LSD: Lettvin vs Leary

Dr. Timothy Leary and Professor Jerome Lettvin confronted each other last May in Kresge Auditorium in a debate that has since proved to be one of the more influential in the history and discussion of LSD.

Dr. Leary, a former professor at Harvard, began experimenting with marijuana and LSD about seven years ago. Since that time, he has been titled by both the national establishment press and the underground as the high priest and chief proponent of the psychedelic cult. He puts his primary emphasis on the freedom of choice and the necessity for religious experience, following, he claims, the Indian tradition. Professor Lettvin holds professorships at MIT in the Departments of Biology and Electrical Engineering. He is well known for his position as a lecturer in the Department of Humanities, as well, offering a course this year on the biological bases of perception and knowledge (21. 97). His background includes work in biology, instrumentation, mathematics, medicine, and psychiatry.

The debate consisted of statements first by Dr. Leary and then by Professor Lettvin, followed by a period of questions. Dr. Leary included in his talk the use of film, moving and still, and of tapes containing music and an occasional interruption, a "voice from the past." He was dressed in what might be described as white pajamas, and he was seated on a red rug on the Kresge stage. On the rug were a chalice of water, a candle, and a small vase of flowers. In this ritual setting the debate began.

With all these technological advances - excuse the word - it's getting harder and harder to be a holy man. Even a part-time holy man.

I am beginning tonight's ceremony by offering this chalice which I am drinking to all of us. The chalice contains a powerful and dangerous chemical given to me by the Boston water supply. It's odorless, colorless, tasteless. It's addictive. As a matter of fact, if you get hooked on it and they take it away from you, you crawl on your hands and knees and your tongue gets black, and your eyes bulge. It's also a dangerous chemical. You have to know how to use it. Too much of it in the wrong place, like in your lungs, like ten feet of it coming over your rowboat, and it will kill you. Maybe we should pass a law against it, because it's so dangerous and so addictive. Maybe only scientists should be allowed to play with it.

Or maybe we could teach our kids how to use it. In which case they'll discover that water has many uses and indeed has been used for thousands of years, millions of years, billions of years, as a way of life.

It has also been used for thousands of years as a sacrament. Now, you know what a sacrament is. A sacrament is a psychedelic technique. It's something that you use to get high. A sacrament is something that gets you off the television stage set, gets you off the big pot television stage set of MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America, and reminds you that you're not just a college student. You're not just 22 or 23 or 24 years old, you're two billion years old. Had you forgotten that? As a matter of fact, water can remind you where you came from. Remember you spent nine months in a watery medium the first nine months this trip, on this planet. Remember all that sloshing?

You're going to see on the screen home movies and slide projections of little travels and trips that we take. The slides give you the LSD experience from the inside, and the movies present the observers' view of an LSD trip from the outside. The movies are unedited film that has been shot minute after minute, hour after hour, during LSD sessions.

I lit a candle to open our ceremony tonight, again to remind us who we are and where we came from and what it's all about; because that's what you're here at MIT to learn, isn't it? Fire has been used as a sacrament for thousands of years. It reminds us that we're all creatures of the sun, that we all have little fires burning inside of us, from solar energy. Now fire is dangerous: fire can kill, fire can burn, destroy. As a matter of fact, the first fellow that invented fire, Prometheus, got into a lot of trouble with the FDA down in Washington, remember? They said, "Wait a minute, you're going too fast, maybe we're not ready for fire."

As a matter of fact, that's a question that often occurs to many of us these days: maybe man isn't ready for powerful chemicals like LSD and the many new ones that are coming. Maybe man's little mind isn't ready at this moment in evolution to deal with too much too fast in the way of reality. Fire is dangerous; maybe we should pass a law against it, maybe we should peck out the livers of everybody that uses it. Certainly we can't let high school and college children have it. How are we going to keep people from burning themselves up and hurting themselves and killing themselves with fire? Well, we've got to start training our kids, from the time they can listen to us, that fire's here, that water's here, that the lot of energies around aren't going to go away, and that they better learn how to use them from the very earliest moments, and know what they can do, and what they can't do, and how they destroy. Because sometimes when I see what fire is doing to the thin layer of topsoil on this planet, I wonder maybe they were right about Prometheus and maybe the human race isn't ready even now to deal with powers like fire.

The flowers are a reminder that we all came from the earth and of the political situation. The word power is used a great deal these days; we talk about fire power, atomic power, electric power, water power, white power, black power. That's not really very new, though; it just got built into the television comic tragedy a few hundred years ago. The next emergence of power in the United States - and you are going to see it happen this summer, it's been happening all spring - is going to be flower power. People carrying not bayonets, or picket signs, but flowers. It's a very powerful weapon. It has been used before, and I predict it's going to bring about changes in our American television stage show.

Now, it may seem eccentric to you that I come to an institute of engineering and technology and start talking about sacraments and earth and air and fire and water and ceremonies, but I don't really think it should be that odd. The uniform I'm wearing may be out of date in this particular brief show you have going here, but people have been sitting barefoot, as I am sitting now in front of you, for thousands of years, in front of candlelight, talking about what I'm talking about: where are we going, what's it all about, what can we do about it, how can we figure it out, how can we tune it back in? There's no real difference between science and religion, or science and magic, or science and mystery. Your television shows now have it all divided up. There's a science show, it's Monday through Friday, and then there's the religion show on Sunday; but that's not the way God or the evolutionary process or central broadcasting station WDNA had it planned at all. Don't you know that the real goal of a scientist is to flip out? Oh, you thought that the role of a scientist was to build bigger and bigger stage sets for the television show we've got going here. Yeah, we got this big road running from the cops and robbers' game here to the cowboy and Indian show over there, and you engineers are supposed to build it so that we can go faster and faster, and farther and farther, from television show to television show. But if you take science seriously, and if you take the history of science seriously, you'll realize that every great scientist wasn't in it for the TV show commercial payoff. He was in it to find out what it's all about: what's the nature of energy, what are the many levels of energy, what are the levels of consciousness, how can we map them out, how can we use them? And as he got to know more and more, and to penetrate deeper and deeper into the mysteries of energy around him, he began to flip out. Look at Einstein. E = mc2! You mean that it's all energy? Ah! Einstein did it without LSD!

You remember Newton? In the late years of his life he got very messy talking about spiritualism. Do you remember that right here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, William James, after a long career in which he had mastered the simple Child's Primer game and American psychology, got interested in untidy things like running nitrous oxide parties in the Back Bay? And wrote books on, of all horrid things for a psychologist, telepathy? The difference between a magician and a scientist is much less than we'd like to think, as we compartmentalize these television scenarios in different pigeonholes.

Now, what I'm going to talk about tonight is what I think every scientist and every prophet, and every spiritually minded person is concerned with: the process of finding a key, of finding more. I realize, with that menopausal part of my mind that I used to have seven years ago in Cambridge, that it's really quite odd for me to be sitting here, talking about religion, and barefoot and so forth - but it's the same trip. You have been led to believe, most of you, that religion is something that's serious and mildly hypocritical, and has really little to do with the basic questions in life, particularly with science. Religion is supposed to be fun and ecstasy because it's all a play we're involved in, of energy. Religion starts as science has always started, in the pursuit, the quest, for the ultimate questions - and it's fun. Science should be fun. Science should be pleasure, science should be flipping out, going out of your mind, really stunned by the joy of this incredible energy situation.

The message I have is an old one. It's the simplest and most classic message that has ever been passed on in world history. It's those six words: drop out, turn on, then come back and tune it in. And then, drop out again, and turn on, and tune it back in. It's a rhythm. Now, most of us are brain-damaged by what Marshall McLuhan would call the Gutenberg galaxy, and most of us think that God, and the DNA Code, made this universe in the nature of subject-object-predicate sentences. There's no level of energy, and no process in biology or physics, that operates with subject-predicate sentences. Turn on, tune in, drop out period. End the paragraph, turn the page. It's all a rhythm, it's all a beat.

Turn on: you find it inside. But you have to come back, you can't stay high all the time, and you have to start building a better model, building a better building, building a better temple, building a better poem, building a better language, building a better music. It has always been done that way. But don't get caught, or get hooked. Don't get attracted by the thing you're building, because you've got to drop out, and it's a cycle. Turn on, tune in, drop out. Keep it going, because the nervous system operates that way. Hundred, thousand, million signals a second. Right? And when your nervous system gets that same beat, you got to keep it flowing.

Now I want to talk to you a minute about the term, "turn on." To turn-on, you have to have a key to get in touch with the neurological, sensory, and cellular information that you've got stored in that two billion year old receptacle you call your body. Now, how do you turn on? Well, you can't think your way out of the sticky black molasses chessboard of American Education. And good works won't do it for you either. You can be as virtuous and as good as you want to, but you're not going to turn on and get the key to the mystery that way. In order to turn on, you have to have what the religious metaphor calls a sacrament. A sacrament is something that changes your body, that changes your nervous system. If a sacrament that you use doesn't affect your body doesn't bring about this internal change, then it's not a sacrament. It's a television show prop that they've given you to keep you nice and quiet in a corner of the studio.

It staggers the imagination to think of the means and the methods that men have used in the past to turn on, to bring about a change in the sensory, neural equipment that we carry around with us. There's hardly any activity, physical, sensory, or even television-prop studio activity, that men haven't used at one time or another to get high, to go out of their minds, to come to their senses, to take a trip. Flagellation, solitude, silence, music, the tambouras, Indian beat, drums in Africa, sexual abstinence, carefully worked out and systematic routines of contraceptuality in which he finds the divine with a member of the opposite sex, fasting, or the ingestion of sacred foods.

It's interesting that the television-studio society always produces exactly, with explicit precision, the sacrament that's needed, for the sickness of that society. In a crowded urban society, those old fellows went out with beards and barefoot in the desert to get away. Try it now, watch the California desert for four or five days and nights, and just sit there, under a palm tree, and don't eat and don't sleep, and don't get involved in any television games. Try to turn off that television part of your mind, and you'll have a full-fledged LSD experience, and it's legal even in California!

Today the sacrament is a chemical or a series of chemicals. Is it a surprise that in this society of television studios which are built entirely by and apparently supported for chemical companies, and in which we use chemicals for every sordid and profane and secular television drama, like killing people, making ourselves more comfortable, keeping ourselves more healthy, and drugging ourselves, so we'll be nice, quiet, tidy television robots and won't get to wondering what it's all about. We've used chemistry, the wonders of the molecule, to do everything possible to keep the television game going. Does it come as a surprise to you that we're now using chemicals to do that only important thing that we can do in our life: to turn on, to find what it's all about, to get back, to remember that we're two billion years old and we're not just studio actors put here for seventy years?

