CHAPTER 11

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THE CENTER DOES NOT HOLD

Since leaving Harvard, Tim had been busy. Our idea for Mexico was to create an international research center where IFIF members could have psychedelic experiences, continue with experiments, and train other guides. We dubbed it the Psychedelic Training Center. Tim signed a two-year lease on the Hotel Catalina and struck up relationships with various psychiatrists and chemists in California and Mexico to involve them in our effort. Joseph J. Downing, a psychiatrist who was the director of the San Mateo County Mental Health Department, agreed to attend the 1963 summer training program to observe our sessions and make notes.

To my alarm, Tim also promoted our project to the media, reaching out to reporters at CBS, Time, Life, Newsweek, and the Saturday Evening Post. As it was, we were already attracting enough attention, not just from federal agents but also from other national media outlets. The press painted us as a drug cult. But as far as we were concerned, this wasn’t about getting high on some Mexican beach. We were serious about the training, about creating the conditions for change and insight.

To transfer our work to Zihuatanejo permanently, the summer program had to be a success. Ralph and Susan Metzner flew down to Mexico to serve as guides during the first few weeks, followed by a few others, like Gunther Weil and Frank Barron. I was to join them as soon as I finished up our first issue of the Psychedelic Review, set to publish in June. In Boston, I took care of Tim’s kids, Susan and Jack, and managed administrative details, screening and handling applicants who wanted to join our utopian experiment.

In Zihuatanejo, Ralph and Susan converted one of the hotel cabins into a dedicated session room. They decorated it with drapes and pillows and brought in candles and incense. There were about forty or so guests at the outset, which put Susan and Ralph on a very busy schedule. They led sessions with groups of three or four people every morning and evening. After a session, participants were required to wait three or four days before doing another, to prevent building a tolerance to the drugs. This meant that there were groups of people at the hotel all along the spectrum: orienting beforehand, in a session, or reintegrating afterward. For several days and nights, Ralph and Susan served as guides without interruption, catching naps when they could.

Tim guided some of the sessions as well, though a lot of his time was spent in Mexico City trying to make political connections to ensure the center’s success. He and Ralph continued to collect notes for our psychedelic adaptation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and at one point, Tim came up with an idea. On the beach there was a beach hut on stilts, which served as a lifeguard tower. He proposed that every day, one member of the group would be tripping up in the tower, as a representative for everyone. The tower was visible from anywhere on the property, so they were always aware that there was someone in that high state. This gave every person a constant reference point for his or her own consciousness. Every day thereafter, we had a ceremony to install a person in the tower; the group later gathered to hear about the person’s trip. It was a creative way of bringing together group consciousness.

The beach in general was a good backdrop for sessions. Ralph and Susan reported that the ocean served as an excellent tool for bringing someone through a difficult phase of an acid trip. If a person was struggling with fear or suspicion or frustration, they would help him or her to the water’s edge, rolling their body in the sand and allowing the waves to wash over them. The experience of nature—the air, the surf, the sun, the sand—washed away the bad feelings.

The participants were happy, and Dr. Downing wrote up positive reports. He would later become one of the psychiatrists who pioneered the therapeutic use of the drug MDMA. Attendees were having such a productive time, in fact, that many of them wanted to extend their stay.

But this would soon prove impossible, and not for logistical reasons. Thanks to our notoriety in the papers, a few days after the retreat opened, a number of uninvited Americans began to show up in Zihuatanejo to get their own taste of consciousness. They camped outside the grounds of the Hotel Catalina and smoked marijuana, which, unlike psychedelics, was illegal. They had nothing to do with us, but rumors started flying. Shortly before IFIF’s arrival, there was a murder in the area, and a local police chief told the Mexican newspapers that the gringos and their crazy drugs were responsible.

Tim’s efforts in Mexico City did not go well. The previous summer, he had delivered a paper on our work to a meeting of psychiatrists, in which he mentioned opening our institute for psychedelic exploration. This was not well received, and a certain Dr. Dionisio Nieto from the National Autonomous University of Mexico began a campaign to have our work stopped. He’d had a bad mescaline trip, and he was critical of our quest. In retrospect, we should have involved Mexican psychiatrists in the project much earlier and hired Nieto as the resident psychiatrist.

Someone notified the health ministry of Mexico. American government agents were also keeping tabs on our activities. Although we were outside the jurisdiction of the US government, the CIA, the Justice Department, and the US ambassador to Mexico began pressuring local authorities, and finally the Mexican government decided to kick us out.

