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You can order your 52 page issue right now for $5 plus$3 shipping and handling, just grab it here. Or join Island Foundation and request we send you the entire collection of Psychedelic Island Views as soon as you join. From the New Issue of Psychedelic Island Views: Dedication to Timothy Leary You hold in your hand, the first issue of Psychedelic Island Views magazine -- dedicated to Dr. Timothy Leary. For the last third of a century he championed the right of the individual to alter consciousness with psychedelics, revealed bold new maps of the mind and showed us the connection between the inner world of visionary experience and the cybernetic network that is rapidly shrinking our planet and linking us all. There have been four previous issues of Island Views as yearly newsletters starting in 1991. Each issue has been dedicated to a different individual important to Island Group's mission of creating a psychedelic culture. Previous issues featured Aldous Huxley, Albert Hofmann and Laura Huxley. However, Timothy is no stranger to these pages. His article, Huxley, Hesse and the Cybernetic Society were featured in our first two issues. Timothy also boosted Island Group's lot by lecturing twice here in Santa Cruz as well as providing the opening keynote speech for our 1991 Bridge Conference at Stanford University. Leary was second to nobody when it came to exciting a crowd with his lightening fast mind, humor and warmth. The last time I saw him speak -- at the Whole Life Expo in April 1995 -- was not the usually upbeat celebration of consciousness I had participated so many times before. The darker atmosphere was because for the first time Tim publicly revealed that he had spreading prostate cancer and that his time was at hand. Peter Stafford reported on the event in the last issue of Island Views: Timothy talked about having a Living Will and expressed astonishment about how few in the audience did after he had asked them whether they, too, had made such provisions. He really got into how he had made arrangements for his brain to be cryogenically salvaged. I recalled an item that had recently made at least one paper -- that Leary had left specific instructions not to be resurrected during an Republican administration. His theme was that he was keeping all his options open and, in fact, his final words were that, at the very end of life he well might decide, "Fuck this freezing business, just stick my brain in the blender." In the end, Leary and the cryonics people who had been so prominent during my interview with him (featured in this issue) parted ways. Leary did not commit suicide, he had a stroke on May 29 and sank slowly into death for the next two days, surrounded by friends and loved one. It was later announced that his remains would be launched into orbit around the earth -- giving new meaning to the Moody Blues song "Legend of a Mind", with its refrain, "Timothy Leary's dead, no, he's on the outside looking in." As I write this two days after his death, it is hard for me to conceive of a world without Timothy Leary. He has been my friend and mentor for twenty years -- Island Group would never have existed without his inspiration and my life would have moved in far different ways. A modern Galileo, he urged us all to take a look at new worlds beyond our imagination. Bruce Eisner |
