I Have America Surrounded
John Higgs
The brilliant first biography of the man President Nixon called 'the most dangerous man in America'.Timothy Leary was one of the most controversial and divisive figures of the twentieth century. President Nixon called him 'the most dangerous man in America.' Hunter S. Thompson said that he was 'not just wrong, but a treacherous creep and a horrible goddamn person.' Yet the writer Terence McKenna claims that he 'probably made more people happy than anyone else in history.’A brilliant Harvard psychologist, Leary was sacked because of his research into LSD and other psychedelic drugs. He went on to become the global figurehead of the 1960s drug culture, coin the phrase ‘tune in, turn on and drop out’, and persuade millions of people to take drugs and explore alternativelifestyles yet the tremendous impact of his 'scandalous' research has been so controversial that it has completely overshadowed the man himself and the details of his life. Few people realise that Timothy Leary's life is one of the greatest untold adventure stories of the twentieth century.Timothy Leary led a life of unflagging optimism and reckless devotion to freedom. It was, in the words of his goddaughter Winona Ryder, ‘not just epic grandeur but flat-out epic grandeur.' Leary's life is undoubtedly one of the greatest untold adventure stories of the twentieth century and this book presents it for the first time in all its uncensored glory.
I Have America Surrounded
The Life of Timothy Leary
John Higgs
For Joanne, with love
‘In religion the future is behind us.’
Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea
Contents
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Foreword (#u6acebf9a-b45d-5b95-b388-26ae27e63e26)
Three months after I was born, my dad, who was Tim’s archivist, went to see him in Switzerland, where Tim was living in exile after escaping prison and being called ‘the most dangerous man in the world’ by President Richard Nixon, who was furiously trying to hunt him down.
My dad and Tim took acid and went skiing, and my dad pulled out a picture of me—the first one ever taken (I was a day old)—and showed it to Tim and asked if he would be my godfather. Tim said: ‘Sure.’
We didn’t meet until seven years later, after Tim was released from prison and came to visit us on our commune in Mendocino County We were walking along a dusty road on a remote mountain ridge. It was sunset and we were holding hands. I looked up at him and said: ‘They say you’re a mad scientist.’
Tim smiled and said: ‘I know.’ I think he liked the sound of that.
Around the time I became a teenager I wanted to be a writer. This, of course, thrilled Tim and we talked constantly about books. My favourite literary character was Holden Caulfield; his was Huck Finn. We talked about the similarities between the two characters—especially their feelings of alienation from polite society. I wanted to catch all the kids falling off the cliff and Tim wanted to light out for the territory. It was a time when I was in my first throes of adolescence and experiencing that kind of alienation. And talking to Tim was the light at the end of the tunnel.
He really understood my generation. He called us ‘free agents in the Age of Information’.
What I learnt from Tim didn’t have anything to do with drugs, but it had everything to do with getting high. His die-hard fascination with the human brain was not all about altering it, but about using it to its fullest. And he showed us that that process—that journey—was our most important one…however we did it, as long as we did it. ‘You are the owner and operator of your brain,’ he reminded us.
Tim was a huge influence on me—not just with his revolutionary ideas about human potential, but as someone who read me stories, encouraged me, took me to baseball games—you know, godfather stuff. He was the first person outside my family—who you never tend to believe while growing up—to make me believe I could do anything. He had an incredible way of making you feel special and completely supported.
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a letter to his daughter in which he said that he hoped his life had achieved some sort of ‘epic grandeur’. Tim’s life wasn’t some sort of epic grandeur. It was flat out epic grandeur.
It’s easy sometimes to get lost in all the drug stuff that Tim’s famous for—all the ‘Turn on, tune in, and drop out’ stuff, especially in a society that loves a sound bite. But it wasn’t Tim’s only legacy. It was his vitality, enthusiasm, curiosity, humour and humanity that made Tim great—and those are the real ingredients of a mad scientist.
Winona RyderDelivered at Timothy Leary’s memorial service 9 June 1996, Santa Monica, California
CHAPTER 1 I’ll Free You, My Love (#u6acebf9a-b45d-5b95-b388-26ae27e63e26)
The signal that the jailbreak could go ahead was a telegram. It arrived on the afternoon of Friday, 11 September 1970, while Dr Timothy Leary was exercising in the prison yard. He was called into the control office and handed a slip of yellow paper that read:
BELOVED—OPERATION TOMORROW
DOCTORS FEEL BEST NOT TO WAIT
TOTALLY OPTIMISTIC ABOUT SUCCESS
AND NEW LIFE DON’T WORRY I’LL BE
BRAVE WON’T BE DOWN TO VISIT
SUNDAY BUT WE’LL BE TOGETHER
SOON I AWAIT YOU I LOVE YOU
CONTACT ME AT THREE TREE
RECOVERY CENTER.
YOUR MATE
The sergeant who had handed him the telegram had done so with a look of sympathy. The message was from Tim’s wife Rosemary, and inmates always reacted badly to cancelled visits. Tim nodded and kept his face blank.
The telegram confirmed that arrangements for the necessary cars, drivers, safe houses and fake identity papers were complete, and that the ‘operation’ could go ahead the following night. The ‘three trees’ mentioned at the end of the telegram referred to the rendezvous. This was a group of trees, joined at the root, which stood a few hundred yards outside the penitentiary. If Tim could get himself outside the prison and reach the three trees, he would find a car waiting to take him to freedom. The symbolism was ideal, for Leary had Irish blood, and a group of three trees, always in fruit, was a symbol of unstoppable life in ancient Irish myths.
The stakes were high. If he did not reach the trees, there was little hope that he would ever be a free man. Leary had just been informed that he would be flown to Poughkeepsie in New York State the following week, where he would face further charges relating to the raid on his house in Millbrook nearly five years earlier. The likelihood of receiving more jail time was strong. This would destroy any hope that he had of escape, for this extra time would almost certainly trigger a transfer to a higher security prison. If he were to break out, it had to be Saturday or never. But that Friday the sky was a brilliant blue. His plan needed a foggy night in order to succeed. Without fog, there would be times during the escape that he would be silhouetted in the sights of the gun trucks and the armed guards. Without fog, only a miracle could prevent him from being shot.
He spent the following afternoon in the television room, watching the Stanford-Arkansas football game, and returned to his cell for the 4 p.m. head count. At 4.30 the whistle blew to signify the end of the count, and he waited for his cellmate to go to the food hall. Tim declined to join him, saying that he had eaten on the early line. The moment that his cellmate left, he got to work.
(#litres_trial_promo)
He opened his locker. He removed the white laces from his sneakers and replaced them with dark ones. Then he sat down in front of the locker, a newspaper across his lap, and painted out the white stripes on his shoes and handball gloves with black dye. There was a sudden jangle of keys outside his cell door, and he quickly stuffed the shoes back in the locker. His heart was pounding as he sat motionless, listening to the guard move slowly away. By the time that it was safe to retrieve the shoes and return to work, he was sweating. He was rushing now, and his hands got covered in the dye. He wiped them on his handball gloves and shoved them back in the locker with the sneakers. Then he moved to the sink, where he began to scrub the black paint off his hands with a wire brush. He used his towel to mop the spilled paint off the floor in front of the locker. Finally, he hid the stained towel under his mattress.
There could be no going back now that his escape preparations were under way. He would not be able to explain why he had painted out the white on his gloves and shoes. He had crossed the line. He returned to his bunk and wrote what, at first glance, appears to have been an extraordinarily self-righteous farewell note to the guards. ‘In the name of the Father and the Mother and the Holy Ghost,’ it read, ‘Oh, Guards—I leave now for freedom. I pray that you will free yourselves. To hold man captive is a crime against humanity and a sin against God. Oh, Guards, you are criminals and sinners. Cut it loose. Be Free. Amen.’ Those who knew Leary well could recognize his sense of humour at work here, but everyone else could be forgiven for seeing only the arrogance and ego that so annoyed his enemies.
Tim then had to wait until after the next count, at 8.30, before he could make his move. Outside the sky was darkening and the weather was becoming cloudy. But there is a big difference between cloud and fog.
The thought of escape had been present when he was first imprisoned seven months earlier. During her very first visit, Rosemary had looked at Tim and made him a promise: ‘I’ll free you, my love.’
This was at Chino, a maximum security prison used as a holding centre for new prisoners. It was where convicts were evaluated and assigned to the most suitable prison to serve their time. It was here that Tim learnt about his potential future homes within the California prison system. Tehachapi, San Quentin and Folsom were all considered escape-proof. So was Vacaville, which was where the mentally disturbed were usually sent. It had a reputation for unpredictable maniacs and sudden violence, but it was not as feared as Soledad. Soledad was nicknamed ‘Gladiator School’, and was notorious for homosexual rape. The only options from which escape seemed possible were the forestry camps in the mountains, and the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo. This was a minimum-to-medium security jail for professional and elite prisoners. But it seemed unlikely that he would be sent to either of these two facilities. These were options for quiet, uncontroversial prisoners, and, according to President Nixon, Timothy Leary was ‘the most dangerous man in America’.
(#litres_trial_promo)
A factor in the choice of jail that he would be sent to was his status amongst the younger prisoners. The penitentiaries of California were notoriously brutal and violent. This was evident to Leary on his first night, when a burning mattress fell past his bars. It was accompanied by screams and shouts from convicts who were attempting to burn the jail to the ground while they were still locked inside.
New prisoners had to be quick to show allegiance to a particular clique or racial group, for a lone prisoner with no protection was seen as weak and vulnerable. When Leary arrived he was a hated figure in much of America. As one inmate told him, ‘If I had teenage kids and they were into drugs and I thought that you encouraged them, I’d have no hesitation in shooting you in cold blood.’
(#litres_trial_promo) This was a common attitude from the guards as well as many of the older cons. These were men who were on the wrong side of the generation gap, who often felt powerless to protect their children from the horrors of drugs and drug culture. And if there was one man who could be held responsible for the tsunami of drug use that swept the nation in the last years of the 1960s, it was Dr Timothy Leary.
Yet Leary was an untouchable figure in the prison system. This became apparent shortly after his arrival, when he intervened to stop the beating of a convict believed to be a snitch. Tim called for the guards, who rescued the man before he was seriously hurt. In doing so, he broke the cardinal rule of the jail—that of minding your own business. This should have earned him a beating, but the attack never came. Leary was protected by his status amongst the younger inmates. He was a living legend to prisoners in their early twenties and below, and especially to all those who had been involved in the drug culture. Drug use within the prison system was a long way removed from the idealistic, pacifist ideals of the flower children during the ‘Summer of Love’. Inmates would take whatever pills they could get, and those with a taste for amphetamines were unpredictable, violent and genuinely scary. It was immediately evident to the guards that, if he wished, Leary could wield his influence and cause a great deal of trouble, and a potential agitator is something that prison officers need to take very seriously.
So a move to the low-security penitentiary at San Luis Obispo, the California Men’s Colony West, did make some sense. The inmates here were older, white-collar prisoners, and the jail was regarded by many as a ‘country club’. The amount of time inmates were confined to their cells was kept to a minimum, and well-behaved prisoners were granted privileges such as contact with visitors or personal gardens. The convicts were aware that they had it good and that they had a lot to lose if they strayed from the conformist path, so they generally resigned themselves to doing their time peacefully. In case anyone was harbouring seditious plans, a semi-official ‘snitch’ system was in place involving certain prisoners reporting the inmates’ gossip to the officers in return for privileges. It was an ideal place to neutralise any potential Leary had for rocking the boat. And he was, after all, a 49-year-old academic and not some hardened street punk.
But was he an escape risk? San Luis Obispo was a low-security prison that did not usually take prisoners with long stretches to serve, as this placed them in a high-risk category. Tim had already been sentenced to a potential 20 years inside, and, for a man a few months short of his fiftieth birthday, this was a life sentence in all but name. It appeared that it would take something close to a miracle to put Tim in a low-security prison but, as Leary once explained, he was ‘in the miracle game’.
On his third day at Chino he was sent for the mandatory psychological assessment and presented with a set of tests. A significant part of these, he was shocked to realise, had been written by himself, 14 years earlier, when he had been one of America’s leading psychologists. They were known in psychological circles as ‘The Leary’. As he scanned the questions he knew exactly what personality traits they were assessing and measuring. He was able to answer each question in such a way that he would appear as close to a model prisoner as it is possible to get. The completed tests clearly showed, to the surprise of anyone who had read the newspapers during the previous decade, that Dr Timothy Leary was docile, conformist and meek. He was, the paperwork insisted, in no way an escape risk, and no one was prepared to argue with the paperwork. So the decision was made: Tim would be sent to San Luis Obispo.
The escape began at about ten to nine on the evening of Saturday, 12 September 1970. Tim put on his dark blue prison jacket and placed all his letters and treasured possessions in the pocket. He put on the blackened sneakers, left his farewell note in his locker and stepped out of his cell into the hallway.
Directly in front of him, at the end of the facing corridor, was the door to an internal prison yard. This was a square of grass enclosed on all sides by four cellblock corridors. It was also where a single tree grew, which seemed close enough to the corridor to enable getting onto the roof by climbing the tree and jumping across from its highest branches.
As he walked towards the door, a couple of convicts stood in the corridor and watched him pass. Tim had no choice but to walk past the prison yard door and round into another corridor, before turning back on himself and making another pass. The two cons were still watching. He walked past them again and headed into another cellblock. He was starting to act suspiciously now, he knew, but he had no option but to keep moving. He walked past them once again, and this time, once he had doubled back, they had gone.
He strode up to the door. As he was about to open it, he glanced into the adjacent cellblock where three more inmates were talking. One of them, a known snitch named Metcalf,
(#litres_trial_promo) looked up and glanced at him at the very moment he was about to reach for the door handle. Tim stopped himself and Metcalf seemed suspicious. Tim walked past and, after doubling back once more, found that when he reached the door again all three of the inmates were looking at him. There was no way that he was going to be able to get through that door unnoticed. He walked on.
There was another entrance to the yard, on the opposite side, but it was risky. He would have to walk across the floodlit square to reach the tree, and no one ever went in the yard after dark, not even the guards. But what choice did he have? He walked through this second door, into the light, and strode quickly and quietly across the yard, praying that no one glanced out of the windows of any of the four surrounding corridors. When he reached the tree he discovered that it was directly in front of the window facing Metcalf. There was no way he could climb up without being spotted. He ducked down and sat on the steps by the door, feeling very exposed, listening to the talk of the convicts a few feet away What was he to do? He knew that he couldn’t stay where he was for long. He would have to climb the tree and make a break for it. It would take Metcalf a few minutes to raise the alarm, so while climbing the tree offered only a small hope of success it was the only option that he had at that moment. He stood up, grabbed a branch and pulled himself up.
With impeccable timing, as Tim’s body appeared in front of the window, he saw Metcalf turn and face away from him. Tim shot up the tree and, within seconds, he had dropped down onto the slanted tiled roof of the cellblock. From here he could look down and see the guards lounging in the custody office. He removed his sneakers and padded barefoot along the corridor roof and across the cellblock, trying not to run into the television aerials that were nearly invisible in the dark. He could see into the neighbouring cellblocks and knew that their lights must be illuminating him up against the dark sky, but he was too elated to care. He reached the end of the cellblock and found his final obstacle: a telephone wire.
California Men’s Colony West was originally an old army base on the central Californian coast, just north of San Luis Obispo. It had been converted into a prison 16 years earlier, and consisted of rows of two-storey wooden barracks that had been connected by roofed-in walkways. It was, and is, considered a model prison, geared towards community work and rehabilitation, and at the time it did not suffer from the chronic overpopulation that has come to characterise the Californian prison system. There were flower beds and lawns, and uninterrupted views to the hills of the Pacific coast. There were no gun towers or walls, but gun trucks guarded the corners of the compound. Anyone attempting to climb the fence could be shot before they reached the top.
The jail offered regular, unmonitored contact visits, and Tim could spend hours with Rosemary every weekend. They could walk together through the gardens. This allowed Rosemary to pass LSD to her husband. It also allowed them to plan an escape.
Rosemary had organised a team of people who were prepared to get Tim out of America. There had been many obstacles to overcome. Once out of the prison, they would have to avoid the roadblocks that would appear across central California as soon as his absence was noticed. Tim would need to be moved to a safe house, and there were the matters of disguises and fake paperwork, and of finding a way to leave the country unnoticed. There was also the matter of the finance needed to fund the entire operation. It was not a simple task, but Rosemary was intelligent and determined, and Tim had legions of supporters who were more than willing to help. Assistance like this was a luxury that Tim did not have in his part of the operation. It was his job to find a way to get himself outside the jail without being shot.