Let's not get upset about LSD. In the first place, there are longer, stronger, and more powerful chemicals with about the same effect as LSD in circulation right now in the United States. There will be many more. I make this flat prediction: as fast as the government passes a law against one of these molecules, a new one will come along, because for thousands of years Caesar has been trying to stop people from wandering off the stage set of the studio game and getting outside under the stars, getting back inside to figure out what it's all about. Let's not get too upset about LSD, because even the era of biochemistry bringing about psychedelic experience is almost over. Within your lifetime you will see the new sacrament or the new key to the internal process, develop. As a matter of fact, most of you are going to have a terrible time with your kids, in about 25 years, because you'll be sitting around home smoking marijuana and preparing for your next weekly LSD session like good, tidy conventional people should, and they'll say, "Hey, Dad and Mom, down in Greenwich Village there's a new technique and it's called electronic brain stimulation." And you're gonna say, "No implanting electrodes in my children's heads." And you're going to say, "Why don't you use the old tried and true methods of finding out what it's about, like LSD." Now there's much confusion about the scientific evidence and the scientific data about LSD. And I'll say this quite frankly: there's no evidence that I know of, and I've checked this thing out pretty carefully, that can tell us very much about what LSD does to consciousness or to the nervous system or to the genetic material. It's a gamble, it's a risk. The sacrament is always a risk. The new technique of expanding consciousness is always a risk. Did you really think that it could be guaranteed for you? Have you forgotten who you are and where you came from, that the whole thing is an adventure, and that you're from a long line of adventurers who got into leaky boats and leaky rafts and put strange things in their mouths and put strange things in the ground, not quite knowing what they were doing? Taking a psychedelic chemical is a risk, and taking LSD is a risk. It's a gamble, it's Russian roulette. But what is it? Name anything that you breathe or put in your body or let filter through the atmosphere into your nervous system, like television waves, that aren't an unknown gamble. Of all the Russian roulette games I see around me, including Vietnam and polluted air, I would say that the Russian roulette of LSD is about the best gamble in the house. To show you the difficult nature of the scientific study of LSD, I want to tell you a story: what happened with the scientific study of marijuana in the United States. You know marijuana has been around a long time. Everyone has their mind made up about marijuana. How many of you have ever read a scientific paper in a scientific journal following the customary checks and controls and language of science? How many of you have evidence about marijuana as sound as the evidence you would expect to base your opinions on regarding any other aspect of the energy system around us. As a matter of fact, do you know that it has been impossible in the United States for the last fifteen or twenty years to do scientific research on marijuana? There was a man named Anslinger back in the 1930's who got Congress to pass a law saying that marijuana was bad. As Judeo-Christians we just have to have something that's bad. There have to be Communists, witches, devils, possession, or the infidel, the pagan. We have to have something that's bad, then we pass a law against it.

Now the facts of the matter are that there were some studies done on marijuana (amazingly mainly in England) suggesting that marijuana could be useful as a psychiatric cure for depression. But for the last fifteen years it has been impossible to do research on marijuana. If a full-fledged, kosher, bona fide scientist at an institute like this wanted to do research on marijuana he had to apply for a government license. And you know what happens when you apply for a government license? Government inspectors come around and say, "What do you want to do research on marijuana for?" You say, "Well, I want to find out what marijuana's about." They say, "What do you mean, we know what it's all about. It's written in the law what it's all about. Marijuana's a narcotic, addictive drug and it causes rape, violence, aggression. You're certainly not going to give MIT students in your laboratory marijuana. Because what would the Massachusetts state legislature think about that?" It's been impossible to do research on marijuana, and I want to tell you that I came into the research biased. I was very much against LSD. I happen to be an Irish American, and I like to drink. As a middle class teacher at Harvard or UCLA, I'd heard about marijuana, but I had no occasion to use it because beatniks used it and I didn't know any beatniks, and it didn't look to me like Alan Ginzburg and Jack Herricks were having a lot of fun - perhaps more fun than I was having but there was no way I could get marijuana or get interested in it. Then we got involved up at Harvard doing research on LSD. And I found out to my surprise that enormous numbers of young people were using marijuana - even Harvard students. I have to laugh when I read about the problems of the Dean of Harvard now, when the Crimson announces that 70 percent of the freshmen class smoke marijuana, and the Dean has to announce that they'll throw people out of Harvard if they use it. Because seven years ago I was saying exactly the same things to the people in our research project. I didn't think we should study marijuana because of my contract with Harvard. We were going to study, LSD, which was legal in those days, and available by mail. I didn't think it would be fair to mix marijuana up with LSD in our research, so I would go - just like the deans at Harvard - around our research projects in Newton or in Mexico and I'd say, "Daddy don't allow no pot-smoking in here." It wasn't, as a matter of fact, until I left Harvard, and left institutional commitments that I decided I would do some research on marijuana. Actually I didn't get around to doing it seriously until I went to India. About the first week I was in India I went to a place called a ganja shop, licensed from the city of Calcutta, and I bought about four ounces of marijuana for a dime or so. I was with a holy man, a guru man named Ashok Fakir who took me down to the Ganges River. We sat there with a group of sadhus, sitting around the burning ghats, and there I began to learn something about marijuana. I was in India for five months, and I smoked marijuana every day trying it out in different contexts, in different activities. I'm sorry to say, my beloved robots of Menopausal Institute of Technology, there's no good and evil in this world, and marijuana is neither good nor bad. LSD is neither good nor bad. As a matter of fact, there's probably no activity that you engage in from day to day or week to week that would not be helped or hindered by the use of marijuana, and the scientific question is which ones would be hindered. In which case you don't ban marijuana; you just don't use the energy that way. And find out which activities are helped by marijuana and go down to the licensed ganja store in Central Square and get it.

There's so much folklore about marijuana. There are very few people who have studied marijuana with any systematic discipline. Now I was a psychologist for fifteen years before I took marijuana. I was an Irish American so I have plenty of experience with booze. I have a lot to compare marijuana with. The first thing that marijuana does, it brings you to your senses. So if you're in a situation where you want to turn on your senses, like just before dinner, marijuana is a great appetizer. On the other hand, if you're on a diet, stay away from pot. Marijuana is very bad for any activity that requires attention to robot details. So if you're going to play bridge, do not smoke marijuana. If you're going to play chess, don't smoke marijuana. You'll be so fascinated by the shine of light on the texture of the wood, you'll be so fascinated by the interplay between you and your partner that you won't keep all of the chess pieces in your mind in place. Don't smoke marijuana if you have to do anything that involves manipulating of dials and machinery and quick response to stimuli, because so much will be going on within your mind and your body, that you'll get distracted. Don't drive a car in the city with marijuana because the flow of traffic in the city is kind of artificial and you will be distracted from watching the red lights. I'd say that one martini is better preparation for driving a car in the city.

The point is you have to examine your schedule of life and determine what percentage of it requires robot routine and immediate response to stimuli. But any time you want to come to your senses, to feel good, to increase sensitivity to people around you, then smoke pot. But do not smoke pot if you have to sell somebody in a hard, aggressive way, because you probably won't feel like doing it.

I make the prediction that as we start eventually bringing our scientific heritage to bear' on the problem of what LSD can do and what marijuana can do, we'll get rid of these goodevil notions of what these powerful neurogenic agents are, and just as we use fire for certain purposes and not for others, we will have enough confidence in our maturity as a civilization to deal with these inevitable keys and triggers to expanded consciousness.

Now you're not under any illusions, are you, that we have passed the age of superstition'? You thought it was all worked out back there with Galileo when he said that the sun went around the earth and he got into all that trouble in Rome. I'm sorry, beloved robots of Menopausal Institute of Technology, nothing's been worked out for you. Every generation in human history has got to pick up the same ball and work the same problems out. I'm sorry. You've got to discover once again that the dialogue between science and conservatism has never ended. There is more superstition and more superstitious use of science today than at any time in world history.

It behooves us to understand the effects of these powerful chemicals which affect us right at home base. Not out there, making things go faster, not over there making things grow faster, but inside, hitting us at that central nerve key that controls the whole thing - consciousness - which can be altered, expanded, slowed, changed in a myriad of ways with the slightest flick of a molecule.

I want to conclude my sermon with some comments about dropping out. This dihomic tends to be the controversial part of the motto "turn on, tune in, drop out." Everyone nowadays accepts the notion of turning on. Even Madison Avenue is telling you that Salem cigarettes will turn you on. Everyone wants to be tuned in. But drop out! But you can't say drop out. You can't tell middle-aged people who have mortof their jobs. I didn't invent this, I'm just reading the lines that were given to me, when 1 say you've got to drop out.

There's a lot said about education. "You've got to finish your education. " When I hear that said I shudder and my cells shrink because, I'm sorry to say this, and I say this with great love and great affection because I'm part of this whole institution that we have going, but the educational system at the present time in the United States does neurological damage to the nervous system and functions as a narcotic, addictive drug. It rather shocks me to think how our parents, with the best intentions, turned us over, at the age of four or five, to a bunch of strangers that they didn't know and probably wouldn't even have had to dinner at their house, to be trained in the only crucial issue of life, control of consciousness. The educational process is a real dangerous drug. Use it carefully, because you're likely to get hooked.

