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Ready to turn on, tune in, and drop out into some serious gnosis? I’m joined by Joseph L. Flatley to discuss his new book, The Occult Timothy Leary: The Tarot, Magical States, and Post-Terrestrial Evolution. We’ll explore the hidden esoteric life of a renowned psychedelic pioneer, tracing his transformation from a Harvard psychology professor into a fugitive philosopher of the occult. You’ll delve into the development of the eight-circuit model of consciousness and a unique interpretation of the Tarot designed to map human evolution from its unicellular origins to a post-terrestrial future. And we’ll further examine how Western mystical traditions and futuristic technological visions merged during the counterculture era to redefine human potential and the quest for immortality.
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Delicious spring gathering start at Whole Foods Market.
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And serve your loved ones Whole Foods Market Sea food.
Always responsibly farmed or sustainable while caught.
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What, how does it work?
It's an astrology thing, it's called a cycle.
Dude, it's awesome.
You put in your birth time and location and it tells you that the reason
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While you're eating eggs to slim down so that somebody will s**t.
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Heresy shouldn't be this much fun, but it is.
It just is, especially when we lean in with those two introductory clips.
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The other one is Nicholas Cage in Long Legs.
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And yes, you have arrived to AM Bagnostic Radio in one of the districts of the virtual Alexandria.
Welcome to this age of Hermes.
These Philip K. Dick Times and what else can I say?
This Philip K. Dick were old age of Hermes.
Nostec time, what else can I say?
You have your own version and I'm sure you're right in how it works for you.
My name is Miguel Conor and as always, I am your pompadus of noses that madman across the waters
of creation that smell of colitas rising through the air of a world gone mad.
Great to see everybody on this moon, not moon day, but this Venus day.
And I hope everybody's doing all right.
And I hope you're working hard on that inner journey to find who you are and what reality is not.
You are the final authority and you're going to do wonders and you come here to get those unique
Nostec takes and guess that you won't find anywhere else on the internet and can work for you.
Today, I am very excited to be joined by Joseph L. Flatley.
We'll call him Lenny because that's his name he uses it.
And he will be discussing his new book, The Occult Timothy Liri,
the tarot, magical states and post terrestrial evolution.
Joseph is an investigative journalist author and publisher of the failed state update newsletter.
The short films have been featured at Three Rivers Film Festival, non-plus-fest and desert days.
His books include New Age Grifter, Speaking of the Introduction,
the true story of Gabriel of Eurantia and his cosmic family.
Lenny, thank you very much for coming on the show.
Thank you, very excited, longtime fan, first time guest.
Great, thanks. Glad we could be of service and we really appreciate your time and
what you and the book you created.
And with us too, we've got the Moon Dog Vans.
Vans, how are you doing?
I'm just fine and interesting we're talking about Timothy Liri because I actually saw him
at the Keystone in Palo Alto one time and he was in his stand-up comedy phase.
I bet you know about that, Lenny.
Yeah, stand-up philosopher.
Yeah, I've heard mixed reviews of his gigs.
I don't know what you thought of it all.
It was interesting because it was him, you know.
He tried to be funny, but you know, what can you do?
Yeah, well, we want to address all these stages that this giant of the Esoterca has gone through.
I think my first time was a lot simpler.
First time I heard of Timothy Liri was in the Moody Blue Song Legend of a Mind.
And I was, you know, 13 and like, who the hell is this guy?
And of course, later on you learn.
Yeah, I mean, I mean, I was 14 and somebody handed me one of his books and it
listed like the eight circuit model of consciousness, which, you know, I'm 14.
What do I know? Nothing.
But just, you know, it did.
It created like, it gave me a template for like understanding the world.
And I've just been fascinated by it ever since.
It hasn't run out of utility for me or, you know, it's the more I've explored it, the more
useful and interesting it's become.
So I was excited to be able to do this book.
And then of course, they renamed it when I sent it to the publisher, the occult Timothy Liri.
So it'll sit on the shelf next to the occult Elvis or the occult Bowie or the occult Silvia
Platte. Yeah, I mean, you got to go with the keywords in this day and age.
Exactly.
The days of a cool title are over.
We got to serve the algorithms, right?
Exactly.
And get to the point.
So awesome. I already see a good crowd there in the chats.
As always, if you have a chat or I'm sorry, a question or a complaint against me or a question
for Lenny, please super chat them so we can get to them.
And for everybody else, yeah, please support Am Bagnostic Radio in any way you can.
And again, I recently just put out my presentation on the dark side of Nosticism and it's done
very well and a lot of good information for members on the shadow side of Nosticism because here we
we show all sides and everything casts a shadow and everything can be weaponized and
everything is weaponized on this planet, including Timothy Liri.
So but we will certainly get into that.
So Lenny, you say you're fascinated with Larry?
Is that was there a final impetus that made you write this book or what was the
tillios behind writing this book?
You know, it's it's rare that you have a subject and you know, you've written similar books.
You know, it's rare that you have like a subject that's so well known or seemingly well known
that you can find a unique angle on.
And you know, I've been just real briefly for the people who may not know.
The 8th Circuit Model of Consciousness is Liri's schema for looking at the various levels of
human consciousness and kind of situating them on a continuum, I would say.
And it gets a lot deeper than that, but that's the basics of it.
And he splits it into two zones.
So terrestrial and extraterrestrial terrestrial consciousness, we all understand.
You get up, you're hungry, you're pissed off at your boss,
you have a cup of coffee, you have beer, you know, like terrestrial.
