I Have America Surrounded

And so began the story of the experimental commune at Millbrook. Their presence was at first cautiously welcomed by the local town people, for the new residents were friendly, kept up a respectable academic demeanour and spent a lot of money in the local liquor store. Initial concerns were minor. The estate ‘once employed several dozen gardeners’, one newspaper commented, ‘but has not been manicured lately’.13 Only slowly did stories about the lifestyle within start to circulate, and the realisation that the new ‘lords of the manor’ were dedicated to strange drugs, group sex and the most un-Christian interpretation of religion imaginable. It did not help matters that the grounds backed onto those of Bennett College, a private girls’ school.

The Millbrook estate was quickly declared ‘out of bounds’ for the pupils, who were informed that any visits could result in their expulsion. This, the president of the college declared, was just ‘a precautionary measure’.

Once installed at Millbrook, Tim adopted a public persona that was, for him, surprisingly cautious. Plans to open IF-IF centres across the country were shelved as legal access to LSD had become too difficult. Instead he focused on the religious dimension of the psychedelic experience, and explored ways to communicate this to people without the use of any psychedelic drug. ‘Chemicals are only one psychedelic method,’ he told Newsweek. ‘There are hundreds of others we can employ here—diet, fasting, dance, breathing exercises, sensory withdrawal, Zen, photography, archery’14 He announced that Millbrook would host a series of drugless consciousness-raising seminars each weekend. ‘The Beats come, they see a straight scene, and they go away,’ he claimed.

These drugless seminars were unusual events. Guests paid $60 a head for the weekend, and would find themselves meditating alone in empty rooms while cards containing written instructions were occasionally posted under the door. The guests had to dress in togas and eat meals together in total silence. A voice would intermittently read ‘bright sayings’ over a Tannoy system, or a gong would be hit. For the full-time residents of Millbrook, who gobbled endless LSD tablets and giggled away in the background, the whole thing was completely ludicrous.

Tim kept up the ‘drugless’ angle for at least the next three years, when he went out on the road and performed ‘Psychedelic Religious Celebrations’ in theatres across the country. These were multimedia events, an hour and a half in length, which attempted to create a sense of spiritual awareness in the audience through light shows, prayers and the stories of Christ and the Buddha.15

The irony of this drugless stance is that by the time Tim arrived at Millbrook it was already too late to stop the swelling interest in LSD that would erupt into the mainstream during 1967’s ‘Summer of Love’. His advocacy at Harvard and Zihuatanejo had gained enough publicity that the existence of LSD was now public knowledge. Curious people wanted to know more, so they started to investigate the subject themselves. The establishment of an underground drug infrastructure that would eventually produce enough LSD to supply an estimated seven million Americans was now under way. Tim could talk about meditation and yoga all he liked, but nothing would put this genie back into its bottle.

Life at Millbrook, of course, was about as far away from the pious earnestness of the ‘drugless’ consciousness work as it is possible to get. Tim, like the CIA before him, was interested in the effect LSD had on what was known as ‘imprinting’. This is the idea that not all behaviour is learnt through a long process of repetition. Instead, there are certain times when a behavioural trait is ‘imprinted’ in the psyche during one specific event. The classic demonstration of this is a famous experiment by the zoologist Konrad Lorenz in which ducklings were hatched, not in the presence of their mother, but in the presence of a tennis ball. The newborn birds then imprinted this ball as their mother image. From that point on the poor ducklings would blindly follow the ball around, even after their real mother had been introduced to them.

It was possible to use LSD to imprint new behaviours, as the CIA discovered in their experiments in brainwashing. Indeed, one of the dangers of LSD is that it is possible for a careless tripper to ‘imprint’ a ludicrous belief by accident. But what the CIA hadn’t understood, Leary believed, was that at the height of an acid trip it is possible to ‘rise above’ all the imprinted patterns. In that state you could see that your behaviour was not the result of free will but of conditioned, robot-like reflexes. This awareness was like a laboratory rat, which had spent its life running along the corridors in a maze, being suddenly lifted up by a scientist to a height where it can look down and for the first time comprehend the maze it had lived in. LSD would allow the duckling in the experiment, for example, to become aware of his automatic response to the tennis ball and understand why it was acting in that way. It was this awareness that interested Tim, for it allowed an individual to work through previously destructive habits and become, he felt, truly free.

Tim’s research was now focusing on eradicating previous mental conditioning. The idea was that an individual could use LSD to replace a specific, unwanted personality trait with an imprint of new, less destructive behaviour. The ability to ‘reprogram’ yourself like this, Tim claimed, was perfectly natural. It was simply the next, unavoidable evolutionary step. Not everyone was convinced by this argument, however, as attempting to improve upon millions of years of evolution by taking conscious responsibility for the way your brain operated seemed arrogant and dangerous. Fortunately, this debate was mostly academic, for it was soon realised that permanently eradicating behaviour was extremely difficult. The problem was that the awareness granted by LSD was fleeting and easily lost after the drug had worn off. How could they make that level of understanding permanent?

