Albion Dreaming (15 page)

There are numerous histories of Leary’s life that cover in minute detail his journey from trainee priest to LSD evangelist. In 1957, when he was a lecturer in psychology at Harvard University, he tried psilocybin mushrooms on a field trip to Mexico. The psychedelic experience, as it had done with so many others, profoundly changed Leary and he commented that he had “learned more about ... (his) brain and its possibilities ... (and) more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than ... (he) had in the preceding fifteen years of studying doing [sic] research in psychology.”
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On his return from Mexico, Leary set up the Harvard Psilocybin Project with colleagues Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert, using a synthesised version of the drug. Leary’s interest in behaviour change, in which he was an expert, led him to believe that psychedelics, in the correct dosage and set and setting, could radically alter behaviour. It was at this stage in Leary’s exploration of psychedelic drugs that he came into contact with Hollingshead. Leary had been warned off Hollingshead by someone he knew, a
millionaire by the name of Winston London. A “no-good, two-bit English con-man” was London’s bodyguard’s view of Hollingshead and he advised Leary to have nothing to do with him. But Leary was intrigued by the persuasive, roguish Englishman and within weeks Hollinsghead had moved in with the Leary family as their lodger.
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At first Leary was wary of LSD. He was a veteran of many psilocybin and peyote trips but believed these drugs were acceptable because they were organic and had long traditions of structured use among the world’s indigenous peoples. LSD, in contrast, was only partly organic, had been created in a sterile laboratory and was primarily used by the military and the secular psychiatric establishment. Psilocybin and peyote, Leary rationalised, were familiar to him. He knew their moods and how to navigate their twists and turns. This rationalization only partly concealed Leary’s underlying fear that, “... the more powerful LSD swept you far beyond the tender wisdom of psilocybin.”
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Leary initially evaded Hollingshead’s invitations to take LSD. Then, in December 1961, the jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson and his wife Flo stayed with the Learys after a performance in Boston. The Fergusons were considered to be an urbane, hip couple who liked to smoke marijuana and so naturally, over dinner, LSD came up as a topic of conversation and Hollingshead soon realised that the couple had never taken the drug. When they found Hollingshead had more than enough LSD they suggested he ran a session for them and Leary. Leary excused himself, claiming he had work to do, while the Fergusons and Hollingshead each took a spoonful from the mayonnaise jar and settled down in front of the roaring log fire.

Hollingshead described their reaction: “After about thirty minutes, Flo, who until that moment had been lying fully reclined on the sofa, sat up, suddenly her face one huge smile, and started waving her arms at Tim. ‘You gotta try this Tim, baby. It’s f-a-n-t-a-s-t-i-c.’ Her husband was equally enthusiastic, ‘Yeah, really Tim’, confirmed Maynard, his face glowing like an electric toaster. ‘It really gets you there – wow – it’s really happening, man ...’”

Leary was curious, noticing that when Flo laughed, “It was not a
nervous or a funny laugh. It was the chuckle of someone who was dead and gone and sitting on some heavenly mountain top and looking down at the two billion years of evolution the way you’d look at a transient episode in a children’s playground.” And with that, Leary’s curiosity finally got the better of him. He swallowed a spoonful of the sweet LSD mixture from Hollingshead’s jar and with it the cultural landscape of the developed world changed forever.

As his mind spun outside of time and space, no longer linked to mundane reality, Leary literally saw the light. “But not just light. It was the centre of life. A burning, dazzling, throbbing, radiant core, pure pulsing, exulting light. An endless flame that contained everything – sound, touch, cell, seed, sense, soul, sleep, glory, glorifying, God, the ‘hard eye of God’. Merged with this pulsating flame it was possible to look out and see and participate in the entire cosmic drama. Past and future. All forms, all structures, all organisms, all events were illusory, television productions pulsing out from the central eye.”
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Perhaps because he was already an experienced psilocybin user Leary was able to tap into the religious aspect of LSD. Or he could have just been very lucky that his first trip was a journey into the heart of light rather than the torments of hell. But Leary’s trip consisted of more than just the fantastical visual hallucinations. The drug allowed him to see through all social roles and games, realizing they were just masks to wear for a time. LSD had “... flipped consciousness out beyond life into the whirling dance of pure energy, where nothing existed except whirring vibrations, and each illusory form was simply a different frequency.”
³³

Leary returned from his trip a convert to the power of LSD. The drug had shown him that “... everything is a message from the impersonal, relentless, infinite, divine intelligence, weaving a new web of life each second, bombarding us with a message. Don’t you see! You’re nothing! Wake up! Glorify me! Join me!” Leary became an immediate acid evangelist.
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Leary’s overnight conversion presented problems for Alpert, Metzner and the others who were already involved in a programme of psilocybin experimentation. In his penetrating study of LSD in
America,
Storming Heaven
, Jay Stevens comments how this cosy world of psilocybin exploration was shattered by the advent of LSD. Psilocybin had become just about manageable but LSD threw the user back into mental chaos and Alpert in particular feared they would never understand how to use the drug. Leary had different ideas and exhorted his colleagues to persevere with LSD.

Hollingshead quickly became a central figure in Leary’s circle of serious scientific psychedelic explorers. But Hollingshead was not bound by any scientific ethics, or by any ethics at all. He was disruptive on group LSD trips, often trying to manipulate or dominate the proceedings. Yet when confronted he denied everything and turned on the charm. Despite his obvious shortcomings Leary fully supported him; everyone had a sneaking respect for him and the path he had now set them on.