And then there's this whole other layer that was kind of not very useful for me because
I've not been to outer space and have not evolved fast beyond Homo sapiens sapiens.
And then one day, but you know, I've been a little bit of a cult practitioner myself.
And I kind of realized through my own work over the years that as you,
and this is, you know, maybe intellectually we all understand this,
but I had this realization where as you kind of go up the ladder of consciousness,
it becomes, you reach a point where it's consciousness, but it's not located squarely in your body.
It's, you know, we all have names for it.
And the, when I finally had the understanding of that,
the knowledge of it, Noces, as opposed to, you know, an intellectual understanding,
I felt like I finally know what the hell Timothy Leary was talking about.
And, and then, you know, he wrote a really interesting book called The Game of Life
that took these stages of consciousness and mapped them onto the tarot major arcana.
And I was like, I was like, this can be so useful. And nobody, you know, people don't really take
Leary seriously. He's been dead for 30 years. His books were not the easiest things to get through.
They kind of have this like, post hippie pre cyberpunk jargon that's kind of like Lucy Goosey.
You know, he'll do things like he'll, he'll use like several names for the same concept in the
same book and not even mentioned it. You're just supposed to, you know, I think he was trying to
like break the bounds of literature or he was trying to do like a James Joyce thing, but
not sure how effective it was. But the info was fascinating. And I felt like it was time to give
him a fair shake and to really look into his ideas. And, you know, I could have done that work
and decided that there was nothing there. And then, you know, that would have been a bummer. But
I kind of found that there is all that there and more. And yeah, a lot more quite an adventure too.
So, well, let's let's unpack his life and get into some of your concepts and what you discovered.
Of course, many who are listening are probably uninitiated into him. And it's been a while. I mean,
most people are in pop culture, knowing from his famous advocate for LSD and the whole turn on,
tune out and drop out concept. And then recently in the, whatever you want to call it, conspiracy,
mystic, conspiratorial circles, it's all about, well, Timothy Leary CIA. And that's been just
in the last 10 years, that's like a dead horse. What's your take on that, Lenny?
Well, you know, it was fascinating because that hasn't just been the last 10 years.
I mean, they've been talking about that since the 1960s. He went to prison and I'm going to
fudge the dates up, 68. And, you know, the counterculture, you know, he eventually,
the US government started spreading rumors that he was working with the government
to, like, as an informant, where a, you know, a source or, you know, trying to,
basically trying to flip on the people that he worked with in the underground. And nobody,
nobody was prosecuted because of anything he did. So if he was, if he was playing with the FB,
you know, if he was working, talking to the FBI, he was probably playing with the FBI,
trying to get out while not ratting on his buddies. But, you know, the 60s were a period they had
co-intel pro. They had the FBI going against the counterculture. The counterculture understood
that you couldn't trust anything that the government said about anybody.
Yet for some reason, they were more than happy to take the anti-Leary propaganda or misinformation
seriously. So you would have like, you know, so if you look at the underground press from the 70s
when Leary was in prison trying to get out of prison, they raped him through the coals. And
it's only continued to this day. So, you know, the questions with Leary tend to be either, was he an
informant, which if he was, he wasn't a very good one. Or was he a CIA asset, which apparently
the Kaiser Foundation of which he was a director and just about every psychology program in the
country was receiving money, you know, that was through M.K. Ultra. So there was some CIA money in
LSD business. He was the guru of LSD. But you can't say anything more than that about it.
You can't say he definitely did or definitely didn't do. The counterculture is not
what you would call the culture then, like kind of the conspiracy underground, whatever now.
They're not very good at what Robert Anton Wilson called maybe logic, which is like, I mean,
that's the rallying cry. And that's what people talk about, like not coming to these premature
conclusions. But, you know, when you're on social media, when you're talking to people in this field,
they don't seem to be able to grasp the concept or operate in that head space, which I guess the
algorithm is largely responsible. So I don't have an answer except to say that we don't really know
what was going on with Leary and the government and to say anything else is, you know, being dishonest.
Right, right. Like you said, there are arguments for arguments again. And there was a time we would
simply balance them out and go about our day. We didn't have to go to X and make a declarative system.
That's it, which is where we are today, right? Very many key and everything's black and white.
Absolutely. So it's, yeah, strange times. Yeah. And so let's talk about the 60s, obviously,
the counter-cultural, but Leary started out as a Harvard professor. What turned him to the
doc side or the esoteric of the mysticism? What made him gravitate to those areas, Lenny?
You know, he was really, he was never really satisfied with like the mainstream. I think he,
he's literally the story he tells in flashbacks, I believe, his autobiography is that
he ended up at the University of Alabama because he was kicked out of West Point and he literally
just started at the beginning of the list of universities and Alabama was at the top of the
exceptedum. So he obviously didn't put much thought into that. Then he gets to Alabama and he
wants to be a philosopher, his whole life, he wants to be a philosopher, but the philosophy line,
philosophy major line is way too long and the psychology line is right next to it and it's much
shorter. So he ended up in the psychology program. So, so you know, he was just flying by the seat
of his pants, it seems, his, you know, his whole life. So he ends up through an accident of disorder
as a lecturer at Harvard and, you know, his first wife killed herself, unhappy marriage, you know,
he, he's not comfortable in the straight-laced world. Him and Richard Albert, the future,
Barbara Amdoss, or like the two guys at Harvard that don't, that are the non-conformists. And
he went on vacation in Mexico and took psilocybin and, you know, his, what he told the people that
were president, present, Larry said that I finally understand James Joyce's Ulysses and from that
point on, the, I think his path was set, he was never going to fit in.
