Welcome to our collection of quotes by Timothy Leary. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Timothy Leary
Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an American psychologist and writer known for his strong advocacy of psychedelic drugs. Evaluations of Leary are polarized, ranging from bold oracle to publicity hound. He was "a hero of American consciousness", according to Allen Ginsberg, and Tom Robbins called him a "brave neuronaut".
As a clinical psychologist at Harvard University, Leary worked on the Harvard Psilocybin Project from 1960 to 1962. He tested the therapeutic effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and psilocybin, which were still legal in the United States at the time, in the Concord Prison Experiment and the Marsh Chapel Experiment. The scientific legitimacy and ethics of his research were questioned by other Harvard faculty because he took psychedelics along with research subjects and pressured students to join in. However, the claims that Leary pressured unwilling students was denied by one of Leary's students, Robert Thurman. Leary and his colleague, Richard Alpert (who later became known as Ram Dass), were fired from Harvard University in May 1963. Many people of the time only came to know of psychedelics after the Harvard scandal.
Leary believed that LSD showed potential for therapeutic use in psychiatry. He used LSD himself and developed a philosophy of mind expansion and personal truth through LSD. After leaving Harvard, he continued to publicly promote the use of psychedelic drugs and became a well-known figure of the counterculture of the 1960s. He popularized catchphrases that promoted his philosophy, such as "turn on, tune in, drop out", "set and setting", and "think for yourself and question authority". He also wrote and spoke frequently about transhumanist concepts of space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension (SMI²LE). Leary developed the eight-circuit model of consciousness in his book Exo-Psychology (1977) and gave lectures, occasionally billing himself as a "performing philosopher".
During the 1960s and 1970s, he was arrested 36 times worldwide. President Richard Nixon once described Leary as "the most dangerous man in America".
Philosophy is a performance sport -- you have to play it with somebody back and forth.
People use the word 'natural' ... What is natural to me is these botanical species which interact directly with the nervous system. What I consider artificial is 4 years at Harvard, and the Bible, and Saint Patrick's Cathedral, and the Sunday school teachings.
One cannot evolve from one's robothood until one realizes how totally one has been robotized.
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.
Followers do not like themselves, of course; that's why they crawl. And masters have nothing but contempt for their subservants, which is why they impose such colorful embarrassments upon them.
The twentieth century may well find historical status as the epoch in which man began to study himself as a scientific phenomenon.
Our assignment was to topple this prudish, judgmental civilization. And it worked.
When people criticize the computer generation, the high tech generation, and say they neglect the body -- well, just walk through a college campus, and you'll see the healthiest, most physically conscious and alert group of human beings I've ever met. So they're not nerds at all.
I totally deplore the notion of an M.D. giving pills to patients -- a medical doctor giving psychological or psychoactive change agents to another person.
I have always considered myself, when I learned what the word meant, I've always considered myself a Pagan.
You are a powerful, unlimited and eternal soul who is here to enjoy the experience of creativity and contribute to humanity's evolution.
The language of God is not English or Latin; the language of God is cellular and molecular.
Prayer is ecstatic communication with your innernavigational computer.
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.
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.
My advice to myself and to everyone else, particularly young people, is to turn on, tune in and drop out.
Longer Version:
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.
By drop out, I mean to detach yourself from involvement in secular, external social games.
I think that marijuana makes you stupid but sensual. I've watched many of my friends and loved ones become more erotic and dumber -- just going around with a glazed expression on their faces from their last orgasms to the next -- and found them really quite boring.
A man without justice is a beast, and a man who would make himself a beast forgets the pain of being a man.
That intermediate manifestation of the divine process which we call the DNA code has spent the last 2 billion years making this planet a Garden of Eden.
To the elitist hedonist, life is the avoidance of boredom and routine.
In a carefully prepared, loving LSD session, a woman will inevitably have several hundred orgasms.
Half the things I've done are wrong, mistakes unintelligible. The moratorium on pot and LSD a year ago is ridiculous. I shouldn't have done that. I make a blunder at least one out of two times I come to bat.
Science fictions are suppressed only when likely to contribute more knowledge and freedom than the defensive orthodoxies they challenge.
One cannot understand the rhythms and meanings of the outer world until one has mastered the dialects of the body.
Extraterrestrial intelligence could have sent DNA-seed packets out through space to plant life on hospitable planets such as earth.
Psychedelic drugs cause paranoia, confusion, and total loss of reality in politicians that have never taken them.
You simply cannot understand psychedelic drugs, which activate the brain, unless you understand something about computers.
The danger of psychedelic drugs, the danger of mind-opening, the danger of consciousness expansion, the danger of inner discovery is a danger to the establishment.
I am 100 percent in favor of the intelligent use of drugs, and 1,000 percent against the thoughtless use of them, whether caffeine or LSD. And drugs are not central to my life.
Romantic poetry and fiction of the last 2000 years has blinded us to the fact that emotions are a low form of jungle consciousness. Emotional actions are the most contracted, dangerous form of fanatic stupor.
When men set out to kill and bully, they dress up. Suit of armor. Combat boots. Uniform.
