8
From the Ivory Tower to the Golden Coast

“Whatever colors you have in your mind, I’ll show them to you, and you’ll see them shine.”

BOB DYLAN1

When Maslow came to California in the summer of 1962, he hadn’t yet theorized communes as mini-Eupsychias, or imagined the ways that growth centers would serve as boot camps for self-actualization. More importantly, he hadn’t been to Esalen, an idyllic growth center tucked within the cliffs of Big Sur, whose existence and cultural significance were for Maslow a most unexpected surprise.

One night that summer, though, Maslow found himself on Esalen’s doorstep. He and his wife, Bertha, had been following the California coastline, tracing the serpentine roads of Big Sur.2 The particular stretch of highway they were driving, as one journalist described it, was “hung halfway between water and sky, on perilous cliffs, spanning gigantic gorges, rushing through sudden strands of sweet-smelling eucalyptus and towering redwoods.”3 Just beneath them, the ocean pounded madly against the cliffs.

Of this dramatic beauty, though, Abe and Bertha could see nothing. In fact, they could see almost nothing at all, save the abrupt and dramatic curves in the road. The night was exceptionally dark, the roads were sparsely lit, and the intermittent establishments that lined it—set back from the highway and tucked beneath forests—were difficult, if not impossible, to find. They were looking for a place to stay.

By a stroke of luck, Abe and Bertha found themselves at the check-in counter of the Esalen Institute, then called Big Sur Hot Springs. Whether because of poor English or astonishment, the desk attendant, a gruff Chinese man named Al Huang, had trouble catching Maslow’s name. He instructed Maslow to write it down. Upon seeing Maslow’s signature, his abrasive demeanor changed drastically. “The Abraham Maslow?” he asked excitedly. Then he repeated “Maslow! Maslow! Maslow!” as he ran to find other members of the institute.4

Richard Price, cofounder of Esalen, came rushing in to greet Maslow. He explained that Toward a Psychology of Being was required reading for the staff at Esalen, and that the mission of the fledgling growth center was to host workshops led by writers and therapists interested in humanistic psychology.5

Maslow was, predictably, flattered by the adulation, and gratified to find another real-world laboratory dedicated to ideas like his own. At Esalen, he found kindred souls, people who really listened to his thoughts (unlike his peers at Brandeis).

The visit marked the beginning of a significant and complicated relationship between one of the nation’s premier growth institutes and one of its heroes. And although Michael Murphy, cofounder and intellectual lynchpin of Esalen, had been away the night Maslow dropped in, the two soon began to correspond, quickly striking up an intimate friendship.6

In contrast to the disdain Maslow had for most of his East Coast peers, Maslow came to prize his relationship with Murphy. It was defined by “self-exposure,” “feedback of intimacies,” and directness.7 A unique character even within the emerging humanistic psychology movement, the tall, athletic, and rather handsome Murphy was “far-out but still really open, curious, not tied to a system.”8 Maslow also considered Murphy a true scientist, and had nothing but respect for the project he had undertaken in the creation of Esalen.9

Esalen became, over the course of the 1960s, a cultural beacon of humanistic psychology, and in this sense served, for many Americans, as a proxy for any direct orientation with the founders or their theory. Here, the ideas Maslow and others generated for understanding human psychology were grafted onto lived experience, where they mingled with other approaches and morphed into novel practices. This more personal outgrowth of humanistic psychology would be known as the human potential movement. In 1962, its goals (as manifested at Esalen) and those of humanistic psychology (as embodied by the founders) were harmonious.

Like Non-Linear Systems, Esalen began as a well-reasoned experiment. Murphy conceived of the institute as a vessel for the exploration of his spiritual and philosophical interests. Meanwhile, cofounder Richard Price hoped the institute would serve as an alternative to punitive mental health interventions, relying instead on the person-centered application of the principles of humanistic psychology.10

The two came from divergent backgrounds. Price was an extroverted Stanford graduate, a recovering mental patient, and the son of wealthy Midwesterners whose oppressive religious interests he rejected. Michael Murphy was an introverted Stanford graduate, an aspiring “mystic,” and the son of wealthy Californians (who actually owned the Hot Springs property). Their paths intersected when they were Stanford classmates, and again in San Francisco when they lived at the Cultural Integration Fellowship meditation center. There they found that, in addition to their common educational backgrounds and affluent families, they shared interests in Eastern philosophy and meditation, having both studied under teachers Alan Watts (for whom a building at Esalen was named in 1968), Frederic Spiegelberg (whose Stanford class first aroused Murphy’s interest in Indian philosopher and yogi Sri Aurobindo), and Haridas Chaudhuri (the founder of the Cultural Integration Fellowship).11

Both Price and Murphy had rejected their parents’ rigid expectations and developed their own personal philosophies in protest. Murphy had fled to India in search of mystical experience, while Price had landed in treatment at the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut, where he received a battery of gruesome shock treatments. Murphy’s hopes for Esalen included a desire to extend his mystical and intellectual curiosity to others. Price hoped, with Esalen, to help develop an alternative to the mainstream psychiatric establishments where he’d received such inhumane treatment.12

While Murphy’s aims for Esalen overlapped with Price’s in their common emphasis on creating an environment most hospitable to individual development and exploration, Murphy’s intellectual and spiritual leanings dictated that he form a more personally and physically distant relationship to the institute. He tended to avoid its experiential activities, focusing instead on the more intellectual seminars.13

