Psych-Out

Tune in. Turn on. Drop out. This slogan was uttered by Timothy Leary to 30,000 hippies in Golden State Park. It was 1967 — prelude to the Summer of Love. Hippie culture and the language of psychedelia broke from our television sets right into our suburban living rooms.

The Age of Aquarius has given way to the Age of Silicon. Where once LSD and psilocybin churned the neural circuitry of a few hippie brains, now my entire species is being doused by the continuous humming, buzzing and bleeping of pockets, purses, and hip-holsters alive with electronic gadgetry. Cellphone? Check. Blackberry? Check. I-pod? You betcha!

Plug in, turn up, and tune out suburbia. And suburbia is everywhere.

Now, I’m not a Luddite grinding my axe in anticipation of some anti-technology uprising. But something is unsettling about all this bleeping. As a psychotherapist, I’ve noticed a drastic rise in psychological troubles tied directly to the hows, whens, and whys of technology usage. Whether it be cyber-gaming, cyber-love, endless interruptions of one’s personal life by e-mail, cellphones and text messages, people feel their flesh-and-blood lives have indeed been broken into. One personal friend of mine counted with horror that he’d spent the equivalent of a full seven months out of his year locked inside that 3 by 4 foot space around his computer screen. (And that didn’t include work hours!)

Who needs LSD? We have Youtube.

Age of Aquarius, from electronica

It was Marshall McLuhan who taught us how the form of a medium, more than its content, alters our senses. All of this electric circuitry plugged into our ears and before our eyes has morphed into an extension of our central nervous systems - a kind of technological skin we can now wear to restaurants. We even live our lives and conduct our relationships inside of these gadgets.

How many times have I tried to leave my cell phone at home, or not check my e-mail for the umpteenth time, or avoid plugging into one of the many technological contraptions that I keep around for my comfort and entertainment, only to find myself feeling as if tweaked by a phantom limb. Try it. Notice how long before the panic sets in.

I braced myself. I committed. My cellphone would remain on SILENT. No walking, nor driving when using it - and away from public. I’d portion my e-mail to twice a day. And watch that internet surfing! For the first 36 hours I went through something I can only characterize as withdrawal - anxiety, restlessness, emotional hand-wringing. But once I slipped free from the urgings of my technological skin to graft itself back in, low and behold, it’s as if I’d awakened to my real skin. I came to an eerie sensation that I’d come back into my body.

Beam me back down, Scottie.

Timothy Leary’s slogan didn’t really mean that we should drop out of the world and do a lot of drugs. His urging was that we do what it takes to open our minds to everything in and around us.

Tune in — interact with the world. Externalize, look around.

Turn on — activate your neural and genetic equipment. Access the layers of consciousness that are available by virtue of your human wiring.

Drop out — free yourself from all those unconscious and involuntary commitments not of your choosing. Amen!

We humans evolved over a span of a few million years hunting and gathering within wide-opened African savannas. Our senses evolved to respond to a simpler, yet more physically demanding pleistocene world. We’ve plugged ourselves into all of these comfort-gadgets for only a microsecond in relative time. Our genetic wiring has not adjusted. It’s making us all a little crazy.

Still, technology is not a devil I’ll ever want to exorcise completely, even if I could. These layers of technological devices are woven intricately into my day to day, and I must admit their benefits. No, this is a devil with whom I’ll have to dance. I’ve grown too accustomed to writing on a computer to ever go back.

Besides, where would I stop if gripped by some whack-brained effort to extricate myself completely? The manual typewriter? The quill? Chisel and stone? And how I still love surfing YouTube, and the intimacy of my I-pod where I can saunter down the street shuffling from Sinatra, to Talib Kwali, to Zepplin and Incubus. As for the cell-phone, nothing frees me up more when I need to touch base with my kids or confirm whether it’s chicken breast “with or without the bone.” It’s time for a strategy — for hard fought middle ground.

Marshall McLuhan reminded, “there is no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” For me I need stop and think at every point when I have that urge to plug in. It’s to be my new norm, not an exception — to live more hours unplugged than plugged so I not forget the play of the flesh and blood world upon my senses.

What’s that? It’s a real voice. A real set of eyes. A real person un-mediated by some byte of technological wizardry. Everyday I remind myself with this reworked mantra from the Summer of Love, “tune in, turn on, and drop out.”

Face-to-face eye-gazing.  Remember that?

So when that cell phone rings or that e-mail flags demanding some immediate response? “Sorry, man - you’ll have to improvise. I’m unplugged, right now.”