Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out Page 10

  The truth of the matter is that the Buddha was born and brought up in Westchester County, educated at an Ivy League college and groomed for that pinnacle of princely success which would allow him in 1967 to subscribe to Horizon, a magazine particularly unlikely to confront him with the prospect of his own divinity.

  First Gautama dropped out. Horrors! Did he really desert his wife and child? Run out on the palace mortgage payment? Welsh on his commitments to his 10,000 concubines? Leave the Internal Revenue Service holding the bag for the Vietnam War bill? Maybe he just moved with his wife and kids to Big Sur, not even leaving a forwarding address for fourth-class mail. Lost Horizon. Or maybe the drop-out was internal (where it always has to be). Maybe he just detached himself invisibly from the old fears and ambitions.

  After his drop-out he struggled to turn on. It’s never easy, you know, to turn on. He memorized the Vedas. Read the Upanishads and the Village Voice and Alan Watts and Krishnamurti. Studied at the feet of gurus. Got the message. “Sorry, young man. We can’t teach it. Divinity is a do-it-yourself proposition, located somewhere inside your own body.”

  So he spent several years practicing lonely austerities. Diet and physical yoga. Gave up smoking. Ate macrobiotic rice. Got thin. Let his beard grow. Looked holy but felt wholly terrible.

  One day, as he was sitting under a tree, a dairy maid offered him a bowl of milk and honey, maybe laced with mushroom juice. It was a forbidden, dangerous potion, against all the laws of yoga abstinence.

  Then he started his trip. Session delights. The marijuana miracle! Vision! Touch! Smell! Sound! Beautiful! Ecstasy!!! But don’t get caught, Buddha! All the manuals warn you! Center your mind! Float to the beginning!

  Next came the sexual visions. Mara the devil sent his naked daughters to entrance. The devil, you say? Oh, didn’t they tell you in Bronxville Sunday School and the comparative religions seminar at Princeton that the devil is part of your own mind that wants you to cop out and sell short your timeless divinity? You’re a junior executive now with the narcotic security needle hooked in your liberal Republican vein, and the secretaries at the office think you’re cute Mr. Horizon-reading Buddha. But remember the teachings! Enjoy but don’t chase the erotic fantasies. Center!

  Then came the terrors. You’ll go insane! You’ll lose your ambition! Brain damage! Permanent psychosis! Bellevue Hospital! Chromosome destruction! Jump out a palace window! Who are you, anyway? Spoiled prince, arrogant Brooks Brothers Faust, to grab with greedy hands the delicate web of God? You’re crazy now and will never get back. Help! Paranoia! Call the court physician! Call a psychiatrist!

  But Gautama remembered the prayer. He centered his mind and body. He spun through the thousand past reincarnations. Tumbled down his DNA code and died, merging in the center of the solar, lunar, diamond, peacock eye of fire that men call God. Illumination.

  From whence he looked back up and saw the fibrous unfolding of life to come, all past, all future, hooked up, the riddle of time and mortality solved by the unitive, turn-on perspective.

  And at that moment of highest Samhadi, Gautama opened his eyes in delight and wonder at the paradise rediscovered by his trip, and looked around and said that great line—”Wonder of all wonders, all men are the Buddha.”

  He had dropped out and turned on. He had made it to the navel-centered beginning. Realized the Buddha-nature of all creatures. And then what? The crossroads in the heroic-mythic-God trip. Why come down? Once you’ve seen it all, experienced the divine flash, why return to the frayed uniform and clumsy tools of your earthly games? How can you come down to play out a role in the silly TV drama of American society? How can you come down from the Buddha game? The wholly-man role? I read the blues today, oh, boy, about a lucky man who great the made.*

  Paraphrased from a classic Buddhist text published by the Beatles.

  Tradition has it that Gautama Buddha after his illumination sat for days under the bo tree, wondering whether he should come back to deal with the pompous Brahmin priesthood and his kindly but myopic parents, the aging king and queen, and the FDA at Benares and the crowd back at the office and the shallow hit-and-run celestial aspirations of his followers. Or even to write articles for the well-meaning editors of very slick magazines. Why bother?