Now you, the younger generation, in particular, have got to drop out. And by drop out I mean all the way. You can't vote. I urge you not to politic. Don't picket, don't get involved in any of these menopausal mind games. Because it doesn't make any difference, Remember 1964? We voted for a peace candidate. Ha, you think it makes a difference? Now you face a problem that's never been faced in this particular magnitude in human history. The speed-up, the acceleration of technology and knowledge means a change in things. Your generation has grown up in a society a thousand or ten thousand years beyond the society of your grandfathers and even of your parents. I want to present one scientific hypothesis, a hypothesis which is so shocking and so frightening to us that it has implications that have been really repressed in the Freudian sense. Because it's a staggering set of data. It's this: after the age of twenty or twenty-five, neurological studies show us that the human nervous system begins to lose cells. That means you have less cells at thirty and at thirty-five and at forty and at forty-five than you had at twenty. Circulatory changes take place in the nervous system. The nervous system is not just an electronic network; it's an undulating, octopus-type, seething, moving net of fibers. Have you seen those new slides in the like World Book about what the nervous system feels like from the inside? Anyone who has taken LSD could have told you that. You're losing brain cells every year of your life after you leave college. Which means that at my age, over forty-five, I'm partly brain-damaged. You like that? You knew that anyway? The neurological facts of the matter are that at fifty-five I'll have less cortical stuff to go on. At sixty-five, when I'm ready to become President of the United States, I'm tremendously brain-damaged. Now you people at a scientific institute must know the strange findings that have been passed on in mysterious anecdotes by your best physicists and your best mathematicians and they say, "Hey, there was that time when I was in graduate school, when I was in my twenties when I really could begin to work and I could figure things out. But now here I am the head of the Atomic Energy Commission and I can't do it anymore." Remember, you've heard your physicists tell you that. You remember Oppenheimer looked into the eyes of a five-year-old kid and said, "If I only could see the world through those eyes I could go on working problems." There are any number of statistical and anecdotal studies to suggest very strongly that we become increasingly brain-damaged after the age of twenty, twenty-five. What does this mean? It means that you young people cannot buy the system of a menopausal mentality. Do you know the men who are running this world, this country, this state had their minds made up about 1910, or 1915. You remember rat-tat-tat machine guns in the old World War trenches and Prohibition and booze? You just can't buy their system. If you ever get around to running for office - which I hope none of you will - if you ever get around to making laws, I suggest the first law you pass is based upon this neurological fact about brain damage. No one over fifty years of age should be allowed to vote or hold power over young, seed-carrying people, should they? Does that make sense? When should people be allowed to vote? When people ask me questions, I don't play my chess game, twentieth-century psychological computer. I ask my DNA code. I ask the process. "Hey down there, when did you want people to vote?" And you were ready to start taking power about the age of puberty. Just about that age, early teens, you began to get control of this billion-cell computer. And when you get in power, why don't you move the voting age down to thirteen? Now that's a terrible thing to do to those menopausal people, to take all that power away from them, and their steel. Because as people get older, and as they lose that power inside, and as they lose the red thread of a billion years, they begin to forget how to do those physical problems they could do at the age of eighteen, twenty, and twenty-five. They get frightened, and they feel death coming; they forget that they're two billion years old and can't die. And they want a metal kitchen, and a two- or three-thousand-pound metal car around them, and they want steel around their city, and they want steel jails to keep the young people from 'causing any disorders, and they want steel around their country, and steel in the sky protecting them. And I think it's time to stop. I'm not urging you to be mean people like your parents or me. Be kind to us. Don't let me, Timothy Leary, vote. But be good to me. As you take away my external power, tell me, remind me of this ancient message. Go home and tell your parents, "Drop out, turn on, Dad. Tune in." Go home and turn on your mother and your father. You know that's how it's done. We're told by the anti-psychedelic people like Dr. Duke Fisher of UCLA that there are ten million pot-smokers United States today. Okay, how did it happen? How did ten million people do this terrible thing? They did it the way everything has grown in human history. Friend by friend, lover to family member to family member - that's how it's grown. You can't get pot unless there's somebody you trust and that trusts you. The sociology of the marijuana network in the United States today. There's no Mafia, there's no syndicate, there's no Dow Chemical for marijuana. It's all kids, and friends, who trust each other. It's an incredible thing. There's no commerce involved at all. As a matter of fact it's an economy of love and turning on. That's what you've got to do: you've got to turn on your parents.

I can't turn on LBJ. But he's got some young people around, and if they have been to good colleges, the statistics show us that half of them - which means either she or her roommate have turned on. So that's the way you have got to do it. You've got to say, "Daddy-bird, you've done enough. Daddy-bird, it was thirty years ago that you ran for president of the bank. And you've got steel all over the world now, Daddy-bird. And you've done enough. Come on, drop out and turn on and learn how to make love all over again and come to your senses. " Because the way the war between the generations is going to be solved is not, as our middle-aged columnists tell us, "Oh, the kids'll grow up and they'll drink whiskey and booze the way we did and drop bombs the way we are doing." Because you're not going to do it. The way to end the war between the generations is take home a flower to Mom and Dad and Auntie and Uncle and turn them on.

In the next six months, a year, two years, there's going to be a lot of tension in this country about the control of consciousness because, like it or not, believe it or not, we have entered into a new age. And I would call it "The Age of Consciousness." The implications of this revolution in consciousness are much greater than the technological or the atomic or the electronic age, because this age is focusing inside. For the first time in human, Western history man has finally caught on that it doesn't make as much difference what goes on out there as it does how much control and freedom you have in here.

That's the big breakthrough with the younger generation. Kids today don't say, "What kind of a sportscar do you have?" They say, "What kind of a head do you have?" We're recognizing that it doesn't do any good to do feeling right, and you can't be free out there, no matter how many bombers you have protecting you. Freedom is consciousness, you can change consciousness specifically and precisely.

Let's not throw consciousness and LSD over into religion. The only reason I use the metaphor of religion is because that's the only language we've got in this funny country and culture of ours; the study of LSD and of marijuana and of electronic brain stimulation can be done scientifically. All the rules of evidence are there.

Didn't you know that the discovery of the psychedelic drugs like LSD are to psychology and to our inner understanding of man what the microscope was to the external study? We can't go around like psychologists pounding people on the outside like doctors did four hundred years ago and bloodleeching like psychoanalysis. We're in a molecular age now. Psychologists have got to be molecular psychologists. You have to apply the microscope of consciousness to your own inner vision, and you will discover that for thousands of years men have been having this vision, taking this trip, wandering down through these inner neurological chambers and the trip is just as consistent as any external voyages from here to San Francisco or from here to the moon. The internal trip can be observed, it can be labeled, it can be manipulated, it can be controlled, it can even be replicated just as easily as any experiment in external science.

It just takes, and I'm sorry to say this for some of you, it takes the good old-fashioned virtues of courage, hard work, discipline, faith in the process.

But you've got to do it. Those of us who are very much involved in LSD have very few illusions. We want neurological studies done. But when it comes to psychiatrists and psychologists giving LSD to somebody else and then announcing the results, that is psychological rape.

To understand the ridiculous nature of the psychiatric literature on LSD, can you conceive of some psychiatrists who came from a funny culture - and there are some - where sex was forbidden and they'd never had a sexual experience and they decided they were going to study the effects of a sexual experience? So being good neural psychologists and physiological psychiatrists, they would get some volunteers whom they would pay five dollars an hour, a boy and a girl. Get them in a laboratory and they'd hook them up with blood pressure things and indices and ECG's and they'd all be wired up and they'd bring a psychologist to give some IQ tests during the experience. Well, can you imagine the report of these psychologists as they staggered back to the Hearst newspapers and reported what they found? They would say, "Why, do you know that during sexual experience the ability to multiply and divide goes down? Do you know that interpersonal and social adaptability is absolutely lost during the experience? They won't even talk to you. Worse than that they seem to revert to some form of psychosis in which they make strange noises and knock vases off tables."

Well, that's the situation we're in with LSD studies on human beings. I'm sorry, beloved technological robots, no one can solve your problems for you. When it comes to religion and psychology and sexuality you have got to do it yourself. You cannot wait until some Big Brother Daddy in Washington with MD's, PhD's and the Department of Public Health tells you it's all right to have the experience. And he'll say, "We cannot have this promiscuous, indiscriminate use of this experience by laymen. We have to have a psychiatrist present even if he doesn't do it himself. " The next era - political era - was predicted by Aldous Huxley, my guru from MIT days, by the way. Aldous predicted that the next dictatorship was going to be not of the guillotine and the rack and the torture - come on, that's old-fashioned - the next dictatorship is going to be a scientific dictatorship in which the people in Washington tell us what's good for us. This we must beware of.

It's an old, old problem. What shall we render unto Caesar and what shall we reserve and preserve to God? It's very simple. Anything that moves and is visible out there in the television studio set of Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America, belongs to Caesar; and let him have it.

When we drove here across Massachusetts we stopped at the red lights. Obey Caesar's laws when you're in his studio because he's got Keystone cops to put you in jail. If you don't like the Caesar that runs the studio you can vote him out of office cause they have these mock elections every now and then.

But when it comes to the kingdom of God, Caesar cannot put on his mail fist or his surgical glove. And where is the kingdom of God? The kingdom of heaven is your body. And when that divine, flipped out visionary two thousand years ago said, "The kingdom of heaven is within," he wasn't fooling around. He meant it's within your body. You must preserve the sanctity of your body. Don't let anyone tell you who can touch your body or what can touch your nervous system or what can touch your eyeballs or your ears or, what or who you can put in your body. If you do that you're giving up the first and last frontier of your freedom and your divinity.

Big Caesar in Washington is gonna say to you: "Oh, but look. We want to do what's good for you, because you might hurt yourself with the fire and the water, you little beloved children robots. And we're gonna pass laws telling you what you can put in your body." What do you say? You might kill yourself and you have to stand out and look Caesar in the eye and say, "Beloved Caesar, if I want to kill myself quickly with cyanide or slowly with Camel cigarettes, it's my business. " What are we gonna do with Caesar? Caesar controls the packaging. We don't want to get involved with that. We will let Caesar put any label on the package he wants. Because he controls the printing presses. He can put on the package: Warning: Cyanide, causes lethal stomach ache. But it's up to you to decide. Or he can say: Warning: Camel Cigarettes, causes a painful death by cancer.

Warning: Marijuana brings you to your senses.

If you want to stick full time, or half the time, to the robot task, don't use marijuana. But after you've done eight or four hours at the chess game factory and you want to go home and come to your senses, read the label on the package and use it. Caesar can put on the package: Warning, LSD causes death, and rebirth. You decide. Because you're God within your body. Your body contains the two billion year old DNA code history and the five billion year old history of energy on this planet.

One final word of warning. You're likely to get in trouble if you walk around MIT and say, "Hey, I'm God." And you go home and everybody is gonna say, "Hey, what did you learn at MIT this year?" "Well, um, I'm God." "Get the doctor on the phone right away," mother says, "I knew we never should have sent him to Cambridge." Now this is again a symptom of the secular, profane, and the turnedoff un-fun nature of our society. Because in other countries in the world today, in other times in human history, if a man said, "Hey, I'm God," his friends would say, "Right, congratulations, you finally caught on." Because the whole thing is inside of you. The whole thing is available to you.

You might take a lesson from India. I'd advise anyone who has had a psychedelic trip to go to India. It's a long LSD session, and a beautiful one, and it requires the same courage and faith that LSD does, because it overwhelms you. But in India it's a wise old country. When people meet they go like this (gesture) and they say, "Namaste." That means something like "I salute the God within you." Namaste. I recognize that you're two billion years old and I am too. Namaste. Yes, I can let the mask of MIT slip for a minute and recognize in your eyes that you're Shiva and you're Shakti and you're the whole works. Namaste. I recognize that we're everything - animal, vegetable - we're the whole business. Namaste. I salute you. I am God. You are God. Namaste.

Beloved robots of MIT: I salute you. You are God. Namaste. And thank you.

Tim, you're an Irish American; I'm a Jewish American. I can't see you as anything but sitting Shiva.

Your argument is exceedingly seductive and in the main I must admit that I find the press of middle-age and middle-class, enormously powerful here in Cambridge, irritating as all hell. The horrid part is that I, too, sit in front of the TV set, slumping, and pay the taxes. I, too, find myself coming to middle-age, and I say middle-class, feeling impotent in the face of this mounting war and the government by senility that we have here in this country. Let me agree with you therefore that the world is an abominable place and has been so as long as we've known it, for all of these many generations that men have been here.

