What do you think?
Rate this book
High Priest
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.
384 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1968
49 people are currently reading
1031 people want to read
About the author
Timothy Leary
170 books820 followersTimothy Francis Leary was an American writer, psychologist, futurist, modern pioneer and advocate of psychedelic drug research and use, and one of the first people whose remains have been sent into space. An icon of 1960s counterculture, Leary is most famous as a proponent of the therapeutic and spiritual benefits of LSD. He coined and popularized the catch phrase "Turn on, tune in, drop out."
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
April 12, 2008
This was probably the 1st Leary bk I read. I liked it alot when I read it. Strangely, though, I had little or no motivation to read anymore by him afterwards. I think I read "Jail Notes" later - but that was probably b/c I was interested in the jail break itself given that I figured I might need some inspiration along those lines someday. "High Priest" is uttterly brilliant w/ an interesting layout of multiple parallel texts & great drawings. It's bursting w/ inspiration.
Why did I have so little interest in reading further? Maybe b/c Leary covered the territory so thoroughly, so insightfully, so painstakingly that there was a feeling of completion to it. Dunno. Maybe parts of it didn't completely jive in a practical way w/ my own circumstances. More than anything else, I think I was too motivated to move on w/ my own philosophical development to immerse myself any further in Leary's. Even now I feel little motivation to read any more. It might be b/c I intuit that I'd have to give great concentration to fully appreciating the genius of it & I don't want to spend my energy that way. The holy ceiling light 'knows' that doesn't always stop me. Maybe some of it just seemed too 'hippie' for me, too New Age. Whatever the 'reason', I still have the utmost respect for this bk & for Leary.
Why did I have so little interest in reading further? Maybe b/c Leary covered the territory so thoroughly, so insightfully, so painstakingly that there was a feeling of completion to it. Dunno. Maybe parts of it didn't completely jive in a practical way w/ my own circumstances. More than anything else, I think I was too motivated to move on w/ my own philosophical development to immerse myself any further in Leary's. Even now I feel little motivation to read any more. It might be b/c I intuit that I'd have to give great concentration to fully appreciating the genius of it & I don't want to spend my energy that way. The holy ceiling light 'knows' that doesn't always stop me. Maybe some of it just seemed too 'hippie' for me, too New Age. Whatever the 'reason', I still have the utmost respect for this bk & for Leary.
May 27, 2023
Some trips I was really into, others not so much. Wacky and fun read though! I would have loved to see what Leary’s house was during the time these took place- truly something unique to that place + time.
March 12, 2023
I imagine Leary, the wise old magician-bard, editing these forbidden notes on cosmic secrets with a sly wink and a knowing smile.
“You have to dilate your pupils to become a visionary.”
Wake up, Tim says. The Matrix has you… Behind this “marionette show” of normal reality is a “whirling dance of pure energy”, the “central eye,” “the one.” You’re trapped in a mental prison of your own making. Break out! Question authority. Think for yourself. Start your own church. Become your own savior. DYOR (Do your own research).
”Psychedelic research is experimental philosophy, empirical metaphysics, visionary science ... a do-it-yourself approach to Salvation.”
Leary’s story as one of the founding members of the American counterculture movement is one of rash iconoclasm that arguably proved counterproductive for his ambitious goals of turning on the nation (“ecstasy above ground”) and utopian peace. And yet, just as in the strangely similar story of Jesus Christ, Timothy Leary’s message echoes loudly in the culture he helped shape. His wisdom speaks for itself, for those willing to listen past the headliners: “escaped prisoner” and “teen drug advocate.” The man should certainly have a thrilling movie based on his real life. Putting that aside, though, if I had to choose one book as my personal sacred text, it might be this one. The more I read it, the more I found the title to be suitable (and not ironically).
”The person who remembers, who reminds, who acts as an alarm clock, who becomes time-and-weather announcer for central broadcasting, station RDNA—this person is called guru. Prophet.”
