Timothy Leary, child in the the 20's, adolescent in the 30's, West Point Cadet in the early 40's, middle class psychologist suburbanite in the 50's, cultural icon of the 60's, convicted "felon" and "fugitive" in the 70's, active lecturer and debater in the 80's, and Cybernaut in the 90's, died shortly after midnight, May 31, 1996 at his home in Beverly Hills at the age of 75. He had been battling prostate cancer since January, 1995. Long time friend, Carol Rosin, said, "He left naturally. He went of his own accord. He was very peaceful. He was smiling."Timothy Leary welcomed controversy saying, "All I'm about is empowering individuals to explore with friends the great wonders and mysteries of life, and that, my friend, is a great Sunday morning end to a sermon, isn't it? Meaning of life?"
A few weeks before Leary's death, John Perry Barlow and others with Leary in company went to the club House of Blues in Los Angeles each in his or her own wheel chair for a luncheon supposedly based on the Last Supper. Wheel chair races were held beforehand by which that day became known as Wheel Chair Day. While merrily cruising home West on Sunset Boulevard from the club at sunset in a rented mauve metallic convertible, they were stopped by a Beverly Hills police cruiser. Two members of the Leary homestead Web contingent (Camilla Grace and Trudy Truelove) were sitting on the trunk of the convertible enjoying the evening breeze. John Perry while admitting to wrong explained to the officer that his friend, Tim, was dying and that they were trying to show him a good time. The skeletal Leary nodded at the officer sheepishly with a beatific smile. John Perry describes the bemused look on Leary's face as if he was "caught in the act of dying like he had his hand in the cookie jar." The officer allowed them to proceed with the young women safely seatbelted in the back seat. Timothy Leary's last outing was to the gourmet restaurant Spago the Monday before his death.
Ralph Metzner said that Leary would be appreciated by history, "It hasn't been about drugs per se all along. It's been about human consciousness--how you can expand it, how to use the brain in a creative way, to enhance human potential, to exist. He acknowledged everyone's inherent creativity."
Paul Krassner said, "He was always described as a drug guru. That was so superficial. There was so much more. He's part of a long tradition of philosophers--a cultural philosopher, a spiritual seeker. One of the underplayed notions of psychedelics was that they provided a vehicle for a spiritual revolution. He always made that connection."
Trudy True, scheduling assistant for Tim, remembers "...about two months or so before he died. We were watching a Canadian documentary about the "evils" of LSD, which none of us had ever seen before, with some scenes shot at Millbrook in 1966 when Timothy was in his absolute prime--virile, brilliant, glowing with intelligence, and just beautiful and vibrant... a perfect moment in his life captured on film....I was sitting behind him on his bed--in awe of this man and his work and this little part of his life I'd never seen, when I felt him shuddering and he leaned back on me with such force that I almost fell...I just held him up as he cried, longing to give him back this moment on film--the youth, the beauty, the goals; to personally eradicate death's shadow spying on him over in the corner, waiting to rob him of his vision, his mind. It was the night I most hated his illness and the night I was properly introduced to Timothy's regret."
The last word Timothy Leary said before slipping into unconsciousness was "Beautiful" as he looked at his 22 year old stepson Zach that Thursday evening. Timothy Leary died quietly in his sleep at 12:44 A.M on Friday, May 31st, 1996 surrounded by family and friends. Tim's very last words mumbled while asleep were "Why not?" and "Yeah." He died smiling. Leary's stepson Zachary said, "I think he'd like to be remembered as a philosopher, a journeyman and adventurer and conqueror of the 20th century".
A Postscript:
On April 21, 1997, Timothy Leary's ashes were launched into space along with the ashes of Gene Roddenberry and twenty two others. Carol Rosin, a close friend, said Leary, weak with illness, had been overjoyed when she showed him a promotional video of the proposed space funerals. He was so excited that he would finally go into space, and with other space pioneers, that he jumped up and down in his wheelchair. I know that is the moment he decided it was time to die."
"I know the realm of death" she said, "because I've been there."She shed her leathery, wrinkled body as she might take off the beautiful embroidered nupike that she wore in the mushroom-velada. She stepped out of her cracked and calloused feet and walked along the path that she knew so well, this time to the end.