Despite his preference, however, Murphy was also significantly involved in shaping the institute’s spiritual emphases. He infused Esalen with the wisdom he had gained from a sixteen-month retreat to Aurobindo’s ashram in Pondicherry, India. There he had engaged in a “hermeneutic mysticism” with Aurobindo’s ideas.14 Aurobindo, one of the first Indian mystics to develop a significant corpus of writings in English, had synthesized Eastern and Western philosophy, yoga, religion, literature, and psychology to propose a vision of man’s divine possibilities that resonated with the idea of human potentialities. “Everyone has in him something divine,” he wrote, “something his own, a chance of perfection and strength in however small a sphere which God offers him to take or refuse. The task is to find it, develop it and use it. The chief aim of education should be to help the growing soul to draw out that in itself which is best and make it perfect for a noble use.”15

Aurobindo’s idea of perfectibility through personal discipline was particularly compelling to Murphy, who meditated eight hours a day.16 The aim of such practice, though, was not limited to personal transformation; instead, it was the grander goal of the liberation and transformation of mankind. Devoted yogic practices, Aurobindo had claimed, could “bring down a divine nature and a divine life into the mental, vital and physical nature and life of humanity.”17

Aurobindo’s inspiration was evident in Murphy’s choice of seminarians, who used yoga and tantra and represented Eastern influences. These seminars were vastly popular, and their themes pervaded Esalen so thoroughly that scholars like Jeffrey Kripal, author of Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion, later interpreted Esalen as one of the great modern religious centers of twentieth-century America.18

Although Murphy’s interests were deeply personal, he preferred spiritual exploration at Esalen to be private, dialogic, and intellectual. In fact, most of the Esalen seminars in the early 1960s were fairly academic. Many incorporated lists of requisite reading that spanned philosophy, Eastern and Western religion, evolutionary theory, and, of course, psychology. Esalen’s first public offering came just after Maslow’s serendipitous visit, in the form of a lecture series titled “The Human Potentiality,” which aptly represented the diverse and complementary interests of the founders.19 The program ran as follows:

 

SEPTEMBER 22–23:	“The Expanding Vision,” led by Stanford engineering professor Willis Harman20
OCTOBER 6–7:	“Individual and Cultural Definitions of Rationality,” led by clinical psychologist Joe K. Adams and ethnologist Gregory Bateson21
OCTOBER 26:	“Art and Religion,” Special Lecture by college administrator, writer, and visionary Gerald Heard22
NOVEMBER 3–4:	“Drug-Induced Mysticism,” led by psychologist Paul Kurtz and Russian-born inventor and industrialist Myron Stolaroff23
DECEMBER 1–2:	Panel Discussion (on human potential) by Joe Adams, Willis W. Harman, Paul S. Kurtz, and Myron J. Stolaroff24

 

Like early AAHP meetings, the Esalen 1962 seminars were largely cerebral. They were thrilling for the participants because of their intellectual daring, but were conducted in the traditions of academic discussion. In the first seminar, participants sat in wooden chairs listening to a Stanford professor lecture on new possibilities for human experience. Adams and Bateson offered a seminar that was comparably buttoned-up and intellectual, but more revolutionarily suggestive, particularly when they argued for the subjectivity of social belief systems and the relativity of defined reality.25

The topic of the second-to-last seminar of the year, “Drug-Induced Mysticism,” suggested the impending Dionysian turn of Esalen. Delivered about a year before LSD experimentation fully hit America, the seminar considered the possibilities for psychedelic expansion of consciousness. Kurtz and Stolaroff piqued participants’ interest and nudged them toward their own experimentation.26

In the early 1960s, most humanistic psychologists were receptive to the potential value of psychedelic experimentation. Many saw a consonance between their own goals—of self-actualization, expanded self- and transpersonal awareness, and intensified experience—and the qualities of psychedelic experience, which produced in users everything from a feeling of temporary transcendence to the (at least temporary) experience of a complete reorganization of perception and meaning.27

Reports of psychedelic experience evoked, in particular, Maslow’s notion of peak experiences. “What I experienced was essentially, and with few exceptions, the usual content of experience but that, of everything, there was MORE,” said one LSD-user, a thirty-six-year-old assistant professor of English whose account of a trip was published, in 1966, in The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience.

Writing under the influence of the drug, he noted that he was able to sense, think, and feel more. Of objects, he saw more color, detail, and form. Of his own emotions, he felt more intensity, more depth, more comprehensiveness. He felt that his mind was able to contain more. “Awareness has MORE levels, is many-dimensioned.” He also felt a sense of more time, more unity with people and things, more self-knowledge, and more alternatives.28

Maslow noted a similar sense of amplification when describing peaks. During a peak experience, he wrote, individuals feel more integrated: “unified, whole, all-of a piece.” They are “more able to fuse with the world.” For example, “the appreciater becomes the music (and it becomes him) or the painting, or the dance.” Peakers, he wrote, feel themselves to be at the height of their powers; they experience a sense of “effortlessness and ease of functioning”; they feel free of blocks and inhibitions; they feel more spontaneous and expressive, more “freely flowering outward”; and they feel “more of a pure psyche and less a thing-of-the-world living under the laws of the world.” Peakers also feel more creative, connected to the present, unique, and grateful.29

Although Maslow had never imagined peak experiences to be replicable in a laboratory, LSD experiences suggested new possibilities. As an exceptionally liberal place that tended to attract experientially curious individuals, Esalen proved a good place to start a dialogue about this kind of experimentation.

The parallel between Maslow’s descriptions of peaking and the personal accounts of psychedelic users helps explain the natural affinity that humanistic psychologists and psychedelic users felt for one another. And, indeed, the early pioneers of LSD experimentation were similar in many respects to the founders of humanistic psychology. They were academics and research scientists. They tended to be intellectual adventurers rather than rebels. And they were serious in their hopes for the drug. By the time the two cultures converged at the nexus of the human potential movement in the 1960s at places like Esalen, however, the time when they might have achieved some kind of genuine intellectual synchrony had passed. The psychedelic movement had already abandoned most of its scientific commitments and had given itself over to the more chaotic elements of uncontrolled experimentation.