Leary’s books and magazine interviews were widely read in Britain. His translation of
The Tibetan Book of the Dead – The Psychedelic Experience
– was highly regarded as a tool for guiding LSD users through their early trips. His other later writings, however, such as
The Politics of Ecstasy
, though they sold well, were less influential on the counter culture in Britain. London DJ and psychedelic adventurer Jeff Dexter, for instance found “Leary hard going ... too falsified in some ways, whereas reading Huxley there was a certain clarity to it.”
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Leary was effective at being a self-promoting figurehead for the worldwide psychedelic movement and he had a huge impact on the public’s perception of LSD. Hollingshead might have known how to manipulate individuals, but Leary was equally adept at manipulating the media. His perma-grinning visage and portentous announcements about a new religion based on LSD use, or how a woman could have thousands of orgasms during an LSD session, were guaranteed headline grabbers.

The relationship between Leary and Hollingshead ran hot and cold for a number of years in the early Sixties. It culminated in their abortive plans for the American psychedelic vision to be transposed to Britain. Leary’s activities in America after he had been turned on to LSD by Hollingshead have little direct relevance to the social history of LSD in Britain. For the time being we must
leave Leary on the cusp of his adventures in consciousness and his love/hate relationship with mainstream America.

The last key individual who influenced the mind set of the British psychedelic generation was American writer David Solomon. Solomon is another advocate of LSD with his roots in military intelligence, in which he served during World War II after being reassigned from a combat unit when his two brothers were killed in action. It is not known when Solomon first took LSD but in the early Sixties he was literary editor for
Playboy
magazine and published Timothy Leary, Ram Das (Richard Alpert), Alan Watts and Humphrey Osmond.

LSD: the consciousness expanding drug
edited by Solomon, with an introduction by Leary, featured essays by Huxley, Watts and Osmond, among other luminaries of the psychedelic scene. The book’s dedication was, “For Aldous Huxley,
guru extraordinaire
, whose words first beckoned me through the doors of perception.”
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In the preface, Solomon clearly states his views on the purpose of LSD. He believed psychedelic drugs “... frequently enable one to see through the myriad pretensions and deceits that make up the mythology of the Social Lie. Thus, to the extent that power structures rely on the controlled popular acceptance of the Lie to shore up and stabilise their hegemonies, psychedelic substances do indeed represent a kind of political threat.” Solomon saw the spiritual uses for psychedelic drugs but tempered this view with his belief they could be used to change socio-economic patterns to bring about a new society based on their insights. For him the psychedelic experience was “no evasive flight
from
, but a deep probe
into
reality”. It was Solomon’s fundamental tenet that the human brain was man’s most inalienable possession and individuals should have complete autonomy over their own consciousness. “No person or institution has the moral right to muffle or inhibit its development. No social authority can successfully arrogate unto itself the rights to dictate and fix the levels of consciousness to which men may aspire, whether these states are induced pharmacologically or otherwise.
Die Gedanken sind frei
.”
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Though Solomon provided only the preface for his book,
his selection of essayists was carefully chosen to give the most positive view of LSD, providing the reader with some of the history, rationale, subjective accounts, and mystique that launched the drug movement. Of all the early psychedelic pioneers and philosophers, only Solomon would go on to be an active, physical presence in Britain’s LSD culture.

The philosophies and writings of Heard, Huxley, Watts, Solomon and Leary spread rapidly through the burgeoning psychedelic movement in Britain. Between them a template had been forged for the expectations and parameters of the LSD experience. Anyone who used LSD need pay no heed to the dire warnings issued by the media because they had their own textbooks written by the forerunners and philosophers of the counter culture. These books were important because they were written by those who had been there and had experience of the transcendent through the agency of LSD, a religious experience unmediated by priest or parson.

Huxley and Leary’s books in particular became sacred texts for the LSD counter culture just as much as the Bible and Koran were to Christians and Muslims. They were treasured by British LSD users, discussed intensely and pored over for clues as how best to interpret an LSD trip, or how to successfully navigate one. All the influential authors described here were optimistic for the future of LSD use. That optimism would soon be taken up by the tens of thousands of young people in Britain who were soon to be offered their own key to the doors of perception.

There is some possibility that my friends and I have illuminated more people than anyone else in history.

Michael Hollingshead
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I
t’s impossible to be certain who took the first recreational dose of LSD in Britain. Though some who took LSD as part of the military and medical experiments carried out in the 1950s and 1960s may have enjoyed their experience, this could hardly be classed as recreational use. By the mid-Fifties, word of the drug’s powerful, often enjoyable, effects had reached Britain through American magazine articles, books and traveller’s tales and there was a ready market for chemical thrills. Poet Dave Cunliffe cogently sums up the scene at the turn of the decade:

“Late 1950s’ British urban Bohemia included a varied mixture of dedicated individualists and loosely affiliated sub-cultural group devotees. Traditional European middle-class artistic life-styles were gradually being swamped by a younger, less identifiable manifestation. Forties hipsters, newly emergent beats, extrovert beaus, traditional jazz ravers, modern jazz cool, opiate junkies, speed freaks, pot-smokers, out of the closet sexual trail-blazers, creative innovators, anarchists, eccentrics, deviants, dissidents,
outlaw bikers, student dropouts, religious cultists, dedicated Utopians, born-again Luddite and all kind of known and unknown orientations and tendencies. A rich counter-cultural soil in which the unifying hippie flower was about to explode.”
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At the tail end of the 1950s, the teenage Cunliffe was a courier for a firm of London drug dealers. He delivered packages, no questions asked, in response to orders placed by phone. Cunliffe had no idea what was in the packages unless they were unwrapped in his presence. When they were, it was invariably marijuana, amphetamine or heroin. These substances had been staples of the jazz scene and those within its orbit since the 1920s, jazz musicians traditionally being the first social group to seek out and make recreational use of any new drug. Now, in the “you’ve never had it so good” decade they were reaching a wiser audience.