Change Your Brain [Paperback]

Timothy Leary (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 30, 2000 | Series: Leary, Timothy

This book tells the inside story of Leary's early LSD research at Harvard. Known throughout the world as the guru who encouraged an entire generation to "turn on, tune in, and drop out," he draws on wit, humor, and skepticism to debunk the power of psychotherapy and to advocate reprogramming the brain with psychedelics. Discussing how various drugs affect the brain, how to change behavior, and how to develop creativity, he also delves into psychopharmacological catalyzing, fear of potential, symbol and language imprinting, and brain reimprinting with Hinduism, Buddhism, and LSD.

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Ronin Publishing (December 30, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1579510175
• ISBN-13: 978-1579510176
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #303,476 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Consciousness Beyond The Mind - The Esoteric Secret, September 25, 2004

By 

R. Schwartz (United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Change Your Brain (Paperback)

This is valuable information, not from a guru or merely eccentric mind, no, but from a former Harvard University psychologist who subjectively and objectively and systematically tested, experimented and clinically proved that LSD and other psychedelics and their subsequent human reactions, mind interpretations and experiential conscious observations were both beneficial and related to outside the limited human mind or chessboards of values and ideas. Of course the government's are threatened by any and all such ideas that venture outside their limited schematical ideas and systems used for social structure, control and submissive subjection and therefore administer intensely unjust persecution.

But to write this information off as arbitrary and valueless is the common human response to change and growth as a human evolutionary species, a rejection that has been practiced since the beginning of time. Therefore those enlightened by such spiritual, rational/non-rational perceptive illuminations have remained relatively unspoken for many thousands of years and have paradoxically been the progenitors of all religious teachings and many political ideologies.

From chapter 8: "To use our heads, to push out beyond words, space-time categories, social identifications, models and concepts, it becomes necessary to go out of our generally rational minds. . .

Our present mental machinery cannot possibly handle the whirling, speed-of-light, trackless processes of our brain, our organ of consciousness itself. . .

We cannot study the brain, the instrument for fabricating the realities we inhabit, using the mental constructs of the past. . . "

And from Chapter 9:
"From the standpoint of established values, the psychedelic process is dangerous and insane - a deliberate pscyhotization, a suicidal undoing of the equilibrium man should be striving for. With its internal, invisible, indescribable phenomena, the psychedelic experience is incomprehensible to a rational, achievement-oriented, conformist philosophy. but to one ready to experience the exponential view of the universe, psychedelic experience is exquisitely effective preparation for the inundation of data and problems to come."

What impressed me about Leary's information is that of mental imprinting - which only occurs during infancy and/or early childhood, the period of stasis - which is basically our entire lives, and the idea of reimprinting, or breaking on through the imprinted frozen or previously impressed mind - which can occur through psychedelics.

Apparently, there is a short time period as an infant only for many species, or both infant and early childhood for humans, which then ends shortly, permanently imprinting the humans social and cultural frame of mind through linguistics for the remainder of their lives. Experiments with birds and the immediate introduction towards a human, or even a ping pong ball, causes the bird to search for this parental ideal the remainder of their lives. As humans we are subject to the attempt to the ideals that were first exposed to us in early childhood, attempting to get as close to that model for the remainder of our lives, anotherwards we all take a still snapshot on reality, forever freezing our interpretation on what otherwise is a moving transient reality.

With psychedelics, there is an opening again as in infancy and early childhood where a person can perceive the moving essence of reality outside our snapshot of imprinted mindset, our still schematic, and see the moving, multifacted reality in its many different levels, through more than one of the chakras, where one then reimprints their minds with new perceptions of reality and refocuses on previous chessboard structures, thus re-entry into society with much broader and wider perceptive capabilities with significant healing properties that are extremely beneficial.

This book is truly ahead of it's time, and of course, rejected as non-conforming to traditional paradigms and therefore considered a major threat to the comfort zones of our societal and cultural games that we take too seriously as a one and only level of reality.

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars not too bad, December 4, 2002

By 

Mathew Love Waraksa (San Marcos, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Change Your Brain (Paperback)

When I first reviewed this book, my understanding of philosophy and social behavior was minimal. As I've grown I've learned quite a bit about the implications of how a topic is presented, and how it will be utilized. Though he has many great ideas, its the utility which I believe is found to be at a lack. So many ideas I think get lost in a philosophical oversight of what is implied by what he says. In practice I don't find that it amounts to anything pragmatically, other than food for thought.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Quantum Psychology Before Quantum Psychology, March 30, 2008

By 

Turtles all the Way Down™ - See all my reviews

This review is from: Change Your Brain (Paperback)

Though Quantum Psychology was created/trademarked by Eddie Oshins in the mid-1970's, you can bet that Timothy Leary was an influence on him.

Quantum Psychology is a means to enable you to stay in your adult experience of what is in your present moment, and maintain rather than lose access to inner resources which your automatic responses cut you off from. It enables you to notice the mechanism of your automatic response "trance" and exercise control over it and respond more effectively, free of the emotional charge of past experiences.
Sound familiar? That is basically what Timothy Leary wrote about in this book. The only difference is that Timothy Leary tinkered with drugs to get there.
In all seriousness, Timothy Leary did make a huge contribution to the field of psychology and others revised his findings later and took credit.

Thank You Mr. Leary