The Harvard Psychedelic Club

by Don Lattin

They would work together to found the Seva Foundation, which has done charitable works around the world, and coauthor a book titled Compassion in Action: Setting Out on the Path of Ser vice. Mirabai would later become the main force behind the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, founded in 1997 in Northampton, Massachusetts. The center has worked to encourage meditation practice in schools, prisons, and the workplace. And it all traces back to that pilgrimage to India.

  Many years later, sitting in her garden in rural Massachusetts, she can only shake her head. “My life completely and utterly changed. It just turned around. Here I was living on the other side of the world. Maharaji was a great gift to us. It’s hard to talk about, but he was remarkable. He was simply the embodiment of unconditional love. He radiated love. You felt utterly and totally accepted as you are. I’d never experienced that before. People had loved me, parents and friends, but I’d never experienced anything like it. Everything just shifted. That became the center point. Nothing seemed terrible or serious again after that. There was always that space to return to.”

  In this 1975 photo, Ram Dass (bearded, at right) sits in the Cambridge, Massachusetts, garden of David McClelland, his old boss at Harvard. Sitting at his right hand is Mirabai Bush, who met Ram Dass at a retreat in India. (Photo by Peter Simon, courtesy of Mirabai Bush.)

  Richard Alpert’s psychedelic baptism, followed by his pilgrimage to India, would forever change the way he looked at religion and psychology. “Until psychedelics came along, I’d had negative experiences with religion. I was a member of a conservative temple in Judaism, which never told me about mystical experiences. So I ended up being a social Jew. My father did that too; we had a political and social religion. My view of psychology was also very limited. We treated humans as objects and paid no attention to their inner world. . . . Now I have moved my consciousness past that, I feel that I am merely a cog in a wheel. I’m doing my gig. I’m living my life for God.”

  Teacher: Kyoto, Japan Summer 1957

  Huston Smith made his first pilgrimage to the Far East ten years before Richard Alpert arrived in India, but both men were in their midthirties when they embarked on their respective quests. Both were young university professors who had climbed the academic ladder, but who were desperately looking for something else. Smith was tired of just writing about satori, the enlightenment experience achieved by some Buddhist practitioners. He’d written enough restaurant reviews of the experience; he desperately wanted a real taste. His first psychedelic drug trip was still three years away. Huston Smith was ready to go halfway around the world for a taste of enlightenment, if that’s what it took.

  Two visitors to the St. Louis campus of Washington University had inspired a summer trip to Myoshinji Monastery—the Temple of the Marvelous Mind—in Kyoto. The first visitor was D. T. Suzuki, the renowned Zen Buddhist scholar who played a key role in the flowering of Buddhism in the West. Two decades before Smith arranged for Suzuki to visit St. Louis, the prolific Japanese writer had visited England and inspired one of the century’s most important reconcilers of East and West—Alan Watts, the influential Anglican/Buddhist writer and lecturer. Watts, who would briefly work with Leary in the early psychedelic research at Harvard, was just a twenty-one-year-old spiritual seeker when he met Suzuki at the World Congress of Faiths in 1936. The second visitor to inspire Huston’s journey to Japan was a Japanese priest who was visiting the States on a Fulbright scholarship. He wound up coteaching a course with Smith on Zen Buddhism, and offered some sage advice:

  “You will never grasp Zen by the rational mind alone.”

  Smith decided to go to Kyoto for a summer of meditation.

  In Kyoto, he crossed paths with another Zen trailblazer. Gary Snyder—the Beat poet and inspiration for the Japhy Ryder character in Jack Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums— had just arrived in the historic Japanese city. Like Huston Smith and Alan Watts, Gary Snyder had been inspired by the scholarly writings of D. T. Suzuki to make his own pilgrimage to the Zen temples of Kyoto. He would spend most of the next thirteen years in Japan. And while Smith would spend only six weeks at Myoshinji Temple, the experience would have a profound effect on the religion scholar’s own spiritual journey.

