Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out Read online

  Develop your own rituals and costumes. Robes or gray flannel suits, amulets or tattoos. You will eventually find yourself engaged in a series of sacred moments which feel right to you.

  Step by step all your actions will take on a sacra mental meaning. Inevit ably you will create a ritual sequence for each sense organ and for each of the basic energy ex changes—eating, bathing, mating, etc.

  You must be explicit about the space-time arrangement for your God game. Each room in your home will contain a shrine. Your house will not be a TV actor’s dressing room but rather a spiritual center. Regular rhythms of worship will emerge—daily meditation (turn-on) sessions (with or without marijuana), and once a week or once a month you will devote a whole day to turning on. Time your worship to the rhythm of the seasons, to the planetary calendar.

  Spell out on paper explicit plan$ for handling financial interaction$. Money i$ a completely irrational focu$ for mo$t We$terner$. A$ $oon a$ your clan member$ detach them$elve$ emotionally from money, you will discover how easy it is to survive economically. There must be a complete and collaborative pooling of money and work energy. Any $elfi$h holding back of dollar$ or muscular energy will weaken the clan. Each clan, as it drops out of the American game, must appraise its resources and figure out how to barter with other groups. Each clan will develop its own productivity.

  Sexuality is the downfall of most religious cults. Clarity and honesty are necessary. Karmic accidental differences exist in people’s sexual makeup. Basically, each man is made to mate with one woman. Heterosexual monogamous fidelity is the only natural way of sexual union. However, because this is the Kali Yuga, and because we live in the final stages of a sick society, sexual variations are inevitable.

  Your mode of sexual union is the key to your religion. You cannot escape this. The way you ball (or avoid balling) is your central sacramental activity. The sexual proclivity of the clan must be explicit and inflexible. Do not attempt to establish clan relationships with persons of a different sexual persuasion. There is no value judgment here. Sex is sacred. People of like sexual temperament must form their own spiritual cults. Homosexuality is not an illness. It is a religious way of life. Homosexuals should accept their state as a religious path. Homosexuals cannot join heterosexual clans. Homosexuals should treasure, glorify, their own sexual yoga. Their right to pursue their sacred bodily yoga is guaranteed to them. Heterosexual clans can support, help, learn from, teach homosexual clans, but the difference must be preserved—with mutual respect.

  Some spiritual people are not compatible with the monogamous union and prefer a freer sexual regime, the group marriage. Good! Many tribes and clans throughout the planet have flourished in complete and holy promiscuity. But be explicit. Painful confusions occur if sexual orientations and sexual taboos (cellular and physical, not psychological or cultural) are disregarded in forming clans.

  Select clan members who share or complement your style, your way of tuning in, your temperament, your sexual orientation.

  The aim of clan living is to subordinate the ego game to the family game—the clan game.

  You will do well to have an explicit connection to a mythic figure. You must select a historical psychedelic guide. You must know your mythic origins. Facts and news are reports from the current TV drama. They have no relevance to your 2-billion-year-old divinity. Myth is the report from the cellular memory bank. Myths humanize the recurrent themes of evolution.

  You select a myth as a reminder that you are part of an ancient and holy process. You select a myth to guide you when you drop out of the narrow confines of the fake-prop studio set.

  Your mythic guide must be one who has solved the death-rebirth riddle. A TV drama hero cannot help you. Caesar, Napoleon, Kennedy are no help to your cellular orientation. Christ, Lao-tse, Hermes Trismegistus, Socrates are recurrent turn-on figures.

  You will find it absolutely necessary to leave the city. Urban living is spiritually suicidal. The cities of America are about to crumble as did Rome and Babylon. Go to the land. Go to the sea.

  Psychedelic centers located in cities will serve as collecting areas. Thousands of spiritual seekers are coming to urban districts where they meet in meditation centers and psychedelic assembly places.* There they form their clans. They migrate from the city.

