Ep. 265 – Ram Dass and Timothy Leary: No Signposts

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We should have hired them for press.

Welcome to Ram Dass here and now podcast. This is episode 265 and this is part two of a three part lecture and this one is called no Signposts. So this one's very special. It's this incredible reunion of Ram Dass and Timothy Leary 20 years to the day after their dramatic departure from Harvard. And so this homecoming is a chance to reflect on their shared history and the groundbreaking work in the field of psychedelics and also the very different paths their lives took. So in this talk, Timothy Leary shares his personal story of coming back to his roots in Boston. And he's got this great blend of humor and history and just heartfelt reflections. He also, in addition to talking about his own history, he talks about the history of the psychedelic movement at Harvard. And it's really quite eye opening and brilliant and surprising. He goes on to talk about the Good Friday experiment as well as just the formation of these ideas that changed not just how they did psychedelics, but really changed the cultural landscape forever. And though he and Ram Dass don't exchange many words in this part of the talk. When they do, you can just feel their love and appreciation and depth and just all of the journeys they've been on together, the depth of their relationship. So there's this really lovely, surprising moment in the talk when Ram Dass learns something new. And you have to listen very closely because someone yells from the audience. You can make out what they say, and then it's just fun to see his response. So if you are curious and want to know more about their journey together, highly recommend this new book called Dying to Know. It's an exploration of their friendship and their shared mission to expand human consciousness. And the book traces their friendship over the decades. So looking at their collaboration at Harvard to their eventual reconciliation, and then also diving into the greatest mystery of all, which is death. So it offers lots of great insights into their impact on psychology, spirituality, and this counterculture movement. So invite you now to settle in and enjoy this incredible reunion by these two luminaries. And check out the book Dying to Know. It's available at shop.ramdass.org and so we know they did a lot of experiments with lsd, but when we're talking about psychedelics, we know there's also mushrooms. And there's so many different kinds of mushrooms, and some are toxic and some are mind expanding and some are just plain nourishing. They support the mind and the nervous system, and one of them is lion's mane, which supports neural generation. It's pretty cool. And it's just one of the ingredients in Magic Mind, this little drink that helps me stay focused and energized and creative throughout the day. And I love it because it's easy to use and it tastes great and it helps me in ways I can't even believe. So encourage you to check it out. Go to magicmind.com ramdas and get a discount if you use the code Ram Dass in the next 10 days. And if you want to support Be Here now network in putting out not only this podcast, but all of our many other brilliant podcasts. Consider joining Patreon. You get the experience of the podcasts ad free and you can skip the intros if you want. Go to patreon.com ramdasspodcast to find out more. And as always, we have such privilege to have access to these wisdoms. And so however they touch us, however they move us, we hope that they ripple out into the world for the benefit of all beings. So here is Ram Dass here and now.

I feel this is a homecoming, not just in the sense of Being with Richard and David and Walter and most of all you, to be back at Harvard. But also in a deeper genetic sense. I was. Produced on this planet as an American Irish person and to come back to Boston, which is after all, the Atlantic sea port to which eight of my great grandparents arrived after migrating from the old world, after climbing the 3,000 mile wall of the stormy North Atlantic, to come to a new and kind of scary, to start a new life settling around Boston, Woburn, Waltham is coming back to my roots. There are many ways in which I could talk, many metaphors, many models, many computer programs I could pop in the the biocomputer. Today I started off with the sociobiological or the genetic to recall for myself and for you that I have an Irish background which is nicely celebrated in Boston. As soon as I got old enough to look around the planet, I migrated away from Massachusetts, 3,000 miles west. And for the last 30 odd years I have been an immigrant, a migrant, a frontier person on the far banks of the Pacific Ocean. A Californian. So it's like coming back to the old sod to come to Boston, as I did at the invitation of David McClellan in 1960 to meet up with my partner and friend Richard. I didn't know much about Harvard when I got here. The first few weeks I was here I was guided around by Richard and by our friend Frank Barron, an old and loyal distinguished psychological colleague. As I wandered around Cambridge and Harvard, I slowly began to realize that there was an extraordinary tradition here, A mainline tradition of psychological inquiry. Now I'm not talking about Professor Skinner or Professor Bruner or Professor Kissinger or Professor Schlesinger, all of whom have performed brilliantly. I am talking about another tradition which has existed in this small village since the early days of its founding. A tradition of transcendental thinking. A tradition of wondrous internal paganism. A tradition that said, turn on, tune in, go within, become self reliant. A tradition that was perhaps founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Now, Emerson's an interesting person. Emerson came to the Harvard Divinity School in, I believe, 1838. Before that he'd been in Europe where he had hung out with such notorious druggies as Coleridge, Wordsworth, the Nature School of English philosophy and poetry, who were expanding their minds with such substances as hashish, opium, turning on their minds with such strange and curious and illuminating books as the Bhagavad Gita. Swamisan came back to Boston, came across the Charles river at the Harvard Divinity School, gave that famous speech in which he said don't look for God in the temples, nor in the buildings, nor from the pulpits. Look within, find the divinity inside yourself. Drop out, Become self reliant. Translated as do your own thing. And for I believe 33 years.

