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."Cut down a banana plant and 24 hours later itwould be an inch out of the ground."1148 In any given day approximately a third of the group were off to the Other World, withanother third acting as guides, and a remaining third recuperating and writing reports aboutwhat they had seen during their voyages of the previous day.The sessions were under thenominal control of Metzner and Alpert, while Leary acted as a kind of psychedelic paterfamilias his first crack at the ancient role.Actually, Tim was curious to see whether hecould create the kind of community that Huxley had only imagined in Island, atranspersonative community (transpersonative was the newest buzzword among theHarvard group), which meant a group of people who had evolved past the ego, who wereliving beyond "the persona, the role, or mask, which we normally are compelled to exhibitsocially."2Could he take three dozen high-powered egos and meld them into a true spiritualbrotherhood?A month was certainly not sufficient time to prove anything, but it was a start, and with afew notable exceptions Myron Stolaroff being one it promised to be a good one.Stolaroffhad met Leary in the spring of 1962, had been charmed and impressed by him, and hadquickly assented when Tim invited him to join the Zihuatanejo project.But now he wasregretting it.He felt completely at sea in Tim's transpersonative community: the womenwere moody, the men aloof.Some of Stolaroff's negativity derived from the fact that he wasforever having to defend his Foundation against the charge that it was selling enlightenmentthe way you would a dinette set five hundred bucks a pop! Disgraceful! Whenever he triedto explain the difficulties involved in financing research the health bureaucracy chose not tosupport, he was met with an indifference that verged on the hostile.There was an us-against-them quality to Zihuatanejo that perplexed Stolaroff, particularly since the usfaction, the Learyites, never tired of talking about the love and openness LSD supposedlyinspired.And he was equally disconcerted by all the "in phrases, in concepts, in ways ofdescribing experiences.I couldn't understand a lot of it and I thought I had a pretty goodhandle on the psychedelic experience." Having struggled long and hard to build a model ofthe psychedelic experience that would be acceptable to mainstream psychology, Stolaroffwas unprepared for Leary's infatuation with religious terminology.Everything was bardothis, bardo that, soon we'll be Buddhas.The word bardo came from one of Huxley's favorite books, the Bardo Thodol or TibetanBook of the Dead.It described the stages the soul presumably passes through after leavingthe dead body.One day, while guiding a session for Metzner, Leary had opened up theTibetan Book of the Dead and read a few pages, and Metzner, after initially fighting thestrange Tibetan concepts, had felt his mind go lifting up through the layers of consciousnessjust as the Tibetan lamas had written.Everyone had been stunned.Had they unwittinglystumbled across an ancient psychedelic guidebook? As Alpert later put it, the Tibetan Bookof the Dead contained "the most vivid descriptions of what we were experiencing withpsychedelics but hadn't been able to describe.We were saying it was ineffable, and there itwas, described in this book that was 2,500 years old."3It quickly became one of Leary's main props (rather in the way Hubbard used Christianiconography and texts), albeit one that was freely translated to fit the moment."O noblyborn, you have departed from your own self," the guide would chant."Even though youcling to your mind you have lost the power to keep it.You will gain nothing more in thisplastic doll world & Remember, when your body and mind were separating, you must haveexperienced a glimpse of the pure truth.Be not daunted thereby, nor terrified, nor awed.That is the radiance of your true nature.Recognize it."4However odd it sounded to Stolaroff, it seemed to work, and in the back of his mind Timwas considering modernizing it and publishing it as the first psychedelic Baedaker to theOther World.149 But Myron wasn't the only source of negativity that Leary had to contend with.There wasalso Alpert, who was filled with an unspecified dread, a feeling of impending calamity,whether for himself or the whole group, he couldn't say.One night he swallowed a massivedose of LSD and walked into the surf and remained there until morning, teetering on thebrink, wondering whether he would live or die, and not caring which way the decision went.The last few months had been both hard and ironic for Alpert: ironic because his meteoriccareer had stalled at the very moment when he was at last doing some original work ("Thiswas the most exciting thing we'd ever been involved in," he later told a reporter."And herewere all these people putting obstacles in our way.")5; and hard because the people puttingobstacles in their way were friends whose good opinion he coveted.Although Alpertrationalized the criticism of the Kelmans of the world as simple colleague jealousy, hecouldn't use that excuse with McClelland.From the moment he'd leaped to Tim's defense, ithad been clear to everyone that he'd chosen a new mentor.And to his old one he'd said,"I'll help him with pleasure because he's that great a being.And I'd help raise money andrun the kitchen and clean the house and raise the children."6But would he leave Harvard for Tim? Having concluded that the tensions within the SocialRelations department were what anyone with the temerity to introduce a "powerful, non-verbal, meta-intellectual agent into a community which is fervently dedicated to words andintellectuality"7 should have expected, Leary was planning to leave Harvard when histeaching contract expired in June 1963; the future of psychedelic research lay outside theivory tower.Thus Alpert was faced with a dilemma: abandon academia and continue as firstlieutenant to a man he considered one of the wisest in the world, or remain safely in hiscomfortable professorial niche.It was all LSD's fault, Alpert decided.The drug was more powerful than they guessed."Ithink we're pushing the edge of this system," he told Leary, after Metzner and another manfound him standing in the surf the next morning and led him back to the hotel."I think webetter cool it, because otherwise we're going to blow it somehow or other."8Unperturbed, Leary suggested a long shower and some hot tea."Cool it" was the opposite of what he was planning to do.For months he had been kickingaround the concept of internal freedom
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