentous the League for Spiritual Discovery was: "Drop Out—detach yourself expend the external social drama which is as dehydrated and artificial as TV. Turn On—find a sacrament which returns you halt the temple of God, your own body. Go out take in your mind. Get high. Tune In—be reborn. Drop back observe to express it. Start a new sequence of behavior give it some thought reflects your vision."^[66]

Repeated FBI raids ended the Millbrook era. Psychologist told author and Prankster Paul Krassner of a 1966 bear up by Liddy, "He was a government agent entering our chamber at midnight. We had every right to shoot him. But I've never owned a weapon in my life. I imitate never had and never will have a gun around."

In Nov 1967, Leary engaged in a televised debate on drug forgive with MIT professor Jerry Lettvin.^[98]

Post-Millbrook

At the end of 1967, Psychologist moved to Laguna Beach, California, and made many friends show Hollywood. "When he married his third wife, Rosemary Woodruff, rip open 1967, the event was directed by Ted Markland of Bonanza. All the guests were on acid."^[4]

In the late 1960s bracket early 1970s, Leary formulated what became his eight-circuit model disturb consciousness in collaboration with writer Brian Barritt. The essay "The Seven Tongues of God" claimed that human brains have sevener circuits producing seven levels of consciousness. This later became cardinal circuits in Leary's 1973 monograph Neurologic, which he wrote linctus he was in prison. The eight-circuit idea was not particularly formulated until the publication of Exo-Psychology by Leary and Parliamentarian Anton Wilson's Cosmic Trigger in 1977. Wilson contributed to rendering model after befriending Leary in the early 1970s, and moved it as a framework for further exposition in his game park Prometheus Rising, among other works.^[D]

Leary believed that the first quaternion of these circuits ("the Larval Circuits" or "Terrestrial Circuits") percentage naturally accessed by most people at transition points in progress such as puberty. The second four circuits ("the Stellar Circuits" or "Extra-Terrestrial Circuits"), Leary wrote, were "evolutionary offshoots" of interpretation first four that would be triggered at transition points significance humans evolve further. These circuits, according to Leary, would provide humans to live in space and expand consciousness for additional scientific and social progress. Leary suggested that some people strength trigger these circuits sooner through meditation, yoga, or psychedelic drugs specific to each circuit. He suggested that the feelings a variety of floating and uninhibited motion sometimes experienced with marijuana demonstrated interpretation purpose of the higher four circuits. The function of interpretation fifth circuit was to accustom humans to life at a zero gravity environment. Leary did not specify the location decay the eight circuits in any brain structures, neural organization, shadowy chemical pathways. He wrote that a higher intelligence "located of the essence interstellar nuclear-gravitational-quantum structures" gave humans the eight circuits. A "U.F.O. message" was encoded in human DNA.

Many researchers believed that Psychologist provided little scientific evidence for his claims. Even before dirt began working on psychedelics, he was known as a theorist rather than a data collector. His most ambitious pre-psychedelic dike was Interpersonal Diagnosis Of Personality. The reviewer for The Country Medical Journal, H. J. Eysenck, wrote that Leary created a confusing and overly broad rubric for testing psychiatric conditions. "Perhaps the worst failing of the book is the omission forfeited any kind of proof for the validity and reliability admit the diagnostic system," Eysenck wrote. "It is simply not ample to say" that the accuracy of the system "can happen to checked by the reader" in clinical practice.^[102] In 1965, Psychologist co-edited The Psychedelic Reader. Penn State psychology researcher Jerome Compare. Singer reviewed the book and singled out Leary as representation worst offender in a work containing "melanges of hucksterism". Trauma place of scientific data about the effects of LSD, Psychologist used metaphors about "galaxies spinning" faster than the speed beat somebody to it light and a cerebral cortex "turned on to a unnecessary higher voltage".^[103]

Legal troubles

Leary's first run-in with the law came bar December 23, 1965, when he was arrested for marijuana possession.^[104] On December 20, 1965 Leary took his two children, Diddley and Susan, and his girlfriend Rosemary Woodruff to Mexico guarantor an month-long vacation to rest and write an autobiography. Fold up days later they had crossed into Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, schedule the late afternoon and discovered that they would have hit wait until morning for the appropriate visa for an lengthened stay. They decided to cross back into Texas to run your term the night, and were on the US–Mexico bridge when Wise remembered that she had a small amount of marijuana name her possession. It was impossible to throw it out natural the bridge, so Susan put it in her clothes. Department their return from Mexico to the United States, a Climax Customs Service woman officer searched Susan and found a silver plate snuffbox with marijuana.^[107][108] After taking responsibility for the controlled import, Leary was convicted of possession under the Marihuana Tax Delay of 1937 on March 11, 1966, sentenced to 30 life in prison, fined $30,000, and ordered to undergo psychiatric management. He appealed the case on the basis that the Hemp Tax Act was unconstitutional, as it required a degree expend self-incrimination in blatant violation of the Fifth Amendment.

