From Harvard to Zihuatanejo
RALPH METZNER
I first met Timothy Leary in the fall of 1959 when I was in my second year of graduate study in psychology at Harvard University. The story we heard was that he had become profoundly disillusioned with the results of his research on the efficacy of psychotherapy (it showed that therapy did no better than the simple passage of time); that his wife had committed suicide; and that these events precipitated him into a personal crisis and caused him to quit his job as research director of the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in Oakland where he had developed a widely used diagnostic test of interpersonal behavior. He then moved with his two children to Florence, Italy, where he met Professor David McClelland, the director of the Center for Personality Research at Harvard, who persuaded him to come to Harvard and teach there.
Tim Leary was the classic professor type with graying hair, heavy glasses, a hearing aid, and a kind of detached, quizzical air. His personal style was genial and affable and he was very popular with the students. Then, in the summer of 1960, while spending his vacation in Mexico, Tim was introduced to the “sacred mushroom” by an anthropologist friend named Lothar Knauth and had an experience that completely turned his life around. In his autobiographical book High Priest1 he has described how he was taken back through the evolutionary process right down to single-celled life and then back up through the layers and strata of oceanic, amphibian, and terrestrial evolution. Since experiences with psychoactive plants have traditionally been described in mystical or mythical language, Leary may have been the first person to recognize and identify them as evolutionary visions or genetic memories. He resolved at that time to devote the rest of his life to the exploration of the awesome potential of these plants to alter consciousness.
When he returned to Harvard he could speak of nothing else. He soon discovered that the sacred mushroom was known as teonanácatl, “flesh of the gods,” to the Aztecs and denounced as diabolical by the Spanish clergy at the time of the conquest of Mexico. For several hundred years they had been generally considered to be nonexistent, mythical or symbolic entities, until they were rediscovered in the 1950s by R. Gordon Wasson. Wasson was a wealthy banker whose interest in mycology was stimulated by his mushroom-loving Russian wife, Valentina. After several years of searching in Mexico, they contacted Maria Sabina, a famous Mazatec curandera, and she initiated them in a nighttime ceremony in a remote, impoverished mountain village in the Oaxaca mountains. The Wassons were deeply moved and transformed by the experience.2
R. Gordon Wasson then began a collaboration and friendship with Albert Hofmann, a brilliant and outstanding research chemist. About ten years earlier, in 1943, Hofmann had discovered the astounding effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), a chemical he had synthesized in 1938 as part of his research for the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company in Basel, Switzerland. Hofmann had since developed a deep personal and professional interest in substances of this type. Upon obtaining samples of the Mexican mushroom from Wasson, Hofmann was able to identify and then synthesize the psychoactive ingredient, which he named psilocybin, after the psilocybe mushroom.
Thus it came about that psilocybin, the active ingredient of the Mexican hallucinogenic mushroom, was manufactured in tablet form by the Sandoz Company, which had a branch in New Jersey. They offered to supply Dr. Timothy Leary of Harvard University with as much of the drug as he wanted, free of charge, for research purposes.
The Harvard Psilocybin Project was formed to investigate from a psychological point of view the astonishing properties of this plantchemical. Right from the start Tim Leary adopted what he called an “existential-transactional” approach to this research. He rejected the impersonal clinical atmosphere of the traditional psychiatric experiment. Having taken the substance himself in a sacramental atmosphere, he knew how important it was to have a warm supportive setting to experience the ego-shattering revelations of the mushrooms.
Aldous Huxley was at M.I.T. that year, and he immediately became an advisor to the Harvard Psilocybin Project. In 1953 and 1955, Huxley had published two widely read books on his mystical experiences with mescaline, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. Huxley described the experience at its best as a “gratuitous grace,” providing access to what he called “Mind-at-Large,” beyond the “reducing valve” of the ordinary egoic mind. He and Tim developed a strong rapport and had psilocybin sessions together during that period, working out a nonclinical, supportive, yet objective and safe framework for this kind of experimentation.
The sessions were mostly held at Tim Leary’s house. Initially, Dr. Frank Barron, a noted researcher in the psychology of creativity, was the only other Harvard faculty member involved in the research. After some time, Frank Barron returned to his original position at UC Berkeley and ended direct involvement in the project. Subsequently, another psychology professor, Dr. Richard Alpert, became involved in the psilocybin research project. He went on to become Leary’s closest associate during the entire time of the psychedelic research, at Harvard and then later at Millbrook. The close friendship and partnership of the two men led Leary later to compare themselves to those archetypal American rule-breaking, authority-defying adventurers Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.
Some of my fellow graduate students at the Center for Personality Research had became involved in the psilocybin project and would talk about their sessions at Tim’s house. Overhearing their conversation, I noticed there was something different in their tone of voice—a new quality of intensity and feeling. They were talking of ecstasy, love, and sharing in a way that was vivid and personal to them. This was unusual in the austere and cynical mental atmosphere of the Center for Personality Research.
I became fascinated, and yet I was scared of drugs and addiction. I examined what I could of the literature and found, to my surprise, that for this class of drugs there was no evidence of physiological damage, and they were absolutely not addicting. I wanted to try them. An opportunity presented itself when Tim decided it was time to apply these drugs to the problem of behavior change. He wanted to give them to prisoners, for a kind of rehabilitative therapy, based on self-insight. If there was a decrease in the amount of criminal behavior after they left the prison, one would have an objective behavioral criterion of personality change. “Let’s see if we can turn the criminals into Buddhas,” he said privately. Those participating in the research had to experience the medicine themselves, which is what I wanted.
Thus, on March 13, 1961, I had my first psychedelic experience. It was a chilly Sunday afternoon when I arrived at Tim’s house. Two other graduate students, Gunther Weil and Lyn K., were involved in the session, as well as Gunther’s wife Karin, the prison psychiatrist, Madison Presnell, and his wife. After we had made ourselves comfortable in the living room, Tim gave everyone six little pink tablets, each containing 2 mg of psilocybin. He took probably a smaller dose. It had already become the preferred policy to not stress the role of guide or teacher, but rather to work on the assumption that we were fellow explorers. Nevertheless, in sessions in which he participated, Tim generally set the tone of the experience.
My first reaction was lassitude. . . . I lay down on the floor and stretched out, feeling very relaxed and yet very alert. Tim had said there would be a period like a decompression or slight disorientation. My body seemed for a while to be in a strange sort of limbo. . . . All of a sudden I found myself in a completely new and magical world. The little green strands of the shag rug were writhing and undulating, like a mass of worms, yet in a most delightful way. The lights reflecting off the glass coffee table top sparkled with a kind of moist luminescence. The furniture, the walls, the floor, were all pulsing and undulating in slow waves, as if the whole room was breathing. I felt like I was inside a living structure, like a vast cell. The rate of the waving motion seemed to be coordinated with my breathing.
This extraordinary sensory fluidity was not at all disturbing; in fact, it was extremely pleasurable. There was clear rational awareness that this was a room with solid walls and a floor, etc. The ordinary world was not erased, it was expanded, enlivened and made infinitely more interesting. For example, I became totally engrossed in contemplating the fascinating edges of things, the curiously beautiful patterns of light and energy weaving around edges and radiating out from them. The telephone was a veritable marvel of diamond-studded, gem-encrusted, crystalline sculpture—yet itself also moving, breathing, changing as if it were alive.
Simultaneously with this unbelievable sensory feasting, Gunther and I were engaged in a kind of verbal interplay, a mock-serious philosophic exchange that had us both convulsed with laughter. Words and concepts exploded in the brain with multilevel ripples of meanings that set off cascades of feeling and physical sensations. Deep philosophic questions arose and dissipated in a stream of paradoxes and absurd riddles punctuated by convulsive giggles. . . .
When I closed my eyes, fantastically beautiful and intricate geometric depth patterns were interweaving behind my eyelids, washing, colliding, streaming by at great speed. Occasionally, there would be images of precious stones or different parts of bodies, but nothing stood still long enough to congeal into anything definite. It felt as if my eyes were giving off a white-hot radiance; my mouth and the sense organs in my face and the rest of the body were glowing, flashing, oozing with liquid light, my nerve fibers crackling with white lightning; my bloodstream felt like a seething stream of lava. My skin was embracing me, enwrapping me, in a kind of alternately wet and dry, hot and cool, almost unendurably pleasurable embrace. . . .
