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Terence McKenna a CIA/FBI Agent?

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Saw this mentioned on disinfo, apologies if it's already been posted.

NEW MKULTRA DISCOVERY: Terence McKenna admited that he was a “deep background” and “PR” agent (CIA or FBI).

August 23, 2013
By Jan Irvin

This explosive audio clip that was just brought to my attention today by “Scott” reveals, in Terence McKenna’s own words, that he was in fact an agent.

The audio clip comes from Dec. 1994 from his lecture at the Esalen Institute, which may be found below in full.

As I wrote on August 28, 2012, in my article: How Darwin, Huxley, and the Esalen Institute launched the 2012 and psychedelic revolutions – and began one of the largest mind control operations in history. Some brief notes.(Here I’ve added most of the pertinent quotes from Mckenna’s True Hallucinations):

“…here is an interesting episode regarding McKenna being chased by Interpol and the FBI – from which no conclusion is ever mentioned. As Henk from Europe emailed me after this original article was published:


[Henk] In 1969, McKenna traveled to Nepal led by his “interest in Tibetan painting and hallucinogenic shamanism.”[6] During his time there, he studied the Tibetan language and worked as a hashish smuggler, until “one of his Bombay-to-Aspen shipments fell into the hands of U. S. Customs.”


True Hallucinations, p. 22ff:

Late in August of 1969 fate turned me from hash smuggler to fugitive when one of my Bombay-to-Aspen shipments fell into the hands of U.S. Customs. I went underground and wandered throughout Southeast Asia and Indonesia, viewing ruins in the former and collecting butterflies in the later. Then came my time in Japan. Whether this gave me an edge on the others in experience seemed unlikely.


True Hallucinations page 166:

This decision to depart California (Henk:and return to the Amazon) was hailed by my circle in Berkeley. Concern for my mental state was rife among my friends, and rumor had reached us that the FBI was aware that I was somewhere back inside the country and had begun looking for me. The Bombay-to-Aspen hashish blues were catching up with me. It was, as they say, time to make a move.

True Hallucinations pg. 179

In February of 1970, a year before I arrived at La Chorrera, my fugitive wanderings had taken me to the island of Timor in Eastern Indonesia. Under indictment in the States for the heinous crime of importing hashish, I traveled and lived under the dramatic assumption that international police agencies were combing the globe looking for me. My cover, that of a graduate student in entomology doing field work for a degree—a butterfly collector—had worked well over the previous six months

True Hallucinations pg. 186

I swallowed hard. He didn’t look like the sort of person who would appreciate my stories of fighting the police at the Berkeley barricades shoulder-to-shoulder with affinity groups like the Persian Fuckers and the Acid Anarchists. Nor did my participation in the Human Be-In or the rolling orgies of the Summer of Love in the Haight-Ashbury seem appropriate to mention. And my recent stint as a hashish smuggler in India and my subsequent move undercover to avoid capture by Interpol also seemed out of place in this particular interview.
I decided to go with the usual half-truth reserved for straight people. “I am an art historian turned biologist. I went to Nepal to study Tibetan but found that I am no linguist when it comes to Asian languages. I have returned to biology, my first love. Specifically, I am an entomologist.
I am collecting butterflies here in Indonesia retracing the route of Alfred Russell Wallace. Wallace was the real discoverer of the theory of natural selection, but Darwin got all the credit. I identify with his underdog status. Wallace was shafted by Victorian science because he was of the wrong class and didn’t know how to play politics the way Darwin did. Wallace explored the Amazon Basin as well and if all goes well, I hope to travel and collect there too. Eventually I will write a monograph on speciation among the butterflies of Amazonas and Eastern Indonesia, which will get me a degree. Then, who knows. Teaching perhaps. Hard to say.

