High Priest [Hardcover]

Timothy Francis Leary (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0848814088 | ISBN-13: 978-0848814083 | Publication Date: June 1976

Back in print after 20 years, this text from the earliest days of psychedelia chronicles the experiences on 16 acid trips taken before LSD was illegal. The trip guides or "high priests" included Aldous Huxley, Ram Dass, Ralph Meltzner, Huston Smith and a junkie from New York City named Willy. It tells of the goings-on and freaking out at the Millbrook mansion in New York State that became the Mecca of psychedelia during the 1960s, and of the many luminaries who made their pilgrimage there to trip with Leary and his group. Chapters include an I Ching reading and a chronicle of what happened during those "spacewalks" of the mind.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Amereon Ltd (June 1976)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0848814088
• ISBN-13: 978-0848814083
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,993,648 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Escaping the Mind's Prison Into Neurological Ecstasy, September 14, 2004

By 

R. Schwartz (United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: High Priest (Leary, Timothy) (Paperback)

I'm sad to finish this book, as I have walked with Leary with his first mushroom encounter in Mexico, walked with his colleges and friends, from Dick Albert (Ram Dass), Robert Metzner, Huston Smith, Aldous Huxley, Walter Clark, Walter Puhnke, Michael Hollingshead, Alan Watts, Allen Ginsberg - I love Ginsberg - , Gordon Wasson, Frank Barrons and even William Burroughs. From his Millbrook estate to his Harvard studies, prison studies, first LSD trip, to his religious experiential studies and the amazing internal transformations that for myself are greatly superior to static intellectualism. And yet using such intellectual insights coupled with subjective encounters - in allusive non-categorical observance - brings forth the dynamics of Leary's story.

There is far too much information to relate here, the book is enlightening.
All together 16 trips or stories along with various quotes from magazine articles, short thoughts, to excerpts from other books from Ginsberg, Hollingshead, Wasson, Walter Houston Clark, Huxley and others make this book not only informative, but really do capture what is intended to be conveyed - the mystical- religious - subjective - internal - experiential - magical/irrational experience of psychedelics and most importantly, their beneficial use in social, psychological, ontological, neurological, rehabilitative, and spiritual uses. There is no doubt in my mind as to the benefits of psychedelics for the human race.

"Everyone who isn't tripping himself because he's too scared or tired is going to resent our doing it. Sex, drugs, fun, travel, dancing, loafing. You name it. Anything that's pleasurable is going to bring down the wrath of the power-control people. Because the essence of ecstasy and the essence of religion and the essence of orgasm (and they're all pretty much the same) is that you give up power and swing with it. And the cats who can't do that end up with the power and they use it to punish the innocent and the happy. And they'll try to make us look bad and feel bad." P. 79


This quote (and others) reminds me of Ray Manzarek's story in his book, Light My Fire, of visiting a Las Vegas style rat pack record executive who literally flipped out after hearing a tape of The Doors, hearing that they were psychedelic orientated music. The power people can never accept surrender and vulnerability that comes with the internal search as opposed to the external control.

"The threshold of adult game life is the ancient and natural time for the rebirth experience, the flip-out trip from which you come back as a man. A healthy society provides and protects the sacredness of the teen-age psychedelic voyage. A sick, society fears and forbids the revelation." p. 133


Trip 1 is Leary's non-chemical death and rebirth of a physical sickness.


Trip 2 is the story of Leary's discover of the mushroom in Mexico with some substantial quotes from Gordon Wasson on mushrooms.


Trip 3 has Dick Albert, Jack and Timothy Leary flying in Dick's plane. It also contains Leary's Playboy interview, other magazine quotes and quotes from Albert Cohen and Shiller's LSD.


Trip 6 has Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky walking around naked, Ginsberg telephoning his pal Jack Kerouac and some great Ginsberg quotes! The movement to turn on the world - well intentioned, but naive, the power people would never submit nor allow such conscious expansion beyond the control principal to continue.


Trip 7 talks about the rational thinking of Arthur Koestler's verses the irrationality of a LSD - religious experience and how the two don't see eye to eye.


Trip 9 shows the benefits of incarcerated prisoner rehabilitation and recidivism rate decrease from LSD therapy.


Trip 11 touches on William Burroughs and how he thinks on another tribal level, as we all come from different tribal evolutionary thinking. In the end Burroughs drops out of the clan and disapproves of the way Leary, his fellow Harvard and other constituents handle the mushroom therapy - Leary's got a monopoly on love.
Trip 12 is about Michael Hollingshead's famous mayonnaise jar of LSD and Leary's first experience along with the Jazz musician and his wife, Maynard and Flo Ferguson. And amazing account, really. And Leary, as Huxley has written in 1953, was forever a changed man. He had seen the games, the roles played, the human fallibility of truths, statistics, ideals and so forth from an objective standpoint, from the ultimate subjective standpoint.


