Dr. Richard Alpert used the same methodology to treat a compulsive homosexual who wished to become capable of sexual relations with women. Three sessions only were required — one of them spent in creating the program in collaboration with the patient. Two LSD trips with (a) pornography and (b) a female sex therapist imprinted the new reality; the man became mostly heterosexual. No Behavior Modifier working without LSD has claimed such a transformation in less than several months of conditioning.18
Please note, one more time, that Dr. Leary never claimed such outstanding results could be obtained without the proper set, the proper setting, and full cooperation and communication between the person seeking Behavior Change and the clinician(s) on the case. Within these parameters, and guided by his “Two Commandments,” he claimed highly beneficial results could be obtained. He specifically warned that ignoring these parameters was a kind of mind-rape which could be severely traumatic to the subject, being experienced as both coercive and terrifying.
“The most important rule,” he told the Reporter vigorously, “is that the tripper decides what behavior change is desired. Nobody else has the right to decide for him.”
That day in 1964, I found this Einsteinian and anarchistic variation on Skinner’s 1984-ish Behavior Mod both exciting and hopeful. I decided that Dr. Leary would definitely need to be watched; here was a man, I said to myself, who will do important work in the next ten years. I had no intuition at all that Dr. Leary would actually spend four of those years fighting to stay out of jail and the other six struggling to get out of jail.
The Queen of Space
A few weeks after my meeting with Dr. Leary at Millbrook, my family had our first UFO experience. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc?
We were living in northern New Jersey (and I was commuting daily to my job at Fact magazine). Our house was at the bottom of a hill and one Saturday morning, while I was home, the kids came running in to tell me that a flying saucer had just landed up near the top of the hill. I went to the back yard to find a neighboring family equally excited.
Altogether, six adults (the Author and his wife plus four from the neighboring clan, which was Appalachian and huge), together with seven children (ours and theirs), had seen what looked like a silvery, saucer-shaped craft landing. Everybody was taking turns looking at the landing site through a pair of binoculars. When it was my turn, I saw what looked like a Bucky Fuller geodesic dome (where none had been before), and no human (or humanoid) figures. Others saw a more saucer-shaped craft and some saw humanoids in silvery costumes.
Then “it” (whatever it was) took off. (It definitely was not a geodesic dome.) Watching it take off, I decided it was probably only a helicopter.
That afternoon, my son, Graham, encountered an “extraterrestrial” in the woods behind our house, at the foot of the hill. She was a female, with silvery skin, and she told Graham (he was five at the time) that he should become a physicist when he grew up.
Prof. Jacques Vallee, who has analyzed all such Contact stories that have occurred since 1890 with a computer to find statistical patterns, informs us that this is drearily typical. The majority of child contactees, Vallee has discovered, report female extraterrestrials. (The majority of adults report males, in two standard types — small green men or giant blue men.)
In fact, Dr. Vallee has found 44 parallels (similarities of image, word and detail) between the average experience of child Contactees and the miracles attributed to the Blessed Virgin Mary in Catholic countries.19 “The UFO and the BVM,” he has said, only half jokingly, “seem to be the same phenomenon.” The Lady most often appears to children, whether She comes in a “space ship” or “from Heaven”; She is accompanied by flashing white lights, usually; and, at Her best, She is capable of suspending the laws of physics in clear view (or telepathically shared hallucination) of huge crowds.
I have asked Graham, who is now studying to be a physicist in accord with the Lady’s urging, to retell the tale again, to check the accuracy of my memory. Graham especially emphasized the odd silvery costumes of the humanoid figures seen on the mountain before the Lady appeared. An old friend, Marilyn Pooler, of Las Vegas, who was living in that part of New Jersey at that time in 1964, “coincidentally” arrived to visit us in Berkeley two days after the above account was written. Quite spontaneously, with no knowledge of Graham’s experience, she told of two seeming extraterrestrials she had seen, about the same time in 1964 — late summer — approximately 30 miles from our home. She is one of the many Contactees who suffered amnesia and can recall only seeing the critters without further details. Twenty minutes later, she awakened as if from trance, and they were gone. Both wore silver uniforms.
