Millbrook Mansion

According to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Weil" title="Andrew Weil">Andrew Weil</a>, Leary was fired for not attending his lecture classes, while Alpert was fired for allegedly giving <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin" title="Psilocybin">psilocybin</a> to an undergraduate in an off-campus apartment.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Leary#cite_note-Weil-19">[20]</a><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Leary#cite_note-20">[21]</a> This version is supported by the words of Harvard President Nathan M. Pusey, who released the following statement on May 27, 1963:

On May 6, 1963, the Harvard Corporation voted, because Timothy F. Leary, lecturer on clinical psychology, has failed to keep his classroom appointments and has absented himself from Cambridge without permission, to relieve him from further teaching duty and to terminate his salary as of April 30, 1963.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Leary#cite_note-termination-4">[5]</a>

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In 1967 he had a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lettvin_Leary_Debate" title="Lettvin Leary Debate" class="mw-redirect">televised debate</a> with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Lettvin" title="Jerry Lettvin" class="mw-redirect">Jerry Lettvin</a> of MIT.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Leary#cite_note-debate-21">[22]</a>

Leary's activities interested siblings Peggy, Billy, and Tommy Hitchcock, heirs to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Mellon" title="Andrew Mellon" class="mw-redirect">Mellon</a> fortune, who in 1963 helped Leary and his associates acquire the use of a rambling mansion on an estate in the town of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millbrook,New_York" title="Millbrook, New York">Millbrook</a> (near <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poughkeepsie%28city%29,_New_York" title="Poughkeepsie (city), New York" class="mw-redirect">Poughkeepsie, New York</a>), where they continued their experiments. Leary later wrote:

We saw ourselves as anthropologists from the 21st century inhabiting a time module set somewhere in the dark ages of the 1960s. On this space colony we were attempting to create a new <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paganism" title="Paganism">paganism</a> and a new dedication to life as art.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Leary#cite_note-22">[23]</a>

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Later, the Millbrook estate was described by Luc Sante of The New York Times as:

the headquarters of Leary and gang for the better part of five years, a period filled with endless parties, epiphanies and breakdowns, emotional dramas of all sizes, and numerous raids and arrests, many of them on flimsy charges concocted by the local assistant district attorney, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._Gordon_Liddy" title="G. Gordon Liddy">G. Gordon Liddy</a>.<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Leary#cite_note-Sante-23">[24]</a>

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Others contest this characterization of the Millbrook estate; for instance, in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Electric_Kool-Aid_Acid_Test" title="The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test">The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Wolfe" title="Tom Wolfe">Tom Wolfe</a> portrays Leary as interested only in research, and not in using psychedelics merely for recreational purposes. According to "The Crypt Trip" chapter of Wolfe's book, when <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Kesey" title="Ken Kesey">Ken Kesey</a>'s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merry_Pranksters" title="Merry Pranksters">Merry Pranksters</a> visited the residence, the Pranksters did not even see Leary, who was engaged in a three-day trip. According to Wolfe, Leary's group even refused to give the Pranksters <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LSD" title="LSD" class="mw-redirect">acid</a>.

In 1964, Leary coauthored a book with Alpert and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Metzner" title="Ralph Metzner">Ralph Metzner</a> called The Psychedelic Experience, based upon the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetan_Book_of_the_Dead" title="Tibetan Book of the Dead" class="mw-redirect">Tibetan Book of the Dead</a>. In it, they wrote:

A psychedelic experience is a journey to new realms of consciousness. The scope and content of the experience is limitless, but its characteristic features are the transcendence of verbal concepts, of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacetime" title="Spacetime">spacetime</a> dimensions, and of the ego or identity. Such experiences of enlarged consciousness can occur in a variety of ways: sensory deprivation, yoga exercises, disciplined meditation, religious or aesthetic ecstasies, or spontaneously. Most recently they have become available to anyone through the ingestion of psychedelic drugs such as LSD, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin" title="Psilocybin">psilocybin</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mescaline" title="Mescaline">mescaline</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyltryptamine" title="Dimethyltryptamine">DMT</a>, etc. Of course, the drug does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key — it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures.[<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed" title="Wikipedia:Citation needed">citation needed</a>]

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Millbrook Mansion

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