Alpert had the distinction of being the only tenured professor ever publicly exorcised from Harvard’s Ivy League faculty. They had both been fired from Harvard in connection with their psychedelic activities. Two of his former students, Sara and David Winter, were teaching psychology at Wesleyan and had invited him to speak.Īlpert was vaguely notorious to me as an associate of Timothy Leary, a counterculture icon. That spring a flyer appeared for a guest lecture by Richard Alpert, Ph.D., formerly a psychology professor at Harvard, who had done some of his graduate work at Wesleyan. They didn’t improve my academic standing. The visual and lyrical effects of psychedelics stimulated my artistic, philosophic, and poetic intuitions and expanded my inner and outer horizons. At the same time, I started smoking pot and experimenting with mescaline, DMT, and LSD. The Vietnam War was raging, and there was upheaval on campus.įreshman year I took a seminar, “Freedom and Liberation in Ancient China and India,” that stirred an interest in Taoism and Buddhism. I had just spent my first extended time out of the country on a semester abroad in Franco’s Spain. I was twenty, a sophomore at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |