Haight-Ashbury in the Sixties/Haight-Ashbury in the Sixties (1996)(Rockument)(Disc 1 of 2)[Mac-PC].iso/mac/MAIN/TUNEIN/TUNEIN01.DIR/00388_Field_Interview with Richard Alpert Part 2.txt

Text File | 1995-06-01 | 21KB | 63 lines

Interview with Dick Alpert
Part 2

            MARIJUANA

   You see, there'll be a lot of people in the thirty-, forty-year-old thing like me who see it coming and want to hold on to it and we're looking to people younger than ourselves.  But it happened so much faster than we ever anticipated five years ago.  And it's going in a geometrical thing outward, you know.  But the point is, if it goes out faster than you're ready with your own growth as spiritually mature people it's on thin ice and you get over into the ego realm and then the thing is kaput.
   I mean, when you get called before a police commissioner, like when Tim was talking to that judge in Laredo, he wasn't sending any vibrations of doubt.  There was no wedge that that judge could say, "Well, don't you think, Dr. Leary, it's a little bizarre to be carrying pot in the car and saying you're turning on for religious purposes?"  I mean, that's not the words, but that's the...
   Tim said, "Your Honor, I took the marijuana at the end of the day, I sat on a hill and I looked at the sunset, and I had a marijuana cigarette and I reflected about the trip, and mankind" and so on and he just came back with that same feeling.
   Just like Allen Ginsberg, when they come to him and say, like, "Well, hello Mr. Ginsberg, glad to have you on this TV show, won't you sit down and tell the audience..." and he sits down, and he doesn't get into the game.  Somehow he comes through as just a spirit.  He doesn't get into the game.

           ALLEN GINSBERG FOR MAYOR

O:  We were talking about Allen this morning in relation to the numbers game.  If we elected him in the next election for mayor, in '72 he could be elected Governor, and then in '76 President.
A:  President, right.  Allen is a very very smart guy and Allen is a master politician.  Which is beautiful in such a gentle person.  And it is not fair to put on Allen the burden that he has to be a total holy man because everybody in human incarnation is all too human.  And it's very hard, because we all want symbols.  I mean, Tim is caught in the same bag, you know, and it's important for all of us to keep these people, you know, like, straight people too.
O:  Do you think it's too far out to propose him for Mayor?
A:  No, I don't think it's too far out at all.  I think it's a very interesting move, if Allen would groove to do that.  Because it's not going to be one of these things:  "I will run if I'm drafted."  He's just going to be there and say "Yeah, man, that's beautiful."  Because he's got to have his whole heart and soul in the way he does every bit of that if he's going to do it.  He's the guy that could do it, though.  He could come very close to doing it...I think you ought to talk with Allen when he comes out in January, and no matter how soon, the ORACLE should start a major campaign, if that's going to be done...
   Imagine what it would be like to have anybody in high political office within our understanding of the universe.  I mean, let's just imagine that Bobby Kennedy had a fully expanded consciousness.  Just imagine him in his position, what he would be able to do.  And the fact of the matter is that any force in that direction can do fantastic things from within the institution.  So my feeling is there are plenty of degrees of freedom to work in within the dance the way it's been concocted without creating a new dance.  And it's not going to be an optimum thing, but there are 190,000,000 people we're playing with here.
O:  That's what Allen used to say:  "Dance with them; pretty soon they follow your step."
A:  Yeah, sure.  Like you take Bucky Fuller setting up that island off Greece, where he's starting a world citizenship center.  It's a beautiful thing.  For five years they've been cruising out there looking over land, they've got the money, they're building an absolutely beautiful done...fantastic scene...and it's going to be the center for world citizenship.  It's a groovy thing, right?  I mean, that's like, not world government but world citizenship, which is much more reasonable.  Well now, as each of these comes along, we'll all want to put our forces, our energies into, "yeah, that too, and that too..."
O:  What is Bobby Kennedy's attitude to acid?
A:  Oh well, as long as it's politically uncool, he's gonna be its worst foe.
O:  Do you know if he takes it?
A:  Oh no, he's not taking it...Unfortunately, the Kennedy scene is like one step back and the game is just like the Mellons about money, it's the Kennedy's about politics.  And politics involves that whole level of, you know, "rurr, rurr, rurrrrr."  I mean, Allen Ginsberg's campaign would never be to take on Mayor Shelley.  That would not be the game.  The game would be:  What is Man all about, and what government is all about, you know...I don't know that he can win, because don't underestimate the power of the Establishment when it's riled.  And it's not gonna let Allen Ginsberg get in and take over the real estate in the financial district without protesting.  But the statement that can be made through it...I mean, I don't think win and lose is what the issue is at all, man, it's the way the game is being played every moment.  And the question is, which platforms does one want to dance on.  Is the platform the newspapers?  Is the platform an auditorium?  Is it a political debate?...
   And it may be that Allen may be outside of the Establishment and it may be that the whole power of the thing builds up completely outside the Establishment...
   All it is that it gets you lots of free publicity, it gets you lots of free TV and radio and public platforms.  Hundreds of people--straight people -- invite him to speak:  The Women's Republican Club, the unions invite him to speak.  So the message is suddenly, like, you know....you see, and that's the game...The inroads into the middle class is where you loosen all the bricks.  See, and then, when Johnson turns around to his big middle class and says, "Look at this!" they've already been looking, see, and that's the game.
   So, I like talking to engineers' societies and all these really straight groups, psychiatrists and stuff like that.  They may say, "I don't want to take it myself, and a lot of the stuff that's going on is irresponsible, but it certainly is interesting!"  It's just that crumbly enough that it will have to be when the time comes, when the vigilante committees are formed...
   There's always the incentive of, you know, "You can make it in the straight world.  You don't have to do this."  The incentive systems in the straight world are money and power.  And if Allen Ginsberg wants money and power, that's were Allen Ginsberg is at, but he doesn't, you know that.  And it's very hard for us, even to understand ourselves when we're playing powerful political games, without really wanting the power that they lead to.  Or, what does that power mean?  It's like, because we've all been reading Eastern literature and we know goddam well that when you get to the forth level, if you use your occult powers, you destroy your spiritual journey.  And that's what we also know, and that's the "uplevel" of politics, you know.

