Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out Read online

  Where can we go?

  Answer number one is to get out into the world, go to where the really important events, the events that you think are important, are happening and climb into them. That, by the way, is how all the great advances in science as well as politics have taken place.

  Answer number two to the question, where can we go, is: Go inside. Go into your own brain; start using the untapped region of your head. Here, my friends, is the real frontier, the real challenge, the real opportunity.

  Well, how do we do that? For centuries, for thousands of years, men have been studying this problem of how to expand their own consciousness, how to get into their own brains. One of the classic methods of doing it is the simple process of meditation. But today in 1963 this method seems far out. You’d be called eccentric if you said to an American that it would be useful for him to spend one hour a day alone—not thinking but just turning off all of the outside stimulation and the internal mental machinery and seeing where that will take him. We have to remind ourselves that meditation has been the classic psychological technique for thousands of years for most of the human race. Every one of our great visionaries, every one of the men who changed the course of human history, worked it out during a meditative experience.

  Modern psychology calls this “turning on” by the fancy name “sensory deprivation.” A few years ago psychologists discovered that if you took an American and you put him in a dark room and you cut off all the sound and you cut off all the light and you cut off all tactile stimulation, in other words, if you turned off all the outside games, he couldn’t keep his mind going and strange things would take place in his consciousness and he would begin to have hallucinations, revelations, visions, or he’d get in a panic and leap out of the room and shout “Help!” The reason for this is (and now we are getting back into neuropsychology) that your mind, your game-playing verbal mind, like a drug habit, requires continual stimulation. You have to keep feeding it. In order to keep up the pretense that you are you and that your level of reality is really reality, you have to have feedback all the time. You have to have people around you reminding you that you are you; you have to have people around you participating in the same immediate realities, sharing the same social delusion, to keep this social reality going.

  Now whenever you get out there, away from the social and sensory stimulation (as with men who are shipwrecked, men who are lost in a desert, men who are lost in the snow, men who go into monasteries, men who go into cells), there are withdrawal symptoms. The people panic because they are moving on to a different level of reality. How many of our great visionaries, our great history-making decisions, have come from men who have gone off in the desert? Jesus Christ went off in a cave in the mountain; Mohammed sat alone in a cave; Buddha lived in solitude for many years, so did St. John of the Cross. So have most of our other great visionaries. The problem now is that it is getting harder to let these physiological events happen. To be alone in order to look within.

  Recently our technology, which has done so much to narrow our consciousness and to produce this robotlike conformity, has turned up two very disturbing processes which are going to cause all of us to do a lot of serious thinking in the next few years. These processes are electrical stimulation of the brain, and the new drugs, which also allow for increased control of consciousness, either by you or by someone else. The next evolutionary step is going to come through these two means, both of which involve greater knowledge, greater control, greater use and application of that major portion of our brain which we now do not use and of which we are only dimly aware.

  These potentialities and these promises aren’t going to go away. Your head, with its unused neurons, is there. Electrical stimulation and biochemical expansion of the neural processes are here, too. They aren’t going to go away just because they upset our theories of psychology or our new words of education.

  In 1943, a most dramatic event took place in a laboratory in Switzerland when Dr. Albert Hoffman accidentally ingested a tiny amount of semisynthetic ergot fungus known as LSD 25 and found himself thrown onto a level of reality which he had never experienced before. This had probably happened to many chemists in the past and to many other people in the past. Hoffman was the man on the spot who was able to understand what was going on. And because of Albert Hoffman of Sandoz Laboratory, we face today the challenge and dilemma of consciousness-expanding drugs. They are not addictive in the sense that there is no physiological attachment to them. I must point out that the very question of addiction is humorous to those of us that feel that we are all hopelessly addicted to words and to our tribal games. These drugs are physiologically safe. Over two thousand studies have been published, and as of 1968 despite the rumors there is no evidence of somatic or physical side effects. But they are dangerous; the sociopolitical dangers are there. We have incontrovertible evidence that these drugs cause panic, poor judgment, and irrational behavior on the part of some college deans, psychiatrists and government administrators who have not taken them.

  What we think is going to happen is that a system of licensing and training will be developed, very similar to the way we train and license people to use motorcars and airplanes. People have to demonstrate that they can use their expanded neural machinery without hurting themselves and without danger to their fellow men. They will have to demonstrate proficiency, experience, training, and then we feel it is their right to be licensed. As in the case of airplane and auto, the license can be taken away from those who injure themselves or injure their fellow men.

  There are many new by-products of this research in consciousness expansion and these studies. First of all, it is inevitable that a new language will develop to communicate the new aspect of experience. The language of words we now use is extremely clumsy, static, and heavy. We are going to have to develop, as chemistry has developed, a language that will pay respect to the fact that our experience, our behavior, our social forms are flowing all the time. And if your language isn’t equipped to change and flow with them, then you are in trouble, you’re hooked. You’re drugged by the educational system. There are going to be new values, rest assured, based on a broader range of reality. Our present values, based on certain ethnocentric tribal goals, are going to recede in importance after we see where man really belongs in the biological evolutionary process. There are going to be new social forms; there are going to be new methods of education.