  Through Vedanta, the religious practice Smith embraced after his encounters with Gerald Heard and Aldous Huxley, the freewheeling Methodist had already explored the spiritual disciplines of Hinduism. After returning from Japan, Smith would begin his fifteen-year tenure at MIT, a period when Zen Buddhism was his primary meditation practice. “In switching I don’t feel as if I’m deserting Vedanta,” Smith told a friend. “Same truth, different idiom.”

  His native Methodism proved more of a struggle.

  At Myoshinji Temple in Kyoto, Smith was placed under the spiritual tutelage of the Zen master Goto Roshi. Smith studiously adhered to the prescribed rituals of the daily visit with Roshi. At precisely 5 A.M., he would slide open the shoji—the door covered with rice paper—bow with palms together, and step into the master’s presence. Roshi would be in the opposite corner of the room, seated in his robes on a meditation cushion. Smith would walk slowly along the walls of the chamber, then make a right turn toward the master. On reaching him, Smith sank to his knees and, with his forehead on the straw mat, extended his arms toward his teacher, lifting cupped fingers upward.

  At first, the Methodist minister found this practice grating. His Protestant upbringing had admonished him to bow down to neither priest nor king, but there he was—kowtowing to a mere mortal! But after a few days of practice, Smith’s disdain for the bowing practice began to dissolve, only to be replaced by another psychological quandary.

  Huston’s six-week session gave him a chance to try out a variety of Zen techniques. There was the basic practice—periods of sitting meditation punctuated with short meetings with Roshi. Then there was another eight days of looking into the heart and mind. There was also time for Smith to study the English-language manuscripts of the Kyoto branch of the First Zen Institute of America. But the Buddhist practice that almost drove Smith insane was the koan, a seemingly nonsensical riddle designed to snap the student out of his normal way of thinking.

  Perhaps the most famous koan is the question, What is the sound of one hand clapping? Smith’s koan came from a question that a monk once asked Joshu, a Chinese meditation master from the Tang dynasty.

  “Does a dog have Buddha nature?” the Tang monk asked.

  “Mu,” Joshu replied.

  At first, Smith thought he’d gotten an easy one. Everything has Buddha nature. So why not dogs? Then Roshi explained that mu is more of a negative response. That puzzled the student. How can a dog not have a Buddha nature, Smith thought, when even grass has it?

  Smith spent six weeks kicking that damn koan around in his head, during which time Roshi would give him little hints but never any answers.

  “You’re a philosopher,” Roshi said. “Nothing wrong with philosophy, but philosophy only works with reason. Nothing wrong with reason, but reason only works when it has experience at its disposal. You have reason. Enlarge your experience.”

  Huston sat on his cushion, trying to stop thinking and start feeling. “Mu.” It’s got to have something to do with that damned “mu”! Oops. You’re thinking. Stop thinking. As the session wore on, and the periods of meditation increased, Smith had trouble just staying awake. He was allowed only three and a half hours of sleep a night. Maybe he was getting into an altered state of consciousness, but if so it was because of sleep deprivation, not meditation. What was happening in his mind was more like insanity than enlightenment. This is not what he read about in all those classic texts describing the experience of satori. Boredom gave way to self-pity, which opened the door to rage.

  Two days before the end of the session, he went to Roshi for his daily interview. Their eyes met in a mutual glare.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Terrible,” Smith shouted.

  “You think you are getting sick, don’t you?”
r />   In fact, Huston had been feeling ill. His throat was tight, and he had trouble breathing.

  “Yes,” he yelled. “I think I’m getting sick!”

  Until that point, Smith thought Roshi was taunting him. Mocking him. Suddenly the face of the Zen master softened into a kind of relaxed radiance.

  “What is sickness? What is health?” he said. “Put both aside and go forward.”

  Smith’s feeling of rage vanished. He had felt like he was going insane. Now he felt fine. What happened? How did Roshi do that? Did Roshi do that? Huston was asking himself the same kind of questions Ram Dass would ask ten years later when all those little miracles kept happening around his guru.

  Smith came to see that Zen meditation and the mysteries of the koan were not simply a rejection of logic and reason. Reason can be useful, he saw, but it is a ladder too short to reach to truth’s full heights. It’s difficult to even talk about the goals of meditation. The word zazen simply means “seated meditation,” and that’s all you do. You just sit. Some may experience an intuitive breakthrough, seeing into one’s true nature. Some may experience satori, a new kind of understanding. Some may just experience frustration and a pain in the neck.