Many options were considered while Rosemary made arrangements and the months passed. Tim studied the movement and timings of the guards and the gun trucks. He discreetly made enquiries amongst the few cons he felt he could trust. The simplest idea was to wait until the winter, when the thick sea fogs rolled in. Then he could simply climb the fence at the back of the compound under cover of the fog, and pray that he could slip unnoticed past the guards who patrolled the open land. But real, thick fogs were unpredictable, making it difficult to synchronise the escape with Rosemary’s preparations. It would also mean waiting until the middle of winter, which he had no intention of doing. Besides, he thought he had found another way: an escape route that could just work. There was a telephone wire that ran for 40 feet from the roof of the cellblock, across an internal road, and ended at a telephone pole that was on the far side of the fence. For weeks he studied it out of the corner of his gaze, wary of being caught looking too intently at any part of his route. He found that the best way to study it was during the yoga practice he performed daily in the yard, stretching his body into positions in which his half-closed eyes could look beyond the fence into the freedom beyond. He began playing handball in order to improve his physical fitness. And he waited for the signal from outside.
Tim crouched at the edge of the cellblock roof, looking down at the 20-foot drop below the cable. The height was crucial to his plans, as the cable was higher than the floodlights. This meant that on a reasonably foggy night he could pull himself across without being spotted by the guards or snipers watching the fence. But it also meant that it would take a lot of courage to launch himself away from the security of the roof, with nothing but faith and a thin wire between him and the ground below. He had been able to study this cable out of the window while sitting on the toilet, and felt sure that it could hold his weight. He would now put that belief to the test.
He put his sneakers and handball gloves on. Lying down on the edge of the roof with his head hanging over the drop, he clutched the wire in both hands and hooked his legs over it. Was it foggy enough? It was not a perfectly clear night, but there was more visibility than he would have liked. But there was nothing he could do about that, and from the moment he stepped out of his cellblock, turning back had not been an option. It was now time to risk everything. A fall could kill him, and if he was seen from this point on he would be shot on the spot. He tensed both hands and pulled himself away from the roof and out into the void beyond.
He had thought that the crossing would be short: a series of long, smooth pulls that would take no more than a couple of minutes. Instead, he found that a second telephone cable was suspended from the first, and the hoops that attached it every 10 inches or so got caught in his hands and feet. Swinging wildly, he struggled for every inch. After about 50 pulls he was exhausted, and physically couldn’t move any further. He was still no more than a third of the way across, hanging over the patrol road a good 20 yards from the fence. Leary hung on to the wire for dear life, sweating, panting and hurting, the 20-foot drop below seeming like an abyss. He was too old for this, he realised. It was just a month before his fiftieth birthday and his body simply wasn’t up to it. Why hadn’t he given up smoking, or worked out more? Was this why no one had ever escaped this way? Perhaps the wire had been placed there as a trap, as a joke by guards who were laughing at him even now through the scopes of their rifles? He glanced down and saw inmates sitting around in the TV room. Then he was lit up in a sudden glare of light.
A patrol car had appeared around the corner. He could see the blue of his denim sleeve turning yellow in the headlights. Slowly the car came towards him along the tarmac road. It passed underneath him. He looked down and could see the guard extinguishing a cigarette in the ashtray.
The car kept moving. He hadn’t been seen.
Then, from somewhere deep inside him, there erupted an enormous surge of energy. He was no longer thinking rationally, but his body was working, his arms and legs moving desperately. He was fixated on the fence. If he was shot, then he wanted to fall on the other side of the fence. At some point he was aware of his glasses falling away, but his limbs kept moving. ‘I wanted Errol Flynn,’ he later wrote, ‘and came out Harold Lloyd.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Then his fingertips touched the wood of the telephone pole. He grabbed the metal stakes at the top of the pole with both hands, before letting go of his legs and swinging down and around to the far side of the wood. It was a move he had practised many times on the end of his bunk. He half climbed, half slid down the pole and lay in the grass, still and panting, watching the lights of the prison that now lay behind the fence. The camp was quiet.
Then he spotted his spectacles glinting in the grass, lying just a few inches from the free side of the fence. He retrieved them and adjusted them on his nose with what he called his ‘funny professorial gesture’. For a moment he had regained the Errol Flynn-like composure that was an integral part of his mental rehearsals of this escape. Then he completely lost it again as he turned to walk quietly down the bank away from the fence, slipped on a stone and tumbled down amongst an avalanche of rocks.
He ran though the dark, listening out for patrols, following a route from memory that Rosemary had described to him. Walls of illuminated prison windows watched him disappear across the open land, run alongside a dry creek bed and follow a small ditch past the main prison gate. He ran past the sign that announced ‘California Men’s Colony—West Facility’, and found the railroad tracks alongside Highway 1.
Awareness of his new freedom hit home as he ran at full speed along the highway, stopping only to hide in bushes when headlamps signalled the approach of a passing car. This short sprint triggered an ecstatic, almost animalistic feeling. Despite his difficulty on the telephone wire, he was in good shape for a 49-year-old man. He was six feet tall, with a bouncy way of walking that made him seem taller and physically more imposing than he really was, and his slender build was more characteristic of a tennis coach than an academic. At the time of his arrest his hair was starting to turn grey, which accentuated the classical aspect of his features. But while his face was aristocratic, his mannerisms were restless and American, and his eyes and smile had an unmistakably Irish charm. It was this subtle Irish glimmer that overrode the American and classical aspects of his appearance and became the prominent characteristic in the memories of those who knew him. His reckless Irish streak could also be relied on to override the other elements of his personality at pivotal times in his life.
Moments later, he reached the three trees.
CHAPTER 2 The Children Will Grow up Wondering about Their Mother (#u6acebf9a-b45d-5b95-b388-26ae27e63e26)
Timothy Leary’s arrest and imprisonment was not the first time that his love of forbidden substances had got him into trouble. His training at the prestigious West Point military academy in Massachusetts had also ended in such a fashion. On that occasion the substance in question was whisky.
Leary had been excited and a little overawed when, on 1 July 1940, he was accepted into the American armed forces. He was 19 years old, and war was engulfing the globe. West Point was steeped in the pageantry of American military history, and the sense of theatre created by the parades, flags and uniforms really appealed to him. But as soon as the need to conform began to be drilled into him, his doubts started to surface.
The physical side of the army wasn’t a problem. He completed the toughest part of the training without difficulty. This was ‘Beast Barracks’, or army basic training done in half the time to make it twice as hard. What was problematic, however, was the requirement to unthinkingly obey his superior officers. Tim’s interest lay in battlefield strategies and military history, and when he joined the army he had thought that it would be an essentially intellectual career. He hadn’t seemed to realise that he would initially be trained to disengage his intellect and simply do as he was told. With hindsight, it is difficult to see how Tim ever thought that he would be suitable for the army. In later years he would sum up his philosophy with the words, ‘Think for yourself. Question authority’ In the military an attitude such as this could get a soldier and all his squadron killed.
Another problem was the monastic conditions that the new cadets lived in. Opportunities for meeting girls were almost non-existent. Their best chance of doing so was when attending sporting events, because they were allowed a few hours of free time between the end of the event and the return to barracks. On the day that the sporting season came to an end, the cadets knew that they needed to make their last opportunity count. Following the army–navy football game in Philadelphia,
(#litres_trial_promo) Leary and a friend managed to find a brothel. Feeling magnificent and indestructible when he left, Tim bought four half-pints of whisky He ended up sharing these with the senior cadets in the toilets on the troop train home. This was a terrific honour, for the strict class system at the academy usually forbade the first years, or ‘plebes’, from speaking to the senior first classmen.
Leary’s involvement in this illicit drinking session was immediately obvious the following day, when he missed the morning reveille formation. Too hung over to attempt anything, he failed to make it out of bed. He readily admitted to the drinking, but did not offer the information that he had supplied the alcohol. When this was discovered, the Honour Committee decided that he had lied to them. They requested his resignation.
How should he respond? Tim knew that resigning from West Point would be a huge disappointment for his mother. But, more importantly, he felt that the Honour Committee was wrong. He had not lied; he had simply not told them the whole truth. Others considered that this was splitting hairs, and that his statement had still infringed the ethical code of the Honour system. Tim, however, was a man who was almost incapable of accepting blame, and he clung to this detail as proof that he had behaved ethically. He announced that he would not be resigning.
A court martial was arranged. The military trial in the elegant, wood-panelled room, with the officers in full dress uniform, their sabres laid on the table, was just the sort of event that had initially attracted Tim to West Point. The court examined all the evidence regarding the forbidden drinking session, and declared that there were no grounds for dismissal of Leary from the service. But he was still guilty of defiance. As punishment, he would be ‘silenced’.
Being silenced, or ‘sent to Coventry’ as it is also known, is a military punishment that effectively turns a recruit into a non-person. The victim is ignored, and the rest of the squadron are forbidden to speak to or acknowledge him. Tim’s roommates were moved into new sleeping quarters and he had to sit alone in the mess hall, surrounded by empty seats. It is a harsh punishment, similar to being jailed in solitary confinement while simultaneously having to undergo the rigours of regular training. Few people can take it for long. To make matters worse, the Honour Committee planned to get rid of him by ‘demeriting’ him. His every action was scrupulously studied for signs of failure. He was written up for ‘untrimmed hairs in nostrils’. A shaving cut was cited as ‘careless injury to government property’.
(#litres_trial_promo)
It may have been the injustice of his punishment that inflamed Leary’s stubbornness. It may have been a test of personal integrity, or it may have been nothing more than sheer bloody-mindedness, but despite now having no hope of a military career, Tim took this punishment and stayed in the academy. He refused to let it beat him. Months passed.
This was not what was supposed to happen. The point of silencing someone is that they will, sooner or later, break down under the treatment. Cadets are not supposed to be able to keep going, especially when, like Leary, they are in their first year and still have over three and a half years to serve. Leary threw himself into reading and sports. The strain turned him into a chain smoker, but he still won the long-distance run and competed at baseball.
In due course he became a sophomore, a third classman in the West Point system. The new influx of cadets saw him and started asking questions about his treatment. The last thing the military wanted was an influx of recruits who start questioning the system. Senior cadets were starting to speak out, too. As time went on, the judgement of the Honour Committee began to look more and more questionable. In August 1941, after nine months of silencing, Leary was approached by a pair of cadet officers who were acting as unofficial go-betweens for the Honour Committee. They asked him what his terms would be to leave West Point.
Leary replied that he would need a written statement of his innocence from the Honour Committee, and he wanted it read out publicly. After a couple of days, this was agreed to. The Cadet Adjutant called for silence during lunchtime in the mess hall, and read out the brief statement of innocence to an unprepared audience. At first there was a stunned silence, and then applause from some of the braver cadets. After lunch Leary packed his bags and left.
When Tim told this story in later years, he framed it as a terrific victory, a triumph of one innocent man’s will against a seemingly unbeatable bureaucracy. Ultimately, of course, he had been rejected by the army and his peers, and had been forced to resign. Yet he found a perspective on events from which he could view his failure as a personal success. He had rejected the consensus viewpoint of the Honour Committee and instead invested his own point of view with a greater level of importance. He had learnt that it was possible to position a defeat in such a way that it appeared to be a success. There is much in this incident that seems to foreshadow the path his life would take, from the forbidden substance to his willingness to fight authority. But it was his ability to choose the way he viewed the events that was perhaps most indicative of what was to come. That and the realisation that the personal cost of a fight like this could be extremely high.
Forbidden alcohol at West Point had previously played a different, more fundamental role in Tim’s life. He had been conceived on the base following a dance at the West Point Officer’s Club.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was 17 January 1920, the day after Prohibition had made alcohol illegal, and his parents were loosened by bathtub-distilled gin.
His newly married mother, Abigail Ferris, was not accustomed to behaving loosely. The Ferris family were farm gentry from the village of Indian Orchard, Massachusetts. It was a strongly Catholic household, full of religious art and books, but years of social respectability had given the family’s religion a puritanical, almost Protestant ethic that differed from normal Irish Catholicism. Abigail was extremely devout and is said to have attended Mass daily. There were no wild parties in the farmstead, no drinking or dancing or merriment. The family was ruled by a series of pious spinsters. Men were not to be trusted, and sex was too horrific to contemplate. Abigail’s sister Mae wept for three days when Abigail got married, and begged her not to go on honeymoon. Tim’s father never visited the Ferris homestead.
The Learys were polar opposites. They were city dwellers in Springfield; rich, sophisticated and fun. They were among the first generations of Irish immigrant families to rise up and become professionally respectable. Tim’s grandfather was a professor at Tufts University, and became the medical examiner for Boston. He had significant real estate holdings and was thought to be the richest Irish-American in western Massachusetts. Like the children of many a wealthy patriarch, the younger generation of Learys veered more towards hedonism than enterprise. There were affairs, intrigue and glamour. Gossip and laughter were more common than religion or worry.
Tim’s father, also named Timothy but commonly known as ‘Tote’, gradually slipped into alcoholism after Tim was born. After West Point he practised dentistry, but although he was successful enough to become General Eisenhower’s dentist during World War II, it seems to have been a career that he had little enthusiasm for. He knew that he would be a wealthy man when his father died, and the drink helped the years to pass by while he waited. Tim grew up, caught in the culture gap between the two sides of his family. It was to the Leary side that he was most attracted, and the Ferrises could see this. The Leary blood in him would be a constant worry for them.
Tim was an only child and was often lonely in his earliest years. Like his father and grandfather, he was named Timothy after St Timotheus
(#litres_trial_promo)and was raised as a strict Catholic. He did what was expected of him by attending mass and becoming a choirboy, but he never seemed happy or engaged by his life. He had an imaginary friend
(#litres_trial_promo) for whom he would make his mother set an extra place at the table. He enjoyed the conversation of his imaginary friend and was an avid reader, but real people didn’t seem to interest him. He much preferred the cartoon character Felix the Cat, who merrily smiled and whistled throughout all his adventures. Prohibition may have made alcohol illegal at the time, but this never concerned Felix. He would usually have a glass of champagne in his hand. It wasn’t until Tim discovered sports and, later, girls that his more sociable, charming side started to emerge.
His grandfather
(#litres_trial_promo) died when he was 14, and the family discovered that the wealth they had been expecting had all but disappeared in the stock market crash, family loans and poor management. Tote went out to get drunk and never returned. Tim would not see him again for 23 years.
Tote had been a poor father, but he was a strong influence. He was a charming rogue, a storyteller and a drunk who had a passionate dislike of middle-class morality and institutions. When he left he seemed to become an archetypal loner figure for Tim, a nonconformist who walked away from his life when he realised that it wasn’t sustaining him. Long-suppressed feelings of abandonment would surface many years later, during a psilocybin trip with the writer Jack Kerouac, but the overriding impact of his drunken, occasionally abusive father was that he was the first person Tim knew who was brave enough to ‘drop out’. Although there was good reason to, Tim could not bring himself to hate him for it.
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The West Point silencing was a terrible disappointment to the maternal side of the family. It was clear by this point that a pattern was emerging in Tim’s life. His career at Classical High School, Springfield, for example, initially showed great promise. He became editor of the school newspaper, The Recorder, and helped it win the interstate award for excellence. He was popular, concerned more with his extra-curricular activities than his academic work, and the girls voted him the ‘cutest boy’. But poor attendance and some controversial editorials in the paper led to a confrontation with the principal that soured his leaving. The principal, Dr William C. Hill, had adopted Kant’s Categorical Imperative as the school motto: No one has the right to do that which if everyone did would destroy society. Tim and Dr Hill clearly saw the world very differently. Leary’s reprimand for absenteeism ended with Dr Hill shouting, ‘I never want to talk to you again. Just stay away from me and this office.’
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Strings were then pulled to get Tim into the Holy Cross Jesuit College. This meant a great deal to his mother, since she dreamed that he would become a priest. Again he started promisingly, but the lack of girls became unbearable. He began gambling, skipping classes and indulging in general schoolboy mischief. It was around this time that Tim, previously a diligent choirboy, began to question Catholicism and rejected his faith. He dropped out during his second year. After entering West Point and being silenced he enrolled in the University of Alabama and, more by accident than design, started studying psychology
(#litres_trial_promo) He was found spending the night in the girls’ dormitory, and expelled.