The High Priest finds us in a desolate place:
”From the standpoint of the isolated individual, life is a science-fiction horror story… while he pursues his dinner he is hurtling towards his own decomposition.”
The solution?
Turn-on. Change your perspective. Wake up from the dream. See through the illusion.
”Find a sacrament which returns you to the temple of God, your own body. Go out of your mind. Get high.”
”The nervous system is an uncontrollable galaxy of mirrors within mirrors. The mind is a neurological method for screening out all but a few redundant, static, conditioned, socially consensual ideas… Like heroin focuses the behavior of a junkie, so does the mind focus the billion-fold avalanche of neurological activity. During the psychedelic experience the heavy shackles of the mind are loosened … consciousness is free to move in any direction.”
”The newness of everything—it is as if the world had just dawned—overwhelms you and melts you with its beauty.”
”Now I am seeing for the first time…”
”I felt the message of the mushrooms which is the wordless, mindless rapture of the moment.”
”Every moment it starts all over again.”
”Every second presented me with a golden chance to tune in, to break through, to glorify, to really groove and dance with God’s great song.”
” An endless variety of ecstatic experience spiraled out around me. I had taken the God-step…”
”What else is important, you foolish desiccated creature, but this fire dance of life creation?”
”Society is a crazy made-up game”
”Psychedelic drugs are counteragents. Destroy the virus. Destroy the status quo. Psychedelic drugs are a specific cure for brain parasites.”
”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. You are neurologically a naked baby…”
”It is the world of your own soul that you seek. Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already its being within yourself. I can throw open to you no picture gallery but your own soul. All I can give you is the opportunity, the impulse, the key. I can help you make your own world visible. That is all… Behind each door exactly what you seek awaits you. ”
”All is consciousness and consciousness is one.”
”Rest, beloved. We are one.”
Tune-in. Harness and communicate these new perspectives in a harmonious dance with the external world. Be reborn. Play a role in the game of life, but don’t forget it’s a role. Remember to smile. Remember this is a dance. Wink wink.
”Once you see how it’s all composed, it is hard to go back to the game.”
”He had died, spun out into the richness of interior space, had unraveled the riddle of the cosmic joke and was now cautiously, incredulously, comically, moving through the marionette show of normal reality.”
”And there it was, that dark moment of fear and distrust, which could have changed in a second to become hatred and terror. But we made the love connection.”
”You need no longer judge the good and evil of each new flick of cosmic process. Until today you have been the slave of the within. Learn to be its master. That is magic.”
”Aren’t we always just a breath away from death…”
”Because you flow like water, you can neither win nor lose.”
”It’s all one! We’re all a part! It flows! It’s all love. It’s all a game back there. Why do we play it so grimly? How funny! ”
”Every man is the chosen man.”
”Acceptance, peace, resigned serenity, it’s all in your own mind, Baby, the whole bit from beginning to end.”
”You begin to look like a happy saint! … you will radiate energy… discover and nurture your divinity.”
”Be like the sun at midday… Cheering and enlightening all.”
”Make them feel right and they’ll do right. Make them feel good and they’ll do good.”
”Religion will be transformed into an activity concerned mainly with experience and intuition—an everyday mysticism underlying and giving significance to everyday rationality, everyday tasks and duties, everyday human relationships.”
”See that soft breeze? That’s the breath of God, for me. And hear those birds? Well that’s the sermon I tune-in to. It’s all God… and the bubbles on this beer, see them, they’re part of the Divine Scheme too. I toast you and God.”
Drop-out. Detach yourself from the external social drama.
”Our consciousness creates the universe we experience.”
”We were all prisoners in a concentration camp of our own making.”
”The psychedelic drugs are sacraments, and like all sacraments that work, they demand your all. They demand that you live up to the revelation.”
”The wise person devotes his life exclusively to the religious search—for there-in is found the only ecstasy, the only meaning.”
“That’s what life itself is. An indiscriminate, unsupervised, uncontrolled two-billion-year-old energy dance with ecstatic communion as the goal.”
