PLAYBOY INTERVIEW: 1 llVlvJ 1 iT I I JL/\Ia 1

a candid conversation with the controversial ex-harvard professor, prime partisan and prophet of LSD

On a sunny Saturday afternoon in 1960, beside the swimming pool of his rented summer villa in Cuernavaca, a 39-year-old American ate a handful of odd-looking mushrooms he'd bought from the witch doctor of a nearby vil- lage. Within minutes, he recalled later, he felt himself "being swept over the edge of a sensory niagara into a mael- strom of transcendental visions and hal- lucinations. The next five hours could be described in many- extravagant meta- phors, but it was above all and without question the deepest religious experi- ence of my life." The implications of that fateful first communion are as yet unmeasured; that they are both far- reaching and profound, however, is generally conceded — for the fungi were the legendary "sacred mushrooms" that have since become known, and feared by many, as one of the psyche- delic (literally, mind-manifesting) chem- icals that have created a national fad among the nation's young and a scandal in the press. The American was a Har- vard psychotherapist named Timothy Leary, who has since found himself trans- mogrified from scientist and researcher into progenitor and high priest of a rev- olutionary movement spawned not by an idea but by a substance that's been called "the spiritual equivalent of the hydrogen bomb."

Few men, in their youth, would have seemed less likely to emerge as a reli- gious leader, let alone as a rebel with a cause. At the age of 19, Leary distressed

his Roman Catholic mother by abandon- ing Holy Cross two years before gradua- tion ("The scholastic approach to reli- gion didn't turn me on"), then affronted his father, a retired Army career officer, by walking out of West Point after 18 months ("My interests were philosophic rather than militaristic"). Not until he transferred to the University of Alabama did he begin to settle down academically — to work for his B. A. in psychology. On graduation in 1942, he enlisted as an Army psychologist, served in a Pennsyl- vania hospital until the end of the War, then resumed his schooling and earned his Ph. D. at the University of California at Berkeley. Acquiring both eminence and enemies with his first major jobs — as director of Oakland's progressive Kaiser Foundation Hospital and as an assistant professor at UC's School of Medicine in San Francisco — Leary began to display the courage and sometimes rash icono- clasm that have since marked every phase of his checkered career. Contending that traditional psychiatric methods were hurling as many patients as they helped, he resigned in 1958 and signed up as a lecturer on clinical psychology at Har- vard. There he began to evolve and enunciate the theory of social interplay and personal behavior as so many stylized games, since popularized by Dr. Eric Berne in his best-selling book "Games People Play," and to both preach and practice the effective but unconventional new psychiatric research technique of sending his students to study emotional

problems such as alcoholism where they germinate — rather than in the textbook or the laboratory.

At the time, predictably enough, few of these novel notions went over very well with Leary' s hidebound col- leagues. But their rumblings of skepti- cism rose to a chorus of outrage when Leary returned to Harvard in 1960 from his pioneering voyage into inner space — beside the swimming pool in Cuernava- ca— to begin experimenting on himself, his associates and hundreds of volunteer subjects with measured doses of psilo- cybin, the chemical derivative of the sacred mushrooms. Vowing "to dedicate the rest of my life as a psychologist to the systematic exploration of this new instrument," he and his rapidly multi- plying followers began to turn on with the other psychedelics: morning- glory seeds, nutmeg, marijuana, peyote, mescaline — and a colorless, odorless, tasteless but incredibly potent labora- tory compound called LSD 23, first syn- thesized in 1938 by a Swiss biochemist seeking a pain killer for migraine head- aches. A hundred times stronger than psilocybin, LSD sent its hallucinated users on multihued, multileveled roller- coaster rides so spectacular that it soon became Leary 's primary tool for research. And as ivord began to circulate about the fantastic, phantasmagorical "trips" taken by his students, it soon became a clan- destine campus kick, and by 1962 had become an underground cult among the

"In 3000 people that I have personally observed taking LSD, we've had only four cases of prolonged psychoses — two or three weeks after the session. All of these had been in a mental hospital before."

"An enormous amount of energy from every fiber of your body is released under LSD — especially sexual energy. There is no question that LSD is the most power- ful aphrodisiac ever discovered by man."

