Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out Read online

  INNISFREE: Yet, a lot of your beliefs do borrow from other cultures. Wouldn’t exposure to these other ways of thinking make your religion more meaningful?

  LEARY: Well, I was born in the twentieth century. I can’t wipe out my whole personal background or change the fact that almost everyone I talk to today is brain-damaged by our education. We’re all crippled. We have to accept the fact that in primary school we fell into the hands of addictive drug pushers, namely teachers. They’ve crippled us. That’s part of karma.

  Every historical era has its own particular trap which drives man away from his divinity and puts him on the outside, and every historical era has its own sacrament, or its own method, of dealing with it. The DNA code is an impressively resilient and impressive blueprinting process. It always produces the protein molecules that are necessary to adapt to the particular evolutionary bind it has actually trapped itself in. Evolution is a series of accidental surprises.

  The genetic code is infinite in its variation and wisdom, and always comes out with the right answer; and exactly the right answer for the particular neurological disease that man has been plagued by for the last 1,000 years is LSD. You see, 3,000 or 4,000 years ago, LSD wouldn’t have been necessary. Man was in touch. He was harmoniously dancing along with the change in the planets, the change in the seasons. He was in touch, he was in tune, he was turned on. LSD existed in natural form. LSD has been in morning glory seeds for hundreds of thousands of years. But until now it hasn’t been necessary to use because you wouldn’t have had to have the effect.

  INNISFREE: You don’t feel that the LSD culture is compatible with American culture now, then?

  LEARY: I don’t think the American culture is compatible with anything. Certainly not with anything that’s been going on in this planet since the origin of life. The American culture is an insane asylum. You take for granted such things as race prejudice, the Protestant work culture, the professional bureaucracy which exists in this country, the complete loss of euphoria which has developed in the past fifty years. Dropping bombs on natives of Vietnam—well, that’s just like a head cold. I mean, that’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’s the current symptom of our insanity.

  LSD and the LSD cult is perfectly in tune with the wisdom of the Buddha or the great philosophies of the past. The Buddha could walk up this road to our house here at Millbrook, and he’d see the signs of his profession because we belong to the same profession, people who are changing consciousness, who are pursuing the eternal quest. He would walk in this house and he’d be much more at home here than he would be in hardly any house in the United States because we’re in touch with him. We’re in touch with the basic cellular and sensory and physical aspects of man.

  There are three processes involved that every spiritual teacher has passed onto mankind for the past thousand years. Look within, have the revelation, and then express it in acts of glorification on the outside and detach yourself from the current tribe. We use the six-word motto “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Now after you turn on, you don’t spend the rest of your life in an LSD state, just contemplating the inner wonders. You begin immediately expressing your revelation in acts of beauty without. That’s what we’re doing in the Village Theater in New York. Every Tuesday night, people come there and we stone them out of their minds.

  INNISFREE: What about LSD?

  LEARY: Well, it’s always biochemical. In order to do anything new, you have to change your nervous system biochemically. Now you can do it through breathing, fasting, flagellation, dancing, solitude, diet. You can do it through any sense organ—visual, auditory, and so forth. There are hundreds of ways of turning on. But at the present time, man is so sick that there are very few people who can use these ancient methods, so that today it is safe to say that drugs are the specific, and almost the only, way that the American is ever going to have a religious experience.

  And our Tuesday night celebrations do not take the place of the sacrament. The sacramental process in our religion is the use of marijuana and LSD; and nothing can substitute for that. There’s a way of training people, and a way of teaching people, and a way of demonstrating to people what the psychedelic does. We have these public celebrations.

  INNISFREE: You don’t seem, then, to be advocating the use of LSD for simple “kicks.”

  LEARY: I don’t know what you mean by “kicks.” We feel about LSD the way a Catholic priest feels about his host. He doesn’t want to have his host sold in vending machines. He doesn’t want to have his sacred host in the hands of doctors to decide who’s going to use it. He wants his host to be given by trained priests or guides in the temple. We feel exactly the same about LSD. Now, the Catholic host should indeed give you a kick. LSD will give you a kick. The kick to me means an ecstatic revelation. I don’t know what a kick means to you. To you a kick may mean going to a cocktail party in Cambridge and flirting with some girl. A kick to me means flirtation—confrontation—with God. Of course, in our puritan society, the word kick is a negative term. We’re such robots that we think the only thing we should do in life is work, get power, and use this power to control other people. In any sane society, the word kick could be the ideal. Kick is the ecstacy; it means going beyond, confronting God, getting out of your mind.

  INNISFREE: What would LSD achieve, though, that conscientious Hindu-like meditation—if we were capable of it—could not achieve?

  LEARY: If meditation works, it will get you the same place that LSD will. But only one person in a hundred thousand can do it through meditation.

  INNISFREE: Even to what you call the precellular level of awareness?

  LEARY: Well, certainly the Buddha, and certainly the writings of the Hindu philosophers—the Shiva myths—were written by men who had reached the cellular level. The theory of reincarnation in Hinduism is a perfect metaphorical and poetic statement of the DNA code.