Catholics now call the BVM “Our Lady of Space.” She is, of course, another archetype from Jung’s collective unconscious, and was around long before Christianity. The Egyptians called her Nuit and connected her specifically with the star Sirius. But depictions of her go back at least to cave statues dated c. 30,000 B.C. Robert Graves, in his famous (and highly controversial) The White Goddess, tried to prove that worship of Her was humanity’s oldest religion, and originally involved the use of the psychedelic mushroom, Amanita muscaria.
American Indian shamans knew her, too, and call her Peyote Woman. She is the female version of Mescalito.
She also appears, amusingly enough, in The Wizard of Oz, as the Bubble Witch. In the film of that novel, each of her appearances begins with a bright silvery globe descending from the sky, after which She appears where the globe lands. This is the way child Contactees generally report Her, according to Vallee, and the silvery globe was also around in some of Her miracles, under the guise of the B.V.M., at Lourdes and Fatima.
In one of Her miracles at Fatima, She caused the sun to plunge directly toward Earth, in the shared experience or hallucination of over 100,000 witnesses. If you believe the sun really did plunge toward the Earth you are naive (in my estimation). But if you accept that 100,000 persons can telepathically share the same hallucination, you must then answer the Big Question (or perhaps I should call it the Wig Question): how much of consensus-reality is similarly created?
The 23 Enigma
I spent five years (1966-71) as an Associate Editor at Playboy. You all want to know, of course, does Hef really fuck all the Playmates, and is he really homosexual? (These are the two most common legends about the Playboy of the Western World.) We have no real inside information — but our impression is that Hef has made love to a lot of the Playmates, though by no means all of them, and that he is not homosexual.
Sorry.
My job was editing the letters in the “Playboy Forum,” and also writing the italicized replies in which the Playboy position was stated. This position is straight old-fashioned mind-your-own-business John Stuart Mill libertarianism, and (since that is my philosophy as well as Hefner’s) I enjoyed the work immensely.
More important to our narrative, William S. Burroughs introduced me to the 23 Enigma while I was at Playboy.
I had said, on first seeing the unpublished manuscript of Naked Lunch in 1956, “This man is the greatest prose stylist since James Joyce.” (I am still rather proud of being the first to make that comparison.) I didn’t meet Burroughs until around 1966, and found Bill a much more charming and ordinary individual than his books suggest — one had been prepared for a mad genius and found instead a rather prosaic, almost academic, quite gentlemanly genius. Here’s his story of the 23 mystery:
In the early ’60s in Tangier, Burroughs knew a certain Captain Clark who ran a ferry from Tangier to Spain. One day, Clark said to Burroughs that he’d been running the ferry 23 years without an accident. That very day, the ferry sank, killing Clark and everybody aboard.
In the evening, Burroughs was thinking about this when he turned on the radio. The first newscast told about the crash of an Eastern Airlines plane on the New York-Miami route. The pilot was another Captain Clark and the flight was listed as Flight 23.
(Aha! Now you understand
the line, “Captain Clark welcomes you aboard,” which appears, always with sinister overtones, in various of Burroughs’ surrealistic novels.)
Burroughs began keeping records of odd coincidences. To his astonishment, 23s appeared in a lot of them. When he told me about this, I began keeping my own records — and 23s appeared in many of them. (Readers of Koestler’s Challenge of Chance will find that there are a great many 23s in that encyclopedia of odd coincidences also.)
This, of course, illustrates Jano Watts’ concept of “The Net” — the lines of coincidence-synchronicity that connect everything-with-everything. It is also an analogy (and maybe more than an analogy) with what physicists call QUIP — the Quantum Inseparability Principle. QUIP, which is accepted by some and denied by other physicists, holds that every particle does affect every other particle, everywhere.
