Editor's Note: This investigative article originally appeared at the Far Gone Books site. It is reprinted here by kind permission of the author.

Twentieth Century Neuronaut
Timothy Leary: The Far Gone Interview

I was driving in traffic along West Temple on a hot Summer afternoon, when I felt the marquis outside of the Zephyr Club grinning down at me like some kind of self-satisfied voyeur--an unsettling experience that I hoped might finally be one of the "flashbacks" I'd always heard about, but which had never seemed to manifest in my own body chemistry. The sign announced an upcoming visit with none other than Timothy Leary; and having just spent a mad weekend on Ken Kesey's farm the previous month, I wasn't about to trifle with the Lords of Karma: I was riding a lucky streak. I also owned Leary's phone number from a 1990 interview I had done with the Mad Doktor. Leary remembered that phone conversation and agreed immediately to dinner.

From an elevator inside Salt Lake City's historic Peery Hotel, Leary emerged looking like some kind of harlequin jester. The shockingly bright checkerboard shirt under a purple vest, which bore the insignia "Anarchic," must have been a calculated media ploy, I reasoned. He was tanned to the point of sunburn and wore, as always, a thousand-watt smile and a pair of white, high-top tennis shoes. Between quick, nervous puffs on his Benson & Hedges, we discussed the new face of electronic stimulation, the novel as an archaic art form--the possibility of fucking giving way to the sperm bank--revealing why the graying Pied Piper of the Sixties is still very much in demand in the Nineties.

INTERVIEW (Salt Lake City, Utah, September 28, 1992)

Fahey: What have you been doing these days? What's your schedule?

Leary: Well, I give about ten to fifteen radio and television interviews and press interviews a week, and I give, oh, five or six performances a month. I'm involved with helping develop methods of electronic communications, which I will demonstrate tonight at the Zephyr Club--brain activating techniques using electrons--and I'm developing computer programs that allow you to design your own hallucinations and to operate your own brain. And I spend most of my time hanging out with the most interesting people in the world, from whom I learn things.

Fahey: Who do you see as the most important neuronauts of the last 50 years?

Leary: What do you mean by the word "neuronauts"?

Fahey: Well, people who have been involved in the consciousness-expanding frontier in the last 50 years.

Leary: Oh, that's a good question. The 20th century has been, historically, has been the century in which the basic philosophic and scientific principles which run the universe--which is quantum physics--have been popularized, humanized, disseminated, domesticated, so that people can learn how to communicate with their brains, and not just with status symbols. And learn how to operate their brains. All this comes directly from the principles of Einstein and Heisenberg, who said, 'the observer creates the universe that he or she interacts with.' So, I say the great neuronauts would be Einstein and Heisenberg and Bohr, and people like that--the people that have applied brain-change techniques.

You start with, of course, the modern artists, the surrealists who totally destroyed reality. It's all an attempt to . . . the 20th century, and the neurological task of our species is to somehow be able to get out of your left brain, out of your mind, precisely, under control, and access the rest of your brain; and then, of course, to be able to go right back to your left brain any time you want to. So, the modern artists did this; they were able to put incredible hallucinations on canvas and still operate very successfully.

The literature of the 20th century that I prize has been totally right-brain, that is fuzzing up literate grammar; of course, we'll start with James Joyce, and then with William Burroughs and Brion Gyson who cut the word line and destroyed grammar; I would include people like Thomas Pynchon and William Gibson in the current generation. Certainly, music of the 20th century is quantum physics, emphasizing innovation and improvisation, and, of course, jazz. And rock music--definitely out to destroy left-brain mind focus and to expand consciousness.

The philosophy of the 20th century--again, its language, linguistic--is based upon quantum physics. The psychology of the 20th century, starting in the 1960s is, again, designed to activate brains and to allow us to operate our brain, both the left brain and the right brain.

That covers it: we have science, linguistics, philosophy, art, music, literature [laughs]. Excuse me [heads off to find a match].

Fahey: To what extent do the psychedelics factor into this equation?

Leary: [Laughs] Well, of course, one thing I omitted in my litany of brain-changing techniques is the use of drugs, which became popularized in the Sixties, but they trace back to the early 20th century [sic]. It's the socialization and popularization of the notion that you can change your brain, change your mind, change your mood, boot up, turn on, turn off, drop out, turn in, drop in [trademark Leary grin]. It is interesting that I omitted psychedelic drugs in that list of . . .

Fahey: Maybe that shows where you've evolved at this certain state in your life.

Leary: Well, no, I just take that for granted. I think we have to give a lot of credit to the pharmacologists and the psychedelic philosophers like Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, our wonderful group at Harvard, and the dedicated LSD wizards like Stanislav Grof and Sasha Shulgin--the great designer drug wizard from Berkeley . . .

Fahey: Abram Hoffer.

Leary: And, of course, Hoffer. And the group around Al Hubbard, who was the great, enigmatic triple-agent.

Fahey: We could talk about the Sixties all day long, but it wouldn't serve much of a purpose. To what extent, within this "reality smashing" . . .