The path of the tracks of the palms of her hands
The path of the tracks of her feet
The path of the tracks of her heels
The path of the tracks of her knees
The path of sap
The path of dew
The path of her long life
The path of her well being
Where her Father stopped
Where her Mother stopped."The day that I die" she said, "what our custom dictates will be done. They will twist the neck of a rooster that should die next to my corpse. The spirit of the rooster will accompany my spirit. The rooster will crow four days after I have been buried; then my spirit will wake up and will go forever to the realm of death. "
She did not depart alone. They say in the nursing home in Oaxaca that at the end she talked with friends and relatives long dead. Her children were there, of this world and the other;
her sprouting children
her budding children
her babies
her offshoots
her hummingbird children with vibrant wings.The Principle Ones were there, just as they had been with her at the hour of her conception.
"Wisdom comes from birth," she said. "It comes together with one when one is being born, like the placenta. The mushrooms have revealed how I was in the days when I was in the womb of my mother: It's a vision in which I see myself turned into a fetus, an illuminated fetus. And I know that at the moment I was born, The Principle Ones were present."She did not go forth unescorted.
She did not go forward unguided.
Because there came the Lord of the Door and the Dooryard
Because there came thirteen lord eagles
Because there came thirteen lord opossums
Because there came thirteen lord whirlwinds of colors
Thirteen sacred whirlwinds of colors
Because there came thirteen lord networks of lights
Thirteen sacred networks of lights
Because there came thirteen lordly ones with the vibrant wings
The sacred ones with the vibrant wings.She did not go unprepared.
Because the little saint children had worked inside her body.
Because she had followed the rope of her life
The rope of her destiny
The rope of her personality.She went forth skillfully.
Because she can swim in the immense
Because she can swim in all forms
A sacred swimmer, the lord swimmer
A woman of the great expanse of the flowing waters
A woman of the expanse of the divine sea.She went forth with familiarity.
Because she is a woman of the networks of lights
Because she is a shooting star woman
A whirling woman of colors
A clockwork woman
A woman who brings lightnings forth
A well-prepared woman
Because she gathered up the primordial
Because she gathered up the sacred
Because she shepherded the immense beneath the water
Because she whistled and shouted and sang and danced in the darkness
Because she was a woman who fell into the world
Because she began in the depths of the water.
Because she began where the primordial sounds forth
Where the sacred sounds forth
Because she came from inside the stomach of her mother, Maria Concepcion
Who gave birth to her
Her virgin doll mother from beneath the sea.
Because she was born, because she slid out, because she fell out
Because she came forth sacred
Because she came forth important
From out of the darkness
From out of the night
When the plains and the hollows hardened." During the wake" she said, "my family will place jars of water next to my lifeless head. It will be the water that I will have to take with me so that I'm not overcome by thirst while I journey to the realm of death. Inside my coffin, they will put seven gourd seeds, greens, and some balls of the dead [a native fruit], all tied up together in a cloth bag. It will be the food that I will take so that hunger doesn't bother me on the way...They will dress me in a clean huipil and my best shawl. Between my hands will be placed a palm cross that has been blessed."
Now she is gone.
With humility. With eloquence.
There are clean flowers where she is going
There is pure water where she is going
Because there is no dust there
Because there is no garbage there
Because there is no resentment there
Because there is no rancor there
Because there is no anger there
She has gone with clarity
She has gone with purity
She has gone with tenderness
She has gone with calmness
She has gone with well being
With freshness
Like breast-milk
Like sap
Like dew
She is known in heaven.adapted from the words of Maria Sabina by Dorwin Gregory (High Frontiers, 1987). See Maria Sabina, Her Life and Chants by Alvaro Estrada
It was something of a fluke that he happened to be with me at the end. We always tried to be together on New Year's Eve, the anniversary of my mother's death in 1958. But Christmas was a holiday we did not usually spend together.........at about 11:00 Tuesday evening, 23 December, I went back to my father's room to check on him.