”The high-tide, flame-wave, surging blood-hot current of life.”
”Nothing exists except undulating energy and flowing consciousness upon which the grasping mind imposes categories.”
”...it is an N-dimensional internally unfolding process. Any point from which one sees the one-ness is a center. That one point of vision is the eye of God, seeing, glorifying, understanding the whole. One such moment of revelation is the only purpose of life … One such moment makes the remaining decades of life meaningful and worthwhile.”
”[the Mystic experience] is not just an experience among others, but rather the very heart of human experience. It is the center that gives understanding to the whole… the very root of human identity has been deepened…”
”The hunger is to merge. To share and to grow. But the terrible price of union is to lose identity. Be trapped by the union.”
It’s a mystical masterpiece, and I can’t believe Leary hasn’t featured more centrally in all my years of researching monistic idealism, oneness, and the perennial philosophy. I’ve certainly spent time with the rest of the “psychedelic philosophers”—Ram Dass, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, Terence McKenna—but Tim I had previously discounted. I shouldn’t have. The presentation is experimental, and perhaps a bit pretentious, but Leary is the first mystic to make me understand mysticism. And I haven’t even taken his sacrament.
“You have to dilate your pupils to become a visionary.”
Wake up, Tim says. The Matrix has you… Behind this “marionette show” of normal reality is a “whirling dance of pure energy”, the “central eye,” “the one.” You’re trapped in a mental prison of your own making. Break out! Question authority. Think for yourself. Start your own church. Become your own savior. DYOR (Do your own research).
”Psychedelic research is experimental philosophy, empirical metaphysics, visionary science ... a do-it-yourself approach to Salvation.”
Leary’s story as one of the founding members of the American counterculture movement is one of rash iconoclasm that arguably proved counterproductive for his ambitious goals of turning on the nation (“ecstasy above ground”) and utopian peace. And yet, just as in the strangely similar story of Jesus Christ, Timothy Leary’s message echoes loudly in the culture he helped shape. His wisdom speaks for itself, for those willing to listen past the headliners: “escaped prisoner” and “teen drug advocate.” The man should certainly have a thrilling movie based on his real life. Putting that aside, though, if I had to choose one book as my personal sacred text, it might be this one. The more I read it, the more I found the title to be suitable (and not ironically).
”The person who remembers, who reminds, who acts as an alarm clock, who becomes time-and-weather announcer for central broadcasting, station RDNA—this person is called guru. Prophet.”
The High Priest finds us in a desolate place:
”From the standpoint of the isolated individual, life is a science-fiction horror story… while he pursues his dinner he is hurtling towards his own decomposition.”
The solution?
Turn-on. Change your perspective. Wake up from the dream. See through the illusion.
”Find a sacrament which returns you to the temple of God, your own body. Go out of your mind. Get high.”
”The nervous system is an uncontrollable galaxy of mirrors within mirrors. The mind is a neurological method for screening out all but a few redundant, static, conditioned, socially consensual ideas… Like heroin focuses the behavior of a junkie, so does the mind focus the billion-fold avalanche of neurological activity. During the psychedelic experience the heavy shackles of the mind are loosened … consciousness is free to move in any direction.”
”The newness of everything—it is as if the world had just dawned—overwhelms you and melts you with its beauty.”
”Now I am seeing for the first time…”
”I felt the message of the mushrooms which is the wordless, mindless rapture of the moment.”
”Every moment it starts all over again.”
”Every second presented me with a golden chance to tune in, to break through, to glorify, to really groove and dance with God’s great song.”
” An endless variety of ecstatic experience spiraled out around me. I had taken the God-step…”
”What else is important, you foolish desiccated creature, but this fire dance of life creation?”
”Society is a crazy made-up game”
”Psychedelic drugs are counteragents. Destroy the virus. Destroy the status quo. Psychedelic drugs are a specific cure for brain parasites.”