  INNISFREE: What of the actual biochemical changes that are behind the psychedelic experience?

  LEARY: Neurologists do not understand the biochemistry of consciousness. They don’t know where consciousness is located. Therefore, the answer to the question of, “What does LSD do?” has to await a breakthrough in neurology. And that breakthrough in neurology will come when neurologists realize that they have to change their own consciousness. They’re not going to find out where consciousness is located by putting electrodes in the brains of animals or giving LSD to animals for that matter. The breakthrough in neurology is going to come when the scientist puts his eye to the microscope; and the microscope of consciousness is your own nervous system. We have trained hundreds of young graduate students, who are now young psychiatrists and young neurologists, and this next generation of turned-on scientists will produce the great breakthrough in neurology, because they are taking the drug themselves.

  INNISFREE: Do you think that the two sciences can coexist side by side?

  LEARY: There’s a perfect dialogue that goes on between outer and inner. It doesn’t do any good to expand your consciousness unless you can accurately express this in some metaphorical or symbolic form. Now the problem at the present time is that our society and our intellectuals and our scientists completely externalize the psychology of behaviorism. Neurology today is poking at the brains of other people. We’re overbalanced this way today. As soon as psychiatrists start taking LSD or more powerful drugs that come along, they will be tuning in on an energy process that will then help them write better equations. You have to experience what you are symbolizing. And when a symbol system gets beyond the experience, then it becomes just a chess game.

  When Einstein first worked out that equation E=MC2, it was a very powerful, psychedelic thing. Literally he had to fall down on his knees at that moment when he realized that all matter was energy just in temporary states of change, that there was no structure. Of course, the Hindu philosophers had pointed that out for a thousand years. But I suspect that very few physicists experience what they are symbolizing.

  Yo
u see, that’s the problem. I think that 99 percent of the people who call themselves scientists, including 99 percent of the people at your institution, are not really scientists. There are never more than a hundred people who deserve the term scientist in any age. The rest of them are just engineers who are simply playing out one little aspect of a metaphor, of a visionary experience, that someone had in the past.

  INNISFREE: How do you determine whether a person will become psychotic under LSD? Is there any way to tell who had best not participate in this religion? Because surely not everyone can.

  LEARY: Who’s to decide? I would say that at present our society is so insane, that even if the risks were fifty-fifty that if you took LSD you would be permanently insane, I still think that the risk is worth taking, as long as the person knows that that’s the risk.

  There is a complete breakdown in assumption here. You’re operating from a psychiatric metaphor, and I’m operating from a religious metaphor. I say that the confrontation with divinity is going to change you, and there are some people who are in such a state of sin that they don’t want to confront divinity; they freak out. Such people should be warned that if you come into this temple you’re going to face blazing illumination of the divinity. It’s going to change you completely; you’re never going to be the same. Do you want to do it? That’s what they said in the Eleusinian Mysteries. They would always warn people, “If you go in here, you will die. You and all of your past hang-ups, sins and so forth are going to be laid out in front of you. You’re going to have to confront them, strip them off and be a changed person. Do you want to do it?” One of the emperors of Rome—I forget which one—came and wanted to be initiated in the Eleusinian Mysteries, and they took him in and said, “This is what’s going to happen,” and he said, “That’s interesting. I approve of what you’re doing, but I don’t want your experience. I don’t want to be changed.” As long as the person knows what’s involved, whatever he does to his own consciousness is his own business. And the fears of LSD in this society existed before the present psychiatric rumors of brain damage. Everyone is afraid to take LSD, because nobody wants to change. Everyone wants to keep his own little egocentric chess game going. The fear of LSD is the same fear that has led to the persecution of people doing the same thing I’ve been doing in other centuries and other tribes. It’s the ancient game of the law. Three hundred years ago you’d be sitting here talking with me about the devil. In Salem, very close to where you go to college, they were talking about witches. The fear then was in terms of witches. The fear of those who are anti-God—which is what you are—the fear is always expressed in the metaphor of the time: witches, possessions, devils, and so forth.

  INNISFREE: You have no fear of LSD?

  LEARY: I didn’t say that, nor would I. There’s everything to fear. You’re going to lose your mind.

  INNISFREE: Isn’t there the fear of taking too much?

  LEARY: There is no lethal dose known of LSD. LSD is a trigger mechanism, like a key. So, ten times the normal dose of LSD is like ten keys for one lock. When you get over three hundred gammas of LSD, you can go up to thirty thousand gammas—the largest dose I know of—and the impact is a little greater: the door swings open a little faster. But it’s the same effect. You see, what you’re confronting is your own two-billion-year-old equipment of sense organs, cellular wisdom, protein memories. They’re the same. Our culture is so hung on the external, playing the numbers game, that 1,000 gammas must be twice as strong as 500 gammas.

  INNISFREE: If you cannot get back to the state where you can contemplate on what you have just experienced, wouldn’t you consider that bad?