And so began a strange regime of ‘deconditioning’ behaviour patterns. It owed a lot to the Armenian mystic and writer Georges I. Gurdjieff, who attempted to bring his followers to enlightenment through tactics such as shock, or mind-numbing physical exertion, such as cutting a lawn with a pair of scissors. At Millbrook, a bell would ring four times a day and everyone in the house would have to stop and write in a diary the behavioural ‘game’ they were currently involved in. Food would be dyed strange colours to confuse the senses, and visitors could find themselves presented with, for example, a plate of green eggs and a glass of black milk. Communal parenting was introduced, much to the dismay of the non-parents, who suddenly found themselves with the responsibilities of unpaid nannies.16 The aim of all this was to conquer the routine, unconscious patterns that leave us sleepwalking through life. Even 10 years later it was noticed that Tim studiously avoided routine,17sleeping in different rooms, brushing his teeth with different hands, and ordering different drinks in bars.

Sexual hang-ups and jealousy are a big part of our conditioning, so they clearly had to go. The third floor was designated as an ‘anything goes’ area, and all beds were open to all-comers. Initial enthusiasm for the idea gradually declined, however, and it was grudgingly accepted that the plan was causing more tension than it relieved. Nevertheless, there was still plenty of sexual exploration in the house, especially for Tim. As the group’s alpha male, he was the focus of attention for the many female visitors who passed through the house. Art Kleps remembered being in the kitchen one morning discussing the similarities between Leary and Jesus with a Christian IF-IF member, when Tim arrived ‘tousled and haggard, drew a coffee and turned to the assembled breakfasters to inquire rhetorically: ‘Jesus Christ, do I have to fuck every girl who comes to this place?’18

All this was extremely difficult for his children, who were now in their early-to-mid teens. After attempts at communal parenting had broken down, Susan and Jack were more or less left to their own devices. Tim claimed that his unorthodox, hands-off parenting was in the children’s best interests, but it seems more likely that he was just too preoccupied with his work to give enough of his time to them. His parenting method, certainly, was the polar opposite of what is currently considered good parenting, since nowadays establishing a routine and clearly defined limits is recommended as the best way to allow children to flourish. His children were soon taking acid and other drugs. Leary stated on stage in 1967: ‘I know no child over the age of seven who hasn’t been given drugs, and I know many of them.’19 There was certainly no effort to provide set and setting and an experienced guide for the first trips of Jack and Susan.

The children reacted in opposite ways. Jack became increasingly aware of his father’s faults, and the disillusionment that began to set in slowly evolved into anger, and eventually outright hatred. Susan, on the other hand, became devoted to her father, and jealous and vindictive towards anyone else who wanted to take up too much of his time.

An attempt to gain a little normality was made at the end of 1964, when Tim entered into a short-lived marriage with Nena von Schlebrugge. Nena, the daughter of a Swedish baron, was one of the many exotic people who passed through Millbrook that year. She was, as Tim wrote to his mother informing her of the wedding, ‘a most remarkable person of unusual intelligence, character and wisdom. She is deeply committed to spiritual goals and is an ideal companion for the metaphysical explorations in which I have been involved. For the last six years, she has been one of the top fashion models in the world.’20

Nena was indeed incredibly beautiful. Tall, blonde and graceful, she had inherited the looks of her Swedish mother, and in time she would come to pass them on to the children of her next marriage, most famously to her daughter, the actress Uma Thurman.

Following their wedding on 19 December 1964, Tim and the third Mrs Leary embarked on an extended honeymoon around the globe. They said goodbye to their friends and family and they headed off, via Japan, to India. Tim had been planning to visit India for a couple of years, a journey he would undertake with a very specific aim. What he was looking for was nothing less than spiritual enlightenment. It was time to undertake what he called his ‘obligatory pilgrimage’.

CHAPTER 6 Thou Shalt Not Alter the Consciousness of Thy Fellow Man

The newly-wed Learys spent four months living in a small cottage in the Kumaon Hills near Almora. It had no gas, electricity or running water, and was situated on a ridge that looked out over the Himalayas. They met up with Ralph Metzner, with whom they took LSD at the TajMahal, but generally they lived quietly and simply. This basic lifestyle did not appeal to Nena, however, and she quickly became bored. She came to the conclusion that the marriage had been a mistake, and by spring it was over.

