Timothy Leary coloring book
The History of the Psychedelic Movement is a cartoon and coloring book published in 1967 by Timothy Leary, Art Kleps, and friends at their infamous Milbrook, New York estate. A rare copy is currently up for auction on eBay with a BuyItNow price of $750. From the item description:
Timothy Leary coloring book (eBay)I purchased this from an officer that worked in the Poughkeepsie Township police department. He obtained it from the Dutchess county S.O. before they burned several hundred copies that had been confiscated from the Millbrook Estate raid.
Very few copies of this book are in existance. Art Kleps himself didn't have a clean copy. I will also include and email of a correspondence between the cop and Art Kleps in 1996. Kleps also stated that the remainder of the inventory was lost in Vermont.
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I can appreciate this item being interesting for its historical significance, but I have to say that I loathe Timothy Leary. Somehow he's achieved some guru-like status when in reality, he irresponsibly promoted the use of a potentially dangerous drug to naive acolytes at a time when little was known about the drug or its long term effects. I'm no square, daddy-oh; I've done the stuff myself... and that's why I understand how terrible LSD can be for some people.
Poster #1: Bullshit.
This needs to be bought and the images released to the public so we can warp our kids of this generation properly.
Maybe someone can help me find the exact quote... I think it was ethnobiologist (and "real-life Indiana Jones") Richard Evans Schultes who said this, or if not then perhaps Albert Hofmann, in response to Timothy Leary describing what a mystical and transcendental experience use of psychedelics imparted, by saying something like, "that's funny, all I saw were changing colors". (I think this was included in the documentary Peyote to LSD: A Psychedelic Odyssey.)
The point being, the spiritualism hype of acid / "magic mushrooms" / peyote greatly exaggerates the expected pharmacological effect of LSD / psilocybin / mescaline respectively. In other words, "it's not as profound as people (such as Timothy Leary) make it out to be".
But they also don't make otherwise mentally stable people want to jump out of windows either.
(Funny how this comic book seems to portray precisely the inverse fantastic speculation of psychedelic drug use as did Altered States -- turning a caveman into a modern human rather than vice-versa.)
Are posters #1 or #3 speaking from personal experience with these substances? It does not seem that they are.
mushrooms, LSD-25, mescaline etc. can be intelligently used by careful people to obtain helpful results under controlled circumstances - sometimes. Lots of times nothing much comes of it. I have never heard of anything bad coming from it except in the cases of people who wouldn't have good results from anything, including never using these tools.
#1, BS. Your attempt to define LSD as a potentially dangerous drug just shows your biased viewpoint, which is not excused by your 'ive done the stuff myself' rider - So have millions and the vast majority dont end up in psych wards.
Peanuts, aspirin, alcohol, morphine, and lots of other substances are bad for some people. Only the mentally strong should take LSD. And #3, as for it having no spiritual validity or usefulness, BS again. While not a path to greater permanent spiritual awareness, psychedelics serve to show people there is more to their lives than previously realised and are responsible for setting many onto more long lasting spiritual paths.
@ #1 I tend to agree. It also annoys me how people deify psychedelic gurus. Nothing is sadder than meeting some young kid who blabbers on about what he's seen on LSD or mushrooms.
For me, people who continuously use psychedelics as part of their 'spiritual path' are lazy escapists, unable or unwilling to undertake the rigorous discipline of an authentic spirituality.
@ #6 I don't see why his "I've done the stuff myself" rider doesn't hold any water. Do you somehow feel that your experiences with the drug are superior to his? If so, why?
If I were forced to pick a psychedelic guru I'd choose Ram Dass, someone who realised that psychedelics were merely a gateway to something greater and left them behind, while Tim Leary continued with his drug-fuelled psycho-babble.
Of course the psychedelic-klique is gonna come with a barrage of pseudo-science, anecdotal evidence and subjectively-chosen statistics.
#8/#3 - I dont quite see how you can equate getting drunk and hooking up with being given insights into yourself and your place in the universe. Please elaborate if you believe they are equivalent, rather than just attempting to drop in throwaway statements such as you just
used.
