Psychedelic OG Who Experimented with Leary, Alpert, and Metzner

In the early '60s, Weil was a dues-paying member, so to speak, of the Harvard Psychedelic Club (see  Don Lattin's book of the same name). He participated with Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (better known as Ram Dass later in life), and  Ralph Metzner on a series of psilocybin projects at Harvard University (and beyond). Weil co-edited the Psychedelic Review journal and the book the Psychedelic Reader, and he was present for both the Marsh Chapel Experiment and the Concord Prison Experiment. After Leary and Alpert unceremoniously parted ways with Harvard, Weil joined them for a summer at the Hitchcock Estate in Millbrook, New York. He says a “prophetic lucid dream” convinced him to leave there before things went awry, leading him back to teaching psychology for a time.

In the late '60s, Weil began working with multimedia guru Gerd Stern on projects. In 1971, their company purchased a recording studio in Boston, Intermedia Sound. There, Weil championed singer-songwriter Paul Pena, whose “Jet Airliner” became a hit for the Steve Miller Band  (“I get requests at least once a month or more for permission to use 'Jet Airliner' for this project or that project,” says Weil, who's also a music publisher). Aerosmith recorded their debut album (featuring “Dream On”) at Intermedia. And Weil received an executive producer credit on Roger Powell's critically-acclaimed electronic music album Cosmic Furnace (1973).

In addition to psychology, Weil has taught Tai Chi and Qigong. He's studied Neuro-linguistic programming and hypnotherapy, and is a longtime student of the works of G.I. Gurdjieff. Through his company Value Mentors, Weil acts as a coach for individuals, families, and corporations, helping them to identify their core values and to express those values in their daily lives. 

And now back to psychedelics: After ceasing his experimentation in 1968 (“I had unlearned what I needed to unlearn” is how he puts it), Weil began exploring psychedelics again during the pandemic (some mushroom experiences, plus one MDMA session). Weil describes his most recent trips as preparatory work for “dropping this body at a certain point.” He has also, on occasion, “guided and advised the leadership” of the Wisdom Dojo—combat veterans who have employed psychedelics as part of their healing work.

Weil, who is 88 years old, reflected on his life's experiences for DoubleBlind from his new home in Oahu, Hawaii, where he moved last year after over three decades in Colorado. What follows is an interview that has been edited for length and clarity. 

DoubleBlind: Your first cannabis experience was in 1952 or 1953, when you were about 15 or 16?

Gunther Weil: My friend Mike Melvoin and I grew up together in Milwaukee. We were jazz buffs early on. So, we used to go down to the Black neighborhood in Milwaukee to a couple of jazz bars. And Mike was already so proficient on piano, he would sometimes sit in with other musicians. And of course, cannabis was just part of the culture. We were kind of adopted by a few of the jazz musicians in Milwaukee. 

Do you feel that your early cannabis experiences were good preparation, in certain regards, for your first psilocybin experience?

Perhaps, in this sense: I was already familiar and comfortable with what we might call altered states.

When I first met Tim Leary, when I was a graduate student at Harvard in 1960, he was my faculty advisor. He mentioned that his interest was in working with psychedelics as a tool for exploring human consciousness, and he offered the opportunity to work with him if that interested me. And, if not, we both would be better off going our separate ways. So, I immediately said yes!

What kind of preparation work did you do for your first psilocybin trip? Was it discussing with Tim Leary and Richard Alpert their experiences, plus reading, say, R. Gordon Wasson or Aldous Huxley? 

I don't recall actually being that prepared. The preparation came after the fact. And then, of course, it was no longer preparation for the first experience, but probably a preparation for that which followed. 

I remember Tim, in other sessions, would spend a few minutes speaking about set and setting, about preparing ourselves by essentially embracing the people, the situation, the environment. To suspend self-criticism, or any other form of critique, and just to enter into a state of not knowing, if you will, and letting that kind of basic compassion and curiosity—of being comfortable with not knowing—be the primary “set” as you enter this psychedelic domain. So, I would say that's good advice for any learning, any situation, not just the psychedelic experience.

What resulted from your early psilocybin experiences?

I got particularly interested in the cultural dimensions, the philosophical, the spiritual, the pharmaceutical: all of which led to our collective interest in creating the Psychedelic Review, which I was at one point the editor of, at other points the co-editor, and on the advisory board, and which led eventually to the publication of a volume that I edited called the Psychedelic Reader, which was based on the best articles I chose from the Psychedelic Review. My background in philosophy and psychology predisposed me to work on that kind of journal that covered the multidisciplinary inputs or basis for psychedelia. Not unlike what DoubleBlind is doing in the current scene, if you will.