  “Just sitting” was a difficult concept for Smith to contemplate. So far, he’d spent his life worshipping at the altar of reason, as an intellectual trying to come to a new understanding of the religious quest. “We in the West,” he would later write, “rely on reason so fully that we must remind ourselves that in Zen we are dealing with a perspective that is convinced that reason is limited and must be supplemented by another mode of knowing.”

  Decades later, Huston still didn’t know exactly what happened during that penultimate meeting with Goto Roshi. The Zen master had played him like a violin, stroking his rage and frustration until something snapped. Something happened. It was about feeling, not about thinking. Intuition, not intellect. It had something to do with realizing the limits of the rational mind, something about the union of opposites.

  “What I do know is that I have never felt so instantly reborn and energized,” Smith would later write. “In that climactic moment I passed my koan, not just theoretically, but experientially.”

  Healer: Along the Colombia–Ecuador border Spring 1973

  Richard Alpert and Huston Smith journeyed to the East on their pilgrimage of self-discovery, but Andrew Weil went off in another direction. He headed south, through Mexico and Central America and into a remote northwestern region of the Amazon rain forest. He was looking for Pedro, a Kofan Indian shaman and healer—not exactly the sort of physician they were turning out back at Harvard Medical School.

  Andy was at a turning point in his life. After graduating from Harvard, young Dr. Weil moved out to San Francisco to complete his residency and revel in the Dionysian rites of the Bay Area counterculture. He’d returned to the East Coast for his ill-fated appointment with the drug-study division of the U.S. Public Health Ser vice. He was finishing up his first book, The Natural Mind, and he knew that its sympathetic view of the drug culture—the very culture that President Richard Nixon had just declared war against—would undermine his future employment with the government and the American medical establishment. Weil had aligned himself as an outsider, someone on the side of the very people he had worked so hard to bring down a decade before. He was starting to realize how it felt to be Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary.

  So, on a rainy night in September 1971, Weil packed up his red 1969 Land Rover and left his home in Sterling, Virginia. It would be a four-year journey.

  Richard Alpert and Huston Smith were drawn to the mystical teachings of Buddhism and Hinduism, but Weil was interested in something else. Since his childhood in Philadelphia, when he cultivated potted plants behind his parent’s row house, Andy had shown a fascination with the plant kingdom. As an undergraduate at Harvard, Weil became a student of Professor Richard Evans Schultes, a pioneer in the field of ethnobotany, which studies the complex relationships between people and plants. Schultes had traveled throughout the Western Hemisphere and done some of the earliest academic research into the use of the peyote cactus, psilocybin mushroom, and other hallucinogenic plants by indigenous tribes on both continents. Schultes would later coauthor a much-read book with Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, titled The Plants of the God: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers.

  Andy Weil was not alone in his fascination with magical plants and mysterious shamans. In the early 1970s, an entire drug-addled generation was enthralled by a series of best-selling books put out by a former UCLA anthropology student. His name was Carlos Castaneda, and he told fantastic tales of his purported apprenticeship with Don Juan Matus, a Yaqui Indian sorcerer in Sonora, Mexico. The first book began with a disclaimer that the contents are “both ethnography and allegory.” Castaneda’s readers were never sure how much of his tale was fact and how much fiction. Nor did they seem to care. After all, many of Castaneda’s fans had themselves experimented with peyote and magic mushrooms, the very plants that fueled the adventures of the intrepid anthropologist and his trickster teacher. They knew exactly what Castaneda was talking about when he titled his second book A Separate Reality. They, like him, were convinced that psychedelic insights were “real” in their own way, even if they were based on hallucinations.

  The Institute of Current World Affairs, a New York foundation, paid for Weil’s pilgrimage. It merely required him to file a few reports and brief monthly newsletters describing his research into the ways different cultures use drugs, plants, and other techniques to achieve altered states of consciousness. Weil was not just interested in getting high. He wanted to know what these indigenous healers could teach the medical establishment about health and healing. Weil had begun the 1970s with a freshly minted medical degree from one of the nation’s most prestigious medical schools, but he had little interest in the invasive, high-tech treatments that would soon dominate health care in America.

