THE SPIRITUAL EMPTINESS OF LEARY'S LEGACY

There are few people who had as deep an impact on baby boomers as the
the late Timothy Leary.

If still living, he would be 88 this year. Many people remember him
for his hippie slogan "Turn on, tune in, drop out." I recently read a
fascinating Timothy Leary biography by Robert Greenfield. It showed me
how little I actually knew about the man and yet how deeply he
impacted the lives of my fellow baby boomers.

Just like his "great American hero" 83-year-old Hugh Hefner, Leary was
from the older "builder" rather than "boomer" generation. So why did
we boomers trust someone over 30 when Leary advocated the LSD revolution?

Leary's impact came from his Harvard and Berkeley university
credentials, his oratory skills and his claim that LSD would open you
up spiritually and socially. Some people see him as the Forrest Gump
of the counter-culture; he was always there reinventing himself as
culture shifted, even in the 1990s. Timothy Leary was a tragic pied
piper figure who led many youth into addiction while destroying his
own health and personal relationships.

Despite what my adult children may think, I was never a hippie.
Relative to the '70s, I thought that my hair was relatively short,
even if it was way over my collar. I remember when my parents warned
me against drug usage at the local Oak Park that I hung around. I
naively told my parents that there were no drugs at Oak Park. Later
that night, I saw drugs everywhere. I noticed a pecking order in drug
usage. Glue-sniffers were definitely at the bottom of the heap, as
everyone knew that this was bad for the brain. I can still remember
the smell of young people doing gluesniffing late at night.

My favorite band as a teenager was Led Zeppelin. Yet seeing them in
person at the Pacific Coliseum, I wondered what was missing. Out of
the blue, someone offered to sell me LSD. I unsuccessfully bargained
with the pusher for a reasonable price, as I felt that he was
overcharging me. Later that year, a teenage girl at Oak Park opened my
wallet, took out my money, and went off to buy LSD. Coming back later,
she offered to share it with me. I thought: "Well, I paid for it. I
shouldn't let it go to waste." But then I heard voices from my Sir
Winston Churchill high school guidance class, saying "Don't do it. It
might hurt your brain." After a 20-minute internal struggle, I again
said no.

Shortly after this, I had a spiritual encounter with Jesus Christ that
took away any desire to do drugs. Countless hippies and other young
people turned from the hollowness of Leary's promises and became part
of the Jesus movement of the 1970s. I remember going to the 1972
Easter Be-in at Stanley Park where a person would be offered drugs
every 20 feet. But instead of doing drugs, we sang spiritual songs,
gave out free food, and were baptized in the ocean at Second beach.
Part of our generation's attraction to Leary's drug promotion was that
we were spiritually empty, and needed to be filled up on the inside.
Even today in 2009, being filled up spiritually is one of the best
antidotes to the emptiness of drugs.