The Universe of Toby Orzano

by Timothy Leary
As published in The Delicious Grace of Moving One's Hand

The last three decades of my life, both professional and amateur, have been dedicated to the study of the PSYCHEDELIC and the CYBERNETIC.

PSYCHEDELIC SCIENCE studies the relationship between the conscious mind and that universe of digital information that is based on the brain.

CYBERNETIC SCIENCE studies the relationship between the conscious mind and that universe of digital information which quantum physicists say make up the texture of all realities.

How can we decode this OFF/ON language of the universe that is captured, produced, and stored in digital programs and appliances and manifested on screens?

My untiring studies in this field began in 1960 when a group of psychologists, philosophers, theologians, and scholars based in Cambridge, Massachusetts organized the Harvard Psychedelic Research Project. Our goals were:

1. PSYCHEDELIC: to develop methods for activating, making conscious, contacting, exploring regions of the brain that are normally inaccessible to awareness.

2. CYBERNETIC: to objectify, precisely describe, map, and communicate this unexplored information.

It is generally agreed that what goes on inside our heads is very different from what we actually do and say.

To complicate matters enormously, we are unaware of almost all of the signal traffic that continually hums in our brains. The human nervous system processes around 100 million signals a second.

From 1960 to 1963, more than a thousand sessions using psychedelic neurotransmitters produced voluminous data in the form of reports, tests, and questionnaires. We concluded, as did every other research in this field, that "words" based on the 26 letters of the alphabet could not describe these experiences.

Beginning in 1960, we began devising a new language to describe this data which flooded our minds during psychedelic experiences. We used words, of course, in dozens of books, hundreds of articles, thousands of breathless lectures and interviews. But we always kept humming that ancient Ganges refrain: "Words just cannot express ..."

We quickly sensed that graphics, icons, yantras, and diagrams were more effective linguistic tools. So we scoured the libraries for Oriental prints, Hindu paintings, Buddhist hieroglyphics.

These icons were better than words, serving, as they did, as curt, stripped-down formulae for the torrents of data we were experiencing. The real problem was they were static, frozen images.

So we quickly turned to electrical optics: visual images presented, not as smears of color on wood-pulp, but in mobile filmstrips and slides. We were particularly impressed with films of biological events, microscopic scenes of cells pulsating and capillary conversations. Our laboratories developed methods for creating our own inter-biological travelogues by passing light through colored jells and fluids. This new "psychedelic art" form quickly became popular as "light shows" for rock concerts and special effects for films like "2001: A Space Odyssey."

But right from the start, we realized that the most powerful and natural language to describe (or at least accompany and facilitate) the open-brain experience was music.

By 1964, a long list of top musicians had come to Harvard and Millbrook for psychedelic experiences. The contract was simple: We would launch them on voyages of exploration into their brains. Upon return they would report back to their experiences in sound.

Among the jazz musicians who came to our centers were: Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charles Lloyd, the Miles Davis Quartet, Alan Eager, members of the Duke Ellington Band, and much so-forth. Of rock musicians there was a full brigade including the Grateful Dead, half of the Beatles, the Moody Blues, etc. etc. Of more serious composers we recall Lalo Schifren, Harry Nilsson, Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar, Ram Siddha, Geoff Prentice, and more.

Presiding over this musical scene was the Residential Musical Maestro, King of the High Trumpet and the new-Big-Band Sound, Maynard Ferguson.

The resident Zen-Mother was Flora Lu, whose feats of elegant spirituality are recounted here.

Newton Center, Massachusetts
Spring 1962

Along the Charles River toward Boston a sickle moon hung low in the cloudless sky. I arrived at Logan Airport just in time to see the New York shuttle taxi in.

In two minutes I caught sight of my visitors: Salinas, in jeans, and with her Flora Lu, a smartly-dressed blond woman of about thirty with creamy skin, a full mouth, and enormous dark blue eyes. She wore no makeup, and her small face exuded worldliness and poise.