A moment of panic occurred that illustrated the fantastic amplifying power of the psychedelic. When I looked at the faces of the others, they were bright and strong and clear. I thought, “This is how archangels look.” They were somehow naked, shed of a fog of dissimulations, anxieties, and hypocrisies. Everyone was true to their own self and not ashamed. I looked at them without shyness and with frank admiration. At one time all the faces were suffused with a soft greenish light. I looked at Karin across the room and told her she was beautiful, and I loved her. She just looked back without saying anything. Then she got up and started to leave the room (probably to go to the bathroom). I began to panic. I implored her not to leave, that dreadful things would happen if she did. Lyn, who was sitting next to me, said it would be all right, but I got more and more upset and terrified, pleading with her not to leave. Karin said she would be back, but I said, “No, no, don’t leave.” She asked, “What will happen if I leave?” I replied, in a tone of desperation, “Something terrible will happen . . . the music will stop.” At that point she got up and walked through the door, and somehow that action became identified with all feelings of abandonment and loss I had ever experienced—there was a moment of acute anguish. And then she was gone, and I felt fine, amazed and relieved. I said to Lyn, “She left, and it was all right.” And Lyn said, “Yes, it was all right.”
Then, holding Lyn close, I suddenly felt myself shrinking in size. . . . I was very rapidly regressing back into childhood consciousness. I actually felt for brief moments what I had felt as an infant, even to the feel of a baby bottle in my mouth. And then, just as rapidly, I was shuttled back to my adult awareness.
At a certain point I noticed that the intensity of the experiences began to diminish, like a slow gliding down. The body felt very warm and relaxed. I understood how my normal perception of the world was constricted by many prohibitions I had somehow accepted. For example, I went outside and on the porch was a box. I looked inside and saw that it was garbage and immediately turned away. Then I realized I didn’t have to turn away, that it was okay to look at it, that I had a choice and was not bound by a set of rules regarding what could or could not be experienced and perceived.
This was to me perhaps the most significant revelation of this experience: that I was basically in charge of what I could perceive and think about, that I was not bound by external forces but rather made choices that determined the extent and quality of my awareness. To exercise my newfound freedom, I made some snowballs and threw them at the screened window of the room in which the group was sitting. I felt greatly exhilarated. Somehow, Tim must have sensed my expansive mood and thought, because with a grin on his face he picked up some small orange pillows and tossed them gently at the window from the inside toward me. The brief interchange had an edge of freshness and spontaneous clarity that made me feel superbly happy.
That first experience with psilocybin had an immeasurable effect on my life. It was radically and totally different, yet during the course of the experience I felt closer to my true self than I had ever been and more aware of my innermost feelings and thoughts. I had also been fully and intensely aware of people and things around me and did not lose the reality perceptions that govern our ordinary world. Rather, ordinary perception was enriched and enlivened beyond comparison. It was clearly false that these drugs were “hallucinogenic” in the sense of hallucinating something that isn’t there.
I could see how much of the sensory phenomena could be attributed to a temporary suspension of the perceptual constancies—those neural mechanisms that keep the visible shapes and sizes of things constant, even though the optical image is obviously changing. An illustration of that happened during the session when I was lying on my side on the ground and Gunther rolled a ball toward me. As the ball approached it grew enormously in size, as the retinal image would. Also the undulating and apparent “breathing” of objects I could trace to the movement of eyes, the constant slight rhythmic oscillations, which become, under the drug, magnified in their action. All the processes that filter, screen, and regulate perception seemed to have been suspended. As Huxley put it, the mind’s “reducing valve” had been inactivated.
The week after that initial session we began the prison project. My second exposure to the drug took place behind prison walls. We wanted to avoid giving the convicts the feeling that they were to be guinea pigs in the drug experiments of a mad professor, so we decided that some members of the project would always take the drug with them. My first trip in the prison environment, among convicts, was a visit to hell. Anxiety was magnified to terror, loneliness to profound abandonment, discomfort to agonizing despair, accompanied by horror visions of devouring machine-monsters. Then, while feeling trapped in the depths of isolation . . .
From a very long way off I heard a tiny voice saying quietly: “I get this feeling of being alone in the universe, just the self.” A human voice. There were others! Cautiously, incredulously, I opened my eyes. A scene of incredible peace and serenity presented itself. Gunther and two of the men were sitting quietly, talking, bathed in a stream of afternoon sunlight coming through the window. One of the convicts was lying on the bed peaceful and relaxed, smoking and reading a paper. Two others were sitting silently, playing chess. A wave of relief washed over me. The prison walls were down; the whole world was wide open. Objects again had that extraordinary depth-dimension, as if there were soft crystalline formations in the space between them and me. People had mellow greenish faces and shining eyes. Someone said: “There is one of everything,” and in some strange way this oneness of everything was the essence, the essence of feelings—one joy, one sadness, one terror, one pleasure.
Suddenly, there was chaos. The psychiatrist burst in: “Everybody back to prison routine, change of guards, out of this room.” There was a mad scramble as everyone put together their belongings, straightened their clothes, tried to force peacefully dissolved identities back into the mold required in prison life. As we walked out through the prison yard, I could feel the guards watching us. “Control, easy now,” I said to myself. As the heavy doors clanged shut behind us with loud rattling of keys, the grim strangeness of it all was somber in our thoughts.
The revelations of this experience were perhaps even more far reaching than those of the first session. I began to see how the suggestibility factor operated: feelings of fear or guilt or blame could be triggered by chance remarks, and these negative emotions could drastically alter the course of the experience. Conversely, a warm word or a reassuring touch of the hand could provide instant comfort to someone racked by inner pain.
We entered into a contract with each of the convicts who volunteered for the study. We told them what little we knew about the drug, about our own experiences, and stated the goal: to facilitate insight that would enable them to make a noncriminal adjustment to life outside once they were paroled. The agreement also called for psychiatric interviews and psychological tests, before and after the sessions, and written reports on each experience.
The results of this work with about thirty convicts were published.3 Although there was no reduction in the rate of recidivism, there were significant personality changes. Subjectively, the men themselves almost always regarded the sessions as beneficial, even those that were painful. Contrary to the dire warnings of many professionals, there was never a moment of violence. Actually, in our research we found that the most violence-prone subjects were psychiatrists and theologians, who had massive repression systems going that could be exposed by the drug experience.
(A year or so later, the power of the suggestibility factor was demonstrated for me again, in an ironic manner. A psychiatrist friend called me from New York, asking for help and reassurance in the middle of his first LSD trip. Recently, the first article had appeared in a medical journal, warning of “untoward reactions” to LSD, and citing nine cases. My friend, under the influence of the drug, already visualized the next issue of the journal with a follow-up report citing case #10—himself. The psychiatric profession, with its training and orientation toward pathological psychic states, was particularly vulnerable to the “national negative programming” of psychedelics, as John Lilly called it.)
As a result of my work in the prison, I grew to like and respect some of the men very much. Al was a man of somber mien and the enormous heavy muscles of a weight lifter. In one session, all in the group were touched as we saw him enter totally, incongruously, into the consciousness of a little boy, expressing wide-eyed, innocent wonder and delight at the photographs in a Family of Man book, or the feel of water running over his hands—and the look of intense inner searching that came over his face when he saw his arm turn into an eagle’s talon.
Donald was in his fifties, serving a twenty-year sentence for armed robbery. In one of his sessions, he had visions of lines and patterns that he traced with careful, probing eyes as he saw in them the patterns of his life. “Does it have any meaning?” he asked, and after a long silence, answered his own question, slowly and haltingly, but deliberately: “Is ego our god? Do we do things so as to have a good image of ourselves in our own eyes?” We talked for a long time. Those of the group that were on longer sentences and were not released organized a study group after the project was terminated. They continued to meet on a regular basis for years after we had been there, working on self-help, self-understanding, becoming guides and helpers for younger convicts. Such was the power of those few initial revelations.
Besides the prison work, we were also experimenting among ourselves. Tim let the graduate students who were involved in the Harvard Psilocybin Project have access to the drug, with the proviso that the sessions be supportively structured and that written reports and other data be obtained from all subjects. We faithfully filled out lengthy questionnaires after each session, wrote accounts, and conducted tests. I was especially interested in the tremendous changes in time perception that occurred with the drug, and ran several experimental tests, which during the sessions always seemed extremely ludicrous. Nevertheless, the questionnaire results were collated and analyzed and the results written up in psychological journals.4
At the same time, it was becoming increasingly obvious that this conventional approach to the study of these experiences was grossly missing the point. The truly significant aspects of the sessions were entirely nonverbal and nonconceptual, and slipped through our category nets like water through a fishnet.
These experiences made us aware that the content of the drug experience was only partly, even minimally, a function of the drug. Rather the internal attitudes, expectations, and feelings, as well as the external atmosphere and mood prevailing at the time, were the crucial factors. Tim Leary called this the set and setting hypothesis, and over the years it has become widely accepted in the professional circles of those who have studied the psychedelic drugs. Contrary to this is the popular idea, promulgated by law-enforcement types committed to a “war on drugs,” that it is the drug per se that is responsible for all the visions and trips.
It was interesting to note the different interpretive models and frameworks that different groups in our society had imposed on the experience provided by these drugs. The first was the psychotomimetic, the psychiatric-pharmacological model, that regarded the drug experience as a simulated psychosis, and treated it accordingly. Concurrent with this model was the CIA-Army interest in the drug as a weapon for brainwashing and mind control. In the sixties many researchers suspected that such work was going on, but only in the late seventies was it made public.5 The military’s interest in LSD waned when the unpredictable nature of the drug reaction became clear: you couldn’t tell whether unknowingly drugged soldiers would become meditative pacifists, agitated madmen, or atavistic animal figures.