”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. You are neurologically a naked baby…”
”It is the world of your own soul that you seek. Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already its being within yourself. I can throw open to you no picture gallery but your own soul. All I can give you is the opportunity, the impulse, the key. I can help you make your own world visible. That is all… Behind each door exactly what you seek awaits you. ”
”All is consciousness and consciousness is one.”
”Rest, beloved. We are one.”
Tune-in. Harness and communicate these new perspectives in a harmonious dance with the external world. Be reborn. Play a role in the game of life, but don’t forget it’s a role. Remember to smile. Remember this is a dance. Wink wink.
”Once you see how it’s all composed, it is hard to go back to the game.”
”He had died, spun out into the richness of interior space, had unraveled the riddle of the cosmic joke and was now cautiously, incredulously, comically, moving through the marionette show of normal reality.”
”And there it was, that dark moment of fear and distrust, which could have changed in a second to become hatred and terror. But we made the love connection.”
”You need no longer judge the good and evil of each new flick of cosmic process. Until today you have been the slave of the within. Learn to be its master. That is magic.”
”Aren’t we always just a breath away from death…”
”Because you flow like water, you can neither win nor lose.”
”It’s all one! We’re all a part! It flows! It’s all love. It’s all a game back there. Why do we play it so grimly? How funny! ”
”Every man is the chosen man.”
”Acceptance, peace, resigned serenity, it’s all in your own mind, Baby, the whole bit from beginning to end.”
”You begin to look like a happy saint! … you will radiate energy… discover and nurture your divinity.”
”Be like the sun at midday… Cheering and enlightening all.”
”Make them feel right and they’ll do right. Make them feel good and they’ll do good.”
”Religion will be transformed into an activity concerned mainly with experience and intuition—an everyday mysticism underlying and giving significance to everyday rationality, everyday tasks and duties, everyday human relationships.”
”See that soft breeze? That’s the breath of God, for me. And hear those birds? Well that’s the sermon I tune-in to. It’s all God… and the bubbles on this beer, see them, they’re part of the Divine Scheme too. I toast you and God.”
Drop-out. Detach yourself from the external social drama.
”Our consciousness creates the universe we experience.”
”We were all prisoners in a concentration camp of our own making.”
”The psychedelic drugs are sacraments, and like all sacraments that work, they demand your all. They demand that you live up to the revelation.”
”The wise person devotes his life exclusively to the religious search—for there-in is found the only ecstasy, the only meaning.”
“That’s what life itself is. An indiscriminate, unsupervised, uncontrolled two-billion-year-old energy dance with ecstatic communion as the goal.”
”The high-tide, flame-wave, surging blood-hot current of life.”
”Nothing exists except undulating energy and flowing consciousness upon which the grasping mind imposes categories.”
”...it is an N-dimensional internally unfolding process. Any point from which one sees the one-ness is a center. That one point of vision is the eye of God, seeing, glorifying, understanding the whole. One such moment of revelation is the only purpose of life … One such moment makes the remaining decades of life meaningful and worthwhile.”
”[the Mystic experience] is not just an experience among others, but rather the very heart of human experience. It is the center that gives understanding to the whole… the very root of human identity has been deepened…”
”The hunger is to merge. To share and to grow. But the terrible price of union is to lose identity. Be trapped by the union.”
It’s a mystical masterpiece, and I can’t believe Leary hasn’t featured more centrally in all my years of researching monistic idealism, oneness, and the perennial philosophy. I’ve certainly spent time with the rest of the “psychedelic philosophers”—Ram Dass, Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, Terence McKenna—but Tim I had previously discounted. I shouldn’t have. The presentation is experimental, and perhaps a bit pretentious, but Leary is the first mystic to make me understand mysticism. And I haven’t even taken his sacrament.
April 6, 2013
This book is a great treatment of the maturation of the expansion of consciousness and the journey through spirituality. It is a diary of finding one's own self and looking deeper within yourself and the outer depths of what lies on the other side of consciousness and the ineffable consequence of inner transformation. This is a great encounter of a movement that changed the world forever.