Flora Lu looked me over, her eyes flashing with intelligence. "Well," she said, "you look like an earthling. After what Salinas told me, I was expecting an extraterrestrial of some sort."

At the curb was a middle-aged man with a serious case of slumping shoulders.

"Poor guy," murmured Flora Lu. "He doesn't look happy."

On second glance I recognized that he was a friend of mine. "Abe!"

Abe Maslow¹ smiled back.

"Can we give you a Uft?" I asked.

"No, don't bother," he said. "I'm waiting for a cab."

"Come along," I insisted. "We're going to Newton Center. No problem to drop you off."

With Flora Lu and Salinas in the back seat, Abe in front, I drove through the tunnel, around the dock area of Boston, and along the Charles River. Abe and I kept up a running tour-guide com mentary on historical spots for the visitors.

"What do you do, Abe?" asked Flora Lu.

"Abe is one of the most important psychologists of our times," I said. "Almost single-handedly he overthrew the Freudian notion that the human unconscious is a primitive homicidal swamp. Abe introduced the term peak experience, and he's convinced a lot of people that the human psyche is filled with wonderful potentials waiting to be awakened and used."

"What's a peak experience?" Flora Lu asked.

"That's what we're going to have tonight," drawled Salinas, "if the professor is good to us. Want to come to our session. Dr. Maslow?"

"I'd love to," replied Abe, "but rm afraid I'm not feeling too cheerful."

"Wouldn't that exactly be the time to have a peak experience?" asked Flora Lu.

"I wouldn't know," Abe said softly, "because I've never had one. It's the old philosopher's paradox. Those who theorize about it are often the last to do it. Freud taught us that."

Our group that evening included a psychiatrist and his wife, two graduate students, and the two elegant ladies from Manhattan. Salinas dominated the session with her fast, needle-sharp hipster mind.

In the morning I was up early. I made scrambled eggs and bacon for myself, and my children, Susan and Jack. Salinas and Flora Lu were still asleep. I drove Susan to the home of a friend, where she was planning to spend the day, and took Jack to a nearby baseball park, where I acted as assistant manager of a Little League baseball team. Jack was the only one who played every inning of the game, because he was a catcher and there was no other boy with his consistency at this difficult position. Jack hit a double and a triple. In the last inning he leaped high in the air to catch a throw from the outfield and tagged the runner at home plate, which saved the game. The coach said, "That Jack Leary is a rock."

When I returned home, Salinas and Flora Lu were chatting at the kitchen table.

"Where have you been?" asked Salinas.

"Out and about. Did you have breakfast?"

"Yes. But it was pretty strange to wake up and find the house empty. We thought we had hallucinated everything." I poured myself a cup of coffee.

"We've been talking about you," said Flora Lu, smiling.

"We decided you may be a hotshot psychologist but you need some help in the Uttle down-to-earth things, Hke how to dress. And how to cut your hair— "

"—and what music to listen to and how to make these sessions more aesthetic than this faculty-club atmosphere you've got going here. So I'd be honored," Flora Lu continued, "if you'd come to my house next weekend. I could arrange experiments with some interesting subjects and show you what life is like in the first-class lounge."

Flora Lu told me to meet her at Birdland, the Manhattan nightclub where top jazz musicians like her husband played and hung out.

When I got there I found Flora Lu sitting with a black-haired spellbinder named Malaca, from Morocco. We listened to music for awhile and talked to the musicians who came by the table. Malaca was a model whose picture was on the cover of Holiday Magazine, she had been married to a member of the royal family of Iran, who had given her a lot of money and treated her badly. She was looking for new meaning in her changed life.

Flora Lu had told Malaca about our drugs. But Flora Lu had also told her that I might be an extraterrestrial so she watched me closely with her mouth half open. I found her overwhelmingly attractive, and was grateful to Flora Lu for arranging such interesting companionship for the upcoming neurological experiments.

Then Maynard³ took the stage, your basic young-man-with-a-horn, standing with legs apart, body arched, screeching, soaring higher and higher.