  Psychedelic centers are rapidly springing up in metropolitan areas, and this tendency must be encouraged. A simple format for a psychedelic enterprise may involve a shop front with a meditation room in the rear. Numerous shops calling themselves “psychedelic” are springing up throughout the country. This development is inevitable, but one should be skeptical about the spiritual nature of such commercial enterprises unless they include a meditation room. Psychedelic businesses should support spiritual communities and provide centers for clan formation.

  The Legal Question

  Unless you form your own new religion and devote an increasing amount of your energies to it, you are (however exciting your personality TV role) a robot. Your new religion can be formed only by you. Do not wait for a messiah. Do it yourself. Now.

  The goals, roles, rules, rituals, values, language, space-tie locale, and mythic context of your religion must be put on paper for two reasons. One, to make the journey clear and explicit for yourself and your clan members, and two, to deal with Caesar.

  The relationship between Caesar and the God seeker has always been uneasy. But the boundaries of the tension can be defined precisely, and if you are clear in your mind, there can be no confusion. You can move with exactness and confidence.

  Everything that exists outside your body and your shrine belongs to Caesar. Caesar has constructed the fake-prop studio for his king-of-the-mountain game, and he can have it. Highways, property, status, power, money, weapons, all things, all external man-made objects belong to him. The spiritual life is completely detached from these props. Obey Caesar’s TV studio rules when you are in his studios. Avoid any participation in his dramas.

  But remember, your body is the kingdom of heaven, and your home is the shrine in which the kingdom of heaven is to be found. What you do inside your body, what energies you let contact your sense organs, and what you put into your body is your business.*

  You are God: Remember!

  All you need do to protect the divinity of your body and the sanctity of your shrine is to be explicit—and to worship with dignity and courage.

  Write down an eightfold definition of your religion (goal, role, rule, ritual, value, language, myth, space-time locale). By doing so, you have formed your religion. The First Amendment to the Constitution, the charter of the UN, and the ancient traditions of human history give you protection to alter your own consciousness inside your shrine.

  If you take a psychedelic sacrament, leave your house and commit a disorder on Caesar’s streets; let him arrest you for overt crime. But your right to turn on in your home is sacred. You make your home a shrine by writing it into the charter of your religion.

  In writing your charter, you must specify where you will take the sacrament and with whom. The charter does not permit you to turn on anywhere. You must respect the possessive claims of Caesar to his fake-front stage sets. And you must also specify visible objects of worship which will be found in your shrine—a statue of Buddha, a picture of Christ, a rock, a wooden carving. You choose, but be explicit.

  Get your charter notarized, or mail it to yourself in a postmarked envelope. You have thereby established, before possible conflict with Caesar’s police, your religion. These are the minimum steps required to protect your use of psychedelic drugs. If you don’t care enough to do this, you don’t care enough.

  But further steps are preferable. It is highly advisable, and quite simple, to incorporate your religion under the laws of your state. Consult a lawyer—a psychedelic lawyer if possible. There are thousands of them around. How? Well, he’ll be under the age of thirty. Your local ACLU would be a good place to start. Ask him to file incorporation papers which are standard a
nd which every lawyer has in mimeographed outline.

  Follow the simple steps necessary to complete the forms, and in short order, you are a legally incorporated religion. Your own sense of dignity and commitment to the spiritual life is encouraged. Your posture and confidence vis-à-vis Caesar’s Keystone Kops is immeasurably strengthened.

  But you must play it straight. Don’t sign anything you aren’t going to live up to. On the other hand, leave room in your charter for easy revision of your religious practices. You are a young, growing religion. For God’s sake, don’t get caught in rigidities at the beginning.

  Use psychedelic sacraments only in designated shrines and only with members of a psychedelic religion. If you are going to be naughty and smoke pot in the washroom of one of Caesar’s stage sets, why that’s all right—but be clear; you waive your religious rights. Do what you will, but be conscious and don’t mix up your naughty game with your religious game.