     LEAGUE FOR SPIRITUAL DISCOVERY

O:  With the League thing, and Tim's switch on that, that it was just a Millbrook venture and everyone should get together with six people and a lawyer and do it themselves, was that a legal maneuver designed by the lawyers?  Why wasn't it an open kind of thing, where there would be many thousands of members, the only token of which would be a card?
A:  That was an idea that was created by Michael Bowen, as far as I know.  It wasn't created by Tim at all.  It makes a major difference, because Tim never had the plan, because Tim is against institutions and he didn't want to be a party to the starting of another big institution.  Because then you've got administration and secretaries and offices and mailing and correspondence and you build a bigger and bigger game until it's just like way out of control.
   And his idea was, how could it revert most to the small community individual and be a statement made by all of us personally, you know, the way we make it.  And that got by the idea of, "What are you trying to do, start a new religion?"  which is the putdown of a new institution.  And Tim's always said that things should be organic and sort of cellular, and a cell builds and it creates an entity unto itself and then it merges with another cell and so on.
   See, the model of the League, really, is out of Herman Hesse's League.  In Herman Hesse's League, nobody knows who belongs to it.  You belong to it if you feel you belong to it.  Nobody's saying they can't all be called the League for Spiritual Discovery.
O:  Why formally organize it?
A:  Well, you only formally organize it in order to give unto Caesar what is Caesar's.  In other words, you work with the laws of the land.  In order to be able to take LSD in you own home for religious purposes you've got to be part of an organized religious structure.  You've got to advise them that you're doing it.  The Charter says, "I will use it in my own home for religious purposes."  And then Tim says, "If you get caught out in the street, man, that's your problem."

