Have you ever felt a little Leary?
Tim Leary was one part Johnny Appleseed, one part PT Barnum, one part Martin Luther, one part Alger Hiss. What would our world look like if Leary hadn’t left his cushy gig at Harvard to implore the youth of America to “drop out, turn on and tune in?” How would our collective consciousness have evolved if he didn’t have The CIA’s best LSD to pass out like candy? If you didn’t already catch this, our “Star of The Day,” Tim Leary, Libra, was born October, 22nd, 1920, in Springfield, Mass.
Leary was a complex character and a man of his times. Born with the master vibration of 22 as his birth note, he shaped culture as a hermes character, a trickster par excellence, coyote and fool.
He led a life on many different levels and layers, with trapdoors, backdoors, dungeons and dragons. During the early days of the great acid wash, The CIA was at the forefront of experimentation. In the book, “Acid Dreams” by Bruce Shlain and Martin Lee, they chronicle the companies involvement with hilarious and troubling accounts of their ongoing experiment. From the laughable images of spooks dosing each others coffee at Langley to operating on prison inmates brains, high on acid with local anesthetics so that the prisoners could talk about what they were experiencing. This was all part of MK Ultra, a massively funded program that was spearheaded by The CIA and mostly invested in mind control, from both a personal and social level.
There is voluminous information out there that Leary was part of MK Ultra, an agent whose goal and role was to spread the gospel of acid and destabilize the culture at large. I’ve sourced researcher Dave McGowan before and he has done stellar work looking at how most of our culture and history has been deeply influenced by socially engineered arms of the military industrial complex, in concert with the media, supporting the continued propagation of Maya aka The Matrix and is worth reading if you have any interest in this area. But sometimes, the experiment gets out of control.
Back in the bad old days of MONDO 2000, Queen Mu, Cryptographer par excellence and friend of Leary’s unearthed an amazing tale of how JFK got turned onto LSD by one of his many consorts, Mary Pinchot-Meyer, wife of CIA head, Cord Meyer. According to Mu, Mary Meyer and a cadre of CIA wives and girlfriends were getting LSD from Leary and turning on senators, congressmen and in Mary Meyer’s case, JFK.
In Mu’s scenario Meyer and Kennedy spent their intimate times not only exploring the soft contours of relating, but also tripping the light fantastic on some of the best rotten, rye mold around. JFK as a result had a major breakthrough in consciousness which led him to a number of epiphanies, including the exit of US forces from Vietnam, the implementation of a new silver standard in conjunction with John Conolly and The Hunt Brothers and, here’s the kicker, going public with the extra-terrestrial cover-up. All of this led up to the “intervention” of Kennedy in Dealey Plaza on 11/22/63. Mary Pinchot-Meyer mysteriously died just a few short months after JFK was killed.
So Tim Leary, the pied-piper of psychedelia nearly accomplished what he had set out to do, but inadvertently and with results that would have been far too damning for the dark wizards behind the veil.
Leary hop scotched from SF and The Summer of Love as one of it’s high priests, to Africa where he was on the run with Eldrige Cleaver, to Hollywood, Laurel Canyon specifically (see Dave McGowan again) where he rubbed elbows with Johnny Depp, Al Jourgensen, John Perry Barlow and even became the godfather of Winona Ryder.
He dove into the internet and cyberspace with as much abandon as he did with his zealous immersion in psychedelic culture. I was in a far elliptical orbit of Leary during his last months through my association with MONDO and attended two memorial services for Leary. I’ll never forget Perry-Barlow trying to speak at Grace Cathedral when something truly weird happened to the PA, feeding back, distorting, grabbing our attention as the trickster himself no doubt threw a bolt of proto-plasmic energy into the proceedings. We all sat back and took notice, laughing at the prospect of Tim still messing with reality, an astral plane agent provacateur cackling from the other side.
Other notable birthdays on this day include, Deepak Chopra, Stiv Bators, Doris Lessing and Ichiro.