Trip 15's Good Friday experiment under the coaxing of the intellectual and scholar Walter Pahnke is also an incredible story and ultimately Leary admits that the mind expansive consciousness is not a rational Descartes mind set, but a religious experience and of course, not under any particular religious structure - in this case Christianity is very constraining, limiting and restraining.


I love the explanation in Trip 16 that Leary related from Pat Bolero to a fellow psychologist who not only became fearful when hearing of "drugs" but could not comprehend her words that attempted to point to the clarity outside of the discursive mindset.


This book has some great Allen Ginsberg quotes and stories, great Burroughs stories, Leary's family, Dick Albert, Michael Hollingshead and many other intellectuals, scholars, divinity school students, the Good Friday experiment, artists, poets, theologians. I love his daughter's, Susan Leary, account of her growing up and observing the LSD sessions, of Alan Watts and others. The trip in Tim's place with Dick Albert, both erroneously thinking the pet dog was dying and other stories make this a very entertaining book to read. But ultimately, its the beneficial attributes from the psychedelic sessions weighted against the opposition that really make this book totally worthwhile.


"Reality and the addiction to any one reality is a tissue-thin neurological fragility. At the height of a visionary experience it is crystal-clear that you can change completely. Be an entirely different person. Be any person you choose. It is a moment of rebirth . . . . It is habit, fear and laziness that keep people from changing after an LSD experience. It's so much easier to doubt your divinity, drift back to speaking English, wearing ties, playing the old game. p. 334


"There comes a point in every lifetime when the blinders are removed and the individual glimpses for a second the nature of the process. This revelation comes through a biochemical change in the body. A Twist of the protein key and you see where you are at in the total process. p. 336


One thing I've learned as a prison psychiatrist is that society doesn't want the prisoner rehabilitated, and as soon as you start changing prisoners so that they discover beauty and wisdom, God, you're going to stir up the biggest mess that Boston has seen since the Boston Tea Party. . . sooner or later, as soon as they see the thing you do is working, they're going to come down on you 0- the newspaper reporters, the bureaucrats, and the officials. Harvard given drugs to prisoners! p. 18

I had seen enough and read enough of the anti-vision crowd, the power-holders with guns, and the bigger and better men we got on your team the stronger our position. p. 128


We even ran sessions for parole officers and correction officials (they tripped). Some of them had unhappy trips. People committed to external power are frightened by the release of ecstasy because the key is surrender of external power. One chief parole officer flipped out paranoid at my house and accused us of a Communist conspiracy and stormed around while Madison Presnell curled up on the couch watching, amused at the white folks frantically learning how to get high. He grinned at me. So you call it the love drug? p. 208

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dr. Tim Leary's Wisdom, May 19, 2003

By 

Tyler C. (West Des Moines, IA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: High Priest (Leary, Timothy) (Paperback)

The ideal audience for this book really has a large range; it is ideal for anyone wanting to experience a "trip" from a hallucinogenic drug without the actual drug. High Priest is an excellent piece of art, it is an encyclopedia of Leary's 16 most life changing "trips" when under various forms of hallucinogens. It is filled with strong imagery to support Leary's want to tell the world about the wonderful hallucinogenic "trip". His style is very unique in that especially in a series of short stories, he can in essence connect them, just as he does in his life with situations. He uses a very intense tone, and style becomes rapid as he submerges into a hallucinogenic state, almost as if you where there with him. Then as he's coming out of it his style loosens and becomes slower, and drowsy. Its almost as if there were two extremes one is cold and gray, and the other is vibrant and full of life. This book will definitely stir your interest about psychedelic drugs and the life behind it. Leary's intense flavor and swirling style can sometimes almost be frightening especially when he discusses his inner emotions about death, and his chilling way of expressing his views on the "life changing trips". I think this book is very educational depending on your view of education, and can teach people, things about other cultures that may not be their own, a counterculture if you will. I recommend High Priest to anyone with a thirst for knowledge and an open mind.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Entertaining, Insightful and Educational, January 15, 2002

By 

JT "suco_alum" (VA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: High Priest (Leary, Timothy) (Paperback)

A simultaneous explanation of why, and why not. The depiction of an appealing experience that within itself shows glimpses of why it may be best left wonderment.
You can get so trapped in the micro while reading this book that it's easy to forget that these thought processes helped shape this country, and etched themselves in time to never be forgotten.
Basically Dr Leary takes us through several "trips" in different settings, and with different participants and hallucinogens. If you're waivering on whether or not this book is for you, I would say the entertainment value alone is worth it. If the subjectmatter is of some interest to you, you'll love it.