Then there was the hallucinogenic model and label, which treated the drugs as tools for studying the brain mechanisms of visual perception and the associated mental states. This type of inquiry is exemplified by the work of the German researcher Heinrich Klüver in the 1920s and the American psychopharmacologist Ronald Siegel in the 1980s.6
Then, paradoxically, it was discovered that the very same drugs used to make some people psychotic were being used to make disturbed or addicted people well. Two models for psychotherapy with these drugs developed. In the European literature, the drugs were referred to as psycholytic (“mind-dissolving” or “mind-loosening”); this approach involved repeated administrations of gradually increasing doses, adjunctive to psychoanalysis. A second model developed in North America, particularly through the work of Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond, who successfully used high-dose single sessions to treat alcoholism and other addictions. Osmond, who had introduced Aldous Huxley to mescaline, coined the term psychedelic (“mind-manifesting”).7
This model was close to that espoused by the Harvard project, except we were less concerned with individual psychotherapy using psychedelics. We used the term “consciousness-expanding” for the drug and the experience; which is reminiscent of the “consciousness-raising” language of women’s liberation groups in the 1970s. This model said: provide a safe, supportive set and setting, with a small group of peers, and the experience will probably be enlightening and productive. Meanwhile, another group of researchers in Menlo Park, California, including Willis Harman, Myron Stolaroff, Robert Mogar, James Fadiman, and others, were developing a creativity context for the drug experience: allowing for architects, artists, designers, scientists, and others to work on new problem-solving strategies during their session.8
The religious mystical approach to psychedelic drug experiences was expressed strongly in Leary’s writings from the beginning, stimulated no doubt by his conversations and collaboration with people like Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, and Huston Smith, all of whom collaborated and consulted with the project. During the Harvard period this approach was exemplified in Walter Pahnke’s epoch-making Good Friday Experiment, a carefully controlled scientific study of drug-induced religious experience (described below). This study led to spiritually oriented LSD-therapy with terminal cancer patients at Spring Grove Hospital in Baltimore, which was conducted and described by the Czechoslovakian psychiatrist Stanislav Grof.9 The religious-mystical paradigm is of course also evident in Leary’s adaptations of the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the Tao Te Ching as guidebooks for psychedelic experiences. Here we find ancient texts in which specially amplified experiences were regarded as initiations—pre-visions of states and levels of consciousness, to be later known and perceived by yogic, magical, or spiritual practices. In a further fascinating line of inquiry, Wasson, Hofmann and the classicist Carl Ruck in 1978 presented evidence suggesting that the Eleusinian Mysteries may have involved the ingestion of the ergot fungus, known to contain LSD-like alkaloids.10
The sessions we were having were forcing us into rapid and in-depth confrontation with our own issues as well. Those of us that had experienced traditional psychotherapy found that the relationship interactions there remained almost entirely on the mental level. They did not even remotely approach the spiritual intensity and emotional power of the experiences we were having with psilocybin. In the heightened state of consciousness induced by the drug, for example, one could observe one’s own psychological projections externalized (i.e., manifested): your feeling states and thoughts would appear on the wall in front of you, or on a friend’s face, displayed in living color like a movie. If there was fear or paranoia in a group, one could feel it physically, like sticky tentacles, palpably spreading from one person to another, pulling them into swamplike miasmas of suspicion or despondency.
A high-dose experimental session with psilocybin that we ran in 1963 exemplified some of these complex dynamics (and risks), as well as illustrating Tim Leary’s laid-back, humorous and yet caring style of supporting our explorations. Tim gave us a lot of leeway in setting up the sessions. Several of us, with already two years of experience, had decided to explore the effects of a higher dosage of psilocybin, to see if they would compare to LSD, which we had also started to use by that time. Some took 40 mg, I took 60 mg, and George Litwin, with his pioneering spirit, had decided to take 80 mg. These dosages, though higher than any we usually took, were still well below toxic levels. It was in this session, however, that I came the closest to suicide that I ever did in the years of working with psychedelics.
When the drug began to work, George was shaking violently. As I looked at him, his face looked strangely distorted and seemed to be coming apart in layers, like one of M. C. Escher’s weird paintings. When he spoke, his voice sounded nonhuman, as if his mouth were filled with metallic mud. He was talking about finding the button that made his heart stop or go.
As I looked around the room I saw great bands of moving streams of energy particles traversing the space, passing through and between myself and the other people. We all seemed to be part of these moving, ever changing bands of energy. They were familiar to me from other mushroom sessions, when I had seen them as luminous vibrating filigree networks. But this time, the intensity frightened me. As my fear level increased, the energy bands congealed and stopped moving; they took on a grayish hue, like prison bars. All at once I felt immobilized and trapped, like a fly in a gigantic metallic spider’s web. I couldn’t even talk and explain what was happening to me; my voice felt paralyzed. Everyone, including George (who was no longer shaking), seemed to be frozen into immobility by these metallic web-cages.
I felt my mind was paralyzed too. I couldn’t think or understand what was happening. I couldn’t tell whether what I was experiencing was real or a drug-induced hallucination (an experience psychiatry refers to as “derealization”). I did however decide I should try to call Tim on the telephone for help. Gunther Weil, who seemed to sense my dilemma, accompanied me to help with the dialing. The telephone set was wiggling and jiggling like a demented jellyfish. Somehow, we managed to reach Tim on the line. I wanted his help to establish some kind of “reality.” I said, “Tell me something real, Tim. What’s happening over there?”
Tim immediately got the message and said, “Well, Jack’s sitting at the table eating a hamburger, Susie’s watching television with her hair in curlers, Michael’s drinking a beer . . .” I started to feel a little better. These were messages from “reality.” Nevertheless, I told him we needed help, and asked if he would come over.
While waiting for Tim to arrive, I was holding on to my sanity with the thought that when he got here, he would free us all from this monstrous spider’s web we were caught in, which also had the effect of making us speechless. It felt like I couldn’t hear, say, or understand anything. I felt completely dehumanized, not even like a biological organism, more like a mechanical puppet or device.
I was so relieved when Tim came through the door—I could see him moving freely through the sticky web of gray steel bands. But then, as I watched in horror, his movements slowed down, became mechanical, robotlike, his voice thickened and slurred, and I plunged into despair as I realized he too was helplessly caught.
This was in the days before we had learned how to take someone through a really deep psychotic experience, how to reach them in consciousness, set up communication, and bring them back. Tim and the others simply laid me out on a bed and hoped for the best. Corky Litwin patted and stroked me reassuringly.
After some hours of objective time, and a hellish eternity in subjective time, the intensity of the experience began to diminish somewhat. I remembered I had taken a drug, and the effect was beginning to wear off. I felt like a living human being again, though thoroughly shaken by what I had gone through. We needed to learn how to bring someone back from psychotic hell-states, as well as preparing for ecstatic heaven-states.
As we proceeded with our explorations, still under the aegis of the Harvard University Psilocybin Research Project, we were increasingly moving into the consideration of religious and mystical concepts and images. Such ideas were foreign to our humanist psychological orientation, but were thrust upon us by the nature of the experiences. Sometimes when Tim was talking to groups about these kinds of experiences, he seemed inspired by an almost messianic fervor that made a powerful impact on his listeners. At the same time the issue of leadership, with its associated complex of idealization and disappointment, was beginning to rear its ugly head.
One strange and moving session on a cold November night in 1961 was particularly memorable for its focus on these issues. Six of us assembled in Dick Alpert’s apartment: Dick, Tim, Michael Kahn, George Litwin and his wife Corky, and myself. Gunther Weil had said he would join us later, as would Maynard Ferguson, the musician, and his wife Flo. Everyone was in excellent spirits. We had never all taken psychedelics together and were looking forward to it.
Our thoughts became serious, almost grave. On the way to the session Mike and I had been talking about the idea of the sin against the Holy Ghost—what used to be considered the one unpardonable sin. We had discussed it as a kind of universal projective test in the Middle Ages—revealing whatever it was you considered your greatest failing. Theologically, it was the attribution to the devil of what really came from the Holy Ghost, thus cutting oneself off from the source of all grace and redemption.
During the session, Mike returned to this topic and related our earlier thoughts. George, who had a marvelous sense for practical detail, was wondering about borderline sins. He asked Tim, as the only Catholic present, “What did the Church do with those rare cases which the existing rules didn’t cover? How did it handle totally new events or occurrences? For example, take a peasant who comes to the priest and says: ‘I took these pills last night, and I met Christ, and we shook hands and spent a wonderful evening together, but somehow everybody goes around telling me I’m bad.’ How would the Church handle that? What would the priest say?”
