Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out

by Timothy Leary

  Every generation lives the old drama out over and over again. Every person can. The challenge is for you to become your own priest. For you to become your own doctor. For you to become your own researcher on consciousness. Researcher. Now there’s a tricky symbol. Research. The cop-out cliché is to say that research is needed in LSD. Who dares to say he is against research in LSD? Should LSD be turned over to the research scientists to study the implication and possibility of the experience? Nope. You cannot get off that easy. No government research project, no medically controlled scientific study, is going to solve your spiritual or emotional problems. And remember: the textbooks only tell you what you have to discover yourself. Have you ever personally experienced that the world is round and whirls around the sun? Please do not wait around in the hope that others will do it for you. The medical profession has had LSD for 23 years. And it has not come up with a use for it yet. And I do not blame the doctors. The psychedelic chemicals which expand consciousness are just not medical problems. LSD has nothing to do with disease or sickness.

  When people talk about research on LSD, I have a little formula I go through in my mind. Talking about LSD is like talking about sex. Now I am not against research on LSD and I am not against research on sex. If some scientists want to hook people up and study the external manifestations of their internal experiences and if some people are willing to be hooked up and be studied by scientists during sexual or psychedelic moments, fine. But the psychedelic experience is an intimate, personal, and sacred one. And you, and you, and you, the individual man and woman, are the only one to do this research. And we cannot wait around, dealing with energies which are so insistent and important, until scientists or government agencies tell us that we can take that risk.

  Drop Out into What?

  Turn on, tune in and drop out. I want to be very clear about the term “drop out.” I don’t mean external dropping out. I certainly don’t mean acts of rebellion or irresponsibility to any social situation you are involved in. But I urge any of you who are serious about life, who are serious about your nervous system or your spiritual future, to start right now planning how you can harmoniously, sequentially, lovingly and gracefully detach yourself from the social commitments to which you are addicted.

  Well, what do you do after you drop out? This question was asked. A young man in the audience said, “Well, it’s all right for you older, middle-aged fellows to go around lecturing on LSD, but what do we young people do?” There’s so much you can do that it makes me dizzy to think about it. First of all, if you are serious about this business, you should find a spiritual teacher. Find someone that knows more about consciousness than you and study with him. And if he is a good teacher, he will teach you all he knows and tell you when he cannot teach you any more, and then maybe you can start teaching him or you will both go on your separate ways. But there’s a tremendous amount of information which has been stored up for the last 3,000 or 4,000 years by men who have been making this voyage and who have left landmarks, guidebooks, footsteps in the sand, symbols and rituals which can be learned from and used.

  Another thing you can do is to be careful with whom you spend your time. Every human interaction is an incredible confrontation of several levels of consciousness. The average civilized human confrontation is, “I bring my checkerboard to you, and you bring your chessboard to me, and we start moving pieces around. If we are cultured and civilized, I will let you make a few moves on your board, and then you will watch me play for a while. If we get very, very intimate and have a deep relationship, we might get to the point where I’ll put some of my symbols on your board and you will put some of your symbols on my board.”

  Anyone you meet is automatically going to come on to you with a fierce symbol system. And tremendous neurological inertia takes over. There is a conditioned-reflex training which pulls you into the other person’s game at the same time that you are pulling him into your game. The more I study the neurology of the psychedelic experience, the more awed and amazed I am at what we do with and to each other’s nervous systems.

  Only a Tiny Bit of You Is Policeman

  Well, what happens if you drop out and leave school and leave your jobs? (And by the way, I address here not just the young people, but the researchers and the doctors and the police investigators here in the audience. You know, only a tiny bit of you is policeman, only a tiny bit of you is doctor.) If you want to drop out of your nonlove game and tune in to life and take some of these questions seriously, you do not have to go on welfare or go around with a begging bowl. The odd thing about our society today is that in the mad lemminglike rush to the urban, antilove power centers and the mad rush toward mechanical conformity, our fellow citizens are leaving tremendous gaps and gulfs which make economic bartering very simple. For the first thing, consider moving out of the city. You’ll find ghost towns empty and deserted 3 or 4 hours from San Francisco where people can live in harmony with nature, using their sense organs as 2 billion years of evolution had trained them to.

  To make a living these days for a psychedelic person is really quite easy. How? There’s one thing that our mechanized society cannot do and that is, delight the senses. Machines can make things go faster and move more efficiently, but machine-made objects make no sense to your cells or your senses. Our countrymen are fed up with plastic and starved for direct, natural sensory stimulation. As you begin to drop out, you will find yourself much less reliant on artifactual symbols. You will start throwing things out of your house. And you won’t need as much mechanical money to buy as many mechanical objects. When you go home tonight, try a psychedelic exercise. Look around your living room and your study and dining room and ask yourself the question which might be asked by a man who lived 3,000 years ago, or a man from another planet: “What sort of a fellow is this who lives in a room like this?” Because the artifacts you surround yourself with are external representations of your state of consciousness.