The modern era of psychedelics had begun in Switzerland in 1943 when chemist Albert Hofmann unwittingly discovered the hallucinogenic effects of a compound he had synthesized five years earlier. Upon accidentally ingesting lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in the lab, he quickly became restless and dizzy and left for home. “At home,” he wrote, “I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination. In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away.”30

Although he’d been searching for a circulatory and respiratory stimulant, Hofmann had unintentionally propelled himself into the realm of alternative consciousness. Enraptured by the experience and unclear on how he had absorbed the substance (he had only touched it), he replicated the experiment three days later. Although his second trip began with the characteristic dizziness and disorientation of the first, he soon went into crisis. His grotesque and threatening furniture spun around; his neighbor became a “malevolent, insidious witch with a colored mask.” He felt possessed by a demon; he jumped and screamed and flailed; he felt certain he was going insane or dying. Then, “the horror softened,” and he returned to a reality in which the colors were more vivid, and the acoustics more resonant.31

Hofmann approached the whole experience with the intellectual curiosity of a scientist; he was not deterred by fear, and continued to study the compound. His experimentation soon took him beyond the Swiss laboratories of Sandoz Pharmaceuticals; he sought hallucinatory plants and mushrooms in Mexico in the 1950s and 1960s. Compelled by the adventure and enthusiastic about its therapeutic potential as “medicine for the soul,” Hofmann brought the hallucinogens back to his laboratory, where he continued to experiment extensively (mostly on himself), documenting the effects of various compounds and attempting to replicate their chemical structures.32

In America, firsthand information about psychedelic experiences came primarily from nonscientists who traveled to locations in southern Mexico, where psychedelic mushrooms were used in tribal rituals.33 R. Gordon Wasson, for example, was a New York banker who traveled to Mexico in 1955 to sample psilocybin mushrooms with the Mixtec Indians. He published an account of his experience in Life magazine in June 1957, describing his own hallucinogenic experience. His first trip began, he wrote, just after midnight in an unlit thatched cabin on the side of a mountain. His “visions,” as he described them, “were in vivid color, always harmonious. They began with art motifs, angular such as might decorate carpets or textiles or wallpaper or the drawing board of an architect. Then they evolved into palaces with courts, arcades, gardens—resplendent palaces all laid over with semiprecious stones. Then I saw a mythological beast drawing a regal chariot. Later it was as though the walls of our house had dissolved, and my spirit had flown forth, and I was suspended in mid-air viewing landscapes of mountains, with camel caravans advancing slowly across the slopes, the mountains rising tier above tier to the very heavens.”34

Articles like Wasson’s began to stir popular interest in psychedelics. They also began to chip away at the negative reputation that earlier accounts of LSD inebriation had perpetuated.35 Sidney Katz’s 1953 Maclean’s article “My Twelve Hours as a Madman,” for example, had stoked anxiety about the drug by conflating hallucinogenic experience with madness. Describing his participation in an LSD research experiment conducted by the Saskatchewan Schizophrenia Research Group, in which he turned into a “raving schizophrenic,” Katz recalled the terror of the experience: “I saw the faces of familiar friends turn into fleshless skulls and the heads of menacing witches, pigs and weasels,” he wrote. “The gaily patterned carpet at my feet was transformed into a fabulous heaving mass of living matter, part vegetable, part animal. An ordinary sketch of a woman’s head and shoulders suddenly sprang to life. She moved her head from side to side, eyeing me critically, changing back and forth from woman into man. Her hair and her neckpiece became the nest of a thousand famished serpents who leaped out to devour me. The texture of my skin changed several times. After handling a painted card I could feel my body suffocating for want of air because my skin had turned to enamel.”36

In spite of the fear he was able to evoke with this vivid description, even Katz refused to reduce LSD experience to its purely negative elements, instead offering a more complex picture that fed public fascination. At the same time that he detailed his most gruesome visions, he also highlighted glimpses of “dazzling beauty” more comparable to those witnessed by Wasson. In these moments, he wrote, “I lived in a paradise where the sky was a mass of jewels set in a background of shimmering aquamarine blue; where the clouds were apricot-colored; where the air was filled with liquid golden arrows, glittering fountains of iridescent bubbles, filigree lace of pearl and silver, sheathes of rainbow light—all constantly changing in color, design, texture and dimension so that each scene was more lovely than the one that preceded it.”37

The sublime, terrifying, and beautiful experiences of LSD compelled readers, in part, because they were unlikely products of the kind of laboratory conditions that produced them. Katz’s trip, for example, occurred in the lounge of Saskatchewan Hospital in Weburn, Canada, where he was flanked by the clinical directors of the hospital, as well as a staff psychologist and a sociologist. After ingesting the drug, he was interviewed incessantly by the directors and photographed extensively by a photographer from Maclean’s.38

The study in which Katz participated was typical of the decade’s psychological and sociological research into psychedelic experience. The medical research community, in particular, took psychedelics seriously, exploring a range of potential medical and psychological benefits. Even with his new interests, Hofmann’s position at Sandoz was secure; he became the director of the natural substances department. In this new capacity, he and his fellow researchers studied a range of possible applications of LSD, exploring its potential as a serotonin blocker, a treatment for migraines, and an anti-inflammatory.39