Aunt Mae worried that Tim was doomed to keep falling into trouble, letting himself down and distressing his family. In a pattern that he would repeat throughout his life, Tim would use his intelligence, drive and potential to raise himself into lofty situations that he then allowed the rebellious part of his nature to hijack and destroy. What could be done about his Leary blood? How could his behaviour be improved? It is ironic that these concerns were being raised about him, for his later professional career would be dedicated to trying to answer those very questions.
Being kicked out of university meant that he lost his draft deferment. Tim returned to the army in 1942 and enlisted into the anti-aircraft artillery. Here he learnt how to load metre-long artillery shells into enormous 90-millimetre cannons, only to have his hearing damaged by proximity to the artillery. He was forced to wear a hearing aid, and the disability prevented him from being sent into combat. He was given a clerical position in an army hospital, and took the opportunity to complete his psychology degree. He left the army with an honourable discharge shortly after the war, by which time he had been promoted to the rank of sergeant. He was awarded the standard certificate signed by President Truman, which extended to Tim the ‘heartfelt thanks of a grateful nation’ for answering the call of duty and bringing about the ‘total defeat of the enemy’. He does not appear to have treated this certificate with a great deal of respect or care, for it is now damaged and looks as if at some point a dog has tried to eat it.
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Leary wasn’t cut out to be a soldier or a priest, but psychology did appeal to him. It was an intellectually adventurous pursuit, on the cutting edge of scientific knowledge. It seemed that great advances were being made in understanding the human mind. On this frontier he could hunt for answers to profound questions, such as why do people act in a destructive manner? How could a person’s behaviour be changed? How can a person be made ‘better’? Of course, he wasn’t searching for answers in order to improve himself. He didn’t think that his behavioural patterns were too bad at all. It was other people who had the problems, and it was them he wanted to help.
The stifling conformity of 1950s’ America was, intellectually at least, supported by contemporary psychological thought. There exists, the psychologists argued, such a thing as ‘normality’. This is how people’s minds, personalities and behaviour should be. But many people differed, by varying degrees, from this norm. They may have been unmotivated, homosexual, radical or mysteriously unhappy. These people were considered abnormal. It was the job of the psychologists to cure them and make them ‘normal’.
The psychologists were confident that they were up to the task. Wonderful new anti-anxiety drugs, such as Librium and Thorazine, had recently been invented, and they were being prescribed at a terrific rate. Therapy became fashionable. And if these methods were not sufficient to deal with severe deviancy, then whole sections of problematic brain tissue could be removed or neutralised through surgery or electric shock treatment.
Psychologists and psychiatrists took over the role in society once occupied by priests or shamans. It was their job to make sure that everything was all right. America couldn’t train psychologists quickly enough in those days, for it was believed that if only they had enough head doctors, then society could be made perfect. For a bright, ambitious young man like Timothy Leary the field of psychology allowed him to establish himself rapidly, achieve financial comfort and respectability, and settle down to just the sort of idealised life that psychologists and the American Dream were offering. After the war he returned to academia and embarked on the longest period of conformity in his life. He moved to California and, in September 1946, he became a doctoral student in psychology at Berkeley. He would consider himself a Californian, jail and legal status permitting, for the rest of his life.
Tim’s professional rise was quick and seemingly effortless. After finishing his studies he worked as a consultant, an instructor at the University of California’s Medical Center, and in private practice. In 1954 he became director of psychology research at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital, and published nearly 50 papers in psychology journals. His work culminated in the publication of a book called Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality: A Functional Theory and Methodology for Personal Evaluation. A huge work, 518 pages long and stuffed with diagrams and charts, it created a big impression in the world of psychology. The Annual Review of Psychology named it their ‘Best Book on Psychotherapy of the Year’ in 1957 and called it a ‘must read’ for American psychologists. It was followed by a manual of diagnostic tests called Multi Level Measurement of Interpersonal Behaviour, which sold well to institutions such as the prison system. It was these tests that, 14 years later, labelled Tim as a model member of the Californian prison population.
Interpersonal Diagnosis was essentially a method of categorising patients based on their personality types. The system would be used for decades to come and was an important step towards the personality tests commonly used today, such as the Myers-Briggs assessment. It included many ideas that were radical at the time. It argued that the definition of normality in psychological therapies was nothing more than a reflection of the white, middle-class values of the vast majority of psychologists.
(#litres_trial_promo) It claimed that the profession was too hung up on symptoms when it should have been analysing the patient’s environment and circumstances. Too often, what was considered abnormal, neurotic or psychotic behaviour was a ‘healthy, pro-survival adaptation’ of an individual to an unhealthy situation. And he argued that ultimately a patient is not a victim, and should not be encouraged to seek a source of blame for their problems, such as bad parents, the system or their background. Instead, they must accept responsibility for their lives and their own reactions to the situations in which they find themselves. This is an idea that is now a familiar concept in the twenty-first century personal development movement. Although many of Tim’s staff contributed to the work that went into the book, the ideas behind it and the overall philosophy were clearly his. It earned him a nickname: Theory Leary.
Interpersonal Diagnosis was the high point of Leary’s psychology career. But despite his success, his dissatisfaction with his profession was slowly becoming visible. For years his research team had been keeping score of the success rate of psychology. The results were sobering. No matter what types of psychotherapy were being used, a third of patients would get better, a third would stay the same, and a third would get worse. Control groups, where the patients did not receive treatment, showed exactly the same scores. It was impossible to avoid the conclusion that the profession he studied simply didn’t work.
Tim’s personal life flowered during this period. He met Marianne Busch during the diagnosis of his hearing problem in the army and fell in love at first sight. She was intelligent, musical, sophisticated and very sexy, and they were married on 12 April 1944. Once in California, they bought a $40000 house in the Berkeley Hills, at 1230 Queen’s Drive, with a terrific view of San Francisco across the Bay. Their first child, Susan, was born three years later, and their son Jack followed two years afterwards.
Their social life revolved around parties with other professional and academic couples. These were flirtatious, alcohol-fuelled affairs, but they always remained on the right side of respectable. No one really misbehaved, or at least not publicly. Like everyone else, the Learys drank heavily and, despite Tim’s father’s alcoholism, they thought nothing of it. Jugs of martinis were thought to be sophisticated, and those who didn’t drink were considered prudes. Cracks had started to appear in the marriage after the children were born, but alcohol helped to mask them, so they stayed, in true 1950s’ style, hidden and ignored.
In 1953, after months of friendship and flirting, Tim realised that he was in love with his project manager, Mary della-Cioppa, more commonly known as Delsey They started an affair that lasted two years, meeting three or four times a week in a small apartment that Tim rented in Telegraph Avenue. The affair became common knowledge, but although Marianne knew, it was never mentioned. Her drinking increased. She started seeing a psychiatrist.
No one realised how badly Marianne was suffering. She kept up the proper, respectable 1950s’ façade when she could have complained and argued and screamed. She could have escaped through separation or divorce. She could have taken the children and moved back in with her parents. Instead, she got out of bed on the night of 21 October 1955, taking care not wake Tim, and went downstairs to the garage. She closed the heavy redwood garage door, which was always left open because it had swollen in the damp weather. She got in the car and she started the engine.
When Tim woke the next morning, it was his thirty-fifth birthday. He was hung over. He searched the house, looking for his wife. His cries of ‘Marianne!’ woke the children, and they were following him when he went outdoors. The sound of the engine idling could be heard from within the garage. He wrenched the redwood door open and inhaled the sudden rush of exhaust fumes. Marianne’s body was in the front seat.
The note she left was brief. ‘My Darling,’ it said, ‘I cannot live without your love. I have loved life but have lived through you. The children will grow up wondering about their mother. I love them so much and please tell them that. Please be good to them. They are so dear.’
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It’s impossible to say how anyone, whether spouse or child, can recover from an event like this. The Learys found their own ways to cope. Tim dealt with the situation by turning to Delsey for support, and after the funeral they were married. They honeymooned in Mexico with the children, a vacation that Jack Leary would later describe as ‘short and unpleasant’. After returning to California, Tim felt the need to get right away. He took a leave of absence from his job, rented out the house and dragged the family off to Spain. The voyage was miserable and Tim and Delsey separated shortly after they arrived.
This self-imposed European exile would be a period of transition for Tim, and the end of his previous life would prove to be painful. The children were having a horrible time being dragged between various European schools. He had lost his faith in his profession. Marianne’s death hung over him, and he now had two failed marriages to add to his failures at Classical High, Holy Cross, West Point and the University of Alabama. He caught the clap from a Spanish prostitute during the Christmas of 1957. His money supply started to dwindle.
Tim rented an Olivetti typewriter and began work on a manuscript that outlined the changes he felt his profession needed to make in order to achieve results. It was called The Existential Transaction. In it he argued that psychologists shouldn’t stay inside clinics, but needed to venture out into the real world and see patients in real-life situations, as the act of going inside a hospital and seeing a doctor changes the patient’s psyche. He also argued that the psychologist himself should not try to be a neutral observer. He had to become involved with the patient, and be prepared to be changed by the process as much as, or even more than, the patient. This was a radical stance to take in the field of psychology. It recalls the paradigm shift in physics caused by Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which stated that the act of observing an event changes the event. This was the ‘transaction’ of the book’s title: the idea that something had to pass between doctor and patient if there were to be any change in the patient’s condition.
In January 1959 Tim became ill. He was staying in an apartment that had been tunnelled out of the rock in Calle San Miguel, in the south of Spain, where water ran down the bare rock walls and the beds were always damp. His scalp began to burn and his face began to swell. Water blisters formed on his cheeks. ‘Tim’s head was almost double in size,’ his son recalled later, ‘completely swollen up, incredible! He couldn’t see; his eyes were completely shut!’
(#litres_trial_promo) The Spanish doctors were unable to diagnose exactly what was wrong with him, for they had never seen anything like it before. The swelling and blisters began to spread to his body. Jack and Susan were sent to stay with a nearby American family, and Tim checked into a warm hotel. The mysterious disease spread to his hands and feet. He could barely walk and began to smell of decay.
The hotel did not permit guests to have pets, so he had had to smuggle Jack’s puppy into his room. The dog was also sick, and soon left a river of slimy yellow diarrhoea across the floor. Tim knew that he would be evicted from the hotel if the maid saw it, so he crawled to the bathroom, collected the toilet paper and set about mopping up the mess. It took him the best part of an hour. Then he discovered that the toilet had broken, and he couldn’t flush the evidence away.
The window overlooked the yard at the back of the hotel, so he crawled over to it and threw the paper out. It landed on electrical cables below, fluttering like flags for all to see. The only way to reach it was to head out across the hallway, down the stairs and out into the back yard. Every step was agony. He used his umbrella as a cane but fell more than once. Somehow he climbed on top of a packing crate, where he frantically waved the umbrella, desperately trying to reach the paper that dripped above his head.
When he finally made it back to his room, hours later, he collapsed into his chair. The pain was great and he had no intention of ever moving again. As the hours passed and the day turned to night, Tim basically just gave up. As he would later write, ‘I died. I let go. I surrendered. I slowly let every tie to my old life slip away. My career, my ambitions, my home. My identity. The guilts. The wants. With a sudden snap, all the ropes of my social life were gone.’
(#litres_trial_promo) And then there came an incredible feeling of liberation.
At some point in the depths of that night Tim felt something new growing in him. When the dawn came he found the swelling had gone from his hands. The disease was leaving him. But it was not just physical healing that occurred, because for the first time in his life Tim believed that he had experienced something spiritual. He felt that he had been reborn, and he suddenly had hope and confidence. He felt that he could move away from the life that he had led, and embrace whatever new life was about to arrive.
This new life was not long in coming. Tim heard that Professor David McClelland, the director of the Harvard Center for Personality Research, was taking a sabbatical in Florence. Professor McClelland had read Interpersonal Diagnosis and the pair met for lunch. Leary explained his thoughts in The Existential Transaction. They echoed emerging theories from a number of American psychologists, and McClelland recognised that these radical theories seemed to offer a way forward for the field of psychology. Impressed, he offered Leary a job. Tim would be returning to Massachusetts. He was off to Harvard.
CHAPTER 3 But Don’t You Think He’s Just a Little Bit Square? (#litres_trial_promo)
Timothy Leary arrived at Harvard at the tail end of 1959. It was a good time to draw a line under the past and focus on the future. The 1960s were about to begin.
His new position called for a new outfit, so he visited a Harvard Square tailor and emerged wearing a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches and a button-down shirt. With his greying hair, horn-rimmed glasses and hearing aid, he looked every inch a stereotypical East Coast academic. The only clue to his rebellious instincts were the white tennis shoes that he wore everywhere. He moved into a nearby hotel and enrolled the children in yet another school.
He soon settled into life at the Harvard Center for Personality Research, and his classes made an immediate impact on the students. There was some suspicion among the more conservative members of the faculty about his ideas, but he was undeniably interesting and it was possible that he was on to something important. He made friends quickly and was soon part of a drinking group called the White Hand Drinking Society. Evenings were spent hanging out in Harvard Square bars, discussing work and generally putting the world to rights. The return to Massachusetts also brought him near to his childhood home, so he was able to spend more time rebuilding his relationship with his mother. She was horrified when she discovered that her grandchildren had never once attended mass, but at least Tim’s current position gave her cause for pride.
Tim got into the habit of returning to his small office on Divinity Avenue to read and drink wine late at night, after his children were asleep. In this relaxed atmosphere he began to attract visits from eager and curious graduate students. Tim was always welcoming and willing to give time to their questions and concerns. It was during this time that he met Assistant Professor Richard Alpert, a man also prone to late-night hours. Alpert was 10 years younger than Leary, and was shorter with a fuller build and a round, friendly face. Like Leary, he was ambitious, a trait inherited from his extremely wealthy family. His father was a noted Massachusetts lawyer who had previously been president of the New Haven Railroad, and Richard had grown up in an atmosphere of money and success. He was a warm, fast-talking, eminently likeable psychologist who was a big hit with Tim’s children. When Tim decided to spend the summer vacation in Mexico, Richard agreed to join him. Their respective methods of journeying south said much about their different personalities. Tim was planning to make the journey in an old Ford that he had just bought, a plan that struck those who had seen the car as being both dangerous and extraordinarily optimistic. Richard tackled the journey with a little more style. He bought a small aeroplane and flew himself there.
That holiday took place in a Spanish-style villa at Cuernavaca. It was an idyllic environment, with a long veranda, terrace, swimming pool and a lush green lawn surrounded by ahuehuete trees and colourful flowering vines. Tim’s daughter Susan spent the summer with friends in Berkeley, but Tim and his son Jack were visited by many friends and colleagues, including Professor McClelland, Richard Alpert and an old friend and drinking buddy from graduate school in Berkeley, Frank Barron. Frank had been instrumental in setting up Tim’s meeting with Professor McClelland in Florence, which led to the offer of work at Harvard. Tim had returned the favour by recommending him for a similar position at Harvard soon after he had arrived.
When he visited Tim in Italy in 1959, Frank had been talking enthusiastically about some ‘magic mushrooms’ that he had obtained from a Mexican psychiatrist. Tim’s response to this was fairly standard for a psychologist in the 1950s. He was disconcerted and a little embarrassed when his previously rational friend suddenly began raving about mystical states and visions, and he warned him that he was in danger of losing his scientific credibility if he ‘babbled this way’ publicly.
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The idea of magic mushrooms had become known to mainstream society only a couple of years earlier, following an article by R. Gordon Wasson in the May 1957 issue of Life magazine. Wasson, an ex-vice-president of J.P. Morgan and Company, the leading investment bank, had the unlikely hobby of ethnomycology, the study of mushrooms in human society. Together with his wife Valentina, he had travelled the world investigating the importance of toadstools in tribal society. He had spent two years in Mexico investigating an intriguing report by anthropologists who, in 1936, witnessed a ‘sacred mushroom’ ceremony in a remote Mexican village. This report seemed to provide evidence that a mushroom cult, believed to date back 4000 years, was still in existence. This cult was centred on the ingestion of a mushroom called teonanacatl, or ‘God’s flesh’. These ceremonies had been driven underground following the arrival of the Catholic Church in Mexico. The cult had been dismissed as myth, and botanists had claimed that these fungi simply didn’t exist.