In fact, just for the hell of it, let me give you an anecdote that I'm sure you will delight in. When Lowry Field was the center of pot distribution in the West, for you must understand that the Air Force during World War II existed mainly on pot, it used to come in by the truckload to Lowry Field. There was an officer's training camp there that suddenly dissolved before the fellows became officers. Suddenly about two weeks before they were to graduate, the fellows all took to pot on the fundamental thesis - which one of them told me at the time and I was delighted - "they can march the body but I'm getting out of here. " It's a very real thing. One can only sympathize with people who, looking at TV and at the TV culture, want to get out. But the problem is whether the navel really replaces TV. I mean, sitting there in front of your navel you strike me as being in a sense very little better off than the first. Let's put it this way: no surprises are likely to come about and you aren't even beguiled by good commercials. Nevertheless, I think that you have made your thesis extremely serious, and I would not do you the dishonor of attacking you on scientific grounds. Therefore, I would like to confine my remarks strictly to the eschatological questions involved. By that I mean simply questions of what constitutes good and evil. Why not? It's a new experience for me. I'd like to try it.

Let's consider. I walk into a state hospital, and am there confronted by a man who-sits with a beatific smile his face, in tremendous ecstasy, and he sits, and he sits, and he is, in a sense, in that curious frame once poemed by George Sylvester Farquhar, "unendurable pleasure indefinitely prolonged." And I ask myself, would I trade places with this man? And here at this point comes an interesting and fundamental question: from all external signs that I perthink from he is in a continued ecstasy. Certainly, if I can get through and ask him, "Say somethin for us," he says, "It's wonderful." All right, fine, let us continue. Then at this point, I ask, "Do I want to trade places with him?" Something deters me - and what is it? Is it a love for the real world, however monstrous it is? Partly that. Is it the notion that my ego will be destroyed? Partly that. That somebody is here to test. Is it the notion that experience is henceforth denied me and all I have is something inside? Just inside me, no outside world. Partly that.

But I feel somehow or another that this man is in the hands of the devil. That is to say he is in a private hell of a curious and somewhat Sartrian divine. That is, having made his pact with the devil, this is what he asks and that is what he gets. For I confess, then, in making these pacts, very much like the ones that we have all had, that what we get, we get literally and what we lose, we lose rather much of. So look at this man, sitting there with a smile, this supremal smile, an ecstatic smile, I feel sick, I don't feel that I'm on the trail; I feel sick for him. And I ask of you, how many would trade? He assures you he is in the utmost ecstasy, when you can get with him. Otherwise he's in that ecstasy. Why would not any of you trade?

Let us take another trade that has been offered in the past. You and I lived through the theory of the lobotomy. They say, "I feel like my mamma." They lift your ivies up; you go flash-flash; and you go on. It doesn't matter. You have traded for "it doesn't matter" a hunk of brain. But, hell, you're losing so much of it, what's a little bit more? It doesn't matter. No. Here, you trade. How many of you can take a lobotomy? It isn't a guarantee that they're asking. You don't care. You come in saying, "I don't want to care. Everything is bothering the hell out of me. Everything, I want to stop caring; I want to be happy." And so he takes - you know - bang, bang.

Is this a trade you would make?

Why not? I asked you to question myself, for I found Tim's presentation extremely compelling, shorn, if you'll excuse me, of those adornments. At any rate, I find Tim's speeches terribly compelling, and for this reason I feel I have to answer him - for myself. This is another way of trading with the devil, selling a hunk of frontal cortex. You'll get another. I think I will tell anecdotes about real people because this is the only way we have of saying something concretely. During World War II an extraordinarily brilliant Italian novelist, or writer, who had been on Mussolini's staff, defected from Mussolini and was taken to New York. I will not mention his name because, unfortunately, we're being televised. But he came to New York and instantly began fundamental propaganda against the Fascists. As the war went on, and as Italy got in for worse and worse straits, he got more and more depressed, to the point where it was impossible to rouse him, even by pushing him. He would sit, literally crying, I mean really depressed. And so somebody persuaded him to go to a psychiatrist. He goes to one who says, "Ach, we can get rid of this quickly, " and gives him a shock treatment in the office. And the fellow goes out into Central Park after he's released from the office, and he sits there and he feels Italy, so what? The war so what? Mussolini so what? My wife so what? And after an hour or two of this he went back to the psychiatrist's office to kill him because the notion of "so what" was so goddamn immoral at this time. He had to have sacred. And it was with difficulty, physically, that we restrained him from the murder. A justifiable one in this case. It's another way of selling one's soul.

All of these questions about selling one's soul to the devil can be comprehended under one reasonable simple view. How much are you willing to pay? I don't think that any of you have neglected in your high school to read Faust. Somehow or another you have been exposed to this in a way. You remember that Faust's pact with the devil was fundamentally the pact: if at the moment I say "It is enough," and I can lie down, if I say "Let time stop now," then you have my soul. You see, "Let time stop now." And the interesting thing is that the hell you go to is the hell of time stopping now. This has been a fundamental trait all the way through. Time stops now; you've had it. This is the case for example, and it need not be under drugs, it need not be with the frontal lobes cut off, it need not be with shocktreatment. It can be in the ordinary course of experience when you go from professor to administrator. Time stops now. You have sold your soul to the devil at that moment.

There are infinite ways of selling your soul to the devil, but now we must come to the juvenile port version of this, namely, how does a kid sell his soul to the devil? Leary would have us believe that one fundamental thing is getting out. You view yourself, you look as it were, sitting glued to the idiot box. You sit glued to the set, watching the play of something going on in which nothing new can possibly occur. Oh, sure, you can Plarvel at too rearrangements of banalities, but a rearranged banality is no less banal. And so you cop out, you drop out, you get out.

You get out and you have this experience of watching yourself which fundamentally is this: you suspend your judgments. What price the judgments? For it is this, fundamentally, that you are trading off to the devil. You are selling off the noetic functions, you're selling off exactly those functions which dissolving these. Henceforth, suspended judgment for a while. You take martini at five o'clock. You don't want to remember what a damn fool you were during the day. You don't want to remember being pushed down by this guy, the compromise you made that was against your grain. You see, all of these things, you've got to forget them, so you cop out with the martini, but with the reassurance that when the alcohol wears off, you are possibly back to a state where the judgment miraculously is back. This is the same, incidentally, with marij uana.

As an aside, Tim, let me agree with you, that I could conceive of no more immoral thing than has been done by the government in the wholephy: the more there is of it around, the more they thrive. There is a fundamentally monstrous thing about forbidding rather than reasoning people out. If you have a thesis, you ac{vance the thesis, and there is a counterthesis one,argues. One does not go with force, of the kind the government has done, spurring the crime rate, as it has been done by the morphine addicts' et cetera. And I feel very violently about this because I used to take care of an addict ward when I was back in the field.

I am perfectly willing to admit with you that the government has done a monstrous thing in forbidding many of the drugs that are around. The forbidding of marijuana is pure nonsense. I therefore I cannot, in conscience, advise people to break the law of the land for the very simple reason that I am not permitted to! But when it comes to LSD, to psilocybin, to all of these other drugs that you have been handing out, that you have been talking about - at this point, sir, I look upon you as a tool of the devil. I look upon you as a fundamentally vicious tool of the devil, and I will explain to you why. In general, when one takes something like a drink, a martini, or a drink of wine, or gets drunk among friends in the evening, and wakes up the next day with a hangover, there is a reassurance, the miraculous reassurance, somehow or another, of judgment to yourself. With LSD, with psilocybin, with mescaline, do we have this reassurance? You have said, "Sure, it's Russian roulette. Sure it's dangerous." But let us look specifically at the danger. I'm not going to talk neurologically because it would only be gobbledygook. What is the fundamental danger? Let us say that one person out of 50 will have a reaction like this. He will take a dose, he will take a trip, and three days later he takes a return trip, and a week later he takes a return trip, not having taken any more drugs, and three months later still return trips are occurring. You know 95% of the drug has been excreted in the first day, and 95% of what's left has been excreted in the next day. What's giving him the trips again in three months? Now, goddammit, how is it possible for anybody, on observing this, to say to a person, "You take one chance in a hundred, and the return trips are free."?

What is a return trip? Let me ask you, if there is no cause, how come the return trip? The flipping in suddenly and the flipping out suddenly? Suddenly colors whirl about, suddenly the smells have color, suddenly the colors have sounds, and then you're back in the normal world. What does this smell like? Clinically, Tim, what does this smell like? If you saw a patient that complained of this, what is it that he would have?

How would you diagnose this, Tim?

Bullshit. You would diagnose him a temporal lobe epileptic with an aura. You know that goddamn well. He looks this way to me. (Leary: I'm only telling what I know." Tim, I had great respect for you a clinician. I still have. Therefore, I'm asking you at this time, is there a case for this? (Leary: Let me talk about that later.'" All right. Let us take the examples in point. Those of you who ever think of taking LSD, before you take it, would do yourselves a favor just dipping into two or three textbooks on epilepsy, written before LSD was discovered so you know they are not biased. There's a variety of fit or seizure called the temporal lobe seizure, a perfectly well-known clinical entity. Now this doesn't mean that has scooped a hole in your brain. Half the time people have seizures of this sort, and in the autopsy can't find where the lesion was. So the lesion is not a scooping out of cells. You cannot say, "Show me the lesion," as if it were a liver and you could cut it out. Somehow, there's a misconnection syndrome. How are you going to show a misconnection syndrome? You don't. All you know is that something strange happens.

What is it these people complain of? you read a description of the aura, If either in Penfield and Ericson's book, called Epilepsy and Cerebral Localization, written many years ago, or if you get hold of an exceedingly charming book written by Macdonald Critchley, called The Parietal Lobe, where he discusses these things, or if you will simply read Dostoyevsky, which is far simpler for most of you, you'll get a notion of what this aura is.

You can become addicted to an aura. When a man comes to me and says, "I haven't had a shot, I haven't had any LSD for three months, but I still flip in and flip out, " as a clinician, what do I worry about? What I worry about here, specifically, is that he has a functional lesion. This sounds like a functional lesion, because clinically it goes along with other things, like tumors, like scars, like hits on the head, and things of this sort. Very well, this is one thing. The temporal lobe is that particular portion of the brain that is affected in half the axe murderers that we have in this country. Has it ever occurred to you, why is it you read all about a guy coming home and he knocks off his wife and three kids, and at the station, he stands there and says, "I don't remember. " Aha, real amnesia, you say. Well, let me assure you, half of these things are, in fact, temporal lobe syndrome - what are called psychomotor seizures. This is roughly the sort of seizure that the fellow who shot the various people at the campus in Texas had. In his case they found the tumor. Now one of the extraordinary things about diseases in this region is, in effect, that you have aberrations of judgment. So we look at LSD people for what might be considered aberrations of judgment. Now aberrations in judgment you see with alcohol, you see with pot, but the judgment comes back the next day. What about LSD, what about psilocybin? I know a set of physicists who took psilocybin a while ago, in a group, because they are curious people. All physicists are curious people. A group of about five or six of them took some psilocybin from the recipe gotten from the telephone number here in Cambridge that you're supposed to call to get that recipe. And, having taken it, they got violently sick the first day and every one of them for three months thereafter was incapable of doing any theoretical work. On all behavioral counts the same, but clearly aberrant in their higher critical function, with a hangover of this: a hangover that lasted, not an hour or two hours, but several days, several months. Let us give it only several days. Let me now for a moment go to a footnote before I continue. Do most of you have any notion of what the most common history of suicide by barbiturate is? A fellow takes a Nebutol to go to sleep and he can't sleep, so he takes two. Having taken two, if he took two because he is unhappy, he now loses that judgment that would prevent him from taking more, and in the suspended judgment under this second dose of barbiturates, he takes the rest of it, and that's when they find him. In general, the suicides do not start out by taking the whole bottle. They start out by taking one or two pills to calm themselves, and then the whole thing when the judgment is gone.

