Sid Jacobson

Interviewer's Note: When Catherine Rogers (local New Orleans Alternative Newspaper Publisher) asked if I would be interested in speaking at the Discovery 92 Expo, I immediately asked who else would be there. She said, "Timothy Leary." I said, "Sure I'll give a talk, and I want to interview him." If you're old enough, think back to the 60's for a moment. Somewhere in your thoughts the name Timothy Leary should spring forward, full of meaning, complete with lights, sounds and feelings. If not, check your pulse.

As background for the interview that follows, in addition to talking with a mutual friend (Robert Dilts, who did a series of lectures across the country with Leary several years ago), I started with his autobiography, Flashbacks (Tarcher, 1990) and a collection of his writings, Changing My Mind, Among Others (Prentice-Hall, 1982). Both highly recommended. So where has he been the last few years? Debating Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy, and others, in various forums across the country. Lecturing. Developing computer software for the mind. Writing articles. Staying much busier than other 72 year old men I know.

Personally, I was thrilled to spend time with one of the great psychologists of our time. I had much more to ask him than our time together would allow, but we connected three times and had some good talks. Leary is unpretentious in the extreme. He always smiles for the camera. He smokes a lot and drinks large cups of coffee. He moves quickly, conserving both time and energy. And he tells you what he believes–uncensored, unabashed and unashamed. It would be difficult not to like him immediately. Has he mellowed in his challenges to authority? Possibly. Does it show? Not much. One final observation to all those who asked me: "Didn't all those drugs he took totally fry his brain?" NO.

Leary began his talk at Discovery 92 with the following plea for understanding and compassion: "I've just discovered a new way of expanding consciousness, of altering consciousness, and having visionary trance experiences and getting lost in the greater things in life. It's called senility." Personally, I hope someday to achieve this state with as much wit, grace and clearheadedness. We began our conversation by talking about his recent work in computer software and electronic approaches to altering the mind.

Sid: How do you see all your work in cybernetics, and with computers, and all the coming things, as an extension of what you were trying to do 30 years ago?

Tim: It's a classic and natural extension–and updating. This discipline of understanding altered states of consciousness and dealing with ways of accessing them, is as old as human history. Any time there is a breakthrough in technology, or in psychology, we learn a little bit more.

In the 1960's at Harvard, we were basically using the methods which had been used for thousands of years. Candlelight; amplified sound, which was very powerful. What was different was that we were trying to communicate it. We were trying to develop ways of communicating this experience which, of course, cannot be expressed in words, or in left-brained orderly icons. We made some progress in the mid-60's with what we called psychedelic light shows. We would have Jello in lights, we would have overlays, and we would have three or four film projectors all on top of each other. Sometimes we would have a show where we would have eight or ten slide projectors, all timed like a symphonic orchestra.... So if you had sixteen fiddles, we'd have sixteen light projectors, and so forth, and with sound too. The beating of the heart. There is a tremendous tradition of altered state, or trance, music. Voodoo music, the music of South America and Africa.

The drums.

Yeah, the drums, the drums, the drums banging. The mesh of the liturgy of the Catholic Church, the droning noise of the Gregorian Chant. So there's a long long history of audio-visual ways of communicating ... well, there are two ethics here. You can use the drums, the bells and the light to create the trance state. And after it's all over, you can use it to experience, to communicate it, to share it with other people.

But we had to give this up because–well it was simply too labor intensive.... now with the tremendous advances, with electronics and multi-media so-called virtual reality–electronic reality–devices, the powerful sounds.... this new kind of music called "techno-rock." And the idea there is they get a thousand young people together and they just jam their eyeballs and their eardrums with sound and light, and put them in a trance situation–but without a spiritual life that's just missing there, for many people.

But we're trying to use that same method, now, to let you choose what kind of messages you want to put in there, so that you're programming your brain using this multi-media overload. It's being done all the time by commercial tv, of course. So for seven hours a day people submit their eyeballs; and therefore their brain's being programmed by Michelob Beer. "The night belongs to Michelob." Or George Bush, you know ... So we're talking about methods using inexpensive computers where people can to do it to themselves.

Yeah. What do you think of all the new brain-mind machines like the synchro-energizers and all those things with the goggles and the headphones? Do you think there's a real future in that, or do you think that in the same way that, for some people drugs become limiting because they can't control them enough, that they're going to be just one more step on the path to get somewhere else.