The Life article, a 17-page feature in the magazine’s ‘Great Adventure’ series, detailed how the Wassons had travelled to the remote highlands of Mexico, where they eventually met a curandera, or medicine woman, from the teonanacatl cult. Being included in a ceremony wasn’t easy, for it was only permitted to enquire about the mushrooms ‘when evening and darkness come and you are alone with a wise old man or woman whose confidence you have won, by the light of a candle held in the hand and talking in a whisper’. The mushrooms themselves had to be picked by virgins before sunrise at the time of the new moon.
(#litres_trial_promo) But eventually the Wassons’ perseverance paid off, and they became the first white people in recorded history to sample God’s flesh. Wasson’s sense of detached scientific observation ‘soon melted before the onslaught of the mushrooms’, he later wrote, and following a night spent on the dirt floor of a remote hut, with his mind flying over incredible landscapes observing wondrous visions, ‘the word “ecstasy” took on real meaning’.
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The mushrooms grew on a line of volcanic peaks just north of the villa where Tim and his friends spent the days lounging in the sunshine by the pool. A frequent visitor to the villa, Gerhart Braun from the University of Mexico, thought that he could obtain some of these fabled mushrooms. Did Tim want to try them? The stories about the mushrooms were undeniably intriguing, but the idea of taking them was a little frightening. Tim’s life had turned a corner and seemed to be on the right track, and there was no reason to jeopardise what he now had with the risk of madness. Yet there was also a professional curiosity involved. Frank had claimed that these strange fungi might play a role in their search for meaningful behaviour change, and this fitted with Leary’s suspicion that the ‘transactional element’ between doctor and patient that he had been searching for might only be possible with a chemical key—a drug.
And he was on vacation. He agreed to try them.
Braun and several friends headed off to the old Indian town of San Pedro, near the volcano Toluca. Here he met a curandera known as Crazy Juana, and by the side of a church away from the market she sold him a bag of the mushrooms. They ate them the following Saturday.
They were black and mouldy. They smelt rotten and damp and tasted bitter and stringy. Sitting in swimming costumes by the side of the pool, all but two of the party joined in. They ate six or seven each, and sat back to see what would happen. One abstainer, a friend of a friend named Bruce, was appointed as the official observer and was given the job of recording the reactions of the rest. After half an hour the effects of the drug started, and the world just came alive. Tim looked at Bruce, who was diligently writing down his observations, and was struck by the realisation that Bruce had no idea at all what he was observing. He found this realisation incredibly funny, and the earnestness and detachment of the scientific community suddenly appeared to him as ludicrous ignorance. How could they even begin to understand something that they were so separated from? The giggles kept coming and soon Tim was engulfed in uncontrollable laughter. Gathering his wits together, he saw to it that the children went into town to catch a movie, and headed indoors for a lie down. Then the visions really started, his mind gently split open and he was away.
When normality returned, Tim was a changed man. The slight change to the chemistry of his brain had altered the entire world. Time and space had been different, and he had understood the world with a clarity that he had never previously believed possible. ‘In four hours by the swimming pool in Cuernavaca I learned more about the mind, the brain and its structures than I did in the preceding fifteen as a diligent psychologist,’ he later wrote.
(#litres_trial_promo) Could this be the key to making genuine changes to the mind? And had he stumbled on a method to explore the methodologies he argued for in The Existential Transaction? If a psychologist took the drug with a patient he would no longer be an uninvolved observer in therapy. The role of the doctor would become that of a guide, reassuring the patient and steering them towards understanding the causes of their destructive behaviour.
But he had experienced something else as well, something inexplicable. He had felt himself slipping back down what can only be described as his genetic history. He had been able to stop and feel each life on his evolutionary ladder. He had mentally travelled back through the aeons, from the time of the simplest land animals to that of life in the oceans, from times of jungles and great ferns back to the start of life on earth. It was a powerful, vivid experience, and it differed from a dream in one important respect. Dreams are imaginative jumbles of experience based on past events and memories. But where had his mushroom visions come from? He had no previous experience to account for the things he saw and felt. The brain had done something that, according to all the literature, was simply impossible.
How should he respond to the experience? Tim could still remember his own reactions to Frank’s admission of his mushroom use, and he knew that he would receive the same uncomfortable reaction when he talked about what had happened. But now he knew that the effect was real, and if all existing theories of the mind were unable to explain it, surely it was the duty of a scientist to investigate further? Surely any scientific model of the mind had to include these inexplicable experiences if it was to be comprehensive and accurate?
It’s no exaggeration to say that this was the pivotal moment in Timothy Leary’s life. He had a new sense of purpose, as if his life’s work had just begun. From that day on he dedicated himself to understanding the psychedelic experience, never doubting the intrinsic value of the experience or the importance of chemicals in exploring the mind. But somehow he had to convince the rest of the world. And the only way he could do that, it was clear, was to persuade other people to try them.
The return to Harvard was an adventure. Tim and Jack accepted Richard’s offer of a flight back in his Cessna. ‘I didn’t tell him I didn’t have a licence yet,’ recalled Alpert later;
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘that would have scared him, I thought.’ Some fundamental flying errors led to the threat of arrest at a Mexican airport, a situation that could have become more serious if it had been discovered that Jack was smuggling an iguana into America, and Richard was smuggling two pounds of grass. Leary’s response was calm and unconcerned. ‘Let’s go and have lunch,’ he suggested, before smoothing things over with a bribe of $20. This was the start of a pattern that would emerge over the next few years. Whenever Tim and Richard were together, something unlikely would invariably happen and they would always end up having an adventure.
Once safely back in Harvard, Tim began to establish what became known as the Harvard Psychedelics Research Program. His first task was to obtain a supply of the mushrooms, and fortunately Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland had isolated the active component, which was called psilocybin. It was a simple matter to order as much as he wanted, and soon little pink pills replaced the foul mushrooms in his research.
Leary put together a study proposal entitled A Study of Clinical Reactions to Psilocybin Administered in Supportive Environments. ‘This investigation sets out to determine the factors—personal, social—which produce optimally positive reactions to psilocybin,’ it stated. ‘Positive reactions’ were defined as ‘pleasant, ecstatic, non-anxious experiences, broadening of awareness and increased insight’. It also detailed the study’s ‘ethical and interpersonal principles, which stress collaboration, openness [and] humanistic interchange between researcher and subjects’. These included participants alternating between the roles of observer and subject, running the sessions in ‘pleasant, spacious, aesthetic surroundings’, and the right of participants to select their own dosage of psilocybin. The proposal did raise a few eyebrows, for ultimately it was a licence for a bunch of academics to hang out in nice places, take as many drugs as they wanted and learn how to have a really wonderful time. But academic freedom was an important principle in the culture of Harvard, and the department approved the proposal. In October 1960 Leary and his colleagues started work.
Setting up the research was stepping into uncharted territory. There were no textbooks or papers for them to follow, as no academics had attempted to do exactly what they were setting out to do. But luck was on their side, for the perfect guide arrived in Massachusetts at exactly the right time. It was a man with one of the sharpest minds of the twentieth century. He was the British novelist Aldous Huxley Huxley found fame in the 1920s with books including Point Counter Point and Crome Yellow, but he is best known for his prophetic novel Brave New World (1932). This was a vision of a nightmarish future that, with the benefit of hindsight, is far more accurate and uncomfortable than other acclaimed dystopias, such as George Orwell’s 1984. Unlike 1984, which shows a nation oppressed by a totalitarian government, Brave New World predicted a civilisation that willingly enslaves itself in order to keep itself supplied with diverting but ultimately meaningless luxuries. As well as its observations about human nature and the political process, the book also predicted many scientific and social revolutions, and everything from genetic engineering to sexual liberation and middle-class narcotic use was prophesied with remarkable accuracy The relevance of Brave New World grows with each passing year, and with it the understanding of just how perceptive Huxley was. It is difficult to believe that the book was written as long ago as 1932.
Although some believe that Huxley was given a dose of the psychedelic cactus peyote by the occultist Aleister Crowley in 1930,
(#litres_trial_promo) it seems more likely that his first drug experience was in 1953, when he took mescaline. He tried LSD shortly afterwards and detailed these experiences in the books The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, which have since become classics of drug literature. It was to these books that Leary turned after returning from Mexico, in an effort to understand what he had experienced. And as luck would have it, Huxley, now aged 66, was at that time a visiting lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—a short distance from Harvard. Tim wrote to him and asked his advice in setting up his Psychedelic Research Program, and they met for lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club. In one of those happy coincidences that can easily be interpreted as a good omen, the soup of the day was mushroom. They both ordered it.
Huxley was delighted that these drugs were going to be studied at Harvard, for he understood well enough the controversial nature of the research, and knew that it would take an institution with the stature of Harvard for the work to be taken seriously. It was also a pleasing coincidence that Leary’s faculty had been established by William James, who in 1902 had written The Varieties of Religious Experience, a book about his experiments with the mind-changing drug nitrous oxide.
Huxley introduced Tim to Dr Humphry Osmond, the British psychologist who had coined the word ‘psychedelic’
(#litres_trial_promo) and used mescaline to treat alcoholics in Canada. Osmond later recalled his first impressions of Leary. ‘It was the night of the Kennedy election. Tim was wearing his gray flannel suit and his crew cut. And we had a very interesting discussion with him. That evening after we left, Huxley said: “What a nice fellow he is!” And then he remarked how wonderful it was to think that this was where it was going to be done—at Harvard. He felt that psychedelics would be good for the academy. Whereupon I replied, “I think he’s a nice fellow too. But don’t you think he’s just a little bit square?” Huxley replied, “You might well be right. Isn’t that, after all, what we want?”
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Osmond would later describe this impression as ‘a monumental ill judgement’.
Huxley participated in psilocybin sessions and gave advice. He warned Tim that what he was doing was not going to be easy and that the opposition would be great. His work had implications for social change and it had the potential to overturn existing scientific paradigms. But there were also religious implications. He was, after all, breaking the original taboo, for mankind had been forbidden to eat from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. The Wassons had spent years studying ancient cults and visionary religions for any hint of mushrooms or secret potions of unknown recipes that were given to initiates. They had found a considerable amount of evidence from all corners of the globe, and in later books Wasson claimed that psychoactive fungi had caused the emergence of religion in prehistory.
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This is undoubtedly a controversial idea, but it is one that has received surprisingly little criticism from the scientific community. This is arguably because that community lacks many other alternative theories to explain the emergence of the religious impulse, and because it provides a physical, chemical cause that is backed by strong historical evidence. It is hardly an idea, however, that is accepted by large, conservative religions. Such religions tend to preach against drug use and are offended by the suggestion that the visions of their founders were in any way chemically induced.
Huxley advised Tim to give the drug to powerful and important people. He said that Leary should run sessions for artists, intellectuals, business leaders and politicians. In this way he would cultivate some powerful friends who could protect his work and spread the word through important networks. Contrary to public belief, psychedelic experiences were not new. They had been around since the dawn of time, but only among an elite class of priests, scholars and the rich. Secrecy, laws and privilege had been used to keep them from the general population, who were allowed only simple stimulants such as alcohol. There was a reason for this. These substances were powerful. Widespread use could threaten a functioning, stable civilisation.
Like Tim, Huxley wanted psychedelics to be better known and understood. He thought that if they were used correctly, they offered humankind a way out of its self-destructive cycles of war and oppression, and this could only be done if powerful men understood them. But it had to be done carefully. He told Tim that because of his charm and respectability, he was the perfect person to ‘front’ such a campaign. This idea appealed strongly to Leary’s ego, but he protested, and questioned whether he was already too old. Huxley replied that this might well be the case, but ultimately he was the best candidate they had.
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Where could Leary find leading artists and opinion formers who would be prepared to take his mushroom pills? The best candidates were the leading lights of the Beat Generation, few of whom were unfamiliar with drugs and all of whom were eager for new experiences. Tim ran psychedelic sessions for well-known writers, such as Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and William Burroughs.
The poet Allen Ginsberg was an early convert who did much to help the Psychedelic Research Program. Ginsberg was born in New Jersey in 1926. His father was a poet and his mother was active in the Communist Party USA. As a young boy he reported spontaneous visionary experiences, and this led to his later interest in Buddhism and mystical states. He was influenced by writers such as William Blake and William Carlos Williams, and developed a style of poetry reminiscent of the rhythms of jazz. His best-known work is Howl, which was banned for obscenity shortly after its publication in 1956. The ban caused outrage among supporters of the First Amendment, which guaranteed freedom of speech, and was eventually overturned. By this time Ginsberg had become a prominent advocate of left-wing politics, and was considered to be a threat to internal security by the FBI.
Ginsberg approached Leary after hearing about his work from a New York psychiatrist, and in December 1960 he arrived at Harvard with his partner Peter Orlovsky, eager to experience this amazing new drug. They took the drug one evening at Leary’s house and had a profound experience, during which Ginsberg prophetically realised that it was time to start ‘a peace and love movement’. He then ran naked around the house, attempted to get Khrushchev and Kennedy on the telephone, and announced to the operator that he was God. He thoughtfully spelt this out to the operator to ensure that there was no confusion.
After the trip Ginsberg was as committed as Huxley to supporting the programme, but his advice was the opposite of Huxley’s. Drugs like this had to be wrenched away from the self-serving elites and scattered amongst the masses, he argued. Who could say that ordinary people did not have the right to experience visionary bliss, to have the veil of illusion removed and know the divine for themselves? After all, were they not Americans? Did the egalitarian foundations of their country count for nothing? It was Leary’s job, Ginsberg argued, to make sure everybody knew about what he was doing, and had access to the drugs in order to do the same themselves.
Over the next few months, while Leary and Alpert tried to assess these two conflicting arguments, they ran psilocybin sessions for over 200 colleagues, graduate students and volunteers. Typically they would take the drug with the volunteers and reassure and calm them if necessary They would also train suitable volunteers as guides to run sessions themselves. The pair made a great team, and their enthusiasm and credentials enchanted everyone they met as they travelled the country giving seminars, workshops and lectures. All the initial feedback was overwhelmingly positive, but what Tim really needed was some undeniable, objective method to measure these subjective effects that he and his study were reporting. He needed hard data, a set of statistics that would withstand the peer review of the scientific community and convince even the most cynical audience that psilocybin was a breakthrough in behavioural research. He also wanted to satisfy the second part of his Existential Transaction: the concept that psychology should leave the clinics and enter real-world scenarios.
The solution was undeniably radical. Leary and Alpert set up a programme to work with inmates in the Massachusetts prison system. Their aim was to lower the recidivism rate, which at the time was running at 70 per cent. If less than 70 per cent of the inmates who were given psilocybin reoffended after release, Leary would be able to show that the drug was an effective tool for convict rehabilitation. But this was not a plan that was without its political risks and dangers. If one prisoner who had been given drugs by the programme killed or raped after release, the press would have a field day. Tim went to work and set about persuading the warden and psychiatrist of Concord State Prison to approve the plan. Both were receptive, and the psychiatrist was put on the Harvard payroll as a consultant. It would be his job to arrange the volunteers.
In March 1961 Leary entered the prison, clutching a small supply of psilocybin. He was accompanied by two graduate students, Gunther Weil and Ralph Metzner,
(#litres_trial_promo) and their aim was to spend the day tripping with six prisoners who were nearing release. The prisoners would use the drug to gain and share insights into why they had committed crime, and they had also agreed to participate in a support programme after release.
Tim took the drug first in order to gain the inmates’ trust. When the effects kicked in, he started to feel terrible. A windowless room in the heart of a penitentiary was not a location that was conducive to a positive trip. They had brought a record player and books of classical art with them in the hope of improving their surroundings, but they could not hide the fact that the atmosphere, and the company, was oppressive. Tim was conscious of how ugly and repulsive the bank robber at his side appeared to him. Nervously, he tried to speak, and they asked each other how they felt. The drug caused Leary to respond truthfully, so he told the prisoner that he was afraid of him. The prisoner was surprised because he was also feeling afraid of Tim.
‘Why are you scared of me?’ the convict asked.
‘Because you’re a criminal. Why are you afraid of me?’
‘I’m afraid of you ’cause you’re a fucking mad scientist.’ They both laughed, a connection was made and the atmosphere started to improve.
