What does Timothy Leary’s expression “Turn on, tune in, drop out” mean?
When we reflect on the countercultural era, we often think of it through the prism of music and its leading lights, such as The Beatles, the Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and the rest. However, given that hippiedom was a very all-encompassing broad church, other figures played an even more significant role by providing it with a philosophical foundation, underpinning all the creative endeavours it produced. One man who had a defining role in the essence of the subculture was Dr Timothy Leary.
Leary was an American psychologist and author known for his advocacy of and experimentation with psychedelic drugs. Due to the nature of his work, he was a controversial figure. This saw him celebrated by fellow pioneer of countercultural philosophy Allen Ginsberg and other like-minded folk such as Tom Robbins but hated by the conservative establishment, with President Nixon even dubbing him “the most dangerous man in America”. Famously, he had many brushes with the law and was arrested 36 times during the hippie period.
Adding credence to Leary’s work for the believers was that he was a clinical psychologist at Harvard University and founded the Harvard Psilocybin Project in 1960 after a trip he’d experienced in Mexico. After that, he started testing the effects of LSD and psilocybin – legal in the US at the time – as therapy. Given he was working at the pinnacle of the Ivy League, others at the university questioned his scientific legitimacy, and he was eventually fired.
Regardless, Leary would come to be a driving force behind the use of psychedelics and countercultural thought, with his philosophy of mind expansion and finding personal truth through LSD widely influential. His 1964 book The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead had a transformative effect on John Lennon and inspired him to turn The Beatles psychedelic.
While Leary popularised several catchphrases that promoted his philosophy, none are as famous as “turn on, tune in, drop out”. He first popularised it in 1966 with a speech in New York before it was made truly historic when he used it the following year at the Human Be-in in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.
So, what does “Turn on, tune in, drop out” mean?
In a 1988 interview, Leary claimed that his famous slogan was actually “given” to him by Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan when they were lunching in New York. According to him, the influential media theorist McLuhan started singing to the harmony of the day’s Pepsi commercial, which at one point included the line: “‘Tune in, turn on, and drop out.'” Leary then used the phrase in a press conference on September 19th, 1966, when he urged people to embrace cultural change by using psychedelics and break off from established conventions.
In his 1983 autobiography, Flashbacks, Leary explained what the phrase meant to him: “‘Turn on’ meant go within to activate your neural and genetic equipment. Become sensitive to the many and various levels of consciousness and the specific triggers engaging them. Drugs were one way to accomplish this end. ‘Tune in’ meant interact harmoniously with the world around you—externalize, materialize, express your new internal perspectives.”
Continuing: “‘Drop out’ suggested an active, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments. ‘Drop Out’ meant self-reliance, a discovery of one’s singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily, my explanations of this sequence of personal development are often misinterpreted to mean ‘Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity'”.
