girl we couldn't get much higher

He'll fly his astral plane.
He'll take you trips around the bay.
He'll bring you back the same day.
Timothy Leary. Timothy Leary.
~ moody blues

I guess that makes me a liar, if you believe Jim Morrison, whose band was named after Aldous Huxley's Doors of Perception, which was about getting at least much higher than not getting high at all. Huxley was also writing back then about "human potentiality," which jump-started Esalen Institute and the whole human potential movement, which mostly proved something we should have known already: that human beings have the potential to be assholes. And on that note, here's a brand new just-out bio of Timothy Leary. Such is the power of reviewers that I immediately ordered this one on the strength of a single sentence from Publishers Weekly... Largely based on interviews with Leary's friends and acquaintances, this book offers a highly detailed and decidedly ugly portrayal of a pathologically selfish, narcissistic yet complex man who lacked basic qualities such as empathy and compassion. Taken together with Booklist's nod to "Leary's pseudospirituality," that's enough to convince me that this one skips the saccharine hagiography and cuts to the chase. Expect to hear more. My advice to people today is as follows: If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out. ~Timothy Leary The "energy process." Uh-huh.

acid is the answer (what was the question?)

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