  At the same time, getting high was part of the research protocol. By the time Weil arrived in the northeastern corner of Oaxaca, Mexico, the locals had grown tired of an endless stream of mushroom-seeking hippies washing onto their shores. They’d had enough of those long-haired seekers with ragged Carlos Castaneda paperbacks in their backpacks. Government troops had even been sent in to clear out the freakish gringos. Weil saw himself more in the tradition of Professor Schultes and Gordon Wasson, the amateur anthropologist who’d tasted the forbidden fungi twenty years earlier and documented his work in Life magazine. Weil was able to charm the locals enough to be allowed entry into the home of Julieta, a curandera, or healer, who lived in the town of Huautla. Julieta’s three-room home, which she shared with her husband and their five children, had stunning views of the steep green peaks of the Sierra Mazateca. Weil was surprised to see that the local healer’s pharmacological cabinet contained both a supply of modern antibiotics and a stash of San Isidro mushrooms.

  Julieta agreed to lead a traditional mushroom ceremony that night at midnight, after the kids had been put to bed and the house locked up. She set up an altar on a low table in the kitchen that included a framed portrait of San Isidro, a popular Mexican household saint. The curandera lit a small charcoal fire to burn two types of incense, a resin similar to frankincense and an aromatic wood called palo santo. Julieta purified her face and hands in the smoke, and asked Weil to do the same. Then she lovingly placed two large mushrooms on a little dish and handed them to Weil, who took his first bite. He was surprised how good they tasted, and didn’t hesitate when Julieta handed him another dish with seven smaller mushrooms, and then another dish, and another dish, until Weil had eaten about twenty of them. After about a half hour, a feeling of extraordinary contentment settled over the initiate. There was a sense of lightness, of well-being. Julieta knelt before the portrait of San Isidro and thrice repeated the Lord’s Prayer. Weil started seeing minor hallucinations, gentle waves of color on all the surfaces in the room. At the curandera’s sug
gestion, Weil went outside to “learn from the moon.”

  It was dark. The sky was full of stars, but Weil could not find the moon. Then he saw it, low over the western mountains, a silver crescent over a dull gold disk. It was an eclipse! He waited, breathless, as the eclipse progressed to totality. What a spectacle! Then there was the stillness of the night. Such magic!

  Weil was to spend one more night at the house. There were some leftover mushrooms, and Julieta suggested that he might as well finish them off. At first, Weil hesitated. It had been so perfect the night before. But then he changed his mind. When else would he have such an opportunity? Julieta performed the same ceremony, but this time the feeling was very different. A heavy fog bank closed in around the house, the temperature dropped, and suddenly nearly everyone in the house was sick. Weil heard crying and coughing from the bedroom. He began feeling sick, then buried in his own fog of depression and isolation. He couldn’t sleep. The mushrooms were working against him, not with him. The previous night he had felt like he was at one with the universe. On this night, he felt alone, disconnected from everything around him.

  There was a lesson in the experience, one that many psychedelic explorers learn the hard way. As Aldous Huxley wrote two decades before in The Doors of Perception, these are powerful, unpredictable substances. Weil had been greedy. He should have trusted his first intuition, which was to honor the initial expe rience, and not gobble down more mushrooms just because they were available.

  Weil’s experiences with the Mexican curandera were powerful, but the real turning point in his pilgrimage came in South America, on a tributary of the Caqueta River in a remote region of Ecuador. He had heard stories about a Kofan Indian trader named Pedro, who supposedly lived in a hut about a half day’s walk into the forest. Weil had already met a number of native healers and shamans on his journey. He was not impressed. Some were drunks; others were obvious con artists. Pedro was supposed to be different, a powerful healer unknown to anyone in the outside world. Weil was searching for something exotic and extraordinary, something worlds away from his ordinary experience. He desperately wanted to find new insight into the source of healing power. He wanted to explore the interconnectedness of magic, religion, and medicine.