The Harvard Psychedelic Club

by Don Lattin

  Perhaps it’s not surprising that Andrew Weil, the youngest and most ambitious member of the Harvard Psychedelic Club, had the greatest long-term impact on American culture. Weil’s main contribution has been his work on the much-needed reformation of the American health-care system. He has led the crusade for what he calls integrative medicine, which takes the best from East and West, combining Western medical technology with meditation and healing practices involving diet, yoga, and acupuncture. His Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona has been instrumental in setting up similar programs at medical centers across the United States. His work has inspired medical practitioners to prescribe meditation and other relaxation techniques to lower stress, reduce the risk of heart disease, and strengthen the immune system—one of the clearest examples of how a counter-culture practice has mainstreamed into American life.

  Richard Alpert, as Ram Dass, inspired the thrill seekers of my generation to go beyond the revelatory insights that psychedelic drugs provide and pursue a less dangerous, and more life-affirming, spiritual practice. Ram Dass helped popularize the meditation techniques now used in Weil’s East-meets-West medical programs. Alpert was a trailblazer, and the counterculture’s most articulate and accessible tour guide, especially for those of us trying to come down off the acid and learn something from the experience, such as how to live our lives with more consciousness and compassion.

  Huston Smith’s impact has been subtler, but significant. Recent surveys of the American religious landscape show that while religious belief is relatively stable, religious affiliation is in decline. One of the fastest-growing religious groups in the United States is the “nones,” as in “none of the above.” These are people who say “none” when pollsters ask them their religious affiliation. Some “nones” identify themselves as atheists or agnostics, but the vast majority believe in God. They pray and/or meditate. Many describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious.” These surveys also show rising religious tolerance—among both the affiliated and the unaffiliated. There are many factors behind these trends, but one of them is certainly the life work of Huston Smith.

  In the two years since I began working on this book, there have been a few changes in the lives of the surviving members of the Harvard Psychedelic Club. Huston Smith moved out of his Berkeley home and into an assisted-living facility. He may be in his nineties, but Huston still finds the energy to give an occasional public talk. Ram Dass fell out of his wheelchair and broke his hip, reducing his already limited mobility. It’s been almost two years since he told me that he “came to Maui to die,” yet he continues to teach on the Internet and welcomes seekers coming to Hawaii on spiritual retreat.

  Leary has been dead more than a decade, but Weil remains a vital force. On a rainy night in 2009, he stood before a sold-out audience of three thousand attentive listeners at the Paramount Theater in Oakland, California, delivering, without notes, an inspiring, informative hourlong lecture, followed by a thirty-minute question-and-answer session. Two weeks later, Weil was in Washington, D.C., to testify before a Senate committee drafting legislation to overhaul the way Americans fund and receive medical care.

  Timothy Leary, Huston Smith, Richard Alpert, and Andrew Weil came together in an extraordinary time of social upheaval and unbridled hope—those thousand days between the election and assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a man who seemed to embody the youth and vigor of the next generation. Kennedy was elected in the fall of 1960, the same season during which Andrew Weil and the rest of the class of 1964 came to Harvard to begin their undergraduate studies. It was a time of openness and optimism, and it all seemed to come crashing down on a single day, November 22, 1963. Two things of note happened that day. President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, and Aldous Huxley died at his home in Los Angeles. Several hours before Kennedy was shot, Huxley’s wife, Laura, sat at his side and administered a dose of LSD to usher the famous writer out of this world and into the next. And it was Timothy Leary who visited Huxley two days before his death, delivering the drugs for that final trip.

  The murder of President Kennedy, followed in tragic succession by the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., could have killed the sixties, but that era’s enlivening spirit somehow survived. Deconstructing a decade is a formidable task. All kinds of forces were at work in the unfolding of the 1960s—the post–World War II economic boom, the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, the war in Vietnam, feminism, ecological awareness, and the human-potential movement. It was also a time when Americans began to see the limits of U.S. military and economic power and started looking for new ways to be part of an increasingly interconnected world.