  I’ll give you one example here. In the last few months, we have been studying accelerated learning by the use of the expanded consciousness. It’s your trained mind, you remember, which prevents you from learning. If a professor of linguistics who doesn’t know any French goes to France with his five-year-old son and they both spend equal time with the French people, who is going to learn French faster? The five-year-old son will quickly outstrip his dad even with that Ph.D. in linguistics. Why? Because Dad has stuffed his mind with all sorts of censoring and filtering concepts that prevent him from grooving with the French process. The psychedelic experience can release these learning blocks. We took, for example, a brilliant woman who had an emotional block against learning language. She wanted to learn Spanish. We gave her a very heavy dose of LSD, put her in a quiet room and put earphones on her, and for eight hours she was flooded with spoken Spanish from records. Every hour or so, we would go in and take the earphones off and say, “How are you?” She answered ecstatically in Spanish! She had been wallowing in Spanish for a thousand years. By the sixth or seventh hour, she was repeating back the Spanish words with the right enunciation, the dialectic tempo and so forth. The problem now is that when she hears Spanish spoken, she is likely to go into another level of consciousness, to get suddenly very high, which leads to other interesting possibilities of auto-conditioning. All of us, adults and students, have been censored so much, the filters have been applied for so long, the neurophysiological processes are so firmly set that if we want to expand our consciousness, we are probably going to have to use chemic
al means. We adults, if we are going to move on to different levels of reality, are going to have to rely on some direct means of this sort. We have high hopes for the next generation, and particularly the next generation after that. It is the goal of our research and of our educational experiments that in one or two generations, we will be witnessing the appearance of human beings who have much more access, without drugs, to a much greater percentage of their nervous systems.

  So there you have it. I’m sure that a few or none of you will follow the advice and the prophetic warnings that I have been giving. I have had to tell you with words. But I’m also going to take my own advice. I’m dropping out of the university and educational setup. I’m breaking the habit. I hope in the coming years as you drift into somnambulance that some of you will remember our meeting this morning and will break your addiction to the system. I’ll be waiting for you.

  I want to leave one final warning. There will be many people who will see the utility of the electrical and chemical techniques I have been talking about and will want to use them, as the Western, scientific mind has always wanted to use them, for their own power and their own control. Whenever new frontiers open up, you have the new problem of exploitation and selfish use. There will be no lack of people who will be delighted to use the underdeveloped areas of your cortex. We have coined the term “internal freedom.” It is a political, didactic device; we want to warn you not to give up the freedom which you may not even know you have. In the Seattle paper yesterday, in one of the columns, I read a very interesting item to the effect that the Russians were developing extrasensory-perception techniques and studying ways which can eventually control consciousness. We can do that, of course, with television now. If 60 million people all watch one program, they are being controlled. But still we have that choice of turning it on or off. The next step, and I warn you it is not far off, involves some fellow using electrical implants and drugs to control consciousness. Then, dear friends, it may be too late. We won’t know where the buttons are to turn them off. The open access to these methods is the key to internal freedom. If we know what we are doing, do it openly and collaboratively, free from government control, then we will be free to explore the tremendous worlds which lie within.

  SEAL OF THE LEAGUE

  3

  Soul Session*

  This interview was conducted by Ken Garrison, editor of SOL magazine, Valley State College, California.

  SOL: As a former professor at Harvard University, and at the time before the experiments with hallucinogens came up, a recognized figure in the field of psychology, you seem to have had a radical about-face when you started talking recently about “drop out, turn on, and tune in.” Would you explain to us what you mean by this?

  LEARY: Well, to begin with, I don’t think I’ve made any radical about-face. My use of the psychedelic chemicals stems directly from my endeavors in psychology. I have found better ways of understanding man’s consciousness leading to a better control of his inner environment. The techniques of modern psychiatry and psychology don’t do this. In my search for new methods, I was led to the study of the drug.

  SOL: From being a member ostensibly of the academic in-group, you seemed to have evolved an “in” beyond that.

  LEARY: If you study the careers of men that are the central figures in our culture, and I’m not saying I am one, but I model myself after them, you will find that as they pursue their data they get further and further removed from Main Street morality and from the dogmas of the academy. Anyone who takes his work seriously has to expect that he will be led into that frightening and insecure area on the fringe. If he doesn’t want to be led out of his mind, he must look at himself in the mirror and realize that he is not a true scientist—he’s playing the game of the academy and academic corrosion. Far from being unconventional, I see my unfolding as highly orthodox and predictable for anyone who takes truth and knowledge seriously.

  SOL: It was my understanding you were dismissed from Harvard for continuing psychedelic experiments on or with students there at the college. Would you explain the circumstances under which you left?

  LEARY: One cannot ever believe what you hear in the newspapers. I was not fired by Harvard for giving drugs to undergraduates. I never gave drugs to any undergraduate at Harvard. I had been offered tenure from Harvard twice under the condition that I stop doing research or tone down the research of LSD. I refused to do this. I didn’t want to be a professor at Harvard, I wanted to find out where it’s at and what’s what, and you usually can’t always do that at a university.