When we had all finished convulsing with laughter, I looked over and saw that George had stopped smiling and was looking at Tim and saying, “I’m serious.”
I felt a wave of sympathy for George and looked at Tim. Tim said nothing. I looked at him very intently and repeated, “What would the priest say to George’s question, Tim?”
Tim became very confused. He did not seem to hear and was fiddling with his hearing aid. We repeated the question. Then he looked at me in silence for a very long time. I became aware of how important the question had become to me. It was the question about this night, about our work, about our whole life, which had come to revolve so much around these drugs—was it good or bad?
It had become a very basic question about existence, and personal worth, the question to which each one must find his own answer. This was what I felt Tim to be saying by not answering the question—that everyone must come to terms with their own condition. When I realized that this was what he meant, I felt tears streaming down my face—not tears of sadness.
After a while Tim began to tell a story about a Catholic man he used to know who always referred to a boy with certain sexual habits as “the monster.” I felt this was the priest’s answer to George’s original question about how to define sin; at the base of the Catholic concept of sin lies a strong disgust toward sexuality.
As I was trying to tell Mike how I felt about these two “answers”—the human one, and the Catholic one—I realized that Tim had “said” all these things unintentionally. He protested that he did not even hear half of what was going on, and that he felt “like a figment of George Litwin’s imagination.”
Outside in the street with Mike and myself on this cold, snowy November night, Tim said he was in a terrible bind and didn’t know how to get out of it. He said he had always regarded us as equals and felt betrayed that he was suddenly being called upon to answer religious questions. “What have you guys been doing all these months?”
Mike was saying intense things about Zen masters and Buddha and Jesus very fast, the main gist of which seemed to be that Tim had to suffer so that we could learn. All leaders have to go through the same process of awakening to the fact that they are being regarded as leaders, not as equals, as they would like to be.
We went back inside and Gunther was saying the time might come when he would decide to leave Tim because he disagreed with him and didn’t want this pure thing corrupted. He saw Tim being sucked into an evil game because he was so naive.
Tim said, “You like your work at the prison and want to continue with that, don’t you?” His voice sounded almost plaintive and apologetic.
The room had become almost totally dark. We were all sitting quietly for a long time. Then Gunther said, “You know, Tim, only a Jew and a Catholic could have this sort of discussion.”
Tim asked, “What is there of me to leave?” He said how he had always regarded us as equal work-partners, as a group working together for common goals.
“Yes, I see that now, I recognize the different roles we play. But there was a time when I exalted you, looked up to you, worshiped you—now you have come down to a human level.”
There was a terrible groan of protest from George Litwin. “Wait a minute, wait . . . I am neither Jew nor Catholic so I can speak here with some impartiality. There was a time before when the Jews exalted a man and made him divine, and then nailed him up when they discovered he was human after all. Whether it’s a fact or not is irrelevant; it is a tradition, and one that we should cease to live by. It’s the Jewish tradition that some people are closer to God than others. But there is another one, the one of the Declaration of Independence, where men gather together to draw up a petition in equality.”
George was magnificent. He was fighting for a new start, away from the ancient modes of exalting people and then tearing them down, toward a vision of true equality between men and common goals and shared responsibility. Most of us heaved a profound sign of relief. Maynard and Flo cheered.
The bubble had been broken. When George finished talking, Tim got up abruptly and without a word went to the kitchen and left the door open. A bright shaft of light streamed into the room. The depressing fog of incipient religious bigotry was dispersed. The tendency to overidealize a potential leader had been clearly revealed and uprooted, at least for that group and that time.
In our discussions at the Harvard Psilocybin Project in those days, we would sometimes semihumorously regard Tim as being the most “far-out” of our group—one who was so extreme in his attitudes on the psychedelics that he defined one end of the scale that we didn’t want to go to. As if we would say, “Well, we won’t go to that extreme, that’s just Tim in his craziness.” But, more often than not, due to the power and inner logic of our own experiences, we’d find ourselves following in his footsteps and eventually coming to share his vision. At least for a while.
Our work continued through the winter and spring of 1961/1962. After the initial experimentation to develop methods for producing positive, valuable experiences that, as in the prison project, could help bring about therapeutic change, Tim was intensifying exploration of the creativity aspects of the drug. For this reason he moved into New York literary and artistic circles to find subjects who were creative professionals. As soon as people heard about psilocybin they wanted to take it. Numerous requests had to be turned down. Our files began to swell with reports from writers, jazz musicians, poets, painters, and philosophers.
Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky came and sampled the drug, as did Jack Kerouac and Charles Olsen. Allen became so enthusiastic during the session that he wanted to call Khrushchev and Kennedy to talk them into taking it. William Burroughs stayed with Tim’s family in Cambridge for a while. Initially positive, he participated with Tim at a psychological convention in New York that drew overflow crowds where he presented a scholarly paper based on his personal experiences with about a dozen different drugs he had tried. Later, he soured on the project and denounced it in tones of virulent paranoia in one of his books: “stay out of their Garden of Delights, it is a terminal sewer . . . they give you love, love, love in slop buckets . . . their immortality cosmic consciousness and love is second-run grade B shit . . .” and so forth.
Gerald Heard, the distinguished English philosopher, friend of Aldous Huxley and author of many books on the history of religion and mythology, visited the project early on and was very positive about the drug. He gave fascinating discourses on the role of psychedelic drugs in mystery cults in ancient times. He advised us not to publicize our findings, to stay underground, following the example of historical esoteric groups and secret societies. Needless to say, his advice was ignored; nothing could have been further from Tim’s whole nature.
During the years to come I often wondered what would have happened had we followed Gerald Heard’s advice—letting psychedelic drugs become the exclusive province of a small group of visionary researchers and explorers. It did not seem to be the script we were called upon to follow. The experiences were too positive to not want to share them with everybody. It would appear that the time had come when this kind of experience should be made available to large numbers of searchers, so that “the doors of perception” could be opened, so that expanded consciousness was no longer something attainable only by rare individuals. The experience was genuine; a view of what was possible. Those who felt the call to search could do so with a vivid knowledge of the goal.
Meanwhile, the world of academic psychology was becoming increasingly strange. I concentrated on finishing my Ph.D. in the spring of that year, because I knew that it was my last dance with the stimulus and response variables of that world. The time of running rat maze-learning experiments in a Harvard basement, as I had done the previous year, seemed already eons distant. Teaching introductory psychology courses to move up the ladder of university success was equally remote. One of my professors, Dr. Brendan Maher, said he couldn’t understand why I was throwing away the opportunity for a really good career in academic psychology. I couldn’t explain it to him.
The Psilocybin Project was generating more and more resistance from the university community. One of the things resented most by Leary and Alpert’s faculty colleagues was that several of their graduate research assistants were deserting them for the more glamorous and exciting work with the drug project.
Professor McClelland, chairman of the department, issued ominous warnings about the social effects of drugs. He pointed to India as an example of a society that had allegedly become degenerate as a result of excessive use of consciousness-expanding drugs—a theory open to serious question, even apart from the equating of cannabis with psilocybin.
We were criticized that our research was loose and our approach uncontrolled and irresponsible. To the contrary, as far as research is concerned, the project carried out and published several extensive statistical and questionnaire studies on the drug experience. Everyone who participated as a subject was required to undergo psychiatric screening at the University Health Services. No one was ever given a drug without their knowledge, or against their wishes, or without full and complete preparation before, and support during, the experience. Tranquilizer antidotes were always available but no one ever requested their use.
Among the rules established by the university was one forbidding us to use undergraduates as subjects. We had not been doing this anyway: our subjects were graduate students, or older people outside of the university. Nonetheless, our activities stimulated a lot of interest in psychedelics and thus led indirectly to a good deal of drug experimentation among Harvard students. Supplies of mescaline, peyote, and other substances were at that time easily obtained by anyone with a little ingenuity.
The supervisory committee also attempted to lay down rules governing the use of the drugs privately, outside of the university context. At this time, there were no state or federal laws governing their use. Dick Alpert, being an Aries, objected to this attempted restriction of his freedom and private life. Tim Leary, being a Libra, agreed to the rules in order to keep the peace, and continued doing what he was before.
