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Birth of a Psychedelic Culture: Conversations about Leary, the Harvard Experiments, Millbrook and the Sixties
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Review
"...Their recorded conversation has the flavor of a lively reunion as the two recall anastonishing young adulthood, generously illustrated with snapshots and brief statementsfrom colleagues...”Craig K Comstock, Huffington Post, March 2010"...Presented as a conversation between figuresof the movement, the authors provide an enticing read into the era...a piece of history well worth looking into, with its unique stories of a truly unique time.”James A. Cox, Editor-in-Chief, The Midwest Book Review
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An enchanted treasure chest, overflowing with insightful new dialogues, fascinating anecdotes, valuable historical accounts and other never-before-published material about the origins of modern psychedelic culture, by the people who helped to create it. Difficult to put down, this exciting book enriched my understanding of how Harvard’s legendary psychedelic research team turned on the world.DAVID JAy BROWN Co-author of Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse & Mavericks of Medicine Ram Dass, Timothy Leary and Ralph Metzner dedicated their knowledge, passion and physical lives to a detailed study of human physio-psychology-spirit. This book shows how their rigorous use of scientific method, combined with courageous personal experience, astounded and educated millions.John allen Inventor of Biosphere 2 Project; Chairman, Global Ecotechnics Someday, when people speak of the Psychedelic Age as they do of the Atomic Era, the Space Age, and the Personal Computer Revolution, the period 1960-1966 at Harvard's Center for Research in Personality and New York's Millbrook Estate will be central to the conversation. PhDs Leary, Alpert?/?Ram Dass and Metzner revolutionized an Ivy League psych-ology department with experimental shamanism during the height of the Cold War era and followed that up by launching a version of Hesse's utopian Castalia Foundation in the guise of a psychedelic commune. They devised novel experiments to study the transformation of the human mind altered by psychedelic drugs available for the first time in history in precise doses. Beginning with psilocybin synthesized from so-called magic mushrooms, they graduated to LSD, the most powerful mind drug ever discovered.They adopted a timeless religious text, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, into a manual for navigating the processes of death and rebirth (The Psychedelic Experience), and produced the first journal (?Psychedelic Review?) solely devoted to this emergent field. They introduced the highly useful concept of ?“set and setting,” and published scores of papers documenting and analyzing sessions (“trips”) conducted with graduate students, prisoners, theologians, intellectuals, artists, “beat” writers and jazz musicians.Transformed from Organization Man styled button-down neuronauts into new wave shamans, these three academics profoundly influenced Western culture despite a relentless push-back by hostile educators, sheriffs and drug agents looking for easy targets, a media that delighted in mocking them, and ultimately the full weight of the United States government challenged by a turned-on youth culture that refused to march in lockstep during the waging of a disastrous war.MICHAEL HOROWITZ Co-author of The High Times Encyclopedia of Recreational Drugs; Co-founder, Director? of Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library
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Product details
Paperback: 264 pages
Publisher: Synergetic Press (February 28, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0907791387
ISBN-13: 978-0907791386
Product Dimensions:
8 x 0.6 x 10 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.4 out of 5 stars
9 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#929,406 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
I have followed many of the writings of Ram Dass an those involved in that culture............I enjoyed this.
Fascinating description of the Harvard years of the Leary-Alpert-Metzner group. Well worth reading.
While the book is entertaining gossip, no new insights are provided into the meaning and significance of psychedelic experience. As gossip, it is no surprise that acknowledgement of the members of the Millbrook community in competition with Leary's Castalia Foundation/League for Spiritual Discovery--Bill Haines' Sri Ram Ashram and Art Kleps' Neo American Church--is limited to maybe three sentences by the editor/interviewer and completely unacknowledged by Alpert and Metzner. Alpert and Metzner, like Leary, are good at self-promotion, though they are not in the same class as the late, latter-day Svengali.It's good, though, to hear a bunch of anecdotes of those days from a few of the surviving horses' mouths.I recommend anyone who found this book interesting to leaven its content with a reading of "Millbrook" by Arthur Kleps (also available on Amazon).
