♪
[Timothy Leary]
It's the taboo.
It's the taboo,
basically, of all time.
- Yeah, of all time.
- Right now,
there are a few more taboos.
We knocked off
the, uh, the taboo
against sex of all kinds-
-You did personally.
♪
[Timothy Leary]
Drugs, of course.
Remember how upset
society got about drugs?
- It still is. War on Drugs.
We certainly know
about that taboo.
♪
[Ram Dass]
The next thing was death.
[Timothy Leary]
Everybody has deep thoughts
about death,
the ultimate taboo.
♪
[Lama Tsultrim Allione]
They blew open this world,
this psychedelic world.
I mean, it ended the 1950s.
It was all up for grabs.
It's hard to describe
what that felt like.
[Andrew Weir]
Leary and Alpert are what will
be remembered as cultural icons
of the '60s, especially,
and very influential people
in not only American culture
but world culture.
[Joan Halifax, Roshi]
You know, they are
iconic figures
who stepped off the map.
They really paid heavily.
[Timothy Leary]
The use of psychedelic drugs
such as marijuana,
mescaline, LSD,
is out of control
in the United States today.
I knew he was an outlaw.
[Zach Leary]
You have to be quite a badass
to get locked up
for your ideas.
[Ram Dass]
We had a deep, deep friendship
but we also had
a deep enmity.
[Timothy Leary]
We're all gonna die.
Why not learn how to do it
with class
and style and friendship
as the climactic expression
of a life?
[Joan Halifax, Roshi]
What Ram Dass did
for our culture
was to open up
a door of spirituality
by having surrendered
so completely to love.
♪
[Timothy Leary]
When you walk in,
there was a flash
of total joy.
- Yeah, yeah, me too.
- And love.
I don't know what
the words are but, uh--
[Ram Dass]
See, in my mythology now,
I'd say you and I
are connected
at a place
where we've both danced through
this incarnation together.
but that we have
a connection
that is timeless
in another sense of that.
And like we're old beings
that know each other well
through many forms.
♪
I think one incarnation
is wonderful.
I mean, I started out
a Jewish boy
from Boston.
From psychology
to psychedelics
to...Eastern mysticism.
And then ended up Ram Dass,
uh...
just getting straight
on 'til it was gone.
♪
[Timothy Leary]
Who are you? Who am I?
It's a very difficult question.
Throughout my life,
I've always been fascinated
by where the action was.
I'd never want to have power,
but I wanted to, uh--
I ran for governor once
against Ronald Reagan.
Uh, I wanted to experience
the different, uh,
theaters or stages
or viewpoints of life.
I think I've lived one of
the most interesting lives
of anyone in the 20th century.
♪
[Robert Redford]
In the summer of 1995,
Timothy Leary announced
to the world media
that he had been diagnosed with
inoperable prostate cancer.
He was dying.
[Timothy Leary]
It's shocking
that people are not expected
to talk about their dying
or to plan it.
Certainly the greatest
adventure,
celebration of your life,
should be the process
of moving on.
♪
[Ram Dass]
He turned it into
a theater piece,
he turned it into a poem,
he turned it into a dance,
which is just what he did
with all the rest of his life.
It was a celebratory moment.
♪
[Timothy Leary]
The thing's a team sport.
Dying's a team sport.
Be open to new ideas.
Remember when people
used to say
that LSD is an escapist drug?
- Yeah, I just think--
- You know, one thing LSD
is native because
you can't escape--
You got a hundred billion
neurons--yeah.
My thing about death
is not escaping it.
I'm running towards Miss Death.
You can't turn this over
to the doctors.
You can't turn it over
to the priests.
You can't turn it over
to the medical profession.
Think for yourselves.
No government agency
or no profession
can solve these
problems for you.
I've got to do it
for myself,
you've got to do it
for yourself,
and all the viewers have
got to do it for themselves.
Take charge of it!
Plan it,
talk to your friends about it.
♪
[Robert Redford]
Timothy Leary,
born October 22, 1920,
in Springfield, Massachusetts.
An only child.
[Ram Dass]
He took birth into such
an interesting tension
in terms of,
on his mother's side,
very conservative
Irish Catholic,
very tight, held in tight,
very judgmental.
His father was a dentist
but from the Learys
who were kind of a wild,
Irish, drinking, divorcing,
going off and running away
type family.
[Timothy Leary]
I was a heavy reader as a child
and, uh, I spent hours
and hours as a kid
studying the heroic
and the interesting
and the adventures
of people who were thinking.
[Ram Dass]
Timothy had an
extraordinarily complex mind,
subtle mind.
He liked the kind of multilevel
nature of consciousness a lot.
I mean, the fact
that James Joyce
was one of his favorite writers
is certainly a key, a clue.
And he was--he was
the romantic Irish bard,
also the kind of, um,
itinerant scholar,
the kind of rascally person
at the bar.
♪
And he seemed to
play the role of a bad guy.
[John Perry Barlow]
As Aldous Huxley said of him,
"The good Dr. Leary
would serve our cause
and his own better if
he could resist his impulse
to cock snooks at authority."
There was a thing in Tim that
just liked to piss people off.
What he was, at heart,
was an Irish rebel.
[Joan Halifax, Roshi]
But like a good Irishman,
um, he could just
pull tricks out of the bag.
And he did it continually.
He had a twinkle in his eye
and seemed leprechaunish
and mischievous.
[Robert Redford]
Timothy's paternal grandfather
advised him to "find your own
way, be one of a kind."
He acted on that guidance,
questioning authority
every chance he got.
Following in
his father's footsteps,
Leary was a genial hell raiser
as a young man.
At West Point,
he was court-martialed
for supplying liquor
to other cadets.
Eventually, he was cleared
of the charge
and left the academy.
Caught between the Catholic
desire to please
and a rebellious nature
that ran deep,
Tim spent his life
walking the edge
between conformity...
♪
...and chaos.
[Ram Dass]
It's interesting,
the things that happen.
He gets thrown out of college
for being found
in a girls' dormitory,
he gets given jail sentence
for originally 40 years
and it was then reduced to ten
for, um, what,
a half an ounce of grass?
And there was a thing
about Timothy,
about right and wrong,
that he was busy
being a bad boy
but in the rascally sense,
the playful sense.
Timothy was not mean-spirited.
He--he was absolutely
quite the opposite.
♪
[Robert Redford]
Richard Alpert,
born April 6th, 1931,
in Boston, Massachusetts.
His father, George Alpert,
was president
of the New York, New Haven
and Hartford Railroad,
cofounder of
Brandeis University,
and a trustee of the synagogue
the family attended.
Studying psychology,
Dick earned his Master's
from Wesleyan
and a PhD at Stanford.
He taught on the faculties of
both Stanford and UC Berkeley.
Then, in 1958,
he was appointed
assistant professor
at Harvard.
A hometown success
at the age of 27.
[Ram Dass]
I kept up a front
because I'd be scorned.
You just didn't talk
about homosexuality.
I mean, my prep school...
Oh boy.
I went through hell...
internally.
[Joan Halifax, Roshi]
A part of it is the privilege
that he was brought into.
♪
A part of it is the era.
It might be a key variant
in his life
that made him really
move into the position
of an outlier.
My homosexuality
set a stage
for feeling like an outcast.
♪
Who am I to you?
In projections?
Well, you are s...
We're not the words for it,
but if I said
something like "soulmate"
or "good friend,"
and "long-term friend,"
and, uh...
I want to expose this, man.
When we met, it's true that
I had read more of the books
but you were ten times
more streetwise
than I was when we met.
Really?
I always think of myself
as kind of a nebbish,
you know...
lost soul, very square,
and you picked me up.
I mean, you helped me.
But you were also
a very scared Jewish boy
- that wanted to--
- Yes, I was also that.
♪
[Timothy Leary]
When people ask me
what's the major discovery
about myself and my life,
it's the confidence
to think for myself
and to, uh, explore.
[Robert Redford]
During the war,
Leary completed
his Bachelor's in psychology
and was posted at
the Army Medical Corps Hospital
in Pennsylvania.
There, Tim met his first wife,
Marianne.
They were married in 1945.
He then got his Master's
in psychology
at Washington State.
In 1946, they moved
to San Francisco
and started a family.
Leary earned his PhD
and began clinical research
at UC Berkeley.
There he developed
a definitive test
for personality assessment
and was published widely
in respected journals.
♪
The American Psychological
Association
named his first book,
The Interpersonal Diagnosis
of Personality,
its book of the year.
♪
Both Leary and Marianne
were heavy drinkers
and Marianne suffered
from severe depression.
♪
She committed suicide in 1955
on the morning
of Tim's 35th birthday
after hearing that he had
been having an affair.