A plausible extension is given by Dr. Fritjof Capra, a young Berkeley physicist who experienced quantum inseparability during an altered state of consciousness. In The Tao of Physics, Dr. Capra defends the “Bootstrap Theory,” which holds, in effect, that everything is the cause of everything, every which way in time.20
Quantum inseparability and the Bootstrap Theory are differing ontological flavors of what are called “non-local” models in modern physics. Non-local models are not limited by Einstein’s speed-of-light barrier; they allow, for instance, that the future may determine the present as much as the past does, as in the famous limerick,
There was a young lady named Bright
Whose speed was much faster than light;
She departed one day
In a relative way
And returned on the previous night.
The latest convert to the non-local or non-chronological model is the famous astronomer-cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle, who explicitly advocates a non-local trans-time theory of causality in his latest book, Ten Faces of the Universe.21
Non-local theories, like Jung’s synchronicity, take us out of the Newtonian action-reaction machine and bring us eerily close to the logic of I Ching and Taoism, in which the seemingly random tossing of three coins may reveal an archetypal pattern of both personal and cosmological significance. With that kind of rationale (or rationalization) I accepted the 23 enigma as a signal that I should attempt to decipher.
After a while my passion for jotting down every significant 23 that came my way began to annoy my Beautiful Red-Headed Wife, Arlen.
“It’s all in your mind,” she told me on several occasions. “You’re just noticing the 23s and ignoring other numbers.”
Of course. But she was annoyed by being implicated in the 23 mystery even before she met me. Our two oldest daughters (by her previous marriage) were born on February 23 and August 23 respectively.
Once the Numerologist went to see the Academy Award film, Charly, with a friend who was particularly dubious about this 23 obsession. The story of the film concerns a low-grade moron (IQ around 70) who is transformed by neuro-surgery into a superhuman genius (IQ 200+). In the crucial operation scene, the number on the operating room is visible, and it is, of course, 23. The friend sat bolt upright.
“Jesus H. Particular Christ,” the friend said hollowly, “How do you do it?”
Most of the 23 data were incorporated into Illuminatus, to which the reader is referred. Here are a few examples:
“Mad Dog” Coll was shot on 23rd Street when he was 23 years old; a year later, Dutch Schultz (who paid for the Coll assassination) was himself fatally shot on October 23, 1935. Marty Krompier, king of the Harlem numbers racket, was non-fatally shot on the same October 23, 1935. (“It’s got to be one of them coincidences,” he told police.) Schultz’s killer, Charlie Workman, served 23 years of a life sentence and was then paroled.
When the donkey metaprogrammer has noticed a few oddities of this sort, the key signal becomes prominent everywhere. I soon noticed the 23 axioms that open Euclid’s Geometry; the fact that the mad bomber in the film, Airport, has Seat 23; that in the old stage productions of A Tale of Two Cities, Sydney Carton is the 23rd man guillotined in the gory climax (some lexicographers believe this is the origin of the inscrutable slang expression “23 Skiddoo!”); 23, in telegrapher’s code, means “bust” or “break the line,” while Hexagram 23 in the I Ching means “Break Apart.” I was even thrilled by noting that in conception Mom and Dad each contribute 23 chromosomes to the fertilized egg, while within the DNA coil of genetic metaprogramming instructions there are unexplained bonding irregularities every 23rd angstrom. Aleister Crowley’s Cabalistic Dictionary later excited weird speculations about 23 perhaps being somehow involved with reproduction by defining 23 as the number of “parting, removal, separation,” “joy,” “a thread,” and “life.”
Run the following, from Professor Hans Seisel of the University of Chicago, through your most skeptical filter:
My grandparents on my mother’s side lived in Gablonz, Mozartstrasse 23; we lived in Vienna at Rossaurelaende 23; our law office at Gonzagagasse 23; my mother at Alserstrasse 23, tuer (apartment) 23, and so it went . . .