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The Prisoner Rehabilitation Program continued and expanded. It was conducted in as open and public a manner as possible, and many visitors to Harvard found themselves invited to observe sessions. Word got out amongst the inmates, and the list of volunteer prisoners expanded rapidly. When the results eventually started to come in during the following year, they were astonishing. They appeared to show that recidivism amongst volunteers who had undergone psilocybin therapy had dropped from 70 per cent to 10 per cent.
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It was almost too good to be true. The implications were enormous, and if it continued, prison populations could be drastically reduced. But the reaction from the academic community was notably muted. Few people were comfortable with the idea of psychedelics, and results such as these forced them onto the academic agenda. Not everyone was prepared to accept this. To the uninitiated, there is something fundamentally frightening about the idea of psychedelic trips, and while the idea of the psychologist taking the drug may have been intellectually acceptable in theory, in practice it seemed wholly irresponsible. Tim had already been gaining political enemies on campus because his work had been attracting more than its fair share of the brightest graduate students. Now he was reporting results that trod on a lot of toes.
It was never claimed that the psilocybin in itself was a ‘cure’. It was part of a system of support and therapy. As Leary noted after his first few experiences with psilocybin, the psychedelic experience did not actually solve anything itself. What it did do, he claimed, was give a much clearer understanding of life’s problems, and that was a useful springboard for finding solutions. The prison programme involved an extensive support system to help the patients after release in order to help them restructure their lives following the insights of the mushroom sessions. The team helped the ex-inmates to find jobs, worked with their parole offices, and Tim even let prisoners stay at his home while they were being housed. Critics claimed that the success of the experiment was due to the extra support and not the drug. A follow-up study 20 years later found that the recidivism decline had not been significant after all, and that the original study used misleading figures in the base-rate comparison.
(#litres_trial_promo) It did find, however, that there was other evidence for personality change. Behaviour change, whether in convicts or psychotherapy patients, is notoriously hard to prove, but it does seem that the use of psilocybin in this particular support programme produced results that warranted further study.
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Leary’s next project did little to calm his critics. Dr Walter Pahnke from the Harvard Divinity School approached Tim in order to do a thesis on a comparison between the psychedelic experience and ‘true’ religious ecstasy. In what came to be known as the Good Friday Miracle, 30 graduate students and trained psychedelic guides arrived in the small chapel of Boston University for an Easter service. Each took a small pill. Half of the pills were nothing more than placebos and half were psilocybin. The experiment was run under strict ‘double blind’ conditions, in that no one present was aware who had been given which pill, but it soon became obvious as to who had taken the psychedelic and who hadn’t. The Easter service and the church surroundings soon had the drugged students wandering round with looks of revelation and bliss across their faces, shouting out praise to the Lord. Analysis of the volunteers’ reactions by divinity students found no differences between the experiences of 90 per cent of the tripping volunteers and that of the saints and other Christian visionaries. Later experiments also confirmed that the number of people who reported a religious revelation after taking a psychedelic drug was as high as 90 per cent when the drug was administered in religious circumstances.
(#litres_trial_promo) Indeed, when the volunteers were tracked down 30 years later, they still made the same claims for the profound nature of what they had experienced that day.
(#litres_trial_promo)The implication here was that a state previously considered a blessing from God could be induced by man more or less at will. The Church might not be able to achieve this, but Leary’s magic pill could. He couldn’t have offended people any more if he tried.
Time published a favourable article about the research and its implications, but it met with a wave of disapproval and criticism. Few people were prepared to accept that a chemical-induced Gnostic revelation was comparable with the ‘real thing’. Leary was vocal in his conviction that all criticism of his work was ignorant, groundless and came from those with no experience of the subject in question, an attitude that would not help him politically. He regarded any attack as the result of the ‘Semmelweis effect’, which claims that the opposition to a scientific discovery is directly proportional to its importance.
This effect is named after the nineteenth-century obstetrician who massively reduced the mortality rate in surgery by insisting that doctors wash their hands, but who was ridiculed and cast out by his colleagues for his troubles. Semmelweis was eventually driven to madness and suicide.
At this point what Leary needed was a period of calm to reduce the political pressure and consider his next steps carefully. He did not get it. Instead his life was blown apart by a substance far stronger and dramatically more controversial than psilocybin. In November 1961 Dr Leary was introduced to LSD.
CHAPTER 4 Then He Licked the Spoon (#litres_trial_promo)
The story of LSD starts with a hunch: on 16 April 1943, the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann responded to a ‘strange feeling’
(#litres_trial_promo) that he should revisit a certain ergot derivative that he had synthesised five years earlier. Ergot is a rye fungus that is rich in alkaloids, and Hofmann, in his role as a research chemist at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in Switzerland, was attempting to find a circulatory stimulant more efficient than aspirin.
This particular compound was the twenty-fifth that he created in a series of lysergic acids. Initial tests had proven unpromising, and he had left it to gather dust since 1938. But on this day some unexplained urge persuaded him to mix up a new batch of this substance, lysergic acid diethylamide-25. He would later claim that he believed that ‘something more than chance’
(#litres_trial_promo) was behind this decision. A minute amount was absorbed through his skin and, following a three-hour ‘remarkable but not unpleasant state of intoxication’, he realised that he had something interesting on his hands. After thinking it over during the weekend, he returned to work on the following Monday and swallowed the first deliberate dose of LSD. He took a mere 250 micrograms, a millionth of an ounce, convinced that the effect of such a tiny dose would be negligible. This was not the case, and his journey home from work that day has gone down in history as perhaps the most memorable and harrowing bicycle ride ever.
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Hofmann’s creation was noticed by the CIA, which at the time was trying to discover an odourless, colourless truth drug. They would ultimately spend many millions of dollars researching LSD, which they described in 1954 as a potential new agent in ‘unconventional warfare’. But during that time they never managed to pin down just exactly what it was that the drug did. Initial reports, greeted with much excitement, claimed that it not only acted as a truth drug, but it also caused prisoners to forget what they had told their interrogators after it had worn off. Later reports declared that it was utterly useless as a truth drug, and went as far as recommending that agents be equipped with a dose that they could self-administer if they were captured and interrogated.
This would prevent them from being able to reveal secrets, or, indeed, say anything coherent at all.
It was then decided that LSD was a psychotomimetic, a drug that re-created the symptoms of schizophrenia or other mental illnesses, and was therefore a useful tool for the study of these conditions in laboratory conditions. The drug could also be secretly administered to enemy leaders to discredit them, and it showed great promise for use in psychological torture. Work continued along these lines for a while, but eventually it was admitted that the effects were really nothing at all like the symptoms of any known mental illnesses. It was almost as if the drug were mocking all attempts to understand it, giving hints and suggestions but always remaining one step ahead of researchers. The CIA would not be the only people working with the drug who would fall prey to its innate trickster qualities.
Despite not knowing what LSD really did, there is no doubt that there was much enthusiasm for it at the Agency. Alarmed by the idea that enemy agents might spike CIA operatives with the drug, the Americans started administering it to their own agents in order to train them to recognise the effects. Initially this was done in controlled circumstances, but eventually it was felt that it would be more valuable to spike operatives without their knowledge. Clearly on a roll now, this scheme was broadened so that it covered not just the unit involved in the research, but the entire Agency, and for a while surprise hallucinations and incapacity became something of an occupational hazard. The scheme was eventually stopped after a plan to spike the punch bowl at the CIA office party was discovered, amid general concern that the whole thing had got blatantly out of hand.
(#litres_trial_promo) Hundreds of Agency staff took LSD during this period, some on numerous occasions. There has been speculation that this might have been linked to some of the more bizarre CIA programmes that emerged at this time, such as research into Extra-Sensory Perception (ESP), or the idea of dusting Fidel Castro’s shoes with a chemical that would make his beard fall out.
The military was also investigating the drug, and it was US army scientists who coined the word ‘trip’ to describe the period of its effects. It was clear that LSD could have a profound effect on the battlefield, and over the course of research it was administered to nearly 1500 military personnel. The British army also experimented with the drug, and a unit was filmed attempting to undergo manoeuvres in a wood whilst under its influence. Unable to understand their maps, radio equipment and rocket launchers, the soldiers became increasingly hysterical and eventually gave up, at which point one man climbed a tree in an effort to feed the birds. Much to the surprise of the authorities, American soldiers began stealing this horrific, madness-inducing weapon, and began using it at parties.
Much of what is known about the US government’s experiments with LSD was revealed in 1977, during Senate hearings in which Ted Kennedy, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, attempted to discover the extent of a CIA programme called Operation MK-Ultra. Operation MK-Ultra was the umbrella programme that covered all of the CIA’s research into chemical and biological weapons during the Cold War. Much of the work was shockingly immoral. Hundreds of mentally ill patients had been used as guinea pigs in research into brainwashing and mind control, and they were dosed with a variety of drugs without their consent or knowledge. At a hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, researchers had given inmates LSD daily for up to 76 days in a row. An American doctor
(#litres_trial_promo) who had sat on the Nuremberg tribunal against Nazi war criminals was discovered to have since undertaken work that clearly violated the Nuremberg Code for medical ethics. Perhaps the most scandalous experiments involved spiking random, unsuspecting members of the public. Drug-addicted prostitutes in San Francisco were hired to pick up men and bring them back to a CIA safe house that was operating as a brothel. Here the prostitutes would administer the drug in drinks so that the CIA could observe the results. The agent in charge of this operation was named George Hunter White. He used to sit on a toilet behind a two-way mirror sipping martinis while he observed the action. He then used pipe cleaners to make models of people in whatever sexual positions he felt were most effective in removing their will and causing them to let secrets slip, and he sent these models to his superiors for analysis.
(#litres_trial_promo) White would later praise his job on the grounds that ‘it was fun, fun, fun’. He went on to add about his time working for the CIA, ‘Where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the All-Highest?’
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During this time the CIA were also monitoring, and at times covertly funding, other research on the drug in civilian medical and academic circles. Some of these experiments, such as the work of Dr Louis Jolyon West at the University of Oklahoma, were based on the Agency’s pet theory that the drug mimicked madness. Dr West, who was a CIA contract employee, conducted an experiment in which he gave an elephant the equivalent of 2000 human-sized doses of LSD, in order to see what would happen.
(#litres_trial_promo) The elephant in question lay down and never moved again. Any possibility of repeating this experiment in order to confirm these findings was dashed, unfortunately, when Dr West attempted to revive the elephant with a variety of chemical stimulants, and accidentally killed it.
But there was also work going on that seemed to contradict what the CIA understood about the drug. Doctors and psychiatrists, notably Dr Humphry Osmond in Canada and Dr Oscar Janiger in Los Angeles, were using the drug therapeutically. LSD was being used to cure alcoholism, study creativity and was even being given to patients in therapy. It became fashionable in Hollywood, and was administered to patients including James Coburn, Anaïs Nin and André Previn. Jack Nicholson used his treatment as the basis of his screenplay for the film The Trip.
(#litres_trial_promo) Cary Grant took over 100 trips to treat depression after the failure of his marriage, and claimed that as a result he had been ‘reborn’.
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This was baffling to the CIA. As they understood it, LSD was an ‘unconventional weapon’ that had the power to send people temporarily insane. They had successfully used it as a form of torture in interrogations. How could this be prescribed by psychiatrists in order to improve mental health? The effects of drugs are supposed to be predictable; a doctor should be able to prescribe a drug and be confident that he knows what it will do. LSD was not like that at all. Somehow it was able to produce totally different effects in different experiments. It just didn’t make any sense.
Leary was introduced to LSD by an Englishman named Michael Hollingshead. Hollingshead was working for the British American Cultural Exchange Institute in New York when he, together with his friend Dr John Beresford, bought a gram of LSD from Sandoz Laboratories for £285. Obtaining it was simple; they wrote to Sandoz on a piece of paper with a New York hospital letterhead, and claimed that they wanted to use it as a control drug in bone marrow experiments. The drug arrived in a small brown vial and, in order to make it a more manageable strength, Hollingshead mixed it with water and icing sugar and transferred it to a 16-ounce mayonnaise jar. Then he licked the spoon.
Fifteen hours later, when he came back down again, he knew that he had something unprecedented on his hands. He had a jar containing 5000 doses of a life-changing chemical, but no idea what to do with it. As he had first heard about LSD from Aldous Huxley, he called Huxley and asked for some advice. After a bit of thought, Huxley suggested that he contact Leary. ‘If there’s any one single investigator in America worth seeing,’ Huxley assured him, ‘it is Dr Leary. He is a splendid fellow’.
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Leary invited Hollingshead to Harvard but initially declined his offer of a spoonful of LSD from his mayonnaise jar. This was partly because the drug had already got a dubious reputation from the CIA’s military experiments, and partly because he believed that one psychedelic was more or less the same as any other. But when he saw the faces of people who had taken a dose, his curiosity got the better of him. He took a trip from which he would never really return. It was much stronger than psilocybin.
‘It was the most shattering experience of my life,’ he would write later.
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘It has been 20 years since that first LSD trip with Michael Hollingshead. I have never forgotten it. Nor has it been possible for me to return to the life I was leading before that session. I have never been able to take myself, my mind, or the social world quite so seriously. Since that time I have been acutely aware that everything I perceive, everything within and around me, is a creation of my own consciousness. And that everyone lives in a neural cocoon of private reality. From that day I have never lost the sense that I am an actor, surrounded by characters, props, and sets for the comic drama being written in my brain.’
Leary’s work had already started to create a slight separation, or dislocation, between his sense of self and the world at large. Over the years he had come to reject the notions of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ behaviour, and instead saw all behaviour patterns as nothing more than ‘games’ that individuals had been trained to play. He saw himself at the time as simply playing the ‘psychologist game’. His daughter was performing the ‘schoolgirl game’ just as, for example, a murderer would be performing the ‘murderer game’. This viewpoint is not intended to deny moral responsibility entirely, but it does tend to dissociate the ethical element from behaviour patterns. It also removes the sense of seriousness from people’s responsibilities, and makes it harder to take social and institutional rules seriously. They are, after all, merely part of the ‘game’. When a Harvard colleague joked that they should form a ‘Psychopath Club’ with those who followed this philosophy, Leary had replied that he genuinely was a psychopath.
(#litres_trial_promo) He told his colleagues that he had violated ‘every part of the American Psychological Society’s code of ethics’, particularly the part about not sleeping with patients.
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But it was only after acid that Leary felt himself became truly distinct from the everyday world as other people understood it. This is not to say that he retreated, ignored or dismissed the world of normal consciousness. He just no longer viewed it as being the ultimate reality He now knew that what he was really living in was not reality itself, but a model of reality created by his own brain. He knew that he had constructed this model, and that he was responsible for it. He also knew that he could change it.
It’s generally accepted that what we ‘know’ to be the real world is not the real world itself, but a model constructed by our brains based on our senses and our previous experience. The brain receives information from the five senses,
(#litres_trial_promo) which it collates in order to produce a mental model of the world, and it is this that we inhabit. This model differs from ‘true’ reality in many ways. We may look at a car and see that it is red, for example, but the car itself has no intrinsic colour. Our notion of ‘red’ comes from the way our visual system interprets the way some photons of light are reflected from the car while others are not. We may see a chair and believe that it is solid, yet science assures us that this churning soup of particles and energy is mostly empty space. It only appears to support our weight because what particles are there repel us. We also know that there is a lot of information ‘out there’ that we do not perceive, such as television signals, or the fluctuations in the magnetic fields that certain animals can use to navigate. However, we generally assume that while our model of reality is not perfect, it is at least reasonably accurate and consistent with the real world. We certainly believe that we are passively observing the world we live in, rather than participating selectively in its construction.
Increasingly, it seems that this is not the case. Research done in areas such as assessing the validity of eye-witness reports has shown that individuals are prone to see only what they expect to see, and can ignore anything that seems anomalous or contradictory to their beliefs. In a famous experiment at Harvard University, Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris showed volunteers a recording of a basketball game and asked them to count the number of passes made. Around 40 per cent of volunteers completely failed to register that, early in the footage, a man in a gorilla suit walked slowly across the court, remaining clearly visible for about 45 seconds. This concept was used by Douglas Adams in his novel Life, the Universe and Everything to create a spaceship that could land on the pitch of a busy sporting event and not be seen by the crowd. The brains of the observers, the spaceship’s owner knew, would reject the visual information that their eyes reported, regard it as ‘somebody else’s problem’, and refuse to acknowledge its existence.