He.

Was not allowed back on these sacred.

Paradox.

We're back after 20.

They're more forgiving now.

As an evolutionary genetic scientist, I would hope this is one piece of evidence suggesting that evolution is speeding up. Of course, American psychology, as we were taught it was founded by a Harvard professor named William James. He wrote Principles of Psychology, which is the classic text of American psychology. Kind of looking that over. As I arrived here, I came across those interesting chapters which led me to read the other book by William James, the Varieties of Religious Experience. A book which has corrupted many a mind in which he describes the glories of nitrous oxide in far more colorful prose than the most intoxicated Irishman. Every day as we walked from across Harvard Square to our offices in 5 Divinity Avenue, the significance of which did not escape us, We passed by that little jeweled chapel, the Swedenborgian Chapel, and Frank Barron told me that William James father was the, I think he was the minister there. The great eminence of the social relations department in those days was another wondrous New England scholar named Harry Murray.

Yeah.

Harry Murray was not your run of the mill pedantic academic. Among other things, he was one of the founders of the oss which later became the CIA. During World War II. He assembled the best minds, if there are such of American psychology, to develop new ways of assessing personality. Some of the first studies on brainwashing, drug induced cathartic verbalization were done by the oss. When we met Murray for the first time after we'd started our research, he looked with great interest and approval and as I remember, quickly volunteered to be one of our subjects. It was a little later that we discovered that the tradition of transcendent thinking, the tradition of mind expanding chemistry, was not limited to Emerson or Thoreau, or to Margaret Fuller, one of the first great American feminist philosophers who also had spent some time in Europe studying transcendental philosophy. Taking the drugs of the time. Married a dashing Italian revolutionary baron, came back to America to continue the crusade and unfortunately was shipwrecked off Fire Island. In addition to this long tradition, mainstream tradition of far out Sufi gnostic Harvard experimentation, There was another branch of drug research. The CIA had been running projects in this area for at least ten years before David McClellan brought the two of us together. Matter of fact, hundreds of Harvard students had been tripped out by answering ads in the Harvard Crimson. He goes, you got $25 if you volunteered for an experiment. Turned out later that such people as Ken Kesey and Allen Ginsberg had first been illuminated by volunteering for such experiments. So when I got here in 1960, I must tell you that I was a square kid on the block. Harvard University was the big league of chemical psychoactive exploration. And for that I thank you, John. Harvard. Starting in 1960. That was an interesting year. John Kennedy was running for the presidency against Richard Nixon. I guess he stole it, the election in Texas and Chicago. But in any case, he became president. There was a sense of youthful energy in the country. Richard and I and Frank Barron and Walter Clark and Gunther Weil, George Litwin and many Ralph Metzner and many others began what was known as the Harvard Psychedelic Research Project. In those days, it did seem almost miraculously simple. We gave, we shared. We took these drugs as novices, as amateurs, hesitantly moving into a field that had no signposts or guidelines. There was simply no language in Western psychology to describe altered states of consciousness or ecstasies or visions or terrors. The psychiatrist said these were psychotomimetic experiences, but that didn't seem to tell us too much. We were smart enough, and I give us this credit, to know how little we knew. We shared these experiences with several hundred people, first of all with young graduate students and with young instructors and older professors. Matter of fact, anyone that really wanted to take the voyage was welcome to come along. We went out to Concord Prison because we wanted to see how the illuminated or the activated or the accelerated brain would work with people very dissimilar from Harvard professors and divinity school scholars. With the leadership of Dr. Pahnke and Walter Clark, we went over to Boston University and now that famous Good Friday, Gave psychedelic drugs and placebos to, I think, 30 divinity students from Andover Newton. It's probably the greatest Good Friday in 2000 years. For half of the subjects. The control subjects got to read the Bible. If we learned one thing that day, Walter, we learned that it's foolish to do a double blind control placebo experiment in which you have half the people in the room on an LSD and the other half not, because after five minutes, no one's fooling anyone. In these first two or three years, we performed without the benefit of federal grants or foundation support. There must have been 30, 35 of us working together voluntarily with no principal investigators. Once you put that pill in your mouth, you were the principal investigator, like it or Not. It did seem so simple and so wondrous because we were. We were fairly good people with a wonderful support system. Seriously and frivolously, joyously and thoughtfully knowing that we were on some frontier moving into some wonderful future. And naturally, our results were positive because we were positive. There were a few moments of fright. Ships lost aloft. Aldous, where are you? Where'd Aldous go? Oh, yeah, Bump. Here's Aldous. There's Wilbur Norville. We kept careful records and we made thoughtful observations and came out with many important theories of psychopharmacology, including set and setting and. And so forth. The problem was, of course, that. I guess the world wasn't ready for us.

