Timothy Leary - How to Operate Your Brain [1993] 30 Minutes.avi

HOW TO OPERATE YOUR BRAIN (1998)
directed by Joey Cavella and Chris Graves
approx. 29 minutes

This is a video version of a lecture that Timothy Leary used to give near the end of his life. Leary is of course best known as an "acid guru" from the 1960s and as rival of G. Gordon Liddy and President Richard Nixon. However he was also an intelligent man with a serious education in psychology and a lot of ideas about the way things work. This video gives a pretty good overview of his philosophy.

The video is a kaleidoscope of colors and flashing images supplied by "Retinalogic". Despite the hallucinatory visuals this video is not about drug use. In order to understand this video you really need to understand the context in which it was made. Leary is echoing French theorists such as Gilles Deleuze in saying that life has too many rules and that we need to let go of the rules in favor of chaos. What he means by "chaos" is basically what anarchists mean when they use "anarchy" in positive way. There was a lot of this kind of talk in the 1990s due to the popularization of the internet, which was seen as a kind of leaderless utopia for the exchange of knowledge and experience, which was also concurrent to the unprecedented interest in multiculturalism. Lastly, there was also some "pop science" reporting in the mainstream media about "chaos theory" which often showed fractal imagery as shorthand for finding patterns in the universe or "order out of chaos". This video makes much use of fractals and "global" imagery (i.e.- showing native dancers, then showing cars driving). This is done to "deprogram" the viewer because "he who controls the eyeball, controls the brain". Or to use another quote from Leary:

"In the Sixties we said 'Power to the People'
.... in the Nineties we say 'Power to the Pupil'."

If the above combination of ideas sounds familiar, its probably because you remember the "rave culture". Ravers had very lofty ideals about equality and uniting the world, however (like the hippies) their subculture was too dominated by drug use to be taken seriously by the establishment. In this video, Leary himself advocates a form of Humanism akin to the John Lennon song "Imagine": no countries, no religion, everybody sharing etc. He places his aims in the lineage of Socrates, Marshall McLuhan and Ralph Waldo Emerson. It sounds a little heady, but the cheesy electronic music insures that the rave audience won't be disappointed with the tape.

Mr. Leary is right to suggest that we think for ourselves and question authority. I even sympathize with his interest in decentralization. However some of what he says borders on relativistic and just "spontaneous for spontaneous stake". In any case, Leary's video is either incompatible with his philosophy or exposes some of its shortcomings. In trying to create a tape that is random and creates new relationships in our minds, what actually happens is that a clear pattern emerges very quickly and we know exactly what to expect within minutes. So starting the video two minutes in is basically the same as starting it twenty-two minutes in. Its kinda cool to watch, but there is more variation in the 'Mind's Eye' videos (which have cliches of their own). Viewing the video nowadays is more like watching a time capsule from another decade than a revolutionary exercize.

One last note: The speech given by Leary in this video was sampled extensively by the music group "Revolting Cocks" in a remixed version of the song "Gila Copter" which can be found on the "Crackin' Up" single.