Over time, we create a mental model of the real world that is strongly influenced by our beliefs, prejudices and experience, and our model will differ from that of other people in far greater ways than is usually accepted. The world that we consciously inhabit increasingly resembles our own ‘world view’. Should an optimistic person walk down a street, for example, they would be inclined to register happy couples, pleasant weather or playing children. A cynical person walking down exactly the same street might completely miss those details, and see instead the homeless population and the graffiti. Of course, the street itself hasn’t changed between the two observations, but this is almost irrelevant, as no one is aware of the ‘true’ street in its entirety
(#litres_trial_promo) The same principal applies to every aspect of life, from the mechanism that decides which news stories grab your attention, to the personal qualities in others that you respond to or overlook. The result of this is that the ‘world’ in which we live is not an objective, distinct environment, but a model constructed in our own image. In the words of Alan Watts, the influential writer on Eastern religions, ‘Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot’. Or as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote back in 1860, ‘People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.’
Leary called these personal mental models ‘reality tunnels’.
(#litres_trial_promo)Each person lives in a different reality tunnel from everyone else, and is personally responsible for constructing their own existential reality. To be truly ‘free’ it is necessary to recognise this for, in the words of the Discordians, ‘Whatever you believe imprisons you. Convictions create convicts.’
(#litres_trial_promo) This is a difficult concept to grasp, but it is profoundly important in understanding both Leary and his influence. It is the concept that explains the post-modern move away from the rational beliefs of the eighteenth-century Age of Enlightenment, which viewed reality as an absolute that could be understood through rational inquiry Enlightenment thinkers assumed that everyone operates in the same reality, but that, Leary believed, was just not true on a practical level. Concepts, relationships and events were now relative, and could only really be understood when analysed alongside the reality tunnels that created them. Our understanding of the physical world had been fundamentally changed when Albert Einstein recognised the importance of relativity, and now, Leary thought, it was time for the mental world to undergo a similar revolution.
Most people, however, go through life without ever questioning the validity of the world they inhabit, for these personal realities are convincing, seductive and consistently coherent. It is difficult to recognise their limitations, although the practice of meditation is useful for ‘switching off’ the brain’s participation in what is perceived. Not everyone would want to do this, of course. The realisation that what you believe to be ‘reality’ is in fact a flawed, personal construction can be a frightening idea, which can leave you feeling groundless, lost or alone. This explains the importance of religious, social and political movements, such as Christianity, environmentalism or communism. Movements like these attempt to ‘synchronise’ the individual realities of a large mass of people around accepted priorities and attitudes—a process that can be personally comforting.
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The idea that the world we are aware of is just an abstract of ‘true’ reality is fundamental to Leary’s later ideas, his behaviour and his sense of humour. The concept, however, existed for a long time before Tim.
It existed in the fifth century BC, in Plato’s claims that the world we are aware of is like the ‘shadows on the wall of a cave’. It is also a fundamental concept in Hinduism and Buddhism, where it is known as Maya, the world of illusions. But Leary was one of the first to approach the concept from an empirical, scientific viewpoint, and one of the first to use a synthetic chemical to see through the veils of Maya. As a result, he could make others experience this awareness without them undergoing years of religious training and practice. And unlike earlier mystics, who went to extraordinary lengths to achieve even a glimpse of the larger reality, he was also able to achieve this state whenever the mood took him. Indeed, he got into the habit of achieving it at least once a week.
Tim believed that LSD allowed you to reject a personal reality and imprint a different one. He argued that it was crazy to live in a reality that was negative and unrewarding because there were an infinite number of other ‘realities’ that the brain could use instead. This is the idea that underpins the majority of Leary’s philosophy. It is made explicit in the titles of some of his work, such as the LP You Can Be Anyone This Time Around or the book Changing My Mind, Among Others, and in remarks such as ‘You’re only as young as the last time you changed your mind’. By understanding how to reprogram your brain, you could step out of one reality and into another. It was a theory that Leary would repeatedly put into practice. His personal reality and his associated persona had changed before, but slowly, under the natural evolution of time. He had been a choirboy, a soldier, a sophisticated professional and an academic, and his version of reality had been shaped differently in each of these guises. From now on, however, Tim would be changing his version of reality every few years, or even every few months. Ideas and beliefs that had been intrinsic and crucial to him would be casually swept away by changing circumstances. Should his present reality prove to be inadequate, he would simply adopt a new one. But this was not a technique that would be easy on those around him.
People who met Tim now could tell almost instantly that there was something different about him. Some found him cold and slightly sinister, even almost inhuman. The majority, though, were spellbound. ‘I knew, the day he walked in, I’d never met anyone like him,’ recalled one of his students.
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘For a few years, I believed that he was the most creative human being that I had ever imagined,’ recalled his colleague and friend Richard Alpert, ‘He was head and shoulders above anybody else at Harvard or anyone else I’d ever met.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He seemed to have developed a knack of not imposing himself on people, but rather allowed those he met to project their own interpretation onto him. In this way he could be all things to all people—friend, scientist, charlatan, genius or irresponsible idiot. It is noticeable today, over 40 years later, that those who knew him at the time still describe him more as a legend than a real person. The impact he had on people has not faded with time. It may be tempting to blame, or thank, LSD for creating these reactions, but as his friend Lisa Bieberman once remarked, ‘To attribute Leary’s personality to acid is absurd, for there have been millions of LSD users, but only one Timothy Leary’
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After LSD, any thought of toning down his work to appease his critics at Harvard went out of the window. From now on psilocybin was out. LSD was the only tool strong enough for him. The fact that the use of this more controversial drug would only inflame his critics further was not a concern. Leary believed that LSD was more important than Harvard, and he wanted everyone to know it.
One problem the research team faced was that the existing medical terminology for ‘abnormal’ states was overwhelmingly negative. The language that typified the LSD reports emanating from the CIA and their partners used terms such as ‘manic’, ‘neurotic’ and ‘psychotic’. The researchers who were actually taking the drug themselves began to search for words that better described the bliss and awe that they were experiencing. When the scope of psychology proved inadequate for their needs, they found themselves drawn more and more to referencing Eastern religions, which had spent many thousands of years attempting to describe these ineffable states. This seemed a natural progression because those who had done most to popularise Eastern thought during the 1950s, the Beats, were the very same people who were participating in the research.
This did little to calm the concerns of other faculty members that Leary and Alpert’s work was becoming increasingly unscientific.
Harvard academics were clearly not sure how to react when they discovered Swami Vishnudevananda performing a headstand on the conference table in the Centre for Personality Research clad only in a loincloth. Tim seemed unconcerned by the reactions his work and life were generating. His house in the Newton Center district had become a multi-family commune, with Leary, Alpert and Metzner living together with various children and partners. This was unheard of at the time, and neighbours filed suit with the city, claiming that they were in violation of zoning laws that limited occupancy to single families. The old lady next door complained to everyone she could about ‘weird people who all wear beatnik uniforms’. A young man who had grown his hair down to his shoulders was a particular concern. ‘Every time I look at him,’ she confessed, ‘I want to vomit.’
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It has been claimed that by the end of 1962 the house had become increasingly chaotic. The English author Alan Watts, who is credited with popularising Buddhism in the West, was amazed at the mess that he found in Leary’s house. He could not understand how anyone who had experienced such expanded awareness could live in such squalor. Those who lived in the house, however, find this reaction a little unfair. Ralph Metzner lived in the commune throughout its existence and claims that the mess was ‘no more than average, although on some days it might have seemed excessive’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Metzner also doubts claims that psilocybin pills were left lying around where they could be found by children, for there was very little psilocybin available during the time of the Newton Center commune and people were very protective of their supplies. Jack Leary, however, has claimed that he found and ate some when he was aged 12. He later recalled staring at the dog, trying to understand how it could be sitting normally and jumping up in the air at the same time. The dog was equally mystified, as Jack had fed it some of the pills beforehand.
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Huxley was becomingly increasingly concerned about Leary’s progress. He was not treading the cautious, considered path that they had discussed. Indeed, he seemed to be almost wilfully courting controversy ‘Yes, what about Timothy Leary?’ Huxley wrote to Osmond in December 1962. ‘I spent an evening with him here a few weeks ago—and he talked such nonsense…that I became quite concerned. Not about his sanity—because he is perfectly sane—but about his prospects in the world; for this nonsense-talking is just another device for annoying people in authority, flouting convention, cocking snooks at the academic world; it is the reaction of a mischievous Irish boy to the headmaster of his school. One of these days the headmaster will lose patience…I am very fond of Tim…but why, oh why does he have to be such an ass?’
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Huxley’s words, as ever, were prophetic. The CIA had been keeping an eye on Tim’s work. They were aware of all LSD research because they were alerted by Sandoz Laboratories to every purchase of the drug.
(#litres_trial_promo)Initially they were content to monitor activities quietly in the hope that his results would be of interest. But it soon became clear that Leary and Alpert were a touch too evangelical and too public with their work, and that their influence was spreading.
Leary had been crossing the country turning on influential people and talking to whoever would listen. He had taken the drug to Hollywood, where his growing fame made him an honoured guest at many film industry parties.
(#litres_trial_promo) It had also taken him to Washington, where he had been approached by a woman called Mary Pinchot Meyer, whom he trained to guide people on LSD trips. Meyer had recently divorced Cord Meyer, an influential CIA agent noted for his work in covert operations. She explained that she intended to organise LSD sessions for a group of ‘very powerful men’ and their wives and mistresses. Meyer has since gone on to feature in a number of conspiracy theories; a mistress of JFK, she was shot dead by an unknown assailant on a canal towpath in October 1964.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was Meyer, Leary claimed, who convinced John F. Kennedy to try acid, which he took, as well as other drugs, while in the White House.
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Tim loved all this attention. He loved being in the company of the rich, the famous and the brilliant. He loved his own growing sense of fame and notoriety. The volunteers who came to the project knew that Tim was the oldest, the smartest and the most psychedelically experienced of the group. It was around this time that, in the words of Ralph Metzner, ‘the issue of leadership, with its associated complex of idealization and disappointment, was beginning to rear its ugly head’.
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It soon became apparent that the participants in the programme were looking to Tim for guidance and expected him to lead them. This seems to have initially bothered Leary, but once he accepted that this was to be his role, he grasped the nettle firmly and never let go. Soon he was the unquestioned alpha male of the psychedelic project, and this position was strengthened with each new person he turned on. Under the influence of the drug, the tripper would often see the guide and drug-giver as an almost divine figure, the benign patriarch who had blessed them with this experience. It was an effect that Tim understood well, for during his first trip he had seen Michael Hollingshead in the same light. It had taken a couple of weeks for this perception to wear off, during which time he had embarrassed Alpert by following Hollingshead around like a lost puppy. For many people to whom he gave the drug, Tim became the personification of LSD itself. Young women in particular would fall hopelessly for him. It was a situation that was easy to take advantage of.
Much to his later embarrassment, Leary had not initially noticed the sexual element of the psychedelic experience. He had always approached a trip as a pure death and rebirth experience that needed to be treated with great respect. He had known that all the senses were heightened and that strong emotional bonds developed between participants, but he had not realised what the natural outcome of this would be until he tripped in a sensually decorated Manhattan apartment with a beautiful Moroccan model. Afterwards he felt almost embarrassed about how long it had taken him to grasp this most obvious effect. How had he been so square and inhibited all this time? He consulted Huxley. ‘Of course it’s true, Timothy’ Huxley told him, ‘but we’ve stirred up enough trouble suggesting that drugs can stimulate aesthetic and religious experiences. I strongly urge you not to let the sexual cat out of the bag.’
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But if Tim had failed to notice the obvious, his growing circle of ‘converts’ were not so blind. There was a core of around 40 committed trippers at this point, and they were increasingly becoming based not in the classrooms and research labs of Harvard, but in Leary’s large communal household in the middle-class Newton Center. Rumours started to abound of wild, drug-crazed orgies in the Leary house. Locals were all too aware of the influx of junkies, homosexuals, Beatniks, foreigners and perverts to their safe Massachusetts suburb. ‘LSD is so powerful,’ Tim remarked, ‘that one administered dose can start a thousand rumours.’ In situations like this the reality rarely lives up to the events that are imagined by those on the outside. In this case, however, the straight world had no reference points to allow them even to begin to grasp what was happening. Behind the doors of the Leary household a constant stream of sexual and spiritual experimentation occurred that was far wilder than they could ever have imagined.
Although it is easy to assume otherwise, it was not just the hedonism and sexual liberation that made those early experimenters so enamoured with the drug. The main factor was intellectual, the belief that taking LSD gave them an increased awareness and understanding of the world. The drug gave insights that, although often lost after the trip was over, still affected people enough to convince them that they had become better or wiser through the experience. Such a sense of improved awareness is difficult to imagine, but it is helpful to consider the metaphor of a cup that is either half full or half empty. The idea here is that an individual decides which of these descriptions applies to his ‘take’ on life, and this indicates whether that person is optimistic or pessimistic. But to an individual who has been psychedelically informed, that concept can appear absurd because they would look at the cup and see that it is both half full and half empty. The two positions are inseparable and there is no contradiction that requires an ‘either/or’ choice. Indeed, to see the cup as either only half full or only half empty takes a lot of mental effort on the viewer’s part, as it is necessary to blind yourself to what is undeniably in front of you. After undergoing such an ‘obvious’ realisation as this, hearing anyone refer to a cup as being only half full or half empty seems somewhat blind or foolish. It was a series of insights similar to this that made those who took LSD feel that they now understood things ‘better’ than people who had not turned on. Increasingly, users of psychedelics began to feel that they had ‘outgrown’ the rest of the population. As the social critic Diana Trilling remarked, ‘I have observed a curious transformation in all the young people I know who have taken the drug; even after only one or two trips they attain a sort of suprahumanity, as if purged of mortal error.’
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The Havard faculty soon became aware that there was a growing black market in LSD amongst the students. It was spreading far beyond the limits of the research programme. Parents were becoming concerned. They were paying a lot of money for a Harvard education because they wanted their children to become the future leaders of American society They had not expected telephone calls from their sons and daughters announcing that they had found God. They were not happy when they decided to drop out in order to study yoga by the Ganges.
The inevitable confrontation came in the form of a staff meeting organised at the request of Dr Herbert Kelman, in order to air the faculty’s growing grievances and concerns. Kelman was a respected and powerful academic who had received grants from a CIA-funded organisation.
(#litres_trial_promo) The turnout for the meeting was so great that it had to be held in an auditorium. A string of complaints against Leary and Alpert poured out, from concerns about the scientific validity of their methodology, to accusations of irresponsible experimentation, corrupting students and damaging the department. Academic journals that stated LSD was dangerous were debated, and a committee was appointed to oversee Leary’s and Alpert’s future work. An undergraduate journalist, Andrew Weil, was investigating the emerging Harvard drug underground and decided to attend this supposedly private staff meeting.
(#litres_trial_promo) His account was printed in the student newspaper the Harvard Crimson and was picked up by the Boston Herald. It made a good story, and concern about this ‘Harvard drug cult’ reached the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), an organisation that had assisted the CIA in its drugs research.
Shortly afterwards the axe began to fall on American LSD research. The FDA declared that LSD was dangerous, and as such should only be administered by a trained medical physician. Leary was ordered to hand over his supply. From that point on, anyone who wanted to work with LSD had to obtain permission from the FDA. Moreover, it was designated an ‘experimental drug’ and hence could only be used for research, not for general psychiatric practice. The LSD therapy community blamed Leary for the ban on their previously legitimate work, but it seems more likely that he was the excuse rather than the cause of this change in government policy. The FDA would not have made such a decision against the wishes of the CIA.
(#litres_trial_promo) By this point the Agency had been studying the drug for over a decade and no longer considered it reliably controllable. They had successfully deployed it in operations, but their focus was increasingly moving to a new drug, quinuclidinyl benzilate, or BZ for short. BZ would knock people to the ground, and they wouldn’t move for three days. It was cheaper to produce, more reliable and, unlike LSD, could even be administered in the form of gas on a battlefield. As far as the CIA were concerned, BZ was a much better weapon than LSD.
Leary and Alpert knew that their days at Harvard were numbered, but they already had bigger plans. They started a non-profit psychedelic organisation that they hoped could expand to have bases in cities around the world. They called it IF-IF, the International Federation for Internal Freedom. It would perform research and publish a scholarly journal, but, more importantly, it would train guides who could go forth and teach others how to use the drug safely. The CIA, of course, found this very interesting. They issued a secret memo that instructed any CIA personnel involved in psychological and drug research to report all contacts with Leary, Alpert or any of their IF-IF associates.
