http://thephoenix.com/Boston/life/95706-harvard-psychedelic-club/
How Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil
killed the fifties and ushered in a new age for America
By DON LATTIN
January 19, 2010
Though it imported most of its principles and philosophies from such
Eastern cultures as those in India and Tibet, as well as from south
of the border in Mexico, the revolutionary mind/body/spirit movement
that has so transformed American and Western society actually got its
start in uptight 1960s Greater Boston.
--
It was here, in buttoned-down Cambridge and in suburban Newton, that
four men Timothy Leary, a Harvard research psychologist; Richard
Alpert (better known as Ram Dass, the persona he adopted after an
enlightening trip to India), a Harvard psychology professor; Huston
Smith, an MIT philosophy professor; and Andrew Weil, a Harvard
medical-school student launched what would eventually become the
counterculture movement.
Through their trailblazing experimentation with (and proselytizing
of) hallucinogenic drugs, this "Harvard Psychedelic Club" influenced
everything from the music, films, and literature of the Western
canon; to the rise of the Silicon Valley technology sector; to what
we eat, how we exercise, and how we make love; and to our very
psychological perceptions of ourselves.
In his new narrative nonfiction work, excerpted here, journalist Don
Lattin looks at how, after expanding their consciousnesses with
psilocybin mushrooms and LSD, these four "career-driven,
linear-thinking intellectuals" advised a generation to "turn on, tune
in, and drop out."
--
CUERNAVACA, MEXICO
SUMMER 1960
Timothy Leary brought the bowl of mushrooms up to his nose and
sniffed. The smell reminded him of musty New England basements, or
perhaps a downed tree rotting in a damp forest. It was now or never.
He slowly placed one of the black moldy things in his mouth and
followed up fast with a cold chaser of Mexican beer. The mushrooms
tasted worse than they smelled bitter and stringy. Before he had
time to change his mind, he stuffed the rest of them into his mouth,
washing the mess down with that more familiar, and refreshing,
alcoholic intoxicant.
It was supposed to just be a regular summer vacation, some time to
relax before starting the new academic year. Leary and his son, Jack,
now 10 years old, scouted out the city of Cuernavaca and found a
villa for rent a rambling white stucco house with scarlet trim,
next to a golf course on the road to Acapulco. Cuernavaca, whose name
comes from an Aztec word for "place near trees," has been known in
more recent times as the "city of eternal spring." Its temperate
year-round climate made the place a popular getaway spot for many
famous Americans, including Hollywood heiress Barbara Hutton, Chicago
crime boss Sam Giancana, and the German-born humanistic psychologist
Eric Fromm, who studied Mexican social customs in a village just down
the road from the Leary villa. Professor David McClelland, the man
who offered Leary his new post at Harvard, was on retreat and working
on a book in nearby Tepozlan, about 10 miles away. But the scholar
who would have the most impact on Leary's summer vacation and the
rest of his life was a University of Mexico linguist and
anthropologist named Lothar Knauth, who was in the area translating
ancient Aztec texts written in Nahuatl.
Leary was renting the Spanish-style villa named "Casa del Moros"
after a wealthy Arab who built the place with two friends from San
Francisco, semanticist Dick Dettering and his pregnant wife, Ruth.
They had settled in and were awaiting the arrival of Frank Barron and
Richard Alpert. Knauth had been hanging around the villa, enjoying
the swimming pool and the lively company. In one of his conversations
with Leary, Knauth mentioned that he knew a woman named Crazy Juana,
an old curandera, a Mexican shaman, who collected magic mushrooms off
the slopes of Toluca, a nearby volcano. Leary remembered how Barron
had been talking last year in Italy about the wonders of these
mysterious fungi. Maybe that was just the ingredient they needed to
spice up their summer vacation at Casa del Moros.
"Why don't you see if you can find some," he told Knauth.
Leary's mushroom connection delivered on the afternoon of August 9, 1960.
Botanists classify these fungi as Psilocybe cubensis, but the Aztecs
called them teonanacatl, the flesh of the gods. Psilocybin mushrooms,
and the secretive indigenous religion that surrounds them, had been
mostly unknown to the American public until an event three years
earlier, when Life magazine published a long and sympathetic story in
its issue of June 10, 1957. The piece was written by R. Gordon
Wasson, a New York banker and amateur mycologist who liked to travel
the world with his Russian-born wife and search for exotic fungi. The
richly illustrated article recounts the adventures that Wasson and
his photographer friend Allan Richardson had in southern Mexico in
the summer of 1955 when they became "the first white men in recorded
history to eat the divine mushrooms."
