The Politics of Ecstasy (Leary, Timothy)

Read it or cop out

interesting

Great book!

I have read through many of Leary's books, and this is the best, hands down. This is Leary at his most coherent, insightful, provocative, and enlightening. Many of his other books fail in one or more of those areas, but this collection (of essays, interviews, magazine articles, and so on) of his work offers a huge amount of food for thought. I don't know if it is 'the most influential book I have ever read,' as one reviewer put it, but it is certainly among the top ten.What's so great about this book? The insanely optimistic and original ideas, of course. The central idea running through the entire book, and much of Leary's life, is that YOU are responsible for your own neurochemistry, and hence states of consciousness. You have (or rather, ought to have, as no government in the world actually dares to follow such sane policies) the right to alter your own consciousness in any way you see fit, provided you don't harm or try to enforce an alteration of consciousness upon another.This message almost seems simple, self-evident - yet as anyone can plainly see, nowhere is it legally permitted (never mind culturally encouraged). Many religious groups or philosophies advocate some kind of self-change or altered states, and many psychiatrists and neurologists will advocate some kind of improved neurochemistry to help prevent or ameliorate mental diseases and so on. But no one has ever before (as far as I know) or since (again, as far as I know) advocated such a radical and potentially liberating idea as: alter your own neurochemistry as you see fit; everyone is free to discover for themselves what is within/beyond.It may be easy to be blinded by the fact that LSD apparently was not the wonder drug that Leary and his ilk were looking for. The changes don't seem to last for most people, and as is evident nowadays, it can be taken frivolously and with no insight gleaned whatsoever. But Leary was already (way back when this was written) talking way beyond LSD - the substances just didn't, and still don't, exist. He was advocating direct synaptic manipulation to engineer learning at the neuronal level (using RNA or proteins), and also to engineer the de-imprinting of fixed habits and concepts that are of no value to the individual, or even detrimental to him or her. He also advocated using various substances to enhance the sensitivity and sensuousness of sexual relations with one's partner. Further, he was recommending a thorough licensing system for psychedelic usage, such that people could be well trained by experienced guides to explore whatever it is that psychedelics have to teach us. If any or all of these ideas had been seriously followed up, we'd be living in a very different (and much improved, methinks) world today.I feel this review has failed to convey the truly revolutionary nature of what is being said in this book - you should really just read it for yourself. I am about to start my PhD in Psychology and I only wish someone like this, with this kind of originality and vision, was still stirring things up in the academic world. Rest in peace, ye Irish madman. I encourage everyone to read this book and take to heart the wildly optimistic vision of humanity's potential and future contained therein.

Wow! What a book! Leary is a real psychedelic guru, not in the orthodox sense, but really a man ahead of his time, a Galileo in the charter exploration of the mind and consciousness. He started off as a conservative Harvard professor, yet not so conservative, as he had his own ideas. But after his religious experience, and that's what psychedelics do - the expanding of your consciousness to a religious experience - he became aware of the societal and cultural chessboards - the games - and here became outspoken apart from the Harvard rationalistic mindset which rests on only one static frame of a multi-dimensional, dynamic existence.I read this book smiling, over and over again. I walked down the street with a smile, mostly for Leary's optimism, then his frank and bold statements, which in most part I agree with. His style sometimes just makes you laugh and smile and say to yourself "I wish I had the guts enough say this." And although his predictions did not come true, you can't help but subjectively comprehend the 60's atmosphere, enveloped with the baby boomers in their youth taking up the majority of the population and their experiential drug use in psychedelics, which in turn, brought forth all the femininity of creativeness, patience, tolerance, peacefulness and artistic development that was permeating the entire American culture and spreading around the world and thus brought on the male dominated aggression of control and police power. So Leary's optimism and predictions were really a good assessment of the time despite their failure to come true. And nothing makes me sadder than to see his predictions fail from the creative mind expanding youth to our current male power, controlling and agressive society.You can write Leary off as a kook from the conservative's point of view, the rationalist who never "experienced," and that's the KEY here - never experienced a trip under favorable circumstances and environment. Leary is the same as other heretics and kooks of history, a Galileo of mind exploration and conscious expansion, a Guttenberg of exoteric enlightenment, as in this book as well as one who clearly recognizes the need for new symbols that relate the esoteric experience of LSD, of cellular memories, of DNA language outside the mind, of experiential journeys that can only be told under a new language, as the microscope discovered new world had brought forth, as quantum physics brought forth and every other new fields of exploration that can only be described outside the current symbols we currently use.Leary on page 141: The lesson I have learned from over 300 sessions, and which I have been passing on to others, can be stated in 6 syllables: Turn on, tune in, drop out. "Turn on" means to contact the ancient energies and wisdoms that are built into your nervous system. They provide unspeakable pleasure and revelation. "Tune in" means to harness and communicate these new perspectives in a harmonious dance with the external world. "Drop out' means to detach yourself from the tribal game. Current models of social adjustment - mechanized, computerized, socialized, intellectualized, televised, Sanforized - make no sense to the new LSD generation, who see clearly that American society is becoming an air-conditioned anthill. In every generation of human history, thoughtful men have turned on and dropped out of the tribal game and thus stimulated the larger society to lurch ahead. Every historical advance has resulted from the stern pressure of visionary men who have declared their independence from the game.On page 196: 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 religious 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, and the much more complicated and pleasurable and revelatory messages of cellular energy. To a Hindu, the spiritual quest is internal.Different sects of oriental religion use different methods and different body organs to find God. The Shivites use the senses; the followers of Vishnu are concerned with cellular wisdom, contacting the endless flow of reincarnation wisdom which biochemists would call protein wisdom of the DNA code; Buddhist manuals on consciousness expansion are concerned with the flash, the white light of the void, the ecstatic union that comes when you're completely turned on, beyond the senses, beyond the body.On page 202-203: What we're doing for the mind is what the microbiologists did for the external science 300 years ago when they discovered the microscope. And they made this incredible discovery that life, health, growth, every form of organic life, is based on the cell, which is invisible.You've never seen a cell; what do you think of that? Yet it's the key to everything that happens to a living creature. I'm simply saying that same thing from the mental, psychological standpoint, that there are wisdoms, lawful units inside the nervous system, invisible to the symbolic mind, which determine almost everything.And I don't consider myself that mystical - unless you'd call someone who looks through a microscope a mystic, because he's telling you about something for which you don't have the symbols. Or the astronomer who detects a quasar and speculates about it.On page 208: Every time you take LSD you completely suspend - you step outside of - the symbolic chessboard which you have built up over the long years of social conditioning. And you whirl through different levels of neurological and cellular energy, continually flowing and changing.Your symbolic mind is flashing in and out. You never love your mind during and LSD session. It's always there, but it's one of a thousand cameras that are flashing away. Of course, the LSD freak-out, or paranoia, is where the symbolic mind freezes any aspect of the LSD session and defines a new reality, which can be positive or negative.Read this book.

Arrived as described and in the expected time frame.

If you are a child of the 60s, you need to read this book.

Thank you to you....?

Book arrived quickly and in good condition, sadly not the edition advertised. Hardback not paperback and not the complete original work...