"I think that anyone who wants to have a psychedelic experience and is willing to prepare for it and to examine his own hang-ups and neurotic tendencies should be allowed to have a crack at it."

young avant-garde from London to Los Angeles.

By 1963, it had also become something of an embarrassment to Harvard, how- ever,which "regretfully" dismissed Leary, and his colleague Dr. Richard Alpert, in order to stem the rising tide of avid un- dergraduate interest in the drug. Un- daunted, they organized a privately financed research group called the Inter- national Foundation for Internal Free- dom (IFIF), and set up a psychedelic study center in Zihuatanejo, Mexico; but before they could resume full-scale LSD sessions, the Mexican government stepped in, anticipating adverse popular reaction, and demanded that they leave the country.

Leary had now become not only the messiah but the martyr of the psychedelic movement. But soon afterward came a dramatic lllh-hour reprieve from a young New York millionaire named William Hitchcock, a veteran LSD voyager who believed in the importance of Leary's xvork — by now a mission — and toward that end turned over to him a rambling mansion on his 4000-acre estate in Mill- brook, New York, which has since become not only Leary's home and headquarters but also a kind of shrine and sanctuary for psychedelic pilgrims from all over the world. On April 16 of this year, it also became a target for further harassment by what Leary calls "the forces of middle- aged, middle-class authority." Late that night, a squad of Duchess County police descended on the place, searched it from top to bottom, found a minute quantity of marijuana, and arrested four people — including Leary. If convicted, he could be fined heavily and sent to prison for 16 years. Already appealing another con- viction, Leary had been arrested in La- redo the previous December as he was about to enter Mexico for a vacation, when Customs officials searched his car and found a half ounce of marijuana in the possession of his 18-year-old daugh- ter. Despite his claim that the drug was for scientific and sacramental use in the furtherance of his work and his spiritual beliefs (as a practicing Hindu), he was fined f 30, 000 and sentenced to 30 years in prison for transporting marijuana and failing to pay the Federal marijuana tax. hi the months since then, the LSD controversy has continued to escalate along with Leary's notoriety — spurred by a spate of headline stories about psyche- delic psychoses, dire warnings of "in- stant insanity" from police and public health officials, and pious editorials in- veighing against the evils of the drug. In May and June, two Senate subcommit- tees conducted widely publicized public hearings on LSD; and three states — Cali- fornia, Nevada and New Jersey — enacted laws prohibiting its illicit use, possession, distribution or manufacture. With a ringing appeal for still more stringent legislation on a Federal level, Ronald

Reagan even dragged the issue into his successful campaign for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in California. It was amid this mounting outcry against the drug that playboy asked Dr. Leary to present his side of the psyche- delic story — and to answer a few per- tinent questions about its putative promise and its alleged perils. Consenting readily, he invited us to visit him in Mill- brook, where we found him a few days later reciting Hindu morning prayers with a group of guests in the kitchen of the 64-room mansion. He greeted us warmly and led the way to a third-floor library. Instead of sitting down in one of the room's well-worn easy chairs, he crossed the room, stepped out of an open window onto a tin roof over a second- floor bay window, and proceeded to stretch out on a double-width mattress a few feet from the edge. While we made ourself comfortable at the other end of the mattress, he opened his shirt to the warm summer sun, propped his bare feet against the shingles, looked down at the mansion's vast rolling meadow of a lawn, listened for a moment to the song of a chickadee in the branches of a tree nearby, and then turned, ready for our first question.

PLAYBOY: How many times have you used LSD, Dr. Leary?

LEARY: Up to this moment, I've had 311 psychedelic sessions.

PLAYBOY: What do you think it's done for you — and to you?