The earliest psychiatric research on LSD, performed in Europe and the United Sstates, used the compound to facilitate mental relaxation in the recovery of repressed memories and to achieve a better understanding of psychosis.40 Other experimental uses included the treatment of schizophrenia and alcoholism.41 Significant research on the treatment of alcoholics occurred between 1954 and 1960, when Humphry Osmond and Abram Hoffer treated approximately two thousand alcoholics under carefully controlled conditions, reporting that forty to forty-five percent of the alcoholics who were treated with LSD had not returned to drinking after a year.42

It was under the aegis of scientific experimentation, too, that Harvard psychology department lecturer Timothy Leary first traveled to Mexico to experience psychedelic mushroom inebriation. Of the experience, Leary later wrote, “I was first drugged out of my mind in Cuernavaca, August 1960. I ate seven of the Sacred Mushrooms of Mexico and discovered that beauty, revelation, sensuality, the cellular history of the past, God, the Devil—all lie inside my body, outside my mind.”43

Leary was one of a number of psychologists who were studying that summer in Cuernavaca. Just down the road was psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, who was performing a sociopsychological study of the village, and Harvard professor David McClelland, who hoped to offer psychological techniques to improve the economic standards of underdeveloped countries. Although he didn’t name names, Leary wrote, suggestively, “Many of the scientists who were working and vacationing there that season had their lives dramatically changed, and none of them will ever completely escape from the mysterious power, the challenge, the paradox of what started to unfold.”44

In the fall of 1960, Leary founded the first psilocybin laboratory in the United States, with the support and participation of psychologist Henry Murray and assistant professor of education and psychology Richard Alpert. The explicit goal of the laboratory was to explore the potential psychological benefits of psychedelics, particularly in the realms of emotional and creative expression, and to pursue the effects of psychedelic inebriation.45

The early results of Leary’s research were promising. In his first study, in which 175 participants from all walks of life ingested psilocybin, Leary reported that more than half had reached new heights of self-understanding; an equally high percentage felt the experience had permanently improved their lives; and 90 percent wanted to repeat the experience.46 Subsequently, Leary conducted the Concord Prison Experiment, in which psilocybin therapy was administered to prisoners. Improvements in the mental health and morale of participants were so marked that Leary was invited to Washington to explore the possibility of a national psilocybin program that would extend throughout the penal system.47

The kind of well-reasoned and cautious experimentation that Leary initially practiced attracted many of humanistic psychology’s leaders. Some participated directly in psychedelic experimentation. Stanley Krippner, for example, who was then an assistant professor of clinical psychology at Kent State and later a president of the American Association of Humanistic Psychology, was enthusiastic about the possibilities of LSD and eager to try it himself.48 Accepting an invitation from Leary to participate in LSD experimentation at Harvard in April 1962, Krippner traveled to Cambridge for the experience. He was so motivated to take the drug that he appeared for the session despite the fact that he had been violently ill from food poisoning the night before and had to be physically assisted to Leary’s lab by a friend.49 His nausea abated the moment the drug took effect.

Krippner was not disappointed by the trip. Describing his kaleidoscopic visions, he wrote, “A spiral of numbers, letters, and words blew away in a cyclone, stripping me of the verbal and numerical symbols by which I had constructed my world. [ . . . ] The recordings of Beethoven and Mussorgsky had never sounded better, and I seemed to be surrounded by chords and tones. The clock on the mantel seemed to be a work from a Cellini studio. I visualized delicate Persian miniatures and arabesques. I was in the court of Kublai Khan; inside a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome; at Versailles with Benjamin Franklin; and danced flamenco with gypsies in Spain, one of whom threw roses into the air which exploded like firecrackers. I was with Thomas Jefferson at Monticello; I watched Edgar Allan Poe write poetry in Baltimore.”50

Feeling that he had encountered the “ground of being,” Krippner described the experience as both religious and transpersonal, concluding that LSD had a useful function in giving individuals a “road map” to expanded consciousness and self-exploration.51

Although Krippner’s experience was compelling, most humanistic psychologists offered only intellectual or ideological support to psychedelic experimentation. In December 1961, Maslow wrote in his journal of the potential of psychedelic trips to yield “stable, permanent & nonvanishing, nonundoable” truths.52

“It has become quite clear,” wrote Maslow, “that certain drugs called ‘psychedelic,’ especially LSD and psilocybin, give us some possibility of control in this realm of peak-experiences. It looks as if these drugs often produce peak-experiences in the right people under the right circumstances, so that perhaps we needn’t wait for them to occur by good fortune. Perhaps we can actually produce a private personal peak-experience under observation and whenever we wish under religious or nonreligious circumstances. We may then be able to study in its moment of birth the experience of illumination or revelation. Even more important, it may be that these drugs, and perhaps also hypnosis, could be used to produce a peak-experience, with core-religious revelation, in non-peakers, thus bridging the chasm between these two separated halves of mankind.”53

In November 1962, Maslow collaborated directly with Leary, serving on a panel on drug peaks at the annual Massachusetts Association of Psychology meeting. And, as late as December 7, 1968, Maslow participated in an LSD study group conference at MIT, where he spoke on peak and plateau.54

Rollo May conveyed his approval of psychedelic research by lending his intellectual support to colleagues studying LSD. On September 18, 1965, he congratulated colleague Charles Dahlberg for getting a grant to study LSD with psychotherapy patients. May wrote, “I am interested, beyond the clinical phenomena as such, in the underlying meaning of the changes of consciousness that take place. I would like very much to observe what light LSD throws on the nature and function of consciousness.”55

Even if they chose not to experiment, Maslow, May, and others were drawn to the topic of psychedelics out of scholarly and personal interests. It bridged the areas of their deepest interest: human capabilities, awareness and insight, religious and mystical experience. Good psychedelic research also embodied their scientific ideals, combining the precision of laboratory experimentation with the descriptive value of subjective report. In incorporating an otherwise elusive experience (of expanded consciousness) into the realm of valid research, psychedelic studies had the potential to push back against the narrow definitions of psychological science that humanistic psychologists so vehemently opposed.