I think they were. I think it all worked fine.

Yes.

I mean, I don't for one moment wish that I was not thrown out of Harvard. Anymore.

There are a few Harvard people here in the room. About 10%. I think I can speak for Richard when I say that we have never, since the day of our being canned, felt any rancor towards Harvard University. I've already told you, it's the main line of American mysticism and transcendental thinking. You're way ahead of West Point on that. There have been many wonderful men and women that have been Harvard graduates. And it's nice to say, you know, I'm a Harvard graduate. There are only two men. They look fire.

That true?

Really? I didn't know that.

I didn't know that.

Emerson doesn't count. He was. He was like, I'm long sabbatical.

Whether it's a fact or not. I love the image.

Yeah, it's a serious question, you know, in a hundred years whether Harvard will be known for its graduates or its.

What a chutzpah he has. It's unbelievable.

Now, what was the name of that college that fired Socrates? Richard, We're going to make sure that Harvard's name will go down in history. When we left Harvard, by the way, you know, it was the Harvard Crimson that got us canned. The Harvard Crimson has asked both of us to write an op ed essay which will appear, I think, in Mundy's paper. I'd like to accept that invitation. If you're going to be around, we can do it together.

I'm not going to do it.

I know you are. Is it okay if I do it? Oh, what I like to do Send my love and if the Harvard Crimson is here, what I'd like to do is I'd like to come over to the Harvard Crimson office tomorrow and sit there in the newsroom. And if you can loan me a typewriter, I can even handle a word processor. And I'd like to type a little essay right there in the newsroom. I'll get some notes from you so.

That you'll know what to say.

I've signed your name to Joint Essays in the past.

He has indeed. He wrote Psychedelic Experience when I was out in the kitchen washing dishes.

Now, sometime after we left Harvard. Well, right after we left Harvard, we. Let's see, we went to Mexico, got kicked out of Mexico. We went to Dominica. Dominica. Got kicked out of Dominica.

Antigua.

Antigua. Oh, did we get kicked out of Mexico.

Millbrook. Then we went to Millbrook.

Yeah. Like when we assembled at Millbrook, New York, in the fall of 1963, we looked at each other and said, we've been kicked out of one college and three countries in three months. Now, that's.

We're doing well. Yeah. And then we found Melon Country.

Melon Country, Yeah. Interestingly enough, I haven't showed this to Richard yet, but I got my Freedom of Information files from the CIA and they actually tracked us. And I have the CIA documents about what we were doing in Dominica and how many people we were there. And they say, these people are going to start, quote, this is CIA language. An alleged happiness hotel.

We should have hired them for press.

The CIA is wonderful. And I'm sure that Harvard being the home of the OSS and the CIA. I hope there's some alumni here with the CIA. Like when they kidnapped me in Afghanistan. The memo said informal extradition. Really? Anyway, no more CIA jokes.

That's too. Yeah.

After this experience of getting cancer from Harvard in three countries, we ended up at Mellon country in Millbrook, New York, and stayed there for about three years. A wonderful series of chapters in my.

Autobiography just released.

