Timothy Leary’s Famous Challenge: Be True to Yourself and Find the Others

If anyone deserves the label “mad scientist,” it’s probably Tim Leary.

Until he was nearly 40 years old, Leary led a fairly conventional life, becoming a respected psychologist and Harvard professor.

Then, in August of 1960, Leary took a trip to Mexico to experiment with psilocybin mushrooms, after hearing about them from a colleague.

This experience radically altered the course of Dr. Leary’s life.

Dr. Timothy Leary, 1920 – 1996 – … ?

Of that first psilocybin experience, Leary later said:

“I learned more about my brain and its possibilities and more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than I had in the preceding fifteen years of studying and doing research in psychology.”

Dr. Leary went on to become an iconic figure in the hippie counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. He developed a number of philosophies related to psychedelics and popularized catchphrases for his philosophy, such as “set and setting,” “turn on, tune in, drop out,” and “think for yourself and question authority.”

Dr. Leary also discussed a number of transhumanist concepts. He coined the acronym SMI²LE, which stood for “Space Migration, Intelligence Increase, Life Extension.” He believed humanity’s future was in utopian technology that would allow us to colonize space, dramatically increase our intelligence, and extend our lifespans indefinitely.

Leary was a spirited proponent of free thought, free expression, and freedom to experiment with consciousness and live life as one chose, so long as one was not harming others. Tragically, the establishment deemed Leary a dangerous threat, and he spent many years in prison, eventually seeing the inside of 36 different prisons worldwide.

Tim Leary’s Unforgettable Call to Arms

There’s one particular passage from Dr. Leary’s work that has been circulating around the Internet for many years, continuously being passed on, due to its power to force one into a state of radical self-honesty.

It’s a passage that has the power to change your life. 

When I first happened upon this passage a few years ago, I felt as if Tim were speaking to me personally.

I imagined him beckoning me to come in close and murmuring in a hushed tone of secret things, mysterious places, and ways of life that deviated from the status quo. In other words, the words spoke to me, as all of my favorite writing does. Here’s the quote, soak it in slowly:

What’s He Saying?

The message Leary delivers in this quote is a powerful one. “Wake up!” he seems to shout, “There’s more to life than you’ve been told.”

The quote is chilling because he’s telling us precisely what we’d sensed but feared to acknowledge — that we don’t really “fit in”, that we can never be like most people, that we’re different. This would seem to be a scary notion. However, Leary’s tone suggests that it’s quite the opposite. Society would have us believe that being atypical is cause for concern, but what if it were secretly a door to liberation?

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