THE POLITICS OF ECSTASY - TIMOTHY LEARY
"My advice to people in America 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."
So advised Dr Timothy Leary and so ensued a social earthquake the like of which America had never quite seen or experienced before. Turn on, tune in, drop out. A slogan as good if not better than any advertising logo ever devised. The problem being, however, that any successful advertising slogan is immediately cast in stone and deprived of any nuance or subtlety and so subsequently becomes a monolith to a depiction of a black and white kind without any shade of grey let alone any other colour.
The term 'turn on' in the Dr Leary sense is self-explanatory as in 'get in touch', the term 'tune in' means to harness, whilst the term 'drop out' means - what exactly? Therein lay a problem. At face value, to 'drop out' means to stop what you're doing whatever that might be and if that means or includes living and participating in society then it means stopping your involvement with that society on whatever level you're engaged with it.
There's no real way of knowing how many people took Leary at his word and followed his advice to the letter but it's a substantial amount. 'I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,' as Allen Ginsberg put it and there's an argument that says this is applicable to Leary's slogan where the best minds were destroyed by his advice leaving the paths to positions of social influence and power wide open to those of a more conservative bent. Meaning this explains how someone like George W Bush ended up as being the President of the United States rather than someone like Jerry Garcia.
That's not to say, however, that 'dropping out' is all bad. It may put a halt to any dreams of becoming President but it can also lead to a job in Silicon Valley and to the invention of the i-Phone or to living in a cave in the Mojave Desert. So it's swings and roundabouts. It's the American dream. It's the reason why the advice to 'drop out' was the hardest pill to swallow and caused the most alarm because it could potentially ruin the careers of a good many students or middle class men with mortgage payments.
And there's the nub. Dr Leary whilst addressing anyone who would listen was being picked up on by a largely middle class demographic and this little fact was never being acknowledged. There was never any class analysis or class politics in any of Leary's words of advice. Does it matter, you might ask? Well yes it does, particularly when considering the social impact Leary had upon a generation.
The immediately striking thing on reading The Politics Of Ecstasy is how Timothy Leary is such an eloquent writer. He's like a cosmologist poet - or a poet cosmologist. He's like a cut-and-dried case for when sending an astronaut into space to send one with at least a grasp of poetry rather than some of the meatheads NASA sends up and on being asked what the view is like they reply "Great!" or "Neat!".
Leary was, of course, a sort of astronaut himself but of innerspace rather than outer. A clinical psychologist, a personality astrologist, a scientific messiah of sorts whose arguments many of which were irrefutable.
'Your body is the universe.' he declared 'The ancient wisdom of Gnostics, Hermetics, Sufis, Tantric gurus, yogis, occult healers. What is without is within. Your body is the mirror of the macrocosm. The kingdom of heaven is within you.' And who could argue with that? Buzz Aldrin?
Likewise with his condoning and advocacy of 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.' And who could argue with that? Isaac Newton?
The Politics Of Ecstasy is a collection of articles, transcribed lectures and interviews presented as a testament to Leary's psychedelic/ecstatic vision. Unlike his 'turn on, tune in, drop out' slogan, however, it's not a vision cast in stone but more an ongoing, organic one. It's a vision buffeted both forwards and backwards by ongoing drug experimentation along with reaction and retaliation from what Leary calls the 'middle-aged menopausal mind system'. Authority, in other words. The Establishment and the protectors of it. The defenders of the status quo. The Ronald Reagans and the J Edgar Hoovers of this world.
Leary understands but tends not to forgive: 'One of the terrible things 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.'
And Leary's solution? Turn them on, baby. Offer them the sacrament. Turn on your parents and even your grandparents. With consent, ideally, though Leary doesn't stop short at seeing it as a wholly bad thing if the Viet Cong were to drop LSD into the water supply. As a cherry on the cake he also thinks there should be laws that allow people to vote at puberty and that voting be taken away at menopause - that no one over the age of fifty should be allowed to vote.
When Leary's saying these things it's like he's riffing on a theme but one that hasn't been clearly thought out. LSD in the water supply would be a major acting of 'spiking' without any precision behind it so would be pretty irresponsible if not reprehensible. Not allowing voting for the over-fifties opens the door wide open to all kinds of other things to be disallowed, leading ultimately down the path to Logan's Run territory. Opening up voting upon hitting puberty leads on to standing for election at the same age and whilst being governed by old duffers with their fingers up their arse and their eye on their stocks and shares is no joy, being governed by a twelve-year old spotty brat could be even less so.
'American culture,' Leary tells us 'is an insane asylum. The Western world has been on a bad trip, a 400-year old bummer. War heroics. Guilt. Puritan ethics, grim, serious, selfish, striving.' LSD in the meantime is 'the spiritual equivalent of the hydrogen bomb'. It's not a narcotic, it's not a medical drug and it doesn't cure any illness. It is instead a new form of energy that will sweep the user 'over the edge of a sensory Niagara into a maelstrom of transcendental visions and hallucinations'. And where's the problem with that? It's almost the kind of thing you might want to have available for free on the National Health.
'There's no such thing as an overdose of LSD,' Leary continues 'There's no known lethal quantity.' So why the big moral panic over it? Why the prohibition? Why has the possession of it, the use of it, the manufacturing of it etc, etc been made illegal? Fear, says Leary. The fear of everything the Established Order stands for becoming obsolete and crashing down, or at least fading away into insignificance. But why then has this not yet happened? Why is there still a constipated Established Order governing a mutually constipated populace? Patently, LSD doesn't lead to psychomania but neither does it lead to a Jesus Christ complex and the creation of heaven on earth. So what does it lead to? Well, that's the beauty of it. LSD leads only to you, the imbiber. It leads to the mirror, to your own reflection. LSD takes you home.
'Write your own life,' Leary advises as a final parting shot. 'Start your own religion. Write your own bible. Write your own ten commandments. Start your own political system.
Reader, write your own Politics of Ecstasy.'
John Serpico
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