April 25, 2012
I really like this book, it details Timothy Leary's acid trips before it was criminalized with "High Priests" like Aldous Huxley and their spiritual interpretations of their visions. Leary's little side notes in the margins really helped to clarify some of the often inane ramblings.
October 22, 2007
An extremely interesting book about Tim Leary's experimentation with LSD and the people he guided while they were tripping. Ginsberg makes an appearance and it's quite funny.
August 4, 2022
As we read, we venture beyond the 'Never-Never' into the mind's Interstellar light enhanced by perception altering psychotropics. A global LSD 'crisis' initiates a meeting between 'birds of a feather' USA President Lyndon B. Johnson and Mao Zedong (leader of the Chinese Communist Party - CCP), meet to plan an anti-LSD campaign while Robert F. Kennedy defends LSD prompting Hubert Humphrey to demand a psychiatric examination. We additionally observe how research can quickly morph into personal pleasure and self-focused experiences. It is of no surprise that light-sight perceptions change when one's pupils become dilated.
Did the dream get in the way of the research? Decades later the follow-ups on Leary's mind experiments paint a remarkably different picture than what our author-artist reported, promised, and displayed on his psychedelic canvas of 'test' individuals, which included Correctional Institution inmates. One concern with the reestablishment of 'psychotics' usage today within the realms of psychotherapy involves the existing preconceptions related to these 'therapeutic' avenues; those being related to these compounds' historicity: positive, negative or perceived. "If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!" Note: LSD was first synthesized by a Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in 1938 while seeking a pain relief for migraine headaches. Hofmann went on to live to be 102 years old.
Having a close friend and two additional high-school classmates who literally 'fried their brains' misusing psychedelics, I would agree that 'strong' therapeutics are for the 'sick' and not for the 'well' to experiment with; no more than a normal healthy person loading up on chemotherapy treatments just out of curiosity. Psychedelic drugs should "serve as medicine rather than diet."
Notations on each page sides' columns are at times more interesting and informative than the actual in-line text. I rate side notes with 3-stars, but in-line text with 1.5-stars.
- An earlier work that may be of interest:
Timothy Leary: The Harvard Years: Early Writings on LSD and Psilocybin
- Excerpts:
"The second half of the book, but one of many, was a transient way of thinking, permeated with the stink of Zen, not impervious to change. This irreverent, destructive, poisonous note a phrase often used in Zen Literature."
"Like every educated savage, I automatically discredited anything that I didn't understand."
Did the dream get in the way of the research? Decades later the follow-ups on Leary's mind experiments paint a remarkably different picture than what our author-artist reported, promised, and displayed on his psychedelic canvas of 'test' individuals, which included Correctional Institution inmates. One concern with the reestablishment of 'psychotics' usage today within the realms of psychotherapy involves the existing preconceptions related to these 'therapeutic' avenues; those being related to these compounds' historicity: positive, negative or perceived. "If therefore the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!" Note: LSD was first synthesized by a Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in 1938 while seeking a pain relief for migraine headaches. Hofmann went on to live to be 102 years old.
Having a close friend and two additional high-school classmates who literally 'fried their brains' misusing psychedelics, I would agree that 'strong' therapeutics are for the 'sick' and not for the 'well' to experiment with; no more than a normal healthy person loading up on chemotherapy treatments just out of curiosity. Psychedelic drugs should "serve as medicine rather than diet."
Notations on each page sides' columns are at times more interesting and informative than the actual in-line text. I rate side notes with 3-stars, but in-line text with 1.5-stars.
- An earlier work that may be of interest:
Timothy Leary: The Harvard Years: Early Writings on LSD and Psilocybin
- Excerpts:
"The second half of the book, but one of many, was a transient way of thinking, permeated with the stink of Zen, not impervious to change. This irreverent, destructive, poisonous note a phrase often used in Zen Literature."
"Like every educated savage, I automatically discredited anything that I didn't understand."
