I was lucky enough recently to put together an email interview with Joanna Harcourt-Smith. I first encountered Joanna’s work through the website Metahistory, which features a lot of contemporary gnostic material and some really interesting stuff on analyzing belief systems, and moving towards healthier alternatives from those that are pushed on us. More recently, I happened across Joanna’s name while doing some research into the history of the counter-culture and psychedelic movement from the 60’s onward. And it turns out that Joanna was closely involved with none other than Timothy Leary. After doing some digging on my own and finding a whole heaping mess of speculation and confusion about what really went on in those days, I decided the best course of action would just be to contact her myself. With her help, we put together an interesting glimpse into her life and work, and the remarkable events in her past. I greatly appreciate the time and effort Joanna took in responding to my inquiry and relating her experiences and insight. Thanks very much Joanna.

[Note about formatting: I’m departing from my normal text style here. So for clarity, my text will be in bold, and Joanna’s responses will be in normal text.]

Why don’t we start with a little background about yourself? I read somewhere that you’re the daughter of a British aristocrat and the niece of a London publisher. Is that correct? Are you of any relation to the Harcourt in the publishing company Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich?

My father, the British aristocrat was a secret agent for Britain during the 2nd world war, his brother was a writer who owned a small publishing company in England called Harcourt Press. My uncle Dr Stanislas Ulam, lived in Santa Fe and worked in Los Alamos on Robert Openheimer’s team. Stan Ulam is generally regarded as the “mother” of H Bomb, because he provided the mathematics for it, working with Edward Teller. Because of my genetic inheritance, I have felt a responsibility to redeem the destructive impulse that led my uncle to invent such a monstrous WMD. Since I was in my twenties I have nurtured the intuition that psychotropic substances could function as an antidote to the atomic, hydrogen and neutron bombs. By the way the formula for LSD and the mathematical equation that opened the door to the bomb where discovered almost at the same time. Albert Hoffman stumbled on the chemical formula for L.S.D on the 17 th of April 1941. The H bomb was conceptualized from 1942 onwards.

The desire for complete annihilation seems to be incompatible with the spiritual intelligence and the reverence for life I have experienced during the psychedelic experience.

You might ask, How about so called “bad trips”? Well, I have had some of those frightening experiences, but I knew in those moments, or learned afterwards, that these intense fears are implacable efforts by the ego to obscure the harmony of the present moment.

In the About Us page on Metahistory, your bio calls you a “self-proclaimed Heartmender”, a role assigned to you in a dream. Tell me a little more about that. How does this calling relate to your work in Metahistory and elsewhere?

I suffered through a difficult childhood at the hands of terrified adults practicing unenlightened and brutal parenting. As a result, my compassion for myself and other living beings turned into defensiveness and narcissism. During the last twenty one years I have worked at healing my personal wounds and my sense of isolation and loneliness so that I could regain a full connection to people and participation to the web of life. A thorough examination of the beliefs I had received from family, society, religion and patriarchal hierarchies has freed my mind and opened me to the wisdom of the heart.

In 1994 I dreamt that my name was “Heartmender.” I understood it to mean that my life’s work is to mend my own heart and in doing so to help mend the hearts of others who like me may sometimes feel like strangers in a strange land. My work with Metahistory is a sensible attempt to mend the prevalent confusion brought about by what I call the dominator belief systems.

How did you get involved with the Metahistory project? What’s the overall goal? How does the Marion Institute relate to Metahistory? Are there any other organizations or websites affiliated with these two or that you’re involved with, which readers might be interested in exploring?

John Lash, the principal author of Metahistory, and I have had a loving, ever-expanding conversation for 18 years. We have explored many areas of awareness, poetry and myth. We are alchemical partners involved in the exploration of transmutation and transformation.

In 2002 the Marion Institute asked John to create an internet site, he and Michael Baldwin founder of the Marion Institute as well as Philip Baldwin and Ian Baldwin gave birth to Metahistory.org. The following year I was asked to bring the feminine current to metahistory.org. In the last 3 years I have created the link page, Precious Mind (my own pages on the site), and Joanna’s Forum, a place to discuss the gender issues that both separate and bring together men and women.