And that's really, yeah, that was a thrust in his life. Whatever, let's talk about some of his
earlier breakthroughs or ideas, tell the audience about the Concord Prison experiment.
Yeah, well, they were, you know, they were trying to make psychology a science because it really
wasn't, I mean, talk about the replication process, maybe it still isn't. But at the time,
they were trying to think, how can, you know, psychology and therapy and changing people's
opinions, beliefs, thoughts, ideas, so Lucy Goosey, how can we quantify it? And the figure that
they came up with was the recidivism rate. So that's a very clear indicator. It's, you know,
they've tracked X number of people who have been to prison are likely to come back to prison.
So if we can,
Therophize, Therophize, if we can develop a psychedelic therapy that works on prisoners and
the recidivism rate is decreased, that's a number we can point to. So they,
you know, they went to this prison and they developed,
they developed kind of a unique type of group therapy. Group therapy was very like underground and
not very well respected at the time, but he was one of the pioneers of that. So him and his team,
you know, developed group therapy, psychedelic assisted group therapy, they would take
psilocybin with the prisoners and it seemed to have some effect. I'm not going to try to guess the
the actual figures, the actual statistics, but what they found out is that, you know,
typical of Tim Leary and the reason he didn't fit in academia is they went in strong,
they had some strong theoretical ideas that they were going to test.
They didn't quite do the follow-up. So Rick Doblin from Maps ended up going in and looking at all the
papers afterwards and, you know, all the data and seeing that they didn't really change the
recidivism rate at all, but it's because they kind of dropped the ball, they had all these people,
they freed their mind, they let them out to society, and then they tried to do their best to do
follow-up and to do subsequent therapy, which is what would have had to have happened in order for
these changes to take hold, but they really didn't. So that's something that like Leary and his
supporters will claim was an unqualified success, but then, you know, when we look at
everything 50 years later, it turns out that there probably was something there, but
they didn't achieve the aims that they were going for.
But it was important because it was an early example of how we can approach
behavioral change and psychedelics and an institutional setting, and it's, you know, in a
world where Tim Leary wasn't vilified and wasn't thrown in prison for a joint or two joints or
whatever, could have been followed up on and could have been developed and could have, you know,
and we're starting to do that work now last 10, 20 years, but I mean, come on, that was 1965.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I know like Bill W. the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, he was doing
LSD therapy in the 60s, but then he got out once it became a, the powers that be decided to
make it illegal. And of course, probably because it was their right, it was something to open
the doorways of perception, kind of help people. And like you said, we are back to it where
these substances can help heal and better your life and open, expand our consciousness. And
you say, for the audience, what, so you say he, he smoked a couple of joints and what got
thrown in jail or actually him and his family were going on vacation to Mexico. He had already
been kicked out of Mexico. And during the Harvard years, during the summer, they had one year or
two years in a row, I can't remember. They had held these kind of, you can call them psychedelic
summer camps, psychedelic retreats, workshops in Mexico. And and Leary, you know, eventually the
Mexican government realized what was going on and checked them out. And they gave him a letter.
And I think, I think the specifics was he's not allowed to reent, he's allowed to visit,
but he's not allowed to work in Mexico or something. So him and his family drove into Mexico and
returned away at the border. And when they came back through the border, his daughter who was a
minor at the time had like two joints, their little bit of pot. I think she just had a little bit
of pot and he took responsibility, you know, it's his daughter. So that began the legal
trouble with the United States government. And you know, Leary took big swings. And there was
a period of time where it seems like he was always hitting the ball. So instead of, you know,
taking a slap on the wrist and, you know, getting a little fine or whatever, he fought this all the
way to the Supreme Court. And there was actually a period of time where the marijuana tax was
declared illegal. And pot was technically legal in the United States for a very brief period of
time because Timothy Leary won this Supreme Court case. And then like a year later, almost to the day,
something very similar happened. A cop pulled him over and found, and I believe it was planted,
like a joint in the, in the ashtray of the car. And that started his legal problems again.
And he didn't get off so lucky that time. He fought him, did not win, and ended up in prison in
California. And then he stayed there for a few years, and then there's of course the famous escape,
right? Him on the run. Yeah, yeah, I'm so bad at dates, but yeah, I don't even believe it was a
year. But yeah, he, he, uh, cooked up a plan. His outside supporters cook up a plan with the,
whether underground in the Black Panthers, where he, uh, climbed, he was, when he was sent to prison,
they gave him a personality test to determine like where he belonged in the prison if he was in
escape risk and so luckily, him and his team had designed the personality test. So he knew how to
answer it. And he answered it. So it was like, this guy's not very smart. He's not, you know, he's,
he's an old man, put him in the garden, put him somewhere low key. So, you know, so they put him
in this like minimum security prison and he, uh, climbed a telephone pole ran across the
top of the prison, the cell block, uh, shimmyed over on a power line, which can you imagine? Or,
you know, you know, okay, some sort of cable and, um, dropped on the other side of the fence and
uh, whether underground picked him up and they drove his prison closed
down towards Mexico so that they, so the police would find it and thought that he was going to
Mexico. And then he flew to Algiers where the Black Panthers had their, um, had their kind of
embassy in exile or their American government in exile. You know, Algieria had recently become
independent, uh, when it's independence from France and became a, you know, socialist government
and they really just saw stuff like this, like supporting the Black Panthers or supporting
Timothy Leary as a, you know, propaganda prank, you know, and, uh, and Tim, they didn't, they didn't
really know who he was and they didn't necessarily want him there. So, you know, you find these
newspapers and it's like leading Black intellectual Timothy Leary is coming to Algieria because they
kind of like lied at Algieria and government don't even get him in and they had to like bribe
the Black Panthers because they didn't want him there. But he ended up in Algieria. Yeah, and then
he's traveling and writing stuff coming to ideas. Eventually, they'd nap him in more Afghanistan
and then he goes back and, uh, yeah, the great story continues. Uh, and, uh, for his ideas too, um,
he believed that, like, Gurgif humans were robots and it was a question of just waking us up
to our true nature, right? Yeah, Gurgif was always a huge influence on him and it was something that,
um, you know, he never really necessarily took the time to like, first of all, his work
happened in different stages and he would just, you know, he lived a life of 10 men at least.
