Preface: The Leary Lectures

In 1969, Berkeley, California was the epicenter of the counter-culture and Timothy Leary was its oracle. It was also the zenith of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, which attracted free thinkers, visionaries, and exhibitionists alike offering non-stop debate and discussion on counter-cultural themes. Here, Leary found himself greeted as a prophet. After all, he was planning to stand for Governor of California against Ronald Reagan. The Leary Lectures in February 1969 were highly charged with expectant human energy and emotion. The crowds asked:  What should we do? Where shall we go? Even:  How do we live ‘divine love’?

The two lectures preserved in this set are classic examples of the spirit of the time. Leary spins his vision of how psychedelic drugs foster breaking through the hedonic gap, the threshold between reward and punishment purgatory and the heaven, or hell, of one’s karmic and genetic inheritance.  As a proponent of the ‘erotization’ of all personal experience, he speaks to the counter-culture’s desire to understand the spiritual imperative of the drug experience. 

CD One is Leary at his most rhetorically helical. He proposes two models for dealing with the intense outpouring of energy which occurs after escaping from the reward/punishment rat maze: one, the laser model, the other, the atomic model. Both offer roles for the electron, the male positive charge. The laser model focuses on a one-dimensional path of attraction to an avatar; and the other, the atomic model, involves connecting to a proton, a female negative charge, in an infinitely variable, multi-dimensional, helical pattern. The latter he refers to as ‘the psychedelic marriage.’

CD Two showcases the topics and textures of the audience participation in a particularly significant way. The speakers come from every point of view. Questions come from communards, from those experimenting with polyamorous groupings, and from spiritual seekers. But they all want Leary’s take on sincerely held questions about life choices and purposes in a post-psychedelic world. 

CD Three treats the question of where and how one finds a place which will reinforce and enrich this release of psychedelic energy. Despite the distraction of Stephanie Lovelace, a classic exhibitionist, who, wanting to share the spotlight with Leary, mounts the stage and removes her clothes, Leary clearly contrasts the ashram and the tribal village. He gives detailed instructions about how to ‘drop out’ of the reward/punishment bastions of urban living by developing rural settlements made up of the electron/proton units functioning as psychedelic marriages. Land prices and interpersonal frictions in a tribal community are further discussed.

CD Four addresses the central importance of children in the tribal community, and Leary’s focus on sexual freedom, jealousy and neurological fidelity are analyzed here. Finally, Leary’s performance becomes what he refers to as a ‘Circus’ of unscripted audience participation; he dons his Circus hat and opens the floor to delicious examples of the anarchistic, yet sincerely inquiring, spirits of the times.

This brilliant collection of early pre-paranoid Leary and the rarefied atmosphere of a counter-culture caught up on the Free Speech Movement of the time, are of glorious significance for those of us who experimented with psychoactive drugs then and later, as well as historians and sociologists who want first hand immersion into the excitement of counter-cultural energy.  They are classic and authentic artifacts of a time which had yet to discover the true anti-drug determination of an increasingly authoritarian US government, the risks of unprotected and unrestrained sexual experimentation, and the ecological and financial costs of tribal living in rural United States.

The counter-culture’s dream of a world radically different from what had gone before seemed achievable in l969. Leary articulated the co-ordinates of a path which many had already taken and many more would embrace. His voice added powerful resonance to a cultural revolution, already in progress.

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