He told me he was cold, and I noticed that his skin was very gray--signs of possible heart failure. I therefore hurried to another room to call for the ambulance. Meanwhile, my son, who has medical training, stayed with him.
I was finishing the phone call when my children called me back into his room. My father was having a grand mal seizure. There was nothing I could do for him but hold him. He died in my arms.
When the ambulance arrived the medics wanted to try to revive him using cardio-pulmonary resuscitation, which my father had explicitly stated should not be attempted. I had a difficult time preventing them from doing it. But at last, once again, my father's will prevailed.
He died of a heart attack or massive stroke or both. It was painful to be with him at the end--but also wonderful, for otherwise he would have died alone.
In accordance with his wishes, my father was cremated and interred with his brother's remains in the columbarium of the Washington Cathedral, on 2 January 1987. The lovely, simple ceremony, held in the Bethlehem Chapel, included a Nunc Dimittis sung a cappella by the boys' choir; this was also as he had requested.
as written by Masha Wasson Britten from The Sacred Mushroom Seeker, Essays for R. Gordon Wasson edited by Thomas J. Riedlinger
Dr. Walter Huston Clark, a retired professor of psychology of religion at Andover Newton Theological School in Massachussetts and a former dean at Hartford Seminary, died Thursday [December 15, 1994] at his home in Cape Elizabeth, Me. He was 92. Dr. Clark taught at Andover Newton in Newton Center near Boston from 1962 until his retirement in 1969. Before that, starting in 1951, he was dean of the School of Religious Education at the seminary. He explored the importance that mystical experience can have in religion, which led to an association with Dr. Timothy Leary and others who advocated the use of hallucinogens to expand their consciousness. In the early 1960's Dr. Clark took part in religious ceremonies in which peyote, mescaline and similar hallucinogens were taken. He spoke out for people arrested for using LSD and other hallucinogenic substances for what they said were solely religious purposes. He was born in Westfield, N.J., graduated from Williams College in 1928 and received a doctorate in psychology and education from Harvard University in 1944. In 1926 he was one of four founders of the now-defunct Lenox School in Lenox, Mass., which was formed as an alternative to the more expensive Episcopal boys' schools in the area. Dr. Clark taught at Lenox for 19 years, and subsequently was on the faculty of Bowdoin College and Middlebury College until his appointment as Dean in Hartford. While still studying at Williams College, he found lifelong interest in understanding the significance of religious experience as distinct from belief. It began when he attended a revival meeting led by Frank N.D. Buchman, the American evangelist and founder of an international movement variously called the First Century Christian Fellowship , the Oxford Group, Moral Re-Armament and Buchmanism. It was an evangelism of personal and national spiritual reconstruction or as Mr. Buchman put it, "world changing through life changing." Dr. Clark wrote about it in his "The Oxford Group: Its History and Significance" (Bookman Associates, 1951). He also wrote a textbook "The Psychology of Religion" (Macmillan 1958). Another book "Chemical Ecstasy" sought to define the parameters of the use of hallucinogens in religion... He is also the author of "Religious Experience: Its Nature and Function in the Human Psyche" (Charles T. Thomas 1973), which records several lectures he gave on the use of psychedelics at Fuller Theological Seminary...--from The New York Times dated 12/21/1994
Walter Clark was a wise and courageous man. A model of Civil Disobedience. He carried on the Dionysian Mysteries in his Andover Newton Theological garb handing out LSD at his wedding when he was well into his seventies. He knew LSD as spiritual food, a way to God, and he devoted his life to sharing what he knew. A beautiful man with a huge spirit.
--from the Internet
A feeling of sorrow!
Oh, I drank the wine of the mushrooms
Gulped it down
Swallowed the fungus beer
And my heart
Oh, the crying!
A bitterly suffering me, I
Made.
Oh, just a miserable man, I
am, on this earth. I
set myself to meditate
on me not enjoying life
on the not happy me here.I remember your plan
Our design
And stop being troublesome.Here are your flowers!
Oh, your gold skin: with that and your
Scattering seed emeralds over the earth
You are fortune itself.In one day we go
In one night to the kingdom of the dead.
We walk like eagles,
Angrily.....