         H-BOMB AS TOTAL ENLIGHTENMENT

O:  Tim said, I think last summer in L.A., that within the year there'll probably be some changes in the laws regarding marijuana, and he got a standing ovation.  Is there anything happening in that area?
A:  Well, I'll tell you.  I've just been floored by what's been going on because more and more of the straight media are defecting from the party line, faster and faster, at an extraordinary rate.  I'm now picking up places like the Boston Herald which are saying "clearly the marijuana laws are unreasonable and they should be replaced," so I have a feeling somebody has taken the lid off and said "Okay, let's go."  Even though, I was in the meeting a few weeks ago when the Treasury Department General Counsel stood up, and he said, "In my lifetime these laws will not be changed," and I couldn't decide whether he was just predicting...writing his own death warrant.
O:  What about Vietnam?
A:  I think the answer is in the spirit that is involved in this kind of a movement, and that spirit moves through a society and up and out  and up and out and up and out until it gets to the point where the President can say (whoever he happens to be at that point), "Let's reason together about it in human terms," and mean it.  And say, "All right we've done enough about fighting our economic battles, this is insane, we're much too conscious for this, let's get on with it."  But that has to come out of a welling of people whose values don't place nationalism or ego extensions above their humanity.  And that reorganization of values certainly isn't found in the churches today.  Johnson can go every Sunday to the church and he will hear just what every feudal lord heard who went out to do battle saying, "We wish the men luck in the battles ahead," as if they were battles for God...
   There are going to be a lot of new faces on the political scene in the next few years that are going to reflect these other values because there is a kind of a stalemate in the scene, I mean, Johnson's trapped, there's nothing much he can do about it, there's nobody you know...And the most interesting thing going in the world today is China, and where their spiritual level is at.  And there's a movement afoot in New York to start our activities in China.
O:  That's what scares me, that we don't have time to save this country before our government reacts to China with a nuclear kind of thing and tries to destroy China, because I see that happening in a couple of years...
A:  Well, nothing in anticipation affects what you do with them.  I mean, you do today what you do, and if indeed we get enlightened one way we get enlightened that way.  If we get enlightened another way, I mean it's not convincing to me that in the bigger warp and woof of consciousness, at the cosmic level, that the bomb isn't total enlightenment for everybody, you know, at the same moment, and that takes care of that earth as everybody saw the great white light and that was it...
   You see it's the same thing about whether you decide to do a dance at the level at which the dance is being done and whether if you don't you're being immoral or irresponsible.  I mean, if you don't fight against the war in Vietnam actively...well, can you, for example say "Well, I'm going to go out and make my life humanly beautiful," at the same time when that's going on outside, and my feeling is the only...You see, I used to ask the question of every Holy Man I'd meet, "Would you explain to me about the Buddha Bodhisattva question?"  And here I am climbing a mountain on my spiritual journey, and yet I see that one of the games is you're supposed to leave firewood in the store ready for the guys who are going to come behind.  That's part of the game of climbing the mountain.  Well now how much time do you spend building the camp for the next people and how much of the time do you spend climbing?
   We had the same issue at Harvard.  Do we stop till everybody understands what we're doing or do we keep going?  And everybody always said, that's a phony question.  And I never understood it as a phony question.  And then I understood that Buddha was right, that you teach by being.  And finally that I could start chains of actions by getting myself into such a beautiful state, as well as I knew how to do, and then just being with people, and I could start vibrations happening that were much more effective.  Like, for example, I can do more of a therapeutic nature in the old model of therapy standing up in front of 500 people and talking for two hours than I used to be doing in all of the hours I sat with patients, hour after hour, year after year.  Then I was feeling my social responsibility: I'm a trained therapist, I've gotta use my training, people need my help, the guy is suffering, he may commit suicide.  Don't I have a responsibility?  How can I go read that book when that guy's there suffering, right?  But I also dug that the further out I got the more I was there for more people.  And I understand this force that's happening as people getting their own houses in order.  We aren't fit to take on any political issues, literally, because we get caught in them on such ugly levels...
