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Don't die. Every ego-poisoned critter you ever outshone will slither out to defame you for the rest of time. Never mind how weak-minded the accusation really is, how contrived the "proof", little men will make a living stripping their brothers and sisters of the benefits you left.
If you go to the video at the bottom of the image linked and riddled-with-factual-inaccuracies piece — Irvin will not stop insisting his "proofs" are nothing of the sort, doggedly increasing the volume of his hallucinatory takes on information that does not say what he keeps asserting over and over and over and over — calling you all kinds of names to make you stop pointing at his error — go ahead and try — and play the little snippet at issue, you will notice that McKenna says, "You mean, am I the alien ambassador whether I like it or not?" and mentions being at the end of his rope in La Chorrera in 1971 when "they" recruited him. If you have read True Hallucinations you will know that at La Chorrera, in the jungles of Colombia, he and even more his brother, eating mushrooms in conjunction with harmaline, felt they had experienced contact with aliens... with an alien intelligence. It is 100% crystal clear to anyone who has read or heard of their time in La Chorrera that he is speaking of being recruited by these aliens.
There can be no doubt of this because that was how he prefaced his answer to the man's question. He invokes the aliens, and he mentions the setting. There were no company men down there with them at the time. There are creatures on the other side of the mushroom, and not only according to Terence. I am not sure if these "aliens" of 1971 metamorphosed in his mind to become the "machine elves" he so often referred to later, but that's moot because he set the scene back at La Chorrera.
But it's not enough that it's just Jan Irvin working out his demons on Terence's memory by trying to muscle that "confession" into something it clearly wasn't to make his point. No, no, Jay Weidner has to chime in, take it to a broader public on Rense. The squished ego problem is made even more explicit with Weidner than the pathetic persistence of Irvin on this fantasy.
"Deep background" is a journalism term. It's about gathering information not to be published, even with anonymous attribution. It's about getting a feel for a subject that, while useful for the journalist's understanding, isn't explicit in the reporting. I suppose covert ops might come up with information that could be used as a sort of "deep background" for persons-of-interest's FBI or CIA files, but McKenna, clearly, was talking about deep background on the psilocybin aliens... "about which the less said the better"... because it was beyond the pale Out There and written about extensively already... and a deep background joke demands, by definition, that one does not go ahead and explain.
Then he gets shifted to "public relations"... for the psilocybin aliens... clearly. After his encounter with the aliens in La Chorrera, he spent the rest of his life doing public relations for psychedelic mushrooms. I have read his books and listened to many hours of his lectures and he never once did anything approximating PR for the feds. This is just ludicrous.
But the catch is, not many people out there are as thoroughly versed in Terence McKenna as I am, and whenever you try to speak sense to Irvin, he pulls his own litany of the debating fallacies he insists he reviles to blot out that ugly old inconvenient Reality. I know this because I have tried. Whenever you try to speak sense to Weidner, he simply starts raving that you are a bad person, a maniac, an ill-intensioned archon. I know this because I have tried.
It's utterly ludicrous.
Even if there were merit to it, which there simply is not, it doesn't bear on right now... on fixing the problem of social engineering and the soft kill going on all around us... let alone the slaughter and mayhem. So, not only is it transcendentally ludicrous, it's unspeakably trivial. I have not wanted to keep belaboring this precisely because it is so trivial, and intellectuals are notorious for compensating for their underdeveloped gonads this way... to the point where it is beneath mention. This is why I have stayed mum on it for so long, but today I find that it is starting to go viral.
I think to myself what harm comes of these assholes besmirching a dead man who helped so many people learn there is more to consciousness than the insufferable left-brain-farts Irvin and Weidner are letting off in our faces over their Terence McKenna envy? Their Esalen paranoia? Excuse me, but it's moot who put up the money for Eselan. I know intimately people who worked there for a long time... held workshops, lectured, met with peers there... and can say with authority that they had not Thing One or even Thing Point Zero Zero One to do with the feds... unless you count reviling them. So, but, do I want to spend my time seeming to be stumping for psychedelics? Is that worth enduring this shit to put forth?
Maybe it is. I don't think I needed psychedelics to convince me of the range of consciousness, to bump me out of my conditioned mentality long enough to get a glimpse of something more like the real landscape... mindscape... because I did, and do, that without assistance from plants or pharmacologic agents. I took psychedelics a few times and found it extremely interesting, learned a lot, but not vital to my personal growth. Except, I am weird. Yes, yes, I know this is a startling revelation, but my point is that most people, very evidently, could really use this clue... the psychedelic clue. Not that they need to dedicate themselves to repeated "heroic doses" or anything like Terence's involvement, but I have known too many people who would never have known to seek spiritual enlightenment if it had not been for LSD or mushrooms. I have known too many people who would never have known to seek mental health without that vital clue, too. There are way too many humans out there who don't know they have anything to wake up, think they are already as awake as it gets, when what they are is hypnotized and locked in a mental prison cell that one little mushroom trip would at least unlock, if not drag them from it out into the fresh air of freedom.
So, here, I have bothered to bring this up on that account, and how dare these so determinedly-deluded wimps try this hard to deprive you of what might be your best chance to finally see?
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Two days later, I find more of the viraltude, with some great comments by someone called "siphersh"....
And...