♪
Marianne's death haunted Tim
for the rest of his life.
♪
In 1958, dissatisfied
with psychology,
which had a success rate,
he thought,
no better than chance,
Leary moved with his
two children, Susan and Jack,
to Florence, Italy.
♪
There he met David McClelland,
the director
of the Harvard Center
for Personality Research.
Leary explained that
he wanted to throw out
the old doctor-patient model
for psychological study
and get involved
with his subjects
in real-life situations.
♪
McClelland was impressed.
[Huston Smith]
Leary was the brightest
psychologist
but Harvard lured him away
by offering him
a three-year research project.
[Robert Redford]
That summer, Timothy Leary
ate psychoactive mushrooms
for the first time
in Cuernavaca, Mexico.
♪
They were offered to him by
a visiting East German
anthropologist
who had heard of their use
among the Aztecs.
[Huston Smith]
And said, uh, "Here, take
these, they're interesting."
[Robert Redford]
Over the next four hours,
he journeyed through
these inner landscapes
and came back
a changed man.
♪
Leary later told Alpert
that he had learned
more about the mind
in four hours
than he had in his 15 years
as a psychologist.
♪
It was 1960
and he was 40 years old.
[Huston Smith]
Having an open book
on research,
anything he wanted to do,
he, of course, wanted
to research these substances.
♪
[Timothy Leary]
When I went to Harvard,
there was another
young professor
who, uh, was a very loveable,
charismatic person
and we joined up as a team.
Richard Alpert,
who is now Ram Dass,
had been more conservative.
[Ram Dass]
When I was at Harvard
with Timothy,
I was so gung-ho.
I had appointments in four
departments simultaneously
and also research contracts
at Stanford.
[Ralph Metzner]
Fantastically successful.
I mean, he had appointments
at Stanford and at Harvard
and then he had a plane
and he had a car
and he had--you know,
he was like a shining star.
He had tremendous charisma.
♪
I was an undergraduate
at Harvard
between 1960 and 1964.
I had met Dick Alpert
at a party.
Um, I found him
uncomfortable to be around.
He was--he, seemed to me, not
comfortable in his own being.
[Ram Dass]
I was like Mr. Power Player
in academia.
Timothy was
way outside of that.
Of all the colleagues
around me,
he frightened me
because he was so free.
He was the only consciousness
on the faculty
that hadn't been co-opted
by Harvard,
that wasn't impressed
with being at Harvard.
I saw you were laughing
at the system, you know,
and I had no sense of humor
whatsoever.
You're not supposed
to laugh at Harvard and--
[Ram Dass]
I know. There was nobody
else at Harvard
laughing at it but you.
I began to sense
what a visionary was,
that Timothy had the ability
to see outside of systems
and therefore he could
open things to where you'd go
but it would take you
a while to get there, maybe.
And he was doing that for me.
I didn't do that.
- You did.
- It was the drugs.
You freed me--
but you gave me the drug.
You enticed--
you not enticed me,
you told me what
the possibility was
and I trusted you.
♪
[Robert Redford]
In the fall of 1960,
Leary discovered
that Sandoz Limited,
the pharmaceutical company,
would send synthesized
psilocybin
to qualified researchers.
♪
He had access
to the active ingredient
of magic mushrooms.
♪
Leary then set up
a research program
to investigate the effects
of psilocybin.
♪
Staff members trained as guides
and took the drug
alongside volunteer subjects
in specially prepared
supportive settings.
♪
This approach became
known as "set and setting."
♪
Careful evaluations were made
of each session.
♪
Alpert was away
at UC Berkeley
but that winter he took
psilocybin for the first time
at Leary's house
in Newton Centre.
♪
It stripped him of
the various identities
he had built up in himself
over 30 years.
♪
He wrote, "I realized
that although everything
by which I knew myself,
even my body and this life
itself, was gone,
still, I was fully aware."
[Ram Dass]
As professor went
and middle class boy went
and pilot went
and all of my games
were, like,
going off into the distance,
I got this terrible panic
because, indeed,
I was gonna cease to exist.
And I got the panic
which is the panic
that perceives
the psychological death
because, indeed, Richard Alpert
was dying at that point.
And the panic was,
"No, stop, stop,
I've got to hold on
to something
so I'll know who I am."
And Timothy,
the wise old Timothy,
always says things like,
"Trust your nervous system."
And you, at dawn,
went home
and you were shoveling snow
in front of your
mother and father's house
and your mother said,
"What are you doing out there?"
"You idiot, come in,
it's four in the morning.
Nobody shovels snow."
[Timothy Leary]
You said, "I love you, Mom,"
or something.
[Ram Dass]
And I said, "I love you"
and I went back
to shoveling snow.
You freed me at that moment
from my mother.
That's what you did.
♪
[Robert Redford]
The Psilocybin Project
was widely supported
and above reproach.
The drug was legally obtained
from Sandoz;
the project authorized
by Harvard.
♪
[Peggy Mellon Hitchcock]
I heard about these
two professors at Harvard
who were offering
to give people psilocybin
in return for having them
write about their experiences.
I arranged to have a session
with Richard.
I felt very comfortable
with him, you know,
so I thought this could
only be a positive experience.
And it really confirmed
a lot of things
that I had...
hoped were true
that I had sort of glimpsed
at various times in my life.
So, in other words,
that there was
kind of a larger reality
than what my everyday
humdrum experiences were.
[Andrew Weil]
I read about the mescaline,
I think, after I
graduated from high school
and was fascinated by it
and read everything
I could on it
and wanted to try it.
When I got to Harvard,
Aldous Huxley had come to MIT
to give a series of lectures
on visionary experience.
I found out that, uh,
Leary and Alpert
were teaching at Harvard
and were interested in this,
so I went over--
I made an appointment
and I met Leary.
I had a good conversation
with him,
he told me
that he thought these drugs
were the most interesting things
he'd ever found
and the potential was enormous.
He didn't see
any downside to them.
I asked him if I could be
a subject in his research
and he told me that
they had made an agreement
with the university
that they couldn't use
undergraduates.
So I got a supply
of mescaline
independent of anything
to do with them.
Um, I took it a number of times
with a group of friends of mine
who were undergraduates.
Um, had variable experiences
with it,
um, one quite powerful
but I didn't know
what to do with that.
You know, it seems to me
if I followed
the implications of that,
I would drop out of college
and I didn't want to do that.
So, I think I boxed
all that up
and set it aside.
♪
[Robert Redford]
Branching out,
the professors organized
a prisoner rehabilitation
project.
♪
Psilocybin was given
to selected inmates
at Concord State Prison.
Their hope was to help them
break through the habits
that kept getting
them re-arrested.
♪
Another famous study
had 30 seminary students
taking psilocybin
at Boston University Chapel
during one of the year's
main services.
♪
It became known as
the "Good Friday Experiment."
[Huston Smith]
There were 16 of us
in this small chapel
who had ingested.
I very soon felt
the awe coming over me.
♪
It was probably
the greatest Good Friday
in 2,000 years.
[applause, laughter]
♪
[Robert Redford]
In the spring of 1962,
just as the Psilocybin Project
was becoming almost manageable,
a British researcher
arrived from England
with a more powerful
psychoactive drug:
LSD.
Lysergic acid diethylamide
was first synthesized
by Albert Hofmann
from a derivative
of ryegrass fungus
at the Swiss headquarters
of Sandoz in 1938.
Five years later,
he accidentally got some
on his skin...
and discovered
its mind-bending properties
during an epic bike ride home.
♪
[thunder rumbling]
♪
[leaves scraping]
♪
[garbled chirping]
♪
[tires skidding]
♪
Hofmann not only survived
the ride
but continued as a chemist
at Sandoz for many years.
He lived to be 102.
At first, Leary resisted
the idea of including LSD
in the Harvard project.
Researching psilocybin
was pushing administrators
far enough.
♪
Another issue was
the reputation LSD had
of being a mind control drug
researched by the military.
♪
But his own experience
convinced Leary
that LSD held potential
for scientific discovery
far beyond that
of psilocybin.
[Ram Dass]
The LSD was interesting
because when he took the LSD,
he didn't talk
for about five days.
And I got afraid
we'd lost Timothy.
[John Perry Barlow]
It's hard to describe
what it was like taking LSD
under the set and setting
of the early '60s.
The rending away
from all of these very intense
paradigms of authority
and monotheism and culture.
As a good lieutenant
on the ship,
I sort of battened down
the hatches
and told everybody
not to touch the stuff
and not to - you know,
just to, you know, wait.
And then Timothy, finally
when he was able to speak,
it was more like, "Wow,"
or "Phew" or "Yes!"
and then we all started.
