Timothy Leary, Gary Snyder, Alan Watts, Allen Ginsberg - The Housboat Summit.pdf

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timothy leary, gary snyder, ala
The Houseboat Summit
Featuring Timothy Leary, Gary Snyder, Alan Watts and Allen Ginsberg
Part One: Changes
Watts: ...Look the, we're going to discuss where it's going...the whole problem of whether to drop out
or take over.
Leary: Or anything in between?
Watts: Or anything in between, sure.
Leary: Cop out...drop in...
Snyder: I see it as the problem about whether or not to throw all you energies to the subculture or try to
maintain some communication network within the main culture.
Watts: Yes. All right. Now look...I would like to make a preliminary announcement so that it has a
certain coherence.
This is Alan Watts speaking, and I'm this evening, on my ferry boat, the host to a fascinating party
sponsored by the San Francisco Oracle, which is our new underground paper, far-outer than any far-
out that has yet been seen. And we have here, members of the staff of the Oracle. We have Allen
Ginsberg, poet, and rabbinic saddhu. We have Timothy Leary, about whom nothing needs to be said.
(laughs) And Gary Snyder, also poet, Zen monk, and old friend of many years.
Ginsberg: This swami wants you to introduce him in Berkeley. He's going to have a Kirtan to sanctify
the peace movement. So what I said is, he ought to invite Jerry Rubin and Mario Savio, and his
cohorts. And he said: "Great, great, great!"
So I said, "Why don't you invite the Hell's Angels, too?" He said: "Great, great, great! When are we
gonna get hold of them?
So I think that's one next feature...
Watts: You know, what is being said here, isn't it: To sanctify the peace movement is to take the
violence out of it. Ginsberg: Well, to point attention to its root nature, which is desire for peace, which
is equivalent to the goals of all the wisdom schools and all the Saddhanas.
A PACIFIST ON THE RAMPAGE
Watts: Yes, but it isn't so until sanctified. That is to say, I have found in practice that nothing is more
violent than peace movements. You know, when you get a pacifist on the rampage, nobody can be
more emotionally bound and intolerant and full of hatred.
And I think this is the thing that many of us understand in common, that we are trying to take moral
violence out of all those efforts that are being made to bring human beings into a harmonious
relationship. Ginsberg: Now, how much of that did the peace movement people in Berkeley realize?
Watts: I don't think they realize it at all. I think they're still working on the basis of moral violence, just
as Gandhi was. Ginsberg: Yeah...I went last night and turned on with Mario Savio. Two nights
ago...After I finished and I was talking with him, and he doesn't turn on very much...This was maybe
the third or fourth time.
But he was describing his efforts in terms of the motive power for large mass movements. He felt on of
the things that move large crowds was righteousness, moral outrage, and ANGER...Righteous anger.
MENOPAUSAL MINDS
Leary: Well, let's stop right here. The implication of that statement is: we want a mass movement.
Mass movements make no sense to me, and I want no part of mass movements. I think this is the error
that the leftist activists are making. I see them as young men with menopausal minds.
 
They are repeating the same dreary quarrels and conflicts for power of the thirties and forties, of the
trade union movement, of Trotskyism and so forth. I think they should be sanctified, drop out, find
their own center, turn on, and above all avoid mass movements, mass leadership, mass followers. I see
that there is a great difference--I say completely incompatible difference--between the leftist activist
movement and the psychedelic religious movement.
In the first place, the psychedelic movement, I think, is much more numerous. But it doesn't express
itself as noisily. I think there are different goals. I think that the activists want power. They talk about
student power. This shocks me, and alienates my spiritual sensitivities.
Of course, there is a great deal of difference in method. The psychedelic movement, the spiritual
seeker movement, or whatever you want to call it, expresses itself...as the Haight-Ashbury group had
done...with flowers and chants and pictures and beads and acts of beauty and harmony...sweeping the
streets. That sort of thing.
Watts: And giving away free food.
Leary: Yes...I think this point must be made straight away, but because we are both looked upon with
disfavor by the Establishment, this tendency to group the two together...I think that such confusion can
only lead to disillusion and hard feelings on someone's part. So, I'd like to lay this down as a premise
right at the beginning.
Ginsberg: Well, of course, that's the same premise they lay down, that there is an irreconcilable split.
Only, their stereotype of the psychedelic movement is that it's just sort of the opposite...I think you're
presenting a stereotype of them.
Snyder: I think that you have to look at this historically, and there's no doubt that the historical roots of
the revolutionary movements and the historical roots of this spiritual movement are identical. This is
something that has been going on since the Neolithic as a strain in human history, and one which has
been consistently, on one level or another, opposed to the collectivism of civilization toward the
rigidities of the city states and city temples. Christian utopianism is behind Marxism.
Leary: They're outs and they want in.
UTOPIAN, RELIGIOUS DRIVE
Snyder: ...but historically it arrives from a utopian and essentially religious drive. The early
revolutionary political movements in Europe have this utopian strain to them.
Then Marxism finally becomes a separate, non-religious movement, but only very late. That utopian
strain runs right through it all along. So that we do share this...
Ginsberg: What are the early utopian texts? What are the early mystical utopian political texts?
Snyder: Political?
Ginsberg: Yeah. Are you running your mind back through Bakunin or something?
Snyder: I'm running it back to earlier people. To Fourier, and stuff...
Watts: Well, it goes back to the seventeenth century and the movements in Flemish and German
mysticism, which started up the whole idea of democracy in England in the seventeenth century. You
have the Anabaptists, the Levellers, the Brothers of the Free Spirit...
Snyder: The Diggers!
SECULAR MYSTICISM
Watts: THE DIGGERS, and all those people, and then eventually the Quakers. This was the source. It
was, in a way, the secularization of mysticism.
 
