I Have America Surrounded

Yet it was Richard who returned from India a genuinely changed man, having renamed himself Baba Ram Dass, and having realised that the temporary illumination induced by LSD could hardly compare to the permanent awareness of a genuinely enlightened soul. He went on to write the bestseller Be Here Now and to become one of America’s leading Hindu theologians.

Ram Dass would later tell an intriguing story about the Hindu guru who transformed his life. He was exactly the same guru who appeared to Tim outside a temple, Ram Dass claims,

(#litres_trial_promo) during Tim’s Indian honeymoon two years earlier. Tim felt incredibly drawn to the man and started to approach him, but became strangely afraid. Fearing that he would miss his bus, he turned and walked away. In so doing he lost the chance to undergo the profound transformation that later occurred in Ram Dass. The incident left a sufficient mark on Tim, however, for him to include it in his autobiography many years later, albeit in a heavily embellished form. In Tim’s more archetypal version, the tourist bus was replaced by a ferryman who took Leary across the Ganges at night to a haunted and forbidden land. There emerged from the dark ‘an old man with long white hair, 20 feet away. He was naked save for a dhoti around his waist. His eyes were luminous. I was terrified. Suddenly I understood: he was some special ancient teacher who had been waiting for me all my life. I wanted to run forward and throw myself at his feet. But I was paralysed with fright.’

(#litres_trial_promo)Leary turned away from the man and later, he says, wept uncontrollably, convinced he had run away from the Buddha. He added as a footnote, ‘If this little story about meeting the wild-eyed time-traveller on the other side of the Ganges seems inconclusive and unfinished, it is because the event was exactly that—inconclusive and unfinished.’

Whatever the reality of the incident, it does coincide with an end to Tim’s attempts to find answers from established religion. He would continue to talk of the divine, but he now saw it as a product of the mind. God was within. He rejected the idea of a ‘higher power’ external to the nervous system. This was not to say that the universe was just dead matter, for he believed that it too was conscious and alive. But while it is aware of what is happening, he claimed, it is not aware in the sense that it plans what it is doing. ‘I think [the harmony in the universe] involves a consciousness of the interwovenness of organic life and inorganic life,’ he told Paul Krassner in 1966,

(#litres_trial_promo) ‘but is there one central computer that’s planning it all or can sum it all up in one moment? I don’t think so.’ Tim would continue to speak of ‘God’ throughout the 1960s, but his definition of the word was very different from that of the patriarchal religions of Christianity, Islam and Judaism. In Tim’s definition, God was essentially sentient chaos.

Having examined all the established religions and found them lacking, Tim decided that the only thing to do was create his own. How hard could it be? True, the established religions were the result of the ideas and experiences of millions of people over thousands of years. But those people did not have LSD. Just as the seventeenth-century astronomer Galileo, armed with his telescope and a few clear nights, could understand outer space to a degree impossible for the generations of star-gazers who came before him, so Tim believed that LSD allowed him to observe inner space more accurately and more frequently than any saint or visionary who had come before. This tool gave him the confidence to draw a line under the religions of the past, and create a brand new religion of his own design.

Leary called his religion the League of Spiritual Discovery, inspired by the mysterious ‘League’ of truth seekers in Hermann Hesse’s The Journey to the East. For its logo he took an existing Eastern motif, gave it a funny Irish twist, and created a four-leafed lotus flower. Millbrook was declared a ‘monastery, a seed ashram, a sanctuary, a spiritual shrine’, and Leary gave himself the title of ‘First Guide’. His religion had two commandments, both based on the belief that the right to control your own consciousness was the most fundamental freedom of all. The first was ‘Thou shalt not alter the consciousness of thy fellow man’. This was the ultimate psychedelic sin, giving the drug to someone without their knowledge or consent. Each individual’s consciousness was their own responsibility, and it was up to them to decide what to do with it. Attempts to bring someone round to your own perspective became known as ‘laying your trip on someone’, and this was considered to be pretty much the source of all of humankind’s problems. This principle was so important that the second commandment essentially restated it, just to ensure that everyone was clear about the issue. It was, ‘Thou shalt not prevent thy fellow man from altering his own consciousness’. Beyond that, everything else was permitted.