LEARY: That's difficult to answer easily. Let me say this: I was 39 when I had my first psychedelic experience. At that time, I was a middle-aged man involved in the middle-aged process of dying. My joy in life, my sensual openness, my crea- tivity were all sliding downhill. Since that time, six years ago, my life has been renewed in almost every dimension. Most of my colleagues at the University of California and at Harvard, of course, feel that I've become an eccentric and a kook. I would estimate that fewer than 15 percent of my professional colleagues understand and support what I'm doing. The ones who do, as you might expect, tend to be among the younger psychol- ogists. If you know a person's age, you know what he's going to think and feel about LSD. Psychedelic drugs are the medium of the young. As you move up the age scale — into the 30s, 40s and 50s — fewer and fewer people are open to the possibilities that these chemicals offer. PLAYBOY: Why is that? LEARY: To the person over 35 or 40, the word "drug" means one of two things: doctor-disease or dope fiend-crime. Nothing you can say to a person who has this neurological fix on the word "drug" is going to change his mind. He's frozen like a Pavlovian dog to this con- ditioned reflex. To people under 25, on the other hand, the word "drug" refers to

a wide range of mind benders running from alcohol, energizers and stupefiers to marijuana and the other psychedelic drugs. To middle-aged America, it may be synonymous with instant insanity, but to most Americans under 25, the psychedelic drug means ecstasy, sensual unfolding, religious experience, revela- tion, illumination, contact with nature. There's not a teenager or young person in the United States today who doesn't know at least one person who has had a good experience with marijuana or LSD. The horizons of the current younger generation, in terms of expanded con- sciousness, are light-years beyond those of their parents. The breakthrough has occurred; there's no going back. The psychedelic battle is won. PLAYBOY: Why, then, have you called for a one-year "cease-fire" on the use of LSD and marijuana?

LEARY: Because there have never been two generations of human beings so far apart — living essentially in two different worlds, speaking two different languages — as the people under 25 and the older generation. Evolutionary misunderstand- ing causes bloodshed and imprisonment. To relieve this situation, I've asked the younger generation to cool it for a year and to use this moratorium period to ex- plain to their parents — and to their jail- ers— what LSD and marijuana are, and why we want and intend to use them. I have made clear that this is a voluntary waiving of the constitutional right to change your own consciousness. But I suggested this as a conciliatory gesture to mollify and educate the older generation and to allow time for the younger people to learn more about how to turn on. I'm demanding that this period also be a moratorium on hysterical legislation and on punitive arrests of young people for the possession of LSD and marijuana. If, at the end of one year, the older genera- tion has not taken advantage of this cease-fire, I predict and indeed urge a firm statement on the part of everyone involved that they intend to resume the use of psychedelics, to exercise their con- stitutional right to expand their own consciousness — whatever the cost. PLAYBOY: What do you say to the stand- ard charge that LSD is too powerful and dangerous to entrust to the young? LEARY: Well, none of us yet knows exact- ly how LSD can be used for the growth and benefit of the human being. It is a powerful releaser of energy as yet not fully understood. But if I'm confronted with the possibility that a 15-year-old or a 50-year-old is going to use a new form of energy that he doesn't understand, I'll back the 15-yearold every time. Why? Because a 15-year-old is going to use a new form of energy to have fun, to intensify sensation, to make love, for curiosity, for personal growth. Many 50- year-olds have lost their curiosity,* have lost their ability to make love, have

dulled their openness to new sensations, and would use any form of new energy for power, control and warfare. So it doesn't concern me at all that young people are taking time out from the educational and occupational assembly lines to experiment with consciousness, to dabble with new forms of experience and artistic expression. The present gen- eration under the age of 25 is the wisest and holiest generation that the human race has ever seen. And, by God, instead of lamenting, derogating and imprison- ing them, we should support them, listen to them and turn on with them. PLAYBOY: If we wanted to take you up on that last suggestion, how would we go about it?

IEARY: Find a beloved friend who knows where to get LSD and how to run a ses- sion; or find a trusted and experienced LSD voyager to guide you on a trip. PLAYBOY: Is it necessary to have a guide? LEARY: Yes. Unless you have an experi- enced guide — at least for your first 10 or 15 sessions — it would be extremely reckless.

PLAYBOY: What if a person can't find ei- ther a guide or a source of LSD among his friends? Where does he go? LEARY: LSD is against the law, and I cer- tainly would not advise anyone to vio- late the law. I will say this, however: Throughout human history, men who have wanted to expand their conscious- ness, to find deeper meaning inside themselves, have been able to do it if they were willing to commit the time and energy to do so. In other times and countries, men would walk barefooted 2000 miles to find spiritual teachers who would turn them on to Buddha, Mo- hammed or Ramakrishna. PLAYBOY: If you can't say where one could buy LSD, can you tell us the formula for making it? We understand it can be syn- thesized in any well-equipped chemical laboratory.