A couple of federales showed up at Zihuatanejo to explain to Tim that they were shutting down the program. Their stated reason was that we weren’t allowed to run a business on tourist visas. Tim, Ralph, and the others packed up, buried their supply of psychedelics on the grounds of the hotel to avoid being stopped and searched, and headed to Mexico City to regroup.

The program had lasted for all of six weeks. I was in Boston the whole time. As I tried to make sense of these events from a distance, I received a call. On the line was a political friend of Peggy Hitchcock’s, a man in Boston who was in the waste-handling business. The unceremonious end to our program had already made the news. “I think it’s terrible what they’re doing to Tim,” the man told me. I said I was planning to go to Mexico to help salvage the situation. “If I put up money for your plane ticket,” he replied, “can I go too?”

So he and I traveled together, flying first to Miami, on Eastern Air Lines. I’d packed a glass bottle of liquid LSD in my suitcase, but with the others all being watched as suspects, I didn’t want to let on to my companion. Besides, this man and I didn’t really know each other. In Miami, the two of us were sitting on the airplane, looking out the window, when the bags began to be unloaded. The baggage handler was violently throwing the luggage around. Suddenly, I noticed that the next bag down the ramp was mine. My heart sank. The bottle of LSD! But what was I going to say?

Of course, the bottle broke, and I discovered when we arrived in Mexico and I opened my suitcase that the LSD had been absorbed into my white silk suit. Later, we cut up the suit into little pieces and ate them to save the doses.

In Mexico City, we had a long discussion about our situation. The group was tired and feeling battered from all the harassment, but we also had the program to think of. Several hundred people had signed up for the summer training and had already sent in deposits. Given the positive results so far, we wanted to continue. We agreed to try to relocate. Tim had received an invitation from an American on the island of Dominica in the Caribbean. Tim and a few of the others went off to Dominica while Ralph and I stayed behind to organize logistics. For our new base of operations, I shipped a Land Rover, food, and other supplies to Dominica. We also shipped a hundred-pound bag of Heavenly Blue morning glory seeds, which were to be our LSD substitute for the summer program.

When I bought the bag from the seed wholesaler, he reported it to the government. An FBI agent came to visit us. I said, “I just love morning glories.” They weren’t illegal, so there wasn’t much he could do. One seed was about the equivalent of one microgram of LSD, so a threshold dose was anywhere between sixty and one hundred seeds. They never really worked all that well for an acid trip. They tasted terrible, and the alkaloids in the seed coat made you thoroughly sick before you got high.

Ralph and I took a plane to join the others. To get to Dominica, you have to fly to Antigua first. On our layover, I went to the beach for a swim. To my surprise, I saw Tim and the others walking toward me on the beach. The group had been thrown out of Dominica the day before. The island politicians had assured Tim that IFIF was welcome—they wanted the tourism—but they failed to mention that political infighting was roiling their government. Their opponents, under pressure from American authorities, accused Tim of heroin trafficking. He’d had to flee under imminent threat of arrest. It was a mess.

I was shocked—and angry. I’d already shipped everything to Dominica. I’d spent months fundraising, even selling some antiques and my motorcycle to help. I’d given Tim money to use with government officials, to grease the wheels. But in Mexico he’d spent that money on a speedboat. Now here he was, getting us kicked out of another country. We got into a big fight on the beach. At the time, I felt like he was the irresponsible one. But in retrospect, I was too.

As long as we were in Antigua, we thought we might as well stay. I arranged for all our stuff to be redirected, and we looked for a place to set up operations. There weren’t any big houses we could afford, so we ended up renting an abandoned nightclub called the Bucket of Blood, near the beach. We knew we had to win over Antigua’s government officials and its medical establishment, so we hosted cocktail parties every day. The island’s psychiatrists all came to check us out. The head doctor was an expert in lobotomies, which of course I knew something about.

We ran some LSD sessions among ourselves and continued rewriting parts of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, but the questions over our future were making us all feel anxious and listless. One day Frank Ferguson, high on LSD, decided the only way out of the uncertainty was to sacrifice himself for our cause. He walked to the office of the lobotomy doctor and, standing there in his bathing suit, demanded a lobotomy.

In Frank’s mind, he was offering himself as the bridge between our group and Antigua’s authorities. The doctor threw him out of the office and reported the incident to the island’s medical board, whose approval we were waiting on. Needless to say, the board gave us a thumbs-down, and we were asked to leave Antigua.