#7 - re whether I feel my experiences are superior to his - lets just say that there are lots of crap psychedelics out there due to its illegal status. I've tripped about 20 times over 15 years, but have only had the good stuff a few times - but those times have served me well as eye openers into the wider reality that we all live in but few are open to. The 'I've done it and it was crap' argument is rather specious. Peoples experiences vary greatly due to their experience with any substance, its quality, and the set and setting. For the record, I've had negative, positive, and neutral experiences on psychedelics - but the positive experiences have been life changing. YMMV...
I dont believe I said anywhere in my previous post that I believe continual use of psychedelics is a way to true spiritual growth. In fact, I implied they are merely good as eye openers to the fact that theres more to the universe than meets the eye. If you dont believe _that_ - then you probably need some good psychedelics to slap you upside the head and SHOW you the truth. Unfortunately, in our modern society, we are frequently so closed off to anything thats not material and measurable, that we often dont even believe there are other dimensions to our existence. It is for closed off people like this (I used to be one of them, a diehard atheist) that psychedelics are useful, for without at least some personal experience of the greater reality, it would be hard for anyone to get the motivation to even try to quest for spiritual knowledge, when they have been bought up all their lives to believe it doesn't exist. I dont know much about Ram Dass, but if he personally used psychedelics as a gateway to taking up a spiritual path (that doesnt use psychedelics), then you are basically backing my argument with a practical example of the benefits of them, used in moderation. However, you dont need a guru, or psychedelics, to teach you a spiritual way - you just need to stop the chattering voice(s) in your head and LISTEN.
Well I'm not necessarily talking about spirituality in the sense of absolute truth, but rather as the capacity to create meaningful change in one's life.
A lot of people seem to cite taking LSD or mushrooms as a kind of turning point in their lives, a catalyst through which they suddenly see
the unconscious choices they've been making which are holding them back.
But most of the psychedelic users I've come into contact with, after this initial flush of self-awareness, have fallen into a pattern of repetitive drug-use which acts as more of an obstacle to them being happy. They're people caught in a loop of experiences which have little value in terms of helping them live a better life.
No spiritual effect? Check the Texas Divinity School study re:psilocybin, conducted before the BANNING OF ALL RESEARCH by the Reagan Administration (and before the Media went on its late-60s "freak-out" binge).... Leary was a professor of psychology at Harvard, not some charismatic street preacher...
The key as always is set towards use & setting in which use occurs...the USA is not a good place to use these substances...cannot relax and enjoy in a group due to illegality...to get spiritual you'll need more than one or two people, you need a community of users, able to control purity and give guidance to new users in a peaceful and tranquil setting...Gov policy is to deny peace/tranquillity to all, not just drug users, or the War will stop...all the good results from psych drug use are group efforts and again the Law prevents this...Psychedelic drug use should not be an individual, solo thing, it is like space travel in that way, it takes a village to get the most benefit from psychedelics...safely into orbit and back again.
Drugs is one of the most pointless arguments you can have. Two opposing views will never agree, except under the circumstances of consuming said substances in the right environment.
One thing that it is worth stating though is that the classic 60's dose was about 350 mics and the average trip you'll find around now is about 70. These guys were eating it out of mayonnaise jars...
Also I think calling this a Timothy Leary colouring book is a bit of a stretch because the neo american church wasn't really anything to do with him.
Wait..this is a Noe-American Church thing? Those crazy solipsists? IIRC they are politically worse than useless...like they work for the DEA only this side of the street...creeps.
Hey, isn't that Keith Olbermann? Sure looks like him!
@elpablo
I don't go with the two-frame model of the drug war. There aren't two sides, the pro- and the anti-. There was everyone in the world, once, who didn't care. No sides. Then one day prohibitionists turned up, who were appalled by the moral laxity caused by alcoholic drinks. They created "sides", but the truth is, they started the argument, so there really was just the world and the radical behavior modification crowd that mostly popped up in Victorian times. That crowd got what they wanted in Prohibition I, and created the Mafia and turned a country into law haters.
The "drug war" that is Prohibition II was started by the same type of moralists, and particularly one man, who I never name, who argued in the early forties that marijuana was a drug used by the dissolute to corrupt and seduce white kids. Particularly he was on about black musicians seducing our daughters.