Joseph Chilton Pierce in his book The Biology of Transcendence writes about the notion of fields of consciousness and ideas. A nurturing and resonant field is necessary for the expansion of the intelligence of the heart, according to the new science Pierce describes. In Metahistory.org John and I are developing a field of inquiry, and others have joined in the dialogue, making it more diverse and available.

I’ve corresponded with John Lash of Metahistory in the past, suggesting you guys ought to start a weblog. I happened across one that you seem to have started last year at some point, but it doesn’t look like it really took off. Is that something you have an interest in coming back to, either for Metahistory of personally? Do you spend any time reading weblogs regularly?

I do not spend time reading blogs, although from time to time I read yours. I would love to get suggestions about weblogs with interesting content. I intend to create a good blog in the near future, but I also highly suggest participation in my forum on Metahistory.org Joanna’s Forum. The forum asks a question I am passionate about “What do you experience as the deepest wounding that separates men and women, and how can we find the courage to heal that wound and close the gap between genders?”.

There is a fascinating dialogue running through the forum. I am developing other questions, and in the near future I intend to spend more time responding to the people who express their ideas and feelings in these pages.

Gnosticism seems to be one of the main focuses of Metahistory. Is that something you’re very interested in personally, or is that more of John Lash’s project? How do you see gnosticism as fitting into both the overall Metahistory project, and the current conversations about spirituality as a whole?

Gnosticism, including the ancient western Mysteries, is indeed John Lash’s subject. I also think, the time has come to uncover the hidden roots of western spirituality. I delight in the return of the feminine creation story and careful awareness of the Gaian perspective. Without deep reverence for beauty and the mystery of life we will not survive. Our planet, its people, animals and plants are being destroyed by nasty beliefs. Mainly, the beliefs imposed on us during the school years - by the way I really admire and agree with John Taylor Gatto. I also want to suggest a book by the deep ecologist Derrick Jenson called Walking on Water. Our religious beliefs are the poison that coats the tip of the arrow that is killing all life on this planet. The best way to stop the extinction of endangered species including humans is to examine and change our inherited beliefs. One way to clean imposed hidden beliefs from our thinking and behavior is to play the Belief Du Jour game, scan yourself for the latest set of ideas you are hanging on to for dear life and change the radio station or frequency.

One of the things I’ve been exploring is how the counter-culture and spirituality of today evolved from previous decades. Having been born a few days after the 70’s ended, it’s difficult for me to put together a really accurate picture of the time period. For the sake of orientation, what would be helpful to keep in mind for people who didn’t experience it firsthand?

The world wars of the 20th century were about sick beliefs, patriotism and all around loyalty to the patriarchal authority. Feudal lords fought each other, for absolute power, and in the process mercilessly destroyed people to achieve dominance. This happens when we feel absolutely separate from one another.
First most people were kept purposely ignorant by the rulers and then starting with the industrial revolution this ignorance was replaced by so called education. But education is only a set of belief systems put in place to create minds that are predictably dumb. During the 1960’s, my generation caught a glimpse of our innate right to pleasure, ecstasy and beauty. A great wave began to swell. Through writing, music, dance, sex and word of mouth the message got out that we are not alone, each person’s way of life impacts all of life. For a time, this kind of thinking was celebrated as a quantum leap in personal freedom. I came to America in 1969 carried by this wave, ready to surf the times. By the way, John’s [Lash] book The Seeker’s Handbook contains a good overview of how the counterculture developed going back to the Renaissance.

I would say that what is left over after the current went back out, leaving the beach awash with conservative religious beliefs is that some of us survived to not only to tell a new story but also plead for the amazing diversity of life.

People like you, Tim, were born into the world, the internet came about so that we can make contact and dialogue about the emotional nurturing we can receive through the sublime designs of nature. One of my favorite things to say is simply “Go outside and see.”

Your name came up while I was investigating Timothy Leary and the history of the counter-culture of the 60’s & 70’s. Could you describe the circumstances of your meeting and later involvement with Tim Leary? Various sources describe you as his wife, “paramour”, girlfriend, and spokesperson. How would you personally describe your relationship with him?

