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From the Cary Grant Website, Chapter 14.
Here are his thoughts on LSD:
Without the ability to fully love or be fully loved, so many of us think that the acquisition of money can bring self-esteem and happiness. I’ve enjoyed friendship with some exceedingly wealthy people. If money brought happiness, then each of them should be ecstatically happy. But I doubt whether any of them is any happier than any of my less well-to-do friends. Money, it seems, attracts more envy than empathy. More lust than love.
In 1932 the practice of psychiatry was little known or respected. The public seemed to regard it, just as I probably did, with skepticism. For years I absurdly treated subjects with which I was unfamiliar, or sports in which I was not proficient, or books which I should have read but didn’t, with disdain. But by 1956, lacking the foundation of early spiritual training and suspecting that there was more happiness available than I seemed able to grasp, I had grown much more tolerant of, and receptive to, the knowledge of others. Other searchers, other sharers. Humanitarians in all fields of endeavor. At the age of 53, after three unsuccessful marriages, either something was wrong with me or, obviously, with the whole sociological and moralistic concepts of our civilization.
Now, I believe in caring for my health; and I trust you do too. Physical health is a product of, and dependent upon, mental health — one nurtures and nourishes the other. And so, together with a group of other interested Californians — doctors, writers, scientists and artists — and the encouragement of Betsy, who was interested herself, I underwent a series of controlled experiments with Lysergic Acid, a hallucinogenic chemical or drug known as LSD 25. Experiment is perhaps a misleading word; to most people it signifies patronization and objectivity. For my part I anxiously awaited their personal benefits that could be derived from the experiences, and was quite willing to be less than objective. Any man who experiments with something that cannot benefit himself, or add to his happiness, and that of his fellow man in turn, is a fool and a menace to society. I’ve heard that a man here and there died during LSD25 sessions; but then I’ve heard that men died during poker games and while watching horse racing; but that didn’t seem to stop such occupations. Those men might have died anywhere while doing anything. Men have also died testing airplanes and parachutes, vaccines and common cold cures. In attempting to traverse the next step into progress and knowledge, men have always died. But there is a difference between the man who knows what he’s about with a high-powered airplane, and an idiot who puts wings on a bicycle and takes off from the edge of Niagra Falls.
LSD 25 is a psychic energizer and the exact opposite in reaction to the addictive drugs and opiates. Indeed, Seconal, or similar sedative, is usually given as an antidote, to quell and offset the effects of LSD 25, if necessary. The action of the chemical releases the subconscious so that it becomes apparent to yourself. So that you can see what transpires in the depth of you mind — and what goes on there you wouldn’t believe, ladies and gentlemen — and learn which misconceptions, guilts and fears, with their resultant repressions, inhibitions and insecurities, have formed the pattern for your past behavior. A successively recurring pattern since childhood.
The feeling is that of an unmarshaling of the thoughts as you’ve customarily associated them. The lessening of conscious control, similar to the mental process which takes place when we dream. For example, when you’re asleep and your mind no longer concerned with matters and activities of the day, your subconscious often brings itself to your attention by dreaming. With conscious controls relaxed, those thoughts buried deep inside begin to come to the surface in the form of dreams. These dreams, since they appear to us in symbolic guise, are fantasies and, if you will accept the reasoning, could be classified as hallucinations. Such fantasies, or hallucinations, are inside every one of us, waiting to be released, aired and understood. Dreams are really the emotions that we find ourselves reluctant to examine, think about, or meditate upon, while conscious.
Under the effect of LSD 25, these dreams or hallucinations, if you wish, are speeded up, and interpreted, when properly conducted ba a psychiatrically orientated doctor who sits quietly by, awaiting whatever communication one cares to make — the revealing of a hidden memory seen again from an older, more mature viewpoint, or the dawning of new enlightenment. Then, if the doctor is as skilled as mine was, he carefully proffers a word or key, that can lead to the next release, the next step toward fuller understanding.
The shock of each revelation brings with it an anguish of sadness for what was not known before in the wasted years of ignorance and, at the same time, an ecstasy of joy at being freed from the shackles of such ignorance.