Consider now the case where the judgment is aberrant for several days, and consider the fact that the suspension of judgment that you undergo in such case becomes regenerative; that is to say, under this aberrant judgment, under this loss of judgment, things cease to be as bothersome, or they can be more bothersome, as in the bad trips. They can become either more bothersome or less bothersome, but something happens, and your judgment, by which you weigh things, goes down. You're now in the position of regenerating this, by taking, say, one trip every three days, one trip every four days, and you pay for the vision of yourself by the loss of judgment. You pay for getting out by the loss of judgment. You pay for whatever visions you get by this loss in judgment. And the loss in judgment stays and stays.

Now you might say, how do I know this? Have I ever taken it? No. I haven't taken it for a rather simple reason. When I was a psychiatrist, I used to watch other doctors give shock treatments to patients. And when it came my turn to give a shock treatment to someone, I decided that I would not give something if I myself did not know how it felt. Now I went to the point of being strapped down, the electrodes applied to my head, and then I said, "Look, I can't take it. I'm calling it off." Yes, because I. was scared.

Through my office here at MIT have passed in the last couple of years a variety of sickies made sick by LSD. I have watched one fellow, psychotlc this, and who is still psychotic if he leaves off on the drugs that maintain him here as a student. He asked me to tell his name tonight. I have no intention of doing so.

I have watched another fellow go into a coma, an unremitting one, which lasted for quite a while. I have watched my physicist friends get sick from this and swear never to touch anything of this sort again. I have watched some of the kids around Harvard Square and have talked with them and found that they are shallower than they have any right to be.

Now, when I say shallower, let me bring out the ultimate objection that I have. Suppose you are an artist, or you are a writer, and you are a second-rate artist or a second-rate writer, and you know that you are second-rate because nobody in his right mind would call you first rate. You are confronted with the fact that you have to look at these productions of yours and know that they will never be hung in the Louvre, that you'll never win the Nobel Prize, that this or that or the other thing will not occur. But really, honestly, you gotta have it. You want your kicks like those guys got their kicks. What is the simplest way? Rather than make the works first-rate, diminish your judgment so that a second-rate thing appears first-rate. That is the obvious thing. If I can take a drink, or if I can take something that diminishes judgment consistently, I can be satisfied with a hell of a lot less.

Now pretend that you're in the position of such an artist or such a writer and you ask yourself, now that I've had this curious kick, under LSD or under pot, where I suddenly appreciate the tremendous intricacy of what I've done, why should I come back to the normal world where it really is not particularly good? And what will the argument be to yourself? Will you argue or will you tend to the indefinitely suspended judgment as the price for getting your kicks out of second-rate stuff?

In a certain sense you might say, "Do you blame people of this sort? Is there any reason why everybody shouldn't have kicks? Why should who happen to get a prize? Let's give prizes out to anybody." LSD. The price seems to be a little bit big, a little steep to pay. I'm giving the devil my judgment, my soul, my intellect, all of the goddamn things I worked for, for these kicks. Like a nymphomaniac. Not like a neurotic person, but like a nymphomaniac. Does anybody here envy the nymphomaniac? After all, there she is, having orgasm after orgasm, wonderful, all day long, without a stop. Beautiful. Terrific. Does anybody envy her? Why not? Because you didn't envy that guy who was sitting in the state hospital either. The kick is cheap. The ecstasy is cheap. And you are settling for a permanently second-rate world by the complete abrogation of the intellect.

In the old days, if it wasn't done by lobotomy, it was done by psychoanalysis. Now it's done by drugs. I can find in myself no joy in such an outlook. I am not particularly skilled in what I do. I'm sure most of you know that I'm a dilettante. I do my best to get kicks out of things, and, in a certain sense, what I do is to train myself to find a kick out of this or that, but it's always temporary. I get into a depression afterwards, because the kick really wasn't all that good. It's like looking back. You slept with a new mistress last night, you worked like all hell to get it, and all of a sudden, was it really worth it? But with the kicks of LSD, with the kicks of too permanent aberrations of judgment, you never go back to the critical stand to take another shot. I don't know what the ethics are here. I, in general, tend to equate good and evil to things that are somewhat different that, shall we say, to what the pulpit man does. For me, something is evil that is mindless. I stand to watch a man turn into cannot a cow, with his great brown eyes rolling sideways at me. He is out of it and ruminating that he has been cropping in the field of the senses. If he looks upon me like a cow in the field, I feel that that transformation is evil. That is becoming a beast, and it is staying a beast. I'm not saying that people who take LSD become beasts and stay beasts. But a small Somehow this does not ring true, and I do not know how to put my finger on why it doesn't ring true. But it is not true, because I would not trade places with him. My only test for the moral aspect of it is this ultimate test of all morals, namely how I feel. My argument proceeds, therefore, about the evil connectives with the uncontrolable, the unwilled, the prolonged loss of judgment occurring with these drastic drugs LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin.

I accept pot and I accept whiskey because with either one of them there is a guarantee for most people, for almost all people, that you will have another chance, you will come back again and decide whether you want to go back. But it will always be your decision, that is, you will always have freedom once again.

But that two or three percent of the various people I have seen taking psilocybin or taking LSD, the two to three percent who do not have this option once they have taken it again, for them my heart bleeds. Why did this have to happen? And then I look with suspicion on the others who have taken it, but I find to my astonishment their whole personality changes. They become more amiable. You might suppose this to be a good thing. A lobotomy patient also becomes more amiable.

I'm not going to waste your time any further by trying to give you data or by exhorting you any more than this. I consider that the evil that is done is this: the evil of the loss, or possible loss, of the highest judgmental faculties we have. It is for this reason that I plead with those of you who want to see that there is possibly some distortion of your judgment connected with this, some possible prolonged difficulty, to do your best to look at the clinical records that have appeared - for example, in the New England Journal of Medicine - to do your best to look up some of the diseases characterized by epileptic auras or read Dostoevsky again, if you don't want to read the other technical books. Then make up your mind whether this is worth it. I'm not scared because I will be released to see beautiful pictures. I am scared because of that ultimate me that judges the rest of me, that top noetic function. I don't want to lose it. dammit.

INNIS FREE: What of the actual bio-chemical changes that are behind the psychedelic experience?

Leary: Neurologists do not understand the biochemistry of consciousness. They don't know where consciousness is located. Therefore, the answer to the question of, "What does LSD do?" has to await a breakthrough in neurology. And that breakthrough in neurology will come when neurologists realize that they have to change their own consciousness. They're not going to find out where consciousness is located by putting electrodes in the brains of animals or giving LSD to animals for that matter. The breakthrough in neurology is going to come when the scientist puts his eye to the microscope; and the microscope of consciousness is your own nervous system. We have trained hundreds of young graduate students, who are now young psychiatrists and young neurologists, and this next generation of turned on scientists will produce the great breakthrough in neurology, because they are taking the drug themselves.

Innisfree: Do you think that the two sciences can co-exist, side-by-side?

Leary: There's a perfect dialogue that goes on between outer and inner. It doesn't do any good to expand your consciousness, unless you can accurately express this in some metaphorical or symbolic form. Now the problem at the present time is that our society and our intellectuals and our scientists completely externalize the psychology of behaviorism. Neurology today is poking at the brains of other people. We're overbalanced this way today. As soon as psychiatrists start taking LSD, or more powerful drugs that come along, they will be tuning in on an energy process that will then help them write better equations. You have to experience what you are symbolizing. And when a symbol system gets beyond the experience, then it becomes just a chess-game.

When Einstein first worked out that equation, E = mc2, it was a very powerful, psychedelic thing. Literally, he had to fall down on his knees at that moment, when he realized that all matter was energy, just in temporary states of change, that there was no structure. Of course, the Hindu philosophers had pointed that out for a thousand years. But I suspect that very few physicists experience what they are symbolizing.

You see, that's the problem. I think that 99% of the people who call themselves scientists, including 99% of the people at your institution are not really scientists. There are never more than five or ten people who deserve the term "scientist" in any age. The rest of them are just engineers who are simply playing out one little aspect of a metaphor of a visionary experience that someone had in the past.

I liked your show, even without pictures, although you did paint some pictures in your own way. That was kind of a gloomy trip. One thing that has been very clear to us, who have been studying the effects of LSD for seven years, is that what you say about LSD is your trip. You begin to see that you're talking about the potentialities of the nervous system, as it can be accelerated or changed or messed up or damaged or confused or made sharper. You see that almost everything we say, with this incredibly desired instrument I just heard about called the mind, is paranoia. Everything you thing you see, every construction, every diagnosis, every symbol, every label, every discrimination on which you pride yourself as Cambridge college students is paranoia. You can enjoy the paranoia, you can get people to agree with you, but it's all your trip.

I share the basic concerns that we've listened to tonight. I don't know whether LSD is the devil's toy. As a matter of fact, I spend many hours a week - many, many hours in the last few years - thinking about the fact that it's very possible that LSD is the worst thing that could ever have come along. Maybe the insidious thing is that as I take it, as I have over four hundred times, I've lost the discriminating ability. I may feel better and better as I'm lying in the gutter with my nose drooling, but I'm too brain-damaged or too dazed to realize.

Several years ago I began myself, and also urging other people who were taking LSD, to keep an objective checklist as to where you are. Not in television game terms about whether your grades were higher or lower and that sort of thing but where you are basically in terms of your two billion year status on this planet.

Now each one of you would have a different checklist. Mine had to do with how much time I was spending out with children as opposed to game playing with adults, am I making more money or less - I'm making less and I think that's good - and so forth. But I still don't know, and I still have an open mind on this question, as to whether I'm a spokesman for, I wouldn't say the devil, but for a dangerous and diabolical situation.

However, I just want to underline one difference that I see here, and it is a philosophic difference, a clear difference and an ancient difference. We've heard a great deal of praise about the noetic function of the mind. Do you want to keep your mind? If you want to keep your mind and that judgmental function, stay away from LSD, stay away from the greatest experience. When you take LSD you realize that what you call your mind is about twenty years old, or at best two or three hundred years old, and the experience that I've been talking about is much more ancient and a much more liberating experience.