[Henk] He was forced to move to avoid capture by Interpol. He wandered through Southeast Asia viewing ruins, collected butterflies in Indonesia, and worked as an English teacher in Tokyo. He then went back to Berkeley to continue studying biology, which he called “his first love”.[6]


Note he fled to avoid capture by Interpol but then after a time he casually returns to Berkeley?


First of all, why would Terence friends hail the idea of him returning to the Amazon because they were concerned about his mental state while the cause of his mental state was his prior trip to the Amazon? That’s a contradiction. Why would Terence make up a reason to go back to the Amazon? Him being wanted by the FBI should be plenty reason I think.

Attempts to get an answer from Terence’s brother, Dennis, regarding the above episode have failed. It seems they want us to believe that Terence just went from being wanted by Interpol and the FBI to just casually lecturing about psychedelics. What happened in the interim? Someone must know the answer.”

We finally have the conclusion to what happened to Terence after the FBI had caught him:

Questioner: I’m real curious about one thing. Why is it important for you to do this?

Terence McKenna: I wonder myself. You mean am I the alien ambassador whether I like it or not? [laughs]. Well, often when asked this question, I’ve said it beats honest work. I mean, my brother is a PhD in three subjects and works in hard science and yet I don’t think it’s brought him immense happiness. Not that he’s despondent. But I was always kind of a slider. You know?

And certainly when I reached La Chorerra in 1971 I had a price on my head by the FBI, I was running out of money, I was at the end of my rope. And then “THEY” recruited me and said, “you know, with a mouth like yours there’s a place for you in our organization“. And I’ve worked in deep background positions about which the less said the better. And then about 15 years ago they shifted me into public relations and I’ve been there to the present.

I think ideas get me high. And I like the feeling of understanding and I love diversity to the point of weirdness.

Questioner: It seems that there’s more to it than that for you. Because, you know, being tuned in to ideas and turned on by ideas is one thing, but you can keep that just to self. The sharing of it is something else. I think that’s what we’re getting at. [??

Terence: well one thing is, I’m really fascinated… I think of myself as a pretty savvy person, and not easily led into false dogma


The question remains: which agency did he work for? Was it the FBI, or the CIA? Since it was mostly the CIA doing the psychedelic studies on the masses, I think it’s likely that he was CIA and is why the Agency was blocking my requests for his files several months ago: http://www.gnosticmedia.com/urgent-release-the-cias-terence-mckenna-foia-request-response-positive-affiliation/

However, in Acid Dreams, Marty Lee, states (pg. 173):

It was a typical sixties scene: a group of scruffy, long-haired students stood in a circle passing joints and hash pipes. The setting could have been Berkeley, Ann Arbor or any other hip campus. But these students were actually FBI agents, and the school they attended was known as “Hoover University.” Located at Quantico Marine Base in Virginia, this elite academy specialized in training G-men to penetrate left- wing organizations. To cultivate the proper counterculture image, they were told not to wash or bathe for several days before infiltrating a group of radicals. Refresher courses were also held for FBI agents who had successfully immersed themselves in the drug culture of their respective locales. For months they had smoked pot and dropped acid with unsuspecting radicals, and now the turned-on spies had a chance to swap stories with their undercover comrades. Former FBI agent Cril Payne likened the annual seminar to a class reunion. Between lectures on the New Left, drug abuse, and FBI procedure, the G-men would sneak away to the wooded grounds to get stoned while American taxpayers footed the bill.

So there is also the possibility that he was FBI.

Lastly, some have actually tried to claim that the mushrooms recruited McKenna (which is tantamount to saying that “God” told him to do it). To this we must apply some logical deduction and critical thinking:

1) Do mushrooms have organizations, deep background and public relations (propaganda)? Or does a spy agency?
2) What would mushrooms need with a public relations or propaganda department? Or is that something a spy agency would have?
3) Would mushrooms tell him the less said the better: “deep background positions about which the less said the better”, or is that something an agency would do?
4) Do mushrooms have “positions”? Or does an agency?
5) Are the mushrooms able to pay him because he’s out of money? Or is that something an agency could do? (remember he’s in trouble for smuggling)
6) Are mushrooms able to get him out of trouble with Interpol and the FBI for DRUG SMUGGLING? Or is that something an agency like the CIA or FBI could do?
7) Do mushrooms answer the story of what happened to him after his arrest? Or is that something that his employment as an agent would do?