[thunder rumbling]
[Robert Redford]
Leary and Alpert
saw their research
as connected to the
centuries-long use
of psychotropic plants
by indigenous people
throughout the world.
[thunder rumbling]
♪
Psychedelic,
from the Greek words "psyche,"
and "delos,"
literally means
"mind manifesting."
♪
After their sessions,
subjects reported
many common perceptions:
barriers dissolved,
everything seemed alive,
even inanimate objects.
They felt a oneness
with everything.
Colors and solid patterns
were transfixing...
♪
...mesmerizing.
The experience seemed
to come in waves.
♪
[Timothy Leary]
The psychotropic drugs,
which are not really
recognized as, uh, existing
or valid tools,
were demonized and glorified for
the wrong reasons in the '60s.
That's natural.
The thing is,
know what you're doing.
♪
[Andrew Weir]
It is normal and natural
to seek altered states
of consciousness, high states,
we do it all the time
in various ways.
Drugs are one way
of getting into them.
♪
Well, there's two classes
of psychedelics.
One are the ones that are
mescaline and its relatives,
more stimulants
than the other ones.
The other one is called
the indoles
which is LSD
and psilocybin and DMT,
um, really are remarkably
light in their effects
on the physical body.
Um, I think, as a group,
these drugs are
very non-toxic.
Um, the main dangers
are psychological ones
of people becoming panicked,
terrified,
um, but I think the positive
potentials are terrific.
LSD is not a drug
like alcohol or a barbiturate.
LSD is, um, a chemical
which contains
several hundred
Encyclopedia Britannicas.
So when you talk to someone
who's taken LSD,
or if you have a seating
with--who's taken LSD,
his conscience is being spun
through many, many different
levels of language
which are not the language
of English
or of French or of Latin,
but chemical languages
of cell and nervous system,
sense organ,
which are many millions
of years old.
Uh, what's the reaction
to taking LSD?
If the person is unprepared
and he swallows
this local library
of chemical messages,
he's confused.
He can be entranced
and delighted
or he can be very frightened.
[Lama Tsultrim Allione]
The experiences, personally,
that I had
with psychedelics,
was all about
opening my mind
and it was always, for me,
about the spiritual journey.
It affected a whole generation
of people that way.
It--I mean, it ended the 1950s.
[Joan Halifax, Roshi]
It was as though
the splitting of the atom
was going to be followed
by another kind of splitting
but it was a breaking open
of the heart
and the opening of the mind.
You know, the reason
that I took LSD
and I think many of us did,
is a hunger to be an explorer.
I think they made me
aware of...
the magic in the world,
of seeing things not just
from a scientific perspective.
They really connected
me with nature
in a way that I wasn't before.
They really showed me
the potential
of how changing things in here
changes things out there
and that's been a major theme
of my work.
♪
[Lama Tsultrim Allione]
It's important to understand
that certain drugs
really are sacred substances.
If you are going to use
some of the sacred drugs,
to use them
in the right context
with the right people.
Timothy Leary and
Richard Alpert recognized this.
I think the early work
that they did with psychedelics
was very important.
Uh, they showed that
set and setting
really influenced
the experience greatly.
That the mindset
of the experimenters
greatly influence the outcomes.
And they really demonstrated
positive potentials
of the use of psychedelics
which I think just now,
you know, is becoming a focus
of attention again.
[Robert Redford]
Doctors Joan Halifax
and Stan Grof
were among the first
to research the use
of psychedelics
with the dying.
In their case,
terminal cancer patients
in 1967.
[Andrew Weil]
In the dying process,
there's often a lot of fear
and I think psychedelics
make it possible
to step aside from that
and observe what's happening
dispassionately.
A guided psychedelic experience
in a dying person
often enabled that person
to drastically cut doses
of opiates for pain relief,
which kept consciousness clear.
It often greatly facilitated
communication
with family and friends,
where before there was
no honest communication
of what was going on,
and it made
the dying process easier
and this was strongly positive
results of these studies.
♪
So I think surrounding
the use of drugs with ritual,
making the occasions
of taking them special,
paying great attention
to set and setting...
is all part of minimizing
their potential for harm.
♪
[Peggy Mellon Hitchcock]
We used to use
the Tibetan Book of the Dead
as a manual
for psychedelic trips
and that really is a manual
of leaving your body
and going into it with
what they call a bardo state
and, you know,
so a manual for death really.
Well, the drug literature
going back to William James
and Harvard people
a hundred years ago,
they always said
it's a dying experience,
it's a death experience.
There's a classic mystic thing
of joy and wonder
which, uh...
But I'm not advocating,
boys and girls.
It's--like anything else,
it's complicated.
I'm very cautious.
I've taken
almost every drug there is
but the reason I can survive
as well as I do
is I'm prudent
and I'm careful
and I try to find out
what's involved.
Twenty years ago,
we knew almost nothing
about the brain.
Now we know
120 billion neurons,
every neuron in your brain
has 10,000 connections.
It's gonna take us decades
to begin to understand
the magnificence,
the complexity of this brain
which creates the realities
we inhabit.
[Robert Redford]
According to Leary,
we use but a small percentage
of our nervous system's
capacity;
that we've learned
over thousands of years
to restrict the use
of our brains
so we can function in society.
Psychedelics open the full
landscape of our minds.
[Ram Dass]
It was if all these did
was accentuate the direction
his life was always going in.
Freeing himself
from systems.
Freeing himself
from all of the ways
that our mind creates
our reality.
♪
[Robert Redford]
Mythic heroes
traveled unknown oceans
in search of adventure
and new lands.
♪
American astronauts
were about to launch themselves
into outer space.
♪
In the 1960s, Leary and Alpert
dedicated themselves
to exploring the nature
of inner space.
[Ram Dass]
That's the word
Timothy and I always used,
that's the mythic level
that Timothy and I lived at,
was we were adventurers.
[Robert Redford]
They averaged
one LSD session per week
and took heroic doses.
♪
They saw themselves
as psychedelic adventurers,
exploring the nature
of reality,
encountering both heaven...
and hell.
♪
They openly shared
the results of their work,
encouraging others
to join them.
LSD was, at that time,
still fully legal.
It was an innocent time
and...a wild ride.
[Ram Dass]
Driving up to Sandoz
in New Jersey
in the huge black
railroad limousine
that I had from my
father's railroad
with railroad wheels
on the end of it,
and Timothy and I
are driving up
to buy this
huge amount of LSD
as Harvard professors,
and, you know, there
were so many of those.
Just one after another
after another.
♪
[Robert Redford]
Ever the scientists,
Leary and Alpert
published articles in journals
and delivered papers
at conferences.
The word was out
and their program
was becoming popular.
Maybe too popular.
[Ralph Metzner]
It ended up so many
graduate students
wanted to work with Leary
and all the other professors
lost students, assistants,
you see,
which pissed them off,
of course.
Independently
about that same time,
I had joined the editorial board
of The Harvard Crimson,
the newspaper,
and, uh, there were stories
beginning to go around
about the drug experiments
at Harvard
and Leary and Alpert.
And I was really
the only person
that had knowledge of that,
so it was logical that
I became the reporter
who dealt with that.
Psilocybin was to be given
only to graduate students,
but there was one slip.
That guy that I turned on,
one person,
was somebody to whom
I was attracted.
I was in a very difficult
role in that
for one thing
I had taken these drugs,
I had positive feelings
for them,
but I had a kind of dual life.
You know, I was this
straight undergraduate
who was doing
this investigative reporting.
[Peggy Mellon Hitchcock]
I think he wrote an article
in The Harvard Crimson
talking about this
and the parents of this one boy
found out about it
and they went to
the officials at Harvard
and said,
"What's going on here?"
[Ram Dass]
The dean of Harvard said
if he didn't squeal on me,
they're not gonna
give him the diploma.
I played a key role
in getting information,
uh, which eventually
led to Alpert's being fired
in 1963.
Um, Leary was never fired,
he quit voluntarily.
Um, that story was front-page
news on The New York Times.
And, uh, I think that was
probably the first time
that most Americans
had ever heard
of psychedelic drugs
or LSD or mushrooms.
So, I do think that
that whole episode
is what exploded this
out of Harvard
into the nation
and the culture.
Of course, this was
a bit of a shock,
to put it mildly,
to Richard,
who had been the one
who was on the tenure track
and he had his career all
sort of mapped out, he thought.
[Timothy Leary]
You were on the tenure track.
[Ram Dass]
I know I was.
And you laugh,
and you laugh!
If it weren't for me,
you would be a...
- I'd be somebody today.
- Retired Harvard--
You blew my cover,
you blew me apart.
I would have been
somebody today.
Yeah, I ruined
your academic career.