Destiny and conditioning led me to seek out Timothy Leary shortly after my first experiences with LSD and mescaline. I was uncomfortable with the contents of my mind and the damage inflicted on my heart by what I now understand were force-fed belief systems. In retrospect I can see how desperately I wanted to “change my mind,” without knowing how. Timothy Leary seemed to be the man who could show me how to do that. When I met Timothy he was a fugitive from prison. He had been singled out by the Reagan and Nixon regimes as a scapegoat for the new freedoms that swept the country and the world. If you “turn on, tune in, drop out,” you escape the grip of the multinational industrial revolution, and also you might not be willing to be fuel for the greedy war machine. Timothy had been imprisoned in the States for possession of a minute quantity of marijuana, he was singled out as an example, punished for publicly tampering with the prevalent fabric of state, family and school, consensus reality.

From my research, it seems that you were with Leary when he was detained and extradited from Afghanistan in 1974. Accounts seem to vary as to what actually happened. What was your eyewitness perspective on the whole thing? Where were the two of you headed at the time and what were your plans? Is it true that the government paid for your first-class airline ticket back to the United States, and if so why? Were you arrested or get into any trouble during Leary’s capture?

When I met Timothy I was 26 and he was 53. He had lived 3 years in exile in Algeria and Switzerland, after escaping from prison in California. He was broke and scared, and the Swiss no longer wanted to give him asylum. He was at the end of a long rope that would end up with his capture and return to prison . I knew nothing about his past. I just fell madly in love with him. I would have followed him to the end of the world, and I did. We traveled together to Austria and then to Afghanistan where he and I were kidnapped by American drug agency agents. I had not committed any crime but I was guilty by association and also I refused to leave Timothy’s side when he was arrested. There is no extradition treaty between the United Stated and Afghanistan and in spite of that we were dragged across several continents by heavily armed federal agents until we landed in California. Nowadays, since the advent of the war on terrorism this practice of American agents kidnapping people in foreign countries has become almost common place. I had nothing to do with this event, the time had come for the long arm of the American prison system to reach out and bring Timothy back to jail in America as a trophy for Nixon’s law and order campaign. During Timothy’s imprisonment I stayed as close to him as I could. I was obsessively in love with him and possessed with the mission of getting him out of prison.

What do you think happened to Leary in prison? I read that he disappeared for a time, and I’ve heard a bit of speculation about behavioral modification experiments or “mind control” happening at Vacaville prison. Do any of those theories ring true for you based on your experiences or are they not worth investigating? Would you say that the prison time he served changed him at all, and if so how?

When I met Timothy he appeared to me as a loving caring human being. After he was released from prison he had quite a different personality. Timothy was moved 23 times during his three and a half year imprisonment . He was also held in solitary confinement for almost two years. Extreme isolation can do some strange things to someone’s mind. Think about it: solitary confinement in the bowels of the prison system for 00.1 grams of marijuana. Is this a form of torture similar to the practices occurring at this time at Guantanamo?

It seems that earlier in his career, Leary harbored a lot of anti-government, or at least anti-authoritarian sentiments. Is that a struggle which concerned you much personally, or was that more his ballgame? Also, according to the BBC it seems that after (or perhaps during) his prison term, he decided to cooperate with the FBI. This seems to have caused quite a stir, prompting the organization of the People’s Investigation of Leary’s Lies in 1974. Allen Ginsberg raised the possibility that perhaps Leary was feeding them phony information to sow confusion. Abbie Hoffman seems to have had harsh words for Leary, comparing him to Benedict Arnold, and betraying people who had helped him, such as the Weathermen. Do you think this was a turn-around from his previous ideals, or was there more going on here than meets the eye? Leary in his recently-released FBI file calls his cooperation part of a “longer range plan”. Do you have any particular opinion on this or anything that might be useful in unraveling this apparent contradiction?

Timothy would have done anything to get out of prison. The situation he was in was intolerable. He had no hope of getting out of prison any time soon. The entanglements of his legal situation suggested that he could stay incarcerated for decades. At fifty four, he was extremely desperate to be free. At some point he asked me to approach US attorneys as well as other state and federal representatives to convey to them his offer to become an informant. Timothy, during a prison visit asked me to send a telegram to the F.B.I saying he was ready to collaborate with information about the Weather Underground and certain radical criminal defense lawyers. In my opinion Timothy Leary acted from human motives, wanting above all else to be released from prison. Perhaps there were other factors going on I was not aware of.