With commandments like that it would have been hypocritical to try to recruit anyone else into the religion and, apart from a few like-minded Millbrook friends, Tim did not. Instead, he urged people to start their own religion. ‘Sorry, baby,’ he wrote in The Politics of Ecstasy, ‘Nobody can do it for you.’

(#litres_trial_promo) While they were at it, they should write their own set of commandments, as Moses’ ‘tortured hang-ups are not exactly yours’. The next step would be to write their own bible, for the Old Testament was ‘the garbled trip diary of a goofy bunch of flipped-out visionaries. Don’t you know that God’s revelation comes to us today clearer and more directly than it did to Elijah, Abraham, Isaiah, Jeremiah? To deny this is to say that God and the DNA code haven’t been busy perfecting the means of communication.’ The foundation for this logic was the realisation that, as individuals were living in different ‘reality tunnels’, a ‘one size fits all’ religion was bound to fail.

Many people took his advice and started their own religions, the most famous examples being the Brotherhood of Eternal Love and the Neo-American Church, which was created by Millbrook resident Art Kleps. The Neo-American Church, with its motto of ‘victory over horseshit!’ and stated goal of ‘money and power’, was intended as a mockery of organised religion. Members of the church were known as ‘Boohoos’, and Kleps gave himself the title of ‘Chief Boohoo’. Leary became a member of both these religions, although the frivolous nature of the Boohoos was perhaps not entirely to his liking. Tim also declared that he was a Hindu, and that being a Hindu did not mean that he was no longer a Catholic. All religions, after all, were different attempts to illuminate the same universal truths. Limiting yourself to one religion was like seeing a beautiful statue in an art gallery, but only looking at it from one angle.

By now, the psychedelic revolution was firmly under way. The publicity Tim received from IF-IF and his Harvard dismissal had created snowballing interest in, and awareness of, the psychedelic experience. It was spreading by word of mouth through colleges and communities, and underground chemists were turning out home-made LSD in quantities of at first thousands, then hundreds of thousands, and soon millions of individual doses. It was global in nature, and in terms of its scale, it was a movement unprecedented in history. Never before had so many people undergone such a radical change in consciousness at the same time. Putting an accurate figure on its size is never going to be possible but, based on the number of LSD doses produced according to the government’s drug agency, a commonly quoted statistic is that seven million Americans took the drug during this period. In the press and on the streets, Tim was the undisputed figurehead of the entire movement. Yet what was happening, and what Tim believed was happening, were two subtly different things.

Tim saw the LSD movement as a revolution that was entirely spiritual in nature, for he knew how LSD produced religious rapture and ecstasy in himself. By now he had discarded his old academic identity and saw himself as a guru. He wrote an autobiographical account of his discovery of psychedelics which he called High Priest. It seemed to be a fitting title, for hadn’t his mother wanted him to become a priest? Those who read Leary or Huxley soon came away with the impression that the drug was nothing less than a holy sacrament. Many people who took LSD came to view Leary as a saint, a holy man, or a messenger from God. Indeed, there were plenty who considered him to be God incarnate. There were even satanists at the time who took to inverting images of Leary in black magic rituals.

There seemed little reason for Tim to doubt his identification of LSD with a religious sacrament. As well as his own experience and that of his colleagues, hadn’t they proved that the drug produced genuine Gnostic revelations in the Harvard ‘Good Friday’ experiment? The results of that and similar experiments had certainly been impressive, with up to 90 per cent of volunteers reporting a religious revelation after taking a psychedelic drug in a religious setting. But 90 per cent is not 100 per cent, and now that the drug was out on the streets there were few who went to the bother of arranging a religious set and setting. Tim had been a psychologist, not a sociologist, and his viewpoint was geared to an individual rather than society as a whole. He had seen some bad trips, but he had always been able to analyse what happened and identify fault with the guide, or the environment, or the individual’s mental baggage. There was no reason why, with work, these faults could not be worked on and the individual could not experience a beneficial trip. This approach is fine when working with individuals, but starts to fall down when the number of trippers increases exponentially. By the time that millions of people are experimenting with the drug, that minority of individual failures quickly becomes a significant social statistic.