You did, you
absolutely did.
♪
What happened was,
you were the one
that showed me that
it was possible
to escape from the system.
You know,
you really did.
I mean, it's been
hard for me
to really
understand how--
how I was ready to hear
that even, you know?
♪
[Robert Redford]
Timothy's contract at Harvard
ended soon after
Dick was fired
in the spring of '63.
They desperately
wanted to continue their work
which was becoming
highly controversial
but still legal.
Where could they go?
[Peggy Mellon Hitchcock]
Just by chance,
my brothers inherited
quite a bit of money
and they had decided
to--with this money,
as a good investment--
to buy this huge property
in Millbrook, New York.
♪
On the property
was an old house there
that was the original house
that had belonged to the person
who developed the property
back in the late 19th,
early 20th century.
♪
Kind of wanted
to be haunted, you know.
It was huge and lots
of turrets and curved glass.
It was really beautiful.
And so I talked
to my brothers,
they weren't going to use it,
and they said, "Sure,
we'll rent you the house
for a dollar a year."
[Robert Redford]
With Tim's children,
Susan and Jack,
and a potpourri of friends
and acquaintances,
the two men launched
into a life
of communal living.
♪
That fall, President John
F. Kennedy was assassinated.
[gunshot, screaming]
The decade had taken
a very nasty turn.
♪
At Millbrook,
the scientists
continued their research
into 1964,
adapting the old house
to its hipper inhabitants.
It soon became a second home
to artists and academics,
musicians and scientists.
♪
Meanwhile, on the West Coast,
the '60s were heating up.
♪
The Free Speech Movement
in Berkeley
began a reinvigoration
of democracy
that would lead to
the Summer of Love in 1967.
LSD, acid, was often
shared freely.
♪
Years later, it became
known that the CIA
ran secret experiments
with LSD in the 1950s and '60s,
hoping to find a way
to use the drug in warfare.
Inevitably,
some of their subjects
began using the chemicals
on their own.
♪
Ken Kesey had first taken LSD
as part of a CIA-funded
research project
while working in
a mental hospital.
♪
Later, he and
the Merry Pranksters
held Acid Tests,
giving LSD to hundreds,
much to the dismay
of the scientists at Millbrook.
[Timothy Leary]
I have never urged
indiscriminate use of LSD
and I've never propagandized
for LSD.
Strangely enough,
my position on LSD
is exactly that of the present
Johnson Administration.
I believe that the present laws,
which penalize sale and
manufacture of LSD, are right.
[John Perry Barlow]
Meanwhile, I'd been hearing
out on the West Coast
that they were filling up
bathtubs full of LSD
and feeding it to anybody
that wanted to come and drink,
you know, as much
as they wanted
and playing crazy music for them
and I thought this was
fucking drug abuse.
[Timothy Leary]
The use of psychedelic drugs
such as marijuana,
mescaline, LSD,
is out of control
in the United States today.
♪
[Robert Redford]
Over four years
of communal living at Millbrook
and scores of shared
psilocybin and LSD sessions,
Leary and Alpert developed
a close and trusting
relationship.
Richard took on
a domestic motherly role,
becoming closer
to Timothy's children
than Tim was himself.
[Ram Dass]
And I got into
the really conscious thing
in my mind that I could
justify my life
being a support system
for Timothy's vision
to find expression.
So it meant raising money,
it meant raising children,
it meant cooking,
it meant, uh, keeping--
getting housing,
it meant moving Jeeps
and stuff
to islands we were
being thrown off of.
You know, I mean,
it was incredible.
It meant setting up
foundations,
it meant, uh--
I mean, it was all
the public relations stuff
to try to keep the game
from getting out of hand.
Richard, do you
know how to operate this?
[Robert Redford]
In December 1964,
Leary married again.
[Ram Dass]
The two studs
comes in the front,
so this goes
in the back.
It goes like that.
You need a stud.
Gunther, you got
the studs?
[Gunther]
Yeah, uh, they're over there.
[Robert Redford]
Peggy Hitchcock
had introduced him
to the beautiful
fashion model Nena
and they fell in love.
Remember as much of the vows
as you can.
- Yes, sir.
- And I will.
[Robert Redford]
They were married
at a chapel
in the nearby town.
Dick was best man.
[church bells ringing]
Timothy and Nena
set off on a world tour,
visiting Japan and India
in a quest for
spiritual understanding.
But by the time
they returned to Millbrook,
the marriage was over.
♪
Leary would eventually
marry five times.
His best efforts never went
into sustaining relationships.
[Peggy Mellon Hitchcock]
In his life there was
a big disconnect
between his heart
and his mind
and his mind was
completely in charge always
and the heart kind of
got left behind.
[Ram Dass]
Intimacy.
They wanted
psychological intimacy.
He was offering
a different kind of intimacy
which is the kind of intimacy
he and I had,
which is the intimacy
of shared awareness
like, you know, in the--
that kind of thing.
He didn't get as deep
into psychodynamic stuff.
I mean, here he was
a psychologist
who had created
a very, very highly regarded
diagnostic
psychological inventory
for assessing personality.
The reason he was
so good at that
is 'cause he was
outside of that.
That domain
or that plane of consciousness
didn't engage him
so that most of the women
around him
were always disappointed.
Now you do the tie and then
you fold that thing over.
[Robert Redford]
Tim's friendship with Dick
also grew rocky.
Theirs had been
like a marriage
at least in some ways.
[Ram Dass]
My capacity to be in
that relationship to Timothy,
part of it, I'm sure,
arises from the fact
that I'm basically gay
and my relationship
with Timothy
was never physical love,
but, um, there was
a love affair going on.
I mean, we loved each other,
we really loved each other
and I became very trustworthy
for Tim to push against,
to lean on in a way,
to get further out.
And Timothy was taking me
out with him.
Going out with him
wasn't all fun and games.
I mean, it was
extremely scary
because I had grown up
in a family
that treasured antiques,
for example,
so that my apartment
in Cambridge
when I was a Harvard professor
was full of absolutely
beautiful antiques,
highboys and--
And then I moved
to Millbrook
where it was monkeys
and aardvarks
and cats and six dogs
and many children
and, I mean, we were
in a 63-room house, you know?
And I watched my antiques
one by--
I didn't have the intelligence
to just sell them, you know?
I watched them all
just be destroyed
before my eyes.
♪
It was undercutting
something very deep in me.
♪
Then, as the years went on,
something very profound
happened
because I started
to distinguish
between visionary
and revolutionary
and that Timothy was both.
And I loved the visionary part
and what I saw was that
the revolutionary part of it
was costing so much
psychically and financially
and socially
and everything.
We were $50,000 in debt
and no matter how hard I tried
I couldn't pay it off
and we were getting further
and further out all the time.
As we got thrown out
of more and more countries,
I thought, um,
as much fun as it was,
now it was no longer
so much fun.
And the other part
of it was,
being in a relationship
with somebody that way,
ultimately, that other part
of you never develops.
And I realized that
I was a more creative person
than this situation
was allowing me to be.
And at that point,
I think that's when
we started to pull apart.
[Robert Redford]
In the fall of 1965,
Richard Alpert left Millbrook
for good.
♪
The awakenings that
psychedelics provided him
never lasted long.
Alpert, and others,
hungered for a way
to maintain and integrate
expanded states
of consciousness.
[Joan Halifax, Roshi]
You know, eventually the world
of mind manifesting substances
became more like decoration.
In this era of
the civil rights
and the anti-war movement,
I realized that, um,
to be engaged politically
I had also to be engaged
with my own mind.
And I just wanted to, uh,
really train my mind
to be very, very stable
and to be able to perceive
my own mental continuum clearly
and not have it so decorated.
♪
[Robert Redford]
As Alpert was leaving,
Leary began a new relationship
with Rosemary Woodruff.
They closed up the house
at Millbrook
and began a trip to Mexico
with Tim's children,
Susan and Jack.
♪
But at the border crossing
in Laredo, Texas,
they were arrested
for the possession
of less than half an ounce
of marijuana,
for which Leary received
a jail sentence
of 30 years.
♪
They returned to Millbrook
and began fighting
the conviction.
♪
Ultimately, the Supreme Court
overturned the sentence,
but Nixon was not
satisfied with that outcome.
Leary was indeed
later jailed,
but for interstate
transportation, not possession.
[Timothy Leary]
Not gonna solve these problems
by putting leading scientists,
like myself, in jail
for 30 or 40 year prison terms
for doing nothing more
than attempting
to use and understand
these new forms of energy
for which yet
there's no evidence
that we've done
any damage to society
or to ourselves
or to other people.
♪
[Robert Redford]
In 1966, drug use of all kinds
was on the rise in America.