Well anything that's prefabricated ... like if you buy a record or a disc, that's the way it is if you like it or not. You can turn it up, you can turn it down, you can turn it off, or you can turn it on. If you buy a synchro-energizer, or one of the other brain machines, many of them are programmed now to give you a choice of meditated, or animated [or whatever]. The key, always, is building in self-options so that the person's not just passively lying there like a vegetable being energized. Also, that you can put in your own programs, like "stop smoking" or "enjoy your brain" or whatever you want to communicate.

So yes, basically I'm very much in favor of the bio-brain machines with, again, the caveat–the warning–that you've got to put your own design on it, or else you'll become a vegetable with a machine.

Sure, sure. You know it's interesting because I was a therapist for a long time and I was always looking for ways to alter people's states in very particular ways. But just altering the state was never enough. You had then to utilize the altered state to help the person make some kind of a change and there is always the limitation of getting inside that other person's brain. I studied Milton Erickson for a long time and all the NLP people. We have Stan Grof, we've got Ericksonian Hypnosis, and NLP and those kinds of things, and certainly the work we talked about that Robert Dilts does with re-imprinting, that largely he credits to your thinking; that helped him. Is the kind of re-imprinting that we're doing the kind of re-imprinting that you were intending to do with the drugs back then, or do you think that we've gone off on the wrong, or a different, path?

I think it's inevitable. There's a very powerful, strong, movement. They talk "trans-personal" which is a brand name for the inner exploration and getting to understand how to operate your mind and your brain....

I'm a very strong fan of NLP. It's a little more scientific, both in its language and its methods. But everybody gets the guru they deserve, unfortunately, and everybody gets the language and the methods they deserve. Everyone that you mentioned, Grof, Erickson, Metzner, Krippner, the so-called New Age or trans-personal psychologists, they're all basically humanistic. They believe it's in you, and it's your job to find it, and it's their job to help you find it. They're very democratic. There's no doctor-patient authority thing there. They're open-minded and good natured, so I endorse all of that, very much.

It relates very much to what you talked about a lot in your auto-biography. One of the theories that you were trying to explain to people when you were starting to use LSD especially, and psilocybin before that, was that the "set and the setting" were very important. That you really have to be going in with the right frame of mind and have a particular intention, and expect it to be good; and you have to put yourself in a safe place or you're going to get into trouble. Do you think that that's mainly what's going on that makes these therapies effective as well–that the set and the setting is there to begin with?

The set means not only your expectations, but also your psychological strength at the time–what you want from your life. If you're just looking for a good time there's nothing wrong with that, but ...

That's what you're going to get.

... that's what you're going to get. You'll get a good time, but it will also lead you, eat you, open you up. Of course the key to all this is communication. If you're lying there with a brain machine, having your brain titillated and inundated with all these strobe lights, or if you take LSD by yourself, it's just you and your brain.

So, it's communication; doing it with other people is the key. Philosophy is a team sport. Anything you think about you've got to put into action. That's what McLuhan said. He said: "I never know what I'm thinking until I hear myself say it to somebody else and hear their reaction to it." You see once they react to it, then it's not an idea in my head, but it's a living thing that's out there.

In NLP we like to say that the meaning of a communication is the response that it gets back.

There you go, yeah.

In that sense, I was thinking about set and setting last night. I was talking with somebody who is a big fan of yours, and said that during the 60's when she was in college she started taking a lot of drugs, but unfortunately you were on a path of evolution, and she got stuck–and woke up when she was 35 years old and realized that she'd just been taking the drugs and a lot of her life hadn't evolved in the way that she wanted to.

Yeah. 

And she decided at that point that she was an alcoholic and a drug addict and quit until she could learn how to do it right. Is it the set and the setting that we're talking about there? What would you say to those folks.

I think, plain common sense. If you take LSD once or twice, and you have illuminations, and it teaches you a lot, and you start studying and you hang out with people, yeah. But if you take LSD, and then you smoke a little marijuana to calm down, and then you take a hit of cocaine to get you going, and then you're drinking–what does this have to do with anything? It's just plain stupidity.... you're obviously not dedicating your life to anything, a life of change and growth ...

Which is the dedication you had, I suppose.

Yeah. Your set; you're basically operating out of lazy self-indulgence. Now I have nothing against lazy self-indulgence, at least three hours a week on weekends, or more, you can lie back and be lazy and self-indulgent. But common sense. Common sense.

Copyright © 1999-2002 Sid Jacobson,Ph.D. All Rights Reserved