Ralph Metzner on Timothy Leary & Birth of A Psychedelic Culture

Ralph Metzner, PhD, is a recognized pioneer in the exploration of consciousness and transformation. As a therapist he has promoted "green psychology" and shamanic ritual as techniques for transcending the bounds of ego and experiencing deep connections with the sacred. Ralph is currently offering a series of workshops on "Alchemical Divination" in OPEN EXCHANGE's Seminars category. It's guaranteed to blow your mind—naturally!

In the early 60s, while still finishing his graduate studies at Harvard, Ralph did psychological research with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass), subsequently co-authoring books on the psychedelic experience. By the late 60s their public lives diverged. Where Leary played anti-establishment provocateur and Alpert became holy man Ram Dass, Ralph built his career as a renowned  psychotherapist, educator, workshop leader, and prolific writer. Ralph is Professor Emeritus at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

To this day, Ralph and Ram Dass remain fiercely loyal to Tim Leary and have co-authored a new book, Birth of A Psychedelic Culture, in part to help restore Leary's sullied reputation. Was it Leary's mistake to publicly advocate the use of LSD, or to use drugs privately in the first place? Or are both a cause for celebration? Like Ram Dass, Ralph believes that the 60s wouldn't have been the 60s without brave consciousness pioneers such as Timothy Leary. Unlike Leary, however, neither Ralph nor Ram Dass have had their careers sidelined by the drug debate.

Drugs are in the news again, from celebrity prescription-drug abuse to the Afghan poppy fields to shoot-outs with dealers on the Mexican border. The Obama administration has recently admitted that the "war on drugs" has been a failure, implying, if not admitting directly, that society needs to redirect its efforts. In many countries where drug use is decriminalized there is actually less drug abuse. If policy makers want fewer people to use drugs, perhaps the best way is to make reality itself more pleasant. That might mean less money for war but more funding for schools, sports, nutrition, healthcare, arts and crafts, music, yoga and meditation. "Woodstock" for everyone – Wouldn't that be the ultimate fulfillment of our vision of the 60s?

Is now the time for a reexamination of Tim Leary's life and times? First and foremost, Tim Leary believed that life should be a joyous celebration, a wondrous journey. Leary was careful to distinguish between various classes of drugs and was no fan of marijuana or depressants. Should he continue to be demonized for advocating personal choice with respect to a certain class of psychedelics? In Leary's own words, "The 21st century is going to be the century of the brain, and the brain can only be navigated with the help of 'brain vitamins', for memory, for acceleration, for different forms of sensual enhancement. You've got to face that fact. It's the taboo. If we have bad drugs, let's make better drugs...."

As always, we invite you to voice your comments for publication in an upcoming edition.

—Bart Brodsky

Bart Brodsky: Birth of A Psychedelic Culture is a very detailed book covering day-to-day reminincences and anecdotes 1961 to1966 when you, Tim Leary, and Richard Alpert did psychological experiments with mind expanding substances, which were legal in the United States until about 1968. Since then you've had a five decade career as a celebrated therapist and academic. Why this book now?

Ralph Metzner: We wanted to do this book because we had not told those stories from our perspective. Leary has told those stories from his perspective in several books, most notably Flashbacks and High Priest, and there have been two other biographies that came out [recently], one of them a hatchet job.

BB: So, a good part of this is to correct the record?

RM: Not so much to correct the record but to give it from our perspective. We asked a friend of ours, psychiatrist Gary Bravo, to interview us, and we recorded the answers in a series of interviews. We went through a lot of editing, transcribed them and edited them. We started with the Harvard Project, how we met Leary, what were our initial impressions, how the Harvard Project evolved, then after Harvard, and then the training projects we had in Mexico and the Caribbean, then an interlude, and then Millbrook, including a trip to India that I took, and Leary and his wife took. And then the Millbrook project breaking up and us all going off in different directions.

BB: I particularly enjoyed the last section where you and Ram Dass lent some perspective to the legacy of the 60s.