Well worth reading. Gives a clear insight into what it was really back then like by those in the know. Full of interesting anecdotes.
An enchanted treasure chest, overflowing with insightful new dialogues, fascinating and little-known anecdotes, valuable historical accounts, rare photos, and other never-before-published material about the origins of modern psychedelic culture--by the people who helped to create it. Absolutely mesmerizing, and difficult to put down, this exciting book expanded and enriched my understanding of how Harvard's legendary psychedelic research team turned on the world, and beautifully preserves this largely unknown information for future generations. Birth of a Psychedelic Culture fills an important niche in the documentation of psychedelic history, and it sparkles with precious insights and illuminating wisdom.
This beautiful, highly aesthetic book is a true gem for anyone interested in experimental and explorative self-research.Here we get what one might call the 'whole story' of the early years of psychedelic research the way it happened around Timothy Leary at Harvard. First legal though controversial, later absolutely illegal and underground. In the very readable interviewform, some really freeflowing and in-depth conversations between Ram Dass (Richard Alpert), Ralph Metzner and the very wellinformed and empathetic Gary Bravo.The story can of course be read in many ways. A bunch of promissing academics being led astray by seductive drugs. And obviously there was major pitfalls, trips that turned 'bad' because of lack of psychological, philosophical and therapeutic tools to handle them. As Metzner states they could really have used a comprehensive model of the psyche like Stanislav Grof's.But it is also a story about courageous people willing to abandon the narrow materialistic paradigm of Western science to bravely charge for new territory.Central is of course the enigmatic figure of Leary. Martyre or self-deluded messianic? Where Metzner clearly seems the most positive of the two.The book has a wealth of interesting photos from this adventurous times, a tongue-in-cheeck foreword by the illustrious Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow and interesting supplementing comments from the likes of Peggy Hitchcock, George Litwin and Günther Weil.Absolutely essential supplement to Higher Wisdom: Eminent Elders Explore The Continuing Impact Of Psychedelics (S U N Y Series in Transpersonal and Humanistic Psychology)
It is tempting to assume we know everything we need to learn about the Sixties and to leave safely submerged what cannot be re-floated (thank God, say some). But two current books remind us that questions raised then and never wholly answered are arising again, buoyed in part by legal but quiet research conducted abroad and here in the U.S.I've been following this re-emergence neither as a devotee of the war on drugs nor as an old hippie (I am an elder, but was never a hippie); rather, as a former board member of a group organized by Robert Jesse and "dedicated to making direct experience of the sacred more available to more people." One evening in winter 1967, I was just a tourist lucky enough to witness Jim Morrison of the Doors on the stage of San Francisco's Fillmore Auditorium, instructing his baby to set the night on fire. As a relentlessly single-minded graduate student then, I watched as Timothy Leary, dressed in a white Nehru outfit, grinning broadly, twirled a long strand of glass beads under a strobe light, his teeth flashing on and off.What is the benefit, decades later, of revisiting the melodrama initiated by a Harvard psychologist eating bitter, stringy psilocybin mushrooms in Cuernavaca in summer 1960? Okay, the cast of characters soon included Allen Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, and the comparative religionist Huston Smith. Set at a prestigious university, an isolated Mexican beach town, and a patrician Hudson Valley estate, the story boasted cinematic potential. However, the main benefit for us is that the Harvard group was presented with many of the questions that illegality soon froze like actors in a prolonged tableau, questions now twitching back to public life.Like Jay Stevens' earlier book Storming Heaven, Don Lattin's recent Harvard Pychedelic Club is a wryly tumultuous history, but whereas the former covers a wider scope ("LSD and the American dream"), the latter focuses sharply on the group that began in Cambridge. In contrast to Latttin's account, Gary Bravo's Birth of a Psychedelic Culture brings us the ruminations of two of the surviving principals of the Harvard group, the scholarly Ralph Metzner and the psychologist formerly known as Richard Alpert, who transmogrified into the spiritual teacher Ram Dass. Their recorded conversation has the flavor of a lively reunion as the two recall an astonishing young adulthood, generously illustrated with snapshots and brief statements from colleagues.As Metzner acknowledged in his own The Ecstatic Adventure, the Harvard group generated "a" psychedelic culture--not the first, not the only. For