♪
Even though his views
were controversial,
Leary was invited
to testify before Congress.
[Timothy Leary]
We've been told today
and we read in the papers
reports from sociologists
that from between
15 to 50 percent,
and in some cases up to
65 and 70 percent,
of our college students
are experimenting with
these mind-opening chemicals.
And I recommend, respectfully,
to this committee
that you consider legislation
which will license
responsible adults
to use these drugs
for serious purposes
such as spiritual growth,
the pursuit of knowledge,
or in their own
personal development.
To obtain such a license,
the applicant, I think,
should have to meet
physical, intellectual,
and emotional criterion.
Your testimony,
I understand extremely clearly--
and it's coming more clear now--
that you feel that there
shouldn't be an indiscrim--
indiscriminate possession
is something
that you do not support.
[Timothy Leary]
For six years, sir,
I have been against
indiscriminate use.
- Indiscriminate use, all right.
- Yeah.
And he felt very strongly
that he would be able
to convince Congress
that psychotropic drugs
be given over
to the medical profession
for healing purposes.
Police officer.
Open the door.
[commotion]
[Joanna Harcourt-Smith]
And he knew
that the minute they decided
to make this
a law enforcement issue,
it would be everywhere.
There would be no stopping it.
Everybody would be able
to get hold of it.
That was terrible for him.
That's where he developed
a very strong rebel side
towards the government.
[Robert Redford]
As Leary continued
fighting the government
and the Texas courts,
the direction of
Richard Alpert's life
changed forever.
♪
He had left the country
in 1967
on a trip through Asia.
♪
One day in Nepal,
he met a young Westerner
who had adopted the ways
of the Indian ascetics
known as sadhus.
Bhagavan Das
seemed to embody
what Richard was looking for.
So he abandoned
his first-class junket
and together,
they descended barefoot
into India.
♪
Before long,
Richard was introduced
to the Indian saint
who would become his guru,
Neem Karoli Baba,
known to his followers
as Maharaj-ji.
[soft singing]
Maharaj-ji gave Richard
his spiritual name,
Ram Dass,
which means "servant of god."
[Ram Dass]
My guru is about
a 70-year-old, um, man.
I don't know
anything about him, really.
You know, I don't even
know that he exists
to tell you the truth,
but it seemed to me
that there was a little old man
in a blanket
and when I looked at him,
the first time I looked at him,
I thought I wasn't
gonna be hustled
and the second time
I looked at him,
all I wanted to do
was touch his feet.
I looked up
and he was looking at me
with unconditional love
and I had never been
looked at
with unconditional love
by anybody.
I felt loved.
I felt loved,
and I felt something
happening in my heart.
[soft singing]
[Robert Redford]
Ram Dass studied yoga
and meditation
before returning to America
a changed man.
[Ram Dass]
Timothy trained me
in the beginning on my escape
and Maharaj-ji
then took over, really.
I see them as my two
powerful teachers in escape.
♪
[John Perry Barlow]
And he comes back
and, you know,
he's maybe 80 pounds lighter
and is putting on
a lot of holy man airs
that are particularly grating,
having seen him in
his previous manifestation,
you know, and I'm thinking,
you know,
"Same guy, new shtick."
♪
[Robert Redford]
Encouraged by Maharaj-ji,
Ram Dass explored
his Indian awakenings
in the book Be Here Now,
which became a manual
for spiritual seekers
throughout the world.
♪
It was first published
in 1971,
hand-stamped and inked
at the Lama Foundation
in New Mexico.
♪
Originally a limited edition
with hand-stitched pages,
it is now in
its 43rd printing.
♪
[Lama Tsultrim Allione]
Be Here Now was seminal.
It's still seminal,
it's still opening up
young people's minds.
They get that book
and it does what it did to us
so long ago, it's amazing.
♪
Ram Dass was a bridge
between East and West
and was a major person
to open this gateway
to Eastern wisdom
to Western culture.
You can tell me, uh,
where'd the Be Here Now
come from?
That was you.
- Be Here Now?
- Yeah.
You've heard of that
haven't you?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, the--
You invented that.
But it was really
actually Bhagavan Das
who, every time
my mind would go off
into my Jewish neuroticism,
he'd say, "Look,
just come back here
and be here now."
So I took it
as a title
but, uh, he used
to say it to me.
[Robert Redford]
Since then, Ram Dass
has traveled and taught widely,
written numerous books,
and, putting
spirit into action,
cofounded service
organizations.
♪
I'm going to run
for the governorship
of the state of California.
[Robert Redford]
In 1968, Leary was
again busted for pot,
this time by the
California State Police
during his aborted run
for governor
against the incumbent,
Ronald Reagan.
He had the support
of people like John Lennon,
who wrote the Beatles' tune
"Come Together"
for the campaign.
["Come Together" plays]
♪
Named the most dangerous
man in America
by President Richard Nixon,
Leary insisted the marijuana
found in his car
had been planted.
One evening I was
in a parked car
and a policeman
came up to the car
and opened the door
against my wishes
and made a pass
at the ashtray
and said, "You're under arrest
for, uh--"
I said, "For what?"
He said, "For marijuana."
"What marijuana?"
He reached in his pocket,
he pulled out two joints
I had never seen before,
half joints,
and, uh, said,
"You're under arrest."
[Robert Redford]
He was finally jailed
in 1970,
one of the first casualties
of the War on Drugs.
But when he was given
the very personality assessment
he had himself devised
at Berkeley in the 1950s,
he got himself assigned
to a minimum security prison.
Then, he escaped
with the aid
of the Weather Underground
and the Black Panthers.
Comment on
your plans now.
My plans are to work
with the Black Panther Party
for the overthrow
of the American government.
When we crossed paths,
uh, in Algeria,
he didn't look like
he was having that much fun.
Eldridge Cleaver looked
definitely distressed
and it didn't look like
they were enjoying each other.
But I think Tim played
with every edge.
He spoke about his life
in terms of being imprisoned
and escaping.
So he said that
he was in prison
and he escaped
and he went to Algeria
with his wife, Rosemary,
and once again,
he was imprisoned
and he needed to escape.
And then he went
to Switzerland
and once again,
instead of being imprisoned
by Eldridge Cleaver
and his politics,
then he was imprisoned
by a gangster
and his machinations.
Rosemary left him
while they were in Switzerland.
I think he was very sad
about that
and I think he
absolutely adored her.
You know, who Timothy Leary
was for me
in the beginning,
he was just a song
of the Moody Blues.
♪ Timothy Leary's dead ♪
♪
Little by little, I sort
of got this romantic image
that this Timothy Leary
might be, you know,
like the king of outlaws.
Through a series
of extraordinary coincidences,
I met Timothy Leary
in Switzerland
and found out that
he was a fugitive from prison.
I was 26 years old
and I found that very exciting.
It felt like it was
my destiny to meet him
and, uh, I was ready
for anything with him.
We flew to Afghanistan
from, um, Vienna.
When we got to the airport
in Afghanistan,
an attaché of
the American Embassy
stole our passports
out of Timothy's hands
and this incredible ordeal
started.
♪
I was taken with him
back to California
where I'd never been.
♪
It was a perfect PR coup
for Nixon.
Two days before
the inauguration
we got brought back in front
of hundreds of journalists.
So Nixon had
the front page,
"Timothy Leary
Brought into Custody."
[gavel banging]
He was in Folsom Prison
for a year.
For those of you
who know him,
he's relaxed and he looks well,
but behind the camera
sits the warden,
the assistant warden,
and probably the captain
of the guard.
I am Joanna Leary
and I'd like to see him out
of here as quick as possible.
[interviewer]
What do you think
of your future?
Do you think you're
gonna walk out of Folsom Prison
a free man one day?
I think my future is
very interconnected
with the future
of this country.
You just can't keep
your philosophers in prison.
If I am kept in prison,
uh, it's going to be
a very bad symptom
for freedom and for hope
and for union.
[chatter]
[Joanna Harcourt-Smith]
I began to see this man
come out of his, um,
solitary confinement cell
somewhat confused,
very red eyes.
He told me that, uh,
they probably fed him drugs
in the food
they were giving him.
They let me visit him
when he was in a padded cell.
He was in a straitjacket,
his head was shaved,
and he began to change
in the sense that
there was less and less
and less of Timothy Leary
on the outside.
Isolation is not only
to keep somebody in a box,
but it's so they unlearn
to communicate
with the outside world.
Criminalizing use, possession
of drugs doesn't work
and it makes everything worse.
Um, I don't think we can
suddenly legalize
things overnight.
