members of the seminar will participate in experiences with
consciousness expanding methods and a systematic analysis
of attention will be paid to the problems of methodology in
this area. This seminar will be limited to advanced graduate
students. Admission by consent of the instructor.“Experimental Expansion of Consciousness” proved to be extremely
popular.
• • •
IN ITS THREE YEARS of existence, the Harvard Psilocybin Project
accomplished surprisingly little, at least in terms of science. In their first
experiments, Leary and Alpert administered psilocybin to hundreds of
people of all sorts, including housewives, musicians, artists, academics,
writers, fellow psychologists, and graduate students, who then completed
questionnaires about their experiences. According to “Americans and
Mushrooms in a Naturalistic Environment: A Preliminary Report,” most
subjects had generally very positive and occasionally life-changing
experiences.
“Naturalistic” was apt: these sessions took place not in university
buildings but in comfortable living rooms, accompanied by music and
candlelight, and to a casual observer they would have looked more like
parties than experiments, especially because the researchers themselves
usually joined in. (Leary and Alpert took a heroic amount of psilocybin
and, later, LSD.) At least in the beginning, Leary, Alpert, and their
graduate students endeavored to write up accounts of their own and their
subjects’ psilocybin journeys, as if they were pioneers exploring an
unmapped frontier of consciousness and the previous decade of work
surveying the psychedelic landscape had never happened. “We were on
our own,” Leary wrote, somewhat disingenuously. “Western literature
had almost no guides, no maps, no texts that even recognized the
existence of altered states.”
Drawing on their extensive fieldwork, however, Leary did do some
original work theorizing the idea of “set” and “setting,” deploying the
words in this context for the first time in the literature. These useful
terms, if not the concepts they denote—for which Al Hubbard deserves