One becomes a battleground of old and new beliefs. Of nightmares beyond description. I passed through changing seas of horrifying and happy sights, through a montage of intense hate and love, a mosaic of past impressions assembling and reassembling; through terrifying depths of dark despair replaced by glorious heavenlike religious symbolisms. Session after session. Week after week.
I learned may things in the quiet of that small room. I learned to accept the responsibility for my own actions, and to blame myself and no one else for circumstances of my own creating. I learned that no one else was keeping me unhappy but me; that I could whip myself better than any other guy in the joint.
I learned that all clichés prove true; which is, of course, the reason for their repetition, even when the meaning has been forgotten by the constant usage.
I learned that everything is, or becomes, its own opposite. A theory I can sometimes apply, but would find difficult to convey.
I learned that my dear parents, products of their parents, could know no better than they knew, and began to remember them only ofr the most useful, the best, the wisest of their teachings. They gave me my life and body, the promising combination of the two, and my initial strength; they endowed me with an inquisitive mind. They taught me to feed myself, to walk, to bathe myself and to clothe myself; and I shall think of them always with love now, not only for what the did know but, even, for what the didn’t know.
For a slow learner, I learned a great deal — and the result of it all was rebirth. A new assessment of life and myself in it. An immeasurably beneficial cleansing of so many needless fears and guilts, and a release of the tensions that had been the result of them. Not a cleansing and release of them all, certainly, for that would be the absolute — the innocence of the newly born baby with an unformed ego still close to God — and I cannot experience the absolute until I have unreservedly returned to the comfort of God.
In life there is no end to getting well. Perhaps death itself is the end to getting well. Or, if you prefer to think as I do, the beginning of being well.
I have heard and now believe it to be so, that drowning men in the last seconds of life relive the whole of it again; probably in order to cleanse themselves before meeting the great Maker, just as our religions instruct; and everyone is accustomed to the phenomenon of elderly people remembering their childhood with extraordinary clarity, yet forgetting what went on only yesterday. We call it second childhood, but it is undoubtedly the same process, undergone at a slower pace, as that experienced by the drowning man.
LSD 25 is no longer obtainable in America. Orthodox psychiatrists using the slower customary methods resisted its usage, and it’s unlikely that it will be reintroduced unless some brave, venturesome and respected psychiatrist publicly speaks out in its favor. Meanwhile, the authorities have banned its use; at least for therapeutic purpose. Although how men can be authorities on something they’ve never tried mystifies me. However, in the hands o f thrill-seekers it could, like whiskey and the automobile, be exceedingly dangerous. I suppose all new methods, new theories, new inventions go through the filter of trial and error, acceptance and rejection. Past the inevitable parade of scoffers and stone-throwers.
Yes, it takes a long time for happiness to break through either to the individual or nations. It will take just as long as people themselves continue to confound it. You’ll find that nowadays they put you away for singing and dancing in the street. “Here now, let’s have none of that happiness, my boy. You cut that out; waking up the neighbors!” “Those darn neighbors need waking up, I can tell you, constable!”
I suppose if a healthy youngster walked along a street in a bathing suit to allow his or her youthful pores a little more oxygen from the meager amount obtainable in our smog-infested cities, he or she would be arrested. “Here now, none of that trying to keep a healthy body in this city. Go to the beach!” “In which direction , officer? This is Kansas City.” Even bare feet and a rare acquaintance with the earth beneath them would be sufficient to disassociate you from the association of your embarrassed associates. Civilization! Oh, brother! And you, too, sister!
I have made over 60 pictures and lived in Hollywood for more than 30 years. Thirty years spent in the stimulating company of hard-working, excitable, dedicated, loving, serious, honest, good people. Casts and crews. I recognize and respect them. I know their faults and their insecurities. I hope they know and forgive mine. Thirty years ago my hair was black and wavy. Today it’s gray and bristly. But today people in cars, stopped alongside me at a traffic light, smile at me!