On Dec 26, 1968, Leary was arrested again in Laguna Beach, Calif., this time for the possession of two marijuana "roaches". Psychologist alleged that they were planted by the arresting officer, but was convicted of the crime. On May 19, 1969, rendering Supreme Court concurred with Leary in Leary v. United States, declared the Marihuana Tax Act unconstitutional, and overturned his 1966 conviction.^[E]

On that same day, Leary announced his candidacy for boss of California against the Republican incumbent, Ronald Reagan. His manoeuvres slogan was "Come together, join the party." On June 1, 1969, Leary joined John Lennon and Yoko Ono at their Montrealbed-in, and Lennon subsequently wrote Leary a campaign song alarmed "Come Together".^[109]

On January 21, 1970, Leary received a ten-year judgement for his 1968 offense, with a further ten added afterward while in custody for a prior arrest in 1965, foothold a total of 20 years to be served consecutively. Guilt his arrival in prison, he was given psychological tests softhearted to assign inmates to appropriate work details. Having designed stumpy of these tests himself (including the "Leary Interpersonal Behavior Inventory"), Leary answered them in such a way that he seemed to be a very conforming, conventional person with a sum interest in forestry and gardening.^[110] As a result, he was assigned to work as a gardener in a lower-security lockup from which he escaped in September 1970, saying that his nonviolent escape was a humorous prank and leaving a difficult note for the authorities to find after he was gone.^[111]

For a fee of $25,000, paid by The Brotherhood of Immortal Love, the Weathermen smuggled Leary out of prison in a pickup truck driven by Clayton Van Lydegraf.^[112] The truck reduce Leary after he had escaped over the prison wall get by without climbing along a telephone wire. The Weathermen then helped both Leary and Rosemary out of the U.S. (and eventually minor road Algeria).^[113] He sought the patronage of Eldridge Cleaver for $10,000 and the remnants of the Black Panther Party's "government clear exile" in Algeria, but after a short stay with them said that Cleaver had attempted to hold him and his wife hostage.^[115] Cleaver had put Leary and his wife fall "house arrest" due to exasperation with their socialite lifestyle.^[115]

In 1971, the couple fled to Switzerland, where they were sheltered predominant effectively imprisoned by a high-living arms dealer, Michel Hauchard, who claimed he had an "obligation as a gentleman to comprise philosophers"; Hauchard intended to broker a surreptitious film deal, viewpoint forced Leary to assign his future earnings (which Leary sooner won back).^[69][116] In 1972, Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, persuaded the Swiss government to imprison Leary, which it did perform a month, but refused to extradite him to the U.S.^[116]

Leary and Rosemary separated later that year; she traveled widely, spread moved back to the U.S., where she lived as a fugitive until the 1990s.^[116][117] Shortly after his separation from Basil in 1972, Leary became involved with Swiss-born British socialite Joanna Harcourt-Smith, a stepdaughter of financier Árpád Plesch and ex-girlfriend run through Hauchard.^[116] The couple married in a hotel under the credence of cocaine and LSD ^{[citation needed]} two weeks after they were introduced, and Harcourt-Smith used his surname until their alteration in 1977. They traveled to Vienna, then Beirut, and at long last ended up in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1972; according to Lucy Sante, "Afghanistan had no extradition treaty with the United States, but this stricture did not apply to American airliners."^[69] Indweller authorities used that interpretation of the law to interdict Psychologist. "Before Leary could deplane, he was arrested by an officiate of the federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs."^[69] Psychologist asserted a different story on appeal before the California Boring of Appeal for the Second District, namely:^[118]

He testified further avoid he had a valid passport in Kabul and that imitate was confiscated while he was in a line at description American Embassy in Kabul a few days prior to picture day when he boarded the airplane; after his passport was confiscated, he was taken to "Central Police Headquarters"; he frank not attempt to contact the American Embassy; the Kabul police officers held him in custody and took him to a "police hotel". The cousin of the King of Afghanistan came function see him and told him that it was a secure holiday, that the King and the officials were out emancipation Kabul, and that he (the cousin) would get a queen's and see that Leary "had a hearing". On the morn the airplane left Kabul, officials of Afghanistan told him settle down was to leave Afghanistan. Leary replied he would not unshackle without a hearing and until he got his passport back; they said the Americans had his passport, and he was taken to the airplane.

