Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out Page 6
SOL: What form of society do you envision 50 years from today?
LEARY: We have worked out very detailed blueprints, prophecies and predictions as to what we think will happen in the next 50, the next 100, even the next 500 years. But I hesitate to attempt to spell this out now because it sounds too farfetched; it would sound like science fiction, speculation. The profession of the prophet, and anyone who takes LSD is likely to be thrown into this profession, is a very risky one because we see things that can happen, and we have to be careful how much information we feed back to our primitive social system before they think we are nuts, before they blame us for what is inevitably going to happen. We predicted 6 years ago that there was going to be a psychedelic revolution; now they listen to us. We went to Washington and told the FDA that this was going to happen.
Now, when it happened, when millions of kids started turning on, Caesar and his bureaucrats blamed us for the psychedelic inundation. But to go back to your question, with all these preliminary qualifications, man is going to get back in harmony with his body, with fellow man, and with other forms of life on this planet. Man is going to realize that consciousness is the key to human life, and instead of power struggles over territory and possession of weapons, the focus of man’s energies is going to be on consciousness. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the great Jesuit philosopher, has spelled out the psychedelic vision in which the world will become unified in one field of consciousness. This will happen through the mass media in the hands of individuals, not networks. It will also happen through the psychedelic experience. The differences which cause conflicts among men and between man and other forms of nature are going to be brought back in harmony. All metal, concrete, electricity and atomic energy is going to go underground. Man is going to realize that his precarious hold on this strange planet depends upon a thin film of about 10 inches of topsoil, and it’s a very delicate balance of energies of cellular and different species that keeps his delicate web of life going. Every time man takes metal or stone from under the ground and puts it in sheets over the delicate, sensitive skin of the planet, he is killing and disrupting this net. So you will find all technology underground. The city of New York 200 years from now will look as it did 200 years ago. The air will recapture the life-giving balance it is supposed to have. The rivers and waters will not be polluted. Man is going to tidy up the mess he’s made in this very recent technological fling. Man has just been intoxicated by machines for 200 years. He is going to come off it and sober up. Man is also going to discover that machines are no fun. That fun comes from the senses and from your body and from human interaction and consciousness. Everything is centered on consciousness, and no amount of steel and metal and apparatus is going to give one second of real ecstasy or real communion.
SOL: Where will the people live when this type of a parklike atmosphere or a natural state has returned to the earth?
LEARY: People will live some of the time under the ground and some of the time above the ground in buildings which will be harmonized with the soil and plant life around them. Now this will sound like science fiction or fantasy, but actually we are doing this at Millbrook, and if you look around at this property you will see an embryonic stage of these wild predictions going on. We even have soil on the roof to symbolize to us that this is a cave we live in, this house. And you will find if you go out into the woods today, members of our community building little cottages and tepees, who want to live out in the woods this summer. You will see in our meditation gardens and in our daily activities here a slow cellular development toward this utopia which I have been describing. We think that our prophecies and our scientific fantasies are more likely to come true than any others because if you listen to the government-supported scientific agencies, they are just predicting to the next antimissile missile. Most of your politicians are just interested in predicting to the next election. They are interested in the next intersection of power where their status is going to be concerned, and there are very few people who are thinking more than 15 or 20 years ahead. But people who are in tune with their own seed energy, like ourselves, are about the only people who are spinning out blueprints; therefore our blueprint is more likely to come about than the more secular and limited blueprints of the politicians.
SOL: Back just a second to the underground, with the steel and concrete and stuff. H. G. Wells formulated a science fiction story called The Time Machine, which predicted a world of this sort back about 20 or 30 years ago. I think he said around the year 2000. He visualized a dualized society where the flower people lived on the surface—
LEARY: Oh, really?
SOL: —and the machine people lived underground. Do you foresee this?
LEARY: Yes. That’s interesting. I have not read that nor read those phrases but it is exactly my own conception; it just makes organic sense.
SOL: Have you seen the movie The Time Machine?
LEARY: No, I didn’t.
SOL: As a matter of fact—
LEARY: I would like to see it.
SOL: —it is parallel to what’s happening here.