Professor Seisel’s mother, while visiting Monte Carlo, purchased a book, Ilya Ehrenburg’s Die Liebe der Jeannie Ney, in which the heroine wins a great deal betting on number 23 at roulette. She decided to experiment; 23 came up on the second try.22
The 23 enigma and its recurrence in the story of Dutch Schulz’s death was reported by the author in Illuminatus.
This is archetypical. We shall see, as we advance, that the peculiar entities in charge of Dr. John Lilly’s hypothetical Cosmic Coincidence Control Center pay special attention to those who pay attention to them.
Meanwhile the Numerologist had a new rationalization for his obsession: the famous story of how Dr. James Watson, coming down a spiral staircase at Oxford, suddenly flashed intuitively on the spiral shape of the DNA. All the micro-photographic evidence at that time seemed to contradict his theory, but Watson irrationally trusted his intuition and kept working on that model. Eventually he won the Nobel Prize for proving that the DNA is a double helix (two spirals interwoven). 23 was my spiral staircase, my intuitive signal.
The heresy hunt begins
One day in 1966, Tim Leary popped into the Playboy office and the Numerologist and the Mad Scientist lunched together. I had recently found quite a few references to “Leary” and “LSD” in Finnegans Wake and asked Tim what he thought of that. He replied that Leary is a common Irish name and LSD in Ireland means “pounds, shillings, pence.”
Then we got into serious rapping and talked about LSD in cancer research. Tim was very excited and hopeful about various successful applications of LSD in treating terminal cancer patients.
The Numerologist mentioned a TV show about the Spring Grove research on LSD and alcoholism. “Did you notice Dr. Unger hugging that one tripper?” Tim asked. “That’s the sign that he’s been to Millbrook. Any therapist who hugs an LSD tripper has studied with us.” He seemed to regard this as at least as important as any of his theoretical-methodological contributions to psycho-pharmacology. Actually, the taboo against touching the lowly patient was breaking down in psychotherapy generally throughout the ’60s; but Timothy, typically, was more enthusiastic and exuberant about it than anyone else.
A few nights later, the Playboy Editor ran into Tim again, at Hefner’s wild jet-set mansion. Tim was boozing it up and had his eyes on a Bunny he obviously intended to prong as soon as possible, so the Editor had no lengthy conversation with him.
* * *
Of course, the Vietnam war had begun to heat up by this time, and the government’s insistence on lying about everything connected with the war had begun to erode the social fabric of the U.S. Systematic lying creates what communications scientists call a “disinformation situation,” in which everybody eventually begins to distrust, demonize and diabolize everybody else.
Paul Watzlavik, among others, has performed classic experiments in which totally sane people will begin to behave with all the irrationality of hospitalized para
noids or schizophrenics — just because they have been lied to in a calculated and systematic way. This sort of “disinformation” matrix is so typical of many aspects of our society (e.g., advertising and organized religion, as well as government) that some psychiatrists, such as R.D. Laing, claim it is the principal cause of psychotic breakdowns. When the politics of lying becomes normal, paranoia and alienation become the “normality” of the day. The government, as the principal liar of the 1960s, was, of course, more deluded than anyone else, since its reality-map had become a classic disinformation system. The establishment began looking around for the villains to blame for the escalating social disintegration. Tim Leary got elected, by unanimous acclaim, Villain #1.
The “war on drugs” — i.e., a war on research — began. That is to say, it was called a war on drugs, but the total effect of all the hysteria and witch-hunting was that the number of drug users steadily escalated each year, especially among the young, the ignorant and the ill-prepared, with predictably uninspiring results. The only experiments that were stopped were those by intelligent scientists who were beginning to learn something new about the nervous system when they were ordered to desist. Ironically but typically, Dr. Leary, who had warned about all this in his Senate testimony in 1966, was blamed for it by the same government that caused it to happen.
Here’s some of Dr. Leary’s 1966 Senate testimony:
Senator Edward Kennedy: You feel that there ought to be control over at least importation?
Final Secret of the Illuminati Page 7