It must also be said that although Leary and Alpert flooded the academic community with research papers, memoranda, and descriptions, some of their written and verbal pronouncements had a quality of messianic overenthusiasm that turned a lot of people off. Tim was constantly inventing slogans such as “You have to go out of your mind to use your head” that antagonized many intellectuals. Typical of that period is this passage from an article Tim wrote for the Harvard Review:
Must we continue to jail, execute, exile our ecstatic visionaries, and then enshrine them as tomorrow’s heroes? . . . Society needs educated priest-scholars to provide structure—the intellectual muscle, bone and skin to keep things together. . . . The nervous system can be changed, integrated, recircuited, expanded in its function. These possibilities naturally threaten every branch of the Establishment. . . . Our favorite concepts are standing in the way of a flood-tide, two billion years building up. The verbal dam is collapsing. Head for the hills, or prepare your intellectual craft to flow with the current.11
With pressures mounting, we began to think of ways to carry on the work completely out of the university context. Tim said it was “as unfair to expect a university to sponsor research on visionary experience as it would be to expect the Vatican to support research on effective aphrodisiacs.” And so, in the summer of 1962 about twenty members of the psilocybin project rented a hotel in the small Mexican fishing village of Zihuatanejo (which has since become a major resort town) in order to pursue in-depth experimentation with the drugs, away from the social and political pressures of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The Mexican sessions were strikingly different from the Harvard psychodramas. Here the setting was the exuberant lushness of jungle flora and fauna, the ceaseless rhythmic pounding of the surf, extravagantly beautiful sunsets, silent lightning storms over the Pacific Ocean, tropical heat and balmy air currents, mysterious sounds of night insects, and the sweet aromas of exotic flowers. In the sessions, a boy playing a flute would become Krishna enchanting the Gopis. The women often transformed into sea nymphs or mermaids; the men, Aztec warriors or jungle shamans.
At the suggestion of Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard we began using the Bardo Thödol ( Tibetan Book of the Dead) as a guide to psychedelic sessions. The Tibetan Buddhists talked about the three phases of experience on the “intermediate planes” ( bardos) between death and rebirth. We translated this to refer to the death and the rebirth of the ego, or ordinary personality. Stripped of the elaborate Tibetan symbolism and transposed into Western concepts, the text provided a remarkable parallel to our findings.
The Bardo Thödol describes the first phase, the first bardo, as a state of complete transcendence, of pure radiant light, that occurs immediately after death; it tells us it can be maintained only by those with high yogic training, who are able to remain undistracted. This first phase usually quickly dissipates into the second bardo, the longest phase of hallucinations and visions of peaceful and wrathful deities, heavenly or hellish experiences. The third bardo was the phase of rebirth, or reentry as we called it, in which you returned to your ordinary personality.
The basic advice of the Tibetan yogis was always the same: remain detached and centered within yourself, don’t become attracted to the pleasant visions or repelled by the painful ones. Remember they are all in your mind. Accept them and float downstream. During rebirth, or reentry, don’t rush, stay balanced, maintain the light for as long as possible. Actually one could move into the complete transcendent consciousness even after having already entered into the second or third phase, if one was able to follow the light from within.
This ancient text—which before our experience with psychedelics would have been so much gibberish—contained in uncanny detail descriptions of many aspects of the voyages we had been taking. Of course, we knew perfectly well that the method the Buddhists were using to explore inner space was not psychedelic drugs, but meditation. However, the vivid descriptions of inner states in their texts made it clear that these were realms that were recognizable and real. Suddenly we were no longer a crazed bunch of psychologists, recklessly plunging into completely uncharted terrain. There had been previous explorations. There was a history, a tradition. There were maps and guidebooks. Though trained in the Western methods of scientific research, Leary (and the rest of us) felt affirmed in our spiritual approach to psychedelic experiences by the discovery of these ancient writings. Our initial work on this text was later developed and published as The Psychedelic Experience.
We also “discovered,” to our delighted surprise, Western authors who had traversed some of these strange inner worlds, without drugs. Hermann Hesse, in his novel Steppenwolf, gives a marvelous description of the psychedelic “magic theater” of the mind; and in Journey to the East tells of the pilgrimage of a group of explorers toward the elusive “home” within, of the secret league of dedicated travelers who shared a vision of fulfillment. The French Gurdjieff disciple René Daumal in Mount Analogue, a mysterious unfinished allegory, portrays an inner mountaineering expedition, describing the pitfalls and challenges of such a mystical journey.
We decided to run an individual session to “test” the Tibetan Buddhist model we were working on, using a moderate dose of LSD. I would be the journeyer, Tim would be the guide. We used our “session room,” with a balcony facing the jungle; the ocean surf roared below. We agreed that if I felt fear I would say so, rather than struggling with it myself.
We started off in silence. Tim read some passages from our new “manual.” For about an hour nothing happened. I was restless and annoyed at myself for not being able to let go. I was thinking too much and too hard. Tim said he’d found focusing on sensory awareness had helped him get out of obsessive thinking. So he lit a candle, opened a cool bottle of beer (which I simply touched) and encouraged me just to focus on pure sense perception. This seemed to cut through the excessive mentation like a knife through butter. I suddenly felt released from a heavy fog of restless and pointless thinking.
I looked at Tim’s face, and to my amazement it became the face of godlike Being, radiating light. Then, as I continued gazing at it, it changed and half of his face looked ugly and demonic. Simultaneously with this visual outer perception, I felt subjectively like a piece of protoplasmic jelly stuck to a rock. The part of me that was floating free in the ocean saw Tim’s face as radiant and divine; the part of me that was still stuck to the rock saw it as ugly and cold. My mind felt like it was cradled in a beautiful, clear, empty space, but then I would slip back into fear and distress.
“I keep on losing it.”
“How do you lose it? With your mind?”
Silence.
“How do you get it?”
“It just comes. I see divinity in half of your face, but the other half changes to horrible.”
“Remember, both come from within you, and pretty soon you’ll be able to see divinity in the whole face, or in the candle, or the cigarette, or the whole following day, if you’re good at it.”
Tim got up and sat by the door. I lay down on the floor, closed my eyes, and again tried to reach that state of ecstatic weightlessness by emptying my mind. I couldn’t do it and got discouraged; I thought I could only reach it with his or somebody’s help. I started to hallucinate—the peaceful and wrathful visions of the second bardo phase. When I saw fearful images, I remembered the admonition of the Bardo Thödol that they were in my mind only, so I told them to go away. To my immense surprise, they did.
Then, with an electrifying shock of insight, I realized that I could do this not only with these relatively trivial demons, but with all my fears. I thought about a friend of mine, whose behavior sometimes scared me. Then I thought how absurd it was that I should let fear feelings that were in me interfere with the relationship I had with someone outside of me. My whole head opened up spherically in every direction simultaneously, and I felt both serene and exhilarated as never before in my life.
I sat up and looked at Tim. He took one look at my face and said, “You made it.” I told him about the fear insight and he added: “Not only the fear of that person, but the love for them is within you too. The point is you have to know your own mental machinery, otherwise it scares the shit out of you.”
We talked for a while about possible ways to maintain this state, where everything you looked at was pulsing and glowing with divine radiance, and the difficulties of living permanently at that level of consciousness. We finally agreed that “in order to live at that level . . . you have to live at that level.”
During this time, for about two or three hours in clock time, though it was subjectively timeless, I had no problem maintaining that state of spherical openness.
It was effortless. I knew I was in my body, and could quickly tune in to any part of it, but I had no identity in it. My identity and awareness seemed to be spread throughout the room and even beyond into the forest outside. This meant when somebody came into the room, as they did, it was as if they were walking into “me.” They were accepted like thoughts entering my head. I could with complete equanimity examine various relationships “Ralph” had with various people, parents, friends, parts of himself, etc.
I felt freer than I had ever felt before. Gradually and gently, over a long period of time, “I” returned back into my usual personality and body-self. The memory of the state of consciousness experienced remained with extreme lucidity.
Many things happened after that first summer in Zihuatanejo. We were more enthusiastic than ever about the potentials of the drug experience for revealing new levels of consciousness and bringing about changes in personality and behavior faster and more effectively than any other method known to us. We also became more serious about communicating what we had already learned to our colleagues in the academic world and the public at large.
Some people tried to fit us into the categories of missionaries, proselytizers, or drug pushers, but this was not the image we had of ourselves at all. We felt like people who had stumbled, almost by accident, onto a possible cure for a virulent plague that was scourging the country. No doubt this was the “emotional plague” that Wilhelm Reich, another misunderstood pioneer, had diagnosed. Yet the majority of the inhabitants, sufferers from the plague, were denying that there even was this condition. Hence anyone proposing a cure for it must inevitably be seen either as a religious nut or a depraved fiend, or both. Nevertheless, we decided to do the best we could in communicating our findings.
Leary and Alpert went back to their Harvard teaching positions. I had applied for and received a NIMH postdoctoral fellowship in psychopharmacology. I signed up for the second-year Harvard Medical School course in pharmacology and read everything I could find about these strange drugs, anything that would help explain their extraordinary action on the human brain. I read thousands of studies, yet nothing really shed any light on this mystery. No one had the faintest idea how the drugs worked. To my surprise I found out that this was also true of most of the drugs used in psychiatry, and even, to a very large extent, of regular medical drugs such as aspirin. They were used because they “worked,” and that was that.
