09/23/2015
Review by David Anthony
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When the fabled nineteen sixties really began remains an open and lively question. Decades do not necessarily gain their identities simply by changing nines to zeroes or zeroes to ones. In the opinion of filmmaker Gay Dillingham in Dying to Know: Ram Dass and Timothy Leary, ex-Harvard Professor Timothy Leary and his colleague and erstwhile compadre, Richard Alpert, later renamed and reinvented as Baba Ram Dass, played major parts in this root and branch transformation. Dying To Know tells their sagas in parallel in their twilight years, as Leary is actively dying of cancer and Ram Dass, an innovator in the realm of consciousness, turned attention to the hospice movement, then suffering a series of strokes, confronts his own mortality.

The film situates Leary and Alpert within the tumultuous times to which they both responded and contributed. Key to their role in changing thought and behavior of a new generation struggling to emerge from Eisenhower era Cold War conservatism and cultural conformity is the investigation of psychotropic or mind altering drugs like psilocybin, a natural psychedelic byproduct of hundreds of mushrooms, and most notoriously, lysergic acid diethylamide-6, LSD. Leary and Alpert conducted scholarly investigations of properties and effects of hallucinogens under controlled conditions on clerics, academics, authors, inmates and agreed to Harvard regulations stipulating restrictions to graduate students. The trials both liberated and manacled Leary and Alpert. The latter proved literal for Leary, especially after a 1963 Harvard Crimson expose by undergraduate investigative reporter Andrew Weil, today a guru in studying mind expansion techniques, foretold an end to their university careers.

Yet both Ram Dass and Leary were survivors with astonishing abilities to recover, reconfigure, recalibrate and recreate their personae. They each demonstrated the tenacity and resilience of the seemingly limitless minds whose imaginative powers they dedicated and sacrificed their ivory tower reputations to probe. The high risks inherent in their experimentation helped usher in novel approaches to living. These were informed by everything from psychoanalysis to yoga and meditative practices and “traditional” disciplines and shamanic healing practices associated with the vast world beyond the boundaries of European psychology, psychiatry or psychotherapy.

None of this came without its cost; the price proved exceedingly high. The societal backlash was immediate and wide-ranging, as period footage reminds us, spanning Congress to the streets, creating and destroying like Shiva and Vishnu, a combative, creative counterculture opposed to endless war, racial segregation and all manner of modes of social and cultural oppression. It is no surprise that within this struggle may be seen seeds of what some critics call the “culture wars” between left and right whose legacies still find echoes in the run-up to the next presidential election cycle.

Closer examination of Dying To Know shows it is about the brevity of existence and how urgently sentient beings need to come to terms with their finite time on earth.