  Gautama’s question is exactly that anguishing dilemma faced by several million young Americans who have taken the psychedelic trip in the last 5 years. Because, when seen sub specie aeternitatis, American society really does appear quite destructive and insane. What can LBJ or Billy Graham offer a dropped-out, turned-on, ill-prepared, confused teen-ager visionary?

  Why not stay dropped out?

  Perhaps the wisest of our times are the total drop-outs—those eccentrics who look around and fold their hands and quit. The quietly but shrewdly mad who crowd our mental hospitals. The drifting, smiling, welfare checksters.

  But the message of the Buddha is to tune in. Glorify! Tune back in, not to the old game. You have to stay dropped out of that. You drop back in to life. You come back down and express your revelation in acts of glory and beauty and humor. Help someone else drop out and turn on.

  The Buddha dropped back in with his four noble truths:

  All life is suffering.

  The suffering is caused by striving.

  You can end the suffering by dropping out of the chase.

  The dropping out involves an eightfold discipline, hard work, continual attention, constant centering of consciousness.

  The term “drop-out” is, of course, deliberately distorted by Brahmins, bureaucrats, moralists, politicians and external power holders. They know that their control will fall apart if people drop out and turn on. The brahminical federal strategy has always been the same. Convince the people that the TV show emanating from Benares, Athens, Rome, London, Saigon, Washington is reality and that the ecstasy is an escape into psychosis and irresponsibility.

  The fact of the matter, as Gautama’s career makes very clear, is that dropping out is the demanding, arduous road. The lonely, scary confrontation with the evolutionary reality. The narcotic escape is to remain in the system. Be a good king, young Buddha. Raise taxes. Encourage trade. Fight wars to protect your people against the enemy. Be good. Join the Christian meddling, missionary society of your time. Of necessity, be a good rebel and protest, picket, lobby, for the political power of the “outs.” The oldest cop-out of history. Nice rebel!

  The message of the Gautama Sakyamuni is drop out and turn on. You can’t do good until you feel good. You can’t free others until you are free.

  Gautama, the Nepalese drop-out, is the greatest spiritual master of recorded history. His message is bleak and direct. Each man is Buddha. The aim of human life is to discover your Buddha-hood. You must do this yourself. You can’t rely on any of the divine avatars of the past. Jesus is dead. Krishna is dead. Lao-tse is gone. You must retrace the ancient path yourself. Discover your own Christ-hood. Stagger down from the mountain, flipped-out Moses, with your own moral code fashioned in the ecstatic despair of your own revelation. The only help you have is the teaching. Fashion a prayer and keep your sense of humor. Use the guidebooks and manuals left by the inspired drop-outs of the past. The Buddha himself spent forty years teaching the most accurate and detailed psychological system the world has ever known. This was his tuning-back-in exercise. Use it and go beyond it.

  But the old texts mainly tell you what not to do. The timing, the direction, the style, the rhythm, the ritual of your search is for you to evolve. But this much is known. It’s all right. It’s all worked out. It’s all on autopilot. Remember the Buddha message. Turn on, tune in, drop out.

  Remember the Buddha smile.

  Dear Horizon reader, put your finger on this

  dot

  remember, and smile.

  SEAL OF THE LEAGUE

  7

  Homage to Huxley

  November 22, 1963, was for Aldous Huxley the time to go.

  In paying tribute (a curious word) to a de
parted luminary, it is customary to appraise his contribution, to wrap up the meaning and message of the hero and to place it with a flourish in the inactive file.

  This ceremonial function is notoriously risky in the case of writers. The literary game has its own stock-exchange quotations in which hardcover commodities rise and fall to the irrational dictates of scholarly fashion.

  To predict the place that Aldous Huxley will have as a literary figure is a gambling venture we shall leave to the professionals who are paid to do it. They might note that he did not win a Nobel Prize—a good sign, suggesting that he made the right enemies and was properly unacceptable to the academic politicians. They will note also that he was a visionary—always a troublesome issue to the predictor. Since all visionaries say the same thing, they are perennial commodities, difficult to sell short, annoyingly capable of turning up fresh and alive a thousand years later.