We started a journal, the Psychedelic Review, to publish scholarly, scientific, and literary articles in this field. Alan Watts, who was at Harvard at the time, and who had taken psilocybin with Tim and written about it in The Joyous Cosmology, helped us put the first issue together. Paul Lee, Rolf von Eckartsberg, and I were the joint editors. Paul was a graduate student in philosophy of religion, a close associate of Paul Tillich; Rolf was a psychology graduate student interested in existentialism and phenomenology. After the first year, they left. I continued editing the review, as a more or less quarterly, for about six years.
We also decided to try communal living. This came about in a rather simple way. We were spending almost all of our spare time talking about the research project and doing a lot of driving back and forth from each other’s houses and apartments. It seemed the obvious thing to do to live in the same house. The first house we lived in, in Newton Center, was shared by Tim, his children Susan and Jack, Dick Alpert, Foster Dunlap and his wife Barbara and their baby, and my wife Susan and myself. Susan and I had met several months before and I had proposed to her during a mescaline session in Zihuatanejo.
After we’d lived in the house for a few months, the city of Newton Center brought suit to evict us, on neighbors’ instigation, for living in a single family dwelling. Dick persuaded his father, George Alpert, a prominent Boston attorney, to defend our case in court. We won because the law defined “family” by reference to sharing of the household, not by blood lines.
One room in the house was set up as a meditation and session room. It was a converted closet, remodeled in such a way that it could only be reached from the basement—you had to go downstairs and then up a ladder. Inside, the walls and ceiling were hung with India print cloth, and luxuriantly colored pillows covered the floor.
The Newton commune, while unsatisfactory in many respects, was the scene of many new and different kinds of psychedelic research. We carried out experiments in which we deliberately invoked problem situations for an individual, who in the expanded state of consciousness would attempt to see through his blind spots. We also performed experiments in language learning, where a person under the psychedelic would listen to recordings of a foreign language being spoken, for several hours, in order to imprint her brain with the sounds and inflections of that language.
Tim, ever the inventive research psychologist (at least at this time of his life), started a collaborative project with Ogden Lindsley, a behavioral scientist who was an associate of B. F. Skinner. Lindsley had pioneered the objective continuous recording of the physical behavior of psychotics in a mental hospital. He designed, at Tim’s request, a device that looked like a typewriter, with a dozen keys that activated strip-chart recordings, each key representing an experiential category. Tim called it the “experiential typewriter.” The idea was that during a session the person, who might be unable to talk quickly enough to describe his ever changing experiences could code them with the push of a button in a few basic categories, such as “body sensations,” “cellular memories,” “thought patterns.”12
We used this device in experiments with dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a powerful new psychedelic that had been discovered by the Hungarian scientist Stephen Szara. It was not orally active, so had to be taken by injection (though later amateur researchers developed a smokable form). It produced a thirty-minute experience of profound transcendence. In one experiment, described in High Priest, Tim was the subject and every two minutes I would ask him to indicate which of the twelve keys on the typewriter best represented his current state of consciousness. I felt the device was a remarkably effective aid in the attempt to objectify internal states.
Generally, during this year and subsequently, we used LSD more, psilocybin decreasingly. LSD was very different. Psilocybin had been the “love-pill.” LSD was never a love-pill; it was a death– rebirth trip. I remember when Tim told me about his first session with LSD that he had taken the night before. He was a changed man. He was stammering about the “plastic doll world,” the total death of the self. I was somewhat frightened and dismayed.
LSD was introduced to us by Michael Hollingshead, an eccentric Englishman, who had held a mysterious, vague job relating to American-English “cultural exchange” in New York, and who arrived one day at the offices of the Harvard Project. He was broke, depressed, and suicidal. But he also had an extraordinary sense of humor, was a consummate storyteller, and a genial, good-natured fellow. Questions about his prior activities always brought evasive answers and wildly improbable, hilariously funny stories. Inquiries we made indicated that certain criminal elements in New York City considered him a con man to be shunned at all costs. He himself expressed fear of being beaten or killed by gangsters.
He had, with the aid of a physician friend in New York, Dr. John Beresford, obtained LSD from Sandoz for the purpose of studying its effect on bacterial molds. The two decided first to try it on themselves, and from their account it must have been an enormous overdose. They were incapacitated for weeks, trapped in inner space networks they could not unravel. He arrived seeking help, and Tim began a lengthy, strange association with him, referring to him as a “divine rascal.”13
I always found Michael’s descriptions of his psychedelic experiences completely baffling. I could not relate to what he was describing. He completely shattered all our assumptions and premises. Instead of following our code of openness, trust, sharing, and sincerity, Michael made use of the awesome suggestibility of the LSD state to confuse, bewilder, astound, and manipulate awareness and perception. Yet, when confronted with this, he would deny it stoutly, and protest his innocence in such a guileless, humorous, and friendly manner that it was impossible not to like the man.
Michael used to take a large dose of LSD every day, while he still had the supply. He had it made up into a kind of paste, like peanut butter, and would spoon it out of a jar. He thought of it as a kind of daily consciousness vitamin. Often he would, while on the trip, mix himself a stiff drink and then watch TV. He had been invited to stay in Tim’s house and help take care of the children, which he did quite well, considering what he was pouring into his system all the time.
Michael’s approach to psychedelics was much more like that of the hippy “acid freaks,” the trips of Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, as described in Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test—not growth, not spiritual experience, not insight or learning, just freak out, go as far as possible to the outermost edge of the hitherto experienced and beyond, blow the mind and yet stay cool and in control, keep up the game.
Taking LSD made the religious dimensions of psychedelic experience inescapable. You were plunged into realms where all hitherto accepted belief systems and identity structures were suspended, as everything you called “you” dissolved in pearly streams of liquid color, in pulsing waves of ecstatic sensations, or shattered silently into perfect, symmetrical, crystalline lattices, or shimmering nets of electronic wave-trains. As you returned from these experiences of pure contentless energy, the world of images and categories in which we live our normal lives did indeed seem like a “plastic doll world.”
People came out of these sessions reeling with awe, overwhelmed by experiences of oneness with God and all other beings, shaken to the depths of their nature by the grandeur and power of the divine life-energy processes going on within their own consciousness.
We turned to religious professionals for help. Huston Smith, Professor of Philosophy at M.I.T., friend of Aldous Huxley and author of the bestselling book The Religions of Man, was one of the first to join our project. He remarked that his experiences confirmed and validated what he had been writing about for years. Some of his students came and joined our project. Walter Houston Clark, Dean of the Theological Seminary at Andover-Newton, a kindly, distinguished old gentleman, became, much to our surprise, an enthusiastic advocate of the potentials of psychedelics.
We ran a series of sessions for ministers, priests, rabbis, and theology students. Some of these were more dramatic and violent than any we’d ever experienced at the prison with hardened criminals. Some got caught up in hell-fire and judgment visions; others wanted to immediately force everyone around to convert, confess, and turn to Jesus; some forgot about God and turned to their wives for solace; some left the ministry; some were deeply confirmed in their calling.
One theology graduate student I worked with in a session, a huge, red-haired bear of a man, wrestled with some nameless monsters in his unconscious for hours, sweating and groaning and finally finding release and peace. However, the next day he announced that he didn’t see any value to it, that it wouldn’t help him write his thesis, or help America beat the Russians, and therefore he didn’t want any more of it—an attitude I found frankly bizarre.
Walter Pahnke arrived and began his famous “Good Friday” study, the first and to this date the only controlled, double-blind, bona fide experimental study of mystical experience. Walter was an M.D. from the Midwest, an ordained minister, and getting his Ph.D. in the history of religion at Harvard. His idea was to give a group of divinity students psilocybin, during a Good Friday service, in a chapel. He understood the set and setting hypothesis, and wanted to maximize every factor to produce religious experiences. A control group would be given placebo, at the same time and same place, and neither subject nor experimenter would know who had the drug and who had the active placebo.
It seemed like an insanely outrageous idea, even to us, and we didn’t think it could work. But Walter was a determined, gee-whiz, clean-cut, Boy Scout type, with totally impeccable credentials and impressive backing. Dean Howard Thurman of Boston University Divinity School agreed to the use of his chapel for the service. Andover-Newton Seminary, through Walter Clark, provided volunteer subjects, highly motivated, pretested, and screened. Harvard University, through our psilocybin project, provided the trained guides, who would work with the twenty subjects in small groups. Huston Smith, of M.I.T., was on his doctoral committee.
Walter had the good sense to turn down our strong recommendation that he should experience the drugs himself first. He knew that if he didn’t maintain his psychedelic innocence that he would be accused of bias and his study would be criticized for lack of objectivity.
The experiment was a complete success. Walter had culled nine criteria from the literature on religious experience, particularly the writings of W. T. Stace. In terms of these criteria the psilocybin subjects experienced states and levels of consciousness indistinguishable from classic mystical experience, whereas the control group did not. The study became famous through psychological and religious circles and was widely written up in the press. Walter got his Ph.D.14
Despite successes such as Walter Pahnke’s experiment, the political pressures at Harvard University continued to mount. Professor McClelland announced that students who participated in the drug work would be dropped from the Ph.D. program. Newspapers played up the sensational angles with abandon: “Weird Drug Studies Bared at Harvard,” “Harvard Eats the Holy Mushroom,” “Drug Craze Grows on Campus,” and so forth.