I feel fine. Alone. But fine. My mother is quite elderly. My wives have divorced me, and I await a woman with the best qualities of each. I will endow her with those qualities because they will be in my own point of view.
As a philosopher once said, “You cannot judge the day until the night.” Since it is for me evening, or at least teatime, I can now look back and assess the day. It’s been a glorious adventure up to here — even the saddest parts — and I look forward to seeing the rest of the film. Just as I did in 1932 when I sat in that Paramount Studio office. I took up the pen and wrote for the first time “Cary Grant.” And that’s who, it seems, I am. Well, as some profound fellow said, “I’d be a nut to go through all that again, but I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.” And that goes for this autobiography.
Wow... this is the most amazing historical discovery in a generation.
The Age:
The story of man is being rewritten. Australian and Indonesian scientists have dug up skeletons of a previously unknown human species - real "hobbits" that stood only a metre tall - that lived on the Indonesian island of Flores, west of Timor, until relatively recently.
The scientists found the first skeleton in September 2003 in Liang Bua, a large limestone cave on the island. The one-metre-tall female, aged about 30 and dubbed "Hobbit", lived about 18,000 years ago.
Six similar skeletons were later found, some of whom lived in the cave just 13,000 years ago. The scientists have speculated that the species may have lived on Flores - which they dubbed the "lost world" - until the 16th century.
Despite having a small brain, the species could cook, hunt large prey and build rafts, the scientists say. Stone artefacts and animal remains were found with the skeletons.
Professor Roberts said the discovery would redraw the human family tree. "It's one of the most important (discoveries) because it shows there was diversity among humans until very, very recently. If you go with the previous models, people say for the past 30,000 years we've been the only human species to inhabit the planet, whereas in fact that's rubbish.
"For most of human history, there's been more than one human species. Right now, it's unusual for us to be the only one around. In actual fact, that's been the case even more recently than we ever believed possible."
"They've got a brain the size of a grapefruit, yet they can make stone tools just as well as we can make them . . . they were cooking, they were making fire and they were hunting those little stegodons, those little baby elephants . . . they were intelligent and almost certainly had language."
"There are lots of local folk tales in Flores about these people which are consistent and incredibly detailed. The stories suggest there may have been a grain of truth to the idea they were still living on Flores up until the Dutch arrived in the 1500s," Professor Roberts said. "The stories suggest they lived in caves. The villagers would leave gourds with food out for them to eat, but legend has it they were the guests from hell - they'd eat everything, including the gourds."
He said isolated Flores was a fascinating "lost world", home to a range of exotic creatures extinct elsewhere, often morphed into giant or dwarf forms through lack of genetic diversity. These included a dwarf form of the primitive elephant stegodon, giant rats, Komodo dragons, and even larger species of giant lizard.
The scientists say Homo floresiensis is descended from Homo erectus, who first arrived on Flores about 840,000 years ago, after leaving Africa about a million years ago.
However, Colin Groves, of the Australian National University, said the skeletons had some extremely primitive features, and could be related to an even earlier human ancestor, Australopithecus, which predated all Homo species and was thought not to have left Africa.
"It's a real lost world . . . until so recently there would have been these tiny little people running around," he said. "It would have been fantastic to see."
Below is a world-flipper of a quote in Timothy Leary's Autobiography
But first, some introductions...
Timothy Leary - Harvard psychologist who kick-started the psychedelic 60s by going around the country "turning on" the intellectual elite in the hopes of passing chemical wisdom into the mainstream.
Neal Cassady - inspiration for the Beat Movement, and friends with Jack Keroac, Ken Kesey, and Allen Ginsberg. You can read more about the Psychedelic 60s and more here
December 1960, Leary invites Cassady to his house to play with drugs. They are chatting it up, and Leary, a novice drug user (compared to Cassady), is describing his challenges.
Timothy Leary
said:
We're doing our best. We've read everything that's been written in the last four thousand years on the subject.