I want to say one final thing about the game of statistics. You say that two or three percent of the people you see have had this trip that continues. I certainly accept that as probable. As a matter of fact, I'm surprised it's more, because the people you see are the people who are in trouble. You don't see the percentage of people who are... (Lettvin: Harvard Square is trouble?) Harvard Square is trouble, yes. I advise anyone who is interested in the spiritual journey to get out of Harvard Square. I don't say follow me either. Do it on your own.

Now the statistics here are two out of three cases that come to psychiatric clinics have recurrent LSD experiences. First of all, if those people were to come to us, we would examine them and discover that many of these people just need to understand what the experience is. Several hundred years ago, if I put your eyes to a microscope, there would be a certain percentage of you that would reel back and you'd never enjoy your food again, because you'd realize that your food was full molecular, cellular mass.

The fact of the matter is that you do see a different perspective - I'm not saying it's necessarily realer - when you take LSD. You don't come back the same person, just as anyone who looks through a telescope must beware, because some of you, one or two or three percent of you will never feel quite solid on the earth, after you realize it's spinning around its own axis and the axis of the sun. A religious, as opposed to a psychiatric, interpretation of these two or three percent could be changed so the person would welcome and understand this new insight. A lot of things that you experience will change you. Two out of three of the people come to a psychiatrist, so it must be less than one percent of the people who are taking trips. Maybe one out of five hundred, maybe one out of a thousand. Okay, maybe one out of a hundred who take LSD will be bothered by recurrent visions. Now let's compare that one out of a hundred with alcohol. We're told that there are about fifty, sixty, seventy million Americans that depend on alcohol. There are about five or six million alcoholics. When you release a drug like alcohol, there's a chance of one out of ten that your life is going to be seriously crippled. With LSD - and we don't really know, we're playing the game of how many virgins there are at Vassar, it seems to be one out of a hundred or one out of a thousand. I want to see the statistics - yours, or I'm sure we'll get better nose count statistics - on the package. I want everyone to be warned. Don't take this trip unless you know you're playing around with a blind roulette game with the most precious thing you have - a thirty billion cell nervous system. Read the label, read Dostoyevsky, read the New England Journal, read our journals, read the ancient stories of mystics and visionaries, and when you've read the whole thing, forget the books and talk to people who have had the experience, and then look at yourself in the mirror, and then you decide yourself, because the only control of LSD is self-control.

Innisfree: Dr. Leary, one of your comments in your Playboy interview was that if you take LSD in a nuthouse you will have a nuthouse experience. The modern student seems to be in a rat race and may not feel he can spare more than a day, say a Saturday, for a "trip." If a student were to take LSD in this rat race environment, would he have a rat race experience?

Leary: Well, you're asking for a wild generalization. No one should take LSD unless he's well prepared, unless he knows what he's getting into, unless he's ready to go out of his mind; and his session should be in a place which will facilitate a positive, serene reaction, and with someone whom he trusts emotionally and spiritually.

Innisfree: When you were experimenting at Harvard, did you find that students were less prepared to go out of their minds?

Leary: Well, I never gave drugs to any student at Harvard, contrary to rumor. We did give psychedelic drugs to many graduate students, young professors, and researchers at Harvard. These people were very well trained and prepared for the experience. They were doing it for a serious purpose; that is, to learn more about consciousness, the game of mastering this technique for their own personal life and for their professional work.

Innisfree: Did you ever publish any of your findings from your Harvard stay?

Leary: Yes, we have published over 35 scholarly and scientific articles. Many of these were based on our Harvard studies: statistical studies, questionnaire studies, descriptions of our rehabilitation work with prisoners, experimental work in producing visionary and mystical experiences, and so forth.

Innisfree: One of the greatest areas of controversy in regard to LSD is that many people fear, Professor Teuber at MIT for one, that from taking LSD you might have recurrences of the psychosis without further ingestion of the drug.

Would you like to comment on this?

Leary: Number one, I can't agree with the word "psychosis". The aim of taking LSD is to develop yourself spiritually and to open up greater sensitivity. Therefore the aim should be to continue after the session the exciting process you have begun. We're delighted when people tell us that after their LSD sessions they can recapture some of the illumination, and the meaning, and the beauty. Psychiatrists think they are creating psychoses; therefore, they would be alarmed at having the experience persist. We know that we are producing religious experiences, and we and our subjects aim to have those experiences endure. And if Professor Teuber's worried about the fact that nobody knows exactly what LSD does, and I share that worry, we must realize that scientifically we are not sure of what thousands of energies which we ingest or surround ourselves by are doing: gas fumes, DDT, penicillin, tranquilizers. Nobody knows how these work, what effects they'll have not only on the individual but also on the genetic structure of the species. There are risks involved whenever you take LSD. Nobody should take LSD unless he knows he's going into the unknown. He's laying his blue chips on the line. He's tampering with that most delicate and sacred of all instruments, the human brain. You should know that. But you know that you're taking a risk every time you breathe the air, every time you eat the food that the supermarkets are putting out, every time you fall in love for that matter.

Life is a series of risks. We insist only that the person who goes into it knows that it's a risk, knows what's involved, and we insist also that we have the right to take that risk. No paternalistic society and no paternalistic profession like medicine has the right to prevent us from taking that risk. If you listen to neurologists and psychiatrists, you'd never fall in love.

Innisfree: A friend of ours told us that he had recurring hallucinations at a time when he really didn't want them and didn't expect them. Are these uncontrollable replays common?

Leary: I think that everyone who takes LSD is permanently changing his consciousness. That is, there are going to be recurrent memories, and recurrent reactions, when you hear the same music, when you're with the same people, when you walk into the same room. Any stimulation may set off a memory. Now, a memory is a live, chemical molecular event in your nervous system. When you take LSD, you're changing that system to a small degree. Now most people are delighted when this happens.

In any thousand people, or perhaps hundred, there's a professional full-time worrier. Now when this person takes LSD, he's going to wonder if he's going crazy, he's going to worry that he's insane, he's going to worry about brain damage, he's going to worry about controlling it. Worriers, of course, are people who want to have everything under control. And life is not under control. Life is a spontaneous, undisciplined, unsupervised event. Your worrying person is going to lay his worrying machinery on LSD.

Innisfree: You mentioned religion a few minutes ago. Prof. Huston Smith of MIT has suggested that the drug-induced religious experience may not be a truly genuine one.

Leary: You're now sitting in a religious center. About 30 people are devoting their lives and energies to a full-time pursuit of the Divinity through the sacrament of LSD. You're calling our sacramental experience psychotic. LSD, the psychedelic experience, is a religious experience. It can be if the person is looking for it, and can be if the person is not looking for it and doesn't want it. Professor Smith has on several occasions stated his belief that the drug-induced experience is a religious experience. He has questions, as I understand it, about how this can be used, and how well we are applying our religious experiences, but he does not doubt that they are religious experiences. Now the religious experience is beyond any creed or ritual, any myth or metaphor. People use different interpretations, different metaphors to describe their religious experience. A Christian person will take LSD and report it in terms of the Christian vocabulary. Buddhists will do likewise.

Question: Tim, you said that LSD constitutes a yoga. Some of us are wondering whether this is a continuing yoga or whether it's a yoga that goes through an initial period and then ceases. Could you explain this if you would?

Leary: I'm very happy that you asked that question and I'll tell you why I am so happy. In almost every confrontation of this sort I make a great deal of what I call the yoga of LSD, the discipline of LSD. I say, to people who have any illusions about cheap mysticism, forget it. The LSD yoga is the toughest,

hardest, and requires the most complex work of any yoga I know. Or, not to use religious terms like yoga, the microscopic instrument that LSD is for the nervous system requires much more hard work because you're seeing many different levels of the personality. There's nothing about LSD has to do with instant mysticism or instant psychoanalysis, and I agree with you completely in your judgment of these instant claims. I'm not at all impressed by someone who says, "I took LSD once and now I see the whole thing." So what? You take LSD once life is going to be spent, perhaps, in picking up the pieces and fitting back together the securities and stabilities that were shattered when you saw that the world is not the simple thing you thought it was.

We're not in such disagreement on the side issues as we might look. I'm against that too. LSD takes work. Don't look to LSD for easy answers and above all don't think that LSD, or marijuana, or booze, or anything is going to make your task in the television studio as a role player in this MIT studio any easier. If you take marijuana or LSD your job as a student is going to be more difficult, and if you are in most tasks and most jobs that are available in this country, you are going to find It harder to keep your job if you take LSD.

LSD does require a systematic dropout, and when I say drop-out, I don't mean drop-out bag. Who am I to tell anyone to take LSD, or not to take LSD, or to drop out, or drop in, or to cop out, or flip out, or whatever? That's your choice. But I'll say this: if you continue to take LSD, or if you take LSD and you're one of those one out of a hundred or one out of a thousand that has recurrent experiences, you have got to be prepared to change your life along with it. It may be that some of these physicists can't do it.

Of course, you don't know what they took, if they rang up a phone number in Cambridge. We don't do that. LSD is like any intimate thing. Don't buy it. We don't want LSD sold in the drugstore, any more than you want any sacrament or any deep love thing sold. Get it from a friend if you're going to get it. Make sure.

But perhaps some of these physicists were discovering that they're supposed to be poets instead. There is an underlying positive interpretation of this definite possibility that you won't want to do your job, or that you can't do your job as well, after you've been turned on. Beware. If you get it from a friend, make sure it's a friend.

Question: Would you comment on the new psychedelic STP?

Leary: Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. This is an in joke. We have been in the position for the last seven years, if you'll allow me to present this: five years ago, and we told them, "There's going to be an LSD boom. You better get ready for it. You better have some training courses, and some scientists trained to do it. It can't be stopped. It's going to come." They looked as though we were crazy. They thought we were talking about heroin. The LSD boom is now here.

We've also been saying for two or three years, "Listen," and I said it tonight, "LSD is the beginning." We already have drugs which are longer and stronger than LSD. This unholy trio of LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline is really old hat now. There are, I'm told by alchemist friends of mine, thirty-two chemicals which can be easily produced and don't require the complex ergot base that LSD does.

One of these is called STP, and we're not shooting motor oil. STP is the throw-off name given to this new psychedelic drug. I have taken it. It is stronger and longer. I've taken one other chemical which is not known, has never been published in the chemical abstracts or literature, which again has an effect, not necessarily stronger, but somewhat different from LSD. This is just the beginning. We are in a psychochemical age. Any warning that the two of us have made tonight, about "Beware, be careful," go double for STP.

I'm sure you know about the psychedelic drug movement in this country. We know people in all cities and towns, and we're in correspondence. We're not dope addicts, criminals, or you dummies, and we're not in it for any sort of profit. Believe it or not, like it or not, it's a religious experience for us. We don't care whether any of you take it or not, but we insist upon our rights to do it.

When STP was developed, it was given to about twenty veteran LSD scientists, none of whom teach in universities. It was tried out on very selected people who had had hundreds of LSD trips, because the people that developed this drug are not in it to make money. It's a crusade with them.