--by HUNGRY-COYOTE (NEZAHUALCOYOTL) King of Texcoco (1431-72) as translated by Frank M. Chapman
The first thing which they ate at the gathering was small, black mushrooms which they called nanacatl (teonanacatl). These are intoxicating and cause visions to be seen and even provoke sensuousness. They ate them (mushrooms) before dawn, and they also drank chocolate before daylight. They ate these little mushrooms with honey, and when they began to be excited by them, they began to dance, some singing, others weeping, for they were already intoxicated by the mushrooms. Some did not want to sing but sat down in their quarters and remained there as if in a meditative mood. Some saw themselves dying in a vision and wept, others saw themselves being eaten by a wild beast, others imagined that they were capturing prisoners in battle, that they were rich, that they possessed many slaves, that they had committed adultery and were to have their heads crushed for the offence, that they were guilty of a theft for which they were to be killed, and many other visions which they saw. When the intoxication from the little mushroom had passed, they talked over among themselves the visions which they had seen.--as reported by Friar Bernadino de Sahagun (1529)
...I took acid not long after a brother of mine had died following surgery (I know: not such a good idea), and I plunged into what was called (appropriately, I decided) a bad trip. That night I saw the death of my lineage--the deaths of my ancestors, the deaths of my parents and brothers, the deaths of the children I had not yet had (and still have not had) and, of course, the death of myself. I sat in a dark-red oversize chair that night and watched death move before me and in and out of my being, and I gripped tight to the arms of that chair until the morning came. It was the only sunrise I have ever been happy to see. I was not the same for days after. Maybe I was not ever the same again.That was 1971, and it was the last time I took acid. It wasn't that I didn't like the psychedelic experience....It's just that I didn't fancy the idea of running into death any more than necessary.....
One night not long before Leary's death, I took LSD for the first time in 25 years. I guess I'd just grown curious after spending so much time around Leary, but I felt I also owed it to myself. I'd left psychedelics on bad terms, and that had never felt right. I wanted to see what might be revealed after so much time.
I lay on my bed in the dark listening to Bach's Goldberg Variations, and once more, death came to visit. I saw what seemed to be thousands of faces. They were all in agony, and then they died and were swimming in straits of beauty and grace. Their suffering, I saw, was inevitable. So was their dying. And so was their release. Once more I saw death move around and through me, and this time I did not try to hide from it. I lay there and cried, and somehow I felt a great comfort in what I'd seen.
I thought about this experience as I sat in Leary's bedroom at 3 in the morning and studied him in his death. As I said earlier, I'd always been terrified of death--even to be near it. When I visited the funeral homes to see my father, my mother, my brother, lying in their coffins, I took short glances and got away quickly. I never touched my loved ones as they lay dead. I don't think I could have.
Sitting with Leary, I realized something had changed--and maybe it had been a gift on his part. His greatest achievement, I believe, was to ask the people he knew to face the darkest part of themselves and then to be willing to be there with them--to interact with them, to guide and help them--when they reached that place....
Being around Leary had taught me what nothing else had: that encountering death did not always have to be an experience of freezing horror. In those last hours, it turned out that Timothy Leary was still a good therapist.
--From Timothy Leary, 1920-1996 written by Mikal Gilmore for "Rolling Stone",issue 738/739,pp. 68,109
...When you see things in these experiences that need changing, it's really important to work on them and change them.
One of the real abuses that I see with the use of psychedelics is something I did myself: It's so easy to just go have another psychedelic experience. I would find out some things, I'd feel a lot better, then I'd start getting loaded up again because I was still doing the things that were producing the negative karma. And instead of addressing it I'd go have another experience. But, finally it came to me: Late in my life, I realized that if my intentions were deep enough I wouldn't have to have another experience...I realized how important it was to work and follow up on what I'd learned and really put it into effect in my life. It does take work and effort. This is the part a lot of people don't want to do, but it's necessary....
...Again it's deepening intentions, being willing to spend the time, being willing to really search out the force of the things that are bothering you and pulling you down.
Psychedelics don't put you there, but they show you what you can reach if you're willing to do what it takes to get there.--From an interview with Myron Stolaroff in HT, July 2000,p. 81