Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out Page 5

  SOL: Would you care to . . . You mentioned that through thousands of years, man has sought ways to turn on. What various ways have there been other than the current LSD method? I think we’re all familiar with peyote.

  LEARY: Well, we mustn’t just think of LSD. There are 80-some known substances in the United States today that can give you the psychedelic effect. There are new chemicals that are being developed in our alchemy laboratories each month. I heard recently of 32 new compounds which are ready to be released when it is appropriate to do so. All these are legal, and they don’t even exist in any of the statutes; they don’t even exist in the patent office. But in addition to the chemical means of turning on, there are many nondrug methods which all eventually involve the way the dervishes do in the Middle East.

  SOL: Do you feel that in this same interpretation or same meaning, the dances that teen-agers do today and for the past several thousand years are a form of turning on and are not viewed in this perspective?

  LEARY: Well, the dance was originally a psychedelic way of expressing one’s self, a way of getting high. Unfortunately, most of these early sacramental methods get worn out and routinized so that the Catholic goes to mass today, follows through a series of routine steps, failing to realize that the Catholic mass is an incredibly powerful psychedelic trip, involving transubstantiation of energy, involving a death-birth sequence, and using all sorts of sensory techniques: incense, genuflection, posture, and so forth.

  SOL: Do you feel that there is a potential religion in the dance?

  LEARY: I think most of the dances that Americans do today don’t get them high. They tend to be stylized fads: the monkey, the slop, the twist, the watusi, and so forth. We are trying to get young people to develop dances which are spiritual. We have Bali Ram, the great Indian dancer, living here. He’s teaching us how body movements can get you grooving with your internal energies instead of doing the mash potato and the whip. The movements can be in tune with your ancient cellular-mythic patterns, and the dance itself can be a wild ecstatic turn-on spiritual event.

  SOL: “Tune in” is the last part of the slogan which you have, and by this do you mean more than just the turning on . . . do you intend direction?

  LEARY: Yes, “tune in” means you take the energies you release when you turn on and you come back to the world and you tune these energies in, you harness them, you express your reactions, reverie, and revelations in works of beauty. The tuning-in process is dropping back in and changing your life, changing the way you dress, changing the way you look, changing the place where you live, changing the sequence of your activities. So that increasingly, every act becomes sanctified. All actions are part of a sacred sequence—eating, making a living—instead of being robot work all these activities should be tuned in. . . . Hello.

  LITTLE GIRL: Hello. Are you taping?

  LEARY: Yes, I’m making a tape.

  LITTLE GIRL: Oh. Is anything going to come on?

  LEARY: No, we’re not listening; we’re talking, we’re making the tape. Then we’ll listen to it later, and we’ll laugh at ourselves. How wise and pompous and smug we are.

  LITTLE GIRL: I wanna say something in that.

  LEARY: All right, why don’t you say something?

  LITTLE GIRL: Hello, Timothy!

  LEARY: Hello, Kathy.

  LITTLE GIRL: I love you, Timothy!!

  LEARY: I love you, Kathy.

  SOL: The tune-in phase of the slogan of the key or guide, I think, is something that is probably misunderstood by most people. It’s the idea that the person who goes on a psychedelic kick is dropping into an unstructured, unmoving, valueless state of affairs from which there will be no continuation of human progress or human development. Would you explain how you would counter these charges?

  LEARY: Yes, because the average American thinks that taking a drug makes you drunk. The average American thinks of getting high as going to a cocktail party because booze is our national sacrament. Now alcohol is a “down” experience. It narrows consciousness and makes you rather sloppy, a rather messy person in thought and action. The psychedelic drugs will take you in the opposite direction. They bring you into levels of reality which aren’t structured because your mind can’t structure them. But the panoramas and the levels that you get into with LSD are exactly those areas which men have called the confrontation of God. The LSD trip is the classic visionary-mystic voyage. I warn everyone not to take LSD unless they’re prepared to have all their certainties and social securities shattered. You can’t take LSD and come back to the television studios at San Fernando Valley State College and play that out with the same enthusiasm. You just can’t pick up your robot role again. This means that psychedelic people act differently for the most part when they come back. But they act; they’re not just sitting around passively. In the last 6 or 7 years a small group of us, which has grown with almost miraculous rapidity, has brought about a change in the consciousness of the United States. Now we’ve done this through action and through effective action and through tuned-in action. Lazy, confused, disorganized people don’t bring about this sort of revolution in consciousness that we’ve brought about in this country. However, the sort of action we recommend throws terror into the hearts of the people who direct the television studio in Sacramento or in Washington or in the administration offices of San Fernando Valley State College. Because the kids that come back from these trips just won’t buy the middle-aged menopausal mind system.

  SOL: Would you care to elaborate on the phrase “menopausal mind”?

