Book Review: The Harvard Psychedelic Club
Don Lattin, an award-winning author and three-time Pulitzer Prize nominee, expertly guides the reader along the ’50s and ’60s psychedelic time line full of fascinating historical characters — icons who were fundamentally instrumental in establishing the American counterculture movement, which evolved into today’s Mind, Body & Spirit era of holistic health, meditation, and yoga.
The storyline involves four legendary figures — Harvard research psychologist Timothy Leary, Harvard psychology professor Richard Alpert (later in life known as spiritual teacher Ram Dass), MIT philosophy professor Huston Smith, and Harvard Medical School graduate Andrew Weil — men who passionately dedicated their lives to the exploration of human consciousness, spirituality, and holistic living.
There were countless other surprisingly notable figures involved in the turning of events, including: author Aldous Huxley, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson, novelist William Burroughs, Buddhist author Alan Watts, author Ken Kesey, Alcoholics Anonymous cofounder Bill Wilson, the Grateful Dead, FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy, television personality Art Linkletter, Hindu guru Maharaji (Neem Karoli Baba), psychologist and author Daniel Goleman, Zen Buddhist scholar D.T. Suzuki, and Beatle John Lennon. There’s even an interesting tie-in to the CIA and President John F. Kennedy.
With clarity and deep insight, Don Lattin deftly follows the lives of the four scholars from The Harvard Psychedelic Club and describes how their live’s paths were inevitably interwoven, all the while subtly suggesting it was no coincidence Leary, Alpert, Smith, and Weil helped significantly alter and expand our religious, spiritual, and holistic perspectives and guided us toward a fresh view into the nature of reality. After following their profound and significant journey you realize just how unique and influential these four men were in the unfolding of our social and spiritual revolution.
It’s particularly interesting to learn how Leary and Alpert’s earnest psychedelic-drug research fruitlessly delved into the possibilities that LSD could revolutionize the practice of psychotherapy by potentially breaking patterns of destructive behavior among criminals, instantly imprinting new behaviors in individuals, or breaking through rooted mental conditioning. In a shocking revelation to the drugs’ true short-lasting effects on consciousness, however, Alpert later learned from Maharaji — a man known for being an embodiment of unconditional love and compassion — “Love is a much stronger drug than this.”
Author’s website: http://www.donlattin.com