   I did the show on the steps at Sproul Hall a few weeks ago.  And because there was a scene set up, a political thing, I had the last 17 minutes following the Beat the Draft movement.  And I was standing in line, I was the fourth speaker, and the first three speakers were perfectly calm and relaxed, and they suddenly got the microphone, and suddenly they were madmen, and I got first the Hitler hit, you know...and I got the "and we've gotta go after them!"  and I was thinking, "How can I follow this?"  What do you do at that point?  I got up and I said, "Well, now we've finished with our concern with external freedom, now we can turn our minds to the matter of internal freedom."  And they felt put down.  I mean, that was like a hostile statement to them, in their book.  And I felt, man, where do I come off when this beautiful thing is happening in Berkeley with the power and the forces and all, because power and success are terribly corrupting and they catch you back, and if you
corruptible, man, occult powers of the fourth level will do you in.  They really will do you in...
   In fact, we all have extraordinary power already, and I think it's like how much do you check back to your calm center and to where you're at in the way you use the power.  And to deny power is as phony as anything else.  The argument is that the misuse of occult power, which is black magic (literally, as opposed to white magic), is really where the downfall is...if you use it for an ego game or to limit someone else's freedom or make the world ugly or whatever.
O:  Tim said, maybe it was in the Playboy interview, "Yes, I would like to be the most enlightened person," but he also said, "that should be your goal too."
   That's like Meher Baba saying, "I am God," see.  And then saying, "You are God," and then the third line is, "The difference between us is, I know it and you don't."  Which is the only thing that saves his statement of "I am God" from feeling like, well, "Who says you're God?  Well, at least I'm St. Paul."
O:  What about Meher Baba's statements about the use of LSD, that it doesn't really bring about spiritual...
   Well, that's really an important statement, to be thought about.  I stopped taking LSD for about six months to explore that question in correspondence with him and his line was that it is illusory.  And of course my answer back to him was "Well, the only reason I ever read your stuff and am writing to you and even think of you as somebody significant is because of LSD."  And then he wrote back and said, "well, a few serious students such as yourself may be able to profit."  And I wrote back and said, man, the few of us are all the millions of people on the earth."  So where's that at?  So I finally put him down for doing that, in my head, and went on with LSD, and I did that on my guts.
   This is the interesting question:  whether we Westerners can ever take on a Master...See, Tim's being cast into the Master role.  But Master roles really don't fit into Western culture, particularly.  And in the East it's very appropriate to go to a guy and say "You know.  I don't.  I lay my life down before you.  You do anything you want."  Baba says, "Love me, turn your whole consciousness over to me, and you'll get enlightened."  And the whole history of Eastern thought is using a Master to gain enlightenment.  Through the guide at the seventh level you will make it.  But that's not gonna work here, and Tim doesn't take on Masters.  I don't take on Masters, I mean I can't do it, just constitutionally at this point in my development I can't do it...
   A guide is a guy who's been there before and will help you, but he's not somebody you turn over your spiritual development to.  You're still doing it yourself.  You're just making use of the guide, or the manual or so on.  Each guy is on his own trip, and it's really Luther, you know, each man is a priest.
...To the extent that we can conceive of the fact that our community is a group of individuals in the sense that each guy's spiritual journey is where it's at, and don't lose sight of that, we have it made, because each guy is constantly thrown back on himself.
   At the religious celebration in New York, Allen and Tim and I were sitting up on the stage and it was a great scene, I mean, a very far out scene.  And a guy said, "Dr. Leary, you've told us about all this religion.  Where do we begin?"  You know, like, "Lead us....where do we begin?"  And I said to the guy, "You begin by asking the question where do we begin?  Then you decide how you're going to answer it, and go do it."  People come up -- hundreds of people -- and they say:  "Your words have inspired me!  Lead me!"  You know, "What do I do next?  Tell me what to do."  And I say, "How the fuck do I know what you should do, man.  It's your trip."
   I think that everybody in the Haight Ashbury should be encouraged to have meditation every day.  I mean, that's my belief.  I think that we should set up shops here that are called Calm Centers...a place where people just come and sit.  They don't turn on, there's no hippie game, it's just softness and thereness.  The thing should be represented by going back into yourself.  And there should be institutions for that, because all our institutions are external game institutions.
O:  A beautiful cat named Luther just came back to that Straight Theater organization, and he's very turned on, and that's exactly what he wants to do at the Straight Theater now:  make it non profit, he's going to make it into a temple.
A:  Right.  That's beautiful.  I've got a group in Philadelphia doing that too.  There's a nice hippie community in Philadelphia...
A:  Steve Durkee wanted to have a major Human Be-In this summer, like at Grand Canyon or someplace like that.  It could be here; it could be anywhere.  But it should be announced by January or February so people can organize their lives, so that they can come with food and bedding.  But it should be a place where a lot of people could live out, for nothing.  Fifty or a hundred thousand people would come, just to be there.  There'd be no "games," not organization, no meetings, no nothing.  Just people being together.