You're cracking me up, man. There are no books written by scientists about ecstasy and cosmic orgasms. it's oral history and poetry. The history books are about meaningless public events like wars and elections and revolutions. (emphasis added) The only important things happen in the bodies and brains of individuals, you understand. That's the great secret of human life that scientists never talk about.
to which Timothy Leary responds, "Is that right."
(Page 52)
Man, that is great! It did a 180 on my perspective on the world.
Such an ugly chunk of my brain is devoted to imitating the gloom laden in the 24/hour news and history books. If you read history, if you watch the news, it feels like the world is this killer cannibal run by a cabal of sinisters. But really, I bike, I laugh with friends, eat good food every day, life is in general good.
The inner story is the ultimate story.
It seems that when we get the fullest possible picture of how our brains and nervous systems work at their peak, what we call logic will be a useful subset of a larger gestalt. - R.U. Sirius (Ken Goffman) from an excellent interview in Better Humans.
An excerpt:
"It started when I started a small zine called High Frontiers in the mid-80s, which was dedicated to the notion of a "neo-psychedelic renaissance." I could have called it a techno-psychedelic renaissance since that was largely what it was about. High Frontiers published about once a year from 1984 to 1988. It was well-liked within the zine world, reaching a circulation of about 20,000, which was good by those kinds of standards. Plus we had several lifetimes worth of fun as I'm sure some of your readers can imagine.
I can imagine...
My personal discovery of High Frontiers initiated the most magical day of my life. It started on the evening of May 31st, 1987, when I picked up issue #3 (1987) at Tower Records in Palo Alto, CA. where I happened to be working that summer. When I found and then browsed this astounding magazine, I quickly realized I had found a most remarkable treasure. I bought it immediately and took it home. I still think this is the single most amazing publication I have ever read to this day. That night I stayed up late in bed reading the whole thing from cover to cover.
Very late that night I finally reached the end. In the back of the zine were many ads, including one for the Psychedelic Shop on Market Street in downtown San Francisco. I had never been to anything 'psychedelic' before, and saw this as my chance to go up there and experience some of the culture, which obviously still seemed to be alive as evidenced by this magazine by RU Sirius. So naively, I wandered up to SF the next morning on June 1st, 1987. I got to the shop, and was overwhelmed at all the poster psychedelic art, books and novelty items. It was amazing. Here I am a young man still in college, just a couple of years after getting away from my parents, and I'm being reborn in the heart of psychedelia. It was a sublime feeling I can't describe. I just spent the better part of the night reading all of this psychedelic stuff that was blowing my mind, it was overwhelming, and now here I am in the SF psychedelic shop. The owner could obviously see I was enthralled, and he told me I should go to Haight Ashbury. And this is where you might think I'm naive. Having read many psychedelic books, including most of Tim Leary's and Robert Anton Wilson’s stuff, Haight-Ashbury was only a vague recollection of something "sixties". And then I remembered, "Oh yeah! Summer of Love!” So I took the map from the guy and drove to Haight Ashbury. I got there, and easily found parking, as it was a weekday. I walked just a couple of blocks and there I was standing on the corner of Haight Ashbury on June 1st, 1987 at at noon.
Then blaring on a radio from the bookstore on the corner, the DJ said that today marks the 20th anniversary to the day of the Summer of Love and the Haight-Ashbury Phenomena, as well as the release of Sergeant Peppers Lonely Heart Club! Whaaaat???! I couldn't believe it. I was blown away. Only 2 months earlier I had first learned in depth the idea of Synchronicities from Wilson's book Cosmic Trigger, and now I'm living in one. It was beyond words...
I must have stood there for another 20 minutes, just soaking in the whole thing. Believe it or not, the Haight on the day was really nice. I walked the whole thing, meandering my way into Golden Gate Park, and spent the rest of the afternoon smoking some very good sativa and enjoying my walk through the heart of the 1967 Be-In. It was utterly magickal, almost as if I was there re-living it. As I slowly walked and explored my way through the park I eventually came upon the Pacific Ocean on this warm and blissful day. As I reached the shores of this large ocean, tears of joy rolling down my cheeks, I become initiated into the Great Work.
Thank you Ken.
