...
It's long, but it's entertaining as heck, and contains a couple thousand refutations of Jan Irvin's shtick about Terence being an agent of the psychopaths sent to make us too stoned to fight them. That man is so exasperating. He just can't seem to grok that going pedant over this exalted method of educating oneself, the education he says has been reserved for oligarchs, only helps a person become as obtuse as an oligarch, that if anything Terence's life was a mitigation against that. Not that Terence was any kind of messiah or that he might not have been more of a bonus for humanity if he'd focused elsewhere, but there's just no way he was the fiend Irvin makes him out to be, wittingly or unwittingly. I can't fathom the tenacity of his negativity on this point. It makes me suspect that Terence made the mistake of making Jan feel small in some personal exchange of one sort or another, and Jan is just getting even with his ghost for that.
I heard Jan yapping to some interviewer about how his bad guys made it out that they'd discovered the mushrooms, listing off all the indications from antiquity that this is just not the case, but, if that is so, and I'm not sure it ever exactly was, still, Terence can't be lumped in there. One of the things he's famous for is the Stoned Ape theory, for crapsakes, his theory of how we made the sudden jump from arboreal brutes to Shakespeare and Mozart and Einstein. He would, and did, credit Wassen for bringing it up in our times, but that doesn't make him some kind of denier of the ancient knowledge of psychedelic mushrooms.
In fact, as much as I like Terence, I have never had an encounter with a book or lecture or interview of his where I did not feel his magisterial left brain was wasted on mushrooms, that his inability to be led into a more right-brained consciousness rendered him stuck, that the poor man, the poor genius was handicapped... he would never be enlightened that way... that if anyone on earth was harmed by his focus on the mushroom it was himself. And, in any case, the rest of us are, and always have been, responsible for our own awakening... will each get the help we deserve and no less.... It strikes me, though, that any help Terence could have been to a few people is being erased by Jan Irvin's crusade against him.
Maybe that's as it should be, but it still irks me.
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