Ray eye blog

Posted by Ray under: Encounters
With Remarkable Men and Women.

I met Doctor Leary ~ in April of 1982 after he and Ram Das, who for this occasion called himself by the name his parents gave him, Richard Alpert; engaged in a dialogue @ Sanders Theater hosted by the long-standing head of the Harvard Psychology Department, David McClelland ~ the same man that had kicked them out of Harvard for giving acid to students and others as a part of their research and teaching in Harvard’s Psychology Department in the 1960’s which is still located in that ivory towered white skyscraper on Kirkland Ave near the Divinity School and the Swedenborg Chapel.

They were given standing ovations upon their arrival onstage and @ the end of the program as well. Their talk was fun, funny, healing and I’m not really sure
what it’s long term impact was on ‘society’; but for that sunny warm April day ~
it felt like the sunlight of sanity and reasonableness had reappeared in the
world, brief as it was.

Dr. Walter Clark, retired faculty, also on the Harvard Psych Dept and his lovely wife, Ruth were also there.  Walter had never been fired or expelled however.  His research involved partaking of peyote sessions with medicine men and ingesting mega-doses of Hawaiian baby wood rose plant extract.
Dr Clark looked like an old, wise owl ~ not predatorial but certainly very
wise.   Looking @ his forehead you could see that his ajna chakra was wide open. When he was in the room with other people, he was present with them but he always seemed to be ‘looking @ a bigger picture’ beyond the immediate surroundings.
I knew him through my association with the SOMA Institute of which Caroline ( then Carolyn Lieff ) was on the staff of as an art therapist. Carolyn and other members of SOMA had adopted Ram Das as their spiritual advisor back in the 1960’s after he had been kicked out of Harvard, travelled to India to meet Maharaj Ji ~ also known as ‘Neem (‘the deep blue One’) Karoli Baba.

Maharaj Ji called LSD ‘yogi medicine’ and Ram Das was blown away when he gave Maharaj Ji 5 hits of acid and asked him to describe his experience to which he replied ‘Nothing has changed.’

Also on the scene back then was Bhagavan Das ~ who had met RamDas @ Neem Karoli Baba’s ashram in India. He had released a very far out recording called ‘Ah’ nothing
quite like you have ever heard before or since then. He also appears on Ram Das’
6 LP set “Love Serve Remember’.   These were the back in the days when RD had 1^stpublished the book ‘Be Here Now’ in collaboration with visionary artist
,Steve Durkee who also produced the very far–out , magical, interactive book
called ‘Seed’ not as widely known as ‘Be Here Now’- which has been republished
several times and is still available.

Do you still have your copy of ‘Be Here Now’ ?

I’m not so sure that it rates as ‘scripture’

But
let’s say it ‘ approaches ‘ scripture.

Towards the end of their dialogue, Dr. Leary was aked the following ? by a member of the audience ; “So Doctor, how would you sum up the purpose for taking LSD and who might benefit most from taking it? “

Doctor Leary smiled and gave the following answer to all present; “ LSD is for
anyone who wants to accelerate and expand their consciousness veryfast and move way beyond where they are now.”

From my perspective and understanding, he was saying that by following this path you were going to quickly travel on an adventurous and sometimes very wild and dangerous ride and you could find yourself in another place, one better than
the one you were in before you started your trip.

Look @ his life :

When he was @ Harvard, he kind of looked like a ‘square’, sort of like 50’s TV show host, Steve Allen, a cultural icon of ‘regularness’ for that era of the pre-acid 1950’s and early‘60’s.   He owned  a large stately home in Newton, MA ( which Boston based rock band, the Cars later rented in the early 1980’s for living and rehearsing. )

Upon expulsion from the Harvard faculty, he and Alpert wound up @ a
private estate in rural New York called Millbrook, where they continued their experiments of turning people on to exploring the spectrum of different states of consciousness with psychedelics such as LSD -25.

@ Millbrook, Leary once complained that he seemed to be stuck in the role
of having the duty of being the guy who had to fuck each and every female guest

during their visit to the estate.

Leary was also onstage during the Summer of Love, 1967 ~ @ a Love-In in Golden Gate Park , San Francisco, CA where Ken Kesey, Chet Helms, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and the Quicksilver Messenger Service  also performed. This was the same Summer that the Beatles had released ‘ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.’