We decided to reduce the embarrassment to Harvard by separating the drug research completely from the university. A nonprofit corporation was established, entitled International Federation for Internal Freedom, or IFIF for short, with offices in Cambridge. The Board of Directors was Leary, Alpert, myself, Walter Clark, Huston Smith, Alan Watts, Paul Lee, Rolf von Eckartsberg, Gunther Weil, and George Litwin. The purposes were to sponsor and support research in consciousness expansion.
The plan was to supply information and the drugs (all still perfectly legal at this point), at cost, to small research groups all over the country, formed for the purpose of expanding consciousness. Most of these would be psychologists, ministers, educators, and other professionals. We would act as research center, collating and distributing information and findings. Requests were already coming in by the hundreds.
But because of the escalating sensationalist publicity, IFIF ran into difficulties from the start. At first we had attempted to set up offices in a prestigious medical building across the Charles River in Boston. We had barely moved our furniture and boxes in—and not yet arranged them—when pressure was put on the owners of the building by the medical people who held offices there, and we were evicted. Offices were then set up in Cambridge.
The drug supply was the next big problem. We could no longer use the free psilocybin that had been supplied by Sandoz for years. This had been turned over to university health authorities. We decided to approach Sandoz in Switzerland and Dr. Albert Hofmann directly.
We knew that time was running out. The drugs were still legal, but it was obvious they would not remain so for much longer. We decided to risk all and sent an order for a million doses of LSD to Sandoz, Basel, which had quoted us a price of one cent per dose. The order was typed on Harvard stationery and accompanied by a check for $10,000.
But it was already too late. Sandoz checked with the Harvard administration and found they were not at all in favor of this purchase. Furthermore, the funds we had counted on to back up the check did not materialize.
Thus our attempt to set up a legitimate distribution system for open-ended, nonpsychiatric research in psychedelics failed. The supply lines of psychedelic drugs then went in two directions. One, into the psychiatric research hospitals, which became more and more tightly controlled, regulated, and supervised. The other direction was underground: black-market chemists made LSD and other drugs in basements, in increasingly vast quantities, varying in quality from very fine to very poor and dangerous.
For our group, the pressure of events was increasing to crisis proportions. Tim had arranged his schedules so that he could be absent in the spring semester and he left for Mexico. Dick Alpert was publicly accused by the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, of having given LSD to an undergraduate, despite his agreement not to. The fact that the student stated the experience was the most meaningful and helpful event of his life made no difference. The incident provided the university with the needed excuse, and Alpert was fired. Leary’s dismissal was ostensibly for failing to show up for classes. It was the first time in over one hundred years that Harvard had fired any faculty member, and it put the story all over the nation’s newspapers. It put LSD in the public eye and made it a symbol of fear and danger. For ten years, until the early seventies, psychedelics remained an almost constant headline news item.
McClelland had said that the drug experiences made the users less sensitive to others. Those of us in the Harvard psychedelic project did not feel that this was so. We were quite acutely aware of the emotional reactions of others to the work we were doing—it would be hard not to notice it. But we felt that the work was too important to stop or slow down because of the fear of those not only unwilling to try it themselves, but who also wanted to prevent others from using it.
My own feeling is that it was our group’s task, our assignment so to speak, to explore the uses and values of these consciousness tools that had suddenly been rediscovered, and to disseminate the findings to the scientific and academic community and to the public at large. The fact remains that by and large the helping professionals (doctors, psychologists, ministers) were unable to accept these methods and develop a growth-enhancing structure to use them for human welfare. Our technological society was (and is) evidently still too fixed in and identified with old nineteenth-century materialistic-rational paradigms to be able to view these excursions into other realities with anything but fear and nervous withdrawal.
From a sociological point of view, it is instructive to compare this process with the response of the Native American cultures to the introduction of peyote in the late nineteenth century. Large numbers of the tribes throughout the North American continent adopted the psychedelic cactus and developed a socially and legally circumscribed religious structure for its use.15
In our culture, by contrast, the failure of the mind professionals opened the doors wide to the uncontrolled activities of black-market exploiters and profiteers, whose products were chemically impure and whose services were spiritually empty. To be sure, there were exceptions—humane, sensitive therapists and explorers here and there—but the last formal psychedelic therapy program in the United States, at Spring Grove Hospital in Baltimore, closed in the midseventies.
Because of the Harvard firings and the increasingly vehement opposition and condemnation by both academic and medical authorities our group decided to move our entire operation again to Zihuatanejo, Mexico. By this time we had learned quite a lot about how to prepare the set and setting of a psychedelic session in such a way as to maximize the chance for a beneficial, educational, and growth-enhancing experience. We decided to open a psychedelic training center in Zihuatanejo, where people could come to be trained in the use of these substances, learn what we had learned, and then return to their own communities and apply it in their professional, therapeutic, and creative activities. Our version of the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a session manual was available as a conceptual guide. One couldn’t imagine a more perfect environment for such explorations.
We rented the Hotel Catalina again and sent out brochures to our IFIF mailing list. The response was overwhelming, since the opportunity was unique. For $200 people could spend a month in one of the world’s most idyllic tropical places, learning to expand their awareness with powerful new aids, in a protective and supportive environment. Applications poured in by the hundreds and were screened and processed by Dick Alpert and assistants, who remained behind at first in the Cambridge office. They also published the first issue of the Psychedelic Review, which served to establish our scientific and scholarly authenticity.
In Zihuatanejo, we converted one of the cabin units into a session room, decorated with India print drapes and equipped with pillows, candles, and incense. Often, however, a good part of the session would be spent on the beach or in the water. We found that the surf, in the protected bay, proved to be an excellent way to bring someone through a difficult phase of a trip. Simply to lie at the water’s edge, letting the waves wash over you, rolling the body across the sand, merging into the eternal currents of air, ocean, sun, and earth, seemed to clear away much fear, suspicion, frustration, and other emotional baggage.
There were usually three or four persons in a session, which might consist of a psychologist, a television actress, a businessman, and one experienced guide. Much of the guiding was done by my wife Susan and myself. We were on a very busy schedule; sessions were started every morning and every evening. A minimum of three to four days had to elapse between sessions for all participants, to let the tolerance effect wear off. Thus, there were always groups either starting or ending a session, or in the middle of one. Sometimes Susan and I went several days and nights without interruption. We learned to sleep “on the wing,” as it were.
The atmosphere was extraordinary. Dr. Joseph (“Jack”) Downing, a prominent psychiatrist from the San Francisco Bay Area, experienced with psychedelics, had come down as an observer. In a chapter he contributed to the book Utopiates, describing our project, he noted a highly unusual occurrence: a young woman in a psychotic state who simply arrived one day in Zihuatanejo and was supportively accepted into the community in such a way that her wild bouts of terror and paranoia were attenuated to a significant degree without the use of psychiatric medication.16
Tim guided some of the sessions, but much of the time he was away in Mexico City, handling the political and diplomatic work necessary to allow the operation to continue. He delivered a paper on our work to a meeting of Mexican psychiatrists. The reaction was frostily hostile, and a campaign was initiated to have our work stopped. Journalistic distortions and fabrications contributed to the problem. For example, an axe murder that had occurred in the area shortly before our arrival was promptly laid at the feet of the gringos and their hongos alucinantes by a local chief of police overzealous for promotion. Other accusations were made, some by applicants to the center who had been turned down—but anonymous accusations in a newspaper, once made, are difficult to refute. Our project also inadvertently attracted a sizeable number of uninvited American marijuana smokers who camped out nearby, adding yet another layer of suspicion and notoriety.
Considering the history of the use of mind-altering plants and mushrooms in Mexico, we had assumed that that country would be more liberal than the United States. This belief was undoubtedly naive. Furthermore, we made the mistake of not securing Mexican medical supervision and cooperation. (We did not regard the psychedelic experience as a medical procedure requiring supervision.) We activated fears of exploitation by foreigners, even though our operation was ridiculously cheap and clearly unprofitable. However, for about six weeks the scheme ran according to plan with about thirty to forty participants—the first wave of several hundred who had been accepted. Almost all were overwhelmingly positive in their evaluation of their experience. The results exceeded our highest expectations.
One of Tim’s creative inspirations was to build a ten-foot high tower-platform on the beach, open to the sea. Here, one person would be on a trip at all times. We thought of him or her as a sort of inner-space lighthouse, a beacon representing the highest state of consciousness; one could tune in to this “high witness” in order to recover one’s bearings when overinvolved in the mundane, or when lost in the hellish bardos. Each morning and evening, someone else took over, and we would have a little ceremony, a changing of the celestial guard, the cosmic watcher of the day or night.