Question: We don't care for mass conversions, but we wanted to know more. We want to get the lenses of our microscopes sharper and sharper. Perhaps LSD is an imperfect, perhaps even dangerous psychedelic drug. Perhaps there will be a more powerful chemical that won't have any side effects. You see what we're doing: we have our own, underground, scientific form of experimentation and communication.

The people that have taken STP that I have talked to are old veterans with STP. Some of these people can control LSD, so that they can play an LSD game. They can take a thousand gamma LSD and give a lecture - which I consider, by the way, a misuse. But, some of these old veterans were frightened by STP. And some LSD veterans, some who are in this room right now, came up and said, "I may never come back after STP." They didn't mind it, but there is this possibility, so all of our warnings go double for STP and the new chemicals, because they're coming.

Lettvin: I dissociate myself from your warnings. There are two sorts of warnings. This is the seductive warning, where you say, "You must not try it because it is dangerous." What better come-on is there for a kid? "Don't try it. It's dangerous." I didn't mean "Don't try it, it's dangerous," in that sense. Our friend Leary points out that these people are not in it for a profit. The hell they're not. They're collecting souls as you collect dollars. I think this business of seducing the young - you think this is religious, and I'm going to be damned religious tonight - I think this business of collecting souls is a form of profit. When I read that Faust is tempted by a vision of Helen, the question that comes to your mind is not, "What is Faust thinking of?" but "What is Helen thinking of when she entices him?"

His warning, "Don't try it, it's dangerous, it's hard work, it's something that you really have to be capable of handling," - what greater challenge is there to him? It is nonsense. I do not warn you in that sense.

Someone once said, "A good man has nothing to fear but his lucid moments." Would you please comment?

Leary: His lucid moments. Right. That's the point that I hope and pray that these discussions will get to. We're getting down to a basic religious difference. It happens to be the religious difference that has divided men in Athens, Rome, and the Church of England; the difference that threw George Fox in jail for six years. This is the difference. This is what the LSD controversy is all about. As long as the discussion is carried on as clearly as it is tonight, and the viewpoints expressed as I have heard them tonight, I am very happy.

If you want to say I'm a religious spokesman, and that I'm in the business of getting your souls, he is too. Let the game be played out at that level. I know of no case in which an LSD head or a marijuana smoker has tried to put a whiskey drinker in jail.

Question: I have heard, and would like to know if it's true or not, that the US Army is carrying out numerous studies on the effects of LSD used against civilian populations. If it is true, it does seem that the Daddy Bird and his friends are being somewhat hypocritical in trying to hoard this stuff for themselves.

Lettvin: The US Government is not above doing this. It's much worse than you imagine. Down with the chemical warfare division. They've got drugs the likes of which you ain't never heard.

There's a movie out on the effects of one drug. It's classified, so I cannot say where you can see it, but there is a bunch of privates in a room playing poker, and then a full five-star general walks in - presumably an actor, I hope - and they look up and say, "Come on, boy, sit down and join us. " This is called a peace-making drug. It makes people non-combative. They are interested, they have a variety of these things, and they're not above using them. They're all planned for that. But, I don't think this does anything but divert from the issue at present.

Leary: No, I don't think so. I think that there's more to this issue, or this question, at least from my side of the chessboard, black or white, as it may be. The Army was considering using the chemical LSD as it would any chemical, to drop it into the Russian or the Chinese water supply. And what better way to turn Moscow into Buddhas while we march in to take over?

Part of the LSD controversy in the United States today has to do with other issues which are disturbing our populace. It's inconceivable to me that anyone could take LSD and not be against the war in Vietnam. There was a case of a Navy Air Station outside San Francisco where a horrible thing was discovered. There were some petty officers and sailors from the base going to San Francisco, and after they got bored drinking whiskey and watching the topless dancers on the North Beach, they strayed over to the Haight-Ashbury, which is the center of flower power. They started smoking marijuana and took some LSD. Well, that caused hell at the base, because some of these petty officers began wearing beads over their uniforms, and they began painting peace symbols on the fighter planes.

Many of the John Birchers these days and many of our congressmen, brain-damaged or not, drunk or sober, are saying that LSD is part of the conspiracy to sap the morale of America to fight Communism, and they're absolutely right. A generation of potsmokers and LSD users just ain't going to kill other young seed-carrying men for old men's chess games. Your question, as I interpret it, has to do with the overall political situation versus LSD.

Don't think that we're sitting around taking LSD and consulting our navels. Yes, yes, I have discovered my body in the last seven years. I've come to my senses and I enjoy every sensual activity a thousand times more than I did when I was stoned on martinis seven years ago. But, that's a straw-man that was set up, as though the choice were between being a hard mental computer student or professor at MIT and being a vegetable. Well, I'd still be a vegetable if I had the choice, but this is a straw-man technique.

There are hundreds of levels of consciousness. Every sense organ is a series of cameras. You have to learn to use sense organs as the Tantric Buddhists and the Naga Hindus and the Yogis taught you. There are thousands of levels of consciousness. What is consciousness? Consciousness is energy received and decoded through organic structures, cellular or sensory, that you have in your body that matter, probably every nerve cell - is such a center. You can conceive of millions of levels of consciousness, within your own body. We're not saying that any one level is better. We don't want people stoned out on LSD just with cow-eyes - although I was going to read you a Wordsworth poem on that. We don't want people stuck on any level. We don't want people being alcoholics we don't want hopheads or potheads, or MIT heads, or computer heads. These are all traps. The goal of our research, and the goal of our yoga, is to make those who are interested aware of the fact that you have countless levels of consciousness, that you can learn how to manipulate them, use them, and apply them for benefit. We didn't bring about the psychedelic revolution in this country by sitting around and taking LSD and smoking pot and consulting our navel. It's hard work, demanding tremendous creativity. I didn't mention tune-in in my lecture, but by tune-in, I mean, throughout history, when a man has had a revelation - and here I'm in agreement, if I may be allowed to - the test of the revelation is: do you make it stick out there, can you express it, can you build a cathedral?

There are a lot of kids around taking LSD, smoking pot and claiming great things, and I don't defend that any more than you would. The test of the psychedelic movement is what comes out of it. Can we bring about peace? Negroes are now starting for the first time to take LSD. Negroes haven't liked the LSD trip because it shows them too much, because of the situation we put them in in this country.

I'm willing to make this prediction; I've made it before in public. You watch the psychedelic movement in this country, and you will see, within six months, that we are bringing pressure to bear in the war in Vietnam and to harmonize the races in this country. Six months - political action towards harmony, not political action towards power. There is a scientific hypothesis - test it and see.

Question: Is there any information at all about the neurological or other aspects of LSD?

Lettvin: Not even strychnine, not even barbiturates, not even aspirin or ordinary ether have a neurological explanation yet. If there is any science in this country more disreputable than neuropharmacology, I have yet to hear about it. For anybody to tell you that a drug acts because it hits this center or any other center of the brain - and that includes me in what I told you before - he's taking a chance with the truth. There are no such things as centers.

If we knew anything at all about how the nervous system acted, possibly we might be able to say how a drug acts. When I talked to you, I did not provide you with a scientific explanation, or scientific warnings. I was telling you as a rank empiricist, as a former clinician, looking at these things utterly empirically and without any science or logic.

Leary: It smells good.

Question: Dr. Leary, earlier you stated, when the flashing lights and the projectors were on, that you advised us all to stay out of politics because it wouldn't do any good. So what do you mean that in six months you're going to bring all this pressure to bear on the administration to do all these wonderful things?

Leary: Thank you for that question.

I said drop out of politics, and now I'm making predictions about events that you judge as politics. Now, when I say drop out of politics, I mean power politics. Most politics - most everything, for that matter - in this country has to do with more power. The only way you're going to change the race problem, the only way you're going to prevent the United States of America from hurtling down its course of aggression, both internal and external, is to change consciousness. I was quite serious when I brought these flowers in. That's how we're going to do it. We're not going to run for office; we're not going to picket; we're not going to bring pressure on the congressmen in Washington. We are just going to turn on the United States. This is an unhappy country. We heard a brilliant, wonderful citizen of this country presenting his essentially religious philosophy of his life and it was a gloomy trip. Look at LBJ's face: he's a gloomy man. Read your newspapers: they're gloomy newspapers.

Come on, life is not a vale of suffering. Suffering, as the Buddha said, is caused by man's mind. This was a garden of Eden, believe it or not, two billion years ago. They worked out this harmonious dance of the species, including the insects and including the different forms of vegetation. Come on, wake up, remember where we're at.

I talk about politics, but I don't mean your type of politics, like running for office. I'm talking about the basic issue. We're going to make this country a fun, love flower country. We blew up our bomb; France has to have theirs. We had super drugstores, Scandinavia has to have theirs. As soon as we start having fun and turning on and coming to our senses and resurrecting our body, it will be the hip thing to do in Paris and Stockholm and Rome. Then the Russians will be doing it, and pretty soon the Chinese, after their menopausal dictators flop out. Now music in China is Bach. We'll have our psychedelic musicians, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, in Peking in two years. That's my definition of politics.

Lettvin: It's been said, "By their deeds you shall know them." I notice you have poets who write not, painters who paint not. You say the way out of the world situation is not to change it, but to drop out. There is a certain degree of irresponsibility in this. The fundamental problem is to change injustice, not to put the blinders on the mind and say, "Isn't it wonderful? I'm against this terrible war. Let us all be happy. " There are people who suffer. No man is an island unto himself. To think yourself an island is a damn fool thing. The dropping out situation, confronted by the horrors of the world, is to think that the horrors of the world are more beautiful than yourself. I can do something about someone who is unjustly handled. That something is not to erase him from my consciousness.

Leary: You've gone and done it again. You're clapping a straw-man. I've said nothing tonight which has to do with dropping out of harmonious interrelations. I'm not talking about subjective idealism. I don't have to defend this last comment because it has nothing to do with what I'm saying. It is much harder to drop out of the American MIT institutional conforming situation. That's the easy narcotic. Just stay in, get your degree, become an engineer. Good boy. Doesn't it feel good? Shoot it in your vein. You get your big computer now. The hard thing to do is to drop out.

You can't do any good in the world today as long as you feel bad. The only way that you're going to bring about goodness and happiness in the world is for you yourself to feel good.

Haven't we had enough of Christian missionaries with those dark faces going over and putting dresses on the natives? You can't start to link up until you realize that it's only your mind that we heard praised so much tonight that makes you think you're an island. Once you're not an island, when you're hooked up, that's the first thing you realize. We're all hooked up.

Question: Dr. Leary, are you happy?

Leary: Happy? Yes, I'm happy. I'm very happy.

Question: You say that the people of India are four thousand years spiritually more advanced than the Western cultures, which are just now being awakened. Are the four hundred million people of India any happier for their four thousand years of spiritual awakening?

