Physical Sensations: None.
Mood: Contented.
Conflict: None.
Sleep: More than eight hours!
Work: Productive.
Pain: None!
Today, when my husband was eating his breakfast, I walked up behind him, slipped my arms around his shoulders, kissed him, and said, “I know you love me.” And I left it at that. Even inside my mind.
He pressed his head into my belly, and I felt his shoulders relax beneath my arms. This poor, patient man. I love him so much. And you know what? He really does love me. Of course he does. I’m not a terrible person who doesn’t deserve to be loved. I’m the woman who is crazy about him, who laughs at his jokes, even his puns, who delights in his company. More than that, I’m not actually unlovable. Sure, I’m volatile and mercurial, but I’m also fun. Yes, I’m occasionally bitchy, but I’m also sweet. I’m opinionated, but I’m willing to admit when I’m wrong. It is suddenly so obvious that what I need to do is just get out of my own way and enjoy my marriage and my life.
My mood was so good today that I found myself able to approach with patience a book that I had up until now barely succeeded in paging through, let alone reading. Be Here Now—written, as the title page states, by “Dr. Richard Alpert, Ph.D., into Baba Ram Dass”—is printed primarily on butcher paper, with text that is not black but a pale blue that, depending on my mood, I find either insipid or soothing. One typical page is nothing more than a drawing of a mandala surrounded by the phrase “From Bindu to Ojas.” There are sketches of Indian gods and instructions to the reader that “The energy is the same thing as Cosmic Consciousness” or “Energy = Love = Awareness = Light = Wisdom = Beauty = Truth = Purity.” I have no idea what any of this means. When Ram Dass writes, “When I’m with the guru, there’s nobody home,” I can’t help sympathizing. When I am with this book, there’s nobody home. Until today.
With my newfound equanimity, I find myself willing to entertain the possibility that the problem is not the book’s but mine. Be Here Now is considered one of the most influential volumes of psychedelic spiritual literature. Certainly, the first section, in which the author details his early research and experiences with LSD, is relevant to my project, if only because it describes an important moment in the history of the drug’s promulgation. Moreover, I am, like Richard Alpert, “a good, Jewish, middleclass, upwardly mobile, anxiety-ridden neurotic.” There are things I can learn from this book, if only I am able to stop rolling my eyes at lines about “the big ice cream cone in the sky” or how “if you are PURE SPIRIT you are not matter!”
In the early 1960s, Ram Dass writes, his name was Richard Alpert and he was an assistant professor of social science at Harvard who had research contracts with Yale and Stanford. The invocation of these three most illustrious of institutions is meant, I know, to reassure and impress the most anxious of readers. Despite having gone to law school at Harvard,*1 and thus being fully cognizant of the essential similarity of the university to every other competitive institution, to my embarrassment I am in fact reassured and impressed. The mere fact that many of the early LSD pioneers in the United States attended or taught at Harvard establishes their credibility, doesn’t it?*2 At Harvard in the mid-1960s, Alpert teamed up with Timothy Leary, a clinical-psychology lecturer and expert in the field of the quantitative assessment of personality, with a Ph.D. from Berkeley, whom Alpert describes as having recently “been bicycling around Italy, bouncing checks.”*3 Leary, who had had a profound mystical experience while taking psilocybin in the form of what Alpert calls “Tionanactyl, the flesh of the Gods, the Magic Mushrooms of Mexico,” had set up the Harvard Psilocybin Project along with (among others) Aldous Huxley, who was then a visiting professor at MIT. In addition to studying psilocybin. Leary had acquired a quantity of LSD*4 and was, Alpert writes, “busy taking it and administering it.” Alpert eagerly joined in on both the self-experimentation and the research.
Among Leary and Alpert’s research projects was the 1961 Concord Prison Experiment, designed to test the effects of psilocybin-assisted group therapy on rates of recidivism. They recruited a group of prisoners with three to five months remaining on their felony prison sentences, and administered the drug in three group-therapy situations, using standard personality tests before and after the therapy to assess the drug’s effects. Leary and his team took the drug themselves, along with their subjects, a common practice of theirs.
Leary claimed that the therapy resulted in a marked decrease in subsequent incarcerations among treated prisoners; however, a thirty-four-year follow-up study by Rick Doblin, the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), failed to find any long-term reduction in recidivism. Moreover, Doblin found Leary’s original report of the study to be rife with quantitative errors and erroneous conclusions.
During the summer of 1961, Alpert and Leary spoke at an international psychiatry conference in Copenhagen. Their talk was not well received. Some critics called it little more than a muddled and incoherent tribute to psychedelic drugs. In the wake of that conference, a series of critical articles in The Harvard Crimson and the Boston Herald, a Hearst tabloid, led to an investigation by the Massachusetts Department of Health, which, though it didn’t shut the Harvard experiments down, did require that all drugs be administered by a qualified physician. Leary turned his supply of psilocybin over to the student health services (the same place where, thirty years later, I was to have my first, decidedly unpsychedelic, therapy appointment), but he continued to distribute LSD widely to willing volunteers.