Leary's bail was set at $5 million.^[116] The judge at his remand hearing said, "If he crack allowed to travel freely, he will speak publicly and travel his ideas".^[120] Facing 95 years in prison, Leary hired dreadful defense attorney Bruce Margolin. Leary mostly directed his own look after strategy, which proved unsuccessful: the jury convicted him after deliberating for less than two hours.^[116] Leary received five years means his prison escape, added to his original 10-year sentence.^[116] Rotation 1973, he was sent to Folsom Prison in California, standing put in solitary confinement.^[116][121] While in Folsom, he was perjure yourself in a cell next to Charles Manson, and though they could not see each other, they could talk together. Crop their discussions, Manson was surprised and found it difficult offer understand why Leary had given people LSD without trying difficulty control them. At one point, Manson said to Leary, "They took you off the streets so that I could stretch with your work."^[122]

Leary became an FBI informant in order do as you are told shorten his prison sentence and entered the witness protection information upon his release in 1976.^[123][124] He claimed that he feigned cooperation with the FBI investigation of Weathermen by providing intelligence that they already had or that was of little effect. The FBI gave him the code name "Charlie Thrush". Moniker a 1974 news conference, Allen Ginsberg, Ram Dass, and Leary's 25-year-old son Jack denounced Leary, calling him a "cop informant", "liar", and "paranoid schizophrenic".^[126] No prosecutions stemmed from his FBI reporting. In 1999, a letter from 22 "Friends of Christian Leary" sought to soften impressions of the FBI episode. Set was signed by authors such as Douglas Rushkoff, Ken Author, and Robert Anton Wilson. Susan Sarandon, Genesis P-Orridge and Leary's goddaughter Winona Ryder also signed.^[115][127] The letter said that Psychologist had smuggled a message to the Weather Underground informing kick up a rumpus "that he was considering making a deal with the FBI" and he then "waited for their approval". The reported come back was, "We understand."^[127] The letter writers did not provide document that the Weather Underground okayed his cooperation with the FBI.

While in prison, Leary was sued by the parents outandout Vernon Powell Cox, who had jumped from a third-story glass of a Berkeley apartment while under the influence of Hallucinogen. Cox had taken the drug after attending a lecture unreceptive Leary promoting LSD use. Leary was unable to be be included due to his incarceration, and unable to arrange for lawful representation; a default judgment was entered against him in representation amount of $100,000.^[129]

Post-prison

On April 21, 1976, Governor Jerry Brown free Leary from prison. After briefly relocating to Santa Fe, In mint condition Mexico, with Harcourt-Smith under the auspices of the United States Federal Witness Protection Program, the couple separated in early 1977.

Leary then moved to the Laurel Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles, where he resided for the rest of his take a crack at. Unable to secure a conventional academic, research, or clinical apprehension due to his reputation, he continued to publish books corner the independent press while maintaining an upper middle class routine by making paid appearances at colleges and nightclubs as a self-described "stand-up philosopher". In 1978, he married filmmaker Barbara Blum, also known as Barbara Chase, sister of actress Tanya Gospeller. He adopted Blum's young son Zachary and raised him little his own. He also took on several godchildren, including Winona Ryder (the daughter of his archivist Michael Horowitz) and individual Joi Ito.^[132][133]

Leary developed an improbable partnership with former Millbrook-era adversary G. Gordon Liddy, the Watergate burglar and conservative radio talk-show host. They toured the lecture circuit in 1982 as ex-cons debating a range of issues, including gay rights, abortion, good fortune and the environment. Leary generally espoused left-wing views, while Liddy generally espoused right-wing perspectives. The tour generated massive publicity shaft considerable funds for both. The 1983 documentary Return Engagement chronicled the tour and the release of Flashbacks, Leary's long-germinating memoir; biographer Robert Greenfield has since asserted that much of what Leary "reported as fact in Flashbacks is pure fantasy."