What's the most potent memory you have of working with prisoners during the Concord Prison Experiment, in which you, the Harvard researchers, took psilocybin side-by-side with convicts in order to see whether that could affect recidivism rates?

I had taken a pretty large dose, and at one point, I found myself speaking to the group. I was inspired. I don't know what I was talking about. It was some kind of philosophical-psychedelic-spiritual insight that I had. I saw through my own eyes as I was speaking, I had a kind of double awareness. I had a visual image of myself being a spider at the center of a web that I was weaving, where all these different individuals in the room were trapped in my web, and I suddenly felt a sense of deep shame and regret for the control that I was exercising. I woke up to my own control there, the hypnotic trance that I was creating. I immediately had an emotional reaction so strong that I fainted. The next thing I knew, I was waking up and was on one of the cots in this hospital wing that we used. I'm looking up at—and I can see it to this day—a sea of faces looking down on me with a great deal of concern about my well-being. And some of these were really tough cons: I'm talking Irish, Italian mafia. Heavy-duty guys, right? But they were looking at me with a lot of love and concern about my well-being.

That must have given you some insight into what you would read in years ahead about psychedelic cult leaders.

That's a really interesting point. I've never made that association. But now that you bring it up, there's a dark side to psychedelics, which was originally featured in the CIA's experiments. The military-industrial psychedelic establishment of that period saw the potential for using psychedelics for mind control. And even today, there are autocratic, anti-democratic tendencies coming out of the Silicon Valley billionaire technology-class around instituting a more authoritarian culture, basically controlled and driven by technology. The use of psychedelics is not a guarantee of inner freedom. It actually has the potential for creating a deeper level of identification with whatever belief system may arise in the course of that session.

When you first met him in his tiny office at Harvard, how did Timothy Leary strike you? And how did that view of Tim evolve for you over the years?

I found him to be super-intelligent. Also very street smart. Very funny. A wonderful sense of humor. He could drop in Irish stories and Irish anecdotes, one of which showed up actually in my first psilocybin session, when at one point he got up and started quoting from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, which blew my mind. I had tried to read Joyce, but I couldn't make head or tails of that particular literary stream of consciousness.

Over the years, I developed a deep love and friendship with him. And I saw a little deeper into some of his own conditioned patterns, his own traumas, things he was not able or willing to look at emotionally. You know, he had an incredible gift as a writer, as a revolutionary thinker, as a thought leader, a creative guy. But he, like all of us, had some shadow elements that I think he really had a hard time facing and acknowledging—or, at least, trying to do some work on. And that was exacerbated later on with the suicide of his daughter, which was a mirror of the suicide of her mother, his wife. There was the yin-and-yang of his creativity and his willingness to challenge authority almost in any form versus the need to do that as a form of his own ego expression—almost a conditioned pattern to be a rebel, in that way.

How did it feel to be a part of the research group at Harvard?

You know, there was Timothy and Richard, Ralph Metzner, George Litwin, and myself working together in the early '60s as part of the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Ralph Metzner, George Litwin, and I were graduate students; they were a year ahead of me. And Tim and Dick were our faculty people. And so the five of us were sort of like the core group of that period at Harvard. We developed friendships and a sense of camaraderie, being on the leading edge of exploration. A sense of comradeship, and an identity as adventurers and explorers.

You stayed in touch with Ram Dass over the years. How was he different after his stroke?

He could think clearly, but there was a delay between his ideation and expression. So he would have to speak slowly. He had to speak mindfully. He had to be able to speak carefully. So that was a very different way of expressing himself than the Richard I knew for many, many years, starting in 1960. I saw him become what I perceive as a really integrated, honest teacher of spiritual work. He really embodied that. And it was through that trauma that that happened, and that was the gift of that.

Is there something that you could share from any recent psychedelic experiences of yours that you think might be helpful for someone presently?

I would say that the biggest insight for me—to rely on my Buddhist inclinations—has been just how everything is so impermanent. Impermanence is just the name of the game. Nothing lasts. We don't last. A thought doesn't last. Everything is always changing. And really, having that kind of insight, not just at an intellectual level, but really at an embodied psycho-emotional level, at least for me, has created an attendant or concomitant sense of compassion for myself and other people.

I'm 88, going on 89. And so I'm looking at the past, extracting aspects of purpose and meaning from those mushroom explorations, preparing myself for dropping this body at a certain point. That's been my interest.

