Instead of an opening paean to psychedelics, he began to relate his experience of living for six months in an ashram in the foothills of the Himalayas. He said it meant “servant of God.” He looked like a soapbox prophet in Hyde Park, which I’d just seen in London. Alpert had just returned from India, where his name had been changed to Ram Dass. Instead of a tweedy Harvard psychedelic psychologist, the speaker entered wearing a scraggly beard, sandals, and a kind of white robe or dress. About fifty people attended, mostly students, spread out on couches, chairs, and the carpet. Living through modern chemistry” (then an ad slogan for DuPont Chemical). Some of it was hedonism, some was dumb, and some of it became the bones of a generation.ĭr. The Beatles and the Stones tripped out, and there was an atmosphere of intrepid inner exploration and raucous fun mixed with political outrage. Pot and acid made rapid inroads, displacing alcohol as drugs of choice. Leary’s infamous 1960s commandment “Tune in, turn on, and drop out” had become a media mantra and a cultural strategy. Alpert had the distinction of being the only tenured professor ever publicly exorcised from Harvard’s Ivy League faculty. They had both been fired from Harvard in connection with their psychedelic activities. Two of his former students, Sara and David Winter, were teaching psychology at Wesleyan and had invited him to speak.Īlpert was vaguely notorious to me as an associate of Timothy Leary, a counterculture icon. That spring a flyer appeared for a guest lecture by Richard Alpert, Ph.D., formerly a psychology professor at Harvard, who had done some of his graduate work at Wesleyan. They didn’t improve my academic standing. The visual and lyrical effects of psychedelics stimulated my artistic, philosophic, and poetic intuitions and expanded my inner and outer horizons. At the same time, I started smoking pot and experimenting with mescaline, DMT, and LSD.
The Vietnam War was raging, and there was upheaval on campus.įreshman year I took a seminar, “Freedom and Liberation in Ancient China and India,” that stirred an interest in Taoism and Buddhism. I had just spent my first extended time out of the country on a semester abroad in Franco’s Spain. I was twenty, a sophomore at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.
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