Leary’s 1962 “Good Friday Study” was a prime example of the attempt to meld scientific and personal interests. In the study, he tested the hypothesis that ingesting a psychedelic drug in a “supportive and religiously meaningful” environment would produce a mystical experience in students who were “spiritually inclined.”56 The experiential reports were powerful. Mike Young, then a twenty-three-year-old divinity student at Andover Newton Theological School, felt that he saw death that day. Describing the experience thirty-two years later, Young recounted his visions. He saw a “radial design like a mandala, with the colors in the center leading out to the sides, each one a different color and pattern.” Frozen in the center, Young viewed each band as “a different life experience. A different path to take. And I was in the center where they all started. I could choose any path I wanted. It was incredible freedom . . . but I had to choose one. To stay in the center was to die. I couldn’t choose. I just . . . couldn’t . . . pick one.” Suspended in agony and indecision, he hung there, until he “died,” only to return momentarily to more pleasant images. Young later attributed to the drug the solidification of his career in the ministry and the obliteration of his fear of death.57

Leary’s scientific interpretation of the reports lacked the power of the personal accounts. He claimed in 1963 that of the ten divinity school participants who ingested the drug (ten others received a placebo), 40 to 90 percent (a significant margin) had experienced a full-on religious experience. Regardless, he brashly argued that the results of such studies “systematically” and conclusively demonstrated that psychedelics could produce a “changed man and a changed life.”58

In attempting to combine scholarly investigation with transcendental experience, Leary’s work was ideally suited to the emerging human potential movement, and to Esalen specifically. Although early Esalen seminars were genuinely committed to an intellectual analysis of the value of psychedelics, group leaders steered participants toward experimentation. At first, this encouragement was only by implication. In discussing the mystical value of drug use, for example, the first psychedelic seminar leaders, cofounders of the International Foundation for Advanced Study, a laboratory for the investigation of the effects of LSD, were enthusiastic about the potential of the drug but were careful to discuss it only in the context of controlled experimentation in a research laboratory.59 With each psychedelic seminar that followed, the assumption that participants would experiment or had experimented on their own became more explicit.

In early 1963, another version of Stolaroff and Kurtz’s seminar, now titled “Religion and Drug-Induced Mysticism,” was held. And that summer, Paul Kurtz led a “post-psychedelic seminar” for those who had experimented with LSD and wanted to discuss their experiences. Leary himself led a seminar in late 1963 with his former Harvard colleague Richard Alpert. The seminar, held first as a weekend retreat from October 30 to November 1 and then as a five-day seminar from November 1 to 6, was titled “The Ecstatic Experience,” and was the basis of their 1966 book Psychedelic Experience.60

Unsurprisingly, the enthusiasm for taking LSD soon eclipsed the interest in having intellectually serious discussions about it. As visitors to Esalen became more and more actively engaged in seeking personal transformation (through encounter groups and bodywork), they grew dissatisfied with abstract discussions that treated transformation as an intellectual object.61 Personal use became more common, in many cases informing self-improvement programs.

The increasing interest in recreational experimentation was reinforced by the growing visibility, and self-awareness, of the counterculture. Authors like Aldous Huxley, for example, romanticized LSD use, constructing it as a tool for consciousness-expansion, pleasure, and religious awakening.62 In 1962, Huxley published an account of what he perceived to be the transcendent elements of psychedelic experience in his novel Island. He wrote, “Even if it doesn’t refer to anything outside itself, it’s still the most important thing that ever happened to you. Like music, only incomparably more so. And if you give the experience a chance, if you’re prepared to go along with it, the results are incomparably more therapeutic and transforming. So maybe the whole thing does happen inside one’s skull. Maybe it is private and there’s no unitive knowledge of anything but one’s own physiology. Who cares? The fact remains that the experience can open one’s eyes and make one blessed and transform one’s whole life.”63 In the final chapter of the book, he challenged the idea that cautious psychological experimentation was the best approach to psychedelics, suggesting instead that the fearless pursuit of religious ecstasy might be a more worthy goal.

Just as Huxley’s concept of human potentiality had served as an inspiration for the human potential movement that took root at Esalen, his belief in the enormous potential of psychedelics aligned well with the interests of Esalen participants. For many, his 1956 book The Doors of Perception had become a kind of bible.64 Describing a single mescaline trip, the book helped to identify psychedelic use as a means of increasing an individual’s sensitivity to the world, allowing him to admit all kinds of perceptions that his brain usually filtered out. By this logic, LSD could serve as a useful tool in the pursuit of self-actualization and increased awareness. Many Esalen participants embraced this idea and began to use the drug liberally, finding the peacefulness and permissiveness of the institute ideally suited to their experimentation.

