fifteen as a diligent psychologist,” he wrote later in Flashbacks, his 1983
memoir. “I learned that the brain is an underutilized biocomputer . . . I
learned that normal consciousness is one drop in an ocean of intelligence.
That consciousness and intelligence can be systematically expanded. That
the brain can be reprogrammed.”
Leary returned from his journey with an irresistible urge to “rush back
and tell everyone,” as he recalled in High Priest, his 1968 memoir. And
then in a handful of sentences he slid into a prophetic voice, one in which
the whole future trajectory of Timothy Leary could be foretold:
Listen! Wake up! You are God! You have the Divine plan
engraved in cellular script within you. Listen! Take this
sacrament! You’ll see! You’ll get the revelation! It will
change your life!But at least for the first year or two at Harvard, Leary went through the
motions of doing science. Back in Cambridge that fall, he recruited
Richard Alpert, a promising assistant professor who was heir to a railroad
fortune, and, having secured the tacit approval of their department chair,
David McClelland, the two launched the Harvard Psilocybin Project,
operating out of a tiny broom closet of an office in the Department of
Social Relations in a house at 5 Divinity Avenue. (I went looking for the
house, but it has long since been razed and replaced by a sprawling,
block-long brick science building.) Leary, ever the salesman, had
convinced Harvard that the research he proposed to undertake was
squarely in the tradition of William James, who in the early years of the
century had also studied altered states of consciousness and mystical
experience at Harvard. The university placed one condition on the
research: Leary and Alpert could give the new drugs to graduate students,
but not to undergraduates. Before long, an intriguingly titled new
seminar showed up in the Harvard course listings:
Experimental Expansion of Consciousness
The literature describing internally and externally induced
changes in awareness will be reviewed. The basic elements of
mystical experiences will be studied cross-culturally. The