  But Aldous Huxley is not just a literary figure, and for that matter not just a visionary writer. Which adds to the critic’s problem. The man just wouldn’t stop and pose for the definitive portrait. He just wouldn’t slide symmetrically into an academic pigeonhole. What shall we call him? Sage? Wise teacher? Calypso guru? Under what index heading do we file the smiling prophet? The nuclear age bodhisattva?

  Many of the generation of scholars and critics who presently adjudicate literary reputations received their first insights into the snobbish delights of the mind from the early novels of Huxley.

  I believe that no one under fifty can quite realize how exciting Huxley seemed to us who were schoolboys or undergraduates in the ‘twenties … he was a popularizer of what, at the time, were “advanced” ideas … he was a liberator, who seemed to encourage us in our adolescent revolt against the standards of our parents.1

  Jocelyn Brooke, “The Wicked Uncle: An Appreciation of Aldous Huxley,” The Listener, Vol. LXX, No. 1811 (December 12, 1963), p. 991.

  This obituary appraisal, a nice example of the “cracked looking glass” school of literary criticism, continues in the same vein:

  I remained under the Huxleyan enchantment well into my twenties. The magic began gradually to fail after Point Counter Point (1928); its failure was due partly to my discovery of other contemporary writers (Proust, Joyce, Lawrence), partly to the fact that Huxley himself had by that time lost something of his original sparkle. I felt little sympathy for his successive preoccupations with scientific utopias, pacifism, and Yoga. . . .

  Of all the misunderstandings which divide mankind, the most tragic, obvious, and vicious is the conflict between the young and the old. It is surely not Huxley who lost his sparkle but perhaps the quoted critic, who graduated from “adolescent revolt” (a dubious, ungracious, middle-aged phrase) to a static “postadolescent” fatigue with new ideas. Huxley continued to produce prose which sparkled, to those who could transfer their vision from the mirror to the events which were occurring around them.

  I believe that no one over fifty can quite realize how exciting Huxley seems to the generations which followed their own. The early Huxley was the urbane sophisticate who taught naïve youngsters that parental notions about sex and society left something to be improved. The early Huxley was an exciting coach in the game of intellectual one-upmanship, wickedly demonstrating how to sharpen the mind so that it could slice experience into categories, how to engage in brilliant, witty repartee, how to be a truly sophisticated person.

  But “then came Brave New World (1932), an entirely new departure, and not, I think, a happy one. . . .” Yes, indeed. Then comes the grim new world of the 1930’s and a new generation who were less concerned with sparkling conversation than with trying to figure out why society was falling apart at the seams. The game of polishing your own mind and developing your own personality (although kept alive in the rituals of psychoanalysis) starts to look like narcissistic chess. Huxley was one of the first men of his times to see the limitations of the obsession with self and never again wrote to delight the intellectual.

  But old uncles are supposed to keep their proper place in my picture album. They have no right charging off in new directions. Investigating meta-self social ideas and meta-self modes of consciousness. No right to calmly ask the terrible new questions of the mind: Is this all? Shakespeare and Joyce and Beethoven and Freud—is there no more? Television and computers—is this all? Uncle Aldous, who taught us how to be clever, rational, individualistic, now claims that our sharp minds are creating air-conditioned, test-tube anthills. “As Mr. Cyril Connolly put it, ‘Science had walked off with art,’ and a latent streak of vulgarity found expression. . . .” Yes, the specific prophecy is vulgar.

  And what is even more tasteless—to be so right. Within 15 years the ludicrous, bizarre mechanization of new world fantasy had become a reality. The conventional artistic response to automation is the nihilist protest. But again Aldous Huxley refuses to play the literary game, insists on tinkering with evolutionary resolutions. Some of us forgot that Uncle Aldous was also grandson. The extra-ordinary, dazzling erudition which spun out bons mots in the early novels is now sifting through the wisdom of the East.

  Huxley’s diplomatic journey to the East brings back no final answer but the right questions. He seeks the liberating seed while avoiding the deciduous underbrush of ritual.