Liberal drug use invited a chaotic element to Esalen that was more than the founders had bargained for. Although Murphy and Price attempted to prevent uncontrolled experimentation on-site, residents and visitors largely disregarded their opposition.65 The most they were able to accomplish in terms of control was the elimination of drug use from meetings and the limitation of experimentation to the rented rooms of participants (a domain protected under state law).66 “We put a bulletin up on the board that anybody found dealing drugs or having drug trips was going to be evicted instantly since it was against the law,” said Murphy. “But, we knew, of course, that these people with that particular look on their face, some of whom couldn’t walk very well, were under the influence of something other than beer or wine.”67

The rampant drug use at Esalen was unsettling to figures like Maslow, who, though supportive of controlled experimentation, questioned the wisdom of rampant LSD inebriation. Several of his journal entries in the mid-1960s conveyed his growing ambivalence. In 1965, he wrote about the risks of LSD abuse, suggesting that extensive use was more likely to result in intellectual “atrophy,” aimlessness, and disconnection than in self-actualization.68

At the same time that Maslow expressed his disapproval of trends in psychedelic experimentation at Esalen and elsewhere, he began to lose faith in Leary’s research. Although the two had worked closely in 1962, their interests seemed to have diverged rather abruptly. Leary’s data collection had become sporadic at best, and his scientific integrity seemed to be declining. Critics reported that by 1963, Leary’s laboratory, which had once attempted to perform valid scientific experiments, had become the supplier of a “semipermanent cocktail party” full of entranced intellectuals who thought they had discovered the panacea for a sick society.69

Leary seemed to be spouting grandiose claims about LSD at every opportunity. In addition to arguing for the power of LSD to forever change one’s life, he maintained that the mass distribution of LSD would improve society, in part by bringing about global peace. As the media paid more attention to his sensational statements, his fellow researchers, like Humphry Osmond and Albert Hofmann, feared that his simplistic vision and exaggerated reports would compromise the future of LSD research.70

In 1963, Harvard closed Leary’s laboratory and dismissed him from his post. This decision came just months after the FDA’s pronouncement that LSD had become too powerful and its results too chaotic, and that the agency would begin to regulate noncontrolled uses.71 At this point the FDA didn’t want to end scientific experimentation, but wanted to prevent abuse.72 The same was true of Harvard, which continued to support controlled experimentation with LSD. As late as 1966, research came out of Harvard supporting the idea that mystical experiences from LSD could be therapeutically useful in treating personality and behavioral disorders.73

Maslow continued to defend, in principle, Leary’s unorthodox experimental methods, but he criticized what he deemed “the Leary technique.74 “The “Leary technique,” Maslow wrote in his journal in 1964, “is a denial of the very principle itself of stages of knowledge for which appropriate stages of personality development are necessary.”75 In eliciting peaks at will, Leary bypassed important steps. It was as if he propelled himself, in one fell swoop, from the ignorance of infancy to the wisdom of old age, without having had an adolescence or adulthood. Where were the formative learning experiences? The bold achievements and awkward failures? The rallying that follows humiliation and defeat? The pride and confidence that develops from hard-won personality integration? Drugs seemed to allow users to skip all this.

Maslow’s primary reservation about Leary’s vision of psychedelic use was theoretical. He quickly came to believe that peak experiences achieved exclusively through psychedelic use were less meaningful than those that occurred spontaneously, but not arbitrarily, after an individual had done the long, hard work of self-exploration. He formulated his critique of psychedelic peaks in much the same way that Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German Lutheran theologian, described the idea of “cheap grace”—it was unearned and undeserved. “Cheap grace,” wrote Bonhoeffer, “means grace sold on the market like cheapjacks’ wares. [ . . . ] Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves.”76 Psychedelic experiences could, of course, be literally purchased. And, unlike the peaks achieved from the arduous activities that Maslow describes (childbirth, for instance), drug-induced peaks were not the product of striving, process, or work of any kind.77

In an unpublished paper titled “Drugs—Critique,” Maslow described the ideal peak experience as akin to “costly grace,” one that, because it was earned, would promote self-confidence, pride in one’s powers, and a sense of achievement. He drew a parallel to the way that earning money would be “health-fostering,” whereas receiving unearned money would be “sickness-fostering.”78

“Even if the drugs were not harmful psychologically,” Maslow wrote, “I think they can be harmful spiritually, characterologically, etc. I think it’s clearly better to work for your blessings, instead of to buy them. I think an unearned Paradise becomes worthless.”79 Maslow’s strongest objections to the LSD culture stemmed from “essentially moral reasons—something like should we build an escalator to the top of Mt. Everest or should we put more automobile roads through the wilderness or should we make life easier in general . . .”80 There was something utterly capitalistic about the consumptive ritual of LSD use. Leary wanted to have, and to transmit, more good feeling, with more intensity and more immediacy. And he didn’t want to have to earn it.

Beat generation author William S. Burroughs concurred with this critique of Leary, recognizing that while LSD could “open the doors of perception . . . only deliberate cultivation of new habits of consciousness could endow such visions with enduring significance.”81 In this respect, there really were no shortcuts to self-actualization, no drug-induced insights that would last.

Even avid users of LSD expressed doubts about the enduring value of psychedelic trips. The day after a trip, writer Arthur Koestler told Leary, “This is wonderful, no doubt. . . . But it is fake, ersatz. Instant mysticism . . . there’s no wisdom there. I solved the secret of the universe last night, but this morning I forgot what it was.”82 LSD use generated a series of epiphanies in which each devalued the last, and in which the cycle devalued the entire project. It was true that psychedelic users experienced moments of sensing that they had found the meaning of existence, but they didn’t seem able to take the insight with them when the trip ended. They needed to do more drugs to access the awareness they had already achieved, and doing more drugs seemed to make it harder for them to function sober.

The cautious criticisms of humanistic psychologists and other thoughtful experimenters were thrown to the wind by outside critics. In many cases, LSD use mimicked the patterns of other already-demonized drugs like heroin, cocaine, or alcohol. Use moved to abuse, and threatened a level of disconnection and impairment in functioning that was threatening to the social structure.