I believe in education
as the--
as the key to
rational drug policy
and that means being honest
about their positive effects
as well as negative effects,
being honest about
the drugs whose use
we not only tolerate
but promote,
like alcohol and tobacco,
and that we make money from,
our government
makes money from.
So, you know, it's--
it's real education,
truthful education
and I think it has to be
at all levels of society.
[Joanna Harcourt-Smith]
Timothy decided to turn
state and federal evidence
so he would get out of prison.
The next morning,
the feds came and said,
"We've received news
that people want to kill you,
both of you,
and so you have to go into
the Witness Protection Program."
♪
Timothy insisted
that they bring us
to Santa Fe.
Our names were changed
to James and Nora Joyce.
♪
We were two drunks
lost in the wilderness,
trying to encounter each other.
♪
The loneliness,
the separation,
the isolation,
um, had driven my alcoholism
and my drug addiction
to a, um...
to an excruciating place.
♪
And so we fought a lot.
We had both
suffered so much.
And from where I look at it
right now,
I think that, um,
the right move for him
was to blame me.
♪
[Robert Redford]
In the end, Leary spent
almost four years in jail,
of which two and a half
were in solitary confinement.
But no matter how dark
the circumstances,
he always remembered
that Marshall McLuhan
had advised him to
"wave reassuringly,
radiate courage,
and you must be known
for your smile."
[Timothy Leary]
I've been in 40 jails
in four continents.
[laughter]
I haven't even been
busted yet.
[laughter, applause]
The proliferation
of LSD and psychedelics
and marijuana, even,
within popular culture,
it was a Pandora's Box.
You know, the second
youth culture got a hold of it,
um, it exploded, you know,
much greater than
anybody knew it would,
much greater
than he knew it would.
Tim really was naive, innocent;
he did not anticipate
the kind of reaction.
[Robert Redford]
Nevertheless, Leary
is often solely blamed
for their popularization
and misuse.
As that poisonous, evil man,
Dr. Timothy Leary, has said,
it is a way to turn on,
tune in, and drop out.
People would say,
"You ruined
an entire generation."
Like, that's
72 million people.
I said, "Yeah." They said,
"Don't you feel regret?"
And I said, "Well,
at one thing I feel it.
Only 100,000 of them
had the decency
to thank me for
ruining their lives."
[laughing]
♪
Turn on to the internal
neurological energy.
♪
Tune in means to harness up
the new revelation and energy
in your life.
And drop out.
Now this may sound
reckless advice today
but it's the oldest advice
that philosophers
and religious leaders
have passed on.
Detach, drop out,
find what's within.
"Turn on, tune in,
and drop out"
and I stand by that statement.
♪
[rhythmic chanting]
[Robert Redford]
Over time, Leary was dismissive
of Dick Alpert's
spiritual journey
which he saw as his
merely playing lieutenant
to yet another
prophetic master.
Leary did not like gurus,
period.
[Ram Dass]
Timothy seemed
quite comfortable
with the metaphors
of the religious traditions,
but later those became grist
for the mill
of his revolution also
and he treated me like sort
of an old-fashioned type person.
[Robert Redford]
Once Leary's long struggle
with the FBI
and the Justice Department
was concluded,
he settled in Los Angeles
with his fifth wife,
Barbara Chase,
and her son Zachary.
[Zach Leary]
Timothy Leary, uh,
married my mother
when I was four years old
and he was the father
who raised me
for, um--from ages 4 until 22,
until he died
when I was 22 years old.
Um, so I lived with him
for 17 years
and I think there's--
somebody pointed out to me once
that I have
the great distinction
of living with him longer
than anybody else did ever.
You know, so he was just,
I mean, a great,
very kind of standard white
picket fence father with me
and most people
don't know that
and when I tell people that
it's really a surprise.
I mean, you know, he took
me to little league practice,
he played baseball with me
in the yard,
we went to Dodger games
all the time.
He made sure I did
my homework.
I mean, it was, you know,
shockingly normal.
♪
[Robert Redford]
After some years
of estrangement,
Leary and Ram Dass' love
for each other
as mythic explorers
guided their reconnection.
[Timothy Leary]
The last 20 years
have been remarkable.
They have put us
through the changes
and we've put them
through some changes.
[Ram Dass]
He didn't ask me
for legitimacy of his life
and I didn't ask him
for legitimacy of mine.
That allowed a new kind
of respect to emerge
between us
which was interesting.
It was a respect
that honored our differences
rather than the adventure
of sharing an idea.
And I really felt
that Timothy
really respected me at the end
and I certainly
respected him.
♪
[Joan Halifax, Roshi]
The question of
"Am I afraid to die?"
is something I actually
live with every day.
I think everybody's
afraid to die.
The question is
how do you deal with the fear?
[Zach Leary]
I like being alive.
I like this incarnation.
You know, I'm attached to it.
If I weren't afraid to die,
I would not be
taking it seriously.
I mean, in some ways
I think death
is the most important
experience
that you're preparing for
all your life.
[Ram Dass]
Why is it so important
to talk about death?
It's the unspoken...
phobia of the culture.
You can see it.
If you look at the major issues
like abortion, death penalty,
euthanasia,
terrorism,
it all concerns
this issue of death.
♪
[Timothy Leary]
When I discovered
I was dying,
and I knew I was going
to die, uh, actively
and creatively,
I called Ram Dass
'cause I knew
he would understand.
- Liked it all.
- See that? That's a gallery
of some book
I wrote years ago.
He's a wise friend
and a loving,
protective friend
over many years
and many experiences.
Tim and I, in 1963
with Ralph,
were doing
The Psychedelic Experience,
which was a manual based on
the Tibetan
Book of the Dead.
And that led to a pretty
deep study of psychedelics
and since we were both dealing
with what we considered
was psychological
death and rebirth,
and we had been through those
death-rebirth experiences
many times together,
it's reasonable for him
to think of me
as somebody
who would understand
what this death experience
was going to be like for him.
♪
[Robert Redford]
The Psychedelic Experience
was the first modern book
to provide a map for
mind-expanding drug sessions.
Much as the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
provided advice
for traveling
through after-death states
known to Tibetan Buddhists
as bardos.
♪
[Lama Tsultrim Allione]
Bardo actually means
"in between."
This is a bardo to--
we are in the bardo of life.
They were talking about
the bardo connected
to the Tibetan
Book of the Dead,
the bardo between
death and rebirth.
And they identified LSD
as a vehicle
to pre-experience
what that would be like.
[Timothy Leary]
Long before I knew
I was dying,
we were using
this metaphor
of leaving your body,
leaving your mind,
and contacting
a different, uh,
level of altered states,
expanded consciousness.
So, uh, my life
has prepared me for this.
[film projector clicking]
[Ram Dass]
I've seen so many people die
clinging to the past...
and also worried
about the future.
I think this is the moment.
That's what I got
is this moment.
And one of these moments,
I'll be dead.
That'll be the moment.
♪
[Robert Redford]
In 1977,
Ram Dass founded
the Dying Project
with Stephen and Ondrea Levine
and Dale Borglum.
♪
He's been a kind of
midwife to the dying
since 1963,
offering wisdom, compassion,
and his knowledge of
other planes of consciousness.
[Joan Halifax, Roshi]
Ram Dass was the pioneer.
He's the person
who really opened up that field
for me personally.
[Ram Dass]
The amount of cost
in keeping people alive--
forget quality of life now,
just physically alive,
the intensive care unit
strategy--
was finally prohibitive,
it was getting prohibitive.
It was just eating up
all the resources.
[heart monitor beeping]
Then comes the hospice movement
which says, "Oh, well,
what we've missed
is that the psychological
part of dying
is also important."
And hospice is much cheaper
than intensive care unit.
Well, all it requires
is that we accept the fact
that death exists.
And that's a big shift
to accept death existing
versus it's a failure
and an enemy.
What Ram Dass did
was really, uh,
inspire people
to, uh, bring, um,
spirituality
and existential questions
into their awareness
so that they could
not only die well
but also live well.
[Ram Dass]
I do a lot of grief work
with people
and what I often am
finding myself saying to people
who have lost
their child or their spouse
after many years
is something like,
you will grieve
and grieve and grieve
and you'll come up for air
and think it's all over
and "I'll be strong"
and then you'll go back under
and you'll go through
depressions and--
Let it all run its course.
Don't push it.
Your mind will recite all
the ways you've lost the person.
That you'll never have
the smell of their body,
or you'll--you know,
all these things--
Milk it all, don't push it away.
But there will come a time
when your mind'll quiet down
a little bit
and in the quietness
of that moment,
the love that you've
ever tasted with that person
will be living in present
and then you'll realize
that what the essence was
that made you connect
with this person
has nothing to do with death.
That love transcends death,
basically.
But you're gonna have to
find it out for yourself.