  After you have incorporated your religion, you can file the application forms and a description of methods of worship in the attorney’s office. In case of any misunderstanding with Caesar’s cops, you will be effectively prepared. Don’t be surprised at the idea of having a lawyer to handle your psychedelic affairs. Psychedelic lawyers will be the most numerous and popular segment of the legal profession in 15 years. For a small amount of money you can have ongoing legal protection for your religion. You’d do it for your business, wouldn’t you? It’s better yet if you find a lawyer who is ready to join your clan.*

  Your lawyer can write to the League for Spiritual Discovery for further legal information, relevant briefs, precedents, etc.

  There is a third legal step which many psychedelic religionists will want to take—the licensing for the importation and distribution of illegal sacraments such as marijuana and LSD. The legal procedure involved in obtaining permission to use drugs is called a declaratory judgment. This procedure can result in a court declaration that an individual or a group may, with the sanction of law, use drugs freely for religious purposes.

  In requesting a declaratory judgment to import and distribute illegal sacraments (and remember here that alcohol, nicotine, and automobiles are also illegal—except to licensed operators), you are asking nothing more than was permitted to Catholic priests and Jewish rabbis during alcohol prohibition. These religionists were allowed to import and distribute an illegal drug—booze—for distribution only by priests and only in designated shrines. The quarter of a million members of the Native American Church are similarly licensed to use peyote, a plant much more powerful than marijuana.

  The filing for a declaratory judgment requires more commitment and energy—and thus becomes the third test of your religious stamina. How much do you care?

  By the end of 1968 we expect that thousands of such applications will be flooding the courts. In each case, the decision as to whether the applicants are entitled to a license to smoke marijuana and use LSD will have to be made on the merits of the case. Each judge and jury will have to rule on the sincerity of the applicants. What a wonderful exercise! Thousands of groups of young Americans will choose to present and defend their new religions in the courts. What a beautiful forum for free debate on the values of marijuana as opposed to booze!

  Thousands of jury members and hundreds of judges will be converted.

  In all of these activities there is no hostility, no competition, no conflict with Caesar. Love and humor are the means. The ends will follow.

  Dr. Leary, What Will Happen to Society After Everyone Turns On, Tunes In, and Drops Out?

  An interesting indication of the “miraculous” growth of LSD comes in the form of the question: What will happen to society after everyone turns on, tunes in, and drops out?

  At the surface, the question seems naïve. Nowhere and never does everyone do the same thing at the same time. It’s all planned in cycles by the DNA code. Organic changes occur gradually and invisibly.

  This question reflects the sudden panic of the TV bit player. What will happen to me if the show goes off the air? Will I lose my little part? What an incomparable tragedy if these cardboard studio walls were to fall down!

  The emotional response to this game terror is reassurance. Don’t worry. Your life begins when your TV game ends. Turn on, tune in, drop out. Then you are free to walk out of the studio—a god in the Garden of Eden.

  The intellectual answer to the question is infinitely complex, depending upon how much time and energy one can mobilize for utopian planning. The League for Spiritual Discovery has worked out detailed blueprints for the next cycle of man’s social evolution. Future manuals will be published by the league describing the year-by-year unfolding.

  In summary: be prepared for a complete change of American urban technology. Grass will grow in Times Square within ten years. The great soil-murdering lethal skyscrapers will come down. Didn’t you know they were stage sets? Didn’t you know they had to come down? The transition will come either violently (by war) or gently, aesthetically, through a psychedelic drop-out process.

  In any case, there is nothing for you to do in a collective political sense. Turn on, tune in, drop out. Discover and nurture your own divinity and that of your friends and family members.

  Center on your clan and the natural order will prevail.

  2

  American Education as an Addictive Process and Its Cure*

  This chapter is a revision of a lecture given by Dr. Timothy Leary at the Second Annual Symposium on American Values, Central Washington State College, Ellensburg, Washington, April 1963. One week following the lecture, the speaker was fired from Harvard University for being absent from class, a paradoxical charge since his regularly scheduled courses had been assigned to other professors the preceding September.

