Today’s random item is a book by Richard Grossinger called 2013: Raising the Earth to the Next Vibration (2010) that was both a part of and a response to the massive 2012 book publishing industry that was flourishing at the time. Grossinger is the founder and owner of North Atlantic Books. Terence was never published, himself, by NAB, although he and Grossinger were acquainted, but Terence did point his friend, anthropologist Luis Eduardo Luna, toward that publisher, which resulted in the well-known book of paintings of Pablo Amaringo’s Ayahuasca Visions: The Religious Iconography of a Peruvian Shaman. Although he had many opportunities for discussions with Terence, it was not until Terence died that Grossinger really gave him the attention he now realizes that he had deserved.

There are 27 pages in Grossinger’s book that have mentions of Terence, and I will not post them all here since that would probably be beyond fair use and Richard is a friend, so I don’t want to step on his toes by publishing large chunks of his book without his permission. However, I do feel comfortable sharing the same sections which are already available on Amazon ‘Look Inside’, which, in fact, includes most of the material on Terence in the book. So, apologies in advance for any paragraphs, sentences, or trains of thought which get cut-off. There are only a few of the relevant pages which aren’t viewable on Amazon, so you’re actually get the vast bulk of Grossinger’s comments on Terence, some of which I don’t agree with and many of which I think are very astute and rarely said. I’ll pick out a few of my favorites below. Enjoy!

“Gunther Stent, when approached by McKenna later, commented: ‘these ideas are not even fallacious.'”

“For all my conversations with Terence over the years, I remember nothing of detail or content, just his florid dress and intense, exotic speech patterns. I was afraid of both drugs and proselytization then, and since Terence represented both in spades, I didn’t listen carefully to what he was saying beyond the surface poetry and thus didn’t realize how radical and astute it was. I never got into active dialogue with him, even though he offered it many times. My loss: Terence was on my wavelength but light years ahead.”

“To look at what the brothers McKenna did in and after Colombia and to understand its seminal relationship to 2012, one has to excavate its different levels, both at the time and in their subsequent evolution.”

“These boys [Terence and Dennis] didn’t want just visions; they wanted to find a transdimensional doorway and storm into hyperspace; they intended to get the universe’s mission statement and change history.”

“Using the detonation of the hydrogen bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 as an anchor for his Timewave mapping the overall change-pattern of the universe and “the ingression of novelty into space-time,” McKenna initially keyed the Omega Point to November 17, 2012, but later revised it to the solstice.”

Grossinger quotes Terence in a nice summation of what I take to be the crux of his eschatological position: “If the universe is evolving deeper and deeper into complexity, faster and faster, and if now in a human lifetime we can see a small portion of this curve–we can actually discern the curve–we should logically conclude that we are very near, relative to the life of the universe, very near to the place where this ramping up of complexity will become so excruciatingly rapid that more change will happen in a single week than in the preceding thirteen billion years, and then there will become a point where more will happen in a single minute than happened in the previous thirteen billion years…
…Who are we in my story? In science’s story, we are nobody; we are lucky to be here; we are a cosmic accident; we exist on an ordinary star at the edge of a typical galaxy in an ordinary part of space and time, and essentially our existence is without meaning, or your have to perform one of those existential pas de deux where you confirm meaning–one of those postmodern soft shoes.
But, if I’m right that the universe has an appetite for novelty, then we are the apple of its eye. Suddenly cosmic purpose is restored to us. People matter, you are the cutting edge of a thirteen-billion-year-old process of defining novelty. Your acts matter, your thoughts matter.”

Terence quoted: “You say that it is a reduction of the psychedelic experience to be caused by drugs because drugs are material atomic systems and therefore we know all about them–I am going to try to convince you otherwise… Every electron is the yawning mouth of a wormhole that leads to quadrillions of higher dimensional universes that are completely beyond rational apprehension. Matter in not lacking magic. Matter is magic.”

“Carrying out their own indigenous science with ayahuasca, DMT, and psilocybin among tolerant and perplexed Witoto Indians of La Chorrera, the brothers McKenna won a hypothetical Nobel Prize by conjuring ‘magical excrement’: a violet “hologrammatic alchemical fluid,” a hyperdimensional form of matter–who said white boys can’t dunk?”

“Mirrors, wormholes, and skrying stones ahoy! Mages and lamas in cahoots across supercontinents and hyperspace! Counterspies spying psychically on each other! Hijinks galore! Thamaturgic mischief amok! O toil and trouble!”

“In McKenna’s indictment, the mushroom is not only ‘taken [but] heard.’ It uses ‘every though in our heads to lead us into telepathically induced scenarios of extravagant imaginings…in-depth meanings of strange places, times, and worlds…’ It makes its recipient ‘nothing more than a message-decipherer, hard-pressed to keep up with a difficult, incoming code.’ It binds molecules to DNA to ‘broadcast a totality symbol…that enter[s] linear time disguised in the presence of ordinary consciousness.”

“Go Terence, wherever you are!“