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The idea behind IF-IF was that anyone could approach them and request a guided LSD trip, and provided they met certain standards of mental health and suitability, they would receive one. In this way, the psychedelic experience would spread far wider than if Leary and Alpert remained working solely in academia. They set up the organisation knowing that there was growing awareness of their work from the press and public, but they were unprepared for the scale of interest that followed. IF-IFs first public operation would be a psychedelic ‘summer camp’ in Mexico. Five thousand applications poured in for the 50 available places.
It was while Tim was in Mexico making arrangements that he heard he had been sacked from Harvard. The official reason was that he had left classes without permission.
(#litres_trial_promo) He was the first Harvard Faculty member to be dismissed since the great American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1838, who had scandalised the Harvard Divinity School with a lecture in which he urged his audience to reject organised Christianity and find God inside themselves. A month after Tim’s dismissal, Alpert was sacked for giving LSD to an undergraduate. Previously, in November 1961, he had given a written promise to the faculty that no undergraduate would receive the drug. It probably did not help matters that Richard was starting a homosexual relationship with the student in question. It certainly did not help that, according to Jack Leary, the student’s father was on the Harvard Board of Trustees and that the student went home and said: ‘Fuck you, Dad!…I’m taking acid and sleeping with a professor!’
(#litres_trial_promo) A deluge of press interest followed the sackings. The first Leary’s mother would know about it was when she saw it in the paper. This would be one scandal for which she’d never forgive him.
‘It tears out my heart to see what happened to them,’ remarked Professor McClelland. ‘They started out as good, sound scientists. Now they’ve become cultists.’
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In the events that followed, Leary might have behaved differently if the influence of Aldous Huxley had been stronger. But Huxley died of throat cancer on 22 November 1963, five hours after the shooting of President Kennedy.
Huxley had known he was dying when he was writing his final major novel, Island (1962), which was in many ways a more ambitious and remarkable work than Brave New World (1932). In the latter he had depicted a frighteningly real dystopia, but in his later years, following his psychedelic experiments, he realised that a far greater achievement would be to disregard the cynicism and attempt to design a genuine utopia. He wrote a pivotal death scene, in which the grandmother was guided through a psychedelic trip in order to ease her passing, as a model for his own departure.
(#litres_trial_promo) He had confided this to Leary a few weeks earlier, during Tim’s last visit. His final words to him were, ‘Be gentle with them, Timothy They want to be free, but they don’t know how. Teach them. Reassure them.’
(#litres_trial_promo) But with Huxley’s presence waning, his influence on Tim would no longer be able to counteract that of Ginsberg. Tim would eventually dedicate himself to the widespread, egalitarian advocacy amongst the young against which Huxley had strongly argued.
During the hour of Kennedy’s assassination, too ill to speak, Huxley wrote ‘LSD—Try it. Intermuscular, 100mm’ on his writing tablet.
(#litres_trial_promo)His doctor reluctantly consented, and his wife Laura administered the injection herself. She sat and read to him from an advance copy of The Psychedelic Experience, a reinterpretation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead that Leary, Metzner and Alpert had written, at Huxley’s suggestion, to guide LSD trips. The injection of LSD produced a noticeably beneficial effect in the dying man. Huxley became relaxed, comfortable and at peace. Very quietly and gently he slipped away.
CHAPTER 5 Jesus Christ, Do I Have to Fuck Every Girl Who Comes to This Place? (#litres_trial_promo)
Tim and Richard had run a psychedelic ‘summer camp’ in Mexico the previous year, in 1962, and it had been a great success. They had rented out the neglected and decaying Hotel Catalina, which sat on the beach about a mile and a half down a dirt road from the town of Zihuatanejo, 180 miles north of Acapulco. Electricity and water supplies were erratic, but the setting was idyllic and they knew they would not be disturbed. About 35 academics, students, friends and interested parties attended, and they spent six weeks running countless LSD sessions together.
According to Huxley’s insights into how to run a positive, successful trip, the beauty of the location and the calm atmosphere were important. The key was to pay attention to what Leary called ‘set and setting’.
(#litres_trial_promo)Here ‘set’ refers to the individual’s mental state, or ‘mindset’, and ‘setting’ refers to both the environment and the people present. It was important to be in a good frame of mind, not anxious or distracted by other concerns, and to be in a harmonious location with people you trusted and liked. If set and setting were good, a positive and pleasurable trip would occur. If they were lacking, however, then the horrors of a bad trip could result. LSD amplifies the surroundings and pre-existing feelings, Huxley realised, but it does not create anything that is not already present. It was the recognition of this principle that explains the different results obtained by Leary and the CIA, and why the same drug could be regarded by different researchers as causing either visionary ecstasy or profound terror. Individuals who were spiked with the drug without their knowledge, or those who were administered it in a clinical medical facility by unfamiliar doctors, were almost guaranteed to descend into nightmares.
For Leary’s party of like-minded friends, relaxing for weeks on a blissful Mexican beach, the results were about as positive as could be. The LSD sessions were joyful, and relations with the local Mexicans were good. Before they returned to America they played a baseball game against the villagers, with most of the American team still under the influence of acid. This gave them an unfair advantage, they discovered, as time kept slowing down after the baseball was pitched. They found they had all the time in the world to study the ball and line up their swings.
(#litres_trial_promo) After quickly going 8–0 up, Tim instructed his team to stop scoring and let the opposition catch up in order to preserve good international relations. The game ended a draw, and ‘everybody urged us to come back next year’, Tim wrote.
(#litres_trial_promo) And we planned to. Those six weeks at Zihuatanejo had given us a glimpse of Utopia.’
The following summer, however, was not a success. It started promisingly, and the guests arrived in good spirits. A 25-foot-tall wooden observation tower was built on the beach where it could be seen from every part of the complex. A relay of people would stay in the tower, tripping, for the duration of the summer camp. Being selected to be in the tower was a great honour, and there would be a ceremony whenever a new person was chosen. Ralph Metzner has since described a memorable night in 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. Hour-long electrical storms soundlessly shattered the sky into shards of yellow, turquoise and violet.’
(#litres_trial_promo) But there were signs that such memorable experiences could not continue much longer. Tim received a telegram from Mary Pinchot Meyer in Washington warning him that his summer camp was ‘in serious jeopardy’.
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The hotel started to attract visits from young, impoverished American travellers, people who in a few years time would be given the name ‘hippies’. They had heard about LSD and wanted to try it, but were turned away by Tim. They took to sleeping on a beach on the opposite side of the bay. Then a gruesome murder was linked by the press to their project. ‘Harvard Drug Orgy Blamed for Decomposing Body’ ran one newspaper headline, although there seemed to be no reason to connect the death to the camp. According to Tim, it had occurred in a village 100 miles away. When the police came to investigate, however, a tripping middle-aged woman, who resembled ‘the lank-haired vampire mistress from cartoonist Charles Addams’ haunted Victorian house’, jumped out at them from a doorway in a narrow corridor. She was naked except for a red and blue ink drawing of a ‘grotesque artistic parody of the crucified Christ’ on her body
(#litres_trial_promo) This was not the sort of thing that went down well in Catholic Mexico.
The police informed Tim that his summer camp was being shut down. The official reason was because he was running a business on a tourist visa. His attempts to appeal against the decision failed. He was told that the President of Mexico himself was insisting that they go, for he had received calls from the American ambassador, the CIA and the Justice Department, all urging Leary’s expulsion.
If this was the case, the most likely reason for this high-level pressure was the publicity that Leary was generating. The CIA had managed to keep their work on behaviour modification relatively secret. While parts were available in academic journals, much of the rest of the work was considered to be military intelligence and should not be available to foreign states. IF-IF, however, had a press officer who naively invited the world’s press to Mexico to witness Tim’s work. Life magazine, CBS, NBC and the BBC all planned stories, and Time, Newsweek and scores of other journals and newspapers were also invited. This was Tim’s reaction to the dismissal from Harvard. As he was no longer protected by the reputation of the famous university, he needed some other form of power base to support his work. Public opinion seemed to be the best option, so he did everything he could to court the press. It made a great story too, thanks to the sacking from Harvard and the idyllic surroundings of the Mexican beach. The majority of the press coverage was negative, but the idea of the establishment stamping down on a rebel scientist who claimed to be able to create enlightenment took hold in the public imagination. Thanks to his academic background, his enthusiasm for the drug, and his willingness to talk to journalists, Tim was by now firmly established in the eyes of the press and the public as the figurehead of LSD.
While the police were shutting down the summer camp, and with the residents in the process of being deported, a few people decided to take a last acid trip. This broke the golden rule of set and setting, and the more paranoid, persecuted atmosphere helped trigger the first cases of prolonged negative effects that Leary had ever seen. One tripper came to believe that he was a gorilla. He went swinging through the trees and terrorised everyone he met. He was eventually captured by Tim and five other men, who trapped him with a rope, tarpaulin and blankets. He was given a tranquilliser and returned to some form of lucidity the next morning. Another casualty, however, went into an almost catatonic state and remained like that for many days. Tim went through this man’s wallet and found several US government identity cards that attested to high-level clearance. When the airline refused to allow him to fly back to the United States in his catatonic state, Tim sent a wire to the US Defence Department. It read, ‘Your agent Duane Marvy is in the Chapultepec Mental Hospital, Mexico City’
(#litres_trial_promo) Then Leary returned to America in order to plan his next move. His first exposure to the dangers of the drug had in no way dampened his enthusiasm for it.
By now IF-IF had a head office in a medical centre in Boston, which boasted the wonderful address of Zero Emerson Place. The first issue of their journal the Psychedelic Review
(#litres_trial_promo) had been published and was a great success. It had a circulation of around 4000 copies, the majority coming from subscriptions. Tim, Richard and Ralph also completed their psychedelic reinterpretation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which was published as The Psychedelic Experience. This was intended as a manual or a guide to navigate the realms of inner space, and emphasised the similarities between an LSD trip and the Tibetan description of the soul’s journey after death. IF-IF was clearly a productive organisation and could hardly be considered a failure, but it still had not managed to found a retreat or a centre to which people could come for a safe, guided psychedelic session.
Tim set off to Dominica, on an ultimately futile journey to seek a suitable location in the Caribbean. That he was starting to become a little desperate was shown in his attempts to settle here, for he considered the location to be far from the idyllic paradise demanded by the laws of set and setting. At night the black sands and thick jungle seemed oppressive and sinister. The island was poverty-stricken and dependent for survival on the foreign corporations that ran the banana industry.
Initial approaches to the island’s officials were highly favourable, however, until a sudden change of mind further up the chain of command led to being told to leave. Tim has claimed that this was because of an approach to the island’s governor by the CIA. He left the island and headed to Antigua, where he met Richard Alpert. Alpert was still in the process of travelling to Dominica and was furious that Tim had got himself thrown off the island before he had even arrived. They set up in an old seafront bar called the Bucket of Blood, which was deserted and almost devoid of furniture, in order to investigate the possibility of establishing themselves in Antigua. They were now about $50000 in debt and Richard had taken to selling his antiques and his Mercedes to support their efforts. The pair began to fight during a group acid trip. ‘There were, like, 14 people sitting around us in a circle,’ Alpert recalled, ‘and Tim felt that what we were really fighting about was sexual in nature and so he took off all his clothes and offered himself to me, really. And the whole thing was totally bizarre. So we rolled around on the floor and then worked it out and we all went swimming the next morning. There wasn’t any real sex between us; not that time or ever. Tim was threatened by homosexuality. I think he’d had some unpleasant episodes in his life that he wanted to forget.’
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One of those present, a man called Frank Ferguson, who was working as Tim’s secretary, had a psychotic episode during the trip. The group was attempting to befriend the leading psychiatrists on Antigua in order to gain support, and one of these was known to be a specialist in lobotomies. As the IF-IF members had come to view the brain as an almost sacred organ, they viewed performing a lobotomy as an almost evil act. Ferguson was troubled by the ethics of dealing with this man. While under the influence of LSD, he decided that the only thing to do was approach the unsuspecting doctor and offer to be voluntarily lobotomised himself, as a sacrifice.
(#litres_trial_promo) This he promptly did and the resulting scandal wiped out any hope of IF-IF being accepted in Antigua.
Their luck didn’t improve when they flew back to the USA. Their LSD was in a mouthwash bottle in Alpert’s luggage, and he saw his bag fall to the ground whilst being loaded into the cargo hold. The bottle was smashed, and the drug soaked into his white linen suit. Obtaining new supplies of LSD was difficult now that it was regulated by the FDA, so for the next few months they were reduced to nibbling the suit when they wanted to trip.
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Fortunately, their luck improved considerably once they returned. They found the base that they had been searching for.
The house at Millbrook was a 64-room Gothic mansion in Duchess County, New York, about 80 miles north of Manhattan. The grounds covered 2500 acres across landscape where Rip Van Winkle, the stories said, had once encountered the Dutch elves. There were orchards, hills, pine forests, a waterfall, a three-storey gatehouse and a separate bungalow. It was empty and deserted when Richard first saw it, exploring its labyrinth of rooms by candlelight, and despite it being an ‘exquisitely horrible house’, he knew that they had found their home.
The house had recently been bought by Billie and Tommy Hitchcock, two grandchildren of William Larimer Mellon, the founder of Gulf Oil. The Hitchcocks were young businessmen, and their trust funds alone give them an income of around $7 million a year each. Their sister Peggy had been a strong supporter of Tim’s since Harvard, and she arranged for Richard to introduce Billie to acid in order to convert him to the cause. Once enlightened, he agreed to allow Tim, Ralph, Richard and a fluctuating group of between 10 and 20 of their friends and families to set up a communal home at Millbrook for a nominal rent.
It was a fitting home for the history-shaping research that they intended to pursue. ‘Big houses with intricate floor plans figure prominently in the drama and fantasy life of individuals and races,’ wrote a Millbrook resident, Art Kleps. ‘One expects, quite reasonably, on the basis of experience, personal and vicarious, that if one is destined to perform noble deeds or to encounter great and mysterious figures, that such a setting will be provided. We do not expect history to be made in hovels.’
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And so began the story of the experimental commune at Millbrook. Their presence was at first cautiously welcomed by the local town people, for the new residents were friendly, kept up a respectable academic demeanour and spent a lot of money in the local liquor store. Initial concerns were minor. The estate ‘once employed several dozen gardeners’, one newspaper commented, ‘but has not been manicured lately’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Only slowly did stories about the lifestyle within start to circulate, and the realisation that the new ‘lords of the manor’ were dedicated to strange drugs, group sex and the most un-Christian interpretation of religion imaginable. It did not help matters that the grounds backed onto those of Bennett College, a private girls’ school.
The Millbrook estate was quickly declared ‘out of bounds’ for the pupils, who were informed that any visits could result in their expulsion. This, the president of the college declared, was just ‘a precautionary measure’.
Once installed at Millbrook, Tim adopted a public persona that was, for him, surprisingly cautious. Plans to open IF-IF centres across the country were shelved as legal access to LSD had become too difficult. Instead he focused on the religious dimension of the psychedelic experience, and explored ways to communicate this to people without the use of any psychedelic drug. ‘Chemicals are only one psychedelic method,’ he told Newsweek. ‘There are hundreds of others we can employ here—diet, fasting, dance, breathing exercises, sensory withdrawal, Zen, photography, archery’
(#litres_trial_promo) He announced that Millbrook would host a series of drugless consciousness-raising seminars each weekend. ‘The Beats come, they see a straight scene, and they go away,’ he claimed.
These drugless seminars were unusual events. Guests paid $60 a head for the weekend, and would find themselves meditating alone in empty rooms while cards containing written instructions were occasionally posted under the door. The guests had to dress in togas and eat meals together in total silence. A voice would intermittently read ‘bright sayings’ over a Tannoy system, or a gong would be hit. For the full-time residents of Millbrook, who gobbled endless LSD tablets and giggled away in the background, the whole thing was completely ludicrous.
Tim kept up the ‘drugless’ angle for at least the next three years, when he went out on the road and performed ‘Psychedelic Religious Celebrations’ in theatres across the country. These were multimedia events, an hour and a half in length, which attempted to create a sense of spiritual awareness in the audience through light shows, prayers and the stories of Christ and the Buddha.