RM: It's fortuitous—we didn't plan it that way—but the [recent] biographies of Leary, and then most of the book reviews that appeared on those biographies, reflected a kind of a mainstream assessment of the 60s as a time when we lost our way. When people "dropped out" and dropped acid and "spaced out," and didn't engage, and all of that sort of thing. Which is actually a false sort of perspective.

BB: Yes.

RM: Because there's actually a lot more to the 60s than that, even if you don't take into account the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement—why wouldn't you take those into account? And so, we felt that there was a tremendous amount of misunderstanding of the role of these drugs and what they really are and what they really mean.

BB: One of Tim Leary's first experiments at Harvard, and I believe you were involved as well, was to see if the recidivism rate of prisoners could be lowered by giving them psilocybin. Do you know how long Tim tracked the prisoners, and do you know the results of that experiment?

RM: The results were ambiguous because the actual recidivism rate is hard to assess and is dependent on a whole bunch of other factors. For example, you can't just expect one experience, or even a few experiences, to completely change a person. It's a behavioral index, and the kind of projects we did—you need more than that. When [prisoners] come out they need job counseling, they need to find a support system, kind of a rehab/ halfway house–none of that existed. We tried to do the best we could but we couldn't do it.

BB: I want to underscore that those were serious experiments.

RM: Absolutely! They were approved and they were written up in the literature. Leary was very positive in his statements and tended to sometimes exaggerate the effects, but nevertheless, the literature is very clear. There were profound changes in people, but they don't necessarily reflect in behavior if you don't have a system to support it. The recidivism rate is only one thing: the rate at which people return to prison.

BB: You also talked about the Good Friday study by Walter Panke, the first and only controlled double-blind study of mystical experience. In the spirit of "set and setting," where a qualified guide insures comfort and safety of the participants, Panke gave divinity students psilocybin during a Good Friday service in a chapel. What were the results?

RM: They all supported the hypothesis, that people under those kinds of circumstances, who were prepared, who had the expectation, and the setting in a church [would have a mystical experience.] And the criteria were extracted from the mystical literature. By checklists and questions and interviews after, six months afterwards, and so forth, they were all confirmed.

BB: Were these experiences life-changing?

RM: That's one of the criteria of "mystical experiences," among others. And Rick Doblin did an interview of some of the prisoners and some of the divinity students 20 years later, and they still reported life-changing experiences.

BB: Reading numerous accounts of psychedelic trips, I looked for some common themes. Tim seemed to enjoy game theory. He liked to talk about creating our own reality and choosing the games we play, and enjoying the games we choose.

RM: Well, that was kind of a metaphor that he used at the time, as did other people like Eric Berne. A game is a sequence of interpersonal social behavior that has certain rules and rituals and structures and understandings and roles, clearly defined roles by agreement. And then they're subject to change and playing new roles, and it's helpful to be very clear about what games you play. It's the idea of bringing more consciousness to your interpersonal relationships. From a psychological point of view, you don't project your own past experiences of your family onto your current family situation.

BB: Tim referred to himself as a "High Priest," but he eschewed organized religion.

RM: That was a joke.

BB: Was that game theory?

RM: Well, I would say that's more tongue in cheek.

BB: Was Tim privately an atheist? An agnostic?

RM: He wrote a very powerful essay on the religious experience. Of course, he came from a very Catholic upbringing, raised by his mother and his aunt, so he was not interested in the Catholic Church. It was something he wanted to get away from. But yes, he was interested in mysticism. His whole understanding of religious and mystical experiences is profound, and I think his initial experience with visionary mushrooms in Mexico was one of the first times that the classic mystical experience was formulated in evolutionary terms. Because he knew evolution, the theory of evolution. So he didn't present it in terms of theological concepts and oneness with god or anything like that, meaning not that he's not a believer, but he presented it in terms of evolutionary progression, from cosmic evolution and terrestrial evolution, biological, single cell, all the way up—

BB: But he seemed a bit ambivalent about Richard Alpert's conversion to Ram Dass, the "holy man" game.