So it's like not always clear from his work where he gets these ideas. In fact, the Gurgif people in
the United States didn't really seem to like Tim or his crew, um, probably the psychedelic drugs.
Um, but yeah, Gurgif was always a major influence. Um, you go to like, when you read, um,
um, accounts of Melbrook, his, his psychedelic compound that him and his, his, uh, team had in
upstate New York in the mid to late 60s, you know, there's, they're experimenting as much with like
Gurgifian techniques as they are with psychedelics. Yeah, for sure. Any, he, again, I know, I don't,
I don't want to go linear, but I don't want to get too far and I want to make sure we cover all of, uh,
the quote unquote theology. He really thought he was a reincarnation of Alistair Crowley.
He, um, he believed that now we're going into the, uh, the search, eight circuits of consciousness and,
which he wrote while he was on the run, right? Well, he, he was in sort of, he, he developed it
over years, but it was in prison that he really nailed it. And, um,
um, in a book called, uh, neuro, neurologic. And he believed that one level of consciousness was
the perception and communication with, uh, information at the level of DNA. And he believed that
anybody who had a strong imprint or a strong influence on kind of the collective unconsciousness
or your, your, your consciousness could be considered a reincarnation. So yeah, you know,
Tim was born in 26 Crowley died in 1947, but using Timothy Leary's, uh, definition of
a reincarnation he could claim to be reincarnated, a reincarnation of Crowley.
Yeah, I love it. Yeah. Well, break the rules, you know, mystics always think, uh, well,
we don't believe in linear time and space and it's all an illusion. Why do we have to follow all these,
you know, logical rules of, uh, mysticism, right? Yeah. I mean, the ultimate, I think message less
than of all this, which, you know, can't be stated enough is like all these definitions and
discussions are really very useful. They're not complete. They don't contain all the information.
They don't complete contain the whole story. So, um, so yeah, so Leary and his colleagues,
Robert Anton Wilson and whoever else were very much aware that they were creating a framework for
under for working with a reality that is ultimately not understandable. Yeah. Very true and very
wise, very sapient. Ben, uh, do you have a question or a question from his, uh, audience? Yeah,
let's start with Graham's question, which is, uh, what are your thoughts on neurocomics comic book
that Leary did in 1979 with George the Capitol? Leo, it's awesome. It's, it's amazing. Um, this,
this comic book is the one shot comic book last gasp in San Francisco, the classic
indie underground comic book publisher. And it's basically, you know, I mentioned in the
beginning of the show about how impenetrable Leary's books can be. This was kind of like a rewriting of,
it's almost like a children's book about the eight circuits of consciousness and it's, it's,
it's kind of like an adaptation of info psychology, you want to Tim's books into something that's
readable and amusing and the arts great. Um, I, I wish it was available in print. Um, you can find
the PDF easily online, but it should be, I wish it was in my collection. Great. Well, grab the PDF,
I guess, although I'm sure you haven't already. Hey, um, I wonder if it was a delicious spring
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Miguel, should we go over the eight levels of consciousness for the audience?
Okay, sure. Everybody should address it.
Yeah, go ahead, Lenny. Can you go over the eight levels for us, the terrestrial and the post terrestrial levels?
Yeah, sir. So these, you know, these work, it's a lot of, my headphones keep falling out.
There's a few different, like, Leary, his ideas often overlap in different disciplines.
So the circuits are applicable to our conscious states, but also applicable to the stages of evolution.
So like he would, the earliest, kind of most primitive circuit, we'll call them circuits,
that's what he called them, a level of consciousness circuit is the oral or bio-survival circuit,
and that is primarily concerned with our survival. It places reality on a kind of either or
two-dimensional plane, either something is safe or dangerous. If it's safe, you go towards it,
you're dangerous, go, you float away from it, and it kind of, it first developed
when the very first one-celled organisms developed, but we, you know, but our consciousness,
the way humans operate is very much has that same circuit on the, you know, the earliest levels,
so like a newborn could be said to exist primarily in the bio-survival circuit.