We seem to inhabit a universe made up of a small number of elements-particles-bits that swirl in chaotic clouds, occasionally clustering together in geometrically logical temporary configurations.
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.
Giger's work disturbs us, spooks us, because of its enormous evolutionary time span. It shows us, all too clearly, where we come from and where we are going.
Individual societies begin in harmonious adaptation to the environment and, like individuals, quickly get trapped into nonadaptive, artificial, repetitive sequences.
Longer Version:
Individual societies begin in harmonious adaptation to the environment and, like individuals, quickly get trapped into nonadaptive, artificial, repetitive sequences. When the individual's behavior and consciousness get hooked to a routine sequence of external actions, he is a dead robot, and it is time for him to die and be reborn. Time to "drop out," "turn on," and "tune in.
The role of anxiety in the development of human personality is central, and it is intricate beyond our understanding.
The first narcotics bust in history is Jehovah busting Adam and Eve for eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge.
I learned more about psychology in the five hours after taking these mushrooms than in the preceding 15 years of studying and doing research in psychology.
Secrecy is the original sin. The fig leaf in the Garden of Eden. The basic crime against love.
I declare that The Beatles are mutants.
Longer Version:
I declare that The Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen.
Current psychological priesthoods ignore the fact that the profession of psychology was originated by Gustav Theodor Fechner, a physicist who recognized that the key to understanding human nature was the relationship between external stimuli and the brain.
My historical reading of the situation is that these great monolithic empires developed, Rome, Turkey, and so forth, and they always break down when enough people, and it's always the young, the creative, and minority groups drop out and go back to a tribal form.
The neurogenetic meaning of the cultural revolution is now clear. Neurochemicals are designed to be pursuitist, not escapist. They open the nervous system to the possibilities of future post-terrestrial evolution.
If you listen to neurologists and psychiatrists, you'd never fall in love.
If you want to move beyond hive-docility, you must become God the Moralist.
In pursuing my fervent goal of relating external stimuli to reports about internal-neural change, we were, paradoxically enough, following the most orthodox tradition in psychology.
At one point consciousness-altering devices like the microscope and telescope were criminalized for exactly the same reasons that psychedelic plants were banned in later years. They allow us to peer into bits and zones of Chaos.
The brain is not a blind, reactive machine, but a complex, sensitive biocomputer that we can program. And if we don't take the responsibility for programming it, then it will be programmed unwittingly by accident or by the social environnement.
The brain is a robot-computer perfectly designed to fabricate any reality we program it to construct.
Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others.
Pursuing the religious life today without using psychedelics drugs is like studying astronomy with the naked eye because that's how they did it in the first century A.D.
Recite to yourself some of the traditional attributes of the word 'spiritual': mythic, magical, ethereal, incorporeal, intangible, nonmaterial, disembodied, ideal, platonic. Is that not a definition of the electronic-digital?
The mission of DNA is to evolve nervous systems able to escape from the doomed planet and contact manifestations of the same amino-acid seeding that have evolved in other solar systems. The mission is the message -- to escape and come home.
LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have NOT taken it.
My favorite three words in the English language are: 'I don't know', because every time I say them, I learn something new.
If you want to change the way people respond to you, change the way you respond to people.
From my first published paper in 1946, my obsession has been to objectify inner experiences, to demystify the software of human existence. How? By relating changes in external behavior, systematically and lawfully, to changes in the brain.
I'd just like to see thinking come back in style. I haven't heard a new idea in eight years. Let's get ordinary people arguing and talking again. I want to trigger new circuits in their nervous systems. That's the philosopher's job and I am the most important philosopher at this time.
At the peak of his scientific triumphs, Newton became a 'head,' a student of the inner spiritual world -- or in modern terms, a neurologician. Modern physicists do not dwell on this dramatic life-change in their hero.
Everything we did in the 1960s was designed to fission, to weaken faith in and conformity to the 1950s social order. Our precise surgical target was the Judeo-Christian power monolith, which has imposed a guilty, inhibited, grim, anti-body, anti-life repression on Western civilization.
What human beings consciously wish is often quite at variance with the results their reflex patterns automatically create for them.
Acid is not for every brain .... Only the healthy, happy, wholesome, handsome, hopeful, humorous, high-velocity should seek these experiences. This elitism is totally self-determined. Unless you are self-confident, self-directed, self-selected, please abstain.
After you turn on, don't spend the rest of your life contemplating the inner wonders. Begin immediately expressing your revelation in acts of beauty.
Each religion has got their own way of making you feel like a victim. The Christians say you are a sinner, and you better just zip up your trousers and give the money to the pope and we'll give you a room up in the hotel in the sky.
Almost everyone today is brain-damaged by our education which is designed to produce docile automatons.
When our systematic knowledge of human expressive behavior is more advanced, it will be possible to study the literary and historical documents of the past and to determine the expressed and implied views of personality that determined the behavior of our ancestors.
To describe externals, you become a scientist. To describe experience, you become an artist.
There are no bad drugs. There's simply stupid people who don't know how to use them.