These laws NEVER apply to the truly dangerous drug, cigarettes, which cost our children their lives in horrible way. The psychedelic drugs once again were demonized in the same way, without logic or numbers, and we stand now in a police state justified by the eternal war to keep people from using drugs that humans have used since they ate a mushroom and took a flight. The drugs don't hurt many, the radical right does by removing dignity and freedom from birth in the name of modifying behavior they don't like. While they drink martinis and smoke a pack.
There are two sides, those who want to control others - never themselves - and those who want people left alone.
I did LSD a few times and certainly had some interesting and (at the time) profound realizations. However, I'm inclined to believe that one of the drug's effects is the sensation (or illusion) that every little thing is profound and symbolic and interrelated; many of these seemingly spiritually awakening moments lose all meaning the next day after the drug's worn off. It's worth doing it once or twice just to experience all of the different sensations, but
I had some decent on LSD; however, I've also known a few people who have had awful experiences and perhaps even had latent psychosis triggered or at least exacerbated. I'm just sick of people who deify this chemical and think it genuinely grants them a spiritual experience and somehow grants them access to some other reality. It's a drug that messes with your perception, that's it.
Of course, being an atheist, I don't believe that there is any sort of universal consciousness or cosmic spirit or anything to tap into.
As for Timothy Leary, I stand by my assertion that Leary was an irresponsible megalomaniacal snake-oil salesman who reacted to the bullshit of the straight life with a new, yet equally vapid brand of bullshit and mumbo-jumbo.
Psychedelics as a tool for "spiritual awakening" is about as real as the wine sacrament transubstantiating into the blood of Jesus. Though they obviously have psychotropic effects on neurochemistry and cognitive function, so I'm also not ruling out the possibilities that, say, Frank Herbert oft speculated about. Just that the "spiritualism" has to do with the psychological "environment" you're doing the drugs in, not a power of the drugs themselves.
(Juxtapose with other "non-spiritual" psychotropic drugs, such as cocaine, ketamine, PCP, amphetamines, or blurring the line: MDMA, 2C-whatever, AMT, and all the other esoteric inventions of Alexander Shulgin. Or all the unusual substances R U Sirus wrote about, e.g. 3,4-methylenedimethoxy methamphetamine.)
In conclusion, I fully endorse morphological freedom and cognitive liberty, but don't deceive yourselves about what psychedelics do or how they operate either.
tools , Zuzu, just tools. We can make and do without tools but they can make things easier if used correctly.
Takuan, agreed.
p.s. stimutacs
me thinks that Jezrael should hang out with more interesting people.
and answer the question zuzu, are you speaking from experience?
MikeLotus, you shouldn't be asking anyone to admit to illicit activity in a public forum that will be archived online for all eternity and available to anyone. Think ahead.
Or, feel free to share which jurisdictions you've lived where possession and use of such chemical compounds were not proscribed by force of law.
(Unless you happen to be old enough to have legally participated in the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests.)
"America takes drugs in psychic defense."
So sayeth St.Iggy Pop.
Drugs not spiritual? Drugs never inspire Art?
Art not spiritual if drug-inspired? Experience of art never enhanced by drug use? Perhaps drugs are a health issue and not one for the courts at all?
It's still:
Drug users vs. Nazis....
"...one of the drug's effects is the sensation (or illusion) that every little thing is profound and symbolic and interrelated..."
But every little thing IS interrelated, although some relationships are more significant than others); what acid does is let you FEEL what you know. It's important to really experience experience, not just make a note of it.
"Because psychedelics don't "give insights into your place in the universe" anymore than being drunk helps you get laid. That's the mythology"
&
"Psychedelics as a tool for "spiritual awakening" is about as real as the wine sacrament transubstantiating into the blood of Jesus."
From those statements its fairly obvious that you dont really know much about what you are talking about, so there is not much point attempting to enlighten you. There are none so blind as those that will not see.
Oh, and btw, alcohol DOES help you get laid - just stop drinking so much yourself and give the girl a chance to catch up with you.