(This column discusses basic “tune in” methods. The next installment suggests harmonious “dropout” methods.)
Psychedelic drugs make it possible to reach a wide range of consciousness. The experienced psychedelic religionist can move consciousness from one level to another, just like focusing a microscope or telescope.
But then what?
So what?
The experience must be communicated, harmonized with the greater flow.
The psychedelic experience is not just an internal, private affair. The “turned on” person realizes that he is not an isolated entity, a separate social ego, but rather one transient energy process hooked up with the energy dance around him.
The “turned on” person is sensitively aware of his own movements, as gestures in the great ballet of evolution.
The “turned on” person realizes that every action is a reflection of where he is at.
The “turned on” person knows that his environment, his world, is created by his consciousness -existing only because he has arranged his sensory and neural cameras to shoot these particular scenes.
The “turned on” person knows that his movements, his dress, his grooming, his room, his house, the neighborhood in which he lives is an exact external replica of his state-of-consciousness. If the out- side environment doesn’t harmonize with his state of mind, he knows that he must move gracefully to get in tune.
“Tune in” means to arrange your environment so that it reflects your state of consciousness.
“Tune in” means to harness your internal energy to the flow around you.
These last few lines contain the most practical, liberating message you have ever received. If you understand this message, you are free to live a life of beauty.
YOUR STATE OF CONSCIOUSNESS IS REFLECTED IN YOUR ENVIRONMENT. YOU CREATE YOUR ENVIRONMENT. Let us consider a sad illumination. The Manhattan office worker. He works in a dark room, foul with polluted air. He moves through a clutter of factory-made, anonymous furniture to a celluloid bathroom and a plastic impersonal kitchen. He eats breakfast of canned, packaged anonymous celluloid food-fuel. He dresses himself in the anonymous costume of the robot city-dweller, cotton underwear, socks, shoes, shirt, tie jacket. He travels through dark tunnels of sooty metal and grey concrete to a metal box office.
There he deals all day with symbols on pieces of tape, which have no relevance to his divine possibilities of sense, seed, cell membrane.
He uses the money he makes to pay for his celluloid food and his foul-air apartment.
This man is surrounded by an environment which is dreary, polluted, dead, impersonal, assembly-line, mass-produced, anonymous.
This is the environment of an automated robot. It is his robot state of unconsciousness which creates his environment. This external world perfectly mirrors his “turned off” awareness.
When this man “turns on” he sees at once the horror of his mind reflected in his surroundings. If he “tunes in” he begins to change his movements and his surroundings so that they become more in harmony with his internal beauty.
If everyone in Manhattan were to “turn on” and “tune in,” grass would grow on First Avenue and tie-less, shoe-less divinities would dance down the car-less streets. (This will happen within twenty-five years. Deer will graze down St. Mark’s Place.)
Every action of a human being reflects his state of consciousness. Therefore, every person is an artist—i.e., one who communicates his experience. Most people are not “tuned in” consciously. They experience only in terms of static, tired robot symbols. Therefore, their actions and their surroundings are robot. Dead art.
After you “turn on” you must “tune in.” You must start changing your dress, your home, your sequence of movements, your environment, so that it reflects the grandeur and glory of your divine vision. You must look and act different.
But this process of “tuning in” must be harmonious and graceful. No abrupt destructive, rebellious actions, please!
Start “tuning in” through your body movements. Walk, talk, eat, drink like a forest-dwelling joyous God.
Next change your dwelling place. If you have to live in the city for the time being arrange your apartment so that it becomes a shrine. Throw out all furniture that is not sacred-psychedelic. Your room should reflect a timeless, eternal beauty with no 20th century impersonal gadgets. Every object should be psychedelic, should make immediate sense to the sense organs of a visiting Buddha, Christ, Lao Tse.
When you have made your body a sacred temple and your apartment a sacred shrine dedicated to psychedelic beauty, you will be ready to change your broader social commitments. Do not “drop out” until you have “tuned in.” Do not “turn on” unless you know how to “tune in.”
If you “turn on” without “tuning in” you will get psychotically “hung up.”
Every “bad trip” is caused by the failure to “tune in.”
Here’s why:
When you “tune in” you trigger off energy. Pot flicks on sensory energy. Hashish to somatic energy. LSD to cellular energy. High dose LSD to molecular energy.
These forceful energies must not be harnessed to a trivial ego game. You cannot hook up 100 million years of sensory-somatic revelation to your puny, trivial personality chess board. You cannot hook up 2 billion years of evolutionary revelation to your squalid social game.
This is why marijuana and LSD are religious sacraments. If they are used in a non-religious setting they will inevitably, sooner or later, freak you out.
I have personally followed over 5,000 persons who have begun the Yoga of LSD. The large majority have had to “turn off,” “tune out,” “cop out,” because they would not harness their tuned in energies to a more harmonious game. Once a week is the natural sequence for the sacramental use of LSD. But you cannot take LSD once a week and stay rigidly rooted in a low level ego game. You have to harness the flow or you will have a bad trip.
To continue to use LSD you must generate out around you an ever widening ring of “tuned in” actions.
You must hook up your inner power to a life of beauty.
EXERCISES
1) Go home and look at yourself in the mirror. Start changing your dress, your behavior, so that you float like a God, not shuffle like a robot.
2) Look around your home. What kind of dead robot lives here? Start throwing out everything that is not “tuned in” to your highest vision.
Make your body a temple.
Make your home a shrine.
You are a God, live like one!