The second circuit, he called emotional territorial, and it's about, it's basically about politics,
it's, and that's why I have no respect for politics or politicians. You know,
it's like, it's all about power games, it's taking control, it's being a top dog or being the
bottom dog, and it developed when mammals started developing pack hierarchies. From there,
the next level, which I guess humans would start to experiment with as they start working with
language, time-binding or semantic, time-binding because language not only allows us to formulate ideas,
but it allows us to transmit them through time. And then the final terrestrial circuit is the moral
or social sexual circuit, and it's called that because, you know, when we reach sexual maturity,
it's not, we aren't as, you know, as beings, as humans, we're not just having sex, but we're also
starting families, we're creating morality, we're creating morality to preserve the family unit,
and also to preserve our genetic influence through, you know, our offspring. And really, that's all that,
it's kind of all that most of us experience, like there are these other levels that
Tim and his colleagues experience and, you know, probably presumably a lot of your readers have
experienced their listeners through the use of like psychedelic trucks, but those are, but they're
literally believed that those were reserved, really, they're kept in the back of our mind for when
we become a space-faring species and we'll need to have these new capabilities, such as
circuit five, the neurosomatic circuit. It's, it's the first circuit that when you, when you use
this circuit, it detaches you from the first four circuit realities. So it's, it's kind of the
prelude for becoming a space-faring species, and he likened it, he said that the way to unlock that
was basically THC. So when you're smoking a joint, you're kind of experiencing what
you're experiencing a small taste of the neurosomatic circuit. The neurogenetic circuit, or circuit six,
that would be a cosmic records, that would be experiencing your DNA, that communicating with your
DNA, that would be any form of magic that involves leaving your non-local, leaving yourself, and
you know, going to another world. Metaprogramming circuit, circuit seven, that's kind of,
that's when you, you start, when you reach the type of consciousness where you can start
changing all the other circuits, all the other things about you that you don't like. And then
the non-local quantum circuit, circuit eight, that is, that's essentially cosmic consciousness,
that's, that's, he thought, I don't know if this is scientifically accurate, but he thought that
when man, when humankind went to the cosmos and entered like the black hole to center the
galaxy, that you would dissolve, you would no longer have anything to do with circuits one through
seven, you would be part of the universe. And, and that's something that's so abstract that I
can't even really wager guess about much farther than that. But, you know, the, the first four
circuits are very useful for people like working in psychedelic therapy or just in any kind of
therapy. In my book, I've talked to, to clinicians who use that, those as a framework for, you know,
treating patients or helping patients treat themselves. The next four really are useful when you talk
about, I think these novel states that you might, that a mystic or a yogi or advanced LSD adapt
to might come across. And they're, they're much harder to discuss because they're so abstract.
But yeah, in fact, circuit eight was,
Leary didn't kind of formulate that until later in the, later in his work, he, for the first writing
about, the first writings of neurologic, which is what he called the science, restricted it to seven
circuits. And then he kind of decided that there must be an eight circuit. I literally think he
was going four and four. Like, it's got to line up. The math has to be good. So that sounds right.
Did he himself ever have a mystical experience, you know, the level eight, you know, through his LSD
adventures or other? Oh, I believe. Yeah. He, um, yeah, if you, when you read his work, it's,
it's very much, he was a mystic. Like, he, he was absolutely a mystic. He was more of a mystic
than he was a scientist. He, um, he was more of a mystic than anything else, really. I mean,
like, I like, I call his work pseudoscience. And I don't mean that in the, uh,
you know, in the way that we cast aspersions on anything we don't believe in. Oh, that's
pseudoscience. But it's like, he wasn't operating under a scientific framework. He knew science.
He understood science. But he was talking about things that science could never quantify. Like,
you know, figuring out how many angels can fit on the head of a pen or, you know, a power science,
right? Power science. Yeah. Yeah. At the same time, he, you're talking about, yes, going to the
stars, but he believed in extraterrestrial life. He had a star seed transmission in prison,
73. Yeah. So he, I believe he used the word star seed prior to the new age concept of the star
seed. I think they kind of, they bought, you know, all these, when you get into the 70s and you
get the new age, just like a mad, you know, mad, mad rush to borrow everybody's terms and add to it.
And so, you know, self printed stapled books and stuff. But, um, he believed, yeah, he absolutely
believed that higher intelligence existed elsewhere in the universe. He also absolutely believed that,
um, it was not physically present in this universe. Like, he thought it would, he, if you said, well,
he, I mean, I'm basically quoting him, but if you told him that like, some higher intelligence,
physically came from another part of the universe to like, uh, anally probe you, or to like,
whatever, you know, he would say, you're nuts. Like, they're going to use the nervous system.
They're going to use, you know, they're, they're not going to do anything so crude as hop into a
physical ship and go across the galaxy. Um, you know, he, uh, he believed that, you know, what we call
spirits or gods or whatever are higher intelligence communicating with us using the best technology,
which is this, you know, billions year old bio computer that's up here.
Naturally, he believed they were taking LSD, right? All the advanced space guys.
I think, I don't think they needed it. I think it was like, it's like, it's us poor primitive humans
that need molecules. That's what you know, we said, uh, he was, it wasn't against in the
reagents or psychedelic, but he said, you know, the human mind is an adventure in itself.
You just go in and the high weirdness is there. And Lenny, but he also, again, he seems such,
he's such a polymath when it comes to, uh, the esoteric, but he also thought that all the keys were
about DNA and evolution too, right? Well, he, yeah. So, I mean, he was using the science of his time,
which is pretty much the science of our time. It wasn't that long ago to explain what mystics and
adepts used their language to explain hundreds of years ago. Yeah, so like, uh, so anything,
anything that, you know, someone, a magician or an adept would experience whether it's, you know,
something, something from like effects magic to, um,
to telekinesis or, you know, telepathy rather or any of these things that we, you know, are,
our magical colleagues or ourselves have experienced can be fit into his schema of consciousness.