We were back to square one.

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We were now about $50,000 in debt. Back in Newton, we glumly discussed what to do next. Our psychedelic training center seemed permanently doomed.

Then Peggy had an idea. Her twin brothers, Tommy and Billy Hitchcock, had just turned twenty-one and come into their inheritances. They’d bought a big estate in Dutchess County, New York, as a tax shelter. The property—twenty-five hundred acres outside the town of Millbrook—had a huge mansion on it that her brothers weren’t going to use. Maybe, she suggested, they’d let us move there.

Peggy and I were good friends by this point. I’d taken her in the Cessna to visit my folks at Willenrica, where we landed on Dad’s three-hole golf course. We’d also flown to visit her family on Long Island, where they held polo matches on the Mellon estate. Peggy and I had also flown to her mother’s island in Canada, where a chauffeur took us to a private lake to fish. Peggy sometimes brought her little white dog in the back seat of the Cessna, and every time we hit an air pocket, the dog would go airborne.

So we had some shared history, and I immediately understood the potential of what Peggy was proposing. She and I got in the car and drove up to Millbrook to take a look at the mansion, which everyone called the Castle. It was a big, ornate manor house that a gas-lamp magnate had built in the late 1800s. It had four stories, with towers and turrets on the outside and a wraparound porch. By the time Peggy and I got there, it was evening. We explored the old mansion by candlelight. Going from room to room, we saw fireplaces, intricate woodwork, tapestries on the walls. We decided the house was perfect.

Peggy suggested that I guide a psychedelic session for each of her brothers, and then they’d agree to let us move in. Billy was a stockbroker. He was on vacation in Acapulco at the time, so I flew to see him. I gave psilocybin to him and his South American girlfriend in a swimming pool. Tommy, a race car driver, had visited us in Zihuatanejo, so he already knew what we were about. He and I had had a deep trip there. The Hitchcock twins agreed to rent the mansion to us for a dollar a year.

We packed up our shared house and took off for Millbrook. Most of us making the move were part of the Newton commune: me and Tim, his kids, Ralph and Susan, Foster and Barbara Dunlap and their son. Frank Ferguson and his wife, Lora, came for a short while; Michael Hollingshead also joined us. There was a clinical psychologist who’d attended the training in Zihuatanejo, Gary Fisher, who came with his wife and children too, but they left after a month or so. He was interested in the therapeutic effects of psychedelics on schizophrenia and autism. Peggy moved in as well, though she also kept her apartment in New York. By this time, she and Tim had become on-again, off-again lovers.

The estate wasn’t a tropical utopia, but it was a nature paradise. There were vast meadows, lush pine forests, and fields of corn and sunflowers. There was a lake for swimming, a waterfall, and a creek with beautiful stone bridges. There were apple orchards, and paths through the woods, and some livestock, and horse stables. The property also featured several other residences, like a two-story chalet that contained a bowling alley and a house we called the Cottage, which featured lots of marble and a swimming pool. The Hitchcock brothers used the Cottage as their getaway, throwing parties there for their rich friends from New York. They loved having us around, their strange and unusual friends, and would show us off as their pet project.

The Castle, which we began to call the Big House, had ten bathrooms, and its sixty-plus rooms included a kitchen, a dining room, several living rooms, and a library. About ten of us were in residence most of the time; on weekends we’d host half a dozen guests. There was another residence, called the Gate House, that Maynard and Flo Ferguson moved into with their four children later that fall. Flo became a central player in the Millbrook scene; she was sort of a mother to many of us. She was a strong woman—classy, adventurous, social—and was often sarcastic in our communal meetings. Flo was the one behind Maynard’s music career; she held together their circle of musician and artist friends.

In contrast to the hangers-on we’d attracted in Zihuatanejo, we were back to being an intimate circle, glad to finally continue our research. As in Newton, we continued our family sessions, sometimes taking LSD together by the fireplace while we played music recordings. Mostly, though, we did individual sessions, taking turns as guides. It was sedate and introspective, with careful dosages. We were often joined by other friends and colleagues from the Harvard Psychedelic Project, who drove up from Cambridge to participate in discussions and reports. Aldous Huxley came for a visit too, though briefly; by this time he had returned to California, and he was weak from cancer. He liked what he saw at Millbrook, though.