LEARY: What I think will happen is that man will live aboveground and will recapitulate preseed cycles. Seed cycles where one will relive the entire growth process inside your mother’s womb. Then you do it again as you grow up as a child, if you live aboveground; and you will do it again, a third time, if you have children. Now in this society, people will start having children when the DNA thought they should, not when they get their Ph.D. but when they start to become adolescents. The DNA code has designed us to have babies at the age of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, because that is when the seed power is at its height. But of course, our chessboard, artificial society, postpones this, and it’s fighting the wisdom of the DNA code. It is purely possible for someone to have completed the three seed cycles—once in the womb, once growing up yourself, and once growing up with your children—at the age of twenty-three or twenty-four; you are ready to live out of the cycle. I don’t think people should be taught control of metal and these potentially antilife energies until they have completed three seed cycles and have enough reverence for, and understanding of life that they can then be allowed to deal with life-killing instruments. The problem is that the person doesn’t really—hasn’t been turned on to his life seed thing. He thinks nothing of taking these instruments of death into his hands—like the gas engine—and killing life with it. So we have teen-age kids with guns and autos, and this doesn’t make sense to our DNA code. At the age of twenty-five or twenty-six you say, well, you have a choice. You can live aboveground, or if you would like to go on to the next level, if you are at that stage of holiness and you understand the sacredness of life, you can be trusted with the more powerful sacraments of electricity and energy. Then you go belowground, and our understanding of the nervous system acceleration, chemically and electronically, is such that you can be taught the symbols of electronic physics. You know, our educational systems are so brutally inefficient and so shamefully disregard the crux of the matter. When we teach kids in school, we teach them not to learn. At the age of twenty, twenty-four, whenever a person is holy enough to learn these more powerful energies, why, then he can learn very quickly. You can teach someone nuclear physics in three or four months. Then he can live underground, he can do his yoga. There will be breakthroughs in physics so that telepathy in 10 or 15 years will be commonplace. Physics is going to expand as more physicists turn on.
SOL: You have mentioned that in keeping with an attunement with the natural stage of our lives, there is a point at which a person should cease to attempt to continue to control or affect things. I want to talk about the menopausal mind and when a person is entering old age. Do you feel at this point that people should just sit back and enjoy life or what there is of it left?
LEARY: Yes, they should realize that the whole thing is a spiritual journey, and the person over fifty, who is dying anyway, who’s half dead, should concentrate on coming to terms with his own deat
h and getting an overall perspective and gracefully turning it over to the young people. So we’ve got to get the older people to turn on. We’ve got to get big reservations for older people instead of these senior citizens places where we surround them with machines. We’ve got to get them to do nothing but dance and make love with God. They should radiate humor and mellowness, and they don’t care about power anymore, and you should be able to go to older people as you did in the village tribe, and the old man is sitting there barefoot, half-naked, with his beard, and he’s glowing, and he doesn’t care. A holy man is someone who doesn’t care about the little chess game of power; he doesn’t care about the chess game of possessions; he doesn’t care about sex, even; he’s beyond all these bodily things and he’s radiating the joys of all of everything. That’s why we’ve got to get our older people to turn on.
SOL: Now I know that it’s hard to set arbitrary evaluations, but at that stage, do you feel a person begins to step into this realm that you say ends at around fifty or some stage where the menopausal mind sets in? Where does a person first enter life’s power zone, as it were?
LEARY: All this has been spelled out in oriental philosophy. The West knows all about machines and fails to realize that all the wisdom has come from the East. The Hindus were dealing with these problems that the psychedelic generation is dealing with 4,000 years ago. It’s all spelled out in the sacred teachings of the East, and they say that there are the 4 stages of life in which you’ve got to learn to use your senses and your seed power, and naturally you’re going to enjoy your sensual body. You’re going to enjoy making love and to have babies and to support your babies. You’re going to have duties, and then you have to have a little power, enough to protect your territory and to feed and support your group. And when your kids are old enough to take over, then you go to the fourth, which is the goal, the end point where you can say, I’m dropping out. I don’t have to worry anymore. Now I can just— You go to the holy cities, like Rishikish in India, and there are all these old people there that have been businessmen in Bombay and college professors, and you’ll find some old ex-governor Reagans naked in Rishikish going around barefoot, and they’ve got these orange robes, and it’s just a big LSD session. Everyone’s high, and you don’t care about the British Empire and taxation; they’re beyond that. They’re just there to hear the roar of the Ganges reminding them that it’s been going on for thousands of years.
SOL: Do you anticipate, then, the evolution of a new type of homogeneous society? H. G. Wells’ idea was of a polarized society and that they clashed—
LEARY: Yes.
SOL: Do you anticipate a clash now and later the evolution to a homogeneous society, or do you think that the clash will—?
LEARY: The clash can be avoided by consulting your own energy system and seeing that there is a place for everything—a place for the machine people and a place for the seed, flower people; you just have to arrange your own life so that you can follow a harmonious sequence. Now we are very much against polarization. Conflict. There is a danger, though, that it will go that way, there is a danger that man will evolve into different species. We must realize that evolution is not through, that man is not a final product, and just as there are many species of primate, there may be just as many species evolving from what we now call man, homo sapiens. It may well be that we’ll have two species. One species, which is the machine species, will like to live in metal buildings and skyscrapers and will get their kicks by just becoming part of a machine. That species of man will become an unnecessary, easily worn-out part of the whole technological machinery. In that case, man will become anonymous—just like the anthill or the beehive. Sex will become very depersonalized. It will become very promiscuous. You won’t care who you make love to because they’re all just replaceable parts. You know, she’s the new pretty blond girl who runs the teletype machine, and you’ll ball her, and then tomorrow, the secretary who runs the electronic typewriter; so that we may well get a new species who will be technological. But I do know that our seed-flower species will continue. And we may hang out in new pockets of disease which the machine people haven’t cleaned up with their antiseptics. And we’ll be somewhere out in the marshes, or somewhere out in the woods, laughing at the machine and enjoying our senses and having ecstasies and remembering where we came from and teaching our children that, believe it or not, we’re not machines and we weren’t designed to make machines and we weren’t designed to run machines. I think you have to be a very holy man to appreciate and understand and run a machine because the machine is a beautiful yoga and a beautiful ecstasy. I’ve nothing against machines; it’s just incredible that the DNA code could produce us and then produce these machines. It’s part of the glory of God’s process, but the machine’s got to be seen as a sacrament, not as a god.
