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: (<>)
Mark Frauenfelder is a weblogger, illustrator, and journalist. He is editor-in-chief of MAKE magazine and co-editor of the collaborative weblog Boing Boing. Along with Carla Sinclair, he founded the bOING bOING print zine in 1988. According to his homepage he was an editor at Wired from 1993-1998 and (<>)
According to Wikipedia, Howard Rheingold is a critic and writer; his specialties are on the cultural, social and political implications of modern communication media such as the Internet, mobile telephony and virtual communities (a term he is credited with inventing). (<>)
According to Wikipedia, Erik Davis is a North American social historian, cultural critic, essayist and lecturer. He is noted for his study of the history of technology and society and his essays about the fate of the individual in the dawning posthuman era. Although significants aspects of his work include media criticism and technology criticism, his works span across other disciplines to include a larger social history of art, religion, and science, technology, and politics. (<>)
R. U. Sirius (born Ken Goffman) is a US writer, editor, talk show host, musician and cyberculture icon, best known as co-founder and original Editor-In-Chief of Mondo 2000 Magazine from 1989–1993. Sirius was also chairman and candidate in the 2000 U.S. presidential election for The Revolution Party.[1] The party's 20-point platform comprised a hybrid of libertarianism and liberalism.[2] (<>)
Ralph Metzner Ph.D. (born May 18, 1936 in Germany), is an American psychologist, writer and researcher, who participated in psychedelic research at Harvard University in the early 1960s with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass). Dr. Metzner is a psychotherapist, and Professor Emeritus of psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. (<>)
According to Wikipedia, Lilly was a pioneer researcher into the nature of consciousness using as his principal tools the isolation tank, dolphin communication and psychedelic drugs, sometimes in combination. He was a prominent member of the Californian counterculture of scientists, mystics and thinkers that arose in the late 1960s and early 70s. Albert Hofmann, Gregory Bateson, Ram Dass, Timothy Leary, Werner Erhard, and Richard Feynman were all frequent visitors to his home. (<>)
According to Wikipedia, Douglas Rushkoff (born 18 February 1961) is a New York-based writer, columnist and lecturer on technology, media and popular culture. (<>)
Collection of Robert Anton Wilson's out-of-print free in eBook form including The Sex Magicians, Illuminatus! Trilogy, Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy, Prometheus Rising, Masks of the Illuminati (<>)
You have entered an Alchemical Garden at the Edge of Time. There is haze upon the distant hills, spreading Acacias bend low over reflecting pools. The air is filled with an all pervasive hum; these are the reveries of the Proustian bees. Your guide will be gardener/curator Terence Mckenna (<>)
Website provides a wide range of information about psychoactive drugs including the psychedelics. The information is of uneven quality and filtered through the non-scientific lens and sometimes highly biased lenses of site founders named Earth and Fire (<>)
The counterculture of the 1960s refers to a period between 1960 and 1973[1] that began in the United States as a reaction against the conservative government, social norms of the 1950s, the political conservatism (and perceived social repression) of the Cold War period, and the US government's extensive military intervention in Vietnam.[2][3]
As the 1960s progressed, widespread tensions developed in American society that tended to flow along generational lines regarding the war in Vietnam, race relations, sexual mores, women's rights, traditional modes of authority, experimentation with psychedelic drugs and a predominantly materialist interpretation of the American Dream. New cultural forms emerged, including the pop music of English band the Beatles, which rapidly evolved to shape and reflect the youth culture's emphasis on change and experimentation.
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Accoriding to Wikipedia, The Hippie subculture was originally a youth movement that began in the United States during the early 1960s and spread around the world, The word hippie derives from hipster, and was initially used to describe beatniks who had moved into San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district. These people inherited the countercultural values of the Beat generation, created their own communities, listened to psychedelic rock, embraced the sexual revolution, and used drugs such as cannabis and LSD to explore alternative states of consciousness.
In 1967, the Human Be-In in San Francisco popularized hippie culture, leading to the legendary Summer of Love on the West Coast of the United States, and the 1969 Woodstock Festival on the East Coast
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This website is by Charles Hayes, the author of Tripping: An Anthology of True-Life Psychedelic Adventures. It has a number of experiences on psychedelics of various sorts as well as links to othe psychedelic websites. (<>)
Shamanic Extracts educated the public about the historical and spiritual use of ethnobotanicals. They make available access of sacred herbs and plants with the purpose of spreading knowledge about them. They hope to preserve the various species of what they refer to as the "shamanic plant kingdom." There underlying values are that we humans can benefit greatly from the "magical and spiritual energies of these plants", helping us to reconnect with nature and make progress on our spiritual journey.
This site is ran by EROCx1, who has been studying ethnobotanicals since 1992. He's a friend of Island and he is interested in spreading knowledge about these plant substances.
SelfGrowth.com is the most complete guide to information about Self Improvement, Personal Growth and Self Help on the Internet. It is designed to be an organized directory, with articles and references to thousands of other Web Sites on the World Wide Web. (<>)
