tune in, turn on, turn on

i started reading a book by timothy leary this afternoon entitled, change your brain. i think leary was a genuis. he figured some good stuff out. i think he tumbled to what is going on around here.

some examples -- he notes in this book that:

Culture is the Game Master

"Cultural stability is maintained by preventing people from seeing that the roles, rules, goals, rituals, language, and values of society are game structures. Cultural institutions encourage the delusion that games have inevitable givens, involving unchangeable laws of behavior...it is treason not to play the nationaliality game, the racial game, the religious game (p.20)."

exposing these games for what they are can be very, very frightening for both those that are doing the exposing and those that are recieving the exposing. we like our games, find safety, and reassurance in them. we don't want them taken away from us.

curiously, what he found through his research (and it was quite scientific at the beginning) was that when the games were exposed on an individual level (he calls a person a "human singularity" -- brilliant, IMO), what was left was, "...the uncensored cortex, activated, alert, and open to new realities, new imprints (p.22)." this sounds to me like that which many are looking for -- freedom, unbridled energy, awareness, wonder. reminds me of a blinking cursor --"whom shall we be today?"

i also realized that much of what i attributed (and attribute today) solely to my sociological understanding of things (when I was actively taking psychedelics twenty plus years ago) was really a combination of psychedelic experience made sense of sociologically. thank god for that, no telling what i would have figure out if i had been studying psychology or economics!!!

not advocating mind-altering substance use, but am advocating mind alteration. the one thing that psychedelics did do was break the routine of the socially-conditioned patterns of thinking, responding, being. i do think that this occurs though other means, too, not just substance use. what is there is important, not one way of getting there. i knew some people that were terrified of what was there -- the lack of social conditioning, the realization of how false most social interaction is, the superficiality of it all, yet the stability of it all, too. exposing its tentativeness, and contrivedness can be deeply discomforting.

so, I do like tuning in to what/who we really are, turning on to the potential that is there, and turning others on to that same potential.

finally, for me, psychedelia meets positive, liberating social change work.