The Indian trip may have been a failure as a honeymoon, but did it also fail as a religious pilgrimage? Tim had been planning this trip for a couple of years, ever since he’d realised that Eastern religious philosophy offered a better system for understanding the psychedelic experience than Western science. Once in India, he dedicated himself to religious practice, becoming a disciple of the tibetan Buddhist Lama Govinda and studying with the Hindu theologian Sri Krishna Penn. Ultimately, though, Tim’s flirtations with Hinduism and Buddhism would not lead to a genuine commitment to those religions. He was never able to totally conquer his ego and his intellect as those practices called on him to do. Tim was extremely fond of his ego and his intellect, and understandably so, for they were both remarkable. What he wanted was a system that contained the necessary understanding of inner space but that allowed him to keep all the fun, personal stuff at the same time. In this he was one of the first to evaluate spiritual practices through Western consumerist principals, a practice that would spread rapidly from the 1970s onwards.

Tim’s ambiguous relationship with existing religions is best highlighted by comparison with that of Richard Alpert, who took his own ‘Journey to the East’ in 1967. In many ways Alpert, the rich and ambitious young man who had been preoccupied with material values, seemed a far less likely candidate for spiritual transformation than Tim.

Yet it was Richard who returned from India a genuinely changed man, having renamed himself Baba Ram Dass, and having realised that the temporary illumination induced by LSD could hardly compare to the permanent awareness of a genuinely enlightened soul. He went on to write the bestseller Be Here Now and to become one of America’s leading Hindu theologians.

Ram Dass would later tell an intriguing story about the Hindu guru who transformed his life. He was exactly the same guru who appeared to Tim outside a temple, Ram Dass claims,1 during Tim’s Indian honeymoon two years earlier. Tim felt incredibly drawn to the man and started to approach him, but became strangely afraid. Fearing that he would miss his bus, he turned and walked away. In so doing he lost the chance to undergo the profound transformation that later occurred in Ram Dass. The incident left a sufficient mark on Tim, however, for him to include it in his autobiography many years later, albeit in a heavily embellished form. In Tim’s more archetypal version, the tourist bus was replaced by a ferryman who took Leary across the Ganges at night to a haunted and forbidden land. There emerged from the dark ‘an old man with long white hair, 20 feet away. He was naked save for a dhoti around his waist. His eyes were luminous. I was terrified. Suddenly I understood: he was some special ancient teacher who had been waiting for me all my life. I wanted to run forward and throw myself at his feet. But I was paralysed with fright.’2Leary turned away from the man and later, he says, wept uncontrollably, convinced he had run away from the Buddha. He added as a footnote, ‘If this little story about meeting the wild-eyed time-traveller on the other side of the Ganges seems inconclusive and unfinished, it is because the event was exactly that—inconclusive and unfinished.’

Whatever the reality of the incident, it does coincide with an end to Tim’s attempts to find answers from established religion. He would continue to talk of the divine, but he now saw it as a product of the mind. God was within. He rejected the idea of a ‘higher power’ external to the nervous system. This was not to say that the universe was just dead matter, for he believed that it too was conscious and alive. But while it is aware of what is happening, he claimed, it is not aware in the sense that it plans what it is doing. ‘I think [the harmony in the universe] involves a consciousness of the interwovenness of organic life and inorganic life,’ he told Paul Krassner in 1966,3 ‘but is there one central computer that’s planning it all or can sum it all up in one moment? I don’t think so.’ Tim would continue to speak of ‘God’ throughout the 1960s, but his definition of the word was very different from that of the patriarchal religions of Christianity, Islam and Judaism. In Tim’s definition, God was essentially sentient chaos.

Having examined all the established religions and found them lacking, Tim decided that the only thing to do was create his own. How hard could it be? True, the established religions were the result of the ideas and experiences of millions of people over thousands of years. But those people did not have LSD. Just as the seventeenth-century astronomer Galileo, armed with his telescope and a few clear nights, could understand outer space to a degree impossible for the generations of star-gazers who came before him, so Tim believed that LSD allowed him to observe inner space more accurately and more frequently than any saint or visionary who had come before. This tool gave him the confidence to draw a line under the religions of the past, and create a brand new religion of his own design.

