High Priest (Leary, Timothy)

It reads like a journal somewhat worthwhile

It's a great book. Really interesting.The reason why I don't give it 5 stars is that it's somewhat complicated to read.The author has (for some reason) mixed some of his texts, so that you get a little bit of one part,and then a little bit from another part, then a bid more from the first part.....and so on and so forth. It's like a puzzle.I recommend you read text with large margin first (most interesting), and then start all over and read the rest.

A simultaneous explanation of why, and why not. The depiction of an appealing experience that within itself shows glimpses of why it may be best left wonderment.You can get so trapped in the micro while reading this book that it's easy to forget that these thought processes helped shape this country, and etched themselves in time to never be forgotten.Basically Dr Leary takes us through several "trips" in different settings, and with different participants and hallucinogens. If you're waivering on whether or not this book is for you, I would say the entertainment value alone is worth it. If the subjectmatter is of some interest to you, you'll love it.

I imagine Leary, the wise old magician-bard, editing these forbidden notes on cosmic secrets with a sly wink and a knowing smile.“You have to dilate your pupils to become a visionary.”Wake up, Tim says. The Matrix has you… Behind this “marionette show” of normal reality is a “whirling dance of pure energy”, the “central eye,” “the one.” You’re trapped in a mental prison of your own making. Break out! Question authority. Think for yourself. Start your own church. Become your own savior. DYOR (Do your own research).”Psychedelic research is experimental philosophy, empirical metaphysics, visionary science ... a do-it-yourself approach to Salvation.”Leary’s story as one of the founding members of the American counterculture movement is one of rash iconoclasm that arguably proved counterproductive for his ambitious goals of turning on the nation (“ecstasy above ground”) and utopian peace. And yet, just as in the strangely similar story of Jesus Christ, Timothy Leary’s message echoes loudly in the culture he helped shape. His wisdom speaks for itself, for those willing to listen past the headliners: “escaped prisoner” and “teen drug advocate.” The man should certainly have a thrilling movie based on his real life. Putting that aside, though, if I had to choose one book as my personal sacred text, it might be this one. The more I read it, the more I found the title to be suitable (and not ironically).”The person who remembers, who reminds, who acts as an alarm clock, who becomes time-and-weather announcer for central broadcasting, station RDNA—this person is called guru. Prophet.”The High Priest finds us in a desolate place:”From the standpoint of the isolated individual, life is a science-fiction horror story… while he pursues his dinner he is hurtling towards his own decomposition.”The solution?Turn-on. Change your perspective. Wake up from the dream. See through the illusion.”Find a sacrament which returns you to the temple of God, your own body. Go out of your mind. Get high.””The nervous system is an uncontrollable galaxy of mirrors within mirrors. The mind is a neurological method for screening out all but a few redundant, static, conditioned, socially consensual ideas… Like heroin focuses the behavior of a junkie, so does the mind focus the billion-fold avalanche of neurological activity. During the psychedelic experience the heavy shackles of the mind are loosened … consciousness is free to move in any direction.””The newness of everything—it is as if the world had just dawned—overwhelms you and melts you with its beauty.””Now I am seeing for the first time…””I felt the message of the mushrooms which is the wordless, mindless rapture of the moment.””Every moment it starts all over again.””Every second presented me with a golden chance to tune in, to break through, to glorify, to really groove and dance with God’s great song.”” An endless variety of ecstatic experience spiraled out around me. I had taken the God-step…””What else is important, you foolish desiccated creature, but this fire dance of life creation?””Society is a crazy made-up game””Psychedelic drugs are counteragents. Destroy the virus. Destroy the status quo. Psychedelic drugs are a specific cure for brain parasites.””Reality and the addiction to any one reality is a tissue-thin neurological fragility. At the height of a visionary experience it is crystal-clear that you can change completely. Be an entirely different person. Be any person you choose. It is a moment of rebirth. You are neurologically a naked baby…””It is the world of your own soul that you seek. Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already its being within yourself. I can throw open to you no picture gallery but your own soul. All I can give you is the opportunity, the impulse, the key. I can help you make your own world visible. That is all… Behind each door exactly what you seek awaits you. ””All is consciousness and consciousness is one.””Rest, beloved. We are one.”Tune-in. Harness and communicate these new perspectives in a harmonious dance with the external world. Be reborn. Play a role in the game of life, but don’t forget it’s a role. Remember to smile. Remember this is a dance. Wink wink.”Once you see how it’s all composed, it is hard to go back to the game.””He had died, spun out into the richness of interior space, had unraveled the riddle of the cosmic joke and was now cautiously, incredulously, comically, moving through the marionette show of normal reality.””And there it was, that dark moment of fear and distrust, which could have changed in a second to become hatred and terror. But we made the love connection.””You need no longer judge the good and evil of each new flick of cosmic process. Until today you have been the slave of the within. Learn to be its master. That is magic.””Aren’t we always just a breath away from death…””Because you flow like water, you can neither win nor lose.””It’s all one! We’re all a part! It flows! It’s all love. It’s all a game back there. Why do we play it so grimly? How funny! ””Every man is the chosen man.””Acceptance, peace, resigned serenity, it’s all in your own mind, Baby, the whole bit from beginning to end.””You begin to look like a happy saint! … you will radiate energy… discover and nurture your divinity.””Be like the sun at midday… Cheering and enlightening all.””Make them feel right and they’ll do right. Make them feel good and they’ll do good.””Religion will be transformed into an activity concerned mainly with experience and intuition—an everyday mysticism underlying and giving significance to everyday rationality, everyday tasks and duties, everyday human relationships.””See that soft breeze? That’s the breath of God, for me. And hear those birds? Well that’s the sermon I tune-in to. It’s all God… and the bubbles on this beer, see them, they’re part of the Divine Scheme too. I toast you and God.”Drop-out. Detach yourself from the external social drama.”Our consciousness creates the universe we experience.””We were all prisoners in a concentration camp of our own making.””The psychedelic drugs are sacraments, and like all sacraments that work, they demand your all. They demand that you live up to the revelation.””The wise person devotes his life exclusively to the religious search—for there-in is found the only ecstasy, the only meaning.”“That’s what life itself is. An indiscriminate, unsupervised, uncontrolled two-billion-year-old energy dance with ecstatic communion as the goal.””The high-tide, flame-wave, surging blood-hot current of life.””Nothing exists except undulating energy and flowing consciousness upon which the grasping mind imposes categories.””...it is an N-dimensional internally unfolding process. Any point from which one sees the one-ness is a center. That one point of vision is the eye of God, seeing, glorifying, understanding the whole. One such moment of revelation is the only purpose of life … One such moment makes the remaining decades of life meaningful and worthwhile.””[the Mystic experience] is not just an experience among others, but rather the very heart of human experience. It is the center that gives understanding to the whole… the very root of human identity has been deepened…””The hunger is to merge. To share and to grow. But the terrible price of union is to lose identity. Be trapped by the union.”It’s a mystical masterpiece, and I can’t believe Leary hasn’t featured more centrally in all my years of researching monistic idealism, oneness, and the perennial philosophy. I’ve certainly spent time with the rest of the “psychedelic philosophers”—Ram Dass, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, Terence McKenna—but Tim I had previously discounted. I shouldn’t have. The presentation is experimental, and perhaps a bit pretentious, but Leary is the first mystic to make me understand mysticism. And I haven’t even taken his sacrament.