  The first question: Is there more? Need the cortex be limited to the tribal-verbal? Must we use only a fraction of our neurological heritage? Must our minds remain flimsy toys compared to the wisdom within the neural network? How to expand consciousness beyond the learned mind? How to find and teach the liberation from the cultural self? Where are the educational techniques for exploiting the potentials? Here again Huxley avoids doctrinaire digressions into mood, authority, semantics, ritual. He keeps moving, looking for the key which works.

  In 1954 he announces the discovery of the Eastern passage: Doors to Perception, Heaven and Hell. Psychedelic drugs can provide the illumination, the key to the mind’s antipodes, the transcendental experience. You may not want to make the voyage. You may have no interest in transcending your cultural mind. Fine. Don’t take LSD. Or you may want illumination but object to the direct, shortcut approach. You prefer the sweat-tears of verbal exercises and rituals. Fine. Don’t take LSD. But for those who can accept the “gratuitous grace,” there it is.

  The age-long problem of how to “get out” has finally been solved. Biochemical mysticism is a demonstrated fact. Next comes the second problem. There is the infused vision of the open cortex, flashing at speeds which far outstrip our verbal machinery. And there is the tribal marketplace which cannot utilize or even allow the accelerated neural energy. How can the gap be bridged?

  Aldous Huxley preached no escape from the insanity and semantic madness of the twentieth century. His next message was not one of quietism and arhat passivity. No one was more concerned, more engaged, more involved in the active attempt to make the best of both worlds.

  To make the best of both worlds—this was the phrase we heard him repeat over and over again during the last years. Of course most of his readers and critics didn’t know what he was talking about. If you don’t realize that it is now a simple matter to reach ecstasy, to get out, to have the vision, to reach the other worlds of your own cortex, then technical discussions of “reentry” problems make little sense to you.

  But there it was. The old Mahayana question now made real and practical. How to apply the now available potentialities of the accelerated cortex?

  Aldous Huxley’s last message to the planet contains the answer to this question in the form of the utopian novel Island.2

  New York, Harper & Row, 1962.

  This book, published in 1962, is the climax of the 69-year voyage of discovery. It is a great book. It will become a greater book.

  Like all great books it is misunderstood in its time because it is so far in front of its time. It’s too much to take. Too much. Island is a continent, a hemisphere, a galaxy of a book.

  At the most superficial lev
el it’s a science fiction tale with heroes and villains in a fantasy land. It’s a satire as well—of Western civilization and its follies. So far, the book can be dealt with.

  But it’s much more. It’s a utopian tract. Huxley’s final statement about how to make the best of both worlds. Of individual freedom and social responsibility. Of East and West. Of left and right cerebral hemispheres. Of action and quietism. Of Tantra and Arhat. Of verbal and nonverbal. Of work and play. Of mind and metamind. Of technique and nature. Of body and spirit. Of religion and the secular.

  It’s a manual on education. A handbook on psychotherapy and mind control. A solution to the horrors of the biparent family, the monstrous father-mother pressure cooker.

  Too much, indeed, for one book; but there’s more.

  Island is a treatise on living, on the living of each moment.

  And most important and staggering, the book is a treatise on dying.

  The easy intellectual rejection of this wealth of practical, how-to-do-it information is to call it fantasy. Adolescent daydreams about how things could be in a society imagined and run by gentle, secluded scholars.

  But here is the terrible beauty of Huxley’s science-fiction-satirical-utopian manual on how to live and how to live with others and how to die and how to die with others: it’s all based on facts. Island is a popular presentation of empirical facts—anthropological, psychological, psychedelic, sociological. Every method, every social sequence described in Island is based on data. Huxley’s utopian ideas can work because they have worked. It’s all been done—not in a fantasied future but yesterday.

  It has been tried and done by Huxley himself, and by his “Palanese” wife Laura Archera Huxley, who presented many of these intensely practical, down-to-earth ideas in her book, You Are Not the Target.3 It’s a mistake to think of him as a detached novelist observing and commenting on the scene. Huxley was a tall, slightly stooped calypso singer, intensely topical, strolling nearsightedly through the crowds, singing funny stilted verses in an English accent, singing about the events in which he was participating. He didn’t just figure it out—he experienced much of it himself.