Almost from the beginning, the media’s portrayals of LSD use dramatized this destructive side of LSD. Reports tended to be sensational and to play to the fear that drug use corrupted youth and undermined American establishments.83 One typical article, published in the New York Times in 1964, described psychedelic drug use with barely veiled contempt and anxiety. Journalist Graham Blaine wrote: “Students feel that these drugs increase their perceptiveness and sensitivity, bring out latent talents and inspire a feeling of extraordinary togetherness among the group which is enjoying the ‘drug experience.’ Of course, the drug generally provides only the briefest of delusional respites. But some of it leads to hopeless addiction or months of insanity.”84

After his dismissal from Harvard, Leary’s own actions and statements provided additional fodder for reporters. In 1966, he founded his own religion, the League for Spiritual Discovery, which was oriented around the sacramental use of LSD, peyote, and marijuana. In one of many public appearances (at a press conference in the New York Advertising Club), Leary announced, “We have a blueprint and we’re going to change society in the next ten years.”85 Leary planned to test in the courts the constitutional rights of members of the new religion to use the drugs at home, in their “shrines.” He grandly asserted that, “Like every great religion of the past [ . . . ] we seek to find the divinity within and to express this revelation in a life of glorification and worship of God. These ancient goals we define in the metaphor of the present—turn on, tune in and drop out.”86

Leary’s nonconformist rhetoric aligned, superficially, with Maslow’s understanding of the place in society of self-actualized individuals, who display a “resistance to acculturation” and a “certain inner detachment from the culture” coupled with an extreme sense of autonomy.87 In Maslow’s studies of self-actualizers in the early 1950s, he had observed among them a general lack of conformity to cultural norms.88 Rather than suggesting emotional immaturity, nonconformity, he found, could signal superior social functioning.89 Not all rebellion was without a cause. In mature individuals, in fact, balanced critiques of cultural norms, choices about living that diverged from the status quo, and well-reasoned rejections of oppressive standards were a sign of higher, not lower, functioning.

Maslow drew a sharp distinction, however, between nonconformist self-actualizers and most other kinds of nonconformists. He described self-actualizers as able to function effectively within the wider culture, notwithstanding their criticisms of it. He found that they have generally “settled down to . . . an accepting, calm, good-humored, everyday effort to improve the culture, usually from within, rather than to reject it and fight it from without.”90

In stark contrast was Leary’s notion of “dropping out.” In 1965, in The Politics of Ecstasy, Leary wrote: “Quit school. Quit your job. Don’t vote. . . . Do not waste conscious thinking on TV-studio games. Political choices are meaningless.” In addition to encouraging frequent use of psychedelics, he suggested that dropouts should form their own “cults.”91

Even after his departure from academics, Leary’s irreverent attitude toward American institutions generated interest from the media, which often focused on the questionable legality of his activities, portraying him as threatening to the moral order of the nation.92 Of the Dutchess County trial of Leary in 1966, a New York Times reporter wrote, “The jurors are trying to determine whether the Foundation [Leary’s communal living experiment] has been promoting LSD experimentation through the country, impairing the morality of children and running a disorderly house.”93 Critics sensed but couldn’t always articulate the threat that Leary posed, and often pathologized even the slightest aberrations from “normal” behavior. Media depictions latched onto the metaphor, and the actuality, of filth as a way to convey the moral disorder and taint that drug users embodied. Look magazine described the archetypal hippie pad as “a filthy litter strewn swarming dope fortress that was a great deal less savory and sanitary than a sewer.”94

Media attention to LSD only escalated as the decade wore on. Historian Jay Stevens writes, “Scarcely a week went by that this curious creature [LSD] wasn’t in the news columns, either raping or murdering or committing suicide in stories that were usually anonymous, uncheckable, and bizarre.”95 Local papers transmitted the mistaken idea that so many people were driven psychotic from LSD that local emergency rooms were being overwhelmed. The media descriptions grossly distorted reality; LSD-related narcotic arrests actually represented a very small percentage of national narcotics arrests in the 1960s, and LSD-related accidents were far rarer than accidents related to the abuse of other narcotics (alcohol in particular).96

By mid-1966, governors were competing to enact anti-LSD legislation, and Congress soon passed federal legislation banning the drug. In October, possession was deemed illegal in every state. With the enactment of such laws, open-ended research came to an end, and researchers encountered obstacles to completing even the funded projects that were underway. Sandoz Pharmaceuticals recalled all the LSD it had distributed.97

In 1967, popular magazines fixated on the potential damage LSD could cause. An article in Science News warned of broken chromosomes, one in Time of cell damage, and the journal Science alarmed readers with reports of chromosomal abnormalities resulting from using the drug.98 Newsweek, Time, and McCall’s published stories about dangers to unborn babies.99 In most articles, the message was the same: LSD use needed to be curbed, and American society needed to be saved from the “rising problem” it posed.100

The black market that resulted from the change in legal status, however, ensured a steady supply of LSD, and the now illegal status of the drug, combined with its continued use and availability, resulted in an even greater public anxiety about the danger its use posed to American institutions.101 Political figures construed drug use as an act of political rebellion that undermined the protective structures of government. President Lyndon Johnson, in his 1968 State of the Union address, highlighted his concern over the advancing cultural interest in drug use, promising to put measures in place to stop it.102 In July 1969, President Nixon asked Congress for more money for enforcement, heavier penalties for violations involving LSD, and the federal authority to break into residences unannounced to seize drug evidence quickly. Nixon also reported that juvenile arrests involving use of drugs rose almost 800 percent between 1960 and 1967.103