Um, it's just, I mean, it really is, it's, it's just like a framework for understanding consciousness,
uh, and, but that takes in advance, that takes in not only mundane consciousness, but, uh,
these novel states that people don't experience unless they are, you know, either meditating for years
or performing ceremonial magic or taking a heroic dose of mushrooms.
Do you think that is at the last four kind of skewed towards, um, you know, the, the idea of
taking the mind altering substances? Well, I mean, he thought that all eight levels of consciousness
were unlocked by kind of specific chemical keys. Um, if you want, if you want to experience like a pure,
a pure undiluted, uh, circuit one, uh, experience, uh, take a shot of heroin. Now, I'm not,
I'm not suggesting you do that, but I mean, that is the chemical key for that, or, um, circuit two
booze, you know, people drink, you know, people get drunk and all of a sudden, either, they're crying
or they're a tough guy, they're rowdy, they know where they are on the, you know, on the,
the ladder as far as like who's the boss and who's not? Um, circuit three, that's more of like a speedy
thing, you know, you get locked into, you know, you get a rid of limb prescription and now you can
concentrate and you get locked into word games and, you know, kind of that thing. Uh, circuit four, I
don't actually, I don't know what circuit four would be, whatever, uh, um, coffee, coffee,
oxytocin or something, um, blue two, um, yeah, yeah, three at a clock, we're going to game.
Oh, yeah, a droog, um, you know, circuit five, uh, marijuana, circuit six mushrooms, circuit seven,
LSD, circuit eight, that's just circuit eight is so beyond human experience that that's,
that's like what, I mean, that's almost what, basically what happens after you leave,
you're no longer human, that's like, that's kind of like the catch-all for everything. It's the, um,
like, you know, cathar or the top of the tree of light.
Sisters, I have a theory. I have a theory that every genre of music has an associated drug.
And I wonder, the Timothy Illieri ever make that kind of connection, you know, like,
like a bebop jazz music would be speed. And of course, the grateful Ted for marijuana and,
and so forth. There's alcohol music, you know, like the blues, I'll, I'll call music the
blues. He certainly wrote about, um, his, uh, anthology of the sixties writing the politics of
Exodus, politics of ecstasy. He wrote about, you know, art as being different types of art being
exemplified by different levels of consciousness or vice versa. Um, there's an interesting, uh,
essay he writes about the Beatles where he like, kind of talks about each individual Beatles and
archetypal purse type of a individual. But, um, I mean, he recorded an album in the 1970s,
a, a teenage crowd rock band called Ashraw Temple, uh, recorded an album with him while he was
a fugitive. He, uh, it was called Seven Up because there were only seven circuits in this scheme
at the time. And also because they were like filling up a seven up bottle with acid and all
taking hits from it, swigs from it. So, um, so he did this kind of like weird crowd rock, noisy,
spoken word album about the seven circuits. It's really cool. It's on Spotify or YouTube. However,
people listen to music. Very cool. And something that we can connect to today,
uh, speaking of his influence is a huge influence and impact on culture is his acronym, uh,
Smile with a two with the after the eye in the L, which, uh, basically summarizes the,
Larry's futuristic version, if you would. Could you explain that, Lenny? Sure. Smile. So,
SMI squared, LE, space migration, intelligence, increase, and life extension. That was, um,
his formulation for, you know, why we are put on this planet. So I actually, when I went to
New York Public Library where they housed the Leary Archives, I found a really cool letter
that he wrote to Robert Anton Wilson, where he's talking about, you know, Crowley's dictum,
do what that will. He said, that's great, but most Thelamites, they go, you know, you ask,
you know, do what that will is great, but you have to ask yourself, what will you do after,
you know, after you've decided that you're going to do your will, he, you know, Larry wrote in
this letter that most Thelamites make themselves pompous asses, but what he would suggest is Smile,
space migration, intelligence, increase, life extension, space migration because we're not going
to get past our four primitive, uh, circuits that are causing war, poverty, violence, etc.
As long as we're stuck on this, this rock with limited natural resources, intelligence increase
because if you're still a dumb human, it doesn't matter if you, if you get off the planet,
if you're Elon Musk and you make it to Mars, if you're still Elon Musk, you know, so there has to be
increased intelligence that corresponds with space migration and life extension.
All three of these things work together and, you know, if you're stuck on the earth and you live
to be, you know, 500 and you're not any smarter, you're not doing anybody any favors,
he talked about how like, like, hell to him would be, you know, we get life extension and he's stuck
on the earth listening to, you know, going to concerts of like 500-year-old Frank Sinatra or
500-year-old John Denver. So he's like, we need it all. And, and he saw it as, you know,
Robert Anton Wilson, a great gift was given to me and to us all, I think, when, um, while I was writing
this book, he layered us, pressed, put out the Robert Anton Wilson's book, Line of Light, which is a,
an examination of Crowley that was not published until, was it, 2024, I think. And,
but that was a lot of the research for me. It was like, you know, it was like, oh my god,
but it was like the perfect reference book. So, um, one of the things that Wilson did for Leary,
or for, excuse me, for Crowley, what I did for Leary is he goes through Crowley and kind of looks at
how his work lines up with current science. And he kind of found all these passages in magic
and theory and practice and the, and other Crowley works that talk about
cosmic consciousness and talk about seemingly talk about evolution and DNA, even though DNA was
in a concept when Crowley wrote them. And, um, in much the same way, Leary's work like smile or turn
on to an indrop out. I mean, that's magic, that's magical ritual right there. Um, he discovered
magical ritual by taking a bunch of acid with his friends and, you know, stumbled upon it. So,
yeah, so smile is a, it's not just like a science fiction or scientific idea. It's also a
philosophical and spiritual technology. And you can see smile today and much of, uh,
perhaps speaking of the dark side, the shadow side of Timothy Leary, but you can see it running
through Silicon Valley, right? In theage and space exploration, manipulating consciousness and DNA,
all those things. Elon Musk. He'll all those cats. Well, and that to the point, you know, he,
Leary would have said, because he basically said the same thing about the political figures of his
time is that these are people stuck in like second circuit, territorial, mines, frames. So, they have
like, you know, so now we're at a point as a species or as a culture or whatever, where we have
access to like these technologies, these advanced technologies, but we're still, you know,
we're still babies. We're still like, like four-year-olds. And so, we're not using them well.