Can you discuss the work you've done for many years now in terms of using an assessment tool to scan and to identify people's and corporations' values, and how you put that to work in terms of your own coaching and mentoring that you do for individuals, families, and businesses?

Yes, the assessment tool is called the AVI. It's based originally on the Australian Values Inventory. It was an assessment model and tool based on the work of a number of different people from the early '60s, '70s. I began to get interested in how we could actually assess people's values, as opposed to what people would describe as their values, which is traditionally called in the psychological literature “self-reports.” So self-reports, psychologically, are notoriously erroneous, or they're just untruthful, because we all tend to have self-images, which basically will support certain values, and not other values that we may actually have. This is called in psychology “confirmation bias.”

So I see a connection over the years in terms of my interest in values, going back to the psychedelic explorations. Also, a major mentor for me, who gave me my first teaching position, was Abraham Maslow, the founder of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, who did subsequent work on Peak Experiences and Being Values. He was interested in hiring me because of my work at Harvard studying peak experiences and psilocybin. I was able to leave Harvard gracefully with a PhD, although it was a very difficult time when Richard was fired, and Tim resigned and was fired. Ralph and George were ahead of me, so they kind of got out and into their careers. I was the last one, and there were a number of faculty who just wanted to get rid of me. But I was protected by a couple of other faculty who knew me and liked me. I completed a quick and dirty PhD, and then I got out. Maslow offered me a teaching position at Brandeis University.

Your father was an early researcher on synesthesia, was he not?

He was. My dad, as a young psychologist in Nazi Germany, wrote his PhD thesis on synesthesia. So synesthesia, for example, is hearing colors, or seeing sounds, where there's a cross-modality. That is very common—it happens in psychedelic experiences. My father never had psychedelic experiences, but he had a scientific background and an interest in psychology, as well as physics, math, and chemistry.

My father actually was arrested on Kristallnacht and taken to Buchenwald, arrested with a group of other young, Jewish academic luminaries. And he was released only because he had French papers. We lost over 20 people in our family, our extended family, during that period.

That must have created some early trauma within you as a child, given how you left Germany as a two-year-old in 1939. Were you able to address that with psychedelics?

There was one experience that I had early on. I think it was probably a heavy dose of LSD at the time. And I experienced a Holocaust memory, or a series of memories. Or at least, a Holocaust movie in which I was a participant, a victim. And it was terrible suffering, yet incredibly powerful. And I came out of that feeling completely wiped out. 

I vividly remember going to Tim and asking him about that experience. This happened in Millbrook. I asked him if he had ever had an experience similar to that. And he paused a long time and in a very loving way said to me, “Gunther, I've been on both sides of the gun.” Gunther, I've been on both sides of the gun. That was like an instant teaching on the different roles we play. So, if you subscribe to a Buddhist worldview, a Buddhist lens, everyone you meet you've had some relationship to in some past lifetime as mother, father, sister, brother, aggressor, victim, business partner, whatever it is. We've all been victims, we've all been aggressors. We've been Nazis and we've been Jews, right? So that was like a wake-up call, if you will, to that. 

Now, for the most part, a lot of that was healed over the years with some therapy and some more psychedelic work. Of course, with the advent of the current political scene, Trump coming into office, I'm very sensitized to the growth of authoritarian fascistic culture, the increasing rawness and crudeness, and just instability and downright hatred, and the growth of antisemitism. All of that has brought back some real kinds of triggers for me, and so that's part of what I've been working on with the psychedelics.

What's your hope for the current psychedelic movement, this resurgence in studies and personal exploration? 

I think psychedelic training and licensing would be useful, but to have it restricted only to MDs who have the sole authority to prescribe, I think, would be a mistake. Because—as it's historically been—the tendency will be for pharmaceutical companies to seek quantity, not quality. To look for the quick fix. There's already pharmaceutical work taking place on removing the psychedelic effect, so, essentially, using newer so-called “psychedelics” in a way similar to an SSRI. To me, the emotional and spiritual insights that occur in the session are the healing process. However, I'm also concerned about the widespread use of psychedelics without proper integration or therapy.

I welcome the resurgence in the studies. I'd like to find an organizational sponsor that might be interested in utilizing the values assessment to compare people's pre- and post-psychedelic experiences. So I would provide the values, work, and my knowledge of psychedelics to work with whatever team of people would be organizing that. I think that would be an interesting research project—to verify empirically the values shift that people describe in their worldview after using psychedelics with the appropriate set and setting.

Gregory Daurer's work has been published by High Times, Westword, CrimeReads, and Please Kill Me. He also records songs as Gregory Ego. Bluesky: @gregoryego.bsky.social‬ 

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