With the help of a local guide, Wasson and Richardson found a
bountiful harvest in a damp ravine in the Mixeteco Mountains. They
brought some of the musty plants to the thatched-roofed adobe home of
Eva Mendez, a local curandera. "We showed our mushrooms to the woman
and her daughter," Wasson writes. "They cried out in rapture over the
firmness, the fresh beauty and abundance of our young specimens."
Sitting beside an altar adorned with flowers and icons depicting
Jesus and his baptism in the River Jordan, Wasson ate 12 mushrooms
and began a nightlong journey into worlds he thought he never knew,
scenes that "seemed more real to me than anything I had ever seen
with my own eyes.
"They were in vivid color, always harmonious. They began with art
motifs, angular such as might decorate carpets or textiles or
wallpaper or the drawing board of an architect. Then they evolved
into palaces with courts, arcades, gardens resplendent palaces all
laid over with semiprecious stones. Then I saw a mythological beast
drawing a regal chariot. Later it was as though the walls of our
house had dissolved, and my spirit had flown forth, and I was
suspended in mid-air viewing landscapes of mountains, with camel
caravans advancing slowly across the slopes, the mountains rising
tier above tier to the very heavens."
Five years later, sitting by the pool of his rented Mexican villa,
Leary had his own encounter with the flesh of the gods. Dick
Dettering and a couple of other guests joined him for the mushroom
trip, while two people at the pool party decided to abstain. One was
the pregnant Ruth Dettering, who was concerned about the effects the
drug would have on her unborn child. The other abstainer was a friend
of a friend who had shown up at the villa the previous night. Leary
called him Whiskers. He suffered from nervous fits, and decided that
an encounter with psilocybin mushrooms might drive him over the psychotic edge.
Leary started coming onto the drug. At first, he couldn't stop
laughing. There was Whiskers, sitting by the pool in bathing trunks
pulled over flowered undershorts. To top it off, he was wearing green
garters, black socks, and leather shoes. Whiskers had decided to take
notes while the rest of the crew tripped off to Mushroom Land. So
there was Whiskers, bent over a notepad, scribbling away like some
Viennese shrink on speed. Leary could not stop laughing. Oh, the
pomposity of scholars, he thought, the impudence of the mind. Tim got
up and staggered into the house, then back out to the pool on rubbery
legs. Suddenly, he remembered the kids. Who was watching the kids?
What would the kids think? He called over to the sober Ruth. "This is
hitting us hard," Leary told her. "You may have six psychotic nuts on
your hands. I think you should send the kids downtown to the movies,
and the maid, too. Get her out of here. And lock the gates. Stay
close, and for God's sake, keep an eye on us."
Leary was losing it. Someone asked, "How do you feel?" Tim couldn't
speak. It was all too much. Everything around him started taking on
the shimmer and glimmer of jeweled patterns. How do I feel? Far away.
Gone. Far. Far. Gone. Drifting off into a cavern of sea light. Making
his way back to the house, he fell on the bed, into the arms of
another woman who had taken the mushrooms.Bodies like warm foam
rubber. Marshmallow flesh. Mermaids. Laughing. Poking fingers through
bikini lace. Quicksand flesh. Dark hair. Ponytail. Cherokee princess.
Hummingbird words buzz from mouth. Stop talking. Look outside. God!
The undulating sea! Deep. Plants twirling together. Not even the
plants know which leaf, which stem, belongs to which. Interconnected.
Giant jungle palm time. Whoa! Oh!! My God!!!
Everything was quivering with life, even inanimate objects. Leary saw
Nile palaces, Hindu temples, Babylonian boudoirs, Bedouin pleasure
tents. Then came silk gowns breathing color and mosaics of flaming
emeralds, followed by jeweled Moorish serpents.
Three hours passed in an instant.
Another hour passed, and Leary was back from his visionary voyage.
Seven psilocybin mushrooms and an ice-cold bottle of Carta Blanca.
That's all it took. Leary was forced to confront the fragile nature
of his beliefs. The mushroom ride shattered the foundation of his
philosophy of life and his view of himself. What we call "reality"
was just a social fabrication. He would later call his trip "the
deepest religious experience of my life."
