Guest speakers: Dr. Timothy Leary and Ram Das
PROGRAM NOTES:
[NOTE: The following quotations are by Ram Das.]
“The next thought I had that I can remember was, Wow you can be anything this time around, you’re free. You can do anything, because it became so apparent to me the way in which mind creates. And I suddenly experienced myself as the creator rather than the victim.”
“Methods are methods are methods. Meditation’s a method and psychedelics are a method. Methods are all traps. A method by its nature is a trap. It has to entrap you into itself in order to eject you at the end. You just hope it self-ejects.”
“Psychedelics was one of the major forces in a shift in consciousness in this culture.”
“Wisdom is what you are. Knowledge is what you know.”
“I don’t for one moment wish that I was not thrown out of Harvard . . . anymore.”
“All form in the universe, including your mind and your thought, is part of law, it’s unfolding lawfully, it’s the karma unfolding, just law. And within that there is no freedom. There really is no freedom in form. The freedom comes as the formless creates the form. There’s where the freedom is. And that freedom, of the formless coming into form, is a place from which you stand, or you don’t stand, in which you experience the creation of your own universe around you.”
[NOTE: The following quotations are by Timothy Leary.]
“[So Emerson] came to Harvard Divinity School, gave that famous speech in which he said, ‘Don’t look for god in the temples, nor in the buildings, nor in the pulpits, look within, find divinity inside yourself, drop out, become self-reliant (translated as do your own thing) and for, I believe thirty-three years, he was not allowed back on this sacred territory. We’re back after twenty!”
“We were smart enough to know how little we knew.”
“Once you put that pill in your mouth, YOU were the Principle Investigator … like it or not.”
“The problem with running Happiness Hotels is that nobody wants to leave.”
Download
MP3
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Macs – Ctrl-Click, select option
Raw Master Files of This Talk
la15-leary-alpert-harvard-reunion-part1.mp3
la15-leary-alpert-harvard-reunion-part2.mp3
la15-leary-alpert-harvard-reunion-part3-track1.mp3
la15-leary-alpert-harvard-reunion-part3-track2.mp3
Harvard Crimson Announcement of this Talk
The Varieties of Religious Experience
By William James (free Project Gutenberg edition)
HI there,
Thank you for posting this talk with Ram Dass and Tim Leary. Really amazing.
I was trying to download the raw files above, and the files are truncated. There is only 3 min of audio on the first two and 40sec on the third.
Can you check them and confirm they are working?
I am using Chrome on a PC and failry computer savvy.
Thanks in advance,
Buddy
[COMMENT by Lorenzo: I don’t know what is causing that. However, I have re-uploaded those files, and if you Right-click (or Ctrl-click with a Mac) you can download them. Also, I added a fourth recording in that series that I just discovered.]
Absolutely wonderful to hear this…their personalities and brilliance shine right through in this recording. I also enjoyed how they handled the heckler/aggressive questioner during the q and a session.
Id like to hear more of Dr. Leary’s talks on the East coast. Perhaps it’s my overlay, but he sees more witty yet academic here, while in some of the west coast talks he sometimes goes a little hippy dippy, so to say…perhaps he just drew a more mature audience here in Cambridge, and responds accordingly.
Cheers!
“Wisdom is what you are. Knowledge is what you know.”
What a beautiful thought..
If you are interested in the true scientific side of the drugs, then I totally recommend the Harvard Psychedelic Club book.
The Harvard Reunion of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, which took place in April 1983, on the 20th anniversary of their controversial firing from the Harvard faculty, was the first time that Leary and Alpert (aka Baba Ram Dass) appeared onstage together since the mid-1960s, when the two pioneers of consciousness separated to blaze divergent paths. Their historic reunion, celebrated in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, was considered by many people (including Leary) to be one of the most important public events of Leary’s very public life. I conceived and produced this event when I was a first-year graduate student at Harvard. I also created an 11 x 17 inch poster to promote it. Over these past 3 decades, I preserved some of the posters very carefully, knowing that one day they would be worth quite a lot as rare gems. Now, for the first time ever, I am making available for purchase a limited number of the original posters, which are in pristine, absolutely perfect condition. (Photo of poster available upon request.) If you are interested, email me at JKasof@post.Harvard.edu or call me at 323-244-9016.
The Harvard Reunion of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, which took place in April 1983, on the 20th anniversary of their controversial firing from the Harvard faculty, was the first time that Leary and Alpert (aka Baba Ram Dass) appeared onstage together since the mid-1960s, when the two pioneers of consciousness separated to blaze divergent paths. Their historic reunion, celebrated in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, was considered by many people (including Leary) to be one of the most important public events of Leary’s very public life. I conceived and produced this event when I was a first-year graduate student at Harvard. I also created an 11 x 17 inch poster to promote it. Over these past 3 decades, I preserved some of the posters very carefully, knowing that one day they would be worth quite a lot as rare gems. Now, for the first time ever, I am making available for purchase a limited number of the original posters, which are in pristine, absolutely perfect condition. (Photo of poster available upon request.) Contact me if you are interested.