LEARY: That's true. But it would be irre- sponsible of me to reveal it. The un- authorized manufacture of LSD is now against the law.

PLAYBOY: Assuming you can get it, how do you take it? Can it be injected, or is it mostly just swallowed in a sugar cube? LEARY: It can be injected or it can come in the form of powder or pills or in a solution, which is odorless, tasteless and colorless. In any case, you're deal- ing with a very minute quantity. One hundred micrograms is a moderate dose. PLAYBOY: For a session lasting how long? LEARY: Eight to twelve hours. PLAYBOY: What's it like? What happens to you?

LEARY: If we're speaking in a general way, what happens to everyone is the ex- perience of incredible acceleration and intensification of all senses and of all mental processes — which can be very con- fusing if you're not prepared for it. Around a thousand million signals fire

off in your brain every second; during any second in an LSD session, you find yourself tuned in on thousands of these messages that ordinarily you don't regis- ter consciously. And you may be getting an incredible number of simultaneous messages from different parts of your body. Since you're not used to this, it can lead to incredible ecstasy or it can lead to confusion. Some people are freaked by this niagara of sensory input. Instead of having just one or two or three things happening in tidy sequence, you're suddenly flooded by hundreds of lights and colors and sensations and images, and you can get quite lost.

You sense a strange, powerful force beginning to unloose and radiate through your body. In normal percep- tion, we are aware of static symbols. But as the LSD effect takes hold, everything begins to move, and this relentless, im- personal, slowly swelling movement will continue through the several hours of the session. It's as though for all of your normal waking life you have been caught in a still photograph, in an awk- ward, stereotyped posture; suddenly the show comes alive, balloons out to several dimensions and becomes irradiated with color and energy.

The first thing you notice is an incred- ible enhancement of sensory awareness. Take the sense of sight. LSD vision is to normal vision as normal vision is to the picture on a badly tuned television set. Under LSD, it's as though you have microscopes up to your eyes, in which you see jewellike, radiant details of anything your eye falls upon. You are really seeing for the first time — not static, symbolic perception of learned things, but patterns of light bouncing off the objects around you and hurtling at the speed of light into the mosaic of rods and cones in the retina of your eye. Everything seems alive. Everything is alive, beaming diamond-bright light waves into your retina. PLAYBOY: Is the sense of hearing similarly intensified?

LEARY: Tremendously. Ordinarily we hear just isolated sounds: the rings of a tele- phone, die sound of somebody's words. But when you turn on with LSD, the organ of Corti in your inner ear be- comes a trembling membrane seething with tattoos of sound waves. The vibra- tions seem to penetrate deep inside you, swell and burst there. You hear one note of a Bach sonata, and it hangs there, glittering, pulsating, for an endless length of time, while you slowly orbit around it. Then, hundreds of years later, comes the second note of the sonata, and again, for hundreds of years, you slowly drift around the two notes, observing the harmony and the discords, and reflecting on the history of music.

But when your nervous system is turned on with LSD, and all the wires are flashing, the senses begin to overlap

and merge. You not only hear but see the music emerging from the speaker sys- tem— like dancing particles, like squirm- ing curls of toothpaste. You actually see the sound, in multicolored patterns, while you're hearing it. At the same time, you are the sound, you are the note, you are the string of the violin or the piano. And every one of your organs is pulsating and having orgasms in rhythm with it.

PLAYBOY: What happens to the sense of taste?

LEARY: Taste is intensified, too, although normally you won't feel like eating dur- ing an LSD session, any more than you feel like eating when you take your first solo at the controls of a supersonic jet. Although if you eat after a session, there is an appreciation of all the particular qualities of food — its texture and resil- iency and viscosity — such as we are not conscious of in a normal state of awareness.