SOL: The way our society’s structured, currently, legally—unfortunately, this is the supranatural structure which is imposed upon us—legally a person attains to and reaches the age of maturity at the age of twenty-one and continues in that state until his death.
LEARY: Right.
SOL: Now, at what point do you believe a person does attain to this realization of himself?
LEARY: Obey the DNA code! I scoff at the chess-game laws of man; they are all old men that rule and pass such laws. There was never a young teen-ager that passed a law against sex. Right! Or a poor young teen-ager that passed laws about guarding a bank. I follow the laws of nature, and nature tells you when someone should vote. Now when a girl menstruates, nature is saying that she is ready, and when a young man reaches puberty, nature is saying that he is ready. One of the terrible things, of course, about the menopausal society is that the older you get, the more brain damaged you are, but in our society, the older you get, the more power you get. So we now have this paradoxical, suicidal situation in the United States, all of the wealth being in the hands of the menopausal people, who are naturally only concerned with protecting this, and that’s why we have a very unhappy, violent country. We are physically violent; there is murder, and there’s assassination and there is worry. Look at Johnson’s face; he is not a happy man. And look at those old devils in Congress; they’re not happy, joyous people. It disturbs me as it disturbs all turned-on prophets—there is so much unnecessary suffering. I think that there should be laws that allow people to vote at puberty, and you should certainly take voting away at menopause. No one over the age of fifty should be allowed to vote. Why should they bother? The reason they vote is because they have no trust in the kids, no trust in the seed bearers. If they really trusted the process, they would gladly give up the vote.
SOL: I still have a few questions. Seems like we keep picking up extra ones as we go along: A few moments ago you used the term “God.” From your perspective, who, what, where, when, and why is God? [General laughter] Because we have concepts of God and so many young, pseudo- or neo-intellectuals become atheistic or nontheistic or pantheistic.
LEARY: A lot of people think I’ve sold out because we’ve started a religion. Some kids think that religion means all the hypocrisy of the Congressman, and the faggot minister and the conservative Sunday school and so forth. I think this is tragic—
SOL: Are you using the ploy of religion to get by the LSD laws?
LEARY: No, we had a religion going long before we started our league formally. We were a religious group 5 or 6 years ago, when we originally came here. Like it or not, or believe it or not, I’m convinced that the religious kick is the only experience that makes life worthwhile. The moment of revelation when you’re turned on to the whole process, which men of old called the mystic, is the whole purpose of life. The great religious leaders were the greatest figures of all. Buddha was the most turned-on guy. Buddha wanted to get rid of suffering. All the concepts about virtue, hard work, and being good are part of that old con game. Religion to us is ecstasy. It is freedom and harmony. Kids should not let the fake, television-prop religion they were taught as kids turn them off
. The real trip is the God trip. Now to get back to the question as to who is God: For thousands of years skeptics have been asking visionaries like me, “All right, who is God? Does he speak Latin? Does he speak Greek? Does he have a white skin or a black one?” You think I can use a 3,000-word language like English to define a process which is 5 billion years old on this planet and which operates at the speed of light and manifests itself in ever-changing forms? I can teach you how to find God. I can teach you methods; that’s my profession. To talk to God yourself, you are going to have to throw away all your definitions and just surrender to this process, and then you can come back and try to tune in and develop an art form which will communicate your vision. God does exist and is to me this energy process; the language of God is the DNA code. Beyond that, the language of God is the nucleus of the atom. Above that, the language of God is the exquisite, carefully worked out dialogue of the planets and the galaxies, etc. And it does exist and there is an intelligence and there is a planfulness and a wisdom and power that you can tune in to. Men have called this process, for the lack of a better word, “God.” I know that when I was at Harvard, God was a dirty word; God is “dog” spelled backward. I don’t care what you call it. It took me 5 years of taking LSD before I would say the word “God” out loud. Because you have to feel right to say it, and I feel very comfortable now in saying that I do talk to God and I listen to Him. He is a hipster, He is a musician, and He’s got a great beat going. You’ll never find Him in an institution or in an American television stage set. He’s never legal! And He’s got a great sense of humor, too! I digressed, and I repeated myself and I don’t pretend to talk in any linear fashion. I’m not writing a book or a paragraph. I’m more like a musician, and I repeat riffs. . . . You can feel free to edit, cut out, or move it around any way that you want. I hope you will, for I’ve been repeating myself.