If you remember the 60s, you weren't really there
— Dr. Timothy Leary
Who out there remembers Tim Leary? Stand up. OK, now, if your hair is grey, sit down.
Sonofagun, no one left standing.
When you mention Tim Leary to someone under 30 today, you're likely to get the same blank look as when you mention W. C. Fields. Even at a "Hemp Fest" last April, I had to explain to this one Sweet Young Thing who Tim was.
In 1966 President Nixon labeled Dr. Timothy Leary, then recently of Harvard, "the most dangerous man in America". You'd think that'd have been enough to keep his notoriety up, but I guess not.
Back then everyone knew who Tim Leary was. His Playboy interview came out that September. He had been on Les Crane and Alan Burke and all those early-60s TV chat shows. My Fall '66 Senior Year High School English teacher was one Stirling Jensen. The previous Fall semester he had turned The Odyssey into a mind-expanding experience that I was too young to appreciate. One day this year he came into class exhorting Tim's then-current "Death of the Mind" tour, which he had experienced at the Village Theater (soon to become the Fillmore East) the evening prior. Thus inspired, I went to the show a few days later. It was still a bit soon for me, I didn't quite get it. (I have since decided that Jensen had done LSD back when it was still legal. I know, tough call.)
There was always a dichotomy between Leary's reputation and the more serious work that he did. Most people don't know that Tim's early work was instrumental in the development of group therapy and of personality inventories. Of course, a lot of the attention he got, and a lot of what he talked about was the LSD experience. But every now and then, in between the talk of inspiring visions and visionary sex, he would try to describe how we each "create our own reality", as he occasionally put it. But the state of neurological research hadn't yet progressed far enough for him to take it much past Eastern philosophical metaphors. A few years later he, along with Robert Anton Wilson, started to publish the so-called "Future History Series", which, besides introducing us to his "eight-circuit" model of consciousness, clarified and crystallized the "creating your reality" metaphor.
All the information your brain gets, it gets through your senses. All it knows about the Universe is that information. Our senses absorb various exogenous signals, sending absurd amounts of data to our brains, which our brain has to sort through and organize into a sort of hologram. That's basically what Tim and Bob were saying explicitly by the late 70s.
Alright, do that thing where the image gets wiggly and end that flashback. Maybe you're familiar with the "Great Courses" series from the Teaching Co. They advertise in Discover and AARP magazine and some others, they sell CD and DVD sets of what are, when you come down to it, college extension or maybe community college-level courses. I've been getting into them lately, tickling parts of my brain that hadn't been tickled in awhile, as I've commented, learning a bit more deeply about ancient history, that kind of thing. One I've just finished is called "Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills", the lecturer is this guy Steven Novella, who's an MD at Yale School of Medicine.
Now, I hasten to point out that this is one of their more recent courses, it was released this year, and makes several comments about very recent events. That is, it's current. The guy's an MD, a Professor at Yale, totally mainstream. And you'll have to take my word for it that these courses are totally apolitical, non-offensive middle-of-the-road, as ideological and academically neutral as one could imagine.
The first several lectures discussed the current understanding of the neurology of perception in the wake of recent advances in imaging. This is from the "course guidebook" that accompanies the course, the introductory paragraph for the lecture titled "Our Constructed Reality"; the over-emphasis is mine:
— Dr. Timothy Leary
Who out there remembers Tim Leary? Stand up. OK, now, if your hair is grey, sit down.
Sonofagun, no one left standing.
When you mention Tim Leary to someone under 30 today, you're likely to get the same blank look as when you mention W. C. Fields. Even at a "Hemp Fest" last April, I had to explain to this one Sweet Young Thing who Tim was.
In 1966 President Nixon labeled Dr. Timothy Leary, then recently of Harvard, "the most dangerous man in America". You'd think that'd have been enough to keep his notoriety up, but I guess not.
Back then everyone knew who Tim Leary was. His Playboy interview came out that September. He had been on Les Crane and Alan Burke and all those early-60s TV chat shows. My Fall '66 Senior Year High School English teacher was one Stirling Jensen. The previous Fall semester he had turned The Odyssey into a mind-expanding experience that I was too young to appreciate. One day this year he came into class exhorting Tim's then-current "Death of the Mind" tour, which he had experienced at the Village Theater (soon to become the Fillmore East) the evening prior. Thus inspired, I went to the show a few days later. It was still a bit soon for me, I didn't quite get it. (I have since decided that Jensen had done LSD back when it was still legal. I know, tough call.)
There was always a dichotomy between Leary's reputation and the more serious work that he did. Most people don't know that Tim's early work was instrumental in the development of group therapy and of personality inventories. Of course, a lot of the attention he got, and a lot of what he talked about was the LSD experience. But every now and then, in between the talk of inspiring visions and visionary sex, he would try to describe how we each "create our own reality", as he occasionally put it. But the state of neurological research hadn't yet progressed far enough for him to take it much past Eastern philosophical metaphors. A few years later he, along with Robert Anton Wilson, started to publish the so-called "Future History Series", which, besides introducing us to his "eight-circuit" model of consciousness, clarified and crystallized the "creating your reality" metaphor.
All the information your brain gets, it gets through your senses. All it knows about the Universe is that information. Our senses absorb various exogenous signals, sending absurd amounts of data to our brains, which our brain has to sort through and organize into a sort of hologram. That's basically what Tim and Bob were saying explicitly by the late 70s.
Alright, do that thing where the image gets wiggly and end that flashback. Maybe you're familiar with the "Great Courses" series from the Teaching Co. They advertise in Discover and AARP magazine and some others, they sell CD and DVD sets of what are, when you come down to it, college extension or maybe community college-level courses. I've been getting into them lately, tickling parts of my brain that hadn't been tickled in awhile, as I've commented, learning a bit more deeply about ancient history, that kind of thing. One I've just finished is called "Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills", the lecturer is this guy Steven Novella, who's an MD at Yale School of Medicine.
Now, I hasten to point out that this is one of their more recent courses, it was released this year, and makes several comments about very recent events. That is, it's current. The guy's an MD, a Professor at Yale, totally mainstream. And you'll have to take my word for it that these courses are totally apolitical, non-offensive middle-of-the-road, as ideological and academically neutral as one could imagine.
The first several lectures discussed the current understanding of the neurology of perception in the wake of recent advances in imaging. This is from the "course guidebook" that accompanies the course, the introductory paragraph for the lecture titled "Our Constructed Reality"; the over-emphasis is mine:
The goal of this first section of the course is to give you an appreciation for the extent to which what we perceive of as reality is actually an illusion constructed by our brains. In previous lectures, you learned how perception is not only highly filtered but also constructed. Our brains assign patterns to what we perceive and then assign meaning to those patterns; our very sense of self and what we perceive as reality is also a constructed illusion by our brains.
Could Tim Leary have said it any better?
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