Great read with an unusual style of writing. Dr. Leary was a pioneer for western ideology of psychedelics and alternate states of reality. The descriptions he gives are very vivid and I enjoyed losing myself in his experiences.

Super quick shipping and the book is essentially brand new!

The trouble with this book is, Leary is too experimental. He can't just stick to a straight narrative but has to mix it up with random quotes and bits of other stories. If you can mentally string together the actual story without getting distracted, he comes across as horrifyingly irresponsible, to the point where it's frankly hard to put yourself in his shoes. And I speak as someone who loves Hunter S. Thompson's work. Thompson was able to take a good story and make it great. Leary takes a great story and makes it rubbish. Ah well. At least books ABOUT Leary are highly entertaining. Can't blame the man for not being able to write a good story.

As described, excellent condition! Thanks!

awesome book if you went through the 60's and experimented with mind expanding drugs! A good insight into T. Leary's world .I get it! but would not recommend drugs to anyone emotionally unstable ! You can slowly get there through deep meditation!

excellent

Sehr interessant, wenn auch in dieser "Doppelgleisigkeit" in der es geschrieben ist schwierig zu lesen. Der Geschichte koherent, daneben aber wie Fußnoten nur links von der seite laufend geschrieben, das Erlebnis vom Gesichtspunkt einer anderen aus, in der Handlung beteiligten Person, samt Reflexionen. Ich musste es 2x lesen.

Excellent