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WHY IS DR. TIMOTHY LEARY IN PRISON?

By Robert Anton WILSON,.

This is a single sheet, photo offset from typescript which is folded twice for mailing.   Guerneville, California [November 1973].

Robert Anton Wilson begins by discussing Timothy Leary’s dire legal situation, his excessive bail ($5,000.000) because the sentencing judge did not like the ideas he espoused; how Leary’s constitutional rights have thus been violated, and compares his treatment to that of the revolutionary psychologist Wilhelm Reich, who was also hounded by the government, had his books burned, and died in an American prison.

Wilson goes as far as to invoke the treatment of scapegoated people in Nazi Germany, and warns that “the fight for Timothy Leary’s rights is the fight for mind itself, for our right to think, to publish our thought, to speak out.”

Warning about the coming Orwellian surveillance state, Wilson concludes prophetically:  ‘The civil liberties you save may be your own.  In the wake of Watergate, how sure are you that they’re not already bugging your phone and watching you.”

Wilson was one of Leary’s most eloquent defenders through the dark years of his imprisonment, and one of his very few connections to the outside. They collaborated on several books, both published and unpublished, and a number of articles, and appeared on stage together. 

This rare ephemeron is an excellent example of their association, and most probably his first published writing on Timothy Leary other than his 1963 Realist interview.

MORE ABOUT  Robert Anton Wilson (born Robert Edward Wilson, January 18, 1932 – January 11, 2007), known to friends as "Bob", was an American author and polymath who became at various times a novelist, philosopher, psychologist, essayist, editor, playwright, poet, futurist, civil libertarian and self-described agnostic mystic. Recognized as an episkopos, pope, and saint of Discordianism, Wilson helped publicize the group through his writings and interviews.

Wilson described his work as an "attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models or maps, and no one model elevated to the truth". His goal being "to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything."

After smoking marijuana for nearly a decade, he first experimented with mescaline in Yellow Springs, Ohio on December 28, 1961. Wilson began to work as a freelance journalist and advertising copywriter in the late 1950s. He assumed co-editorship of the School for Living's Brookville, Ohio-based Balanced Living magazine in 1962 and briefly returned to New York as associate editor of Ralph Ginzburg's quarterly fact: before leaving for Playboy, where he served as an associate editor from 1965 to 1971.

According to Wilson, Playboy "paid me a higher salary than any other magazine at which I had worked and never expected me to become a conformist or sell my soul in return. I enjoyed my years in the Bunny Empire. I only resigned when I reached 40 and felt I could not live with myself if I didn't make an effort to write full-time at last."

Along with frequent collaborator Robert Shea, Wilson edited the magazine's Playboy Forum advice column. During this period, he covered Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert's Millbrook, New York-based Castalia Foundation at the instigation of Alan Watts in The Realist, cultivated important friendships with William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, and lectured at the Free University of New York on 'Anarchist and Synergetic Politics' in 1965.

The Cosmic Trigger series  == In the nonfiction and partly autobiographical Cosmic Trigger I: The Final Secret of the Illuminati (1977) and its two sequels, as well as in many other works, Wilson examined Freemasons, Discordianism, Sufism, the Illuminati, Futurology, Zen Buddhism, Dennis and Terence McKenna, Jack Parsons, the occult practices of Aleister Crowley and G.I. Gurdjieff, Yoga, and many other esoteric or counterculture philosophies, personalities, and occurrences.

MORE FROM THE DICTIONARY ABOUT  == Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an American psychologist and writer, known for his advocacy of psychedelic drugs. During a time when drugs like LSD and Mescaline , Sacred plants were legal, Leary conducted experiments at Harvard University under the Harvard P Project, resulting in the Concord Prison Experiment and the Marsh Chapel Experiment. Both studies produced useful data, but Leary and his associate Richard Alpert were fired from the university.

 Leary believed LSD showed therapeutic potential for use in psychiatry. He popularized catchphrases that promoted his philosophy, such as "turn on, tune in, drop out", "set and setting", and "think for yourself and question authority". He also wrote and spoke frequently about transhumanist concepts involving space migration, intelligence increase and life extension (SMI²LE), and he developed the eight-circuit model of consciousness in his book Exo-Psychology (1977).

 During the 1960s and 1970s, Leary was arrested regularly and was held captive in 29 different prisons throughout the world. President Richard Nixon once described Leary as "the most dangerous man in America".

Leary authored and co-authored over twenty books and was featured on more than a dozen audio recordings. He had an acting career that included over a dozen appearances in movies and television shows, over thirty appearances as himself in the same, and produced and/or collaborated in both multi-media presentations and computer games.

  In June 2011 The New York Times reported that the New York Public Library had acquired Leary's personal archives, including papers, videotapes, photographs and other archival material from the Leary estate, including correspondence and documents relating to Allen Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Arthur Koestler, G. Gordon Liddy and other prominent cultural figures. Following an archiving period of up to two years, the material will be open to scholars.

 Beat poet Allen Ginsberg asked Leary to participate in the experiments after hearing about the Harvard research project. According to Leary's autobiography, Flashbacks, LSD was given to 300 professors, graduate students, writers and philosophers and 75 percent of the test subjects reported the experience as one of the most educational and revealing experiences of their lives.

 Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert founded the International Foundation for Internal Freedom in 1962 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This was run by Lisa Bieberman (now known as Licia Kuenning), a disciple of Leary and one of his many lovers.

Their research attracted a great deal of public attention and, as a result, many people wanted to participate in the experiments, but were unable to do so because of the high demand. In order to satisfy the curiosity of those who were turned away, a black market for psychedelics developed near the Harvard University Campus.

 On September 19, 1966, Leary founded the League for Spiritual Discovery, a religion declaring LSD as its holy sacrament, in part as an unsuccessful attempt to maintain legal status for the use of LSD and other psychedelics for the religion's adherents, based on a "freedom of religion" argument.

(Although The Brotherhood of Eternal Love would subsequently consider Leary their spiritual leader, The Brotherhood did not evolve out of IFIF International Foundation for Internal Freedom.) On October 6, 1966, LSD was made illegal in the United States and controlled so strictly that not only were possession and recreational use criminalized, but all legal scientific research programs on the drug in the US were shut down as well.

During late 1966 and early 1967, Leary toured college campuses presenting a multi-media performance "The Death of the Mind", which attempted to artistically replicate the LSD experience. Leary said the League for Spiritual Discovery was limited to 360 members and was already at its membership limit, but he encouraged others to form their own psychedelic religions. He published a pamphlet in 1967 called Start Your Own Religion, to encourage people to do so .

Leary was invited to attend the January 14, 1967 Human Be-In by Michael Bowen the primary organizer of the event. Leary spoke at the Human Be-In, a gathering of 30,000 hippies in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and uttered the famous phrase, "Turn on, tune in, drop out".

In a 1988 interview with Neil Strauss, Leary stated that slogan was "given to him" by Marshall McLuhan during a lunch in New York City. Leary added that Marshall, "was very much interested in ideas and marketing, and he started singing something like, 'Psychedelics hit the spot / Five hundred micrograms, that's a lot,' to the tune of a Pepsi commercial. Then he started going, 'Tune in, turn on, and drop out.'"