The transmission
Timothy Leary was a Harvard psychologist who became the most notorious public advocate of psychedelics in the 1960s. With Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass), he ran the Harvard Psilocybin Project until both were dismissed in 1963.
Leary emphasized that the content of a psychedelic experience is governed by “set and setting”—the user’s mindset and physical/social environment—a principle adopted from Huxley and Osmond that remains central to psychedelic therapy.
He adapted the Tibetan Book of the Dead into The Psychedelic Experience as a guidebook for the trip, and coined the slogan “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” In later decades he reinvented himself as a champion of personal computers and cyberspace, declaring the PC the LSD of the 1990s.
Leary’s lasting contribution to the mind-power lineage is the idea of the programmable mind. His “eight-circuit model of consciousness” and his insistence that beliefs function as “reality tunnels”—selective constructions that can be rewritten—made consciousness something one engineers rather than merely inherits.
This metaphor of mind-as-software, consciousness as reprogrammable, fed directly into Robert Anton Wilson’s popularizations, into cyberculture’s fusion of psychedelics and computing, and into the contemporary manifestation-and-reality-shifting claim that changing your internal “program” changes your experienced reality.
What they gave
Set and setting: Codified the principle that expectation and environment shape inner experience, foundational to psychedelic therapy and belief-driven manifestation framing.
- Reality tunnels: Popularized the view that perceived reality is a selective, reprogrammable construction—core to reality-shifting discourse.
- Mind-as-software: Framed consciousness as something one can deliberately “reprogram,” bridging psychedelics and later cyberculture.
- Cyberdelic turn: Linked the psychedelic ethos to personal computing and cyberspace, anchoring digital-age consciousness culture.
In their words
Of course, the drug dose does not produce the transcendent experience. It merely acts as a chemical key - it opens the mind, frees the nervous system of its ordinary patterns and structures. The nature of the experience depends almost entirely on set and setting.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: Huxley’s reducing-valve mysticism; the Harvard Psilocybin Project; the Tibetan Book of the Dead; cybernetics and information theory.
- Influenced: Robert Anton Wilson; the 1960s counterculture; Terence McKenna; cyberdelic and reality-tunnel discourse running into modern reality-shifting.
Revelations they taught
Their Practices 1
Essential Works
- The Psychedelic Experience1964
- The Politics of Ecstasy1968
- High Priest1968