  It’s All Going to Work Out All Right

  And now, a final word of good cheer, directed especially to those who are concerned about the psychedelic revolution. This revolution has just begun. For every turned-on person today I predict that there will be 2 or 3 next year. And I’m not at all embarrassed about making this prophecy because for the last 6 years Dr. Alpert and Dr. Metzner and I have been making predictions about the growth of the new race, and we have always been too conservative. Let no one be concerned about the growth and the use of psychedelic chemicals. Trust your young people. You gotta trust your young people. You had better trust your young people. Trust your creative minority. The fact of the matter is that those of us who use LSD wish society well. In our way we are doing what seems best and right to make this a peaceful and happy planet. Be very careful how you treat your creative minority, because if we are crushed, you will end up with a robot society. Trust your sense organs and your nervous system. Your divine body has been around a long, long time. Much longer than any of the social games you play. Trust the evolutionary process. It’s all going to work out all right.

  SEAL OF THE LEAGUE

  11

  Neurological Politics

  Declaration of Evolution

  When in the course of organic evolution it becomes obvious that a mutational process is inevitably dissolving the physical and neurological bonds which connect the members of one generation to the past and inevitably directing them to assume among the species of earth the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them, a decent concern for the harmony of species requires that the causes of the mutation should be declared.

  We hold these truths to be self-evident:

  —That all species are created different but equal;

  —That they are endowed, each one, with certain inalienable rights;

  —That among them are Freedom to Live, Freedom to Grow, and Freedom to pursue Happiness in their own style;

  —That to protect these God-given rights, social structu
res naturally emerge, basing their authority on the principles of love of God and respect for all forms of life;

  —That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of life, liberty, and harmony, it is the organic duty of the young members of that species to mutate, to drop out, to initiate a new social structure, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its power in such form as seems likely to produce the safety, happiness, and harmony of all sentient beings.

  Genetic wisdom, indeed, suggests that social structures long established should not be discarded for frivolous reasons and transient causes. The ecstasy of mutation is equally balanced by the pain. Accordingly all experience shows that members of a species are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, rather than to discard the forms to which they are accustomed.

  But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, all pursuing invariably the same destructive goals, threaten the very fabric of organic life and the serene harmony on the planet, it is the right, it is the organic duty to drop out of such morbid covenants and to evolve new loving social structures.

  Such has been the patient sufferance of the freedom-loving peoples of this earth, and such is now the necessity which constrains us to form new systems of government.

  The history of the white, menopausal, mendacious men now ruling the planet earth is a history of repeated violation of the harmonious laws of nature, all having the direct object of establishing a tyranny of the materialistic aging over the gentle, the peace-loving, the young, the colored. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to the judgment of generations to come.

  —These old, white rulers have maintained a continuous war against other species of life, enslaving and destroying at whim fowl, fish, animals and spreading a lethal carpet of concrete and metal over the soft body of earth.

  —They have maintained as well a continual state of war among themselves and against the colored races, the freedom-loving, the gentle, the young. Genocide is their habit.

  —They have instituted artificial scarcities, denying peaceful folk the natural inheritance of earth’s abundance and God’s endowment.

  —They have glorified material values and degraded the spiritual.

  —They have claimed private, personal ownership of God’s land, driving by force of arms the gentle from their passage on the earth.

  —In their greed they have erected artificial immigration and customs barriers, preventing the free movement of people.

  —In their lust for control they have set up systems of compulsory education to coerce the minds of the children and to destroy the wisdom and innocence of the playful young.

  —In their lust for power they have controlled all means of communication to prevent the free flow of ideas and to block loving exchanges among the gentle.

  —In their fear they have instituted great armies of secret police to spy upon the privacy of the pacific.

  —In their anger they have coerced the peaceful young against their will to join their armies and to wage murderous wars against the young and gentle of other countries.

  —In their greed they have made the manufacture and selling of weapons the basis of their economies.

  —For profit they have polluted the air, the rivers, the seas.

  —In their impotence they have glorified murder, violence, and unnatural sex in their mass media.

  —In their aging greed they have set up an economic system which favors age over youth.

  —They have in every way attempted to impose a robot uniformity and to crush variety, individuality, and independence of thought.

  —In their greed, they have instituted political systems which perpetuate rule by the aging and force youth to choose between plastic conformity or despairing alienation.

  —They have invaded privacy by illegal search, unwarranted arrest, and contemptuous harassment.

  —They have enlisted an army of informers.

  —In their greed they sponsor the consumption of deadly tars and sugars and employ cruel and unusual punishments for the possession of life-giving alkaloids and acids.

  —They never admit a mistake. They unceasingly trumpet the virtue of greed and war. In their advertising and in their manipulation of information they make a fetish of blatant falsity and pious self-enhancement. Their obvious errors only stimulate them to greater error and noisier self-approval.

  —They are bores.

  —They hate beauty.

