This final 1997-published book by Dr. Timothy Leary, 60s’ rascal guru, creeped me out almost as much as the 70s movie The Stepford Wives. Surely you know what I’m talking about, right? The men in a Texas town make robots to look like and replace their wives. The heroine asks why when she is finally cornered and the answer is “Because we can.”

So no, it wasn’t Leary’s Directed Panspermia theory of how life began on our planet that did it. The idea of aliens seeding Earth with coded DNA that makes life evolve like an experiment and we’re time capsules is just plain ridiculous in spite of Leary’s references to scientists forming the theory. And his confident prediction of a President Gore in 2001 might creep some people out, but not me. Rather it was when he started extrapolating on his vision of the robotic future of our bodies and brains that I stopped smiling.

It was like the fiction of The Stepford Wives becoming reality on the pages of his book!

The Contents

His main objective in writing Design For Dying is really to help us to die like him with dignity and on our own terms, surrounded by friends in a party atmosphere. He champions Dr. Jack Kevorkian for challenging the injustice of taking away a suffering person’s right to die when he wants to. He also sings the praises of hard drugs for easing great pain and lists an average day’s drug use, which I only include as a curiosity:

2 cups caffeine
13 cigarettes
2 Vicodin
1 glass white wine
1 highball
1 line cocaine
12 balloons nitrous oxide
4 Leary biscuits (marijuana in melted cheese on a Ritz cracker)

Leary calls this “low-dosage stuff,” but then he’s also lived on other pyschedelic drugs since the 60s like LSD, then meth and a boring experience of heroin, which need to be used with more caution. Besides relieving constant pain from his advanced prostate cancer, and sometimes he went without just to be more social, drugs will prepare one for the final trip.

Just like in death, being high allows unfiltered, sharper communication between all of the complicated layers of our intellectual pathways. If we die unprepared to experience this ultimate high, he believes we will be disoriented and unable to “navigate” through the experience. If we do it right, supposedly it can last for what seems like eternity. I should explain that to him the brain is our soul.

The book doesn’t get to his design for dying, though, until he has given us his theories on the meaning of life, cybernautics, language (“the cybernetic approach is to consider semantics as syntax”), drugs, psychology (Leary indeed taught it at Harvard) and mutation. In Part Two called Dying, he offers his own design for dying for encouraging others to follow. Then in Part Three, Designer Dying, is where he gets weirder and creepier as he suggests options for suspending your death and that one day computers will be protein-based and able to give us immortality as they replace our body parts. Nanotechnology, already in its infancy, will make this possible.

Why? Because we can.

His co-author, R.U. Sirius, then editor in 1996 of radical mag Mondo 2000, finishes the book with description of Leary’s death, how he rejected the cryogenics plan and why, and many, many pages of friends and relatives sharing the lessons Leary taught them and their favorite memories of him as he died.

Commentary

You’re no doubt wondering why a clever girl like me took the time to read such a bizarre book. Well, I almost gave up on it in the first screwball part, but I didn’t because I knew it would be a pleasure entertaining you with my review of it. Take a gander at this:

(He’s talking about the Internet and traditional word-oriented programming languages)
Personal transmutation (the ecstasy of the “ultimate hack”) is the veiled goal of both systems. The satori of harmonious human-machine communication resulting in the infinite regress into metalevels of reflection of self is the reward for immaculate conceptualization and execution of ideas. Pp 48

That last sentence was, fortunately, the most confusing one of the 239-page book and his ideas are typically what will challenge you, but I do believe a person more knowledgeable in computers than me would get more out of this book. Maybe not, though. Perhaps one needs to be on drugs to better enjoy most sections of Design For Dying.

I certainly can understand why his friends and relatives admired his ability to celebrate death with them and the public via the Internet (leary.com) and interviewers. Most people deny it, cover it up, fear it and waste their last days in a “hospital-prison” suffering, miserable and, if not alone, unable to talk about it. Timothy Leary showed the world around him that death need not be a taboo subject.

So if you skim through the first and third parts, just taking in his dying experience in the middle, you will skip the confusing and the creepy parts. However, if you want the full monty, I mean the full panorama of the book (only found in used copies or the library), you have my condolences. I suggest you just go straight to a viewing of The Stepford Wives if you want to get creeped out!


Recommended: No