Timothy Leary Quotes

a man — venerable, with a white beard, or on a cross, or as a baby, or a sage seated in the full lotus position. Are these not limiting incarnations, temporary housings, of the great energy process?

So Harry Haller, the Steppenwolf, had his psychedelic session, discovered instead of one reality, infinite realities within the brain. He is admitted into the select group of those who have passed through the verbal curtain into other modes of consciousness. He has joined the elite brotherhood of the illuminati.
And then what... Throughout the ages mystical groups have formed to provide social structure and support for transcendence. The magic circle. Often secret, always persecuted by the sleepwalking majority, these cults move quietly in the background shadows of history. The problem is, of course, the amount of structure surrounding the mystic spark. To much to soon, and you have a priesthood ritual on your hands. And the flame is gone. To little, and the function is lost; the interpersonal unity drifts into gaseous anarchy. The bohemians. The beats. The lonely arrogates.

"The essence of "new" is, of course, the modern version of Roman coliseum shows and gladiator combats. American civilization, for certain explicit biblical reasons, apparently requires that its leaders, its political heroes be publicly sacrificed."

The underlying solution - repeated again and again - is to recognize that your brain is producing the visions.

They do not exist. Nothing exists except as your consciousness gives it life.

"All of this educational work was enormously successful. Millions of Americans accepted the "head philosophy," the belief that Ego and "Social Reality" are neural fictions."

"Just as every Hollywood picture is "put together" by producers, who are always in tight control of the enterprise and reap the lion's share of the profits, so is the Outlaw Industry managed by lawyers."

We were thinking far-out history thoughts at Harvard...believing that it was a time for visions, knowing that America had run out of philosophy, that a new empirical, tangible meta-physics was needed.

"Today, reality is created mainly by television and movies. The media producers have become a priest-caste who guide, direct, and manage reality.

"I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more . . . "

"Don't follow leaders! Watch your parking meters!"

When Bob Dylan sang these lines in the 1960s, he was performing philosophy, transmitting powerful new ideas for which his mass audience was ready. Dylan thus triggered off heretical, sinful acts of resistance to authority, rejection of militarism, refusal to join the mechanical factory culture."

"One of the many curious aspects of American culture is the absence of an "upper" class, a "high" society, an hedonic aristocracy. America since Lincoln has been a heavy, feet-on-the-ground John Wayne society. The triumph of mediocrity and practicality."

The modern fixation on abstract, quantifiable, and rational modes of thought has profoundly alienated us from the directly sensorial and mimetic forms of knowing and relating maintained by indigenous cultures, allowing us to treat the natural world as something separate from ourselves. The entheogenic experience can temporarily reconnect the modern individual with lost participatory modes of awareness that may induce a greater sensitivity to his or her physical surroundings, beside raising a psychic periscope into the marginalized realms of mythological archetype and imaginative vision.

While sitting in my prison cell, I was astonished to hear the local rock station play a new song by the Beatles entitled "Come Together." Although the new version was certainly a musical and lyrical improvement on my campaign song, I was a bit miffed that Lennon had passed me over this way. (I must explain that even the most good-natured persons tend to be a bit touchy about social neglect while in prison). When I sent a mild protest to John, he replied with typical Lennon charm and wit: that he was a tailor and I was a customer who had ordered a suit and never returned. So he sold it to someone else.

John asked what he could do to help my campaign for governor. "Write a campaign song," I replied. "Okay," said John, "what's the theme?" "Our campaign slogan is 'Come together, join the party.'" "Great title," said John. He grabbed his guitar and started improvising.

My advice to people today is as follows: If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out.

My advice to myself and to everyone else, particularly young people, is to turn on, tune in and drop out. By drop out, I mean to detach yourself from involvement in secular, external social games. But the dropping out has to occur internally before it can occur externally. I'm not telling kids just to quit school; I'm not telling people to quit their jobs. That is an inevitable development of the process of turning on and tuning in.

If you are serious about your religion, if you really wish to commit yourself to the spiritual quest, you must learn how to use psychochemicals. Drugs are the religion of the twenty-first century. Pursuing the religious life today without using psychedelic drugs is like studying astronomy with the naked eye because that's how they did it in the first century A.D., and besides telescopes are unnatural.