  Assessing the impact of the psychedelic movement on all this is tricky at best. We have to look deeply, into the DNA of these movements, to see the psychedelic vision at work. In some ways, the impact is obvious. The holistic feeling these drugs unleashed helped millions of us find new ways of looking at our mind, body, and spirit, and, through that new vision, it sparked a movement that would change the way we think about our mental health, our physical well-being, and our spiritual search for a power beyond our skin-encapsulated egotistical selves. The sixties were such a divisive decade that, when we look back on it, we tend to forget that the “counterculture” was not just against everything. The antiwar movement was for peace. The civil rights and feminist movements were for equality. The environmental movement was not just against pollution; it was for a new way of seeing the interdependence of all living things.

  Psychedelics inspired many of us to take a more positive, expansive view of our potential as human beings. Psychologists transcended Freud. Sociologists and political scientists moved beyond Marx. Cynics, skeptics, and hard-core materialists suddenly found themselves interested in the spiritual quest. People of faith began to see beyond the doctrines and dogma of their own religious traditions to envision a more inclusive understanding of the contemplative core that runs through all world religions.

  We may not like to admit it now, but many of us turned on, tuned in, and dropped out, at least for a while. We saw the light. We began to question the materialist, consumerist mind-set into which we were raised and started looking for other ways to be. We learned to laugh at ourselves, and at much of what was going on around us. Many of us turned our back on that vision in the eighties and the nineties, when corporate America roared back into our lives with a vengeance. Many of us spent decades amassing at least enough material wealth to see the world, raise our families, send our kids to college, and plan for our retirement. But at least we tried to find another way. Now, more than ever, we need to remember the lessons of that idealistic era. It’s time, once again, to find new ways to live together with equality, justice, and compassion.

  Richard Alpert, Timothy Leary, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil each laid a cornerstone for what would be built—and what can still be built—from the progressive vision of the psychedelic sixties. The story does not end with them, for the forces they helped unleash were immeasurably larger than those four men, and the changes they wrought are still with us today. They changed the way we view the world, heal ourselves, and practice religion. They changed the way we see the very nature of reality. We see the best of them in the best of ourselves. In the end, it’s not about the drugs. It’s about remembering all the life-affirming moments along the way—those glimpses of wonder and awe, empathy and interconnectedness—and finding a place for all of that in the rest of our lives.

  AFTERWORD

  This book was not about me, yet I owe it to the reader—and perhaps myself—to end with a personal story, one that helps explain why I spent two years of my life chronicling four other peoples’ lives.

  It happened at the end of that era we’ve come to call “the sixties.” Julia and I were starting our first year of studies at the University of California at Berkeley. We’d just met, fallen in love, and decided it would be extremely far-out to drive down to Big Sur,
drop some acid, and spend the weekend camping on the central California coast. We threw two sleeping bags and ourselves into my red 1965 Mustang, which had a white vinyl roof and two McGovern bumper stickers plastered across the rear window. We arrived sometime in the midafternoon, pulled off Highway One, and parked the car under a small stand of Monterey pines. We looked at each other, smiled, and carefully laid two tiny pieces of LSD-infused blotter paper onto our tongues.

  We had just enough time to wander through a maze of scratchy manzanita and down to a stand of whimsical sandstone formations sculpted atop a windswept cliff. There were the usual early warning signs as we started coming onto the acid—a queasy stomach and that uneasy feeling that accompanies the first tugs on the existential anchor. That feeling passed quickly. There was that familiar shift in pattern recognition that often comes with the psychedelic experience, when you suddenly notice the wonderful symmetry of nature and interconnectedness of things that once seemed separate. Colors get brighter; the air seems fresher and more alive. We stopped on a bluff high above the crashing waves and swirling tide pools, where we soon found ourselves too stoned to stand up. We dropped to our knees like we were no longer separate beings, and then rolled over on our sides, unconcerned that we were just a few feet from the edge of the cliff.