PLAYBOY: How about the sense of smell? LEARY: This is one of the most over- whelming aspects of an LSD experience. It seems as though for the first time you are breathing life, and you remember with amusement and distaste that plas- tic, odorless, artificial gas that you used to consider air. During the LSD experi- ence, you discover that you're actually inhaling an atmosphere composed of millions of microscopic strands of olfac- tory ticker tape, exploding in your nos- trils with ecstatic meaning. When you sit across the room from a woman during an LSD session, you're aware of thou- sands of penetrating chemical messages floating from her through the air into your sensory center: a symphony of a thousand odors that all of us exude at every moment — the shampoo she uses, her cologne, her sweat, the exhaust and discharge from her digestive system, her sexual perfume, the fragrance of her clothing — grenades of eroticism explod- ing in the olfactory cell. PLAYBOY: Does the sense of touch become equally erotic?

LEARY: Touch becomes electric as well as erotic. I remember a moment during one session in which my wife leaned over and lightly touched the palm of my hand with her finger. Immediately a hundred thousand end cells in my hand exploded in soft orgasm. Ecstatic ener- gies pulsated up my arms and rocketed into my brain, where another hundred thousand cells softly exploded in pure, delicate pleasure. The distance between my wife's finger and the palm of my hand was about 50 miles of space, filled with cotton candy, infiltrated with thou- sands of silver wires hurtling energy back and forth. Wave after wave of ex- quisite energy pulsed from her finger. Wave upon wave of ethereal tissue rap- ture— delicate, shuddering — coursed back and forth from her finger to my palm. PLAYBOY: And this rapture was erotic?

LEARY: Transcendentally. An enormous amount of energy from every fiber of your body is released under LSD — most especially including sexual energy. There is no question that LSD is the most powerful aphrodisiac ever discov- ered by man.

PIAYBOY: Would you elaborate? LEARY: I'm saying simply that sex under LSD becomes miraculously enhanced and intensified. I don't mean that it sim- ply generates genital energy. It doesn't automatically produce a longer erection. Rather, it increases your sensitivity a thousand percent. Let me put it this way: Compared with sex under LSD, the way you've been making love — no matter how ecstatic the pleasure you think you get from it — is like making love to a department-store-window dummy. In sen- sory and cellular communion on LSD, you may spend a half hour making love with eyeballs, another half hour making love with breath. As you spin through a thousand sensory and cellular organic changes, she does, too. Ordinarily, sex- ual communication involves one's own chemicals, pressure and interactions of a very localized nature — in what the psy- chologists call the erogenous zones. A vulgar, dirty concept, I think. When you're making love under LSD, it's as though every cell in your body — and you have trillions — is making love with every cell in her body. Your hand doesn't ca- ress her skin but sinks down into and merges with ancient dynamos of ecstasy within her.

PLAYBOY: How often have you made love under the influence of LSD? LEARY: Every time I've taken it. In fact, that is what the LSD experience is all about. Merging, yielding, flowing, un- ion, communion. It's all lovemaking. You make love with candlelight, with sound waves from a record player, with a bowl of fruit on the table, with the trees. You're in pulsating harmony with all the energy around you. PLAYBOY: Including that of a woman? LEARY: The three inevitable goals of the LSD session are to discover and make love with God, to discover and make love with yourself, and to discover and make love with a woman. You can't make it with yourself unless you've made it with the timeless energy process around you, and you can't make it with a woman until you've made it with your- self. The natural and obvious way to take LSD is with a member of the oppo- site sex, and an LSD session that does not involve an ultimate merging with a person of the opposite sex isn't really complete. One of the great purposes of an LSD session is sexual union. The more expanded your consciousness — the farther out you can move beyond your mind — the deeper, the richer, the longer and more meaningful your sexual communion.

PLAYBOY: We've heard about sessions in which couples make love for hours on end, to the point of exhaustion, but never seem to reach exhaustion. Is this true? LEARY: Inevitably.

PLAYBOY: Can you describe the sensation of an orgasm under LSD? LEARY: Only the most reckless poet would attempt that. I have to say to you, "What does one say to a little child?" The child says, "Daddy, what is sex like?" and you try to describe it, and then the little child says, "Well, is it fun like the circus?" and you say, "Well, not exactly like that." And the child says, "Is it fun like chocolate ice cream?" and you say, "Well, it's like that but much, much more than that." And the child says, "Is it fun like the roller coaster, then?" and you say, "Well, that's part of it, but it's even more than that." In short, I can't tell you what it's like, because it's not like anything that's ever happened to you — and there aren't words adequate to describe it, anyway. You won't know what it's like until you try it yourself — and then I won't need to tell you. PLAYBOY: We've heard that some women who ordinarily have difficulty achieving orgasm find themselves capable of multi- ple orgasms under LSD. Is that true? LEARY: In a carefully prepared, loving LSD session, a woman will inevitably have several hundred orgasms. PLAYBOY: Several hundred} LEARY: Yes. Several hundred. PLAYBOY: What about a man? LEARY: This preoccupation with the num- ber of orgasms is a hang-up for many men and women. It's as crude and vulgar a concept as wondering how much she paid for the negligee.