We designed experiments in living and came up with different frameworks to test our interpersonal dynamics. We liked going outside for sessions—we had a couple of favorite hills—but we also made use of the other buildings. One experiment involved two people sequestered for a week in the bowling alley house, to see how tripping together affected them and the rest of the community. Another effort put different couples on the third floor of the Big House, to see how they negotiated their sexual jealousy. Yet another experiment was a variation on the lifeguard tower in Zihuatanejo: every week, we designated one person to trip for all of us in a building we called the Meditation House. Unlike the other experiments, this one was more about inner spiritual growth. When the week was over, we would parade over together from the Big House to hear what insights the person had returned with.

Tim insisted on keeping notes and records of all the sessions. We designed forms to record a person’s journey, trying to develop specific metrics for bliss and other moods. As we continued rewriting the Tibetan Book of the Dead, we wanted as much data to work with as possible, to see how closely a psychedelic trip matched the soul’s journey through the bardo, in between death and rebirth. Tim, Ralph, and I continued to write and edit the Psychedelic Review, which Ralph largely oversaw, going to Cambridge to get it printed.

Our reputation and the attention of the press was such that our doings at Millbrook attracted the curious. Ralph and Tim and I often found ourselves giving talks on consciousness to visitors. If someone really wanted, we guided a trip, but we did not administer psychedelics to outsiders except occasionally. When we did, we interviewed the person first, with a questionnaire designed to cement a loving relationship with the guide. We were committed to creating a supportive set and setting. Sometimes I’d make a participant wait a few days, to get him or her into a more conducive mindset for a trip. Afterward, we did postsession debriefings.

Allen Atwell, a painter who taught art at Cornell University and had studied Indian tantric traditions, was one visitor who came for a session. His guide was Ralph. He spent almost his entire trip laughing. Allen later painted the famous mural of the Nepali eyes on the outside of the Big House. Other visitors included a mix of psychology, literary, and arts people, such as the psychiatrist R. D. Laing, the futurist author Robert Anton Wilson, and the arts publisher Felix Morrow.

Peggy invited the famous jazz bassist Charlie Mingus, who came up from New York in his sports car and played out in the orchard, because he didn’t want to perform with all the white folks around. He ended up staying for a while and helped prune the fruit trees. He and I bonded over the social ostracism we’d both faced—he because of the color of his skin, me because of my sexuality.

About an hour from Millbrook, there was an experimental art collective called USCO, cofounded by poet Gerd Stern, artist Steve Durkee, and audio technician Michael Callahan. Stewart Brand, a Stanford biologist who would later go on to start the Whole Earth Catalog, was also friends with the USCO crew. We met Stern while still at Harvard; he was friends with Allen Ginsberg. But in an even more curious connection, Steve Durkee had married my old friend and Stanford student Barbara Greer.

Barbara arranged for us all to meet, and the USCO artists often came to Millbrook. We’d sit around and dream up ways of translating the psychedelic experience into sounds and images. Steve Durkee helped us turn the maids’ quarters in a wing of the Big House into meditation rooms, painting beautiful, bright spiritual murals in each room.

On the freezing-cold night of November 22, 1963, we got word that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. There was snow on the ground, and all of us stopped what we were doing, caught in the silence of the night. We turned on the TV and watched the newscasts over and over. Soon afterward, we learned that Aldous Huxley had died on the same night. The loss of our great friend and mentor at the same time as our president felt like a profound synchronicity. I took comfort that Aldous’s wife, Laura, with whom I’d grown close, had been at his bedside. At his request, she administered LSD as he drew his last breaths.

“Concentrate on the light,” she instructed. Knowing Aldous, he had.

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We felt as though we could transform society. We were an eclectic group of people with a higher vision for living, interacting, and problem solving with the help of a greater consciousness. Intuitively we were communal. We cultivated vegetable and flower gardens; we shared chores and babysitting. We were kind of hard on the Castle—we played football inside and kept cats and dogs and a monkey—but for the most part, communal life went pretty smoothly. I had an aardvark named Arty, who used to nestle into me, his snout in my armpit. I baked bread as usual, maintained an eye on Jack and Susan, kept the cars running, and helped manage the bills.

There wasn’t a lot of money coming in. Tim and I gave some college lectures and presented at a couple of conferences, but we needed to generate more income. We decided to rebrand our efforts, abandoning the name IFIF to create the Castalia Foundation, a new organization by which we could support ourselves. The name came from Hermann Hesse’s book The Glass Bead Game, which features a community of seekers in a fictional place called Castalia.

