I Have America Surrounded. John Higgs

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СКАЧАТЬ both dangerous and extraordinarily optimistic. Richard tackled the journey with a little more style. He bought a small aeroplane and flew himself there.

      That holiday took place in a Spanish-style villa at Cuernavaca. It was an idyllic environment, with a long veranda, terrace, swimming pool and a lush green lawn surrounded by ahuehuete trees and colourful flowering vines. Tim’s daughter Susan spent the summer with friends in Berkeley, but Tim and his son Jack were visited by many friends and colleagues, including Professor McClelland, Richard Alpert and an old friend and drinking buddy from graduate school in Berkeley, Frank Barron. Frank had been instrumental in setting up Tim’s meeting with Professor McClelland in Florence, which led to the offer of work at Harvard. Tim had returned the favour by recommending him for a similar position at Harvard soon after he had arrived.

      When he visited Tim in Italy in 1959, Frank had been talking enthusiastically about some ‘magic mushrooms’ that he had obtained from a Mexican psychiatrist. Tim’s response to this was fairly standard for a psychologist in the 1950s. He was disconcerted and a little embarrassed when his previously rational friend suddenly began raving about mystical states and visions, and he warned him that he was in danger of losing his scientific credibility if he ‘babbled this way’ publicly.¹

      The idea of magic mushrooms had become known to mainstream society only a couple of years earlier, following an article by R. Gordon Wasson in the May 1957 issue of Life magazine. Wasson, an ex-vice-president of J.P. Morgan and Company, the leading investment bank, had the unlikely hobby of ethnomycology, the study of mushrooms in human society. Together with his wife Valentina, he had travelled the world investigating the importance of toadstools in tribal society. He had spent two years in Mexico investigating an intriguing report by anthropologists who, in 1936, witnessed a ‘sacred mushroom’ ceremony in a remote Mexican village. This report seemed to provide evidence that a mushroom cult, believed to date back 4000 years, was still in existence. This cult was centred on the ingestion of a mushroom called teonanacatl, or ‘God’s flesh’. These ceremonies had been driven underground following the arrival of the Catholic Church in Mexico. The cult had been dismissed as myth, and botanists had claimed that these fungi simply didn’t exist.

      The Life article, a 17-page feature in the magazine’s ‘Great Adventure’ series, detailed how the Wassons had travelled to the remote highlands of Mexico, where they eventually met a curandera, or medicine woman, from the teonanacatl cult. Being included in a ceremony wasn’t easy, for it was only permitted to enquire about the mushrooms ‘when evening and darkness come and you are alone with a wise old man or woman whose confidence you have won, by the light of a candle held in the hand and talking in a whisper’. The mushrooms themselves had to be picked by virgins before sunrise at the time of the new moon.² But eventually the Wassons’ perseverance paid off, and they became the first white people in recorded history to sample God’s flesh. Wasson’s sense of detached scientific observation ‘soon melted before the onslaught of the mushrooms’, he later wrote, and following a night spent on the dirt floor of a remote hut, with his mind flying over incredible landscapes observing wondrous visions, ‘the word “ecstasy” took on real meaning’.³

      The mushrooms grew on a line of volcanic peaks just north of the villa where Tim and his friends spent the days lounging in the sunshine by the pool. A frequent visitor to the villa, Gerhart Braun from the University of Mexico, thought that he could obtain some of these fabled mushrooms. Did Tim want to try them? The stories about the mushrooms were undeniably intriguing, but the idea of taking them was a little frightening. Tim’s life had turned a corner and seemed to be on the right track, and there was no reason to jeopardise what he now had with the risk of madness. Yet there was also a professional curiosity involved. Frank had claimed that these strange fungi might play a role in their search for meaningful behaviour change, and this fitted with Leary’s suspicion that the ‘transactional element’ between doctor and patient that he had been searching for might only be possible with a chemical key—a drug.

      And he was on vacation. He agreed to try them.

      Braun and several friends headed off to the old Indian town of San Pedro, near the volcano Toluca. Here he met a curandera known as Crazy Juana, and by the side of a church away from the market she sold him a bag of the mushrooms. They ate them the following Saturday.

      They were black and mouldy. They smelt rotten and damp and tasted bitter and stringy. Sitting in swimming costumes by the side of the pool, all but two of the party joined in. They ate six or seven each, and sat back to see what would happen. One abstainer, a friend of a friend named Bruce, was appointed as the official observer and was given the job of recording the reactions of the rest. After half an hour the effects of the drug started, and the world just came alive. Tim looked at Bruce, who was diligently writing down his observations, and was struck by the realisation that Bruce had no idea at all what he was observing. He found this realisation incredibly funny, and the earnestness and detachment of the scientific community suddenly appeared to him as ludicrous ignorance. How could they even begin to understand something that they were so separated from? The giggles kept coming and soon Tim was engulfed in uncontrollable laughter. Gathering his wits together, he saw to it that the children went into town to catch a movie, and headed indoors for a lie down. Then the visions really started, his mind gently split open and he was away.

      When normality returned, Tim was a changed man. The slight change to the chemistry of his brain had altered the entire world. Time and space had been different, and he had understood the world with a clarity that he had never previously believed possible. ‘In four hours by the swimming pool in Cuernavaca I learned more about the mind, the brain and its structures than I did in the preceding fifteen as a diligent psychologist,’ he later wrote.⁴ Could this be the key to making genuine changes to the mind? And had he stumbled on a method to explore the methodologies he argued for in The Existential Transaction? If a psychologist took the drug with a patient he would no longer be an uninvolved observer in therapy. The role of the doctor would become that of a guide, reassuring the patient and steering them towards understanding the causes of their destructive behaviour.

      But he had experienced something else as well, something inexplicable. He had felt himself slipping back down what can only be described as his genetic history. He had been able to stop and feel each life on his evolutionary ladder. He had mentally travelled back through the aeons, from the time of the simplest land animals to that of life in the oceans, from times of jungles and great ferns back to the start of life on earth. It was a powerful, vivid experience, and it differed from a dream in one important respect. Dreams are imaginative jumbles of experience based on past events and memories. But where had his mushroom visions come from? He had no previous experience to account for the things he saw and felt. The brain had done something that, according to all the literature, was simply impossible.

      How should he respond to the experience? Tim could still remember his own reactions to Frank’s admission of his mushroom use, and he knew that he would receive the same uncomfortable reaction when he talked about what had happened. But now he knew that the effect was real, and if all existing theories of the mind were unable to explain it, surely it was the duty of a scientist to investigate further? Surely any scientific model of the mind had to include these inexplicable experiences if it was to be comprehensive and accurate?

      It’s no exaggeration to say that this was the pivotal moment in Timothy Leary’s life. He had a new sense of purpose, as if his life’s work had just begun. From that day on he dedicated himself to understanding the psychedelic experience, never doubting the intrinsic value of the experience or the importance of chemicals in exploring the mind. But somehow he had to convince the rest of the world. And the only way he could do that, it was clear, was to persuade other people to try them.

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