TURN ON. Why do we so favor this language of the "turn on" for all things psychedelic and, hence, wikidelic? Our only analogy for the novelty and seemingly infinite potential of psychedelic experience was a machinic one -we chose to compare ourselves to an informational machine both digital and analog. "Turn on" is digital, announcing as it does a discrete state of "on" or "off." So Leary's mantra begins with an experimental performative mapping of ourselves as Boolean machines.TUNE IN. "Tune in" resounds with the suddenly enormous freedom to metaprogram this obviously interactive - and hence, for Leary, cybernetic - machine we momentarily map ourselves as. As a third order cybernetic operation, ( a map of a map of a map that clears new territories) "Drop Out" tunes the tuning toward the most proximate bit of order with which we have an analogy, with which we are continuous -a "sample" of the former self which is then dropped, released. Any aspect of ourselves for which we do not have a satisifying narrative, either (1) produces a narrative, and in a jiffy, through difficulty and out or (2) is released due to inability to narrate. This penchant for letting go of some accrued noise (Gelassenheit as Eckhart dubbed it) seems to initiate a tropism toward re-imagining self in the Light of Self.DROP OUT. So "dropping out" was anything but a "giving up", but was instead an intensification of personal yes spiritual iinformational rhetorical evolution necessary to the next stage of the human and transhuman adventure. Add to the mix that this brings out larger structures within which we are embedded ( See the Witkin Embedded Figure Test and its responsiveness to psychdelics, and Pop goes the dissipative structure - the noosphere! Psychedelics offered a rhetorical re-orientation, a living within Korzybski's "The Map is Not the Territory" that lets go of linguistic phenomena as anything but labels for our benefit and evolution. When I drank ayahuasca, I learned to let go of former versions of my self that were not sustainable in the context of larger versions of my Self ( ecosystem), and I did so by releasing them and seeing them for what they are - aspects of my self and not my Self, maps and not territories.
Leary famously gave out the mantra "Turn on, Tune in, Drop Out", and we seem unable to hear the original context of this "drop out", which was really a "dropping in" to radical learning through the breakdown of established rhetorical habit structures. From the beginning, Leary treated the sacred context of psychedelics as both fundamental and implicit in the rest of his work. In this way Wiki is in its way as psychedelic as LSD. It "manifests" "mind", but hints at a collective mind, a Millbrook for the Noosphere. So we are "turned on" to our evolutionary feelin' through sexual selection in evolution, a sorting of our selves by our Selves in intensive, ecstatic mutual self examination. To put it in primate terms, the self is put under the microscope by the Self, and groomed. Mobius has written of the "ecodelic hypothesis" in his forthcoming tome, and with the right googlin you can find it!
