Video - Promotion for The Harvard Psychedelic Club
Boston Phoenix | Though it imported most of its principles and philosophies from such Eastern cultures as those in India and Tibet, as well as from south of the border in Mexico, the revolutionary mind/body/spirit movement that has so transformed American and Western society actually got its start in uptight 1960s Greater Boston.
It was here, in buttoned-down Cambridge and in suburban Newton, that four men — Timothy Leary, a Harvard research psychologist; Richard Alpert (better known as Ram Dass, the persona he adopted after an enlightening trip to India), a Harvard psychology professor; Huston Smith, an MIT philosophy professor; and Andrew Weil, a Harvard medical-school student — launched what would eventually become the counterculture movement.
Through their trailblazing experimentation with (and proselytizing of) hallucinogenic drugs, this "Harvard Psychedelic Club" influenced everything from the music, films, and literature of the Western canon; to the rise of the Silicon Valley technology sector; to what we eat, how we exercise, and how we make love; and to our very psychological perceptions of ourselves.
In his new narrative nonfiction work, excerpted here, journalist Don Lattin looks at how, after expanding their consciousnesses with psilocybin mushrooms and LSD, these four "career-driven, linear-thinking intellectuals" advised a generation to "turn on, tune in, and drop out."
Boston Phoenix | Though it imported most of its principles and philosophies from such Eastern cultures as those in India and Tibet, as well as from south of the border in Mexico, the revolutionary mind/body/spirit movement that has so transformed American and Western society actually got its start in uptight 1960s Greater Boston.
It was here, in buttoned-down Cambridge and in suburban Newton, that four men — Timothy Leary, a Harvard research psychologist; Richard Alpert (better known as Ram Dass, the persona he adopted after an enlightening trip to India), a Harvard psychology professor; Huston Smith, an MIT philosophy professor; and Andrew Weil, a Harvard medical-school student — launched what would eventually become the counterculture movement.
Through their trailblazing experimentation with (and proselytizing of) hallucinogenic drugs, this "Harvard Psychedelic Club" influenced everything from the music, films, and literature of the Western canon; to the rise of the Silicon Valley technology sector; to what we eat, how we exercise, and how we make love; and to our very psychological perceptions of ourselves.
In his new narrative nonfiction work, excerpted here, journalist Don Lattin looks at how, after expanding their consciousnesses with psilocybin mushrooms and LSD, these four "career-driven, linear-thinking intellectuals" advised a generation to "turn on, tune in, and drop out."
