You don’t “know” that he got in trouble at Harvard for giving LSD to students, or that he ever said “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

 

You don’t “know” that Art Linkletter’s 20 year-old daughter walked out of a 6tth floor window on LSD, or trippers sometimes claim they’ve seen God.

 

You don’t “know” that LSD leads directly to long hair, random sex and brown rice.

 

You don’t “know” that an LSD trip gives you pulsing hallucinations like:

 

 

Okay. You’ve emptied your mind of preconceptions and prejudices. You are now ready to read “High Priest,” Timothy Leary’s 1968 account of the first trips he took, who he took them with, what he experienced and what he learned. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here.] 

 

Start in 1959. Leary is, he says, “an anonymous institutional employee who drove to work each morning in a long line of commuter cars, and drove home each night and drank martinis and looked like and thought like several million liberal middle-class robots.”

 

Could be anyone you know. Except that the institution is Harvard. And that Leary was on the fast track.

 

But on a research trip to Spain with his two young children, he gets so violently ill that he surrenders to his illness and has his first death/rebirth trip. “I slowly let every tie to my old life slip away. My career, my ambitions, my home….I was a 38 year-old male animal with two cubs. High, completely free.”

 

A year later, he takes mushrooms in Mexico. And here, for the first time, he writes what he sees:

 

 

Leary also tracks what’s going on with others who have chewed the bitter mushrooms. It’s tame stuff: the giggles, revelations of oneness with everything in the universe, “Buddha unity.”

 

Back at Harvard, what he’s learned starts to undermine the academic/success game. Research, he writes, “is a phony ritual to counteract fear of the mystery.” The key to the mystery of life? “Chemistry.” The nervous system? “Equal amounts of God and Devil.”

 

In his new reality, Harvard presents him with fresh problems. Control of the drug as an issue of power. Playing the game even as you’re dealing yourself out of the game. Keeping mind-altering drugs as a sacrament for those in the know or giving them to just anybody.

 

What’s most compelling in “High Priest” is how acutely Leary recalls the psilocybin trips that he and his friends took. Allen Ginsberg, in a darkened room, listening to Beethoven and Wagner, as Leary enters and announces, “You are a great man.” Arthur Koestler taking hallucinogens and feeling no different. Leary’s interim conclusion about life: “God and sex are the two central beats of the dance.” A behavioral observation: “The people you turn on fell in love with you or never wanted to see you again.”

 

In l961, Leary starts tripping with his colleague Richard Alpert (later to become Ram Dass). The language changes: sacrament, holy man, ritual. They’re learning about ideal settings, the need for a guide, LSD as prayer. For two years, Leary works in a prison, taking LSD with convicts to see if they can stop playing “the bad boy” game — like the experience of other researchers who gave LSD to alcoholics, he gets astonishing results.  

 

Also in 1961, his first LSD trip. For those who have taken it, this is the big league of psychedelics.  “Like all sacraments that work, they demand your all. They demand that you live up to the revelation.” Reluctantly he concludes:” Cambridge, Massachusetts was not a place to start a new religion.” Really? Bet you’d have twigged that Harvard couldn’t handle “rocks are aware” and “all is consciousness.”

 

What Leary, in his enthusiasm and innocence, misses: At the height of a visionary experience, you can become a completely different person. But visionary experiences have a half-life. Prophets have even shorter lives — over and over we kill them.

 

 

After the experiences he describes in these pages, Tim Leary detonated his old life, decided to save the planet, and became for his troubles, a spokesman and a showman. “High Priest” shows you how a charismatic professor came to take this route — it hints at the one-note message that’s to come.

 

But that’s not our concern. Here we’re watching a man wake up from a Kafkaesque nightmare, and learn how to look inside without judgment, and learn how to be with other people when they’ve swallowed a sacrament. I

 

This is an old story — really, the oldest. And one of the most exciting: “I once was lost but now am found/ Was blind, but now I see.” Just reading it will get you high — legally.