March 2, 2025
Revisiting that part of my past.
High Priest is such an eloquent book that showcases many layers of our current modern prison.
Somehow, and after 7 years of my introduction to psychedelic plants, I realize how similar experiences are, and how truly there is a language transformation caused by these plants, allowing many takers to simultaneously speak it without knowing that others have "tuned in" to speak it.
The field of research concerning these plants seems to be endless with possibilities and to know that major figures like Ram Dass, Alan Watts, Huxley, and others all met together and explored together these plants, is quite something.
Anyone interested to go to one of the modern starts of psychedelic research must read this fascinating documentation that marks the failure of even Harvard where the author began his scientific research and questions and quest.
High Priest is such an eloquent book that showcases many layers of our current modern prison.
Somehow, and after 7 years of my introduction to psychedelic plants, I realize how similar experiences are, and how truly there is a language transformation caused by these plants, allowing many takers to simultaneously speak it without knowing that others have "tuned in" to speak it.
The field of research concerning these plants seems to be endless with possibilities and to know that major figures like Ram Dass, Alan Watts, Huxley, and others all met together and explored together these plants, is quite something.
Anyone interested to go to one of the modern starts of psychedelic research must read this fascinating documentation that marks the failure of even Harvard where the author began his scientific research and questions and quest.
March 7, 2021
Essential reading for the spiritual psychonaut. Will help you to rebuild yourself after taking the psychic plunge and make some sense out of ecstatic rapture—— a near impossible feat of mental assimilation by normal means. The best asset of this book is its ability to guide you, to help you build trust with your own higher self, to silence the inner raving critic, redefining the power and parameters of your own inner vision regardless of what so-called logic or the greater society tries to impose on you. The world is stranger than we know but everything that’s there to discover is already complete and within us. Thanks Tim!
February 19, 2025
Really good, really self indulgent. Hard to finish. Would rather just experience these things myself than read his records of them. That’s what the book is though, records, with some creative curation. Would be a good coffee table book if the cover wasn’t so unbearable to look at.
June 21, 2021
amazing trips
January 4, 2025
A detailed historical inside view of lsd before it became illegal. Told by one of the most well know pioneers, along with his friends who were pioneers in their own rights. One group tells their story of where it all started for them, their developments in expending and experimenting with consciousness. A trip that started but did not end, resulting in a life long passion.
*** I recently saw videos released from the Timothy leary archive that showed him hanging out with a group of military officials partying and clearly had a undercover female FBI agent as his handler posing as a girlfriend lover…. I mean it could not be more obvious in the video itself…. This really puts into question Timothy leary, and the governments true intention and involvement with lsd and it’s cultural music scene. The subjects being discussed in the video were also telling how the hippies were being used to effect and balance political issues ect ect
*** I recently saw videos released from the Timothy leary archive that showed him hanging out with a group of military officials partying and clearly had a undercover female FBI agent as his handler posing as a girlfriend lover…. I mean it could not be more obvious in the video itself…. This really puts into question Timothy leary, and the governments true intention and involvement with lsd and it’s cultural music scene. The subjects being discussed in the video were also telling how the hippies were being used to effect and balance political issues ect ect
November 18, 2014
I am astounded that this book is not more popular. Timothy Leary was such a famous public figure in his time, and arguably still is, as I occasionally hear his name brought up in conversation from time to time.
He changed the world of psychedelics for better and for worse. Yes, he was irresponsible with his studies and abused his position, but the controversy over his studies also brought psychedelics to the forefront of the news and made many, many headlines. I doubt that anyone would have been able to bring new (to the united states that is) drugs into public awareness without carrying extensive baggage.
He changed the world of psychedelics for better and for worse. Yes, he was irresponsible with his studies and abused his position, but the controversy over his studies also brought psychedelics to the forefront of the news and made many, many headlines. I doubt that anyone would have been able to bring new (to the united states that is) drugs into public awareness without carrying extensive baggage.
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews