Millbrook

Harvard let them go in the spring of 1963 — Timothy Leary for absenting himself from his own lectures, Richard Alpert for sharing psilocybin with an undergraduate — and the letting-go made them. Dismissal from America's oldest lectern did not discredit the heresy; it certified it, and put two psychologists on the front pages as men who had seen something worth a career. What they needed next was a roof commensurate with the programme.

Peggy Hitchcock — patron, enthusiast, heiress — arranged the landing: the Big House on her family's estate at Millbrook, sixty-four rooms in the Hudson Valley two hours north of Manhattan, rented to the exiles for a nominal sum by her brothers, heirs to the Mellon fortune. In the Tibetan manual the household would soon adopt, the first bardo is the moment the old life dies and a clear light appears. Harvard was the death. Millbrook was the light.

For five years the Big House ran as all three at once, which was its glory and its flaw. The Castalia Foundation — named for the secret college in Hesse's Glass Bead Game — sold drug-free weekend seminars to the curious, who came up by train to learn the cartography of states they had not yet visited. The Psychedelic Review carried the research idiom outward in sober type. Jazzmen, poets and seekers cycled through the sixty-four rooms; Hitchcock money sat quietly above the whole experiment, removing the need to earn; and beneath the patronage a rotating congregation kept house and waited its turn for a session. Discipline was intermittent. Conviction was total.

The house's real manufacture was not the sacrament, which was everywhere soon enough, but the method. The Psychedelic Experience (1964), written with Ralph Metzner, recast the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a session manual — a guidebook for the dying repurposed for the living, its instructions to be read aloud at the door of each bardo. The protocol became famous enough to surface, barely disguised, in Lennon's "Tomorrow Never Knows". This was the estate's export before any of its residents left: the ineffable made reproducible, a procedure anyone could carry away in a coat pocket.

In 1964 the bus arrived — the Merry Pranksters' Furthur, painted like a migraine, carrying Ken Kesey's crowd east to meet the other pole of psychedelic America. The meeting curdled politely. The West wanted carnival, and found by its lights a church too solemn by half; the East regarded its visitors as tourists of a country it was still trying to map. The two psychedelic Americas exchanged courtesies on the lawn and failed to merge — divergence, arriving by bus.

The law ended it, as the law intended. In 1966 G. Gordon Liddy — then an ambitious assistant prosecutor for Dutchess County, later a Watergate conspirator — led a raid on the house. Leary answered in kind and in costume: he founded the League for Spiritual Discovery and argued religious freedom, recasting the laboratory as a church whose sacrament the state had no business seizing. It bought time, not safety. Roadblocks ringed the estate, guests were searched, and each headline recruited even as it wore the sanctuary down. By 1968 the Hitchcocks had had enough, and the household was evicted.

The house emptied; the experiment did not. Set and setting now governs the clinical psychedelic session as it once governed the Big House, and Richard Alpert went out through Millbrook to India and came back as Ram Dass, carrying the current into the mainstream with Be Here Now.