Psychedelic Salon 183
Timothy Leary on What Are Humans For? (1983)

PROGRAM NOTES:

[NOTE: All quotations below are by Timothy Leary.]

âThe people who were teaching us about consciousness-expanding drugs were people like Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, even Henry Luce, the respectable conservative founder of âTimeâ magazine. There was a large group of thoughtful people who told us that the doors of perception were going to open and an avalanche of change would happen.â

âHarvard is there to train Ivy Leaguers to go to Washington and Wall Street and keep the wasp establishment going. Theyâre not supposed to be turning out new Buddhas and a new brand of science fiction neuronaughts.â

Leon Tabory, Bruce Damer, and Allan Lundell looking through a few boxes in the Timothy Leary archive. ... SOURCE: www.learyarchive.comâThe history of America is the history of those of us that belong to this wonderful brotherhood and sisterhood of avant-garde inner voyagers. We believe that weâre the American tradition. And so we really werenât that surprised when the thing exploded in the Sixties. Thatâs what weâd signed up for.â

âI personally now feel that the concept of generation, the generation you belong to, is one of the most important things in your life, because youâre going to be swimming like a school of fish in this school of your own generation.â

âItâs so simple, too. If you want to change, itâs geography, just move to the place different people hang out, and listen.â

âI see very clearly that the age of the people you hang out with determines your age. ⦠Generations are temporal units, and you can jump generations, you can migrate. And how do you migrate from one generation to another? Itâs time travel, just hang out with people of different ages.â

âWhat are humans for? Weâre not here to fight Communism. Weâre not here to fight for a job. If we donât do that any more, what are we for? Well the answer to that is, the function of the human being is to evolve, to grow, to become more intelligent, to become a more advanced form of our species.â

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