My advice to people today is as follows: if you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out.

Timothy Leary’s slogan “turn on, tune in, drop out” emerged at the height of the 1960s counterculture, when he was publicly advocating psychedelic experience (especially LSD) as a tool for personal and social transformation. The phrasing is closely associated with his appearances and speeches in 1966–1967, after his Harvard-era psychedelic research and amid growing legal and political backlash against drug use. In this formulation, Leary frames the slogan as “advice” grounded in taking one’s body and perception seriously—linking the counterculture’s interest in consciousness expansion to a quasi-scientific vocabulary of the nervous system, sense organs, and “energy” processes.

Leary casts life as a “game” whose stakes are perception and consciousness. “Turn on” suggests activating awareness—often via psychedelics in Leary’s usage—while “tune in” implies aligning oneself with one’s environment, community, and inner signals rather than inherited social scripts. “Drop out” is the most provocative: not mere apathy, but a deliberate refusal of institutions and routines that, in his view, dull perception and constrain autonomy. The rhetoric blends scientific-sounding physiology with spiritual self-fashioning, presenting altered consciousness as both a personal discipline and a cultural critique of mid-century conformity.