Ralph Metzner was born in 1936 in Berlin, to a Scottish mother and German father. He lived in Germany with his family during the first ten years of his life, coinciding with WWII and the destruction of the German nation. The second, adolescent decade was spent in an English boarding school and at Oxford University. Thus German was his first language and English his second. He obtained a doctorate in psychology at Harvard University in the 1960s. There he came into contact with psychologist Timothy Leary and conducted research studies with consciousness-expanding plants, substances and fungi. Since that time he has lived in California, where he has been, and still is, a psychotherapist, academic, researcher, writer and teacher in studies of consciousness and its multifarious transformations.