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course, that is still the way it is. A therapist or a teacher has to do
things according to accepted standards, no matter how absurd those standards
are. As Leary says on page 194 of his book, Changing
My Mind, Among Others: "As prime conditioner of his fellow men, the psychologist or educator must be an exemplar-calm, serious, controlled, sensibly cynical, smugly pessimistic and above all, rational. To study the unconditioned state, to produce pleasure in his subjects and to act in a natural, hedonic manner would lead to his excommunication." In Timothy Leary's, High Priest, he mentions how he and Aldous Huxley had a different outlook than conventional psychology in what they were trying to do. This is from pages 65-66: "We talked about how to study and use the consciousness-expanding drugs and we clicked along agreeably on the do's and the not-to-do's. We would avoid the behaviorist approach to others' awareness. Avoid labeling or depersonalizing the subject. We should not impose our own jargon or own experimental games on others. We were not out to discover new laws, which is to say, to discover the redundant implications of our own premises. We were not to be limited by the pathological point of view. We were not to interpret ecstasy as mania or calm serenity as catatonia; we were not to diagnose Buddha as a detached schoid; not Christ as a exhibitionist masochist; not the mystic experience as a symptom; not the visionary state as a model psychosis." Leary and Huxley did not believe in the scientific method of research which says that the scientist cannot try LSD himself because he would lose his "objectivity". With LSD, there is no such thing as doing research on others or animals. The scientist has to experience it for himself in order to understand what he is supposed to be researching. On page 186 of Huxley's writings, Moksha, is a letter he wrote to Leary about this: "You are right about the hopelessness of the 'scientific' approach. Those idiots want to be Pavlonians not Lorenzian Ethnologists. Pavlov never saw an animal in its natural state, only under duress. The 'scientific' LSD boys do the same with their subjects. No wonder they report psychoses." Leary had an interesting comment mentioning scientists. This is from page 101 of The Politics of Ecstasy: "Yes, it is frightening and this defines the scientist of consciousness. He must have courage. He must embark on a course of planfully and deliberately going out of his mind. This is no field for the faint of heart. You are venturing out (like the Portuguese sailors, like the astronauts) on uncharted margains. But be reassured-it's an old human custom. It's an old living-organism custom. We're here today because certain adventurous proteins, certain far-out experimenting cells, certain hippy amphibia, certain brave men pushed out and exposed themselves to new forms of energy. Where do you get this courage? It comes from faith in your nervous system, body, cells, the life process, the molecular energies released by psychedelic molecules and faith in the harmony and wisdom of nature." |