This was baffling to the CIA. As they understood it, LSD was an ‘unconventional weapon’ that had the power to send people temporarily insane. They had successfully used it as a form of torture in interrogations. How could this be prescribed by psychiatrists in order to improve mental health? The effects of drugs are supposed to be predictable; a doctor should be able to prescribe a drug and be confident that he knows what it will do. LSD was not like that at all. Somehow it was able to produce totally different effects in different experiments. It just didn’t make any sense.
Leary was introduced to LSD by an Englishman named Michael Hollingshead. Hollingshead was working for the British American Cultural Exchange Institute in New York when he, together with his friend Dr John Beresford, bought a gram of LSD from Sandoz Laboratories for £285. Obtaining it was simple; they wrote to Sandoz on a piece of paper with a New York hospital letterhead, and claimed that they wanted to use it as a control drug in bone marrow experiments. The drug arrived in a small brown vial and, in order to make it a more manageable strength, Hollingshead mixed it with water and icing sugar and transferred it to a 16-ounce mayonnaise jar. Then he licked the spoon.
Fifteen hours later, when he came back down again, he knew that he had something unprecedented on his hands. He had a jar containing 5000 doses of a life-changing chemical, but no idea what to do with it. As he had first heard about LSD from Aldous Huxley, he called Huxley and asked for some advice. After a bit of thought, Huxley suggested that he contact Leary. ‘If there’s any one single investigator in America worth seeing,’ Huxley assured him, ‘it is Dr Leary. He is a splendid fellow’.11
Leary invited Hollingshead to Harvard but initially declined his offer of a spoonful of LSD from his mayonnaise jar. This was partly because the drug had already got a dubious reputation from the CIA’s military experiments, and partly because he believed that one psychedelic was more or less the same as any other. But when he saw the faces of people who had taken a dose, his curiosity got the better of him. He took a trip from which he would never really return. It was much stronger than psilocybin.
‘It was the most shattering experience of my life,’ he would write later.12 ‘It has been 20 years since that first LSD trip with Michael Hollingshead. I have never forgotten it. Nor has it been possible for me to return to the life I was leading before that session. I have never been able to take myself, my mind, or the social world quite so seriously. Since that time I have been acutely aware that everything I perceive, everything within and around me, is a creation of my own consciousness. And that everyone lives in a neural cocoon of private reality. From that day I have never lost the sense that I am an actor, surrounded by characters, props, and sets for the comic drama being written in my brain.’
Leary’s work had already started to create a slight separation, or dislocation, between his sense of self and the world at large. Over the years he had come to reject the notions of ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ behaviour, and instead saw all behaviour patterns as nothing more than ‘games’ that individuals had been trained to play. He saw himself at the time as simply playing the ‘psychologist game’. His daughter was performing the ‘schoolgirl game’ just as, for example, a murderer would be performing the ‘murderer game’. This viewpoint is not intended to deny moral responsibility entirely, but it does tend to dissociate the ethical element from behaviour patterns. It also removes the sense of seriousness from people’s responsibilities, and makes it harder to take social and institutional rules seriously. They are, after all, merely part of the ‘game’. When a Harvard colleague joked that they should form a ‘Psychopath Club’ with those who followed this philosophy, Leary had replied that he genuinely was a psychopath.13 He told his colleagues that he had violated ‘every part of the American Psychological Society’s code of ethics’, particularly the part about not sleeping with patients.14
But it was only after acid that Leary felt himself became truly distinct from the everyday world as other people understood it. This is not to say that he retreated, ignored or dismissed the world of normal consciousness. He just no longer viewed it as being the ultimate reality He now knew that what he was really living in was not reality itself, but a model of reality created by his own brain. He knew that he had constructed this model, and that he was responsible for it. He also knew that he could change it.
It’s generally accepted that what we ‘know’ to be the real world is not the real world itself, but a model constructed by our brains based on our senses and our previous experience. The brain receives information from the five senses,15 which it collates in order to produce a mental model of the world, and it is this that we inhabit. This model differs from ‘true’ reality in many ways. We may look at a car and see that it is red, for example, but the car itself has no intrinsic colour. Our notion of ‘red’ comes from the way our visual system interprets the way some photons of light are reflected from the car while others are not. We may see a chair and believe that it is solid, yet science assures us that this churning soup of particles and energy is mostly empty space. It only appears to support our weight because what particles are there repel us. We also know that there is a lot of information ‘out there’ that we do not perceive, such as television signals, or the fluctuations in the magnetic fields that certain animals can use to navigate. However, we generally assume that while our model of reality is not perfect, it is at least reasonably accurate and consistent with the real world. We certainly believe that we are passively observing the world we live in, rather than participating selectively in its construction.
Increasingly, it seems that this is not the case. Research done in areas such as assessing the validity of eye-witness reports has shown that individuals are prone to see only what they expect to see, and can ignore anything that seems anomalous or contradictory to their beliefs. In a famous experiment at Harvard University, Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris showed volunteers a recording of a basketball game and asked them to count the number of passes made. Around 40 per cent of volunteers completely failed to register that, early in the footage, a man in a gorilla suit walked slowly across the court, remaining clearly visible for about 45 seconds. This concept was used by Douglas Adams in his novel Life, the Universe and Everything to create a spaceship that could land on the pitch of a busy sporting event and not be seen by the crowd. The brains of the observers, the spaceship’s owner knew, would reject the visual information that their eyes reported, regard it as ‘somebody else’s problem’, and refuse to acknowledge its existence.
Over time, we create a mental model of the real world that is strongly influenced by our beliefs, prejudices and experience, and our model will differ from that of other people in far greater ways than is usually accepted. The world that we consciously inhabit increasingly resembles our own ‘world view’. Should an optimistic person walk down a street, for example, they would be inclined to register happy couples, pleasant weather or playing children. A cynical person walking down exactly the same street might completely miss those details, and see instead the homeless population and the graffiti. Of course, the street itself hasn’t changed between the two observations, but this is almost irrelevant, as no one is aware of the ‘true’ street in its entirety16 The same principal applies to every aspect of life, from the mechanism that decides which news stories grab your attention, to the personal qualities in others that you respond to or overlook. The result of this is that the ‘world’ in which we live is not an objective, distinct environment, but a model constructed in our own image. In the words of Alan Watts, the influential writer on Eastern religions, ‘Reality is only a Rorschach ink-blot’. Or as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote back in 1860, ‘People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of character.’
Leary called these personal mental models ‘reality tunnels’.17Each person lives in a different reality tunnel from everyone else, and is personally responsible for constructing their own existential reality. To be truly ‘free’ it is necessary to recognise