example, Huxley had published a couple of books in the Fifties on thoughts occasioned by psychedelics in that capacious mind. The investment banker Gordon Wasson had written at length in Life about his discovery of a psilocybin ritual in Oaxaca. Stan Grof had done extensive research with LSD therapy in Prague and in the U.S.; and Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond, in Canada.The main question raised by reminders of the Harvard cohort is this: what are the benefits, if any, of various psychoactive molecules? Should the group's saga be dismissed as a swirl of inflated claims and false hopes, or can it also be read as a set of questions raised and, in some cases, not yet satisfactorily answered?Let us deal first with the charismatic Leary. According to an unforgiving obituary in Harvard's university daily, he had likened himself to Prometheus, presumably for having set minds on fire. In the same spirit of grandiosity, Leary might also be compared with Martin Luther, in the sense of challenging the establishment of his day and suggesting direct access to another reality, in Luther's case through his translation of the Bible; in Leary's, through a molecule that he wanted to help make vernacular. One difference is that despite the best efforts of activists, Leary was unable to get enough political power on his side to weather the inevitable counter-revolution.It is a cliché of the underground psychedelic culture that Leary was advised by Huxley to continue discreet research among patients, artists, intellectuals and the like; by Ginsberg, to turn on as many people as possible. (The poet's advice came during an acid initiation when Ginsberg sought to get JFK and Khrushchev on the phone in order to settle the nuclear stand-off.)However, by the early Sixties, whatever Leary would do, the cat was clawing its way out of the bag, and by the later Sixties the West Coast contingent led by Ken Kesey was sponsoring "acid tests," at which lysergic acid diethylamide-25 was widely distributed. This drug is famously potent, and millions of doses were available through the grace of such underground chemists as Stanley Owsley. Word of mouth would have assured its spread, even without the McLuhanesque slogan of "tune in, turn on, drop out," even without Leary's claim in a Playboy interview that LSD was the "most powerful aphrodisiac ever discovered by man."In any case, it is now 2010, and far from dwindling, the list of psychoactive molecules used in the U.S. has grown. Whereas the Harvard "club" relied mainly on psilocybin and LSD, many "psychonauts" have since become familiar with such drugs as ayahuasca from the Amazon basin, ibogaine from West Africa, salvia divinorum from Mexico. MDMA (Ecstasy, or as Metzner dubbed it, an "empathogen") was rediscovered in a California lab and became a staple first of psychotherapy and then of the underground rave culture. In what may serve as a portent, ayahuasca "tea" is now actually legal in the U.S., at least for adherents of a religion that started in Brazil, as is mescaline for members of the Native American Church.Meanwhile, a magazine as hard-headed as The Economist, eager to stop the drug wars, claims that "prohibition has failed; legalization is the least bad solution." Legalization, the editorial continues, "would transform drugs from a law-and-order problem into a public-health problem, which is how they ought to be treated."Misuse is certainly a problem, as are addictive drugs such as the widespread methamphetamine. But to what extent are certain molecules, properly used, a problem at all? The Harvard club clearly treated the psychedelics as an opportunity. With the wisdom of hindsight, various questions arise:In what ways are psychoactive drugs useful for dealing with alcoholism and other addictions, terminal cancer, and what we now call post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)?In what situations do psychedelics involve danger, including the opportunity cost of trivialization? How do these compare with other dangers that we accept, such as driving or consuming alcohol, and how can the dangers in using psychedelics be avoided or minimized?Under what conditions, if any, are psychedelics beneficial not only for medical purposes, but also for "expanding consciousness" and for occasioning "spiritual" experiences?What are good models for a search that might be occasioned by psychedelics? (Leary and Metzner devised a manual for psychedelic sessions based loosely on a Tibetan classic and wrote a paper praising Hermann Hesse as a pioneer, especially in the novels Steppenwolf and Journey to the East.)If guides are necessary or helpful, how should they be chosen? who trains them, and what do they do and avoid doing? Should psychedelics be used to reinforce commitments already made, as to a specific religious belief?Should powerful drugs be legalized, decriminalized, or what? Who controls access?Over the long term, how can the effect of psychedelics be channeled to positive ends? To what extent does this require a continuing practice that's not dependent on drugs?If people