  We started to melt together. I’d curled up into a fetal position. Julia was tall and thin, more or less equaling my six-foot frame, so she could easily wrap her arms and legs around my torso. At first, it felt like I was inside of her, like an unborn child. Then I was born again. Then we merged together like we were one being—physically, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually. All we saw was white light, but we somehow continued communicating with each other. Not with words, but through some other means of communion. Time stopped, or at least it slowed down to a glacial pace. Such a feeling of, of, um . . . suchness.

  Neither of us had a watch, but at some point we opened our eyes and saw a glorious sun setting over a dark, crimson sea. Clouds of varying shades of gray, black, glowing white, and flaming purple filled the sky. They seemed to take the form of giant, flowing letters of fire that didn’t really spell anything but communicated a message beyond words.

  Yes!!!!

  Four hours passed like an instant, or perhaps an eternity, and then it started to rain. We had planned to just toss our sleeping bags under the trees down the hill from Highway One, but suddenly the thought of a warm room, a hot shower, and the clean white sheets of a queen-sized bed was irresistible. We drove back up Highway One and took a road east to Salinas. Along the way we told each other what we could about what had just happened. I started telling Julia things about her family and her past that I had no way of knowing. She returned the miracle. At the same time, the intense effects of the acid had passed. I was perfectly capable of driving—even in the pouring rain on a dark, curving coastal highway—although it did seem a bit like the car was on automatic pilot.

  One strange and wonderful aftereffect persisted into normal consciousness. Somewhere near Salinas, somewhere east of Eden, I slipped my arm around Julia and pulled her toward me. Our skin was no longer a boundary of our separate selves. We melted together every time we touched. That ecstatic feeling continued through that wondrous night. The melting-together feeling continued into the next day, when we felt absolutely sober and straight except when we touched. Back in Berkeley, that feeling—physical and sexual but at the same time spiritual—of melting together every time we touched continued for days, then weeks. There was absolutely no doubt in my eighteen-year-old heart and soul that Julia and I would be together for the rest of our lives. So this was love. This was what people were talking about when they talked about becoming one with each other. You could literally become one with another being. This was bliss. This was ecstasy. This was real.

  Or was it?

  About a month after the Big Sur trip, Julia and I drove up to the northern end of California with another couple from our Berkeley dorm. We chose this spot at the suggestion of my roommate, whose family were members of a private resort deep in the north woods. It seemed like a great place for a long hike and another trip with that righ teous LSD. What my roommate did not mention was that this family resort was actually a hunting lodge with separate dormitories required for unmarried men and women.

  LSD’s ability to melt the ego and foster a feeling of oneness with the other—with the world—is awesome. It can inspire ecstatic spiritual communion. It can also spark a terrifying existential crisis. Melting into the earth and losing all conception of your skin as the immutable boundary between you and everything else can be wondrous or horrendous—or a simultaneous combination of the two. This second trip in the northern woods was the “bad trip” from central casting. At Big Sur, I’d felt the luscious vastness of the psychedelic experience. But this time around I felt myself shrinking, getting smaller and smaller and terrified of everything around me—including Julia. Suddenly, my soul mate was my adversary. It seemed like she and my two other companions were laughing at me, mocking me. What had been a glimpse into the mind of the mystic became a quick trip into paranoid madness. Of course, it didn’t help that we were surrounded by hunting families who were not pleased to see four wacked-out hippies invade their sanctuary, or that we kept hearing gunshots all around us.

  Somehow, I managed to make it through the day and back into the dormitory for our second and final night. It was a terrifying, sleepless night, full of voices that may or may not have been imaginary. But what was most frightening was the fact that these paranoid, insecure feelings continued the next morning and on the drive back to Berkeley. Julia was distant, and we soon split up upon our return to campus. She would tell me decades later that she was scared off by my “dark energy.”

