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.
Timothy LearyRead
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.
Interpretation
Focus on internal growth and self-awareness before making external changes in your life.
Timothy Leary's quote emphasizes the importance of inner reflection and personal evolution as prerequisites for any meaningful changes in external circumstances. He advocates for a mindset shift, suggesting that to truly engage with life, one must first detach from societal pressures and superficial commitments, thereby enabling genuine self-discovery and transformation.
In practice
In a motivational seminar discussing personal development.
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.
Think for yourself and question authority.
There are three side effects of acid: enhanced long-term memory, decreased short-term memory, and I forget the third.
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 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.
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_x000D_ 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_x000D_ telescopes are unnatural.
Cleverness, after all, has its limitations. Its mechanical judgments and clever remarks tend to prove inaccurate with passing time, because it doesn't look very deeply into things to begin with.
True economy consists in always making the income exceed the out-go. Wear the old clothes a little longer if necessary; dispense with the new pair of gloves; mend the old dress: live on plainer food if need be; so that, under all circumstances, unless some unforeseen accident occurs, there will be a margin in favor of the income.
Many have made a trade of delusions and false miracles, deceiving the stupid multitudes.
Fortunately, problems are an everyday part of our life. Consider this: If there were no problems, most of us would be unemployed.
You can't have good ideas unless you have lots of ideas.
Adversity has the effect of eliciting talents which, in prosperous circumstances, would have lain dormant.
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