"Death is like the sun: it illuminates everything around us, yet it's painful and difficult to look directly at it." (read here)
Dying to Know is a documentary directed by Gay Dillingham and narrated by Robert Redford, which spans 80 years, asking the deepest questions about life, drugs and the final frontier: death. The film project began at the Los Angeles home of Timothy Leary in 1995 just about the time Tim discovered he was dying of cancer and called his friend and colleague of a lifetime, Ram Dass (Richard Alpert) to talk about the process of moving on. They had written The Psychedelic Experience, a book based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, so Tim thought Ram Dass would understand what he was going through. Their conversation turned to much more. Dying to Know captures them during that intimate and entertaining conversation about life, death and the psychedelic explorations that began it all.
In the early 1960s, two Harvard psychology professors began promoting psychedelics as a way to explore the edges of consciousness. Timothy Leary became a missionary for mind-altering drugs, igniting a global counter-culture movement that landed him in prison and won him the moniker as “the most dangerous man in America" (Richard Nixon). Richard Alpert, a.k.a Ram Dass, became a spiritual teacher for an entire generation who, now in his 80s, continues to teach compassion and self-knowledge.
There will be a preview tomorrow, December 14, at the Rio Theatre in Santa Cruz, California (see here) then I hope it will be distributed worlwide... at least like a DVD....
Dying to Know Teaser from Gay Dillingham on Vimeo.
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