  LEARY: The problem with LSD is not enduring change. The problem is that it doesn’t last long enough. You see, if LSD really worked the way these fear merchants say it does, it would be easy to use it to change personality. If it changes the normal person and gives him hallucinations afterward, you should be able to take the criminal and the alcoholic, the drug addict, and the generally mean person and change him under guidance. The processes of neurological imprinting and the way we build up our conditioned mental processes is highly resistant to change. If you take LSD, you still come back speaking the English language and knowing how to tie your shoe lace. The problem with LSD is that much too quickly do you slip back into the routine ways of thinking. That’s why, if you take LSD, you should take it many, many times, and you should plan to slowly change your environment so that your external commitments are keeping up to your internal achievements. It’s very hard work to change the human psychology, even with LSD. That should give comfort to the frightened, and probably anguish to the optimistic like myself. Human nature is so resistant to change.

  INNISFREE: Do you think you are being harassed for your unorthodox beliefs?

  LEARY: I don’t use the term harassment, and I have no paranoid theories about conspiracy. The game I am involved in is set out with exquisite precision. What I am doing has been done by people in every generation in the past. It’s like the Harvard-Yale game. It’s played out every year. Now, Harvard isn’t harassing Yale. The game between those who know that man can change and become divine in this lifetime and want to teach people how to do it completely threatens the establishment. In every generation you say, “No, it’s all been done and settled, and just get your good lawyer-priest and do what we tell you to do.” And this dialogue between the establishment and the utopian visionaries will inevitably exist in every historical era.

  It’s played fairly. The fact that they want to hound me out of existence is right. They should, just like the Harvard defensive team wants to throw the offensive’s quarterback for a loss. I have no complaint about this; I’m perfectly good-humored about it. The more energy that is directed against me, the more energy that is available for me. It’s the perfect physical law of jujitsu—the more government and professional establishment dynamism that is set off against what we’re doing is just a sign to us that we’re doing fine.

  INNISFREE: What are the existing restrictions on LSD by the federal government?

  LEARY: The federal law does not forbid the possession and personal use of LSD. It prohibits the manufacture and sale of LSD or the administering of it to someone. There are some states—four or five, of which New York State is one—which outlaw the possession of LSD.

  INNISFREE: In your Playboy interview you gave the exact number of LSD sessions you had taken. You record each session?

  LEARY: Yes, I keep careful record of each session, where, and what was the purpose of the session.

  INNISFREE: And do you write down a description of the experience or thoughts that came to you?

  LEARY: Yes, most of the time. Not always.

  INNISFREE: What do you consider more valuable, the actual trip or the contemplation of it afterward?

  LEARY: It goes together. One without the other is rather meaningless. But again, you ask if I write it down. It’s more important what you do afterward; after a session we may go out and plant a new garden, after a session we may change a room in the house, after a session we may throw out the television set, after the session I may spend the next five hours talking quietly with my son. The intellectual is so hung up on the disease of words that nothing exists unless he writes it down. The human being has been involved in this adventure for thousands of years before the printing press. As my friend Marshall McLuhan so eloquently pointed out—you see, whatever I say today about words is just what Marshall McLuhan said in his book, The Gutenberg Galaxie—the misuse of the printing press is one of the greatest catastrophes to happen to the human nervous system. It has forced man to think in the linear subject-predicate fashion, which is what Marshall McLuhan and I are attempting to do something about, and which modern technical advances, like electronics, and psychochemicals such as LSD, will inevitably change.

  SEAL OF THE LEAGUE

  6

  The Buddha as Drop-Out*

  This article was written in response to a request from Horizon
magazine, which in the summer of 1967 was planning an issue on the hippies. The article was penciled hastily and typed by the author’s daughter, who at the time was involved in a mystical removal from all human games except the mastery of touch typing.

  Horizon sent a check for $400 along, with a note of puzzling jocularity about my “frankness” and “honesty.” It was only after the issue was published (without “The Buddha as Drop-Out”) and after reading the introduction to the issue that it became clear that the editors of lost Horizon had mirthlessly missed the point of the article. They saw it as confessional rather than satirical. They wanted no part in the strategy to persuade their readers to become Buddhas.

  They have a point. Buddhas don’t subscribe. They inscribe.

  The message of the Buddha, Gautama, is the familiar, ancient always to-be-rediscovered divine instruction:

  Drop out

  Turn on

  Tune in

  The avatar, the divine one, is he who discovers and lives out this rhythm during his earthly trip.

  The life of the Buddha, Gautama, is simply another case illustration in the venerable library of tissue manuals on “How to Discover Your Own Buddha-hood.”

  Gautama Sakyamuni was born a prince. His father, the king, and his mother, the queen, were determined that he should carry on the family business and not discover his divinity. According to familiar parental tradition, they attempted to protect their son from confronting the four basic dimensions of the human time span: sickness, age, death, and the existence of eccentric, barefoot holy men—alchemists who could show him how to solve the time riddle by—

  Dropping out

  Turning on

  Tuning in