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Tim Leary in Charge

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October 2, 2019

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Test creator

Photo by GoaShape on Unsplash

Social engineering requires testing people to see how they can be influenced and used. One of
the most famous test creators was Timothy Leary, who may have had some sincere desire to
help people heal with his mental illness tests, but he also had a strong CIA-related effect on
the history of the world.
Timothy Leary created four tests for mental illness, one of them being the Interpersonal
Behavior Circle Personal Inventory produced when he ran the Kaiser Foundation Research
Project. At this time MK-ULTRA was giving marijuana to mental patients as part of their
experimentation. He had founded the Oakland Kaiser Psychiatric Clinic in 1950 and with
federal grants, researched mental illness.

The Leary Circumplex is a circular vector map of human personality pictured as a


combination of love (ranging from love to hate) and power (ranging from dominance to
submission.) Ideally we exist as a balance of all these things, situated in the center of that
circle. Another way of viewing this and the test itself is available now at the dating site OK,
Cupid. He created Interpersonal Theory, and wrote a book, published in 1957, called
Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality.

He also created The Leary test for the CIA to give to applicants. This should be no surprise.
Leary was closely tied since graduate school with a man named Frank Barron who was
employed by the CIA at the Berkeley Institute for Personality Assessment and Research.
Funny how often Berkeley, where Leary got his clinical psychology Ph.D. and taught, comes
up in relation to social engineering. Leary was well aware that the Institute was operating
financially, and with psychology personnel, from the CIA.

Considering the woman-and-drink-loving hedonistic rebel was known for wife swapping
with friends in Berkeley, this connection may have been doubly strong. And Barron was the
one who gave him CIA psychedelics and moved his interest in substances in a new direction.
Barron was certainly not his only CIA buddy at the time.

Later he worked with Barron, who created the Harvard Pyschedelic Drug Research Center, at
the Harvard Center for Personality Research where Leary got interested in drugs as a way to
change people, and so created the Harvard Drug Research Program. Quotes from “How to
Change Behavior: “Up until recently I considered myself a behavioral scientist and limited
the scope of my work to overt and measurable behavior. . . Except for reflexes and instinctual
reactions and random muscular movements (which fall into the providence of physiology),
all behavior is learned. . . Behavior is therefore artifactual and culturally determined.”

This is similar to B.F. Skinner, also of Harvard, who suggested psychological behavior
modification, and noted the only semblance of freedom we have is the delusion arising from
not being aware of control. Leary was a complicated man, working with the CIA as a social
engineer, doing experiments on prisoners, yet promoting the hedonistic freedom that came
naturally to him since youth.

At Harvard he worked with Richard Alpert (Baba Ram Dass) and they both were heavily into
the ideas of Aldous Huxley, who was influenced by the head of the British foreign
Intelligence, H.G. Wells and Crowley. Wells was ostensibly sent to the US to influence the
artistic youth who would spread the affect, and to prepare the way for drugs and Isis cults of
which which Huxley was a core member. Gregory Bateson and Alan Watts were also key
members. Huxley pushed Leary further into his role in social engineering.

Crowley had been influenced by the racist occultist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Look into Isis
Unveiled, by Madame Blavatsky, the Theosophist who has perhaps had more affect on the
New Age than anyone else. The book suggests the British aristocrats come together in the
name of Isis.

Famous Writers in the Cult of the Goddess Isis

Many of the most famous authors did psychedelic Isis rituals in conjunction
with work in Intelligence agencies.

medium.com

Leary and Alpert promoted LSD to the counterculture youth, who were taking it for free
when they went to the huge rock and roll music concerts. Washington was supporting this
process. Why would Augustus Stanley create and give away fifteen million hits?

Photo by Dino Reichmuth on Unsplash


While there, Leary introduced the Beat writers, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Orlovsky, and Burrows to
LSD, and also gave it to everyone else around him — including prisoners, at the time the CIA
was involved in giving it to inmates. He also directed CIA asset Mary Pinchot, recently
divorced wife of CIA-International Relations Division head, Cord Meyer Jr. to use it to
influence her long time lover, President Kennedy. Cord Meyer’s job was to organize
infiltration.

The CIA’s MK-ULTRA program beginning in 1953 through their front group, The Society for
Human Ecology, researched psychedelics at Harvard and the Bay Area, including Berkeley.
Perfect timing for Leary to be involved.

Leary promoted the very talented Beatles, who many people believe were used as a social
engineering ploy perhaps more than any of the other musicians at the time, though most of
the well-known ones, sons of Intelligence agents, who moved to Laurel Canyon, were also
fostered for that reason, according to authors like Dave McGowan. The Revolver album with
the the lyrics to “Tomorrow Never Knows” mimicked the sentence Leary, Alpert, and Ralph
Metzner put together for people taking psychedelics. “Whenever in doubt, turn off your
mind, relax, float downstream.” This was lifted from The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which
was traditionally read to Buddhists as they were dying in order to move past the anticipated
traps within the Bardos in the afterlife.

Later Leary took up the meme, Turn on, tune in, drop out and with Harvard Ph.D Metzner,
and Alpert, co-wrote a book called The Psychedelic Experience. He associated intimately
with the famous musicians who were shaping culture at the time, even going on stage with
many of them, and being their muse. Like many of them, he was enamored of Aleister
Crowley.

Metzner, a psychopharmacologist, collaborated with Leary in a number of ways, with


research and promoting the use of psychedelics for spiritual purposes. Leary was arrested
often for drugs, and while incarcerated for marijuana (ironic since it was used as a truth drug
in the 1940s by the CIA’s precursor the OSS), was sprung by the Weathermen and taken to
Algeria where he and his wife were given political asylum, in spite of the fact that the charge
was drugs.

They lived with the Black Panthers until they moved to Switzerland and eventually lived in
Afghanistan, where American agents brought him back to prison. Not just one, but twenty
nine prisons in California. One might wonder who felt his presence was required at those
institutions, perhaps to influence inmates or to create the public belief that he was rogue, and
why Governor Brown saw fit to let him out well ahead of schedule.

With the resurgence of psychedelics, this tidbit of history becomes worth revisiting.

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