Meanwhile, a passion for LSD bloomed in the counterculture. Psychedelic imagery suffused beat poetry. In several poems, including “Lysergic Acid” and “Mescaline,” Allen Ginsberg extolled the drug’s virtues and romanticized his trips. His poem “Graffiti 12th Cubicle Men’s Room Syracuse Airport” contained the following lines:

Man, I’m really stoned out of my skull really O-Zoned—good old LSD the colors in here are so nice really fine colors and the floor tile is really outasight if you haven’t tried it you ought to since it is the only way to really get your head together by first getting it apart LSD Forever.104

In the late 1960s, Leary left the puritanical northeast for California. Here, he ensconced himself in the epicenter of the nation’s countercultural fringe. Estranged from his academic origins, Leary embarked on a series of adventures that included ingesting massive amounts of LSD, challenging Ronald Reagan in the 1969 gubernatorial race, spending some time in state prison for marijuana possession, laying out plans for space colonization, and attempting to be frozen in cryogenic suspension. Characters like Leary fed on California’s far-out energy as much as they fueled it.

By the late 1960s, California had become a national site of experimentation and a safe haven for progressive thought. According to Look magazine editor George Leonard, “If the United States was a laboratory of social and cultural change, California was that part of the lab where the most advanced experimentation was taking place.”105 Look had launched a California issue on September 25, 1962, and Life had followed with its own California issue a month later. The cover of Look’s California issue proclaimed that “Tomorrow’s Hopes and Tomorrow’s Headaches Are Here Today in Our Soon-to-Be Largest State.” Articles referred to California as a “Promised Land for Millions of Migrating Americans” and the harbinger of “The Way-Out Way of Life.” According to one historian, California was the answer to Americans’ new surplus of leisure time, uniquely attuned to individual quests for sensation and stimulation. “Everything was bigger, newer, better, faster, shinier in California; it was the jewel in the technocracy’s crown,” he wrote.106

California also embodied productive tensions, a simultaneous threat and a promise, that fueled an ethos of energy and change. Many Americans, still true to their sense of pioneerism and to their traditional Puritan roots, found the rapid change and cultural flux of California simultaneously exciting and frightening—“a window to the future, good and bad.”107 Those who witnessed student protests in Berkeley, race riots in Watts, or drug culture in Haight-Ashbury would certainly attest that California did not consist solely of starry-eyed youth with flowers in their hair. The Haight, for example was often a site more of dissolution and confusion than of harmony and goodwill. One historian wrote that the “madness of the place, the shouts, the chasing, the gunning bikes, the chaotic, occasional screams of girls running has convinced people that the Haight is a rare species of insane organization.”108 Joan Didion, in her 1967 essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” described San Francisco as a site of “social hemorrhaging.”109

In the broader cultural perception of California, however, the promise did tend to outweigh the threat. Idealistic, self-seeking Americans followed a path to California that the federal government itself had charted. In 1962 alone, the U.S. government channeled forty-two percent of all government funds for research and development into the state.110 California seemed to possess a surplus of great minds capable of leading America toward great things. In contrast to the intellectuals of the Northeast, California’s thinkers seemed more receptive to experimental ideas—more flexible, open, and experientially daring.

Unsurprisingly, many humanistic psychologists also felt the pull of California’s promise. In 1967, Maslow wrote, “It dawned on me again that I feel closer to so many of the California people than to my friends & acquaintances here (in the Northeast). I’d always thought this was the accident of nearness & distance. But now it occurs to me that these are all T-group people, & it makes a difference. They’re more direct, honest, candid, undefended, open, feedbacky, etc. And so I actually do justly & correctly feel more intimate with them than I do with non-T-group people here.111

By using the term “T-group people,” Maslow was referring to those who participated in sensitivity training groups, a form of group therapy in which people learned about themselves through their interactions with others. T-groups most often took place in the growth centers that drew personal growth seekers to weekend and weeklong programs. Like Esalen, these growth centers employed a variety of techniques ranging from encounter groups (or T-groups) to workshops on yoga and meditation.112

Growth centers, too, had a reciprocal relationship to the California environs. They drew the seekers, the emotionally and intellectually curious, the experimenters. And their success was heightened by their idyllic surroundings and the state’s vibe of possibility. Many centers were located on the coast, in view of dramatic cliffs and the alternating peaceful and forceful Pacific Ocean. Those in Northern California were often ensconced in tall trees, like the redwoods that surrounded Esalen. At the same time that the surroundings suggested the revolutionary possibility of social and self-transcendence, they also harked back to the traditions of early American pioneers and transcendentalists like Thoreau. “While one may need as-yet-undiscovered drugs to imagine how Thoreau would have reacted to the hugging, shouting and acid-dropping at Big Sur,” wrote one journalist, “his quest at Walden Pond is certainly one fountainhead of the Esalen Hot Springs experiment.”113

Seminal AAHP members, including Carl Rogers, Rollo May, George Leonard, Jackie Doyle, and Abe Maslow, were lured from around the country to this mecca of experimentation and progressive thought. Rogers moved to California in 1964, Maslow in 1969, and May in 1975. Eight of AAHP’s first twenty-five conferences took place in California, and the Journal of Humanistic Psychology, though originally sponsored by Brandeis, was published in California.114 The majority of early adherents to humanistic psychology, too, were Californians. This fact was reflected both in the numbers of AAHP members who resided in the state and in the decision to open AAHP’s first office in San Francisco in 1965.115

The West Coast localization represented a literal break from the Northeastern and Midwestern universities at which the ideals of humanistic psychology were first conceptualized. Figuratively, the move to California suggested a new zeitgeist for humanistic psychology, a stronger connection to the rebellious energy of the 1960s, and a cultural fructification of what had begun as an academically and professionally based movement.116