According to the book Acid Dreams, in that same speech Ginsberg also wondered out loud if you were some kind of “agent provacateuse, double agent, or CIA hysteric,” among other things. His statement seems to indicate a lot of friction between you and other people involved in the scene at the time. Was this a result of Leary indicating you were to be his spokesperson upon his return to the United States? That book also quotes you as testifying before a grand jury in the case of former Brotherhood of Eternal Love lawyer George Chula, that you believed 99% of the drug culture “to be dishonest lying people [who didn’t know] where they were coming from and where they were going.” Does that accurately reflect your feelings at the time, or your feelings on the matter right now?

I want to point out that none of the people mentioned above ever spoke to me about these events, including the author of Acid Dreams. It would have been easy to ask me personally, as you have done, what really happened during those times. They preferred to work out their own story about Timothy without me, even though I was a key figure in the story.

No one in that group ever did hard prison time in the toughest prisons in the United States such as Folsom Prison or Vacaville. Not one of them knows the distress of a prison wife witnessing her man’s cut and bleeding shaved head, the death threats and the times he was held, for days in a padded cell in restraints with twenty four hour glaring electric light. I myself was searched in indecent ways and mocked by the guards often when I came to visit. I hardly knew America at the time, having grown up in Paris, but I knew the government committed acts of psychological and physical torture. True, it is a fact; I sought to entrap Georges Chula.

I did it because Tim asked me to do, it was the hardest thing I ever did. I wanted to help secure Timothy’s release. He needed to accumulate brownie points for his upcoming parole board hearing. Remember I was very young, totally overwhelmed by the circumstances that surrounded me. I knew practically nothing about the people who condemned me. I was caught in a whirlwind of political agendas that extended far beyond my reach. I was even accused of being a government agent, sent to seduce Tim Leary and “turn” him in, although no shred of evidence was ever presented for that scenario. Others have written that Tim was turned into a double agent in his West Point days, but I see no evidence for that claim, either.

The players of the counterculture team stole my identity, invented stories about me, put labels on me, and used me as the scapegoat of the government’s scapegoat. Until I could reclaim my own mind, I was trapped between the forces that kept Timothy imprisoned and those who needed to blame someone other than Timothy (because they idolized him, for instance) for his decisions and actions during his prison time.

Obviously, one of Leary’s most lasting influences was in the popularization of psychedelic drug use. Were your opinions on the subject in line with his? Were you much of a drug user yourself? Do you feel today that drugs have a valid role in spiritual and psychic exploration and individual freedom?

I would like to draw a line between drugs and ceremonial medicines. In the past until 1984 I had a drug problem, an alcohol problem, a grandiosity problem, a general grasping and clinging problem due to the suffering I felt and further inflicted upon myself. With such problems I believe it is impossible for anyone to benefit from conventional drug use, and these kinds of problems would, I believe, disqualify people from ceremonial use.

It is possible that Timothy Leary’s imprisonment and my obsession with his liberation became the metaphor that helped me free my self gradually from my own imprisonment within myself. The prison system grasped at Timothy with iron hands, the more we thrashed around the tighter the grasp became. In insane situations you can go insane. Somehow I went to the extreme ends to rescue us from the madness, yet my attempts were also part of the madness. Through living Timothy’s story as if it were my own, I literally lost my mind. A few years later I was given the awareness to let go of my attitudes, the wanting for things to be other than they are. I stopped my various addictions realizing they were unskillful conditioning of intention. Pushing away pain or wanting vanishing pleasure to endure did not work for me anymore. I learned to love and accept myself.

As for ceremonial medicine, this has nothing to do with taking drugs. As Terence McKenna said, the genuine psychedelic message is an anti-drug message. I have always known that plant medicines are healers and evolutionary throw forwards. For myself I had to become sober to be initiated into the plant world, to be sane enough to partake of Gaian intelligence. I believe this is the higher intelligence that Tim was aspiring to find and share. It is this heart-bound intelligence that we are developing in Metahistory.org. There are many divine and helpful herbs, flowers and vegetables in Gaia’s basket. To experiment with them with reverence, in a state of fluid letting go, is what John and I call sacramentalism. “To self or not to self” is a choice to be made. The rule of sacramental practice is, “Stay behind the medicine.” Beauty, reciprocity and participation in the dance of life are my deepest intentions.