Around midnight we piled into a black limousine parked in front of the cabaret, rolled along the West Side Highway, and thirty minutes later pulled into some woods and up a gravel driveway to a large Tudor house. There were two Jaguars out front.

"Let me show you your new laboratory," said Flora.

The living room was enormous and plushly carpeted. A huge U-shaped couch, deep and soft, framed the giant fireplace. Rubbed-wood paneling and bookshelves made the flashy nonobjective paintings stand out. One wall was lined with electronic sound equipment and yards of record albums.

What impressed me about the luxury of this room was the sure erotic intelligence with which each detail had been arranged.

"Come, I'll show you your room."

Flora Lu opened a door off the long upstairs hallway. "I hope you'll be comfortable here." The floor and the huge bed were covered with furs, splashed with pink silk pillows. Wood and velvet. Mirrors.

"Would you like to see our room?" she asked.

The master bedroom was a soft cove of lace, tassels, drapes, and furs. Rubenesque paintings and Tantric yantras.

It was a delightful introduction to hedonic consciousness. Indeed the very existence of pleasure as a way of life had been unknown to me.

I had lived much of my adult life amid the usual upper-middle class comforts, the habitation/functional machines used by professional people in this era.

But these were more than convenient quarters. Flora Lu had designed a temple to seduce each sense into rapture, to entice the body into a harem embrace. In this baroque bordello-shrine my hedonic education was initiated.

I was, at the time, a successful robot respected at Harvard, clean-cut, witty, and, in that inert culture, unusually creative. Though I had attained the highest ambition of the young American intellectual, I was totally cut off from the body and senses. My clothes had been obediently selected to fit the young professional image. Even after one hundred drug sessions I routinely listened to pop music, drank martinis, ate what was put before me.

I had "appreciated" art by pushing my body around to "sacred places," but this tourism had nothing to do with direct aesthetic sensation. My nervous system was cocooned in symbols; the event was always second-hand. Art was an academic concept, an institution. The idea that one should live one's Hfe as a work of art had never occurred to me.

After we took psilocybin, I sat on the couch in Flora Lu's Elysian chamber, letting my right cerebral hemisphere slowly open up to direct sensual reception. Flora Lu and Maynard started teaching me eroticism the yoga of attention. Each moment was examined for sensual possibility. The delicious grace of moving one's hand, not as part of a learned survival sequence, but for kinesthetic joy.

I was wearing the silk shirt and velvet trousers that Flora Lu, true to her promise to be my fashion coordinator, had left on my bed while I showered. Flora Lu was wearing light blue silk. Maynard was a Florentine noble garbed in tight fitting velvet pants. In a Moroccan caftan, Malaca was soft, touchable.

A fire burned gently in the hearth. The air was scented with incense. His sensitized ears now as big as the Arecibo Dish, Maynard swayed with pleasure. Flora Lu floated around the room, her face transfigured with delight. Malaca blossomed into a flower of great beauty, her classic features now stylized with the dignity of an Egyptian frieze.

My eyes connected with hers. We rose as one and walked to the sun porch. She turned, came to me, entwined her arms around my neck.

We were two sea creatures. The mating process in this universe began with the fusion of moist lips producing a soft-electric rapture, which irradiated the entire body. We found no problem maneuvering the limbs, tentacles, and delightful protuberances with which we were miraculously equipped in the transparent honey-liquid zero gravity atmosphere that surrounded, bathed, and sustained us.

This was my first sexual experience under the influence of psychedelics. It startled me to learn that in addition to being instruments of philosophic revelation, mystical unity, and evolutionary insight, psychedelic drugs were very powerful aphrodisiacs.

Malaca was upstairs taking a bubble bath. Maynard dozed on the sofa. I stood by the glass doors in the dawn, aware that my sunrise-watching index had risen dramatically since initiating this research into brain-change.

