Timothy Leary was undoubtedly a controversial figure of the 20th century. His fanatical admirers saw him as the philosopher and guru who revolutionized the formation of personality and the expansion of human consciousness. His opponents saw him as a public threat. US President Richard Nixon had named him "America's Most Dangerous Man" and the FBI "No. 1 Public Danger."
How they saw him was commonly accepted: that Leary was a complex man. A heretical man with significant studies in psychology, "allergic" to anything normal, with a love of LSD, which he studied and considered to be the means to transcend the limits of the human mind and get a lot out of jail.
People say the word "natural". Natural for me are these herbal ingredients that interact directly with the nervous system. "What I consider artificial is four years at Harvard, at the Bible, at St. Patrick's Cathedral and the sermons at the Catholic Church," he once said.
Timothy Leary was born in 1920 in Springfield, Massachusetts and raised in a Catholic family of Irish descent.
His parents divorced when he was a teenager. He attended Holy Cross College and was then forcibly sent by his father to the West Point Military Academy. There he was most often punished as he had been found drunk many times.
In 1941 he was expelled from the University of Alabama because he had spent a night in the dormitory. After fighting in World War II he decided to return to university and study clinical psychology at the University of Berkeley, where he received his bachelor's and master's degrees.
Leary lived the life of a typical middle-class family, with his wife and two children, while teaching at California universities and researching human personality and group therapy. During these periods of apparent calm, Timothy was boiling inside. He drank and often cheated on his wife and when the woman decided to put him in the corner for his misdeeds he told her: "The problem is yours". In 1955 she could not bear it and committed suicide.
In 1958 Leary moved to Europe with his children. While in Spain he fell ill and experienced a strange delusion. "Suddenly all the ropes of my social self disappeared. I was a 38 year old male animal with two young. Made, completely free "he had said, describing what he experienced.
Returning from Europe, he accepted a position as a lecturer at Harvard University. This was followed by a trip to Mexico and his first contact with the psilocybin mushrooms, also known as "magic" mushrooms, rushed by the delirium he experienced in Spain.
Leary, who returned from Mexico, was a different person. He immediately organized the Harvard Psilocybin Project Harvard), in order to investigate the effect of LSD, during which he administered the psychotropic substance psilokivine to volunteer students. "Spiritual ecstasy, religious revelation and union with God are now possible," he said of the students' participation in the experiments.
The same experiments involved well-known personalities from the field of intellect, music and literature, resulting in the creation of a wide network with people who became the apostles of a movement for the liberation of the mind.
Reactions from the students' parents were not long in coming, and Harvard soon refused to continue working with Leary. The reason cited by the University for the "divorce" was that the professor did not show up for classes as he was too busy with his psychedelic experiments. But Leary would find the means to continue the experiments with relative autonomy.
Leary soon found another sponsor for his experiments. The heirs of a wealthy family provided him with a 64-room Millbrook mansion where he could experiment with hallucinogenic substances without difficulty.
He found more and more celebrities to recruit for his purpose. Musicians like jazzman Charles Mingus and writers like William Burrougs walked through the mansion door and sided with the scientist. His fame traveled to the ends of the earth and he achieved what he wanted: next to the celebrities he became famous himself. Jack's son had said characteristically: "He never wanted to be a guru. "He wanted to be a rock star like Mick Jagger, he just didn't know how to play the guitar!"
By the mid-1960s, Timothy Leary had become one of the leading public advocates of the use of LSD and other psychedelics.
When the psychologist was called to testify before a subcommittee of the Senate USA on whether LSD was dangerous and should have been banned, he said: "The car is dangerous if used improperly. "Human stupidity and ignorance is the only danger people face in the world." His arguments did not convince anyone and the Senate proceeded to ban LSD.
And Leary's reputation may have grown, but his experiments mobilized the authorities. In 1965 he was arrested for possession of marijuana in Texas and sentenced to 30 years in prison, a sentence overturned on appeal. It was then that he announced his candidacy for governor of California, thus trying to get his message across to the LSD in this area as well.
The FBI raids on the experimental villa were now a daily occurrence. In 1967 Leary made a failed attempt to continue to spread the importance of the use of LSD, creating a religious organization whose practices did not work.
His political ambitions came to a head when he was arrested again in 1970 for possession of marijuana and jailed for 10 years. A few months after his incarceration, he escaped to Algeria, from there to Switzerland, where he was imprisoned again and returned to the United States, where he was taken to Folsom Prison and in solitary confinement. In the next cell was Charles Manson who is said to have told him: "You were taken from the streets so that I could continue your work."
Leary was released from prison in 1976. He resumed lecturing as a philosopher and writing articles for magazines such as the National Review, but did not continue to promote LSD.
His new area of interest was computers, which he considered the next step in human consciousness, or as he called them the "LSD of technology". Then he develops the concept SMI2IE (Space Migration, Intellegence squared, Life Extension), a triptych for the man of the future and how he could become better.
Timothy Leary was cremated. Some of his ashes were sent by rocket into orbit in space and the rest were scattered by actress Susan Sarandon at the Burning Man festival in 2015, the annual celebration of music, arts and culture that could be called the hippie biennale!