  —They hate sex.

  —They hate life.

  We have warned them from time to time to their inequities and blindness. We have addressed every available appeal to their withered sense of righteousness. We have tried to make them laugh. We have prophesied in detail the terror they are perpetuating. But they have been deaf to the weeping of the poor, the anguish of the colored, the rocking mockery of the young, the warnings of their poets. Worshiping only force and money, they listen only to force and money. But we shall no longer talk in these grim tongues.

  We must therefore acquiesce to genetic necessity, detach ourselves from their uncaring madness and hold them henceforth as we hold the rest of God’s creatures—in harmony, life brothers, in their excess, menaces to life.

  We, therefore, God-loving, peace-loving, life-loving, fun-loving men and women, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the Universe for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name and by the Authority of all sentient beings who seek gently to evolve on this planet, solemnly publish and declare that we are free and independent, and that we are absolved from all Allegiance to the United States Government and all governments controlled by the menopausal, and that grouping ourselves into tribes of like-minded fellows, we claim full power to live and move on the land, obtain sustenance with our own hands and minds in the style which seems sacred and holy to us, and to do all Acts and Things which independent Freemen and Free-women may of right do without infringing on the same rights of other species and groups to do their own thing.

  And for the support of this Declaration of Evolution with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, and serenely confident of the approval of generations to come, in whose name we speak, do we now mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.

  The Constitution of Life

  WE, THE FREEMEN AND FREEWOMEN OF THE PLANET TERRA, IN ORDER TO FORM A MORE PERFECT UNION, REESTABLISH SPECIES HARMONY, PROVIDE FOR THE PHYSICAL AND SPIRITUAL SUSTENANCE, PROMOTE THE GENERAL WELFARE OF ALL LIVING FORMS, INSURE A CLIMATE OF ECSTATIC PRAYER, AND SECURE THE BLESSINGS OF LIBERTY TO ALL CREATURES NOW LIVING AND THEIR POSTERITY, DO ORDAIN AND ESTABLISH THIS CONSTITUTION FOR THE UNITED TRIBES OF EARTH.

  ARTICLE I: LAWS

  Section 1: The Laws of God as expressed in the evolving principles of Biology and Physics are the Only and Supreme Power of the Planet.

  Section 2: The governing of human affairs shall be based on this basic principle: Love God and every living creature as thyself. LOVE-EVOLVE.

  Section 3: No rules shall be established by man which interfere with the harmonies and rhythms of nature or the rights of other men or other species to evolve according to the Divine Plan.

  ARTICLE II: TRIBES

  Section 1: The organization of Freemen and Freewomen into small social units for the purpose of physical and spiritual growth is recognized as a basic part of the unfolding Law of Nature.

  Section 2: Tribes are defined by territory collectively leased from God and by an individual tribal style of life and worship freely chosen.

  Section 3: Tribes shall establish game rules governing their own style of life and worship. Such rules shall have authority only within the tribal territory and shall not interfere with the physical and spiritual growth of other species in their territory and other species and tribes outside their territory.

  Section 4: The territory and natural resources leased by any Tribe shall be proportional to the numbers of tribe members.

  Section 5: No tribe shall number more than 360 persons
over the age of fourteen and under the age of fifty years.

  Section 6: While each tribe shall evolve its own style of self-government, the following seed principles shall not be violated:

  a. No tribe shall manufacture or possess weapons (mechanical, electrical, or chemical) designed to maim flesh, cripple health, wage war against or coerce other sentient beings.

  b. Police shall function as unarmed umpires to supervise tribal games and to isolate violence in emergencies. No person shall exercise police or judicial authority for more than three years.

  c. No secret police. No secrets about other sentient beings.

  d. Each tribe shall guarantee free and equal access to life-giving energies. Competition and artificial scarcities shall be allowed only in the case of nonessential things. Competitive and greed games shall be considered as therapeutic expressions of archaic impulses, throwbacks to earlier, prehistoric epochs.

  e. The exercise of tribal authority—voting and rule making—shall be considered burdens assigned by God and the DNA code to the tribal seed bearers, those between the ages of fourteen and forty-nine years. Persons under the age of fourteen and over the age of forty-nine, in consonance with the obvious directives of the DNA code, shall be relieved of all secular obligations and be free to laugh, learn, play, love God and exist as Holy Children of the Divine Parents.

  f. No tribe shall allow invasion or restriction of private behavior within the dwelling places, shrines, or bodies of Freemen and Freewomen.

  g. No tribe shall compel or restrict the mode of education, free movement, or free communication within and between individuals and tribes.

  ARTICLE III: ALL-LIFE COUNCIL

  Section 1: Planetary affairs and interplanetary relations shall be governed by an ALL-LIFE COUNCIL. The ALL-LIFE COUNCIL shall protect the freedom of all species and individuals within the territories of the participant tribes and shall negotiate on behalf of Freemen and Freewomen with nontribal governments.