I spent an unforgettable night on the tower, watching the moon rise and travel over the bay, its silvery radiance reflecting from the murmuring surf. I watched it set behind the mountains as the pink-orange light of dawn suffused the sky. Swimming at night, one could move one’s hands through the water and watch strings of pearly phosphorescent particles cascading from each fingertip. Hour-long electrical storms soundlessly shattered the sky into shards of yellow, turquoise, and violet.
During the day one could sit on the beach, and by field telephone order drinks from the bar, which would come down the hill on a tray moving by a pulley on a rope. Digging fingers and toes into the warm sand and opening the pores to the sun, you could discard the false masks of civilization and tumble into the strong, cool, and brilliant surf, awakening billions of sleeping cells to the eternal cycles of sun and sea and earth. The experiences of those days and nights were etched into memory with exquisite clarity and precision.
I believe that in Mexico we violated territorial instincts. Perhaps the Mexicans felt that we were there to do something that would be considered too crazy to do at home—and in a sense they were right. Medical and government authorities in the United States were condemning what we were doing and passing laws to make it illegal as fast as they could. It’s as if your neighbor were to come to your yard and stand on his head. Even if he did no harm to your yard, you would wonder why he didn’t do it in his own, and be naturally suspicious.
Two journalists arrived from Mexico City to do a story. They were curious about our project and very friendly. They drank with us, told stories, and exchanged jokes. One of them even took an LSD trip. After being with us for several days they announced that they were actually federal agents and gave us notice to leave the country within five days. The technical reason given was that we were running a business while only on tourist visas. Tim tried pulling all the strings he knew, with many phone calls to Mexico City, all to no avail. While we had been absorbed in paradise, our goose had been cooked.
The serene, almost otherworldly atmosphere of our little paradise was shattered. People started dispersing; there was sympathy, but also disappointment. Some guests had just arrived and had not yet had any sessions. They pleaded with us to have just one. Unwisely, to minimize their disappointment, we permitted it. Since the whole ambiance had been poisoned, most of these sessions were bad; some of them very bad.
One man developed a religious mania and shouted the Lord’s Prayer at the top of his voice across the Zihuatanejo bay. Later he fell off some stone steps and fractured his jaw. He punched Tim out and bruised his ribs. It took four men to hold him down while Jack Downing gave him antipsychotic medication (which we normally never used).
Another man, for whom I was the reluctant guide, on the day after his session decided to walk home to Boston, taking off on foot and in underwear, heading toward the village. While everyone else was packing, we kept having to send someone out to bring him back from his long walk home. He was impervious to any rational persuasion. Once we got to the Mexico City airport, in the late evening hours, our restless traveler continued to pace up and down, tailed by tired staff members. He would go to the ticket counter and demand a ticket to infinity. The clerks politely asked him to return in the morning. Finally, by trickery and luck, we managed to get him into a taxi and to our hotel. But our troubles were not over. Running on manic energy, while everyone else was dead tired, he paced the streets, demanding a taxi to take him to Boston. We finally took him to the American hospital, where, to my surprise, after one last maniacal lunge, he meekly followed the nurse’s orders to undress and get into bed.
This was the first time I understood something I was to experience personally and observe several times: under certain conditions, when all the internal structures maintaining our view of reality have been undermined, a person might well accept any available external structure as better than none at all. We learned later that this man stayed in the hospital for two weeks. He wrote us, stating that the experience, though painful at the time, had taught him some valuable lessons. Part of the reason for his excessive paranoia, we found out, was that he had come to Zihuatanejo against his employer’s wishes. He was involved in national security work and feared that the drug might make him reveal classified information. This fear was enormously heightened when the federales arrived to evict us.
We regrouped our scattered and battered forces at the house of a friend in Mexico City. Tim arrived, bandaged and limping from his encounter with the religious fanatic. Dick Alpert and Peggy Hitchcock flew in from Boston. We had a long discussion about what had happened and debated what to do next. Several hundred people had signed up for the training and sent in deposits. We wanted to salvage the operation somehow, in view of the positive results we had obtained with the few we did take through the program before the final fiasco. So we decided to try to relocate somewhere else immediately.
Most of us returned to Massachusetts, to our house in Newton Center. A reconnaissance group consisting of Gunther Weil, David Levin, and Frank Ferguson was sent to the Caribbean. We had received an invitation from an American living on the island of Dominica, in the British West Indies. The initial reports of the scouting group sounded positive, so Tim took off. Pretty soon the reports coming back to the rest of us sounded very positive, fairly bubbling with enthusiasm. This was the place, Tim wired. We prepared to leave. A few days later, another wire: something had happened, the group was leaving Dominica. But they were going to the neighboring island of Antigua, which was much better anyway. So we should come down. And bring the morning-glory seeds (this was to be our LSD substitute).
I was the last of the group to arrive in Antigua, where a motley crew of fifteen had assembled. They included Gary Fisher, a psychologist from Los Angeles who had done pioneering work using LSD in the treatment of autistic children, and also his wife and children. Several other couples with children were there, as well as Tim’s children. There was a familylike atmosphere, with excited speculations about pirate adventures. However, there was also a considerable amount of tension, some of it between Leary, Alpert, and myself, some generated by our repeated expulsions and what was emerging as a pattern of persecution.
We rented an empty hotel compound by the beach, ominously named “The Bucket of Blood.” This was evidently someone’s idea of a joke, associating it with pirate marauders, but the place had peculiar vibrations. Most of the sessions we had there were “bummers”; some were horrendous. Nevertheless, we strategized how to get the psychedelic training project going again. We rewrote the Tibetan Buddhist manual. We talked to all of the island’s six medical doctors, trying to enlist their support for our venture, getting lukewarm responses at best. Moreover, when we talked to the British Governor of Antigua, he waved Time magazine, which carried a story on our Mexican fiasco, in our faces. He did not want a British protectorate to be associated with anything like that—no, Sir! Judging by the Time article, we could hardly blame him.
Meanwhile, at the “Bucket of Blood,” events had taken a sinister turn. Charles, one of the most gifted and competent members of our group, a veteran of many trips, who had never before had a negative experience of any consequence, went on such a freaky session that it became the last psychedelic he ever took. It shook everyone deeply to see Charles of all people get caught in such a nightmare. For several days we could not determine what was happening to him. He would sit morosely silent for hours, saying very little, apparently trusting no one except his girlfriend.
Finally, we pieced together that he had decided, in his madness, that the main opponent of our operation in Antigua was a certain black psychiatrist who was a lobotomy specialist, and very conservative. Charles wanted to sacrifice himself by offering to be lobotomized in exchange for our getting permission to stay and work there. One day, he actually started toward the capital in order to carry out this demented martyrdom. His girlfriend stayed with him constantly, gradually nursing him back to health, over the next several weeks. He did not, however, communicate with any of the rest of us for years. I found out that he reconverted to the Catholic Church—exemplifying again the pattern of grasping at any available strong structure from an experience of maximum disintegration. As far as I know, he never came anywhere near psychedelics again.
These events dealt the coup de grâce to our stay in the ill-fated “Bucket of Blood,” in Antigua, and indeed in the Caribbean. Gary Fisher and I briefly explored the option of moving to the French-controlled island of Guadeloupe, but our money ran out after a week. Everyone returned to the States. Indeed, it seemed that Fate had sealed our attempted psychedelic training center forever. Escalating political sanctions and legal prohibitions by now had made open experimentation with psychedelics virtually impossible.
Leary, Alpert, and myself, together with a few others, moved to a huge estate in Millbrook, New York, owned by the Hitchcock brothers, where we established a research and training center for consciousness expansion without drugs. The Millbrook center, named the Castalia Foundation, became a sort of unofficial national headquarters for information and advocacy concerning psychedelics. It was also the center of an ever changing scene of magic and creativity, with extraordinary stories so far only partially told.17 Other members of our little band of adventurers dispersed to different parts of the country to build careers and normal family lives. Raising children and having a mortgage does wonders for making pragmatists of us all.
Many erstwhile psychedelic voyagers, myself included, went on to study and practice meditative, yogic, and psychotherapeutic modalities of consciousness expansion during the 1970s and 1980s, becoming initiated in Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, Christian, or shamanic traditions. Some have stopped using the botanical and chemical amplifiers, grateful for the opening vision they provided. Others continue their explorations into the many dimensions of consciousness and reality, absorbing the lessons learned from plant teachers, animal guides, ancestor spirits, human elders and gurus, wise artists, tricksters, and nature deities. I went on to a ten-year period of intense involvement in a Western esoteric school of light-fire yoga (Actualism) and subsequently immersed myself in the study and practice of shamanism. As for Tim Leary, “to hundreds of thousands of his friends and admirers, he remains one of the outstanding visionary geniuses of the twentieth century. To me he was the perfect exemplar of one of those who in the last of the Psychedelic Prayers are listed as likely to be closer to the Tao—“smiling men with bad reputations.”18