Original publication: September 1999.
Tim Leary’s Cannabis Spirituality Or, Know Your Guru Over Time
PAUL KRASSNER
Recently I had dinner with Keith Stroup, executive director of NORML. He has been in the struggle to decriminalize marijuana for a long time, so I felt encouraged to see him in such an optimistic mood. Although medical marijuana is still in heavy battle mode, Stroup is now girding his legal loins to fight for recreational use.
I was reminded of an interview I did with Tim Leary back in 1965. Here’s an excerpt that is just as relevant today as it was then:
Q. A lot of people smoke pot for what they consider pleasure, simply to get high. Are you copping out on them by fighting your marijuana case on the grounds of religious freedom?
A. The pursuit of happiness is in the Declaration of Independence. But most people who use LSD and marijuana to get high don’t really know how to do it, because the science and discipline of ecstasy is probably the most demanding yoga that I can think of.
People who criticize my use of the First Amendment—that is, religious belief and practice—as a defense of my smoking marijuana and using LSD, simply don’t understand what religion means, or they have a very narrow, Western, Protestant-Catholic-Jewish concept of religion.
My philosophy of life has been tremendously influenced by my study of Oriental philosophy and religion. Of course, what the American, regardless of his religious belief, doesn’t understand is that the aim of Oriental religion is to get high, to have an ecstasy, to tune in, to turn on, to contact incredible diversity, beauty, living, pulsating meaning of the sense organs. People that use marijuana and LSD in their homes or their own gardens say, “What does this have to do with religion?” Because religion to them means priests, Bibles, churches, Sunday schools, sects, rules and regulations.
To most Orientals the sacred temple of religion Is your own body. The shrine is your own home. Your priest or teacher or guru is someone with whom you live and share most of the joys and frustrations of daily life. It requires time, training, practice and discipline to really use your sense organs; to move your consciousness from one type of ecstasy to another requires knowledge and guidance.
“So just turning on with pot or LSD in your home can be pleasant and even revealing,” Leary concluded. Most people, he observed, don’t “pay respect to the potentialities of your nervous system and your cells,” and psychedelic drugs like marijuana and LSD have the power “to open up these complex realms.”
Several years later, as a result of his religious quest, Leary found himself in prison. Eventually, he escaped with the aid of the Weather Underground, and announced that he was “armed and dangerous.”
I interviewed Leary again months before his death:
Q. When you escaped from prison, you said, “Arm yourselves and shoot to live. To shoot a genocidal robot policeman in the defense of life is a sacred act.”
A. Yeah! I also said, “I’m armed and dangerous. ” I got that directly from Angela Davis. I thought it was just funny to say that.
Q. I thought it was the party line from the Weather Underground.
A. Well, yeah, I had a lot of arguments with Bernardine Dohrn.
Q. They had their own rhetoric. She even praised Charles Manson.
A. The Weather Underground was amusing. They were brilliant, brilliant Jewish Chicago kids. They had class and dash and flash and smash. Bernardine was praising Manson for sticking a fork in a victim’s stomach. She was just being naughty.
Both interviews with Leary are included— alongside conversations with several other countercultural icons such as Alan Watts, Ram Dass and Jerry Garcia—in my book, Impolite Interviews, which has just been Updated by Seven Stones Press.
Before his death, he decided on cremation and for a portion of his ashes rocketed into outer space to orbit the Earth. I asked him if the remainder of his cremains could be mixed with marijuana and rolled into joints so that his family and friends could smoke him. “Yeah,” he replied. “Just don’t bogart me.”