RM: He did not like the "guru trip." He was very opposed to the guru trip. That was not his mode. Ram Dass's mode was Bhakti yoga, that's the devotional; it happens as a result of devotion to the guru, and your practice and chanting, and so forth. Leary was more of what the Indians would call Ghani yoga, very mental yoga, and spiritual practices, meditation and so forth. His model for the work that he was doing, going along with game theory, was that he was captain of a team. He liked baseball a lot. That's a temporary role that you assume for the purpose of the game, and you don't play that the whole time, when you sit at home with your family and eat a meal.

BB: So everyone can be captain, according to Tim?

RM: Yes, or you might say, like the leader of an expedition. Let's say you have an expedition that's exploring some territory that's never been explored before, like South America. You have someone who's the team leader, and you have members of the team who play different roles, have different interests. And that was also part of Herman Hesse's Journey To The East, which [Leary] and I wrote an article about. Different people had different interests. Some were interested in the biology; some were interested in philosophy; some were interested in how it applied to relationships between men and women, and so forth.

BB: You co-authored several works with Tim. At some point you went from graduate student to peer. Did that change your relationship?

RM: When in the course of the project I finished my PhD and got a postdoctoral fellowship in psychopharmacology, in order to learn more about the drugs we were exploring and doing research—

BB: Did you also do therapy on each other?

RM: Well, not technically. We did explore the use of these substances in a therapeutic mode. Our research was not therapy per se. The prison project would probably come closest to that. But there were lots of other people doing therapy with LSD in Europe [and elsewhere], people like Stan Grof. That was not our model. We were doing group ceremonies, the first study in a naturalistic setting. And that was Tim's interest. Even before he got involved with the drugs he was interested in something called existential transactionalism. The two kinds of relationships that psychologists have, like an experimenter to a subject, or a doctor to a patient, are both asymmetrical power relationships, people would say nowadays. People weren't using that language exactly, but he felt he didn't want to do that. So, his approach to the prisoners' project, for example, was not, "You're prisoners, we're doctors, and we're going to give you this drug." That's the standard approach. That's the way medical companies do all the time. Tim had a different idea. That was the expedition model. Because we found these drugs, they're not drugs like any other drug. They're drugs that affect the way you look at the world, you see the world, you understand the world, you think about the world, you understand reality. Not like a drug that strengthens the muscles or the heart or breathing or counteracts infections or something like that. The effects on the body are very minimal, so the model was we had these unusual experiences that could provide insight and we'll share them with you. Maybe you'll have insights that'll help you change your behavior. That was a very egalitarian model. So we took the drugs with the prisoners. Of course, we didn't all take it at the same time. We always had some people who weren't taking it, to provide safety and reality testing, and all that. But, of course, the mainstream academics didn't like that, because they thought that it was violating the rules of academic research. You're not supposed to do that. From their point of view that was correct, if it were any other drug. But if it was a drug that affects consciousness, it was ridiculous. There is no behavior! It was kind of a joke. If you want to study LSD from a behavioral point of view, it's kind of boring. The person's going to lie on the ground and say nothing for six hours. Maybe now and again say, "Wow, that was amazing!"

BB: The focus of your own work, over many decades, has been on consciousness expansion, not necessarily drug use. When you helped found the Castalia Foundation in 1964, named after Hesse's Glass Bead Game, you were doing weekend seminars using non-drug methods of consciousness expansion such as meditation and yoga.

RM: Using the drugs became politically more and more difficult.

PICTURED LEFT: Timothy Leary on the town, circa 1960. MIDDLE: Professor Richard Alpert (before he became Ram Dass) and graduate student Ralph Metzner conduct psychological experiments, circa 1964. RIGHT: Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert at Harvard, circa 1961. Photos courtesy of Ralph Metzner and the Leary Futique Trust. Reprinted with permission of Synergetic Press, publisher of Birth of a Psychedelic Culture.

BB: Did the non-drug session differ markedly from the psychedelic trips?