Leary called his religion the League of Spiritual Discovery, inspired by the mysterious ‘League’ of truth seekers in Hermann Hesse’s The Journey to the East. For its logo he took an existing Eastern motif, gave it a funny Irish twist, and created a four-leafed lotus flower. Millbrook was declared a ‘monastery, a seed ashram, a sanctuary, a spiritual shrine’, and Leary gave himself the title of ‘First Guide’. His religion had two commandments, both based on the belief that the right to control your own consciousness was the most fundamental freedom of all. The first was ‘Thou shalt not alter the consciousness of thy fellow man’. This was the ultimate psychedelic sin, giving the drug to someone without their knowledge or consent. Each individual’s consciousness was their own responsibility, and it was up to them to decide what to do with it. Attempts to bring someone round to your own perspective became known as ‘laying your trip on someone’, and this was considered to be pretty much the source of all of humankind’s problems. This principle was so important that the second commandment essentially restated it, just to ensure that everyone was clear about the issue. It was, ‘Thou shalt not prevent thy fellow man from altering his own consciousness’. Beyond that, everything else was permitted.

With commandments like that it would have been hypocritical to try to recruit anyone else into the religion and, apart from a few like-minded Millbrook friends, Tim did not. Instead, he urged people to start their own religion. ‘Sorry, baby,’ he wrote in The Politics of Ecstasy, ‘Nobody can do it for you.’4 While they were at it, they should write their own set of commandments, as Moses’ ‘tortured hang-ups are not exactly yours’. The next step would be to write their own bible, for the Old Testament was ‘the garbled trip diary of a goofy bunch of flipped-out visionaries. Don’t you know that God’s revelation comes to us today clearer and more directly than it did to Elijah, Abraham, Isaiah, Jeremiah? To deny this is to say that God and the DNA code haven’t been busy perfecting the means of communication.’ The foundation for this logic was the realisation that, as individuals were living in different ‘reality tunnels’, a ‘one size fits all’ religion was bound to fail.

Many people took his advice and started their own religions, the most famous examples being the Brotherhood of Eternal Love and the Neo-American Church, which was created by Millbrook resident Art Kleps. The Neo-American Church, with its motto of ‘victory over horseshit!’ and stated goal of ‘money and power’, was intended as a mockery of organised religion. Members of the church were known as ‘Boohoos’, and Kleps gave himself the title of ‘Chief Boohoo’. Leary became a member of both these religions, although the frivolous nature of the Boohoos was perhaps not entirely to his liking. Tim also declared that he was a Hindu, and that being a Hindu did not mean that he was no longer a Catholic. All religions, after all, were different attempts to illuminate the same universal truths. Limiting yourself to one religion was like seeing a beautiful statue in an art gallery, but only looking at it from one angle.

By now, the psychedelic revolution was firmly under way. The publicity Tim received from IF-IF and his Harvard dismissal had created snowballing interest in, and awareness of, the psychedelic experience. It was spreading by word of mouth through colleges and communities, and underground chemists were turning out home-made LSD in quantities of at first thousands, then hundreds of thousands, and soon millions of individual doses. It was global in nature, and in terms of its scale, it was a movement unprecedented in history. Never before had so many people undergone such a radical change in consciousness at the same time. Putting an accurate figure on its size is never going to be possible but, based on the number of LSD doses produced according to the government’s drug agency, a commonly quoted statistic is that seven million Americans took the drug during this period. In the press and on the streets, Tim was the undisputed figurehead of the entire movement. Yet what was happening, and what Tim believed was happening, were two subtly different things.

Tim saw the LSD movement as a revolution that was entirely spiritual in nature, for he knew how LSD produced religious rapture and ecstasy in himself. By now he had discarded his old academic identity and saw himself as a guru. He wrote an autobiographical account of his discovery of psychedelics which he called High Priest. It seemed to be a fitting title, for hadn’t his mother wanted him to become a priest? Those who read Leary or Huxley soon came away with the impression that the drug was nothing less than a holy sacrament. Many people who took LSD came to view Leary as a saint, a holy man, or a messenger from God. Indeed, there were plenty who considered him to be God incarnate. There were even satanists at the time who took to inverting images of Leary in black magic rituals.

There seemed little reason for Tim to doubt his identification of LSD with a religious sacrament. As well as his own experience and that of his colleagues, hadn’t they proved that the drug produced genuine Gnostic revelations in the Harvard ‘Good Friday’ experiment? The results of that and similar experiments had certainly been impressive, with up to 90 per cent of volunteers reporting a religious revelation after taking a psychedelic drug in a religious setting. But 90 per cent is not 100 per cent, and now that the drug was out on the streets there were few who went to the bother of arranging a religious set and setting. Tim had been a psychologist, not a sociologist, and his viewpoint was geared to an individual rather than society as a whole. He had seen some bad trips, but he had always been able to analyse what happened and identify fault with the guide, or the environment, or the individual’s mental baggage. There was no reason why, with work, these faults could not be worked on and the individual could not experience a beneficial trip. This approach is fine when working with individuals, but starts to fall down when the number of trippers increases exponentially. By the time that millions of people are experimenting with the drug, that minority of individual failures quickly becomes a significant social statistic.

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