I have the same problem with this as with the FoIA response, when Jan Irvin wrote that "it very clearly says their search revealed “an openly acknowledged affiliation”". There was a lot of handwaving going on, Jan Irvin trying to explain his "logic", but the response obviously didn't "clearly" say that. It's just not true.
Similarly, Jay Weidner says that "Terence McKenna admits clearly that he's an agent of the US. government". And Jan Irvin used the word "admitted" as well. What they are saying is just simply not there.
The trivium, that Jan waves around so much is logic, rhetoric and grammar. You only need to have an elementary (and I mean elementary) skill with grammatical cohesion and rhetorical coherence to see that Terence was obviously talking about the transdimensional tykes from hyperspace, and not a worldly agency. To misunderstand it, you not only need to take it out of context, you then also need to confer the imagined meaning onto it.
I understand that you can argue how this may be some hidden or sub-conscious projection of a supposed government affiliation. But it's clearly not an "admission", and certainly not a "clear admission".
One must be rigorous with the logic, comprehend the semtantics and understand the textual coherence when dealing with investigations like this, or otherwise you will conjure up a runaway sequence of sloppy logic, semantic misapprehensions and loose associations.
I'm not trying to talk against the conspiracy theory per se. I'm just saying that there's a reason why it's important to be stringent on the level of the particular pieces of information. Those are the foundations of the thought process. And a theory is only as strong as its weakest link.
And...
And while I'm at it, let me share my impressions about the research.
I read all of Jan Irvin's articles on the topic, and I downloaded the TheBrain database. I was looking for sources that would reveal some kernel of truth, so to speak, so that I can maybe learn something new, juicy, interesting about the history of the psychedelic movement. I was focusing on Wasson's expeditions, because that's where the CIA involvement seems to be the most tangible.
And I did find an interesting source. It seems that a chemist working on psychedelics for the CIA was piggybacking on one of Wasson's expeditions in search of the mushroom.
http://www.erowid.org/plants/mushrooms/mushrooms_article5.shtml
But beyond that, it's pretty underwhelming. It's really bizarre how Jan Irvin seems to be aware of the concept of logical fallacies, at least on the level of rhetoric, but at the same time his argument consists of a bunch of non sequiturs chained together, as if they would somehow add up to a valid argument by virtue of quantity. They don't. That's exactly the point of the whole logical fallacy issue.
As for the thesis itself, I think it's very improbable. The central idea seems to be that the CIA never noticed, not in the sixties, and never since, that psychedelics are deconditioning agents, and that on the societal level they catalyze dissent, scepticism, and even revolutionary ideas. That they think that psychedelics are automatic brain-washing agents, that will make people docile and easier to handle.
How could they have not noticed the obvious about psychedelics? It's just an extremely absurd idea, in my opinion.
siphersh ended this last comment with the link to the whole thing, and seems to me to have done a better job on this than I have in many respects. In fact, if I could bring myself to sign up for that commenting service, I'd get in there and tell him/her so, but I guess this will have to do instead.
Here's what Terence has to say about Jan Irvin's theory during the same Esalen workshop at 33:58
“The cultural enterprise is not being managed. It’s out of control. Which is good news, I think. Because if it were under control, it would probably be under the control of someone with plans not terribly pleasant for the rest of us. I think the great good news is that the cultural process is expressing its own dynamic.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj1yFZRmFsw#t=2038
For anyone who's listened to the whole recording, or is familiar with his talks in general, it must be very clear that he was talking about having been recruited by the psychedelic entities.
For Terence, the original central issue about psychedelics is that there are these seemingly autonomous, mischievous beings in the DMT experience, that seem to have an agenda, and they insist on getting you do something important.
They went to La Chorrera in 1971 with the intent of finding a long-lasting version of DMT, so that they can better explore this "ecology of souls". And that's how they got involved with the mushroom.
He was always talking about this relationship with "the other" in mushrooms and DMT and the role of the psychedelic messenger.
“In many languages the word ‘shaman’ means ‘go-between’.” - 1:34:55
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj1yFZRmFsw#t=5695
“[...] that you would burst into some place somewhere where there would be these chattering, self-transforming, linguistic creatures, that are made out of light and punning intentionality, and are trying to get you to perform some unimaginable task that is somehow caught up with the unravelment of the space-time continuum and the destiny of the species, and so forth, and so on…" 3:06:30
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj1yFZRmFsw#t=11190
“The entities inside the DMT trance are real entities. [...] This then has to be taken seriously. Questions like where are they, who are they, what do they know. [...] Are these things here for no reason? [...] Is there a message? Is there a purpose?” - 5:00:48
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj1yFZRmFsw#t=18048
In one of his talks he likened the "elves" to shady peddlers who are trying to sell you something, and convince you to trust them, but they act really suspicious.
He even uses the phrase "alien ambassador" when he talks about how "they" recruited him.
Even if one doesn't know anything about him, it should be very easy to recognize the textual cohesion and find the word "alien" that "they" refers to. It's elementary school level text comprehension, really.
It's so very obvious, that the audience reacts immediately with laughter. There's no slight pause, it's not some intricate, obscure joke. It's something that you'd expect. Becasue it's what Terence was always talking about. The aliens, the message, the agenda and the messenger, in the role of the go-between, the alien ambassador. That's his main shtick.
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