Whereas. It was twenty years ago today, 1967, L`ete d`amour, when Hesse was revered by college students as the Novelist of the Decade. A mega-sage, bigger than Tolkien or McLuhan or Bucky Fuller or even Kahil Gibran!
In the '60s Hesse's mystical, utopian novels were read by millions. The popular electrically-amplified rock band "Steppenwolf" was named after Hesse's psyber-delic hero, Harry Haller, him who smoked loose "long, thin yellow . . . immeasurably enlivening and delightful" cigarettes and then zoomed around the Theatre of the Mind, ostensibly going where no fictional heroes had been before. Since Dante Alghieri, Coleridge, Rimbaud and Huxley, anyway. Continued on website link.
This is a video version of a lecture that Timothy Leary used to give near the end of his life. Leary is of course best known as an "acid guru" from the 1960s and as rival of G. Gordon Liddy and President Richard Nixon. However he was also an intelligent man with a serious education in psychology and a lot of ideas about the way things work. This video gives a pretty good overview of his philosophy.
The video is a kaleidoscope of colors and flashing images supplied by "Retinalogic". Despite the hallucinatory visuals this video is not about drug use. In order to understand this video you really need to understand the context in which it was made. Leary is echoing French theorists such as Gilles Deleuze in saying that life has too many rules and that we need to let go of the rules in favor of chaos. What he means by "chaos" is basically what anarchists mean when they use "anarchy" in positive way. There was a lot of this kind of talk in the 1990s due to the popularization of the internet, which was seen as a kind of leaderless utopia for the exchange of knowledge and experience, which was also concurrent to the unprecedented interest in multiculturalism. Lastly, there was also some "pop science" reporting in the mainstream media about "chaos theory" which often showed fractal imagery as shorthand for finding patterns in the universe or "order out of chaos". This video makes much use of fractals and "global" imagery (i.e.- showing native dancers, then showing cars driving). This is done to "deprogram" the viewer because "he who controls the eyeball, controls the brain". Or to use another quote from Leary: (47.00)
Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an American writer, psychologist, modern pioneer and advocate of psychedelic drug research and use, and one of the first people whose remains have been sent into space. An icon of 1960s counterculture, Leary is most famous as a proponent of the therapeutic and spiritual benefits of LSD. He coined and popularized the catch phrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out."
From Timothy Leary on Wikipedia the Free Encyclopedia (47.00)
"THE INTELLIGENCE AGENTS by Timothy Leary Full Text Publisher's Notes:"This document illustrates the Standard Reality Fabrication Tactics used by Intelligence Agents assigned to nursery planets mutating from Stage 12 (Centralized New-Deal Insectoid Socialism) to Stage 13 (Neurosomatic Self-Discovery)."' (47.00)
In the late 70s and early 80s, Leary's model of the Eight Levels of Consciousness and his vision of a post-terrestrial existence free from all limits (free from social and political limitations, as well as the limits of space, time, and the body) influenced quite a few "psychedelic philosophers"(discussed below) and a considerable number of young people interested in altered states of consciousness. Many young people in the early 80s, however, were not only interested in the drug-aspect of Leary's theory. They felt that Leary, by including technology into his vision of the future, helped them to define the new generation they were part of. Leary's Exo-Psychology theory offered these people who had decided to "leave the flower-power 60s behind" a new way to live with technology, to make it theirs. In the eyes of these people, Leary resolved the dichotomy between spirituality (the "inner quest") and science/technology (the "outer quest"). In Exo-Psychology and Neuropolitics, he shows that technology is not intrinsically evil; it can have a liberating effect as well. In The Intelligence Agents, Leary suggests that we should look westward for change because the East is stagnating. Leary was the one who made young psychedelic trippers and anti-technology-oriented (ex-) hippies aware of the fact that drugs were only a part of the continuing evolution of the human species towards enlightenment, and that the evolutionary purpose of technology was to help us on our "spiritual path" towards freedom, enlightenment, and immortalit (47.00)
Timothy Leary: biography, bibliography, filmography, links on the Pop Culture Biography Project. Some unique info, links not updated regularly. (47.00)
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