I was at the store looking at this book by Huston Smith, about entheogenic drug use in religion, and there was a quote from Timothy Leary in it, about how working forces you to think in a certain way, and that you should quit your job. For good. And that institutional education constricts and suffocates natural learning, and that you should quit school. For good. And I was all like, “Whoohoo! Hell yeah!” And that made me come home and see if I could find the quote from him online. But alas. Those damn hippied out websites are so poorly organized. It fucking pisses me off. These people need to stop smoking pot and dropping acid for like 15 minutes, and figure out how to communicate with the rest of the world, because its really not that goddamn hard, and will make what they are doing about a billion times more effective.

Anyway, some other things I found: From Robert Anton Wilson, on that annoying yet sometimes informative site, Fusion Anomaly, about Metaprogramming:

“As Leary points out, ‘The more conscious and intelligent you become, the more you want to become even more conscious and intelligent.’ Until now, we have never come close to understanding the self-teaching capabilities of the human brain. It is possible, and not unlikely, that even such geniuses as Da Vinci, Beethoven, or Einstein are only partial foreshadowings of what the turned-on brain can do.’ “

And also from Douglas Rushkoff - I think what he’s describing is what I do to my mind all the time on purpose, and without drugs (good example is last night):

One of the primary features of the psychedelic experience as it relates to the human computer hardware, believes Ron Lawrence, a Macintosh expert from Los Angeles who archives Tim Leary’s writing, is that it “reformats the hard disk and clears out the ram.'’ That is, one’s experience of life is reevalutated in an egoless context and put into a new order. One sees previously unrecognizable connections between parallel ways of thinking, parallel cultures, ideologies, stories, systems of logic, and philosophies. Meanwhile, trivial cares of the moment are given the opportunity to melt away (even if in the gut-wrenching crucible of intense introspection), and the tripper may reenter everyday life without many of the cognitive traps that previously dominated his interpretation of reality. In other words, the tripper gains the ability to see things in an unprejudiced manner, like the computer does.

There’s also a lot of really good quotes on their page about “Autodidacts” or people who are self taught.

I wish this damn fusion anomaly site was organized differently, cause its so clumsy. Like I see what they are going for obviously. I am not stupid. Its this idea of interconnected nodes of information that I am always talking about, and sure, fine, thats great. But that doesn mean you need to have a bunch of crazy colors and like flashing gimmicky bullshit everywhere, just to prove how “psychedelic” your content is. Plus they have all these really good quotes, which are completely unattributed, so I cant research them any farther. And there are references to all these media files, none of which you can download. What the goddamn hell! Seriously irritates me to no end, cause it compromises the quality of all of it.

A similar, and slightly better site is Deoxy.org. Well, actually its a lot better, but still has some shit that pisses me off. But at least they are damn trying. Jesus christ!