You know, he saw, like, Leary wrote something really interesting. It's a, it's a brief,
it's a brief passage in his book, The Game of Life, and it's almost, probably almost,
would seem flip if you, you know, if you were not in the right, read it. But he talked about
eugenics, and he talked about Hitler specifically as, like, an immature response to the,
to like the six circuit. So, six circuit collective neurogenetic, it's awareness of genes,
and it's awareness of, you know, something connecting humans of archetypes of a lot of these
topics that A on bite listeners would be familiar with, but it's not viewing them in a holistic or
enlightened way, it's viewing them as, you know, an excuse for genocide. It's just awful,
obviously. It's sort of polluted with two, right? Yeah, well, that's exactly it. So, so,
Leary believed that, whatever, you know, as if you were using the, the schema, the eight circuit
model to, to look at individual personality, which it can, we all have one of the first four
circuits that we have, he called it imprint, because he borrowed from imprinting Conrad Lorenz,
so I'll use his word. So, like, we all have like a circuit that is our most heavily imprinted.
So, like, if Peter Teal has the strongest imprint on circuit two, and it's a negative imprint
in the sense that he always feels like he's got to be the boss, or he's got to be a bully,
every, all other information is going to be filtered through that. He's not going to look at
any of these other questions without trying to figure out how can I make money off it,
how can I be the boss of it? And that's why, that's why evolution in Leary's schema would be
progressively relaxing the hold of the terrestrial imprints, and then moving on to
experiencing the extraterrestrial imprints. Antaro Ali, are you familiar with his work?
He is, he is one of the new, the original Falcon press writers. He, he expanded on Timothy
Leary's work quite a bit. He passed away like two years ago. He kind of discovered, he worked with
these circuits through his own spiritual practice for years and years and years and years,
and since the 80s. And he kind of discovered that there are connections between the first four
in the human personality, there's connections between the first four circuits and
the five through eight. So like, circuit one and circuit five are connected in a way that if you
don't have a strong, healthy environment, a bio-survival circuit, then you're going to like go off the
deep end if you indulge the neurosomatic circuit or the territorial, emotional territorial circuit
corresponds to the collective neurogenetic circuit. So there's definitely some meditations or theorizing
that can be done if you pick up my book and read about the different circuits and think about how
they're connected. Yeah, what about love? I don't, I think these are all self, you know,
almost self-sistic or not self-sistic, but you know, narcissistic type of
viewpoint, but there's no love in any of them that I see. Maybe I'm not seeing it.
I don't know that love is a circuit. I think it's more like a force or a, you know, it's like
it's an emotion. It's an emotion that kind of you would hope would inform all of these, right?
Did Larry talk about love, you know? I don't know that, I don't know, I don't know that he
addressed it in the way that you're describing. That's actually something I never thought of.
I mean, in my mind, that's something that should be the basis of everything, right?
Yeah. It's like, it's like, what about gravity? It's like, well,
but I mean, that's a meditation point. Yeah, I think probably more of empathy because he really was
the foundation was how to free mankind, right? Lenny? How to get us to our potential as human beings
and as a culture and a society on earth and in the universe? Yeah, and I mean, he was a
crowlyite. He was a, he was a thalamite. He thought that love is the law, love, under will.
And this is, you know, a technology for, or a framework for understanding, you know, you know,
dividing personality and spirituality and evolution into pieces.