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The irony of this drugless stance is that by the time Tim arrived at Millbrook it was already too late to stop the swelling interest in LSD that would erupt into the mainstream during 1967’s ‘Summer of Love’. His advocacy at Harvard and Zihuatanejo had gained enough publicity that the existence of LSD was now public knowledge. Curious people wanted to know more, so they started to investigate the subject themselves. The establishment of an underground drug infrastructure that would eventually produce enough LSD to supply an estimated seven million Americans was now under way. Tim could talk about meditation and yoga all he liked, but nothing would put this genie back into its bottle.
Life at Millbrook, of course, was about as far away from the pious earnestness of the ‘drugless’ consciousness work as it is possible to get. Tim, like the CIA before him, was interested in the effect LSD had on what was known as ‘imprinting’. This is the idea that not all behaviour is learnt through a long process of repetition. Instead, there are certain times when a behavioural trait is ‘imprinted’ in the psyche during one specific event. The classic demonstration of this is a famous experiment by the zoologist Konrad Lorenz in which ducklings were hatched, not in the presence of their mother, but in the presence of a tennis ball. The newborn birds then imprinted this ball as their mother image. From that point on the poor ducklings would blindly follow the ball around, even after their real mother had been introduced to them.
It was possible to use LSD to imprint new behaviours, as the CIA discovered in their experiments in brainwashing. Indeed, one of the dangers of LSD is that it is possible for a careless tripper to ‘imprint’ a ludicrous belief by accident. But what the CIA hadn’t understood, Leary believed, was that at the height of an acid trip it is possible to ‘rise above’ all the imprinted patterns. In that state you could see that your behaviour was not the result of free will but of conditioned, robot-like reflexes. This awareness was like a laboratory rat, which had spent its life running along the corridors in a maze, being suddenly lifted up by a scientist to a height where it can look down and for the first time comprehend the maze it had lived in. LSD would allow the duckling in the experiment, for example, to become aware of his automatic response to the tennis ball and understand why it was acting in that way. It was this awareness that interested Tim, for it allowed an individual to work through previously destructive habits and become, he felt, truly free.
Tim’s research was now focusing on eradicating previous mental conditioning. The idea was that an individual could use LSD to replace a specific, unwanted personality trait with an imprint of new, less destructive behaviour. The ability to ‘reprogram’ yourself like this, Tim claimed, was perfectly natural. It was simply the next, unavoidable evolutionary step. Not everyone was convinced by this argument, however, as attempting to improve upon millions of years of evolution by taking conscious responsibility for the way your brain operated seemed arrogant and dangerous. Fortunately, this debate was mostly academic, for it was soon realised that permanently eradicating behaviour was extremely difficult. The problem was that the awareness granted by LSD was fleeting and easily lost after the drug had worn off. How could they make that level of understanding permanent?
And so began a strange regime of ‘deconditioning’ behaviour patterns. It owed a lot to the Armenian mystic and writer Georges I. Gurdjieff, who attempted to bring his followers to enlightenment through tactics such as shock, or mind-numbing physical exertion, such as cutting a lawn with a pair of scissors. At Millbrook, a bell would ring four times a day and everyone in the house would have to stop and write in a diary the behavioural ‘game’ they were currently involved in. Food would be dyed strange colours to confuse the senses, and visitors could find themselves presented with, for example, a plate of green eggs and a glass of black milk. Communal parenting was introduced, much to the dismay of the non-parents, who suddenly found themselves with the responsibilities of unpaid nannies.
(#litres_trial_promo) The aim of all this was to conquer the routine, unconscious patterns that leave us sleepwalking through life. Even 10 years later it was noticed that Tim studiously avoided routine,
(#litres_trial_promo)sleeping in different rooms, brushing his teeth with different hands, and ordering different drinks in bars.
Sexual hang-ups and jealousy are a big part of our conditioning, so they clearly had to go. The third floor was designated as an ‘anything goes’ area, and all beds were open to all-comers. Initial enthusiasm for the idea gradually declined, however, and it was grudgingly accepted that the plan was causing more tension than it relieved. Nevertheless, there was still plenty of sexual exploration in the house, especially for Tim. As the group’s alpha male, he was the focus of attention for the many female visitors who passed through the house. Art Kleps remembered being in the kitchen one morning discussing the similarities between Leary and Jesus with a Christian IF-IF member, when Tim arrived ‘tousled and haggard, drew a coffee and turned to the assembled breakfasters to inquire rhetorically: ‘Jesus Christ, do I have to fuck every girl who comes to this place?’
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All this was extremely difficult for his children, who were now in their early-to-mid teens. After attempts at communal parenting had broken down, Susan and Jack were more or less left to their own devices. Tim claimed that his unorthodox, hands-off parenting was in the children’s best interests, but it seems more likely that he was just too preoccupied with his work to give enough of his time to them. His parenting method, certainly, was the polar opposite of what is currently considered good parenting, since nowadays establishing a routine and clearly defined limits is recommended as the best way to allow children to flourish. His children were soon taking acid and other drugs. Leary stated on stage in 1967: ‘I know no child over the age of seven who hasn’t been given drugs, and I know many of them.’
(#litres_trial_promo) There was certainly no effort to provide set and setting and an experienced guide for the first trips of Jack and Susan.
The children reacted in opposite ways. Jack became increasingly aware of his father’s faults, and the disillusionment that began to set in slowly evolved into anger, and eventually outright hatred. Susan, on the other hand, became devoted to her father, and jealous and vindictive towards anyone else who wanted to take up too much of his time.
An attempt to gain a little normality was made at the end of 1964, when Tim entered into a short-lived marriage with Nena von Schlebrugge. Nena, the daughter of a Swedish baron, was one of the many exotic people who passed through Millbrook that year. She was, as Tim wrote to his mother informing her of the wedding, ‘a most remarkable person of unusual intelligence, character and wisdom. She is deeply committed to spiritual goals and is an ideal companion for the metaphysical explorations in which I have been involved. For the last six years, she has been one of the top fashion models in the world.’
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Nena was indeed incredibly beautiful. Tall, blonde and graceful, she had inherited the looks of her Swedish mother, and in time she would come to pass them on to the children of her next marriage, most famously to her daughter, the actress Uma Thurman.
Following their wedding on 19 December 1964, Tim and the third Mrs Leary embarked on an extended honeymoon around the globe. They said goodbye to their friends and family and they headed off, via Japan, to India. Tim had been planning to visit India for a couple of years, a journey he would undertake with a very specific aim. What he was looking for was nothing less than spiritual enlightenment. It was time to undertake what he called his ‘obligatory pilgrimage’.
CHAPTER 6 Thou Shalt Not Alter the Consciousness of Thy Fellow Man (#litres_trial_promo)
The newly-wed Learys spent four months living in a small cottage in the Kumaon Hills near Almora. It had no gas, electricity or running water, and was situated on a ridge that looked out over the Himalayas. They met up with Ralph Metzner, with whom they took LSD at the TajMahal, but generally they lived quietly and simply. This basic lifestyle did not appeal to Nena, however, and she quickly became bored. She came to the conclusion that the marriage had been a mistake, and by spring it was over.
The Indian trip may have been a failure as a honeymoon, but did it also fail as a religious pilgrimage? Tim had been planning this trip for a couple of years, ever since he’d realised that Eastern religious philosophy offered a better system for understanding the psychedelic experience than Western science. Once in India, he dedicated himself to religious practice, becoming a disciple of the tibetan Buddhist Lama Govinda and studying with the Hindu theologian Sri Krishna Penn. Ultimately, though, Tim’s flirtations with Hinduism and Buddhism would not lead to a genuine commitment to those religions. He was never able to totally conquer his ego and his intellect as those practices called on him to do. Tim was extremely fond of his ego and his intellect, and understandably so, for they were both remarkable. What he wanted was a system that contained the necessary understanding of inner space but that allowed him to keep all the fun, personal stuff at the same time. In this he was one of the first to evaluate spiritual practices through Western consumerist principals, a practice that would spread rapidly from the 1970s onwards.
Tim’s ambiguous relationship with existing religions is best highlighted by comparison with that of Richard Alpert, who took his own ‘Journey to the East’ in 1967. In many ways Alpert, the rich and ambitious young man who had been preoccupied with material values, seemed a far less likely candidate for spiritual transformation than Tim.
Yet it was Richard who returned from India a genuinely changed man, having renamed himself Baba Ram Dass, and having realised that the temporary illumination induced by LSD could hardly compare to the permanent awareness of a genuinely enlightened soul. He went on to write the bestseller Be Here Now and to become one of America’s leading Hindu theologians.
Ram Dass would later tell an intriguing story about the Hindu guru who transformed his life. He was exactly the same guru who appeared to Tim outside a temple, Ram Dass claims,
(#litres_trial_promo) during Tim’s Indian honeymoon two years earlier. Tim felt incredibly drawn to the man and started to approach him, but became strangely afraid. Fearing that he would miss his bus, he turned and walked away. In so doing he lost the chance to undergo the profound transformation that later occurred in Ram Dass. The incident left a sufficient mark on Tim, however, for him to include it in his autobiography many years later, albeit in a heavily embellished form. In Tim’s more archetypal version, the tourist bus was replaced by a ferryman who took Leary across the Ganges at night to a haunted and forbidden land. There emerged from the dark ‘an old man with long white hair, 20 feet away. He was naked save for a dhoti around his waist. His eyes were luminous. I was terrified. Suddenly I understood: he was some special ancient teacher who had been waiting for me all my life. I wanted to run forward and throw myself at his feet. But I was paralysed with fright.’
(#litres_trial_promo)Leary turned away from the man and later, he says, wept uncontrollably, convinced he had run away from the Buddha. He added as a footnote, ‘If this little story about meeting the wild-eyed time-traveller on the other side of the Ganges seems inconclusive and unfinished, it is because the event was exactly that—inconclusive and unfinished.’
Whatever the reality of the incident, it does coincide with an end to Tim’s attempts to find answers from established religion. He would continue to talk of the divine, but he now saw it as a product of the mind. God was within. He rejected the idea of a ‘higher power’ external to the nervous system. This was not to say that the universe was just dead matter, for he believed that it too was conscious and alive. But while it is aware of what is happening, he claimed, it is not aware in the sense that it plans what it is doing. ‘I think [the harmony in the universe] involves a consciousness of the interwovenness of organic life and inorganic life,’ he told Paul Krassner in 1966,
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘but is there one central computer that’s planning it all or can sum it all up in one moment? I don’t think so.’ Tim would continue to speak of ‘God’ throughout the 1960s, but his definition of the word was very different from that of the patriarchal religions of Christianity, Islam and Judaism. In Tim’s definition, God was essentially sentient chaos.
Having examined all the established religions and found them lacking, Tim decided that the only thing to do was create his own. How hard could it be? True, the established religions were the result of the ideas and experiences of millions of people over thousands of years. But those people did not have LSD. Just as the seventeenth-century astronomer Galileo, armed with his telescope and a few clear nights, could understand outer space to a degree impossible for the generations of star-gazers who came before him, so Tim believed that LSD allowed him to observe inner space more accurately and more frequently than any saint or visionary who had come before. This tool gave him the confidence to draw a line under the religions of the past, and create a brand new religion of his own design.
Leary called his religion the League of Spiritual Discovery, inspired by the mysterious ‘League’ of truth seekers in Hermann Hesse’s The Journey to the East. For its logo he took an existing Eastern motif, gave it a funny Irish twist, and created a four-leafed lotus flower. Millbrook was declared a ‘monastery, a seed ashram, a sanctuary, a spiritual shrine’, and Leary gave himself the title of ‘First Guide’. His religion had two commandments, both based on the belief that the right to control your own consciousness was the most fundamental freedom of all. The first was ‘Thou shalt not alter the consciousness of thy fellow man’. This was the ultimate psychedelic sin, giving the drug to someone without their knowledge or consent. Each individual’s consciousness was their own responsibility, and it was up to them to decide what to do with it. Attempts to bring someone round to your own perspective became known as ‘laying your trip on someone’, and this was considered to be pretty much the source of all of humankind’s problems. This principle was so important that the second commandment essentially restated it, just to ensure that everyone was clear about the issue. It was, ‘Thou shalt not prevent thy fellow man from altering his own consciousness’. Beyond that, everything else was permitted.
With commandments like that it would have been hypocritical to try to recruit anyone else into the religion and, apart from a few like-minded Millbrook friends, Tim did not. Instead, he urged people to start their own religion. ‘Sorry, baby,’ he wrote in The Politics of Ecstasy, ‘Nobody can do it for you.’
(#litres_trial_promo) While they were at it, they should write their own set of commandments, as Moses’ ‘tortured hang-ups are not exactly yours’. The next step would be to write their own bible, for the Old Testament was ‘the garbled trip diary of a goofy bunch of flipped-out visionaries. Don’t you know that God’s revelation comes to us today clearer and more directly than it did to Elijah, Abraham, Isaiah, Jeremiah? To deny this is to say that God and the DNA code haven’t been busy perfecting the means of communication.’ The foundation for this logic was the realisation that, as individuals were living in different ‘reality tunnels’, a ‘one size fits all’ religion was bound to fail.
Many people took his advice and started their own religions, the most famous examples being the Brotherhood of Eternal Love and the Neo-American Church, which was created by Millbrook resident Art Kleps. The Neo-American Church, with its motto of ‘victory over horseshit!’ and stated goal of ‘money and power’, was intended as a mockery of organised religion. Members of the church were known as ‘Boohoos’, and Kleps gave himself the title of ‘Chief Boohoo’. Leary became a member of both these religions, although the frivolous nature of the Boohoos was perhaps not entirely to his liking. Tim also declared that he was a Hindu, and that being a Hindu did not mean that he was no longer a Catholic. All religions, after all, were different attempts to illuminate the same universal truths. Limiting yourself to one religion was like seeing a beautiful statue in an art gallery, but only looking at it from one angle.
By now, the psychedelic revolution was firmly under way. The publicity Tim received from IF-IF and his Harvard dismissal had created snowballing interest in, and awareness of, the psychedelic experience. It was spreading by word of mouth through colleges and communities, and underground chemists were turning out home-made LSD in quantities of at first thousands, then hundreds of thousands, and soon millions of individual doses. It was global in nature, and in terms of its scale, it was a movement unprecedented in history. Never before had so many people undergone such a radical change in consciousness at the same time. Putting an accurate figure on its size is never going to be possible but, based on the number of LSD doses produced according to the government’s drug agency, a commonly quoted statistic is that seven million Americans took the drug during this period. In the press and on the streets, Tim was the undisputed figurehead of the entire movement. Yet what was happening, and what Tim believed was happening, were two subtly different things.
Tim saw the LSD movement as a revolution that was entirely spiritual in nature, for he knew how LSD produced religious rapture and ecstasy in himself. By now he had discarded his old academic identity and saw himself as a guru. He wrote an autobiographical account of his discovery of psychedelics which he called High Priest. It seemed to be a fitting title, for hadn’t his mother wanted him to become a priest? Those who read Leary or Huxley soon came away with the impression that the drug was nothing less than a holy sacrament. Many people who took LSD came to view Leary as a saint, a holy man, or a messenger from God. Indeed, there were plenty who considered him to be God incarnate. There were even satanists at the time who took to inverting images of Leary in black magic rituals.
There seemed little reason for Tim to doubt his identification of LSD with a religious sacrament. As well as his own experience and that of his colleagues, hadn’t they proved that the drug produced genuine Gnostic revelations in the Harvard ‘Good Friday’ experiment? The results of that and similar experiments had certainly been impressive, with up to 90 per cent of volunteers reporting a religious revelation after taking a psychedelic drug in a religious setting. But 90 per cent is not 100 per cent, and now that the drug was out on the streets there were few who went to the bother of arranging a religious set and setting. Tim had been a psychologist, not a sociologist, and his viewpoint was geared to an individual rather than society as a whole. He had seen some bad trips, but he had always been able to analyse what happened and identify fault with the guide, or the environment, or the individual’s mental baggage. There was no reason why, with work, these faults could not be worked on and the individual could not experience a beneficial trip. This approach is fine when working with individuals, but starts to fall down when the number of trippers increases exponentially. By the time that millions of people are experimenting with the drug, that minority of individual failures quickly becomes a significant social statistic.
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