  My confused, paranoid state continued on and off, but mostly on, for weeks. There were frightening LSD flashbacks, but it was more like the drug never really wore off. Chemically, the drug was gone, but psychically and spiritually, the acid trickster would not let me be. I was afraid that I had suffered permanent brain damage. I lost the ability to read—not a good state of mind for a first-year student at the University of California. One word in a sentence would send my mind shooting off on an uncontrollable tangent. There were hallucinations extreme enough that I stopped driving because I couldn’t be sure if green lights were really green. Somehow, I succeeded in hiding this insanity from everyone around me. Sharing my state of mind with anyone, I feared, would get me sent to the nearest nuthouse. I stopped taking drugs, including alcohol and marijuana, but it didn’t seem to help. I was still stoned out of my mind.

  It took a few months, but I somehow got through that hellish descent. The low point came when I was home for the holidays and the hallucinations got so terrifying that I decided to call a mental-health hotline. I ran out to a sidewalk phone booth near my mother’s apartment in southern California. When I got into the booth I changed my mind about making the call, only to get trapped inside the glass box—forgetting in my psychotic state that one pulls inward to open the accordion doors of those old kiosks. To the amusement, or perhaps terror, of some passersby, I was frantically pushing out against the closed door. Suddenly, I realized what I was doing. I saw the startled expressions on the faces of the pedestrians as I pounded on the door. At the time, I had a bushy black beard and a long tangle of dark hair, making me look a bit like Charlie Manson on a bad-hair day. Then I started to laugh. The joke was on me, but I was able to laugh at myself. To this day, I recall that hilarious, terrifying moment as the beginning of my recovery. I pulled open the door of the phone booth and walked out into the rest of my life.

  There would be other battles with drugs and alcohol, but in the end I think I came out of that teenage experience stronger and saner than ever. I’d been to the other side, and I’d made it back alive. It was my version of the hero’s journey, but not a trip I recommend for the faint of heart.

  Years later, I read a scholarly article by Ralph Metzner, one of the Harvard gradua
te students who assisted Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert in their psychedelic drug research at Harvard. In the article, titled “Ten Classical Metaphors of Self-Transformation,” Ralph uses the same symbols I had long used to describe what happened to Julia and me at Big Sur—how our trip began with a return to “the original state of womb-like unconscious oneness.” Metzner describes the double-edge nature of spiritual growth—especially when it involves a loss of “skin-bounded ego-consciousness.” He writes, “Whereas for some people the prospect of a transformation of consciousness is charged with delight, and excitement, for many the idea of change produces fear.”

  My two acid trips unfolded in the early 1970s, nearly a decade after Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert first stressed the importance of the “set and setting” for any psychedelic drug experience. Make sure you are in a safe, secure, and comfortable place, surrounded by a pleasant environment and people you can trust. In other words, it’s not a good idea for hippies to drop acid at hunting lodges. At the time, I hadn’t heard Leary and Alpert’s warning, and even if I had, I probably would have ignored their advice.

  It took me many years to realize that the ecstasy and the agony of my freshman year were not just a great acid trip followed by a bad acid trip. They were the beginning of a long and slow process of spiritual conversion, a painful but ultimately rewarding journey that continues today. Those two psychedelic experiences so long ago left me fascinated with and fearful of the mystical state. They left me curious and skeptical about the spiritual claims of my generation. That curiosity and skepticism led to a long career as a religion writer for the secular press, a perfect perch from which I could “objectively” follow the spiritual journey of my generation of seekers.

  Millions of us took LSD and other mind-altering drugs back in the 1960s and 1970s, and many of us are still trying to figure out what it all means. Sometimes I look at the whole spiritual search of my generation—the human-potential movement, the pilgrimages to India, the Buddhist meditation centers, the gurus, the New Age craziness, the “spiritual, but not religious” shift in our attitude toward faith—and I’m convinced that it never would have happened if a Swiss chemist hadn’t accidentally dosed himself in a lab mishap at the end of World War II.