  The topic is the individual in the college, his commitments and his work. A broad subject indeed! Let us define the task more specifically. Let’s aim the dialogue to each of you, who are, after all, individuals in the college. Let’s talk directly and prophetically to your situation.

  Let’s set an ambitious goal to present the most important message you have ever listened to, to present a challenge which will change some of your lives. This may sound immodest but it’s not, really, because what we shall consider has nothing to do with me personally. Like the other speakers, I, too, have been sent over by Central Casting to read my lines in the scenario we are working on today. I am simply a temporary mouthpiece for the message you are about to hear. Another reason for setting a bold goal is that this is my last performance in this particular drama. This is my last lecture as a college teacher to a college audience, and after the performance I’m going to take off the greasepaint and change uniform and move on to another show.

  The third reason for claiming that my ambition today is not immodest is that I am saying nothing new. I didn’t write the script. The lines were written by the oldest playwright in the business I am simply repeating the oldest message in human history. We know, of course, that the wise men don’t talk. The Book of Tao tells us that he who knows, speaks not and he who speaks, knows not. When the wise men in the past did talk, they have always written the same book. They have always told us the same message, repeated in a different dialect, using the metaphor of their time, using the vocabulary of their tribe, but it is always the same message. “Turn off your mind. Step for a moment or two out of your own ego. Stop your robot activity for a while. Stop the game you are in. Look within.”

  Oh, words! More good advice! The words that I have just given you are pretty trite and cliché today in the twentieth century, aren’t they? But 3,000 years ago, when they were first enunciated, they were tremendously exciting. They probably brought about biochemical changes in the neurosystems of the people that heard these chants for the first time. Of course, now in the twentieth century, we are bombarded by words, thousands of words an hour, so that what I’ve just said is only another tattoo of syllables bouncing off your ears. Today we don’t know what to look fo
r if we try to get out of our game, and we don’t know how to do it.

  Now if you look at some of the metaphors that were used by these men in the past who changed the course of human history, the great visionaries, the great religious leaders, the great poets, you find an interesting correlation, a similarity. They all found the same thing when they looked within. They talked about the inner light, about the soul, the divine flame, the spark, or the seed of life, or the white light of the void. You will recognize that I have just ranged in these metaphors through several great philosophers, both Eastern and Western. All of these metaphors rang true and were right at the time. We can recognize now that they were clumsy metaphors for what are actually physiological processes within our nervous system. Listen! Each of those poetic images within the next 2 to 5 years is going to be validated by modern biochemistry and modern pharmacology.

  Let me define the problem as I see it. I want to define it first of all ontologically, in the scientific sense, and then later I’ll talk about the social aspects of the problem which we now face.

  Ontologically there are an infinite number of realities, each one defined by the particular space-time dimension which you use. From the standpoint of one reality, we may think that the other realities are hallucinatory, or psychotic, or far out, or mysterious, but that is just because we’re caught at the level of one space-time perception.

  For many people it’s an infuriating thought that there are many, many realities. Last week, I was giving a lecture on consciousness expansion with Professor Alpert at the Aero-Space Institute in Los Angeles. A young engineer happened to be in the building that night, busy with some aerospace activity, and as he was leaving the building, he saw this crowd in a large room, and he came in to listen. After the lecture was over and we were on the way out, he stopped us and started to argue about reality. He could hardly talk, he was so mad. He said, “There is only one reality, the reality that is here, the reality of our physical laws, and for you to say that there is a range of realities, and particularly to say that this range might be brought about by drugs, is intellectual fraud, deceiving your fellow man!” It seemed to disturb him and make him angry to think that this solidity (which we are convinced exists around us) is perhaps just one level of an enormously complex continuum of realities. Now it’s bad enough to say that there are other realities, but it’s really intolerable if we suggest that some of the other realities are more conducive to ecstasy, happiness, wisdom, to more effective activity, than our familiar reality. So much for the general ontological situation. Let us try to spell this out in more exact terms.