US. psychologist and proponent of sensory expansion. Leary’s self- described “illumination” occurred in Mexico in August 1960 as a consequence of eating “sacred mushrooms.” In 1962, Leary, then a professor at Harvard, was introduced to the hallucinogen LSD by a biologist who had been studying the drug’s effect on spiders. Leary subsequently began to promote LSD as a social cure-all. He set up the Castalia Foundation, coined one of the defining buzz phrases of the 1960s, “Turn Off, Tune In, Drop Out,” and cowrote The Psychedelic Experience (1964) with Richard Alpert, a like-minded Harvard colleague. Leary and Alpert believed LSD to be a sacramental chemical that could induce spiritual revelations, and they accordingly modeled The Psychedelic Experience after the Tibetan Book of the Dead. They intended their book as a manual for mind expansion that would impart a mystical, even religious, frame of reference to the LSD experience.
Leary’s activities attracted the disapproving attention of the FBI, leading to a conviction on charges of possession of marijuana, a sentence of imprisonment for ten years, and a jailbreak engineered by a radical group called the Weathermen. Leary escaped to Algeria, was recaptured in Afghanistan, was returned to the United States, and remained incarcerated until 1976. He later toured on the lecture circuit with Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy. Leary also wrote about himself (Flash Backs, 1983) and extensively about such subjects as exopsychology, neurologic, neuropolitics, neurogeography, and rejuvenation.