Ever since psychedelics (from the Greek for “mind manifesting”) first came into use in the West, Buddhism has had to deal with them. Many students of Buddhism have become interested in psychedelics, and many users of these substances have become interested in Buddhism. In the sixties and early seventies, zendos and meditation halls were flooded with young people who had experimented with LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and other hallucinogens and were now seeking a more sustainable society. Birth of a Psychedelic Culture contains reminiscences from the vanguard of the psychedelic movement. The book centers on conversations about the good old days between onetime Harvard professor Richard Alpert, later known as Ram Dass, and Ralph Metzner, a psychologist and author who was a graduate student at Harvard when Alpert and his colleague Timothy Leary were conducting their experiments in psilocybin and LSD. The dialogue is deftly moderated by psychiatrist Gary Bravo, and there’s a breezy, beautifully written introduction by John Perry Barlow, a Harvard graduate, Grateful Dead lyricist, and computer pioneer who by the mid-Sixties was also “fully enrolled in the Eastern Orthodox Church of LSD,” as he puts it. Revelations about the Harvard Psilocybin project (later the Harvard Psychedelic project), about Leary and Alpert’s continued experimentation with psychedelics in a Millbrook, New York mansion, and about their sojourns to Mexico and India offer a sensational—and at times riveting—contribution to our understanding of a complex and confusing issue. Peppered with recollections from lesser-known members of Alpert and Leary’s circle, Birth serves as a kind of scrapbook of the psychedelic movement. The detailed descriptions of their specific drug “journeys,” along with insights about the various substances they ingested, are particularly interesting. Numerous cultural figures play supporting roles in the drama, including Aldous Huxley (everyone’s inspiration, it seems), radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing, musicians Charles Mingusand Maynard Ferguson, and writers Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs. Black-and-white photographs of the pioneers serve as a visual timeline of the transformation in their physiognomies that accompanied the transformation of their minds.
––ALLAN BADINER Tricycle Contributing Editor and author of Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics
This entertaining and firsthand account of those heady days of the sixties sheds light on the intentions, dynamics, trials and errors of the utopian movement led by Timothy Leary and his chief lieutenants, Richard Albert (later Ram Dass) and Ralph Metzner.
A clear evolution is painted: from the carefully controlled scientific explorations and academic background of the early phase beginning at Harvard; to the middle years in Mexico and at Millbrook in upstate New York where LSD became a key element of experiments in group living; to the disintegration of the movement under the influence of ego battles, family demands, a trend to indiscriminate drug use, and the inevitable crackdown by officialdom.
Along the way we hear live interviews and conversations with Ram Dass and Metzner, interspersed with written excerpts from Leary and some of the other notable consciousness pioneers. Overall the book serves not only as a fascinating chronicle of a unique period of social and cultural history, but also as a tale about the testing of the limits of human potential – the boundless and universal truths accessible with the aid of psychedelics, and the counterbalancing forces of ego and social constraint – the range of possibility we continue to confront half a century later. ––ALTERNATIVE CULTURE
What a treasure of a gift this is! Psychedelics may not be addictive, but this book is, and I read it compulsively. There is something about what you three guys did that had a massive loosening-up effect on so many. You opened our minds and your book demonstrates that the party goes on. I found the honesty of your sharing profound; the way you were able to be so critical of one another, and yet still uphold each other. Thank you for having fearlessly mapped out a cultural history from which a lot of people, both knowingly and unknowing, now live and are touched by . ––ALASTAIR MCINTOSH, environmentalist, activist and author of Soil and Soul: People Versus Corporate Power
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 Harvards 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-founde, Director of Fitz Hugh Ludlow Memorial Library
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