  LEARY: Yes. I say there’s one word which explains politics, economics and social conflict today. It’s not “left” or “right”—it’s “age.” The men who are running your college and your state and your government had their minds frozen somewhere between 1914 and 1920. That’s when their vision of God and the world was formed, and baby, they’re not going to change it. It’s frozen in a World War I—Depression mentality, and we are now in a social process that is a thousand years beyond what they knew in high school and college. If you study the political events of the last two elections, you’ll see that this age variable predicted some of the election surprises. Whenever you had a young, virile man whose eyes looked alive and looked as though he was carrying seed and who looked as though he could make love, he almost invariably defeated the older candidate regardless of how liberal the older candidate’s words might have sounded. I think we have an ominous situation in the United States today because of this menopausal mentality. The reason we have this insane political setup in the world today is because of these impotent and senile duffers, Mao in China, De Gaulle in France, Johnson here, playing out their visions of 40, 50, and 60 years ago and very eager to send young, seed-carrying men to carry out their chess games of status and prestige. If everyone just took six months or one year and just dropped out, the creaky menopausal structure of the American power will just slowly crumble. I think every teen-age and college kid should go home and turn on their mother and father. “Come, Father, take off your shoes, feel the sand in your feet. Come on, Grandma, and light up, enjoy the beauties of nature around you.”

  SOL: By “turn on,” did you mean psychedelically turn on or enlighten otherwise?

  LEARY: Turn them on in any way that you can. To turn on means to come to your senses. Older people start losing the internal power; they lose that connection of the 2-million-year thread of life and they get frightened and they want to have metal around them. The grandmother wants to have a metal kitchen, she wants to have a metal car, she wants to have steel around the country. This is a psychology of fear, fear of death and the fear of the loss of vigor. The kids should go home and turn on their parents by bringing her flowers and by bringing them music and by urging them to enjoy life. I think, for instance, that Johnson should go down and lie in the sun with Adam Clayton Powell, and he should come back to his senses and learn how to make love again. People who are carrying seed are concerned with the perpetuation of seed. It isn’t
conceivable to me that a young man or woman of twenty-five would do anything to blow up this planet. Though the men of fifty or sixty who are only going to be around for 10 or 15 years, sure, why, they would gladly blow the thing up for some concept of status and prestige.

  SOL: Why then, from the way you talk, I think we have jumped over some previous and necessary philosophical analyzation. What, to you, is the most basic, important, and essential point of life? I assume from the way you speak that it is the carrying of the seed, the regeneration of life itself through life and that this should be the central focal point of our lives, instead of such things as power, national honor and things of this sort. What should be the centering element of the energy forces?

  LEARY: Well, you’ve given me the answer to the question. Centering and harmony is the seed concept of all energy and of all life. Tolkien said in his wonderful trilogy The Fellowship of the Ring, where you had the forces of metal, fire and power opposed to the people who want to live in harmony with nature and to live free. Freedom and harmony are the keys to our religion and to the political movement to where it evolved in the United States today. Freedom to find your own inner potentiality and to develop it without coercion from an external centralized authoritarian political entity. To get back in harmony with your own body and with life around you. Modern American man is completely out of rhythm with nature; he is out of rhythm with the seasons; he is out of rhythm with the planets; he is out of rhythm with the soil. In the political situation there is going to be, in my opinion, a spiritual regeneration which is going to be brought about by turning on yourself and finding the basic rhythm inside and then turning it back in.

  SOL: I would like to talk for a second about the alleged harmful effects of LSD to people biologically, physiologically and also some of the purported good effects it can have upon people. Do you care, first of all, to explain some of the good effects that you think it has had socially or that it can have socially?

  LEARY: You seem to equate good with social good. We feel you can’t do good unless you feel good. You can’t have a good society unless you have individuals who are turned on and are tuning in.

  SOL: The specific answer to which I was pointing to earlier was, is there any indication that persons who are or have been narcotic have been helped out of their addiction with LSD?

  LEARY: I can introduce you to five of them right on this property, today.

  SOL: Is there or has there been any indication that persons who have had sexual hang-ups such as homosexuality, or monosexuality, if you would, can be helped out of this hang-up through LSD?

  LEARY: Yes, there have been many studies which have supported this that we know to be true personally. The psychedelic experience can help a person get back into a harmonious sexual activity. Homosexuality, for the most part, is a psychological or learned distortion. Since man is basically the seed-carrying male, he’ll realize that he’s been designed by the genetic code to act as the man and to pass on seed in the male way, so LSD may act as a specific aid to homosexuality. But only if the homosexual wants to change; there is no panacea here.

  SOL: You feel that there is needed research in this area? Or to your knowledge, is there any research being carried on in this area?