But it's true.
I had this tragic loss,
the great love of my life
dropped dead on me.
I was getting
this huge overflowing of love
from other people
and it was absolutely useless.
I mean, I felt like
a black hole for love.
I mean, it didn't make any
difference what anybody said,
they didn't understand
what it felt like.
And I felt like they were
wasting their love on me.
Which is a terrible feeling.
And, uh...
...I mentioned this
to Ram Dass...
...and then he said--
I said, "I feel like
a bottomless well of--
you know, I mean,
just love goes in
and you never hear
anything hit bottom,"
and he said, "Well,
consider the possibility
that it's not bottomless,
just that it's very deep..."
Sorry.
"...and that one day
it will fill with love."
I don't know, that still--
[clears throat]
--still kinda gets me.
♪
[Lama Tsultrim Allione]
Death and someone dying
is an initiation
that we as human beings
go through
and it enriches us,
it deepens us,
it opens our hearts.
It's a terrible thing
but it's--I think
it makes us bigger
and deeper
and more compassionate
as people.
♪
I found out I had cancer
about a year ago.
But the real pressure of it,
the symptomatic pressure
of it
just the last
two or three months.
I've had moments
of deep pain.
I've had moments
of when the pain pills
almost knock me out
and I was a source
of worry to my friends
because I was
suffering so much.
And it's been a shock to me
to discover
that, uh, pain exists
and it can really dominate
your consciousness.
So I've had to work
that through.
♪
There we go, mm-mm.
[Ram Dass]
See, the issue is pain
and consciousness,
the relation of pain
to consciousness,
because when
you're looking at it
from just the physical body,
the goal is to get rid
of as much pain as possible
even if you have to
put the person to sleep,
keep them asleep 'til they die.
That's the most humane
thing to do.
Here we are, six years later
and I've had a stroke
five years ago.
♪
I don't remember time
but this is now '03.
♪
[Robert Redford]
In February 1997,
Ram Dass suffered
a severe stroke
and a massive
cerebral hemorrhage.
Doctors gave him only a
ten percent chance of survival.
♪
Hundreds of hours
of rehabilitation later,
he was still
partially paralyzed,
though able to get around
in a wheelchair.
♪
After years of service,
he had to learn
to accept the help of others.
I am more now
identified with my soul
and more...
♪
...compassionate to my body.
♪
See, I don't know
how I'll be
if I'm in
your situation.
At this moment,
I don't feel anxious at all,
I mean, about my life
or anything.
The stroke was so painful
that I pushed out and away
by going to the witness
in the soul.
Just witnessing the stroke
rather than experiencing
the stroke.
What a psychologist would label
"dissociation."
I--sure.
Yeah!
My pains I treat lovingly.
Pain...
a worthy adversary.
We're gonna have to
fight it out.
♪
[Joan Halifax, Roshi]
He has been through a lot.
It's interesting
to be with him
because there's
an absence of self-pity there
and the fact he's been
in that chair for 15 years,
I mean, that is no joke.
And he's over 80 now.
I mean, that's
really remarkable
that he's lived so long.
It's a testimony to his
delightful determination
that I think is
a kind of model
for all of us.
There's something
about his essence
which has not changed at all.
I really feel it's love.
[children giggling, shrieking]
[Robert Redford]
Ram Dass now lives in Hawaii,
cared for by a community
of loving friends and students.
[exclaiming]
[cheering]
He's more active than ever,
teaching, writing,
counseling,
and appearing virtually.
My body is 80 years old,
I am a soul.
[Robert Redford]
Although still
physically restricted,
he continues his work,
furthering the vision he
pioneered with Timothy Leary
more than 40 years ago.
Adding to his personal legacy
is a son, Peter Reichard.
Ram Dass was introduced to him
in 2009.
It was a shock
to both of them.
Wow! In a million years.
Of all the crazy things.
And what a great guy,
Peter, his son.
[chatter]
[Robert Redford]
Peter had never
heard of Ram Dass,
let alone that he was
his biological father.
Long ago, Richard Alpert
had a brief affair
with Peter's mother
while teaching at Stanford,
before his Harvard years
with Timothy Leary.
Peter was the result.
But his mother
had moved back east
and never told Richard.
Now, more than 50 years later,
Ram Dass finds himself
connected
to a new and growing family
in the final years
of his current incarnation.
[John Perry Barlow]
The amazing thing,
the great singular
accomplishment
of Ram Dass' life, I think,
is that...
setting out from, you know,
not very promising beginnings,
he has become
a truly wise person.
Deeply.
[Ram Dass]
If you see that
the moment of death
is the moment
when you engage
the deepest mystery
of the universe--
and that's what the whole
Eastern traditions are about,
preparing you
for that moment
so that you will be
equanimous,
you will be, uh, curious,
you will be present,
you'll be not-clinging
to the past
and not grabbing,
just be with each moment
moment by moment.
[soft chanting]
Some people do some of their
most profound spiritual work
in the last few minutes
before they die.
♪
[Robert Redford]
Wanting to get a head start--
why leave it to
the last minute?--
Timothy Leary at 75
approached his final days
with characteristic enthusiasm.
He promised to "give death
a better name
or die trying."
[Timothy Leary]
We're all gonna die.
Why not learn how to do it
with class
and style and friendship
as the climactic expression
of a life?
The last week I have not
been using any pills
and, uh, it's been a fascinating
and wonderful experience.
So far.
I've become very friendly
with my cancer
and I--also,
I say in public, you know,
my cancer I see now
as my teacher
and I try to talk to her
and I say,
"Miss Cancer," I say,
"get it together," you know?
- If you go, it goes.
- "We're both stuck
in the same body, see?
So let's make a deal, hey?
Let's keep the body alive
a little while
and we can have more fun."
[laughing]
[heart monitor beeping]
When the heart waves flatline,
the brain goes on.
They call it
the "sliver of opportunity."
- Yeah.
- Your life flashes
in front of you--
And you go
into ecstasy.
The light at
the end of the tunnel.
- Sure, sure.
- Yeah, that all comes
from the near-death
experiences.
The brain is happy
'cause then the brain
is in states that
the Buddhists talk about.
- It's pure consciousness.
- Sure.
It's extricated itself
from all the senses.
[Timothy Leary]
Yeah. But see, that
15 minutes is timeless
like an LSD session.
- Mm-hm.
- You go through
95 lifetimes and death.
Well, every minute
is timeless.
There you go, yeah.
Like everybody else, I'm
speculating and I may change,
I'm trying to learn.
[Lama Tsultrim Allione]
This period that
Timothy Leary speaks about,
this 15 to 20 minute period,
what that would be called
in the Tibetan teachings,
is still the process
of dying.
So you're not dead yet
but--the gross body is dead
but the subtle body is still
remaining in the body.
So that's what
he's identifying.
♪
[Timothy Leary]
At this period
in human history,
we're lucky enough
to be here
when, for the first time,
scientists are developing ways
to keep you alive
or to bring you back.
The churches say, "No,
you have no right
to take--your body
belongs to God."
Well, uh, show me
the paperwork.
[lightning crashes]
[Robert Redford]
By 1993, Timothy and Barbara
had divorced,
although Tim remained
close to her son Zach.
[Zach Leary]
He had a lot of personal
heartache in his life.
You know, his wife,
Marianne, killed herself
and every marriage
ended in divorce.
His daughter, Susan,
also committed suicide.
Jack didn't speak to him.
So there was a lot
of heavy stuff going on there,
a lot of heavy karmas
and a lot of interpersonal
relationships
that he just really
couldn't work out.
And I think, uh,
you know, that really--
it really broke his heart.
And there was no question
that, you know,
him getting to raise me again
was a chance for him
to do it over again.
♪
He had an uncanny knack
to reinvent himself.
Especially in the late '80s
and into the '90s,
you know, he was much
more of a cyber culture icon
than he was, you know,
a '60s hippie icon.
You know, and that's why
he kept young people around
because he was so fascinated
with youth culture
and with computer culture
and, you know,
early internet culture
and cyberpunk culture
and music culture and art.
[Timothy Leary]
Every technique
that science has now
for bringing you back,
I'm signed up with.
[lightning crashing]
Uh, I'm going to have
my blood cells
available for cloning.
[Ram Dass]
It's inconceivable to me
that Timothy could have taken
as much acid as he's taken
and been through as much
as he's been through
and end up a philosophical
materialist
in which when the body's dead,
you're dead.
Yet that's what
he professed.
Why did it end up
that you're interested
in things here and now
and I'm interested in
la-la land all the time?
- Why is that?
- You're not really.
[Ram Dass]
I am. I am.
What do you mean--
what's la-la land?