Being published next month by Jeremy and Houghton Mifflin. Jeremy, are you here? There's Jeremy. Two wonderful pictures of Richard in my autobiography.

Worth it for that. It's actually good, though. I read parts of it because I've only seen it for a few hours, but it is fun.

So we ended up in Millbrook, New York, and stayed there for three or four years. And then we realized that we had escaped from a wonderful institution called Harvard University and had set up another institution called.

Well, it was.

If it was the Castella foundation, it was called the Freedom Center. Freedom Center, League for Spiritual Discovery. God knows we had a name.

God knows I remember that one.

We had had enough of Happiness Hotel. Evening. The problem with running Happiness Hotels is that Nobody wants to leave. So we decided to. We literally decided we would. Remember that time, we decided we would define ourselves as global travelers. This was. Perhaps this was after Sputnik, but before Apollo. And we found out that for in those days, seventeen hundred dollars, you could get an around the world ticket which you had to use within one year. So we agreed that we would make an annual rotation around the globe in one year. And first Ralph Messner went, and then Nina and I went, and then you went and we closed down our center at Millbrook. And like astronauts buckling our spacesuits and heading for the four quadrants of the galaxy, or like knights of old saddling to go to the poor cornerstone.

Or.

Four prison escapees heading in four different directions. Whatever metaphor you want to use. We decided to spread over the globe and see what was going on out there. And after 20 years, we reassembled to share with each other and with you some of our observations. The last 20 years have been remarkable, haven't they? They have put us through the changes. Yeah. And we've put them through some changes.

There's no.

I know. There's no us and them.

It's only us putting ourselves.

I know you're going to say that.

Got to treat you language. It's got to clean up his act.

I'll be the straight man. Intern Richard is a Unitarian.

He ends up his book by calling me a theosophical Unitarian minister. Right. Isn't that what you call me?

With a. With a congregation of millions.

Congregation of millions.

Yeah.

It's not a bad role. It's a little stodgy, I know.

Well, I read his book.

I read his. Putting on this image of myself that he. His mind creates, you know, and I'm this horny minister. No. Is all I can describe myself with. Hope.

I use the metaphor. One of the books that really damaged my brain at an early age and left me hopelessly. Whatever your hope, whatever you call that was too hopeless. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. I think that that's the ultimate American book. It's the, you know, the old trip up and down the river.

I only cross the river.

Yeah. Helping to free any slaves along the way. Though I can never figure out whether I'm Tom and you're Dick or Jerry.

Tom and Jerry. I think it is.

I'm hucking your Tom.

I always saw you as the. This captain of the African Queen, which is funny considering, you know, and me standing behind you like Winston Churchill being stolid. No, he wasn't, it turned out. But he looked that way. I mean, how he looked. Giving you courage to go on. That was the myth I used to work up.

We got a few miles off that one.

We got miles out of so many scenarios and so many myths. We still are now when we.

When we.

Whenever you want to play, just tell me. Yeah.

You want to do my thing? When we left 20 years ago today on our voyage of discovery. I've been very involved in politics, activism, prison escapes, running for governor, exile. I've been in 40 jails and four continents.

I haven't even been busted yet. I got a brand new belt. I'm ready to notch it.

We may have blown that whole stage.

Yeah, that seems pat.

Well, I did it for you.

I appreciate it. I knew that at the time.

I find that the metaphors I've been picking up in the last 20 years have been different. Naturally. I've gone through different terrains, learned new dialects, perfected some of the old dialects. The language is important. And as I listen to Richard and read what he writes, I see that he's saying very similar things, but in different words. At the moment, I'm very intrigued by the language of the information revolution, Computerise. I'm entranced and enthralled by the notion of the brain as a network of 40 billion personal computers, apples and oranges, and IBM's and the drugs or access codes and so forth, so that we have naturally picked up the dialects of the terrains we've been going through. I have been with Richard now for about almost 48 hours.

Yeah.

In Massachusetts, on a farm coming across northern Massachusetts. It's been intoxicatingly, hasn't it? Wonderful.

Yeah. Delicious.

48 hours.

Delicious.

We're just very happy to be here. This podcast is brought to you by the Love Serve Remember foundation and ram dass.org we appreciate you listening and we appreciate all the support that you've given us. Please continue that support and donate@ramdas.org we can then continue to share what Ram Dass has been sharing for all of these years. Thank you.