  LEARY: Let me say something about research. The term research is the biggest sacred cow we got going in our country today. It is 99 percent phony. Any time you hear someone say he is going to do research, watch out because he is likely to be intruding upon your privacy for his own profit. We have no interest in doing research on LSD. Doing research on consciousness is very much like doing research on sex. Occasionally some psychiatrist wants to hook up a couple that he can persuade to perform sexual activities in the laboratory to study heart palpitations and temperature during lovemaking. If people want to do that, it is all right. But you know and I know that research on sex has to be done by you yourself. One of the problems of LSD in the United States today is that psychiatrists have tried to do research on LSD and have gotten nowhere, or they simply haven’t had the experience themselves. Their interpretation and explanation of the LSD effect is exactly the interpretation of someone who hasn’t had any sexual experience. Suppose some psychiatrist who had never had any sexual experience were to get a couple, and he would hook them up with tachometers and blood-pressure instruments and EKG and give them psychological tests during intercourse, and you see what a picture he paints! “Why, the simple task of performing multiplication and division is lost during sexual intercourse! [Laughter] Blood pressure goes up! . . . You froth at the mouth! . . . You utter strange animal cries! . . . Why, they’re hardly civilized human beings! . . . They thrash around and knock vases off the tables! . . . They wouldn’t talk to you in a sensible way! . . . They wouldn’t talk about rational things like Nixon versus Reagan! Clearly this is a dangerous, convulsive type of experience, both psychologically and socially, which should be banned!” There have been plenty who would say exactly that about the sexual experience. If you give LSD to someone and he sits there quietly and won’t talk to you for three hours, you say, “Oh, he’s in a catatonic stupor,” but then you talk to him later, and he says, “Stupor? No, I was flipping through revelations and delights of ecstasy. I was more alive than I’d ever been in my life.” We’re very much against the taboo of sacred cow research. You’ve got to do the research on your own consciousness. YOU’ve got to do the research on your own intimate way of life. No Big Brother daddy with an M.D. or Ph.D. can do these things for you. It’s this Western engineering technological notion that people can do things for other people with forms of energy.

  SOL: What about the rumors of chromosomal disorders that have popped up lately?

  LEARY: Well, now we’ll get to your second question that has to deal with the dangers, but let me say one thing about the benefits of LSD. LSD is a key to releasing energy. Like any form of energy, it can be misused in the hands of the reckless or in the hands of the foolish, or in the hands of people who want to exploit for their own power motives. The real misuse of LSD is when it’s in the hands of someone who would do it to someone else. The only control of LSD is self-control. The only benefits of LSD are the benefits you are willing to discipline yourself to get. You get from an LSD experience only what you bring to it and what you’re ready to take away from it. There’s a real panacea here. The benefits of LSD get you involved in the most difficult, disciplined yoga of all, ’cause you’re learning how to use your head and learning how to use your body. Now the harms and dangers of LSD are mainly its danger to society. There’s no evidence yet that LSD brings about any physiological damage. There’s no evidence yet that LSD has any effect upon the brain itself in a deleterious way. Now it may, in the future, turn out to have effects we don’t understand yet. Anyone who takes LSD is gambling; it’s a risk. Of course, everything in our society is a risk. Putting your nervous system in front of a television tube and being battered by all those radiations may bring about changes that we don’t understand. Now as far as the chromosomal or genetic changes brought about by LSD, there was one research done at Buffalo which was a straight out-and-out hoax, and subsequent studies of this sort will demonstrate that this was a political piece of research designed admittedly before the research was done to prove that it was dangerous. It was done by a man named Cohen. These studies were in vetro—that means cells that were in tubes, not in the living organism. Changes in those cells could be brought about by any number of substances in the heavy dosages they were using, and it tells nothing about any changes. There’s no evidence from these anthropological sources or from the clinical data provided by the hundreds of LSD babies that are being born each year that would suggest danger. . . . There are LSD babies right around this house. They were conceived under LSD and born during LSD experiences.

  SOL: You were saying that through thousands of years of usage there is no evidence that hallucinogens have affected our evolutionary code?

  LEARY: No, there are specific tribes in Mexico, the Maztec t
ribe, which uses psilocybin, and I know of no evidence that any harmful mutations have taken place.

  SOL: What form of—?

  LEARY: On the other hand, I want to make it clear that I’m not saying anything positive about LSD. I’m not saying in this interview that anyone automatically benefits from LSD, and serious questions are raised in our minds all the time about the use of LSD. How much energy and neurological revelation can the frenzied human mind tolerate without flipping out? LSD possibly shouldn’t be used in the widespread way in which it is. We seriously concern ourselves about such questions. But we do object to pseudoscientific statements from psychiatrists and public health officials which breed fear and panic in the American people about scientific questions that won’t be answered for decades.