When asked to comment about the significance of this amazing
record; Leary told the crowd that ” …this album is drenched with drugs…” and

underscoring this the Beatles were also sending out his same message of

‘tune
in

turn
on

and

drop
out’

And Why Not ?, I figured ~

as the Johnson Administration was expanding the war upon Southeast Asia focused in Viet Nam and Cambodia, drafting young men by force to go there and to spill their blood and guts and give up their lives to fight against the menace of a communist society ?

Art Linkletter, another TV talk show icon of regularness had accused Leary of

causing the suicide of his daughter who took acid and jumped out of the window

of a Manhattan high-rise because she believed she could fly.

Soon after that Tim Leary went on the lam hiding out from the CIA.   He’s said to have travelled to Afghanistan in the 1970’s eventually being caught by the CIA, then sentenced to do time in Federal prison.

From prison, he developed theories about  human evolution and space travel, which he called ‘Neurologic’. He said  this information was channeled to him while in prison  from another dimension.   Through the support of friends and his beloved partner, Rosemary, he was released from prison. He spent time doing stand up comedy and debating Nixon fascist operator G Gordon Liddy about drug policy and related social issues. He was once quoted as saying “ I wouldn’t want to have gotten trapped in the swampy backwater that is Harvard anyway “.

After the event I was standing a couple of feet from Dr. Leary on the  floor near the stage.   He smiled @ me, his silver hair shining brilliantly under the bright lights of Sanders Theater.   I asked him if he remembered Carolyn Lieff when he was @ Harvard with Dick Alpert.   I described her as a tall, beautiful, soft spoken British woman who was an artist, model ,fashion designer who also led Sufi dancing @ the Harvard Divinity School ?

Looking into the ‘distance’ of the past , he smiled again, saying; “Yes I do remember her”.

As we moved from the 1980’s into the 90’s, Tim Leary became involved in computer technology, especially software for reprogramming one’s consciousness. He said that ‘ All of this external computer technology / hardware and software is just an externalization of what the human being is already capable of internally’.

Stephen Jobs, founder of Apple Corporation once admitted that he found acid very inspirational when he was developing his first computers.

During this phase Tim Leary collaborated with sexy Italian scientist and performance artist, Doctor Fiorella Terenzi, recording ‘music of the spheres’ using electronic signals being emitted from quasars, galaxies and planets as the orchestration.

He was said to have traded in psychedelics for tobacco and wine.   He developed
prostate cancer and announced from his home in Beverly Hills, California that “
Madame Cancer had taken up residence in my body…” and he was soon going to be a ‘goner’.

Two different cryogenic companies got into a bidding war over which firm he should entrust the removal and freezing of his brain for future resuscitation and rejoining with a human body again.

In the end he decided ‘the hell with that idea’.

I personally believe that the person’s spirit sits within the heart space which

is ‘associated with’ the physical organ but not necessarily located in the same

physical dimension, anyway. so that doesn’t bother me.

I recall the day he died .  I could sense his eternal astral and
cosmic soul travelling through the ‘bardo’, a word from the Tibetan Book of the Dead that describes the ‘void’ that exists between different planes of reality.

swa ha

&

Om sweet home

Travel on Tim Leary until you get ‘there’

A song written about Timothy Leary when he was alive and well back in the 1960’s is ‘Legend of a Mind’ by the Moody Blues from the album ’In Search of The Lost Chord’

Here are the lyrics :

He is also mentioned in the Who’s song ‘The Seeker’

Pete Townshend’s lyrics are displayed here :

His statement; “ LSD is for anyone who wants to accelerate and expand their
consciousness veryfast and move way beyond where they are now.” stayed with me.

It actually inspired me to launch an amazing adventure that involved taking 2 hits

of acid in 1984 in Cambridge, MA then driving my huge Ford Crown Victoria to
Connecticut to visit my Father one misty spring evening in late May.

Please Note that this is NOT an endorsement that anyone should undertake such an adventure, or even a similar one.

I recall once that a colleague from Mass Art’s SIM Department, Don Subhan, a
brilliant musician and ‘ wizard in the making’ had dropped acid then paddled a
canoe out into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Maine near Bar Harbor, never to be seen again, nor the body or boat ever found.

Stay tuned for the sharing of my amazing trip and it’s reverberation throughout my life in the near future.

Until then is Now.

Ray eye.

Ray Iasiello

CertifiedHatha Yoga Teacher

Certified Resonance Repatterning™ Practitioner

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