During the psychedelic revolution of the 1960's, no one is more remembered for his teachings than Timothy Leary, who saw hallucinogenic drugs as a doorway the mysteries of the mind. Leary graduated from the University of California at Berkely and received his Ph.D in psychology. In the years following he wrote several books on the subject. In 1959 he was invited to become a lecturer at Harvard, were his work focused on the theory that all social interaction could be reduced to a set of "games". (Leary 18) Later, his research took a dramatic turn following a psychedelic experience with psylocybin, a hallucinogen found in a rare strain of mushrooms. The experience led to a dramatic change in Leary, and his work headed in a different direction, towards that of expanding the human way of thought through responsible use of drugs such as LSD, mescaline (also known as peyote) and psylocybin to name a few. His experiments eventually became known to the FBI who Leary would have problems with in the future.
In 1959 Timothy Leary moved his family to Cambridge, and began his career as a professor, lecturing on psychology at Harvard. Leary fit the perfect physical description of a college professor except for his white tennis shoes, which he wore everywhere. His focus of teaching immediately strayed from the normal places of study like Freudian oriented clinics and hospitals, to areas of greater challenge like skid-rows, ghetto community centers, jails, Catholic Orphanages and other places he felt were natural habitats of humans. Leary was interested in changing the way people interacted with each other and the thought that some psychological problems could be resolved by getting rid of imprinting that has been imposed on every person's mind from the structure of society. Leary's interest in changing the ways of human behavior was shared by a fellow colleague, named Richard Alpert. Alpert spoke to Leary of "magical mushrooms" that he had taken in Mexico and the possibility that they may be the key he and Leary where searching for in their studies.