Arnold J. Toynbee was a renowned historian. His life work, "A Study of History", was a ten-volume tour-de-force, covering all of known history in considerable detail, charting the patterns to the rise and fall of a number of distinct civilizations. He wasn't just any historian. Rather, he had a unique ability to transport himself into the fabric of the history he was writing about. He talked about...
"the experience of a communion on the mundane plane with persons and events from which, in his usual state of consciousness, he is sundered by a great gulf of Time and Space that, in ordinary circumstances, is impassable for all his faculties except his intellect. A tenuous long-distance commerce exclusively on the intellectual plane is an historian's normal relation to the objects of his study; yet there are moments in his mental life -- moments as memorable as they are rare -- in which temporal and spatial barriers fall and psychic distance is annihilated; and in such moments of inspiration the historian finds himself transformed in a flash from a remote spectator into an immediate participant, as the dry bones take flesh and quicken into life."So, when he visited the sites of historic events, or considered their components, he didn't just mentally catalogue them and analyze them. He oftentimes had experiences of merging into them. He just has to approach the site of the theatre of ancient Ephesus, and then...
"At the instant at which this historic panorama impinged on the spectator's eyes, the empty theatre peopled itself with a tumultuous throng as the breath came into the dead and they lived and stood up upon their feet. 'Some... cried one thing and some another; for the assembly was confused, and the more part knew not wherefore they were come together.' [Acts xix. 32.] Those two dishevelled figures must be Gaius and Aristarchus; that ineffectual-looking creature must be Alexander. What is this rhythmic roar into which the babel of tongues is resolving itself? Will Gaius and Aristarchus escape with their lives? Thank Heaven for the intrepid town clerk's promptness and presence of mind. But at the moment when the cries of 'Great is Diana' are dying down and the clerk is beginning to reason tactfully with the crowd, the life flickers out of the scene as the spectator is carried up again instantaneously to the current surface of the Time-stream from an abyss, nineteen centuries deep, into which the impact of the sight of the theatre at Ephesus had plunged him."Nothing special, you say? Doesn't prove anything? No, it doesn't. Maybe he just had a good imagination. Lots of people do stuff like that. Sure, but they don't all write a comprehensive world history. Anyway, the point is one of past history, or future history, being an experiential reality you can step into. We're not talking about time travel machines here. But we're not either talking about merely mental exercises and visualizations. We're talking about a state of consciousness beyond intellect. If you want to know how it was, or how it will be - go and look. Be there.
Scientists claim they may have found the lost city of Atlantis.
From the Article:
The quest to find the lost city of Atlantis has begun in earnest off Cyprus's southern shores.A US-led team of explorers claims the ancient city lies on the seabed between Cyprus and Syria.
With the aid of unique underwater maps, a US researcher claims to have assembled evidence to prove the mythological island of Atlantis really existed.
Using sophisticated sonar technology, California-based Robert Salmas says he has not only been able to pinpoint Atlantis to a sunken land mass off Cyprus's southern coast, but even discern its geographical features as described by Plato.
The alleged discovery has been greeted with barely concealed mirth by the Mediterranean island's tourism office.
I'm a bit of a skeptic, not of Atlantis so much, as any claim to have found it. For example, there has been growing evidence of an advanced civilization off the coast of Costa Rica, with discovery of very large, precisely carved spheres.
My suspicion is that there may have been a lot more 'civilization' than is currently historically recorded, possibly going back thousands of years before Babylon. We now know the Sphinx of Egypt was probably built sometime between 6000-8000 BC, thousands of years before the first Pharaohs. And it was in that time that the Sahara, once a lush forest was just becoming a desert.
Terrence McKenna is his book Food of the Gods, says that between 6000 and 15000 BC, the Sahara "forest" was home to a large scale matriarchal culture. The paleo-climatology evidence certainly supports the lush Sahara scenario. It makes sense in light of the Ice Age, which brought increase moisture and lower temperatures to those regions of the world. For example, the deserts of the southwest, including Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico were homes to great sprawling forests when the first Indians migrated to those regions.