  SOL: Were you simply not granted tenure, and therefore you had to leave the college? We have a very similar circumstance at Valley State. An instructor has been there past the time that you either have to be granted tenure or you have to leave. Is that—?

  LEARY: No, the technicality on which I was fired with only two months to go on my salary, on my contract, was because I was absent from classes.

  SOL: If you had the opportunity to—

  LEARY: I was absent from all my classes because they had taken all my classes away from me. [Laughter] So I left, and they knew I was leaving.

  SOL: If you had the opportunity to practice the psychedelic research which you are engaged in now, would you accept a position at an American college or university?

  LEARY: Absolutely not. I consider American education to be a highly dangerous, addictive, contracting process. I’m quite serious about this, and I urge all students at every level of education to drop out. You’re going to learn very little of value and meaning in high school and college, and your mind is going to be trapped and hooked. We are urging young people to drop out of the very new and radical institution of American education and find a teacher, a tutor, and you learn what is appropriate and relevant.

  SOL: In other words, if I interpret you correctly, you are proposing for the millions of students and young people a system of individual, small-clan tutor-learner situations, and that you propose, as far as learning processes go, that this is the form, or rather this is the lack of form it should have?

  LEARY: Yes, but let’s not take any statement I make out of context. Obviously, when I say the kid shouldn’t go to school, I’m implying changes in the broader social fabric of our country which we foresee coming. What we have in the United States today is a typical centralization and urbanization which happened in Rome, which happened in Constantinople, which has happened throughout human history, in which enormous masses of people crowd together in the anonymous robotlike anthill of city life. Now, if you want to be an IBM computer robot or a bit actor in the American television studio of American society, go to school and they’ll teach you all the little rules of rote behavior that’ll get you right out in the TV studio. If you want to be a machine, go to college. But we are anticipating and predicting a change in our society. There is going to be a return to the basic human unit which is the clan or the cult, or the tribe. What I’m predicting and urging is the most orthodox American model. We try to become self-sufficient rather than depend on government paychecks and Social Security.

  SOL: You talk about the nonlearning situation in our schools. How do you apply this to the advanced sciences such as medicine, neurological surgery—some of these things which are tremendously intricate and tremendously advanced, at least from the point of view of the typical medical scientist?

  LEARY: Which requires training—

  SOL: Right, which requires, in fact, maybe a systemized, formalized training institution.

  LEARY: No, no. I don’t go along with that at all. It is true that more and more of the professions require long, disciplined periods of training. I’m not advocating the return to some romantic life of savagery. We can’t do away with modern science. It’s here to stay, and it’s going to continue to develop. I’m simply against the mass impersonal granting of thousands of Ph.D.’s in physics to men who never really experienced energy inside their own body, but simply memorize canned equations. Such anthill m
entalities, no matter how clever they are at engineering, are going to develop bombs or faster and faster robot vehicles and are going to take man further and further away from his ultimate being, his living, organic nature. Knowledge doesn’t depend upon these huge public-supported mind machines that we now call universities. In particular, the State of California is much more susceptible to this type of impersonal “learning” factory.

  SOL: Now we’ve covered the drop-out phase of your slogan—

  LEARY: I’d like to say more about the drop-out. People think when we say drop-out, we mean become just a lazy, idle person; just take LSD and contemplate the beauty of your navel. The facts are that dropping out is hard work; dropping out requires courage; dropping out releases your energy so that you turn on and release energies. What are you going to do with these energies? Are you going to go back to Valley State College and learn how to be a Ph.D. robot? You drop out of the fake-television American game to find a way of harnessing the energies you are releasing. The people here at Millbrook are full of energy, as you have noticed as you move around the house. They’re extremely healthy and they’re very hardworking. It takes a considerable amount of energy to convert a sort of jungle like this place to a place of harmony and beauty. You drop out to free your energies for high-level functioning. By drop out, we don’t mean fall out; if you want to fall out, be a nice conforming robot and stay in college, and you just drift along the addictive path of middle-class success—that’s the easy way.

  SOL: Would you care to comment upon the “turn on” phase of your slogan?

  LEARY: Well, it’s been known for thousands of years that man can change consciousness and the levels of energy and wisdom inside, or what is sometimes called revelation—that is, direct personal experience. In every culture there have been men who have studied consciousness. They have been called shamans or gurus or alchemists. These men have studied the science of expanding consciousness. Most people don’t realize that consciousness expansion is as equally complex a problem as the study of physics, because the nervous system and the levels of consciousness available to man are infinite in their complexities. And the techniques and methods of turning on and controlling the flow and energies of awareness and of mapping where you have gone and of helping others to make these explorations is very similar to the use of the microscope, because the microscope turns you on to levels of energy which are invisible to the naked eye. Turning on requires a change in the physiology of the human body. You can’t turn yourself on with your mind; you can’t turn yourself on with work. You have to have something to bring about the biochemical change; it’s called a sacrament. Today we turn on with chemicals because we live in a chemical society. In 10 or 15 years, chemicals such as LSD will be outmoded. We will be using electronic and electrical methods of expanding consciousness because like it or not, consciousness is a biochemical electrical network, and the way to trigger this off and use it to its fullest extent is through chemical electrical technique.