Timothy Leary Biography: His Beginning as a Guru for Change

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Timothy Leary was conceived on a military reservation in West Point, New York on January 17, 1920 to Abigail and Captain Timothy Leary. His life would become an element for social exploration and change.

Training for the Future

On the preceding day of his birth, alcohol became an illegal drug. His father, in training him for future life, often told him that prohibition was bad, but not as bad as no booze at all. In addition, his grandfather took him aside one night when he was 10, and told him not to do anything like anyone else. Maybe these two experiences were an indication of what was to come for Leary.

Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out

Expelled from high school, silenced at West Point, and expelled from the University of Alabama, Timothy Leary was the owner of the phrase “Tune in, Turn on, Drop out.” He stressed that the phrase must be continually repeated if one wanted to live a life of growth.

The drugs and this phrase became useful in his function as cheerleader for change. Drugs were one way to accomplish this goal.

Hallucinogenic Drugs

In 1960, in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Leary tried “magic” mushrooms for the first time, and had his first psychedelic experience. While high on the drug, he learned that knowledge of how the brain operated was the most pressing scientific issue of his time.

Soon after, he contacted the Swiss firm that discovered LSD and asked them for a supply of the active ingredient in the mushrooms, called psilocybin. Months later, pills were delivered. Leary thought they would transform the lives of everyone who tried them. He called it his research, and it took place in the early 1960’s at Harvard. He then developed it into lectures, seminars, and workshops, flaunting mind expansion through chemicals.

His experiences with LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs made him a sort of guru for the sixties and seventies.

Altered States

His initial interest in altered states spread to a number of his friends and colleagues. His excitement was contagious, and he discovered that strong bonds developed among those who shared a drug “session.”

Some of his prominent friends and colleagues who explored the mind-altering drugs with him were the British scholar Aldous Huxley, the poet Allen Ginsberg, the American novelist Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassidy, Richard Alpert, who was a visiting professor from the University of California, Ralph Metzner, an experimental graduate student at Harvard, William Burroughs the writer, Cary Grant, Jack Nicholson, and many more “researchers.” The purpose of the research was to study how LSD could be used for personal growth.

At the beginning, LSD changed many people’s lives. Twenty years after his first experience with LSD, Timothy Leary was never the same. He never took the social world so seriously again. It made him even more interested in the workings of the brain. He wanted to expand the knowledge about human nature and to find out how the brain could be changed by all of the various “brain drugs.”

In the years that followed, Leary wrote a philosophic paper that was to become the basis of his research for the next eighteen years. His paper presented a sort of coaching manual on how science provided better answers to basic questions than did religion.

An Extraordinary Life

Through his year as a cadet at West Point, from his career as an award-winning social scientist, to a psychologist at Harvard, to his twenty-year jail sentence for possession of half an ounce of marijuana, Leary led an extraordinary life as a beatnik and a hippie. Almost everyone had heard of him during this time, and many tried to follow in his footsteps.

Author of over 100 books and articles on psychological diagnosis, personal evolution, computers, and consciousness, generational politics and space migration, Leary was one of the most controversial figures of the twentieth century. Whether you loved him or hated him, his impact on American culture was a symbol of change and self-discovery for an entire generation.

Resources about Timothy Leary

virginia.edu exhibits of Timothy Leary

Answers.com Information and facts about Timothy Leary

Testimony of Timothy Leary in the Chicago Seven Trial

Stephen Bello talks about interviewing Timothy Leary in the Harvard Crimson

Resource by L.Brown

Leslie Brown is a writer and editor with over 20 years of experience in book publishing, information technology, and web content. She has edited books of fiction and non-fiction and is currently providing web content for two web sites. Leslie has a B.A. in Creative Writing, and she has also done some graduate work in technical documentation. She lives near Seattle, Washington, across from a lake, where she often plays in the water with her rescued golden retriever.

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