Timothy Leary returned from Mexico and immediately set up the Harvard
Psilocybin Project. The idea was to recruit graduate students and
faculty members from the many colleges, seminaries, and universities
in the Boston area. They would take a controlled dose of psilocybin,
the active ingredient in the magic mushroom, and then write up
reports about their experiences. Leary was thoroughly convinced that
psychedelic drugs would revolutionize the practice of psychology.
His project was officially part of the university, but its most
important activities occurred within the walls of Leary's rented home
at 64 Homer Street, just across the Charles River from Harvard, in
the leafy Boston suburb of Newton. The spacious, three-story home
sits atop a hill overlooking a neighborhood park and baseball
diamond. A wealthy French bicycle manufacturer built it in 1893.
Three large fireplaces radiate from its central chimney, warming
wood-paneled rooms on the ground floor. The fireplaces were all
ablaze during the psychedelic drug experiments Leary conducted over
the long winter nights of late 1960 and early 1961.
Leary came back to Harvard as a man transformed. There was no way he
was going back to his old life, to his old ways of doing things. His
new boss, David McClelland, was just finishing up his book The
Achieving Society, a psychological investigation into why some
societies prosper and others fall apart. Surely David McClelland
would understand the importance of these insights. He would certainly
agree that these psychedelic experiences could be used to further the
goal they both shared to humanize the profession of psychology and
foster an enlightened, compassionate society.
He didn't.
Leary saw unlimited possibilities.
McClelland saw administrative hurdles and political problems.
Leary suddenly realized that there was no way to convey the power of
the mushroom vision. It was something you had to experience
firsthand. It was something every man would have to try for himself.
--
NEWTON, MASSACHUSETTS
FEBRUARY 1961
Richard Alpert would have taken the magic mushrooms in Mexico with
the rest of the gang, back in the summer of 1960, but he arrived a
few days after Leary's first trip. Everyone was still aglow in the
aftermath of the experience, but the mushrooms were gone. Richard
would have to wait nearly nine months before he got his own
psychedelic baptism back home in Timothy Leary's living room.
Back in Mexico in the summer of 1960, Leary was still feeling the
mystic wonder of it all when he met Alpert at the Mexico City
airport. Richard had quite an adventure just getting there. He'd just
bought his flying teacher's Cessna and had decided to fly from San
Francisco to Mexico City over the startled objections of his instructor.
"There's no way you can do that," his teacher warned. "That's a
really difficult airport to fly into. Traffic control is a mess down there."
"Don't worry," Alpert said. "I'll be fine."
He bought the plane on a Saturday and flew down on Sunday. Alpert had
already rounded up a Stanford anthropologist who needed a lift to
Mexico, but he didn't tell him he had just bought the Cessna the day before.
They arrived and found Leary waiting in the terminal. Richard was
eager to tell Tim about the terrors of his airplane trip, but it
turned out Leary had an even more amazing trip to talk about.
They stood in the lobby as Alpert told the story about buying the
plane and flying down to Mexico the next day.
"That's quite a trip, Richard," Leary said. "You know, I've been
doing some flying myself internally."
They got to the villa, and all the guests were sitting around the
pool talking up the mushrooms. But the magic fungi were gone, and no
one knew how to find Crazy Juana and score some more. Meanwhile,
Leary was already planning his mushroom research project and wanted
to begin as soon as he got back to Harvard. He and Alpert were
trained clinicians, but this was not going to be like other drug
tests. They were going to change the world.
"We're going to take a whole new approach with this research," Leary
told Alpert. "Everyone thinks these drugs cause psychosis, but that's
because they've been controlled by psychiatrists. Of course they're
going to view this as psychosis. That's all they know. But there is
really something deeper going on here, Richard. Wait until you try
them. I learned more about psychology from these mushrooms than I did
in graduate school. These drugs can revolutionize the way we
conceptualize ourselves not to mention the rest of the world. It'll
be great. We'll give them to philosophers, poets, and musicians."
Alpert had been working with Leary for about a year at Harvard.
Richard might have had the bigger office at the Department of Social
Relations, but Tim was clearly the mentor in their relationship.
There were about 10 research psychologists in the department, all of
them interested in the dynamics of the human personality. As he got
to know Leary, Alpert started changing the way he looked at Harvard,
and the way he looked at himself. Until Tim showed up, Richard was
happily playing the professor role. He'd go to faculty meetings, sit
in big chairs, and have tea from a silver tea service. It was easy to
let the whole experience go to your head. Alpert would walk through
Harvard Yard and begin to think he really was somebody. He was a
member of the Harvard faculty. But Tim wasn't like that. He was the
first guy Alpert ever met who was not impressed by Harvard. It was just a job.