Flora Lu carried in a tray containing a silver coffee pot, a silver pitcher of cream, two porcelain cups, and a bowl of apples, bananas, and shiny green grapes.

She placed the tray on a low table and rode gravity down to a sitting position on the rug. "I want to continue the discussion we were having last night."

I felt a flush of warmth in my body, as my face muscles softened into a smile. "Yes, I remember." The secret-of-the-universe business.

We had been sitting harmoniously in front of the fire when Flora Lu leaned toward me. "It's all Sex, don't you see?"

It had all become clear. Black jazz combos playing the boogie. Swedish blondes disrobing on a tropical beach. Tanned slim Israeli boys belly dancing to frenzied drums. Soft laughter from dark corners and behind bushes. The real secret of the universe was that everyone knew it but me.

A few days after the session I asked Aldous Huxley what he thought about the erotogenic nature of psychedelic drugs. His immediate reaction was agitation. "Of course this is true, Timothy, but we've stirred up enough trouble suggesting that drugs can stimulate aesthetic and religious experiences. I strongly urge you not to let the sexual cat out of the bag. "

My first reaction to the aphrodisiac revelation was to have a good laugh at my own expense. We had been running around the land offering mystic visions and instant personality-change to priests, prisoners, and professors, and all the time we were unwittingly administering the key (if used in the right circumstances)to enhanced sex. What an inhibited square I had been. Why did it take so long for me to stumble on this fact? We had long recognized that these drugs tremendously intensified bodily sensations taste, smell, touch, colors, sound, motion, breathing. And we knew that in the right setting, strong empathetic connections formed between people. By programming set and setting toward the philosophic, spiritual, or scientific, we had steered ourselves perversely away from an otherwise inevitable heightening of sensuality and affection.

Huxley was unrealistic about one thing: It simply wasn't possible to censor everybody's experience as we had censored our own. About this time we learned, to our dismay, that hip pleasure-seekers in Las Vegas, Beverly Hills, and Aspen were saying LSD (a psychedelic drug none of us had yet tried) meant "Let's Strip Down." These discoveries came as a delicious shock to our prudish academic minds.

It had never occurred to us that this experience, which we treated with such deference and awe, could become a popular party item. (Except for that rascal Dick³, who was already researching this area with cooperative Harvard undergraduates.) It was that night's experience with Malaca that alerted me to the certainty that our G-rated philosophic drugs would eventually be used recreationally.

Since this sexual awakening at the Fergusons' house, I have found myself dutybound as a scientific-philosopher to pass on the information that psychedelic drugs, with appropriate set and setting, can be intensely aphrodisiac. This statement perhaps more than any other makes puritans and fanatic moralists furious.

It seemed natural, somehow, that Malaca and I would stay together. When I drove back to Newton Sunday night, we dropped by her place for some of her belongings and she set up residence in my home.

It was hard for her to adjust to my domestic scene: two noisy kids, crowds of graduate students, and researchers always talking shop. After a week I still saw Malaca as a temple dancer-divinity from the 33rd dynasty. But it soon became obvious that up here in the middle class 20th century she was out of place, turning into a petulant, spoiled Arabian girl. The image from the drug session was slowly fading.

NOTES
¹Abe Maslow: U.S. philosopher, psychologist, and author of Toward a Psychology of Being and Motivation and Personality. Maslow is known for inventing the hierarchy of needs in modern psychology, which range from basic physiological needs such as food and shelter, to esteem and self-actualization.

²Maynard and Flora Lu Ferguson: Maynard Ferguson was a trumpet soloist for Stan Kenton, a world class jazzman in the 1950s. His wife Flora Lu introduced Asian design to the early drug culture.

³Richard "Dick" Alpert: American psychologist Alpert co-directed the Harvard Psychedelic Drug Research Project with Leary. In 1967, during a pilgrimage to India, Alpert became a devotee of Neem Karoli Baba, a Hindu guru, and changed his own name to Baba Ram Dass. His classic book Be Here Now helped popularize Eastern spirituality in America.