Where do you think the counter-culture of the 60’s & 70’s lost it’s way? Do you feel like it’s unraveling was entirely self-inflicted, or did government antagonism play a large part? If you could change one thing that happened back then, either personally or with the larger social movement, what would it be? What do you see as the biggest successes and failures of the movement?

In my view both ”The Movements” actions and my actions were reactions to historical, family and educational slavery. I am fond of saying there is no human condition. There is only blind human conditioning. We were dancing and making love against Puritanism and religious doctrine. We demanded peace against war, but we were not yet prepared to change the inherited story lines, the patriarchal script that uses a male god to sanction war. Many things have become apparent since the sixties, the advent of Buddhism in America and Europe. The Deep Ecology movement came into being. Personal computers and the Internet are vehicles for sharing thought and spreading calls to action. Women are taking their powerful place in the world in spite of resistance and abuse. Wangari Mathai, a black ecologist woman from Kenya received the Nobel peace prize this year. In the sixties and seventies, as a generation of young rebels we shook the maracas and rattles of change, and the vibration of that era is still echoing through the world for those whose ears and hearts are open wide.

How does the work you’re doing today with Metahistory and elsewhere relate to what you were involved with in the 60’s and 70’s? What would you say are the most important lessons to be learned from this time period for people on that same path today?

Precisely, Metahistory picks up the threads of the adventure of consciousness through time and proposes different myths and stories to build our world view and restore our future to fun, gratitude and ecstasy . We can experience a future myth focused on beauty and tenderness . This planet, our home, is very dear to me. I watch her create endless variety of life. Basil and eagles, oleander and whales, you out there, me here, and the dog having his siesta on the road. Gaia has to be defended from greed and pillage. Metahistory proposes stories that offer an alternative to MTV and Fox News, not to mention religion and centuries of blind cultural conditioning. Poetry and the release of the imagination are crucial to the unraveling of the life force. Perhaps we are now facing the last green vomit of the patriarchy (as in the Exorcist)!!

One of the topics we’ve been discussing in depth on my site lately is building communities of spiritually aware people. You seem to have a wealth of experience in that area with regard to your current projects and your past. Do you have any advice for people who might either be interested in building such communities or in choosing good ones to be a part of?

Recently I was interviewed by Mike Hagan Mike Hagan-Radio Orbit. He said something to me I had never heard, but Timothy Leary would have said in his time: “Find the Others”. I think that’s the key, we need to find each other, to create an intimate web of allies, sacred alliances.

In his upcoming book “Dreaming Sophia” John Lash writes about the ancient Mystery schools, which made up a vast network of such alliances. See A Sheaf of Cut Wheat. What he reveals in that piece might be an answer to the building conscious communities.

What is your vision for the future? How is it informed by events occurring now, or that you’ve witnessed in your lifetime? Conversely, what are your fears about the track we seem to be headed on? What are the most important challenges we face as a culture, and as spiritually aware people?

I see horrible greed, I see the destruction of our sacred habitat. I see sexual dis-ease. I see rampant sexually transmitted diseases. I see animal creatures becoming extinct at an alarming rate. I see millions of children deprived of the basic dignity of survival, I see people killing each other out of powerless rage and bottomless despair. I see that we are at the 11th hour and 11 minutes of the human experiment. I see mind control and torture, I see the rush to fulfill the Armageddon scenario by sexually repressed power hungry madmen.
Is there a future? I don’t know. I know that the present moment is pregnant with possibility, I know that the mind is part of the body and the body is a creation of the earth. I see we need not be oppressed by destructive ideologies, I see the push of a flower through a crack in a cement wall. I see the stars and galaxies, and I know that the neo-cons can not eat them for breakfast no matter how hard they try.

I see love is a conscious choice and a daily practice. I see this nightmare story turning into a tale of ecstasy and gratitude. I see opalescent light and the triumph of tenderness.

I’d just like to extend my thanks once again to Joanna Harcourt-Smith for this very intimate interview and her candor in responding to my questions. On a more administrative note, I plan on putting together a fairly regular feature on this site for interviews. Next in line is John Lash, who writes most of the gnostic material at Metahistory. I’m starting with email interviews for the time being, and may at some point move into recording mp3’s, etc, but I need to get a better set-up technologically before that can happen.

PS. If you’re interested in doing some follow-up research on Timothy Leary, I just happened across a great archive of Leary audio, interviews and more. Enjoy!