PLAYBOY: Still, there must be some sort of physiological comparison. If a woman can have several hundred orgasms, how many can a man have under optimum conditions?

LEARY: It would depend entirely on the amount of sexual — and psychedelic— ex- perience the man has had. I can speak only for myself and about my own expe- rience. I can only compare what I was with what I am now. In the last six years, my openness to, my responsiveness to, my participation in every form of sensory expression has multiplied a thousandfold.

PLAYBOY: This aspect of LSD has been hinted at privately but never spelled out in public until now. Why? LEARY: The sexual impact is, of course, the open but private secret about LSD, which none of us has talked about in the last few years. It's socially dangerous enough to say that LSD helps you find divinity and helps you discover yourself. You're already in trouble when you say that. But then if you announce that the psychedelic experience is basically a sex- ual experience, you're asking to bring the whole middle-aged, middle-class monolith down on your head. At the

present time, however, I'm under a 30- year sentence of imprisonment, which for a 45-year-old man is essentially a life term; and in addition, I am under in- dictment on a second marijuana offense involving a 16-year sentence. Since there is hardly anything more that -middle- aged, middle-class authority can do to me — and since the secret is out anyway among the young — I feel I'm free at this moment to say what we've never said before: that sexual ecstasy is the basic reason for the current LSD boom. When Dr. Goddard, the head of the Food and Drug Administration, an- nounced in a Senate hearing that ten percent of our college students are taking LSD, did you ever wonder why? Sure, they're discovering God and meaning; sure, they're discovering them- selves; but did you really think that sex wasn't the fundamental reason for this surging, youthful social boom? You can no more do research on LSD and leave out sexual ecstasy than you can do mi- croscopic research on tissue and leave out cells.

LSD is not an automatic trigger to sexual awakening, however. The first ten times you take it, you might not be able to have a sexual experience at all, be- cause you're so overwhelmed and de- lighted— or frightened and confused — by the novelty; the idea of having sex might be irrelevant or incomprehen- sible at the moment. But it depends upon the setting and the partner. It is almost inevitable, if a man and his mate take LSD together, that their sexual en- ergies will be unimaginably intensified, and unless clumsiness or fright on the part of one or the other blocks it, it will lead to a deeper experience than they ever thought possible.

From the beginning of our research, I have been aware of this tremendous per- sonal power in LSD. You must be very careful to take it only with someone you know really well, because it's almost in- evitable that a woman will fall in love with the man who shares her LSD expe- rience. Deep and lasting neurological imprints, profound emotional bonds, can develop as a result of an LSD session — bonds that can last a lifetime. For this reason, I have always been extremely cautious about running sessions with men and women. We always try to have a subject's husband or wife present dur- ing his or her first session, so that as these powerful urges develop, they are directed in ways that can be lived out responsibly after the session. PLAYBOY: Are you preaching psychedelic monogamy?

LEARY: Well, I can't generalize, but one of the great lessons I've learned from LSD is that every man contains the es- sence of all men and every woman has within her all women. I remember a ses- sion a few years ago in which, with hor- ror and ecstasy, I opened my eyes and

looked into the eyes of my wife and was pulled into the deep blue pools of her being floating softly in the center of her mind, experiencing everything that she was experiencing, knowing every thought that she had ever had. As my eyes were riveted to hers, her face began to melt and change. I saw her as a young girl, as a baby, as an old woman with gray hair and seamy, wrinkled face. I saw her as a witch, a Madonna, a nag- ging crone, a radiant queen, a Byzantine virgin, a tired, worldly-wise Oriental whore who had seen every sight of life repeated a thousand times. She was all women, all woman, the essence of female — eyes smiling, quizzically, resignedly, devilishly, always inviting: "See me, hear me, join me, merge with me, keep the dance going." Now, the. implications of this experience for sex and mating, I think, are obvious. It's because of this, not because of moral restrictions or re- straints, that I've been extremely monog- amous in my use of LSD over the last six years.