And, but I mean, for me, the most fascinating part is the, the correspondences with the
tarot trumps. He, you know, he had, there are 22 trumps. He had 24 stages of evolution because each
of these circuits had three stages. And so that meant he had to invent two tarot cards, but
which I don't necessarily think he had to, but that's, that's one of the star maker and the velvet
hole. Yeah, that's what he called them. So his idea was that, so he was talking about, you know,
when we get to circuit eight, we're talking about the very end point of the end of human experience,
beyond like what we can even hope to achieve after we've climbed the letter of evolution,
which I don't think, I think you can fudge it and just say, well, maybe we'll sum it up in one
card because it's all abstract and meaningless anyways. I mean, at that point, what the hell are you
really talking about? Yeah, that's for sure. And to stress your book is not just a history book,
you have exercises and applications. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, that was the kind of the novel approach
was kind of like where the rubber meets the road is like, if, if Larry's writing can really be,
you know, if Larry's stages of evolution and his circuits can really be tied to tarot cards, then
that means that reverse also has to be true. You have to be able to take tarot cards and do exercises
and do whatever you do with tarot cards, and it has to be applicable to Larry's schema. So, again,
it was like an experiment. Can I make this work? And I think it works. I do readings with the
Larry's version of the deck that I, I mean, he didn't create a version of the tarot deck. I think
my publisher was a little confused because I think they thought when I pitched the book, maybe I was
not very clear. They thought that there was like a Timothy Leary tarot deck lying around, but
there wasn't. So I had to make one for myself. And it works. It works really well. I mean, it's
you know, this correspondences in Western occultism, astrology, tree of life,
tarot cards, now Timothy Leary, all correspond to each other. And if you look at, say,
if you do a reading, a tarot reading, but then you also refer to like the
astrological signs or symbols or concepts that the tarot cards read and read up on them,
tarot cards correspond to and read up on them. It adds a level of,
you know, it adds another level of interpretation, which, which, and I found that,
Leary, you know, you kind of had to tweet because Leary, like I said, he wasn't the clearest writer,
and a lot of it was like this like weird pop science fiction jargon. And, but, you know,
when you get down to the good stuff of what, what Leary was saying, what Robert Anton Wilson was saying,
it's really, really interesting. So I think that's what my book is. I think it's kind of like a
translation from Leary speak into English. And you do have a great job while we're getting to the
advance any last question from the audience. Yes, we did have one, didn't we? We had
Frank Sidebottom, a member of our YouTube channel. Did Leary die tripping? Like,
Aldous Huxley. And I was just going to ask about raw, but never mind now.
Since you just talked about him. Yeah, no, I don't, I mean,
Leary died of prostate cancer, but the time they caught it, it was an operable. And he was in
great pain and not really, it wasn't high though. Did he take LSD or something?
Well, they took, well, I'm trying to get to that. It's not as simple as like he just took a hit.
I mean, he was like on his deathbed, and he was incredible pain and not all there, but
he did have a regimen and they put it on his website. He had a regimen of,
of drugs and various drugs, psychedelic drugs and
pain, oh, mind altering drugs, pain killers that he was taking. And I'm sure he had plenty of
that in his body. I'm sure he had a helium and pot and whatever, but I don't, I don't know
that he was tripping because like also when Huxley died, it was far different. His wife,
Barbara Huxley gave him LSD and guided him through a trip using the betting book of the dead,
but Tim was too far gone at that point to undertake any psychedelic experiments on his deathbed.
Okay, you know, the other question I had as we end the show was that since he was familiar with
Aldous Huxley's work and Aldous Huxley was definitely a big proponent of, I think he coined the
term perennial philosophy. I'm surprised that if Tim, if the Leary didn't hook onto that and,
you know, associate the eighth level with, you know, the perennial philosophy.
Well, you know, when the Harvard silocybe and experiment started
working, you know, researching psychedelics, they quickly found that the academic literature was
underwhelming to say the least. So they reached out to anybody who had, anybody who had plumbed
these depths in the past. So the beats Aldous Huxley, I think Aldous Huxley was like a,
was a fellow at Harvard or, you know, like Huxley was brought on to the team basically. So yeah,
so they worked together on this. Very interesting. Right. Thanks. It was awesome. Well, we are getting
to the end. I guess one last question for me, Lenny. What do you think is his legacy on modern times?
That is a really good question because he's kind of forgotten. He's kind of, you know, he,
you know, he's, I don't know what his legacy would be aside from, like,
whatever his legacy is, it's not his work in magic, mysticism,
these things that are so important to so many people now, you may be even more than were when he
was writing about them. So I'm hoping that this book is like a small part in that renaissance.
So ask, ask me in five years. We'll probably have a better answer.
For sure. For sure. Awesome. Well, we are at the end again for the audience. This is an open
podcast, but for members on Patreon, YouTube, or AB Prime, there is an audio bonus that summarizes
thing. There will be some gated podcasts next week as we get our hands dirty into more intense
narcissism on runaki, book of revelation, archons, quantum physics, and the demure. So please
join support, join the revolution of the spirit and the mind and help keep growing this red pill
cafeteria as I call it. Yes, shining crazy diamonds. And yeah, great show. Lenny, I have your
your website, have your book, the Colt Timothy Larry on the show notes anywhere else you want to
send people. Uh, yeah. So my sub stack where I cover a lot of things, including Larry and
Strange, this unique time we find ourselves in right now. It's called failed state update.
You can google that or you can just go to Lennyflatley.substac.com. That's the newsletter. And
if you go there, you'll get everything. Check it out, people. Check it out. Good content. Well,
first I will say Vance, thanks for keeping this company on this ride. Oh, it's a great trip,
wasn't it? I was glad to be here. No, Bernie. Thanks Lenny. And yeah, it was very interesting.
Thanks for all your cool info on Timothy Leary. Oh, thank you guys. It was a pleasure.
It was a blast. Yes, Lenny. Really appreciate you coming on the show. Glad you put this book out
because these figures are all important, especially in this age where nobody knows what's up and
down and nobody knows which is the way through. So they went through a lot of this stuff. So they
have some wisdom and their ideas are perennial, as I say. So we'll keep doing it. We'll keep doing
it. Yes, this is PKD approved for sure. Yeah. All these guys like Phil O'Kee, Dig, Timothy Leary,
Terrence McKenna, they're all trying to figure this grand theory of everything and they gave
us some great stuff. So we'll keep their memories alive in Robert Anton Wilson, all those 70s cats.
So, but that's it. We are at the end again. Please support AMBite and next week we've got some
great shows until then. Yes, have a good weekend and I hope you get to the to the eighth level of
your life, even if it's briefly. Take care everybody and thanks. Thanks guys.
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