RM: Well, yes, because you don't have that kind of intense thing! You're basically having experiences that you might have typically in meditation. We did a lot of audio-visual things, slide-shows, and films. I got involved in making films, which I still do. And we used meditative methods, adopted methods from Gurdjieff, Buddhism, whatever we could find. And this was also designed to get people out of the idea, "This is a drug: You take the drug and you become enlightened." It's not like that. It's never been like that. [Drugs are] amplifiers that amplify perception, everything that happens, total function of the set and setting, the intention that you put into it— nothing else. If you have the intention to do therapy on your neurosis, or to treat alcoholism, it could help. But our intention was to collect data from people. One of the articles we published was "The Reaction to Psilocybin in a Naturalistic Setting." A natural, supportive set and setting, not a clinic, not a laboratory, but a livingroom with supporters there, allowing people to speak and to report on their own experiences and work on their own issues. And then we did a lot of work giving it to artists and writers and other people who were sophisticated in exploring their own consciousness and asked them what they felt. So it was a very egalitarian and respectful approach.

BB: Did Tim's very public advocacy of drug use in some ways contradict the original concept of "set and setting"?

RM: No, not at all.

BB: You don't think the scene got out of control, at least in the general—

RM: Well, it got out of control, but I don't think—well, you know, Tim testified in Congress. He did not advocate everybody should use drugs. Drugs were not given out freely. We didn't give drugs to students at Harvard. But students took their own drugs. And Tim did speak, and we all did, describing what we found. So, if that sounds good, if it sounds interesting and good, yes, that was true. We were enthusiastic about what discovery we made. Like the analogy would be, we had an expedition and we accidentally discovered South America. Nobody even knew it existed. Then we came back and said, "Wow, if you go West and South you discover this continent, and it's huge, and it has all these strange animals and plants, and so forth! And people said, "You guys are crazy. You want us to go to some crazy country that doesn't exist. How we know it even exists?" And so forth.

BB: I resonated with the following statement that you made in Birth of A Psychedelic Culture: "Governments are deeply threatened by consciousness changing substances and are never comfortable with supporting much research unless it's negative, and, of course, many universities tend to be conservative institutions." Do you see that changing?

RM: Well, that was Leary's point, and that's why he wasn't annoyed or disappointed with Harvard's for not supporting that project any further. Because they are the guardians of the tradition. Of course, there's innovative work going on, but it's very controlled. It's very controlled. You can't—for example, universities won't support projects in parapsychology. They won't support projects in UFOs, or mystical experiences to this day! When I was at Harvard I never learned about Carl Jung, even. I don't know whether they teach Carl Jung now. And certainly nothing about Buddhism or religion as part of a psychology training program. No, not even to this day! Even at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where I taught for 30 years, which is an alternative graduate school, they didn't teach much about esoteric studies. They taught about Buddhism and Eastern philosophy in a general way, but nothing about parapsychology, new sciences. Everybody has their limits. And, of course, universities and academic institutions have to obey certain guidelines and criteria of accreditation. So they're the guardians of tradition. So, Leary wasn't opposed to people doing research or doing therapy with these drugs. He was supportive of it; he just didn't want to do it himself. He'd done a lot of it [before]; he was a therapist; he'd done research on therapy. He'd done a major textbook on interpersonal diagnosis of personality which is still used, and which they used to diagnose him when he was in prison!

BB: What would be the role of psychedelics today, with the mainstreaming of new age spirituality and the ongoing sexual revolution, and cyberpunk roleplaying, and environmentalism, and the internet, all of which to a great degree have been inspired by people who say they have been involved in psychedelics.

RM: What I say in my book, The Expansion of Consciousness, is that 60s was a period of the collective expansion of consciousness. You have individual expansion of consciousness, then you can have collective expansion of consciousness, expansion of the world view, the philosophy of the culture. Then you had these transformative social movements, like the anti-war and the civil rights movement and the women's movement. Talk about consciousness-raising! It's a similar concept. And the idea of the counter-culture. It's good when it's like an underground cultural stream, and it seems like it's counter, but that's not the basic intention. The basic intention of the anti-war movement, yes, to be against the war machine, but for people living peacefully together! The same thing with the civil rights movement. Yes, you have to be temporarily against discrimination and racial prejudice, but the positive dream is like Martin Luther King said, you want to have white children and black children to be able to go to school together, equality.