PLAYBOY: When you speak of monogamy, do you mean complete sexual fidelity to one woman?

IEARY: Well, the notion of running around trying to find different mates is a very low-level concept. We are living in a world of expanding population in which there are more and more beauti- ful young girls coming off the assembly line each month. It's obvious that the sexual criteria of the past are going to be changed, and that what's demanded of creatures with our sensory and cellu- lar repertoire is not just one affair after another with one young body after an- other, but the exploration of the incredi- ble depths and varieties of your own identity with a single member of the op- posite sex. This involves time and com- mitment to the voyage. PLAYBOY: Do you mean to imply that you've had only one bed partner in the last six years?

LEAHY: I've had more than one long-term relationship during this period. But there is a certain kind of neurological and cellular fidelity that develops. I have said for many years now that in the fu- ture the grounds for divorce would not be that your wife went to bed with an- other man and bounced around on a mattress for an hour or two, but that your wife had an LSD session with some- body else, because the bonds and the con- nections that develop are so powerful. PLAYBOY: It's been reported that when you are in the company of women, quite a lot of them turn on to you. As a matter of fact, a friend of yours told us that you could have two or three different women every night if you wanted to. Is he right?

IEARY: For the most part, during the last six years, I have lived very quietly in our research centers. But on lecture tours and in highly enthusiastic social gatherings,

there is no question that a charismatic public figure does generate attraction and stimulate a sexual response. PLAYBOY: How often do you return diis response?

LEARY: Every woman has built into her cells and tissues the longing for a hero- sage-mythic male to open up and share her own divinity. But casual sexual en- counters do not satisfy this deep longing. Any charismatic person who is conscious of his own mythic potency awakens this basic hunger in women and pays rever- ence to it at the level that is harmonious and appropriate at the time. Compul- sive body grabbing, however, is rarely the vehicle of such communication. PLAYBOY: Do you disapprove of the idea of casual romance — catalyzed by LSD? LEARY: Well, I'm no one to tell anyone else what to do. But I would say, if you use LSD to make out sexually in the seductive sense, then you'll be a very humiliated and embarrassed person, be- cause it's just not going to work. On LSD, her eyes would be microscopic, and she'd see very plainly what you were up to, coming on with some heavy-handed, mustache-twisting routine. You'd look like a consummate ass, and she'd laugh at you, or you'd look like a monster and she'd scream and go into a paranoid state. Nothing good can happen with LSD if it's used crudely or for power or manipulative purposes. PLAYBOY: Suppose you met a girl at a par- ty, developed an immediate rapport, and you both decided to share an LSD trip that same night. Could it work under those circumstances? LEARY: You must remember that in tak- ing LSD with someone else, you are voluntarily relinquishing all of your per- sonality defenses and opening yourself up in a very vulnerable manner. If you and the girl are ready to do this, there would be an immediate and deep rap- port if you took a trip together. People from the LSD cult would be able to do it upon a brief meeting, but an inexperi- enced person would probably find it ex- tremely confusing, and the people might become quite isolated from each other. They might be whirled into the rapture or confusion of their own inner work- ings and forget entirely that the other person is there.

PLAYBOY: According to some reports, LSD can trigger the acting out of latent ho- mosexual impulses in ostensibly hetero- sexual men and women. Is there any truth to that, in your opinion? LEARY: On the contrary, the fact is that LSD is a specific cure for homosexuality. It's well known that most sexual perver- sions are the result not of biological binds but of freaky, dislocating child- hood experiences of one kind or anoth- er. Consequently, it's not surprising that we've had many cases of long-term homo- sexuals who, under LSD, discover that they are not only genitally but genet-

ically male, that they are basically at- tracted to females. The most famous and public of such cases is that of Allen Ginsberg, who has openly stated that the first time he turned on to women was during an LSD session several years ago. Bui this is only one of many such cases.

PLAYBOY: Has this happened with Les- bians?

