League for Spiritual Discovery

The League for Spiritual Discovery was the later form of the organization Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert took on the road after leaving Harvard. Its history in the account is chiefly one of movement: first from Cambridge to Mexico, then to Dominica, and ultimately to Millbrook, where the group found a longer-lived base in a sixty-four-room mansion.

From Harvard to an Itinerant Organization

After their departure from Harvard, Leary and Alpert continued their work with a following that included numerous former students and associates. The International Federation for Internal Freedom moved with them; it would later morph into the League for Spiritual Discovery. The account links the organization’s changing name to a wider shift in circumstance, as the former professors left the university setting and carried their enterprise into new locations.

A Route Through Expulsion and Exile

The group first relocated from Cambridge to Zihuatanejo. The Mexican government expelled them under pressure from U.S. authorities, ending that attempt to establish a base. They moved briefly to the Caribbean island of Dominica, where the government also expelled them. The sequence made the organization’s early development inseparable from the limits imposed on where its leaders could remain.

The League’s eventual home was Millbrook, New York. There, Leary and Alpert spent several raucous years in a sixty-four-room mansion owned by the wealthy patron Billy Hitchcock. Compared with the brief stays in Mexico and Dominica, Millbrook offered a sustained setting for the group and its followers, though the account characterizes it as a settlement after repeated displacement rather than as the result of a stable institutional progression.

Place in the Wider Psychedelic Network

The account presents the League as part of Leary and Alpert’s post-Harvard public trajectory, carried forward by a circle of former students and hangers-on. It does not describe a formal structure or specify the organization’s internal programs; instead, its identity emerges through the people who traveled with it, its successive relocations, and its eventual association with the Millbrook mansion.

The broader afterlife of this generation appears in the later underground psychedelic scene: guides interviewed by the narrator could trace professional lineages back to Leary, often through one of his graduate students. That lineage places Leary among the sources of later practice, but does not establish that the League itself directed or organized those guides. Its clearest significance in the account is as the name assumed by a mobile post-Harvard enterprise whose movement through successive expulsions marked its break from university life.