Jan Irvin has made the mistake of thinking brute logic and rational arguments are more persuasive than being charming, witty, kind and humble. Ever since he picked up on the trivium as a tool for determining higher resolution on reality he has become haughty and pompous. I wouldn't be surprised if his girlfriend had left him in and his mum doesn't love him so much (just kidding).
However that doesn't mean he has not done us a huge service by outing Terence McKenna as on the CIA books. I know that will not compute for many of you. How can a man who evangelized magic mushrooms and DMT be collaborating with the CIA?
Well we don't know the full extent of his relationship but if you are mature enough to sit down with the evidence and determine for yourself, you will see without question that reason says he was promoting memes and narratives that were not always of his own choice though they may have often overlapped with his own views.
My challenge in coming to terms with this information began with the Aquarian Conspiracy that I blogged back here. I simply couldn't digest that the 60's counter culture revolution was started by the CIA. All those hippies, drugs and free sex was another way for the powers that be to manage a chunk of the population so that they thought other people's ideas were their own when in fact institutions like the Esalen Institute peddle these memes or cultural movements and are even responsible for propagating the 2012 date as a point of cyclical change. It can lead to large groups of people becoming ineffective dreamers. The New Age movement has been susceptible to this and has handed over much over their sovereignty and dignity to channelled messages (though they are interesting to analyse for meta narratives and obvious manipulation)
It's hard to grasp why something so convincing could contain falsehoods but I can rattle off a number of issues that corroborate McKenna as CIA collaborator and cultural narrative driver. I will always enjoy most of his work but from now on I can tune out when he waffles on about transhumanism and eschatology or transformational objects at the end of time. I still think something is happening but I'm more responsible for it's outcome than Terence McKenna and actually that's self evident to those who follow me on Twitter where I put in a lot of work pulling back the veil of corporate and institutional lying in the media and so forth.
I will continue to enjoy Terence McKenna on many many subjects for his stimulating and extensive knowledge but maybe like you I put too much trust in him (and my own judgement) and so for the opportunity to stand up on my own two feet we have Jan Irvin to thank.
This doesn't mean entheogens are bad. They're bigger than any CIA cultural back burner pimping narrative pilot-light in case a wider cultural meme is needed in the future. It also doesn't mean 2012 isn't the start of great transformational change. It is all around us. I suspect Terence would be smiling a bit at this but it's fair to say his smuggling of marijuana into the United States as traveller around Asia was probably used as blackmail to keep his ass out jail.
I suspect the mushroom told him the error of his ways one day too. Hat's off to Jan Irvin. Great courage and persistence is required to ground our idols instead of leaving them carelessly and eternally in the heavens. None of us are that good.
Here is the CIA Freedom of information act release that confirms the CIA had a relationship with Terence that they do not wish to share with the public.
TerenceMcKenna CIA FOIAresponse02
A video explaining my latest short article on "How Darwin, Huxley, and the Esalen Institute launched the 2012 and psychedelic revolutions -- and began one of the largest mind control operations in history." Located at:
This video is the first to reveal the background origins of the Esalen institute through Aldous and Julian Huxley, both grandson's of Charles Darwin's "Bulldog" Sir. Thomas Henry Huxley. The Huxleys helped found the Esalen institute to promote Julian Huxley's eugenics, humanism, transhumanism and feminism to manipulate middle class Americans into following their agenda through psychedelics and the new age movement.
This is not to say that psychedelics or entheogens don't have value, it just means that devious people have usurped them and created a false movement to fool people into thinking that they've completed their task of freeing their minds.
As McKenna says in one quote found shortly after we film this video:
"This was in '67 when I was a sophomore in college. The interest in altered states of consciousness came simply from, I don't know whether I was a precocious kid or what, but I was very early into the New York literary scene, and even though I lived in a small town in Colorado, I subscribed to the Village Voice, and there I encountered propaganda about LSD, mescaline, and all these experiments that the late beatniks were involved in. Then I read The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell, and it just rolled from there. That was what really put me over. ***I respected Huxley as a novelist, and I was slowly reading everything he'd ever written, and when I got to The Doors of Perception I said to myself, "There's something going on here for sure.***"
~ Terence McKenna - From Mushrooms, Elves, and Magic.
See this thread on the Gnostic Media website: