Haight-Ashbury in the Sixties/Haight-Ashbury in the Sixties (1996)(Rockument)(Disc 1 of 2)[Mac-PC].iso/mac/MAIN/TUNEIN/TUNEIN01.DIR/00416_Field_Another Session With Tim Leary Part 2.txt

Text File | 1995-06-01 | 6KB | 23 lines

Another Session With Tim Leary
Part 2

OVER 10 MILLION ACID USERS?

   TL:  I've been way off on all my estimates.  I thought it would take until 1970 before we'd have 10 million LSD users.  I've been very conservative with everything I've said in the last 7 years.  If I had it to do over again, I would have turned on ten times more than I have, and made all my predictions ten times more outrageous.
   VA:  There's a community evolving in the Southwest that has a natural shrine and it's this old redwood that's been hit by lightning.  The shoot of its root shot up purple through the trees.  It's a shrine, and the moon shines down on it...
   TL:  Well, I don't want to push the Southwest because it would change things if there were an avalanche of ruthless people suddenly descending on the Southwest.  The main message is to get out of the city and go to the land.  And the second message is that those that have done it had better consider themselves pioneers or like the guys that came over to this country in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries.  You've got to plan ahead of time.  You've got to outfit yourself.  You've got to be prepared to do just what those pioneers did.  You've got to struggle.  You've got to give up a lot of luxuries and a lot of the frivolities and a lot of the entrancing complications of city life.
   I think it would be unwise for people to just hitchhike to the Southwest and expect to be taken in.  The thing here is tribal.  And if you study how the tribes operate, the tribe is a natural unit designed by the DNA code.  It's familial, it's animal, it's territorial.  You can't just wander into a tribe and say, "Well, man, I'm here."  You can't do that to the Hopis.  You can't do that to the Navahos.  You can't join.  You can't become a Jew, which is another very powerful surviving and important tribe.
   The essence of the tribe is it doesn't want to proselytize, it's not looking for new members, it's based on a little piece of land; it's centered around a totem or a religious center.  And these things just don't happen easily.
   And it's not necessary to go to the Southwest.  Within a hundred miles of any large city in the United States there is sacred ground...which is probably available at very low cost or can be rented very easily by anyone who wants to do this.
   And the final thing, which I've said many times before, is that the basic psychological problem of growing up is sexual.  And the communities, the utopian tribes, which make it are those in which the sexual energy is harnessed.  What you have in H/A and the cities is a healthy thing--young kids coming, wanting sexual freedom, wanting to explore, wanting to overthrow this horrible sexual Puritanism that the middle-class in this country is obsessed with.
   Making it as a tribe, making it as a clan of animals, sexual energy has to be harnessed in some very explicit way.  The clans that are making it, from what I've observed, are those built around a core of male/female units.  These give a centeredness to the community.  Then if you have four or five couples, young people can come and go.
Sexually unharnessed people come and go but the gyroscope of the tribe will remain untouched.
   VA:  Have you found or thought about different forms of family units, that is different from the male/female/child relationship?
   TL:  Yes.  There are a number of ways in which tribes have harnessed sexual energy.  There are some tribes in the South Seas where there is complete promiscuity and group marriage.  That's of course the highest form of human communication.  But it's very hard to pull off.  It takes generations to develop that sort of thing.  And for people as crippled as the American society, this is going further to tap on a spiritual sexual matter.  But anything that works, that survives, is right.  Though we must be explicit about these sexual issues, if you're not, your ashram, your tribe, your clan will flounder.
   I've been involved now for seven years in utopian communities and psychedelic/pot living.  And I've observed many others.  Sexual energy becomes eccentric and it throws it off...
   I say once again that our great gurus in these matters are the Beatles.  I consider them the four evangelists in the psychedelic movement.  I think their intelligence, their creativity and their spiritual power just can't be overestimated.  There was a picture in Life magazine last week of the Beatles sitting each one with his wife, covered with flowers, in front of their guru, and behind that smiling old wise man was a picture of his guru.  And I think that that's the great message at this point for all acid heads and pot smokers and flower children.  Tear that picture out and put it over your shrine cause that's where it's at:  the male/female relationship, the giving up of commercial things, they're following a teacher.  And it doesn't make any difference who your teacher is as long as he's someone who's got something for you at the moment.  And they're downplaying drugs.  They're still using drugs I know, but they're downplaying it because there is a certain point where the drug experience has got to be tied to some tune-in spiritual method.  And I am dropping out of this role I've been in for the last few years.  I very happily turn over the robes to the Beatles.
   VA:  Why do you think the Beatles are the forerunners of the movement?  Do you associate this with their national heritage being as they are British?  (British accent)
   TL:  Absolutely yes.  (laughter)  I have just written a long essay called "My Trip to England," and I demonstrate very conclusively that the great things of the psychedelic movement have all come from England:  Aldous Huxley;  Humphrey Osmond, who coined the term 'psychedelic;'  Gerald Herd;  Alan Watts, here in S.F. who is the real father of the hippie movement if you trace it back ten or fifteen years.  The psychedelic books, like the Tibetan Book of the Dead.  These ancient books were translated by Englishmen.
   It traces back to the English conquering India, but it was really India that caught the minds of the English.  It was as inevitable that George Harrison would go to Calcutta as it was that Elvis Presley would go to Hollywood.
   VA:  The Beatles and The Stones and the others, you notice, have all come up from the lower working classes...
   TL:  Yes.  I wrote a second essay in which I showed that the English spirit is basically Irish.