[Ram Dass]
Well, I'm interested
in the awareness
that happens after
the brain gets eaten.
When I think about
the moment of death,
I usually think of
a great acid trip.
I think of the dissolution
of conceptual structures.
[birds chirping]
♪
[Timothy Leary]
I have, uh, under
my personal supervision,
witnessed over 3,000
ingestions of LSD.
[Senator Dodd]
Over 3,000?
Well, can you briefly
describe the effect of it?
Well...no, sir.
Um...you might say
I was sitting there
and suddenly I began
to dissolve.
Every cell in my body
began to break down
and I was afraid I would
become a puddle on the floor.
Then, uh, I saw a
huge serpent coming up.
The serpent swallowed me,
I went into
the serpent's stomach.
Later, I was excreted
and I exploded. Then, um...
[Joan Halifax, Roshi]
And you see Teddy Kennedy there
and it's like,
oh my gosh, this--
these guys must
have been having
their own little mental
breakdown listening to him.
Now by this time,
even the most experienced
and hard-bitten psychiatrist
is likely to be
crouching under the table,
saying, "In 30 years
of my practice,
I have never listened
to anything
so frightening
and so far out."
Now actually, if you
told this story
to, um, a Hindu,
he'd say, "Oh yes.
The third dream of Vishnu.
Oh yes, that's like
the 11th chapter
of the Bhagavad Gita."
We also have
neurological and, uh,
anatomical explanations
for the so-called hallucinations
of LSD.
Hallucinations are not
mysterious or supernatural.
Hallucinations are
the nervous system
having experiences
for which we don't have words.
It's the dying process
of the psychological realm.
It's the kind of dissolving
of the perspective
from which you're standing.
That, to me, is one
of the things
that's happening
while people are dying.
And then I feel
you're catapulted
out into non-conceptual space.
Is that the way you're
imagining it?
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So is my sense
of the continuity of awareness
beyond the brain
is just my wanting to
keep something going?
- Is that--
- I don't have that.
[Ram Dass]
I know you don't have it and--
- I'm curious.
- What becomes--
You're curious? I'm curious too.
I'm very curious.
♪
Do you use
the word "soul"?
"Soul"?
All the time.
What do you mean
by it?
- It's consciousness.
- Super consciousness.
And it--she hangs around
the brain,
not the sole of your foot.
She's gonna hang
around the brain.
Well, Ramana Maharshi
says it's right here.
The heart. Oh, the heart.
I've had to tell
a thousand Hindu gurus
that the heart is a wonderful
organ to pump blood
and they haven't discovered
Harvey's theory of circulation.
They're using the heart
as a metaphor.
[Ram Dass]
Yes, they're using
the heart as a metaphor.
It's a very bad metaphor,
I think.
They're using the lower
right-hand corner,
the size of a thumb...
- Are you kidding me?
- No.
- Wow.
- It's the size of a thumb.
- Yeah.
- It's called the rhodiom,
and it's right here--
- It grows there?
- It's right there.
- Naturally?
- It's there.
It's there, it's not
in a physical manifestation,
it's in a subtle form.
- Well, how do you contact it?
- Well, you gotta get
better technology.
Well, see, I'm--yeah.
Better than LSD
and better than, uh...
Well, in LSD,
you saw all that
but it went by so fast
and you didn't
have a model,
a conceptual model,
to save it.
It just went through.
'Cause so much
went through
every time I took acid.
It must be for you too.
That what we have
conceptualized
is the tiniest trivia of
the edge of the whole thing
and that's why dying
seems to fascinating to me.
- Exactly, yeah.
- Because you're going, like--
Like this.
- You hope.
- Huh?
It may not be that way.
I hope it is.
Gotta be that way.
♪
Can you have dinner
with us afterwards?
[Ram Dass]
I can't, I gotta fly
back to San Francisco.
Oh, darn.
I'm working against
a deadline for a book.
You're working
against a deadline too.
How 'bout that deadline? Yeah.
Speaking of deadlines...
[laughing]
[Robert Redford]
Towards the end of May 1996,
Leary began to show signs
of kidney and liver failure.
[Zach Leary]
I think some of his fears
of letting go
and not knowing
what was next,
sure, I think that scared him.
And I think he was, you know,
absolutely normal
and understandably human
in those moments.
But the process of dying
and actually, you know,
slipping into that unknown
was incredibly beautiful
for him.
You know, it was
everybody else around
that was freaking out.
Ram Dass was really
mostly there for us.
It was the counseling
he was sort of giving to us
that was so precious
and meaningful.
You know, it kind of
got out of control,
we probably had
too many people around
and a lot of us
didn't really know
what we were going to do
once he died.
[Ram Dass]
And so, I was talking to them
about not talking to him,
not trying to engage him,
not trying to pull him back,
but to let him be
wherever he is,
but they could talk
among themselves in the room
about all the beautiful
things he'd done in life
which is like an old
Tibetan practice.
Uh...and I talked to them
about, um,
working on themselves
to not demand linearity,
so that if he comes up
with things
from different places,
to let their minds soar
so they could be with him
as his mind floated
through planes
of consciousness.
♪
And I told them to love death
as much as they love life;
to allow the mystery
of the universe
to be something awesome
and beautiful.
♪
[Zach Leary]
He was letting go willingly.
You know, he wasn't
trying to just hang on,
hang on, even if
the quality of life suffered.
You know, he was really going
with the organic nature
of things.
[Ram Dass]
We haven't really created
the right space
for people not to be
afraid during this moment
that can be very frightening.
But as Tim Leary said,
"I die so hard each time."
♪
[chatter and violin music]
[Robert Redford]
Timothy Leary's last trip
began early
on May 31st, 1996.
He was surrounded
by friends to the end.
♪
Sometime in the last
seven hours of his life,
he said, "Compadre,"
and then he said,
"Esperando," "I'm waiting,"
and then he said,
"Follow, follow,"
and then he said,
"Beautiful, beautiful"
and then he said,
"Flash, flash."
Then he said the word "Why?"
in a deeply moving way.
"Why? Why?"
and followed by an
almost mantra-like repetition
of the words
"Why not? Why not?"
♪
Here in Southern California,
the Harvard professor
who became
the outlaw acid king
of the 1960s is dead.
Dr. Timothy Leary
advocated the use
of mind-bending drugs.
In recent years--
[Ram Dass]
And there were 25
or 26 messages
from CBS and CNN
and ABC and da-da-da-da,
and so I called
The Washington Post
and I said, "Yes?"
"Oh, how do you feel about
your friend Timothy's death?"
So I looked inside
to see how I felt
and I said, "Fine."
And there was this long silence
on the other end of the phone.
It was clear that I had--
they had written
the material already
and I wasn't playing
by the script.
♪
He and I have met
in ideas and experiences
and intuitive being together
that is so deep
that I can't imagine that
I will ever think of Timothy
as not being present.
♪
Timothy and I
are explorers,
we're beloveds,
we're deeply connected
to each other
and I can't imagine
that that'll change a flicker.
Flicker.
♪
[Robert Redford]
Timothy Leary made history
one more time.
Fulfilling his dreams
as a futurist,
his ashes,
along with those
of Star Trek's creator
Gene Roddenberry,
were sent into orbit.
It was the world's
first funeral in space.
♪
[Ram Dass]
There's no doubt at all
that I will be around...
after I die.
♪
[Timothy Leary]
Think for yourselves.
Discover, explore, and
treasure your own uniqueness.
The proper study
of a human being is yourself.
[Ram Dass]
Tim's right, go into yourself
and then, if you go
in deep enough,
there is truth
and that truth leads you
to pick the people,
the beings,
with whom you're going
to spend your life...
♪
...and your death.
♪
If you have identified
with your soul
when you're alive,
death, it's just
another moment.
♪
In ourselves
it's all there.
It's all there.
God is awareness,
so when we tune
into our awareness,
we close the space
between the individual and God.
You delve deep
into the moment,
you come to all
and everything.
One becomes the moment.
One becomes love.
Life and death are one.
♪
It's ecstatic.
It's like becoming God.
It's--it's--it's...
[sighs peacefully]
♪
Richard, you have
enriched my life.
I'm sorry. Ram Dass,
you have enriched my life.
No, I can be Richard,
come on.
You've enriched
my life, Richard,
and, uh, I'm so proud
of both of us
and I thank, uh, you
for making this opportunity
for us to make love
in public.
Yes, exactly.
Thirty-five years
we've been dancing like this.
It's been a hell
of a dance, hasn't it?
And we're
totally different--
[Ram Dass]
So different, so different.
- Great.
- But at this moment,
we so appreciate
each other.
Isn't that nice?
Big hug.
Here, here we go.
Okay, cut.
♪