I had read about Timothy Leary as the psychologist associated with the phrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” He was using the slogan publicly by 1966, and it became one of the defining phrases of the counterculture after he repeated it at San Francisco’s Human Be-In in January 1967. But this detail about his journey and time in the Kumaon Hills was completely new to me.
Before that journey, Leary had worked at Harvard University with Richard Alpert who would later become "Ram Dass". Along with Ralph Metzner, they explored psychedelics, consciousness and their possible therapeutic uses.
Their work became controversial, and their careers at Harvard came to an end in 1963, although under different circumstances. Harvard did not continue Leary’s appointment, while Alpert’s appointment was terminated after he gave psilocybin to an undergraduate in violation of university rules.
In one respect, however, they were asking a question (ahead of their time) that has returned to scientific research decades later:
"Could psychedelic substances, under carefully controlled conditions, have therapeutic value for the human mind?"
Today, universities, medical researchers and biotechnology companies are once again studying psychedelic compounds as potential treatments for conditions such as depression, trauma, addiction and other forms of psychological distress.
That renewed interest does not mean that every claim or method associated with the psychedelic movement of the 1960s has been vindicated. Modern clinical research involves controlled doses, screening, supervision and carefully designed trials.
But it does show that the therapeutic possibility Leary, Alpert and others were exploring did not simply disappear.
Their paths afterwards would take them to India - but separately, and in very different ways.
Leary travelled to India in 1965.
Alpert made his own journey in 1967, met Neem Karoli Baba, and eventually became known throughout the world as Ram Dass.
Why Kasar Devi?
Photo caption: Crank’s Ridge near Kasar Devi, Almora - part of the Himalayan landscape associated with Timothy Leary’s 1965 stay in the Kumaon Hills.
Photo: Alexey Komarov (Alexkom000) / Wikimedia CommonsLicensed under CC BY 4.0
Near Almora, Kasar Devi sits among pine-covered hills looking towards the Himalayas.
Long before modern tourism reached the region, these hills had already attracted monks, writers, philosophers, artists and spiritual seekers. The combination of isolation, mountain landscape and intellectual cross-pollination made the area an unusual meeting place between Eastern traditions and Western seekers.
Kasar Devi has also acquired a modern mythology of its own. It is sometimes linked with Machu Picchu and Stonehenge through claims about unusual geomagnetic effects or connections with the Van Allen radiation belts.
There is no established scientific evidence for that claim.
But perhaps Kasar Devi does not need such an explanation. Its landscape and its remarkable history of attracting people interested in consciousness, philosophy and spiritual inquiry are fascinating enough.
A House on the Ridge
Leary did not simply arrive in Almora by chance.
Ralph Metzner had reached the region earlier and had already begun spending time with Lama Anagarika Govinda, the German-born Buddhist scholar and spiritual teacher who lived in the area with his wife, the artist Li Gotami.
Metzner later travelled down from the hills and met Leary and his wife Nena in Delhi. He spoke enthusiastically about Almora, the Himalayan surroundings and his conversations with Lama Govinda.
Leary was intrigued.
They decided to travel north.
According to Metzner’s later account, Leary, Nena and Metzner rented a house high on the ridge, with Metzner occupying the guest room.
Their days soon developed a rhythm.
In the afternoons, they would visit Lama Govinda and Li Gotami.
That detail changes the picture considerably.
Leary was not simply passing through India as a tourist. For a period, he was living in the hills, talking with people who had spent decades studying Buddhist philosophy and consciousness, reading ancient texts and attempting to relate those ideas to his own psychological investigations.
The relationship between Leary and Govinda is particularly interesting.
They came from very different intellectual worlds, yet apparently discovered a common fascination: systems for understanding the human mind.
Lama Govinda had spent years studying Buddhist and Asian systems of consciousness.
Leary, long before becoming a counterculture celebrity, had been an academic psychologist concerned with describing and classifying patterns of human personality.
Metzner later remembered that the two men got along extremely well.
And Leary had brought something else with him to the hills.
Nine Translations of the Tao
Nine English translations of the Tao Te Ching.
That is the detail that fascinated me most.
Imagine carrying nine different translations of the same ancient Chinese text into the Kumaon Himalayas.
Leary would choose a passage from Lao Tzu and read it in one translation.
Then another.
Then another.
He would compare how nine different translators had interpreted essentially the same ancient words.
Metzner recalled Leary sitting beneath the pine trees working through these different versions.
Leary himself later described a similar process: he would repeatedly read the translations, trying to move beyond the differences in wording and identify what he believed to be the underlying meaning of a passage.
Then he attempted something unusual.
Rather than produce another conventional translation of the Tao Te Ching, he tried to reinterpret its ideas through the language of consciousness and psychedelic experience.
I find that image fascinating.
Leary is usually remembered through his public persona — psychedelics, controversy, counterculture and that famous slogan.
But here we see another Leary:
"Sitting somewhere in the Himalayan hills, returning again and again to the same ancient verse through nine different translations, searching for words that might describe an experience he felt ordinary language could not easily capture."
Another Himalayan Encounter
There was another interesting encounter during this period.
Metzner, Leary and Nena also visited Sri Krishna Prem, an English-born spiritual teacher who had settled at Mirtola, not far from Almora.
Leary was apparently sufficiently impressed by him that he later returned for another meeting on his own.
In his later writings, Leary referred to Krishna Prem in remarkably admiring terms.
This makes his time in the Kumaon Hills even more interesting.
It was not simply a retreat in which Leary sat alone writing.
He was moving through a landscape populated by people who had devoted much of their lives to questions about consciousness, perception and spiritual experience.
From the Kumaon Hills to Psychedelic Prayers
The work Leary began in the hills eventually became:
"Psychedelic Prayers after the Tao Te Ching"
The book was not a conventional translation of Lao Tzu.
It was an adaptation - Leary’s attempt to take ideas from the Tao Te Ching and reinterpret them through the psychological and psychedelic framework occupying his mind at the time.
The book itself preserves something of the geography of its creation:
Kumaon Hills, Almora, India -1965.
It was later completed at Millbrook, New York, in 1966.
When seen that way, the journey behind the book becomes almost as interesting as the book itself:
Harvard → psychedelic experiments → India → Delhi → Almora → Lama Govinda → the Kumaon Hills → nine translations of Lao Tzu → Millbrook.
And perhaps that is why this particular story stayed with me.
Not because of the famous slogan.
Not even primarily because of psychedelics.
But because of those nine books on a Himalayan hillside.
Today, we could feed nine translations of the Tao Te Ching into an AI tool and ask it to compare their wording, recurring ideas and interpretations in seconds.
But Leary carried the books. He read them, compared them and contemplated them. Somewhere among the pine-covered hills of Almora, a new book began to emerge. Did psychedelics sharpen his thinking, or was it the time and space (charged surroundings) to sit with nine different translations? We can’t know - but the image of him working through those books in the kumaon hills fascinates me.
Sometimes the journey behind a book is almost as fascinating as the book itself.
-Ash
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