In other words, the mystical doctrine that all men are equal in the sight of God, for the simple reason
that they ARE God. They're all God's incarnations.
When that doctrine is secularized, it becomes a parody...that all men are equally inferior. And therefore
may be evil-treated by the bureaucrats and the police, with no manners.
The whole tendency of this equalization of man in the nineteenth century is a result, in a way, of the
work of Freud. But the absolute recipe for writing a best seller biography was to take some person who
was renowned for his virtue and probity, and to show, after all, that everything was scurrilous and low
down.
You see? This became the parody. Because the point that I am making--this may seem to be a little bit
of a diversion, but the actual point is this;
Whenever the insights one derives from mystical vision become politically active they always create
their own opposite. They create a parody.
Wouldn't you agree with that, Tim? I mean, this is the point I think you're saying: that wen we try to
force a vision upon the world, and say that everybody ought to have this, and it's GOOD for you, then
a parody of it is set up. As it was historically when this vision was forced upon the West, that all men
are equal in the sight of God ans[sic] so on and so forth...it became bureaucratic democracy, which is
that all people are equally inferior.
Snyder: Well, my answer to what Tim was saying there is that, it seems to me at least, in left-wing
politics there are certain elements, and there are always going to be certain people who are motivated
by the same thing that I'm motivated by.
And I don't want to reject the history, or sacrifices of the people in that movement...if they can be
brought around to what I would consider a more profound vision of themselves, and amore profound
vision of themselves and society...
Leary: I think we should get them to drop out, turn on, and tune in.
Ginsberg: Yeah, but they don't know what that means even.
Leary: I know it. No politician, left or right, young or old, knows what we mean by that.
Ginsberg: Don't be so angry!
Leary: I'm not angry...
Ginsberg: Yes, you are. Now, wait a minute...Everybody in Berkeley, all week long, has been bugging
me...and Alpert...about what you mean by drop out, tune in, and turn on. Finally, one young kid said,
"Drop out, turn on, and tune in." Meaning: get with an activity--a manifest activity--worldly activity--
that's harmonious with whatever vision he has.
Everybody in Berkeley is all bugged because they think, one: drop-out thing really doesn't mean
anything, that what you're gonna cultivate is a lot of freak-out hippies goofing around and throwing
bottles through windows when they flip out on LSD. That's their stereotype vision. Obviously
stereotype.
Leary: Sounds like bullshitting...
THE NEWSPAPER VISION
Ginsberg: No, like it's no different from the newspaper vision, anyway. I mean, they've got the
newspaper vision.
Then, secondly, they're afraid that there'll be some sort of fascist putsch. Like, it's rumored lately that
everyone' gonna be arrested. So that the lack of communicating community among hippies will lead to
some concentration camp situation, or lead...as it has been in Los Angeles recently...to a dispersal of
 
