Ex-Counterculture Guru Finds His Brain Research Center Largely Unused : Mountain Man: World War II veteran seeks to teach people how to use the 90% of the brain that he says goes to waste. But now that pilgrims have stopped coming, his retreat is a lonely spot.

This raw, rugged country west of Denver has attracted thousands over the decades, searching for identity, truth or at least solace in the arch beauty of mountains and sky.

One of them was T.D.A. Lingo, who in turn attracted thousands more from the counterculture to hear his message: Nirvana was within reach without drugs.

It was the final station for Lingo, who came here in 1957 in a long trip that began in World War II when a buddy took a bullet meant for him and died in Lingo’s arms. For Lingo it was a mandate to find out why people kill each other and to understand the human brain.

Way stations included careers as a radio personality and folk singer and a $16,000 prize on a network quiz show that bought him 250 acres of this mountain paradise, which he calls the Dormant Brain Research and Development Laboratory.

There Lingo sought the therapeutic value of bonfires, all-night parties and joyful sunrises over a high meadow on Laughing Coyote Mountain. The recipients were thousands of young people, and Lingo was their guru.

Those seekers are largely gone now.

At 67, Lingo is alone on his 250-acre spread. His brain research is finished. He awaits the “brain revolution.”

Lingo still wants to teach people how to release the 90% of the brain he says goes unused. He says that through simple exercises, people can release their frontal lobes and reach nirvana--a total-happiness, out-of-body, at-one-with-God, super-intelligent experience.

Without a universal brain revolution, Lingo says, humanity is doomed.

With gray hair that reaches past his shoulders, a beard and a smell of smoke about him, Lingo has the look of a wild mountain man. His voice booms and his hands sweep in gesture one minute, and the next he clamps his hands on his knees and speaks softly and pointedly.

Only a few years remain before AIDS, economic disaster, race wars or overpopulation destroys civilization, he says.

“I’ve got my marshmallows up here, so if there’s a conflagration down there, I can sit up here and roast marshmallows and watch the world go to hell,” Lingo says.

“My life’s work is over, until somebody wants this information. I can’t force it on anybody.”

Lingo studied at several universities until a University of Chicago professor told him to leave academia because it was too slow and conservative.

He lives primitively, using a hand pump to coax water from the ground. The only electrical power is a generator to run an old printing press. He has no telephone.

In the 1950s he was a folk singer known as the Drifter, described by the Denver Post as “the buckskin balladeer of Lookout Mountain.”

He talked philosophy with the father of singer Judy Collins, and helped introduce the future star--then a shy teen-ager--to folk music.

He also had a Denver radio show, and he appeared on Groucho Marx’s “You Bet Your Life.” He won his grubstake on NBC’s “High-Low” in 1957.

Between 1957 and 1966, Lingo and others brought children between 6 and 16 years old to the mountain. He said Denver-area teachers and juvenile detention centers put him in touch with troubled but intelligent children.

Those children built the half-dozen log-and-stone cabins on the mountain, Lingo says, pointing out the kid-size doorway to the cabin he uses for his 5,000-volume library.

“We were curing them,” Lingo says. “All of a sudden one of the judges down in Denver said, ‘Hey, I’m not going to send any more of my juvenile delinquents because you’re curing them, and if this catches on, I’m going to be out of a job!”

By the summer of 1966 the camp was closed. Welfare officials refused Lingo’s requests for a license, citing inadequate sanitary and safety standards.

Then Lingo’s Center began research on young adults, and Laughing Coyote Mountain became a draw for the counterculture.

“I had a rule, ‘If you have any dope on you, bury it right now,”’ Lingo said. “Because the sheriff was watching me. And everybody agreed.”

Now Lingo has five to 10 visitors a month, and carries on correspondence with serious brain students around the world. He’s publishing a book on an old printing press.

Once or twice a month, he travels to Black Hawk, a town of about 200, to pick up his mail and to chat with his only friend left in the area, Postmaster Tony Trujillo.

“He’s a wonderful person. He’s just kind of eccentric,” Trujillo says. “He’s very intelligent. Sometimes he comes in with a flower in his hair.”

Lingo’s philosophy seems to be an amalgam of messages. He believes people can heal themselves only by cathartic release of childhood traumas.

Like aboriginal peoples, he believes all things--animals, rocks, flowers--have living spirits. Like New-Agers, he believes meditation and creative visualization can release trauma-bound energy.

He says the only difference between his message and others’ is that they sell their message.

But neurosurgeon Robert Breeze of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center thinks anyone who says humans use only 10% of their brains is “out to lunch.”

“I have never understood what people mean by that,” Breeze said. “It’s not like there’s a big area of the brain we’re not using. That’s the sort of thing you read in a comic book; there’s no scientific basis.”

Lingo opens a black box and removes a real skull. He then pulls a stocking cap off a large glass jar, revealing a rubbery mass coated in white powder: a brain preserved in formaldehyde.

“That’s the brain that taught me. At least, got me started on what I was doing,” Lingo says.

It is the brain of the professor at the University of Chicago. He left Lingo his brain in his will.