Leary, Timothy (1920-1996)

With Dr. Richard Alpert, Leary became a controversial figure in the psychedelic revolution of the 1960s. He was born October 22, 1920, in Springfield, Massachusetts. He attended Holy Cross College (1938-39), the U.S. Military Academy (1940-41), the University of Alabama (A.B., 1943), Washington State University (1946), and the University of California at Berkeley (Ph.D. in psychology, 1950).

He was an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley (1950-55), director of psychological research at the Kaiser Foundation, Oakland, California (1955-58), and a lecturer in psychology at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1959-63). After leaving Harvard Leary became the head and first guide of the League of Spiritual Discovery, which was based at a mansion in Millwood, New York.

Leary and Alpert were both dismissed from Harvard for their experiments with psilocybin (later revealed to have been funded by the U.S. government). They engaged in widespread psychedelic experiments and emerged as advocates for the use of LSD and other such drugs to produce altered states of consciousness, and to treat alcoholism, schizophrenia, and other psychophysiological disorders. Together they launched the psychedelic revolution that in less than a decade impacted an entire generation.

The belief that mystical experience could be obtained from mind-altering drugs came from Leary's and Alpert's experiences as well as from the suggestion made a decade earlier in Aldous Huxley 's book The Doors of Perception (1954), which described the sacramental use of peyote by certain North American Indians.

Having exhausted the drug experience by 1967, Alpert went to India in search of more substantial spirituality and experienced a major transformation. He discovered a guru in the Himalayas and returned to the United States as Baba Ram Dass. His transformation became a parable of the emerging New Age movement, and he is a popular teacher of Hinduism and New Age values. Leary had gone to India in 1965 and converted to Hinduism and added a spiritual dimension to his psychedelic activities. After Alpert had left the United States, Leary continued to advocate the psychedelic revolution. His publications during this time reflect his efforts to provide information and instruction on the use of hallucinogens and, influenced by Eastern philosophies and religious texts, reveals Leary's emphasis on the spiritual possibilities of psychedelics. In 1964, Leary, along with Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner, published The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. This book relates the death and rebirth cycle experienced through psychedelic drugs to the ancient Buddhist text that prepares followers for the after-death experience.

Various brushes with the law on drug charges resulted in Leary receiving sentences of 10 years imprisonment by a federal judge in Houston on January 21, 1970, and another ten years in Santa Ana, California, on March 22, 1970, both charges involving marijuana offenses. He began serving his sentence at the California Men's Colony West in San Luis Obispo, but escaped in September 1970 and later surfaced in Lebanon. He settled in Switzerland for a time but later returned to the United States and served his sentence at Folsom Prison in California. The 10-year jail sentence in 1970 resulted from possession of less than half an ounce of marijuana, which had a street value of ten dollars. His 42-month imprisonment (29 months in solitary confinement) seemed to reflect mainstream opinion about the psychedelic revolution initiated by Leary and his associates.

Leary's case was reviewed in the mid-1970s, and in March 1975 he was paroled but immediately began serving another sentence. Leary was finally released April 21, 1976. Separated from his wife, Rosemary, in 1971, he married his fourth wife, Barbara, after being released from jail.

Over the next 10 years Leary continued to be in the public eye as a trendsetter in ideas. He lectured widely, though he no longer advocated the psychedelic revolution or drug taking. In September 1976 he spoke to 3,000 students at Princeton University on a scientific approach to self-development. In his book Exo-Psychology (1977), he suggested that human beings could evolve into pure, intelligent, disembodied energy. Other lecture topics include Skylab/space shuttle activities and efforts to increase human intelligence and life-span, summed up in the acronym SMILE (Space Migration, Increased Intelligence, Life Extension). He founded an organization named Starseed, a cooperative to colonize space.

In 1982 Leary toured on a debate circuit with convicted Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy, who participated in a 1966 raid on Leary's Millbrook drug community. In the 1990s Leary had taken on a role as a futurist guru, advocating ways to stimulate human development and intelligence. He had popularized the concept of SKPI (Super Knowledge, Processing Interaction), using computers as mind-expanding tools. Although Leary refrained from advocating mind-expanding drugs, he expressed no regrets for his part in the psychedelic revolution.

A comprehensive assessment of Leary, his kaleidoscopic career and philosophies, and the views of other commentators can be found in Contemporary Authors (Vol. 107, 1983). In addition to Leary's own biographical works, see also Psychedelic Drugs, Hallucinogens, and Mushrooms. Leary died of cancer on May 31, 1996 in Beverly Hills, California.

Sources:

Kleps, Art. Millbrook: The True Story of the Early Years of the Psychedelic Revolution. Oakland, Calif.: Bench Press, 1977.

Leary, Timothy. Changing My Mind among Others: Lifetime Writings. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1982.

——. Flashbacks. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher, 1983.

——. High Priest. New York: World Publishing, 1968.

——. The Politics of Ecstasy. New York: G. P. Putnam's, 1968.

——. The Psychedelic Experience. New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1964.

——. Psychedelic Prayers after the Tao te ching. New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1966.

Leary, Timothy, Robert Wilson, and George A. Koopman. Neuropolitics: The Sociobiology of Human Metamorphosis. Los Angeles: Starseed/Peace Press, 1977.

Slack, Charles W. Timothy Leary, the Madness of the Sixties, and Me. New York: Peter H. Wyden, 1974.