Timothy Leary: Outside Looking in

PSYCHEDELICS / BIOGRAPHY "Timothy Leary's Dead. No, no no no, he's outside, looking in. " -The Moody Blues, "Legend of a Mind" "Tim was a chieftain. He stomped on the terra, and he left his elegant hoof prints on all our lives. " -Hunter S. Thompson "Tim Leary probably made more people happy than anybody else in history. " -Terence McKenna "What I learned from Tim didn't have anything to do with drugs but it had everything to do with getting high. His die-hard fascination with the human brain was not all about altering it, but about using it to its fullest. " -Winona Ryder Timothy Leary inspired strong feelings in everyone he came into contact with during his momentous life. An unrelenting proponent of expanding consciousness and challenging authority, he was brilliant and erratic, extravagant and enthusiastic, wise and foolish. Ram Dass called him the most creative man he had ever known, while Richard Nixon called him the most dangerous man in the world. Many agree that his exuberant popularizing of psychedelics radically altered the course of the twentieth century. His research at Harvard University and subsequent dismissal from the faculty helped to inaugurate the counterculture of the 1960s, awakening a generation to its own potential. His later arrests, escapes from prison, asylum in Switzerland, and return to the United States mark him as an archetypal hero. His eventual embracing of computers and the Internet kept him at the forefront of the battle for personal freedom and creative expression. The essence of Leary's life has often been reduced to his celebrated formula "Turn on, tune in, and drop out. " But the wider implications of this call to communion are forgotten, just as the complex nature of Leary's personality is often reduced to the superficial spin put on his ideas by the media. In Timothy Leary: Outside Looking In, many of the great artists, thinkers, and rebels of our time discuss Leary's life and legacy. In doing so, this gathering of minds goes beyond a simple tribute to the man and becomes a provocative dialogue on the evolution of consciousness. ROBERT FORTE studied the history and psychology of religion at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago and has taught at the University of California in Santa Cruz. He served on the board of directors of the Albert Hofmann Foundation and is the editor of Entheogens and the Future of Religion.