When we understand that he was an agent, as he admits, then the contradictions are removed we don’t have to twist things into believing that magical mushroom beings or UFOs hired and paid him to work in their organization in public relations and deep background to the present – which he wasn’t allowed to discuss. These are things agencies do, not mushrooms or UFOs. Such a claim that the mushrooms recruited him is clearly ridiculous. The false claims of mushroom or aliens recruiting him is clearly a case of psychological cognitive dissonance and reaching for anything to avoid facing the facts which make one feel uncomfortable when they’re faced with new information that might reveal that they were fooled. Rather than dreaming up magical beings to avoid the facts and issues, just laugh it off and admit you were fooled by those people. This way the next time it’s less likely to happen to you again.

Source: http://www.gnosticmedia.com/McKenna-Agent

Seems legit.

Edited by chilli

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i dunno man he fuckin loved his mushrooms. ive got a few of his books but

yeah wouldnt surprise me, he had the idea of mushrooms being extra advanced intelligent life. they could manipulate their form or something and chose to be mushrooms because the spores would spread so easily throughout the universe. to inhabit as many worlds as possible. and they communicate with those who ingest them via the psychedelic experience they enable due to their dna. a dna 'imprint' of some kind is also imparted upon the ingestor? and his/her dna permanently altered from then onwards.

have you read 'true hallucinations' at all? explains so much

Edited by whoami
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"And certainly when I reached La Chorerra in 1971 I had a price on my head by the FBI, I was running out of money, I was at the end of my rope. And then “THEY” recruited me and said, “you know, with a mouth like yours there’s a place for you in our organization“. And I’ve worked in deep background positions about which the less said the better. And then about 15 years ago they shifted me into public relations and I’ve been there to the present."

This is really the only evidence, the rest is just fucking around with selective and weak interpretation. If anyone can be bothered to go through the 5+ hours of audio to find where this passage occurs please post the timestamp.

I made the mistake of clicking the link and trying to read the article about Darwin and his plan for mind control. Couldn't get past the first paragraph it was such utter shite. Author should be ashamed of himself for that one.

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i flicked through but

GO TO THE COMMENTS ON THAT ARTICLE

nice little shit-fight to read, its quite funny xD

yeeaaaaah!!!

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"And certainly when I reached La Chorerra in 1971 I had a price on my head by the FBI, I was running out of money, I was at the end of my rope. And then “THEY” recruited me and said, “you know, with a mouth like yours there’s a place for you in our organization“. And I’ve worked in deep background positions about which the less said the better. And then about 15 years ago they shifted me into public relations and I’ve been there to the present."

This is really the only evidence, the rest is just fucking around with selective and weak interpretation. If anyone can be bothered to go through the 5+ hours of audio to find where this passage occurs please post the timestamp.

I made the mistake of clicking the link and trying to read the article about Darwin and his plan for mind control. Couldn't get past the first paragraph it was such utter shite. Author should be ashamed of himself for that one.

There's an audio clip underneath the vid. He does appear to admit being recruited by "them" and suggests that he has been working in deep cover. I have heard this piece before, I must have assumed at the time that it was the mushrooms that recruited him. He was a wordsmith, and very smart, I'm not sure he would have openly admitted to being an agent, surely he had enough time to create a plausible excuse, I would like to hear the context of the questioning again (which I have forgotten in the amount of McKenna I have absorbed, usually while I'm busy wandering the bush). I think you can find conspiracies anywhere if you look hard enough, though it is plausible that the military industrial complex would love to distract the smarter left-wing socialists as best they could away from what's "really" going on, and use the war on drugs as an excuse to smear, arrest and otherwise destroy any coherent attacks on their control.