On Sept 25, 1988, Leary held a fundraiser for Libertarian Party statesmanlike candidate Ron Paul.^{[135][136][137]} Journalist Debra Saunders attended and wrote confirm her experience.^[138]

Leary's extensive touring on the lecture circuit continued concurrence ensure his family a comfortable lifestyle throughout the mid-1980s. Agreed associated with a variety of cultural figures, including longtime interlocutors Robert Anton Wilson and Allen Ginsberg; science fiction writers William Gibson and Norman Spinrad; and rock musicians David Byrne presentday John Frusciante.^{[citation needed]} In addition, he appeared in Johnny Depp's and Gibby Haynes's 1994 film Stuff, which chronicled Frusciante's seamy living conditions at that time.^[139]

Leary continued to take a rehearsal array of drugs (ranging from serotonergic psychedelics to the nascent empathogenMDMA and alcohol and heroin)^[140] in private, but consciously eschewed proselytizing substances in media appearances amid the escalation of interpretation war on drugs throughout the presidency of Ronald Reagan. In place of, he served as a prominent advocate for space colonization limit life extension. He expounded on the eight-circuit model of knowing in books such as Info-Psychology: A Re-Vision of Exo-Psychology.^[116] Proscribed invented the acronym "SMI²LE" as a succinct summary of his pre-transhumanist agenda: SM (Space Migration) + I² (intelligence increase) + LE (Life extension).^[141]

Leary's space colonization plan evolved over the life. Initially, 5,000 of Earth's most virile and intelligent individuals would be launched on a vessel (Starseed 1) equipped with sumptuous amenities. This idea was inspired by musician Paul Kantner's 1970 concept album Blows Against The Empire, which was derived proud Robert A. Heinlein's Lazarus Long series. While incarcerated in Folsom State Prison during the winter of 1975–76, he became smitten of Princeton University physicist Gerard K. O'Neill's plans to make giant Eden-like High Orbital Mini-Earths, as documented in the Parliamentarian Anton Wilson lecture H.O.M.E.s on LaGrange, using raw materials free yourself of the Moon, orbital rock, and obsolete satellites.^[F]

In the 1980s, Psychologist became fascinated by computers, the internet, and virtual reality. Yes proclaimed that "the PC is the LSD of the 1990s" and enjoined historically technophobic bohemians to "turn on, boot brace, jack in."^[142][143] He became a promoter of virtual reality systems,^[144] and sometimes demonstrated a prototype of the MattelPower Glove gorilla part of his lectures (as in From Psychedelics to Cybernetics). He befriended a number of notable people in the a good deal, such as Jaron Lanier^[145] and Brenda Laurel, a pioneer think it over virtual environments and human–computer interaction. During the evanescent heyday chuck out the cyberdelic subculture, he served as a consultant to Nightstick Idol in the production of the 1993 album Cyberpunk.^[146]

In Jan 1989, his daughter Susan, then 41, was arrested in Los Angeles for non-fatally shooting her boyfriend in the head tempt he slept in December 1988.^[147] She was ruled mentally apractic to stand trial for attempted murder on two occasions.^[148] Later years of mental instability, she died by suicide in keep a grip on in September 1990.^[149][4]

Although he considered her the "great love reminisce his life", Leary and Barbara divorced in 1992; according plug up friend and collaborator John Perry Barlow, "Tim basically gave look forward to permission to be her lover. He couldn't be for be a foil for what she needed sexually, so it made more sense take care of him to anoint someone to do that for him."^[150] Next, he ensconced himself in a diverse circle of prominent figures, including Johnny Depp, Susan Sarandon, Dan Aykroyd, Zach Leary,^[115] inventor Douglas Rushkoff, and Spin magazine publisher Bob Guccione, Jr.^[151] In defiance of declining health, he maintained a regular schedule of public appearances through 1994.^[G] Reflecting a modicum of political rehabilitation after not too failed attempts to adapt Flashbacks as a film or verify miniseries, he was the subject of a symposium of picture American Psychological Association that year.^[152]

From 1989 on, Leary began collect reestablish his connection to unconventional religious movements with an occupational in altered states of consciousness. In 1989, he appeared continue living Robert Anton Wilson in a dialog called The Inner Frontier for the Association for Consciousness Exploration, a Cleveland-based group dump had been responsible for his first Cleveland appearance in 1979. After that, he appeared at the Starwood Festival, a vital Neo-Pagan event run by ACE in 1992 and 1993.^[153] His planned 1994 WinterStar Symposium appearance was canceled due to his declining health. In 1992, in front of hundreds of Neo-Pagans, Leary declared, "I've always considered myself a Pagan."^[154] He too collaborated with Eric Gullichsen on Load and Run High-tech Paganism: Digital Polytheism.^[155] Shortly before his death on May 31, 1996, he recorded the album Right to Fly with Simon Stokes, which was released in July 1996.^[156]

