John Beresford
JOHN BERESFORD
Tim,
You have always been a source of amazement to me: my placid life compared to yours. We met in the early days of the fateful (and, we both know, fated) introduction of LSD to the mind-at-large of the Western world. The first time I heard about you was with Tony Cox. We visited a friend whose name I don’t recall and which, in the urgency of composing this memo for you, I won’t search through the records to look up. He was a tall lanky fellow, into those “silly sigh beans,” as he chose to call the sacred mushroom pills you were then handing out in the bars of Greenwich Village. Tony’s friend was telling us about this “mad Harvard professor” who had spread a handful of the psilocy-beans on the counter and said, “Try these.”
Mad? No. Harvard? Yes. Professor? Well, not quite. Doctor Leary: the press used to word it with a touch of sarcasm. Yes, very much the teacher, the doctor in the real sense of the word. It seems you taught the world to dip into the reaches of the soul and face reality. It was a different reality from the plain old sordid one left over from the ’50s, and the shock woke a generation to what is really there, back at what Huxley liked to call the Antipodes. Discovering it, a generation of gnostics came to life.
Probably what you taught as basic to the session was trust. It is only your mind, would be the message to the taker. Your friendly mind. It may try a round of tricking you, seeing if it can trip you up. But treat it as a child, a child you love. Don’t let it bamboozle you. You know better than it does. Let it growl like a tiger. Well, the tiger mind can eat you if it wants. You won’t deny it a nibble, surely? Then the whole thing turns into a game, and tigers act the same as other players, evolving into light and color and the brilliant melody of consciousness in free play. You, with your linguistic skill, called it a trip—and the word caught on. Yes, this life we have is a trip—and let us make sure the destination we head for is the right one.
I won’t take up your time, except to explain something of what you’ve said I disagree with. First, there is that old shibboleth of set and setting. You started a tradition with that phrase. By now, any old commentator who makes a living from explaining, among other things, the effect of LSD—and I mean someone who has never deigned to experience the effect of the magic substance but who professes nonetheless to know all about it—solemnly intones the phrase you cooked up, set and setting. It all depends on the mental set you start with, and the scenic setting of the place you take your LSD in (or mushrooms or whatever). A nerdy, squeaky-clean hospital setting or psychology lab, and you’ll scare the living daylight out of an experimental subject you foist LSD on. The beautiful garden or the trancelike wilderness, and you’ll generate a tranquil experience. That’s true, up to a point, but the commentator who seeks desperately for material to clog a textbook doesn’t see the paradox he has landed in. For the psychology lab is not supposed to be a place that gives you the creeps. It is supposed to be a source of neutral information. The textbook writer manages to overlook the fact that he and his world-outlook instigate a bad experience.
Not easy to keep the record straight, there. Fast reading takes the reader to the conclusion that not the lab and its professor but the LSD the professor has doled out is the cause of the anxiety, the panic, the disturbing experience, the mistake of taking the tiger as actual. The idiotic term “hallucination” takes control of reader-thinking. LSD is written off as a “hallucinogen.” Fuck, who wants to have hallucinations? Not me, not you, not anyone with a head screwed on right. So why do people take LSD, Mr. Professor? Dunno, come to think of it, they must be crazy.
That, I’m afraid, is the one misinterpretation your set and setting motto slips into. Yet we know there is some truth to the expression. “Set,” of course, is ambiguous, as “setting” is not. “Set” could mean the mental state of someone who should not be taking LSD in the first place, someone cursed with schizophrenia or liable to it, or on the other hand 99 percent of the population for whom taking LSD, done right, is safe and beneficial. It could also mean not this at all but getting out of bed on the wrong side or not getting out of bed on the wrong side in the morning. The problem with the set and setting logo is that it doesn’t go far enough. It doesn’t explain what an advantageous or disadvantageous set is or does.
Here I am crabbing at a few distortions on your birthday. Okay, no one else is going to be, so let me be a crab. Where we disagreed in the old days was the science bit. It must be true that you believed that science has no place in magical inquiry. I know what you mean. You mean that scientific theory has no place as an explanatory device for one’s understanding of the effect of LSD. The behaviorism, the varieties of analysis, the faux theory of cognitive psychology that supplanted behaviorism and psychoanalysis beginning in the ’60s—nothing remotely scientific has a handle on the effects of LSD. But I think you made a generalization the future will not bear out. You generalized from the irrelevance of present-day psychology to the assumption, which I question, that science, meaning scientific method, is incapable of making the effect of LSD comprehensible. Surely, that cavalier disowning of science caused your ejection from Harry Murray’s old department at Harvard University!
Which brings me to the point. Suppose you had dug your heels in and said, not that science is a lost cause, but that somewhere in the unknown mists of science there must be an explanation which makes sense of the extraordinary effect of the sacred chemicals? That would have meant embracing science instead of disowning it, and—who knows?—deriving that brand new theoretical perspective which gives LSD its due as the key to an answer to J. B. Watson’s old conundrum: “What is this thing called consciousness?”
Ah! But then had you stayed on at Harvard and taken up the cause of understanding the effect of LSD and not—as you did—fulfilled the dreams of a generation eager for the spiritual experience LSD bestows, then there would not be millions today who offer gratitude to you for what you did. The endearing habit of tossing a handful of Sandoz psilocybin on the counter of a Greenwich Village bar grew into a practice, unforeseen by any but yourself, of opening the world of North America, and soon Western Europe, to an experience of the formerly incredible.
When I spoke with a friend whose life was saved by an experience with MDMA, which opened the heart chakra of this individual, and I brought up this great What If—What if Tim stayed on at Harvard and became the futurist scientist I had in mind?—the reply was prompt. The answer was, my friend said without hesitation, that she would not be alive today. We all know that LSD (or MDMA) saves lives, again with the qualification that it is used properly, respectfully. But I don’t mean to dwell on the extreme. The many millions who by today have had first-hand experience of the effect of LSD and those sister chemicals have you to thank for the “new wine” they no longer have to stuff into “old bottles.” The spiritual revolution, long overdue, has started. Because of you.
So we met at Newton Center, and we met at Tecate for discussions with Ivan Tors on the LSD organization it was thought possible he might set up, and we met on the Island of Dominica where, just possibly, an evolutionary commune might find its home, and we met in Toronto where I introduced you to my Rose—remember? But our paths crossed seldom. For my own took me into the confused epoch of modern psychiatry where there was no place for the extraordinary or the divine. And always I was thinking of the day when a legitimate theory of consciousness would be possible to enunciate through the medium of LSD, there, as always, as a scientific instrument. So we stand at opposite poles of the conundrum.
But I love you.
And Fare Thee Well.