Alpert had missed out on the mushrooms in Mexico and wasn't in
Cambridge in the fall of 1960, when Leary started gathering together
the tribe that would become the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Alpert
had been teaching that semester as a visiting scholar at the
University of California at Berkeley, but he was getting lots of
fascinating reports about what was happening back at Harvard. He
couldn't wait to get back and join the party, and his chance finally
came one day in February 1961.
Alpert returned just as the biggest storm of the season dumped two
feet of snow on the streets of Newton. Leary invited him over to his
house for a Saturday-night initiation. By now, Leary and his growing
band of graduate students had started experimenting with a new batch
of drugs they'd gotten from Sandoz Laboratories in Switzerland. The
drug was a synthesized form of psilocybin, the active ingredient in
the magic mushrooms of Mexico. The psychic effects were the same, but
the dose was easier to control.
While Alpert had been in California, Leary had begun to assemble an
eclectic squadron of test pilots at his increasingly chaotic home.
They included Beat poet Allen Ginsberg; jazz trumpeter Maynard
Ferguson; William Burroughs, the legendary novelist and heroin
addict; and Alan Watts, the popular Buddhist writer and commentator.
Ginsberg was sitting at Leary's kitchen table the day Alpert burst in
from the cold. Alpert joined them at the table, upon which stood a
bottle of pink pills from Sandoz labs. He measured out 10 milligrams
of the drug and washed the pills down with a few gulps of beer.
Allen and Tim and Richard sat down in the kitchen and waited. Right
away there was a bit of a melodrama. Tim's son, Jack, was upstairs
when the boy's dog ran out of the house. The dog had been out
galloping around in deep snow and came in panting heavily. They all
started thinking, "Oh, no! The dog is dying!" Then they figured out
that they really couldn't tell if the dog was dying because they were
so high. Their thinking and senses were too distorted. Jack was 11
years old. He was upstairs watching television and a bit peeved that
these silly adults were bothering him. He came down, assured them
that the dog was fine, then marched back upstairs to the TV.
Alpert started really coming onto the psilocybin. There was too much
talking in the kitchen, so he walked into the living room, a darker
and more peaceful setting. He sat down on the sofa and tried to
collect himself. Looking up, he saw some people over in the corner.
Who were they? Were they real? Then he started to see them as images
of himself in his various roles. They were hallucinations, but they
seemed so real. There was the professor with a cap and gown. There
was a pilot with a pilot's hat. There was the lover. At first, he was
a bit amused by the vision. Those are just my roles. That role can
go. That role can go. I've had it with that role. Then he saw himself
as his father's son. The feeling changed. Wait a minute. This drug is
giving me amnesia! I'll wake up and I won't know who I am! That was
terrifying, but Alpert reminded himself that those roles weren't
really important. Stop worrying. It's fine. At least I have a body.
Then Alpert looked down on the couch at his body. There's no body!
Where's my body? There's no-body. There's nobody. That was
terrifying. He started to call out for Tim. Wait a minute. How can I
call out to Tim? Who was going to call for Tim? The minder of the
store, me, would be calling for Tim. But who is me? It was terrifying
at first, but all of a sudden Alpert started watching the whole show
with a kind of calm compassion.
At that moment, Richard Alpert met his own soul, his true soul. He
jumped off the couch, ran out the door, and rolled down a
snow-covered hill behind Leary's house. It was bliss. Pure bliss.
At the time, Alpert's parents were also living in Newton. Their home
was just five blocks from Leary's house on Homer Street. It was three
in the morning, but that didn't stop a stoned Richard Alpert from
storming through the snow to go see his parents. When he got to his
parents' house, he saw that no one had shoveled the deep snow off
their walkway. So he went into the garage and got the shovel. In his
drugged state, he saw himself as a young buck coming to the rescue.
He was all-powerful. He would save his parents! It all seemed so
mythological. Then he looked up at the window and saw his parents
standing there. They were obviously peeved, or at least confused.
Then they assumed that their son must have been drinking with Leary.
Alpert saw them up in the window and waved at his startled parents.
Then he stuck the shovel in the snow and started dancing around it.
He felt so fine, perfectly fine.
.
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