what the beginning of the community began.
Leary: These are the old, menopausal minds. There was a psychiatrist named Adler in San Francisco
whose interpretation of the group Be-In was that this is the basis for a new fascism...when a leader
comes along. And I sense in the activist movement the cry for a leader...the cry for organization...
Ginsberg: But they're just as intelligent as you are on this fact. They know about what happened in
Russia. That's the reason they haven't got a big, active organization.
It's because they, too, are stumped by: How do you have a community, and a community movement,
and cooperation within the community to make life more pleasing for everybody--including the end of
the Vietnam War? How do you have such a situation organized, or disorganized, just so long as it's
effective--without a fascist leadership? Because they don't want to be that either.
See, they are conscious of the fact that they don;t want to be messiahs--political messiahs. At least,
Savio in particular. Yesterday, he was weeping. Saying he wanted to go out and live in nature.
Leary: Beautiful.
Ginsberg: So, I mean he's like basically where we are: stoned.
GENIUS OF NON-LEADERSHIP
Watts: Well, I think that thus far, the genius of this kind of underground that we're talking about is that
it has no leadership.
Leary: Exactly!
Watts: That everybody recognizes everybody else.
Ginsberg: Right, except that that's not really entirely so.
Watts: Isn't it so? But it is to a great extent now...
Ginsberg: There's an organized leadership, say, at such a thing as a Be-In. There is organization; there
is community. There are community groups which cooperate, and those community groups are sparked
by active people who don't necessarily parade their names in public, but who are capable people...who
are capable of ordering sound trucks and distributing thousands of cubs of LSD and getting signs
posted.
Watts: Oh yes, that's perfectly true. There are people who can organize things. But they don't assume
the figurehead role.
Leary: I would prefer to call them FOCI of energy. There's no question. You start the poetry, chanting
thing...
Watts: Yes.
Leary: And I come along with a celebration. Like Allen and Gary at the Be-In.
NATURE AND BOSSISM
Watts: And there is nobody in charge as a ruler, and this is the absolutely vital thing. That the Western
world has labored for many, many centuries under a monarchical conception of the universe where
God is the boss, and political systems and all kinds of law have been based on this model of the
universe...that nature is run by a boss.
Whereas, if you take the Chinese view of the world, which is organic..They would say, for example,
that the human body is an organization in which there is no boss. It is a situation of order resulting
from mutual interrelationship of all the parts.
 
And what we need to realize is that there can be, shall we say, a movement...a stirring among
people...which can be ORGANICALLY designed instead of POLITICALLY designed. It has no boss.
Yet all parts recognize each other in the same way as the cells of the body all cooperate together.
Snyder: Yes, it's a new social structure. It's a new social structure which follows certain kinds of
historically known tribal models.
Leary: Exactly, yeah! My historical reading of the situation is that these great, monolithic empires that
developed in history: Rome, Turkey and so forth...always break down when enough people (and it's
always the young, the creative, and the minority groups) drop out and go back to a tribal form.
I agree with what I've heard you say in the past, Gary, that the basic unit is tribal. What I envision is
thousands of small groups throughout the United States and Western Europe, and eventually the world,
as dropping out. What happened when Jerusalem fell? Little groups went off together...
Ginsberg: Precisely what do you mean by drop out, then...again, for the millionth time?
Snyder: Drop out throws me a little bit, Tim. Because it's assumed that we're dropping out. The next
step is, now what are we doing where we're in something else? We're in a new society. We're in the
seeds of a new society.
Ginsberg: For instance, you haven't dropped out, Tim. You dropped out of your job as a psychology
teacher in Harvard. Now, what you've dropped into is, one: a highly complicated series of
arrangements for lecturing and for putting on the festival...
Leary: Well, I'm dropped out of that.
Ginsberg: But you're not dropped out of the very highly complicated legal constitutional appeal, which
you feel a sentimental regard for, as I do. You haven't dropped out of being the financial provider for
Milbrook, and you haven't dropped out of planning and conducting community organization and
participating in it.
And that community organization is related to the national community, too. Either through the
Supreme Court, or through the very existence of the dollar that is exchanged for you to pay your
lawyers, or to take money to pay your lawyers in the theatre. So you can't drop out, like DROP OUT,
'cause you haven't.
Leary: Well, let me explain...
Ginsberg: So they think you mean like, drop out, like go live on Haight-Ashbury Street and do nothing
at all. Even if you can do something like build furniture and sell it, or give it away in barter with
somebody else.
Leary: You have to drop out in a group. You drop out in a small tribal group.
Snyder: Well, you drop out one by one, but...You know, you can join the sub-culture.
Ginsberg: Maybe it's: "Drop out of what?"
Watts: Gary, I think you have something to say here. Because you, to me, are one of the most
fantastically capable drop-out people I have ever met. I think, at this point, you should say a word or
two about your own experience of how live on nothing. How to get by in life economically.
This is the nitty-gritty. This is where it really comes down to in many people's minds. Where's the
bread going to come from if everybody drops out? Now, you know expertly where it's gonna come
from--living a life of integrity and not being involved in a commute-necktie-strangle scene.
Snyder: Well, this isn't news to anybody, but ten or fifteen years ago when we dropped out, there
wasn't a community. There wasn't anybody who was going to take care of you at all. You were
completely on your own.
 

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