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Does "Turning on" refer to "beginning your counter-cultural action"?

 
 
Reply Wed 27 May, 2015 02:25 am

Context:

However, we should not be too quick to feel nostalgia for the counterculture of the 1960s. Yes, crucial breakthroughs were made, socially and psychologically, and drugs were central to the process, but one need only read accounts of the time, such as Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem, to see the problem with a society bent upon rapture at any cost. For every insight of lasting value produced by drugs, there was an army of zombies with flowers in their hair shuffling toward failure and regret. Turning on, tuning in, and dropping out is wise, or even benign, only if you can then drop into a mode of life that makes ethical and material sense and doesn't leave your children wandering in traffic.

- Waking Up by Sam Harris
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FBM
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Reply Wed 27 May, 2015 03:10 am
Wow. That's an oldie: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_on,_tune_in,_drop_out

It means to get high on drugs, iirc.
oristarA
 
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Reply Wed 27 May, 2015 03:43 am
@FBM,
Cool!

Quote:
"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 that engage 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. "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 were often misinterpreted to mean "Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity".[4]
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PUNKEY
 
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Reply Wed 27 May, 2015 07:45 am
"Turn on, tune in, drop out" is a counterculture-era phrase popularized by Timothy Leary in 1966. In 1967 Leary spoke at the Human Be-In, a gathering of 30,000 hippies in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and uttered the famous phrase, "Turn on, tune in, drop out".
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