undertake a "spiritual" journey, how can they best deal with the vicissitudes of a relationship with a guru or "spiritual friend" or counselor?For those who believe that a major cultural or "spiritual" change is necessary, can any of these molecules help? (Huxley believed a psychoactive drug had a place in his utopia, Island.) If so, under what conditions?I gather that psychedelic enthusiasts long ago got past the fantasy of dumping LSD in reservoirs and hoping for world peace. In its place, researchers are starting legally to study the effects of the drugs, both as medicines and, as Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins writes, occasions for "mystical-type experiences."For example, with help from the Council on Spiritual Practices, the Hopkins research team reported that 33% of the volunteers "rated the psilocybin experience as being the single most spiritually significant experience of his or her life, with an additional 38% rating it to be "among the top five most spiritually significant experiences."With support from the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), legal research on several psychoactive drugs is now being or has recently been conducted in such countries as Canada, Germany, Israel, Russia, Switzerland, and at several universities in the U.S. (For more details, go to [...]), click on "R&D medicines," then on "Psychedelic research around the world.") MAPS itself is now focusing on medical uses of marijuana and on MDMA, especially as it may help with post traumatic stress disorder, widespread among rape and accident victims and among vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.So far, most of this global research falls within the medical model. But the brooding omnipresence hovering above the field remains the experiment at Marsh Chapel, the last effort of the Harvard group before they decamped from the Boston area. A graduate student named Walter Pahnke conducted a study on a Good Friday, based on an elaborate set of criteria, finding that 30-40% of volunteers had a "complete" mystical experience with the help of psilocybin.In Cleansing the Doors of Perception, Huston Smith, a participant at Marsh Chapel, went so far as to write "until the Good Friday Experiment, I had no direct personal encounter with God of the sort that bhakti yogis, Pentecostals, and born-again Christians describe." The son of missionaries in China and a believer belonging to a mainline Protestant church, Smith wrote a best-selling book about the principal religions of the world. A "mystical-type" experience might be experienced as "Christian," as "Hindu," or whatever; it can also be received without the hypothesis of any god.Five decades after the "Harvard psychedelic club," that university is again somewhat involved with psychedelics, not only as the alma mater of the persistent and ingenious Rick Doblin, founder of MAPS, but as the base for research, for example, on peyote as a sacrament in the Native American Church.If a main benefit of the psychedelics is a glimpse beyond consensus reality--the personal discovery that "there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy"--then we deserve careful research on what they can in fact make possible. In science it's true that Kary Mullis credits LSD with helping to spark his Nobel Prize-winning discovery of polymerase chain reaction (PCR), but despite rumors about Francis Crick, most Nobels have been awarded for work which, to the best of our knowledge, was done on no drugs more psychedelic than coffee, beer, and tobacco.Meanwhile, a column in Fortune magazine makes a case for the use of psychedelics to generate creative thought among business people. Michael Schrage imagines a retreat center for "creative business visualization," at which visiting executive teams would be given "small, precise dosages" of psychoactive materials to "push themselves beyond the boundaries of conventional business perception" and thus gain a competitive edge in the global marketplace.In considering whether psychedelics, optimally used, can reveal other ways of thinking and experiencing the world, the Hopkins research and the Fortune column go far beyond a medical model which asks mainly whether a drug can do more good than harm in curing a disease. In contrast, the basic question raised by the Harvard group is this: under what circumstances can the psychedelics liberate humans from restrictions normal in the everyday thinking that is necessary for such challenges as designing bridges, driving cars, and completing tax returns? In what ways, to what extent, under what conditions, can some of these molecules help to enrich our lives?The Harvard "club" began proposing and exploring models. Whatever the aftermath in the Sixties (or as a physician would say, the "sequelae"), it was in the best tradition of a university to raise the questions. Now we are gradually finding other opportunities to propose answers, and on that basis, to improve public policy.
Great Book about people who gave their all to change our consciousness.
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