LEARY: I was just going to cite such a case. An extremely attractive girl came down to our training center in Mexico. She was a Lesbian and she was very active sexually, but all of her energy was devot- ed to making it with girls. She was at an LSD session at one of our cottages and went down to the beach and saw this young man in a bathing suit and- — flash! — for the first time in her life the cellu- lar electricity was flowing in her body and it bridged the gap. Her subsequent sexual choices were almost exclusively members of the opposite sex.

For the same reasons, LSD is also a powerful panacea for impotence and fri- gidity, both of which, like homosexual- ity, are symbolic screw-ups. The LSD experience puts you in touch with the wisdom of your body, of your nervous system, of your cells, of your organs. And the closer you get to the message of the body, the more obvious it be- comes that it's constructed and designed to procreate and keep the life stream go- ing. When you're confronted witli this basic cellular fact under LSD, you real- ize that your impotency, or your fri- gidity, is caused by neuropsychological hang-ups of fear or shame that make no sense to your cells, that have nothing to do with the biochemical forces inside your body urging you to merge and mate with a member of the opposite sex. PLAYBOY: Does LSD always work as a sex- ual cure-all?

LEARY: Certainly not. LSD is no guaran- tee of any specific social or sexual out- come. One man may take LSD and leave wife and family and go off to be a monk on the banks of the Ganges. Another may take LSD and go back to his wife. It's a highly individual situation. Highly unpredictable. During LSD sessions, you see, there can come a microscopic per- ception of your routine social and professional life. You may discover to your horror that you're living a robot existence, that your relationships with your boss, your wife and your family are stereotyped, empty and devoid of mean- ing. At this point, there might come a desire to renounce this hollow existence, to collect your thoughts, to go away and cloister yourself from the world like a monk while you figure out what kind of a life you want to go back to, if any.

Conversely, we've found that in giving LSD to members of monastic sects, there has been a definite tendency for them to leave the monastic life and to find a mat- ing relationship. Several were men in

their late 40s who had been monks for 15 or 20 years, but who even at this ma- ture age returned to society, married and made the heterosexual adjustment. It's not coincidental that of all those I've given LSD to, the religious group — more than 200 ministers, priests, divinity stu- dents and nuns — has experienced the most intense sexual reaction. And in two religious groups that prize chastity and celibacy, there have been wholesale de- fections of monks and nuns who left their religious orders to get married after a series of LSD experiences. The LSD session, you see, is an overwhelming awakening of experience; it releases po- tent, primal energies, and one of these is the sexual impulse, which is the strong- est impulse at any level of organic life. For the first time in their lives, perhaps, these people were meeting head on the powerful life forces that they had walled off with ritualized defenses and self-delusions.

PLAYBOY: A great deal of what is said about LSD by its proponents, including you, has been couched in terms of reli- gious mysticism. You spoke earlier, in fact, of discovering "divinity" through LSD. In what way is the LSD experience religious?

IEARY: It depends on what you mean by religion. For almost everyone, the LSD experience is a confrontation with new forms of wisdom and energy that dwarf and humiliate man's mind. This experi- ence of awe and revelation is often de- scribed as religious. I consider my work basically religious, because it has as its goal the systematic expansion of con- sciousness and the discovery of energies within, which men call "divine." From the psychedelic point of view, almost all religions are attempts— sometimes limit- ed temporally or nationally — to discover the inner potential. Well, LSD is West- ern yoga. The aim of all Eastern reli- gion, like the aim of LSD, is basically to get high: that is, to expand your con- sciousness and find ecstasy and revela- tion within.

PLAYBOY: Dr. Gerald Klee.of the National Institute of Mental Health, has written: "Those who say LSD expands conscious- ness would have the task of defining the terms. By any conventional definition, I don't think it does expand the conscious- ness." What do vou think? LEARY: Well, he's using the narrow, con- ventional definition of consciousness that psychiatrists have been taught: that there are two levels of consciousness — sleep and symbolic normal awareness. Anything else is insanity. So by conven- tional definition, LSD does not expand symbolic consciousness; thus, it creates psychosis. In terms of his conventional symbol game, Dr. Klee is right. My con- tention is that his definition is too nar- row, that it comes from a deplorable, primitive and superstitious system of consciousness. My system of conscious-