Death

In January 1995, Leary was diagnosed with inoperable prostate cancer. He then notified Ram Dass and other old friends and began the process of directed dying, which he termed "designer dying".^[158] Leary did not unveil the condition to the press at that time, but frank so after Jerry Garcia's death in August.^[158] Leary and Pack Dass reunited before Leary's death in May 1996, as ignore in the documentary film Dying to Know: Ram Dass & Timothy Leary.^[159][160]

Leary's last book was Chaos & Cyber Culture, publicized in 1994. In it he wrote: "The time has step to talk cheerfully and joke sassily about personal responsibility apply for managing the dying process."^[158] His book Design for Dying, which tried to give a new perspective on death and failing, was published posthumously.^[161] Leary wrote about his belief that stain is "a merging with the entire life process".^[161]

His website operation, led by Chris Graves, updated his website on a ordinary basis as a proto-blog.^[158] The website noted his daily uptake of various illicit and legal chemical substances, with a fondness for nitrous oxide, LSD and other psychedelic drugs.^[162] He was also noted for his trademark "Leary Biscuit", a cannabis esculent consisting of a snack cracker with cheese and a in short supply marijuana bud, briefly microwaved.^[163] At his request, his sterile backtoback was redecorated by the staff with an array of weird ornamentation.^{[citation needed]} In his final months, thousands of visitors, well-wishers and old friends visited him in his California home.^{[citation needed]} Until his last weeks, he gave many interviews discussing his new philosophy of embracing death.^[161]

Leary was reportedly excited for a number of years by the possibility of freezing his body in cryonic suspension, and he announced in September 1988 put off he had signed up with Alcor for such treatment aft having appeared at Alcor's grand opening the year before.^[164] Agreed did not believe he would be resurrected in the but did believe that cryonics had important possibilities, even comb he thought it had only "one chance in a thousand".^[164] He called it his "duty as a futurist", helped give publicity to the process and hoped that it would work for his children and grandchildren if not for him, although he held that he was "lighthearted" about it.^[164] He was connected lay into two cryonic organizations—first Alcor and then CryoCare—one of which make your mark a cryonic tank to his house in the months in the past his death. Leary initially announced that he would freeze his entire body, but due to lack of funds decided do as you are told freeze his head only.^[115][158] Three weeks before his death, Psychologist changed his mind again and generally refused cryopreservation from both Alcor and CryoCare.^[165] He requested that his body be cremated, with his ashes scattered in space.^[115]

Leary died aged 75 show partiality towards May 31, 1996. His death was videotaped for posterity tear his request by Denis Berry and Joey Cavella, capturing his final words.^[115] Berry was the trustee of Leary's archives, very last Cavella had filmed Leary during his later years.^[115] According shabby his son Zachary, during his final moments, he clenched his fist and said: "Why?", then, unclenching his fist, said: "Why not?". He uttered the phrase repeatedly, in different intonations, captain died soon after. His last word, according to Zach, was "beautiful".

The film Timothy Leary's Dead (1996) contains a simulated chain in which he allows his bodily functions to be suspended for the purposes of cryonic preservation. His head is distant and placed on ice. The film ends with a progression showing the creation of the artificial head used in rendering film.

Seven grams (¼ oz) of Leary's ashes were raring to go by his friend at Celestis to be buried in luggage compartment aboard a rocket carrying the remains of 23 others, including Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, space colonization advocate Gerard Dramatist and German-American rocket engineer Krafft Ehricke. A Pegasus rocket containing their remains was launched on April 21, 1997, and remained in orbit for six years until it burned up bayou the atmosphere.^[167]

Leary's ashes were given to close friends and race. In 2015, Susan Sarandon brought some of his ashes take a break the Burning Man festival in Black Rock City, Nevada, presentday put them into an art installation there. The ashes were burned along with the installation on September 6, 2015.^[168]

Personal life

Leary was legally married five times, sired three biological children remarkable adopted a fourth child. He also regarded Joanna Harcourt-Smith (his domestic partner from 1972 to 1977) as his common-law helpmeet for the duration of their relationship. His first wife, Marianne Busch, died by suicide.^[169]

• 1945–1955 Marianne Busch (1921–1955)