We decided to turn our informal talks for visitors into weekend workshops. These Castalia Foundation seminars launched at a fee of seventy-five dollars per participant. The seminars didn’t include psychedelics; the idea was to equip attendees with the tools for an acid trip without being suppliers. We didn’t have enough LSD to share with the public, and anyway, we didn’t want the kind of sensationalism that had plagued us in Zihuatanejo.

We’d show workshop attendees how to run a session and how to create a good set and setting. We used slides, music, candles, incense. Our aim was to teach about the spiritual journey, so we covered other areas of interest too: meditation, Gestalt therapy, Sufism, exercises in self-awareness inspired by the mystic G. I. Gurdjieff, hatha yoga, tantra, and even karate. Sometimes we’d color the food in the dining room—the butter green, the milk blue—or play auditory tricks, with a microphone or a gong, to challenge people’s expectations. One of our workshop participants, I remember, was Khigh Dhiegh, an American TV and movie actor who introduced us to the I Ching, the ancient Chinese divination text.

The seminars helped structure our weekends and gave us a way to handle visitors, who were now coming by the droves, particularly from New York. Van Wolf, the art impresario and talent agent we’d met through Peggy, was always bringing guests from the fashion world: models, photographers, other agents. Word was out that Millbrook was a good place to party on the weekends, and it didn’t matter that we didn’t share our drugs; visitors brought their own.

As the months went by, we continued guiding sessions for individuals, especially for people who could help us financially. Saul Steinberg, the beloved New Yorker cartoonist, came at one point, as did trumpeter Miles Davis, then at the forefront of innovations in jazz. Even Ralph’s mother came to visit us; he guided her on a trip that she really enjoyed.

Some friends from my California days also paid us a visit. Ken Kesey, after participating in the government-sponsored drug tests while a student at Stanford, had published his novel about psychiatric patients, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, to widespread acclaim. He’d also been cultivating fame of another kind, forming a commune of his own with former Stanford colleagues, bohemians, and literary figures. Together they’d been freely experimenting with drugs, throwing parties and sharing LSD with anyone interested. In June 1964, after the publication of his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, Kesey and his Merry Pranksters decided to take a cross-country trip in their rainbow-colored bus, which they christened Further. They decided to stop in at Millbrook.

They arrived in July, with the expectation of a grand meeting: East Coast and West Coast, a convergence of our experimental communities. But they didn’t tell us they were coming, and when their bus pulled up on a Sunday, honking and blaring music, we were not ready for a raucous party. We had just finished a family psychedelic session the night before, and we were all very tired. Tim wouldn’t come down from his room—he said later he had the flu—so it was up to me, Ralph, and Susan to serve as the welcoming committee.

Allen Ginsberg, back from India, was also on the bus; he’d boarded in New York to help lead the Pranksters to Millbrook. It seemed to us that the Pranksters were on speed. They were all jumpy, especially the driver, Neal Cassady, the model for the Dean Moriarty character in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. There was also a young Stanford philosophy professor on board, Jane Burton, who happened to be pregnant. A former girlfriend of Kesey’s named Dorothy, who would go on to marry my student Jim Fadiman and become an award-winning filmmaker, had arrived at Millbrook a few weeks earlier, and she was as surprised to see them as we were.

Kesey and his Merry Pranksters thought we were inhospitable and arrogant, but it was just bad timing: the Millbrook crew wanted to go to bed. It’s true we had philosophical and stylistic differences. The Prankster approach was to get as high as possible and see what happened; we were committed to inquiry, inner exploration, and set and setting. They were the wild, let-everything-fly, party-down division of the psychedelic movement; we were the buttoned-up researchers. Tim would famously change course, becoming the psychedelic Pied Piper. But at the time, he felt strongly about limiting LSD, considering it a sacrament not to be sullied by indiscriminate use.

Tim, Ralph, and I threw our energies into putting the finishing touches on our psychedelic manual. We asked Alan Watts, who by this time was living on a houseboat in Sausalito, California, to read the proofs. He declared it to be a rare psychiatry book that attempted to classify the states of consciousness. That August, our guide for how to use mind-expanding drugs was published as The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. We dedicated it to Aldous Huxley. The first printing sold out so quickly, the publisher had to print several more runs. We had a best seller.

The broad reach of the book made us realize that even though we no longer occupied an intellectual perch at the apex of academia, we were at the cutting edge of a much greater paradigm shift. Psychedelics were expanding the consciousness of not just a few researchers and their subjects, but a great swath of American culture.