Leary: This question comes up very often. In the first place, to my knowledge, brain-damaged as I am, I don't remember saying tonight any great praises of India as a country, and I haven't made claims of the happiness of the Indians. I do say that all Western philosophy, religion, and science has rooted itself in India. They were dealing with our problems four thousand years ago. Those Vedic philosophers were taking soma; they were just about getting around to discovering existence's problems. But what's happened to India?

India is in an economically miserable situation today because they have had about two thousand years of Western mental intervention. Don't you remember what Columbus was looking for? He was looking for the Indies. What was he going to bring to the Indies? He was going to bring them that cross that originated as a cross of love and he was going to stick it in their gullet and he was going to take their spices and gold. That's where our Western culture started. The history of India is the history of consistent rape by the French, by the Portuguese, by the English, and now by the Americans and probably by the Chinese. I don't feel that soma - or LSD of today - is the cause of India's tragic dilemma.

I have lived in India. I lived in a village where every day as I took a walk I saw a group of lepers, sitting on the road. I got to know these people. I couldn't talk with them, but I'd see them every day, and we would smoke a cigarette together. When I had the money I'd go clink-clink-clink and give a hundredth of a cent to each one. I've seen Harvard professors and I've lived with them, and that group of eight lepers in India was no more unhappy than the average professor at the faculty club at Harvard.

Question: You both seem to advocate some sort of control of LSD, other than the government absolutely forbidding it. I'd like to hear both your views on who should control it and what type of control it should be.

Leary: All such questions about control of fire, control of gunpowder, control of firearms - a big issue today all come down to self-control, to a mature adult society. The only control is self-control, but since we are an uncontrollable people at this time, I think that LSD at this moment should be licensed. You should have a license to use LSD about at the level of difficulty and challenge and physical and mental balance as is required to pilot an airplane. It's a very dangerous thing if someone takes an airplane from one of these local fields, goes swooping over here for kicks, and crashes into a highway or Harvard Square. You need physical and psychological examinations and you need training. One thing I didn't mention in my lecture is that both marijuana and LSD and other psychedelic drugs need a lot of training. Most people smoke pot the first time and think nothing happens. It's extremely subtle, and you have to be trained to use marijuana.

When it comes to LSD, tremendous training of this equipment is needed. Restrictive licensing for LSD, and some sort of training course, some sort of manuals, and some sort of tests. Your first few LSD sessions should be in preserves or in quiet places set aside for spiritual exploration.

On this American television station we don't have any places set aside for spiritual wandering in the woods, taking off your clothes, slipping out, and trying the way of the great mystics. We don't have it. We should have preserves like this where people who are very carefully prepared and know what they are getting into could have the experience and be trained.

For marijuana, I would say that the license to smoke pot should be like the license to drive a car. You should be a certain age, reasonable health, reasonable psychiatric situation, pass a minimal physical and intellectual test and light up.

Lettvin: The problem is a very complex one. One of the reasons I quit Boston Psychopathic Hospital several years ago was because of the utter disgust of the policies of the now dead but I do not believe in this de mortuis nil nisi bonum - Dr. Rinkle. Dr. Rinkle was in the forefront of administering LSD to Harvard students at the time. Responsible, psychiatric, medical control: you give them five bucks, they come in, they turn on. They don't know what they are taking, but every medical student needs five bucks, so they come in.

I watched, under his benign aegis, one psychosis come to full flower, one kid change his personality completely, and when I say drop out, I mean really drop out of medical school. There were a variety of others whose performance and self-confidence went way down. When he says it should be under responsible control, there is no fiction more abominable than this. There is no doctor that has the right to give a drug that is potentially dangerous unless some benefit can accrue and it must be shown that some benefit can accrue. Therefore, I am opposed to the licensing business. I consider that the drug is monstrous.

But, when you come to the question of control, you come into a queer business. The government, by its somewhat mindless handling of the morphine, heroin and cocaine problem, has made arguments that are the slightest bit convincing. The government could not possibly ban LSD and make a case that would impress you any more than its case against marijuana. Obviously it is not up to the government to control it. The social control will rest I think, with those of us who can persuade you - not to take it.

Question: Dr. Leary, you say that mystical experience consists of seeing into oneself. When you take LSD, is a foreign matter that you're injecting, ingesting into yourself, and therefore you are changing yourself. Therefore, how can you really see into yourself, and why should you need to take something from out of yourself to see into yourself and get the mystical experience?

Leary: That happens to be the hardest question that anyone's been asked in the last four thousand years of recorded history. It's the classic paradox of philosophy. Certainly, it's central problem of Eastern philosophy. If the visionary experience of the samadhi, the nirvanic or the satoric experience is outside the self, who's around to have it? How can you talk about it? How can you describe it? For a thousand years, men like myself have been sitting scratching their heads when this question is asked.

The answer is usually this. We cannot describe with the three thousand words in the English language that I learned getting a PhD, a neurological and cellular process which has been going on for two billion years, which is infinitely complex.

Therefore, when you contact these energies, you understand, because your nervous system knows. Everyone has here a computer which knows exactly where it's at. You see it when you turn on to this. Then you come back and you say, as James's friend did, "Well, it's all this," or "It's all that." And of course, these are poor explanations. Men in my position, thousands of years, have had to say, "We can't describe God for you," or "We can't describe the evolutionary cellular molecular process for you in words." We can teach you how to find it. We can teach you methods of turning on and of finding your divinity and ways of communicating it as we tried to do tonight with this new form of art, and as artists have tried to do for thousands of years. Another interesting thing, though: STP seems to allow the reasoning mind to remain with you. At the same time, you realize you're E = mc2, and you're a dancing, shimmering mosaic of particles. STP seems to allow you to continue to think and talk at the same time that you're involved in what we call a cellular consciousness, and spinning down what we call, poetically, your DNA trip. We're just beginning. We both agree that we know nothing very scientific about the nervous system and about drugs which change it. I foresee in the near future psychochemicals which will allow a person to have these beyond-the-mind experiences; at the same time you're like the scientist looking through the microscope at a level of reality which was invisible until two hundred years ago. You look through the microscope, you see all these squirming, dancing things, you look at the electronic microscope and you see the shimmering dance, and you still have your mind to annotate and make the symbols. I have absolute confidence that within two or three years you will have chemicals which will allow you to keep your mind, and at the same time flip through these other realms.

I think this is going to be a tremendous advantage at every level. If we did have an LSD which allowed a person to remain at his judgmental function, the whole discussion would be over. We wouldn't have a religious argument, because you could have your mind and I could have the divine process

Lettvin: How would you know if you are keeping your mind? Here's a practical thing. At a cocktail party at the faculty club I walk up to a drunk professor and I say, "You know, you are just a little bit tight. You argue a little differently." "No, I'm perfectly sober." Observe: to the person, always the present, the temporary, the now is the criterion for judgment. How in the world, Tim, could you tell that you are keeping your mind?

Leary: I would be glad to answer that question as objectively and psychometrically as possible. Granted that the drunk thinks he's sober. When you're measured by a psychologist, you drop.

Lettvin: Ha! What does a psychologist measure that's worth anything?

Leary: I agree with that, as a former psychologist. But you've got to give: you can't have it both ways. You can't say that there is a mental judgmental reality that would be threatened by alcohol or my new drug and at the same time say that there is no objective test. You name me an objective test of judgmental, accurate, chess-game-playing intellectual functions, and I will say that LSD at the present time will drop you in that. You cannot take LSD and perform many of these functions which require slow three-a-second outputs of a thirteen billion cell computer. So much is going on that your IQ drops during the period you take LSD. I'm making the prediction that no matter what objective test you want to name, we'll have a drug within three or four years that will allow you to reach the high point of LSD and still perform the test, or whatever you do at a cocktail party that shows you're functioning normally, or supernormally. That's my prediction.

Question: The speakers have somehow overlooked the possible social impact of drugs in their standpoints. We all realize that something is wrong, something is not going as it should in this society - education, government, war, or whatever. Dr. Leary offers us drugs as a way out. Dr. Lettvin hasn't made himself clear about this question. Does Dr. Leary envision the same society going on, the men working at the same factory, having the same boss, looking at the same stupid television and the same stupid elections and then during the rest of his day taking a trip? And how does Dr. Lettvin look at it? That's one question, to both speakers. Why do we somehow hesitate to employ social changes or change of social structure?

The second question is to Dr. Leary specifically. Dr. Leary often employs some standpoints, or appearances, of Eastern Zen philosophy. But, my question is, why drugs, Dr. Leary? Cannot all these revelations, cannot all this encouragement, cannot all these inner insights and trying to find a way out and to make our life better so deformed, or the individual so changed, that it can no longer be done without drugs?

Leary: Yes, people have often asked me that question. They say, "Dr. Leary, there have been holy men and visionaries for thousands of years who never used LSD. They never heard of Santa's laboratory." Yes. Of course, the people who get any type of experience from LSD are those who are looking for it and know how to use it. Certainly it's possible, we know from human history, for people to get turned on without using drugs, even without holy and sacred hashish, which has been used by meditative people and contemplative people and visionary people for thousands of years. Yes, there are a thousand ways to get high, there are a thousand ways to turn on and drop out temporarily. But most of them require a tremendous amount of discipline, a complete drop out. If you go to a Zen monastery, you have to give up everything. I've talked to Zen masters in Kyoto and they say, "Oh, well, maybe in forty years of being a Zen master I've seen two or three men that reach satori." It's tremendously consuming work. Actually, we're trying to keep some sort of a society here going with the chemical religion.

I want to say one final thing about your question. This will be the last thing I'd like to say tonight. I am, as closely as I can examine my motives, a religious person, devoting most of my energies to the religious quest as I see it - and fully aware of the traps and pitfalls involved. I have a complete trust in the DNA genetic process and in the evolutionary process on this planet. I think that the whole thing is out of control as far as our minds are concerned; I think that if our minds really saw what was going on in evolution, we'd shriek out of our heads, because we couldn't stand the reality of the evolutionary process.

But I have a complete trust in it. I think that the evolutionary process is continually getting itself into scrapes and bailing itself out by the skin of its teeth. It's been going on for two billion years. I think that the psychedelic drugs happen to be at this moment the exact cure for the illness that threatens not only our society and its happiness, but other forms of life on this planet. I think the DNA code looked around at a technological, drug-producing culture like ours and the DNA code found LSD. LSD happens to be, at this moment, the exact cure for the disease of our minds. LSD will be outworn, as the Hindu techniques have been outworn, and there'll be a new method. Anything that can get you high and allow you to come back and make this a more beautiful world, anything that can get you high that way, blessings and godspeed.

Lettvin: If you want to know, the difference between Tim and me is this. I don't believe that opium should become the religion of the people. I have the second difference. Tim takes the passive approach to the world; I take the active approach. I love women, I love the world, I love everything that there is in it and I love it massively, as you can see. And I love it complexly because it is complex' and there is so much of it. Why in the world should I turn into myself?