BB: I wonder if the counter-culture hasn't been mainstreamed. Despite two wars going on right now, a majority of the American people want peace. They want a clean environment. They want sexual freedom—

RM: It's always been that way. The American culture especially, and human culture in general, is multi-layered. We talk about the title, Birth of A Psychedelic Culture. It's a sub-culture, not a counter-culture. It was pushed underground. It was underground because the use of substances that affect consciousness is mostly illegal, so it has to be underground, just like certain movements in the middle-ages were underground and secretive, like Hermeticism and alchemy and so forth were, because they involved intention to spiritual essence within the person themselves. It's a kind of meditative thing, and the Church didn't like that because the Church wanted to control all religion. So, it's an underground stream of culture. The point is it's not criminal, it's not hurting anybody. It wants to pursue its own— And there are many other sub-cultures in this country. There are subcultures of Muslims, for example. There are subcultures of Marxist-Communists. Whatever! Artists subcultures. Regional subcultures. The idea of a culture is a network of communications involving certain shared values, belief systems, interests, overlapping. And there's mainstream culture. Mainstream culture itself is diverse, ranging all the way from fundamentalist rightists. The spectrum from the extreme right to the extreme left, is that mainstream culture or is it separate cultures, separate values? They might as well be different planets!

BB: It's be nice to think we have enough pluralism in our culture to embrace a wider spectrum, to increase the spectrum.

RM: Absolutely. People now talk about the economy, about Wall Street and Main Street. Those are two different cultures. Wall Street is interested in maximizing money and profit. Main Street, the main goal is to have jobs! To raise their families! And education and healthcare!

BB: Yes, decent access to healthcare without going through a maze of regulations.

RM: Exactly.

BB: Now, with the perspective of about 40 years, what do you think Tim's legacy should be, and the legacy of the psychedelic era?

RM: I think it's changing. This book may reflect a reevaluation of that. Astrologers like Rick Turner say that the planetary aspects are a little bit like they were in the 60s.

BB: I would urge readers to go to the last chapter of Birth of A Psychedelic Culture to get a sense of that reevaluation.

RM: I would hope that people would see it for what it really is. It's like an exploration of new possibilities in the areas of human relations, creative expression, scientific knowledge, and political-economic, the environmental movement—see, it's all connected to that. People who were psychedelic became inspired, myself included, were inspired to become environmental activists. Because when you expand consciousness you become aware of [how] we're destroying the environment, and you make different choices. When Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring it was a consciousness expanding experience. All of a sudden you ask yourself, why is it "silent" spring? Why aren't the birds singing? What's happening? And then you find out there's all this industrial pollution going on. And then you decide we don't want to pollute the water and the air.

BB: And it's no coincidence that the name of one of your organizations is Green Earth Foundation.

RM: Exactly.

BB: I can't thank you enough for breaking into the middle of your Sunday. Let's talk again before too long and explore all the other work you've done.

RM: Yes!

When OPEN EXCHANGE interviewed Timothy Leary for our April-June 1990 edition, we asked if it weren't now time to put aside drugs, live more naturally and organically. After all, back-to-the-land "drop-outs" had now inspired a burgeoning interest in healthy living. Leary was unrepentant, even defiant in his reply: TIM LEARY: That's an understandable, but deplorable cop-out. People that talk about "natural," [but] they drive cars instead of walking. They use glasses instead of going around myopic. The brain that's evolved over 2 billion years needs neurotransmitter chemicals, just the way the lungs need air.... The 21st century is going to be the century of the brain, and the brain can only be navigated with the help of "brain vitamins," for memory, for acceleration, for different forms of sensual enhancement. You've got to face that fact. It's the taboo. If we have bad drugs, let's make better drugs....

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