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I'm just trying to work out where MK Ultra fits into it.

Back in those days "the organisation" was how the NSA was referred to.

Maybe he was a spy. It makes sense. He seemed to spend a lot time in south east Asia and Asia in general around the time of the Vietnam war & the US needed intel wherever they could in the region.

Get people off their face on mushies or acid and they'll spill their guts in the loving afterglow - sometimes. It would have given him a reason to be in those places without attracting too much attention if he outwardly appeared to be seeking hallucinogens. It would be easy for him to establish networks without local authorities knowing what he was up to.

Edited by SallyD

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I was listening to one of the psychedelic salon podcasts where Terrence said all of the above mentioned, it was certainly said in some jest like he was poking fun.

Having listened to a good two dozen of the podcasts of just Terrence, its fairly easy to conclude he loved to joke and didn't take half of what he said seriously.

I'm not for or against Terrence, he could talk the hind leg off a donkey which was entertaining to say the least, but the more I listened the less I was inclined to believe half of what he said.

It won't be too hard to find the relevant podcast and assess the comments in the context of the whole 90min talk.

There is a lot of fascinating stuff on Terrence, particularly how he had a big dose that scared the crap out of him, he then spent the next decade talking large doses up without ever taking one again.

Quite the showman.

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wow some people seriously need some medication for obsessive compulsive disorder. that or they just need to get a life

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haha I reckon. McKenna told good, provocative stories. but like anything a total tripper talks about, it should be taken lightheartedly.. mushroom people are definitely not the craziest idea concieved by psychedelics so why not just take his word for it like 'ok man :)'

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I've wondered if he was ever smuggling for the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.

It may have simply been a case of when the FBI finally caught up with him he got off his charges or had them reduced by supplying some valuable information about other smugglers/operations. His was quite articulate but I've never seen any proof he worked for the FBI and given his interests in ethnobotany (and smuggling) I would suggest it's more likely, if he ever was 'employed' by them, it was for consultancy on pyschedelics (mushrooms) or smuggling networks. He seemed like the type of person who would want to avoid jail time.

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Oh my Jan Irvin is scrapping the barrel again for PR. darwin, huxley and mckenna... wtf. his latest obsession seems to be claiming that any psychedelic figure more well known than himself was/is part of some illuminati conspiracy. If you want to get the straight story on mckenna, read brotherhood of the screaming abyss by his brother Dennis. Terence may have had many personal issues and lived a quite incredible life, but he certainly wasn't working for the CIA.

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I was listening to one of the psychedelic salon podcasts where Terrence said all of the above mentioned, it was certainly said in some jest like he was poking fun.

Having listened to a good two dozen of the podcasts of just Terrence, its fairly easy to conclude he loved to joke and didn't take half of what he said seriously.

I'm not for or against Terrence, he could talk the hind leg off a donkey which was entertaining to say the least, but the more I listened the less I was inclined to believe half of what he said.

It won't be too hard to find the relevant podcast and assess the comments in the context of the whole 90min talk.

There is a lot of fascinating stuff on Terrence, particularly how he had a big dose that scared the crap out of him, he then spent the next decade talking large doses up without ever taking one again.

Quite the showman.

my first thought when i read the mckenna quote about "the FBI was after me, i was at the end of my rope.. then they recruited me.... etc... deep background....... now i'm public relations"

could he have been talking about being recruited by beings encountered during trips? asking you specifically fenris or anybody who has seen the entire conversation.

if so, it's a good little deceitful play on words. my interpretation seems credible, especially since he happens to get recruited during the expedition when he and dennis first begin tripping out of their gourd on mushrooms.

i really want to read dennis' book. it's good that don't need to put terence on a pedestal or enshrine any of his statements. that's how religions begin and i doubt very much he wanted to be responsible for another religion. his words will fade, but the minds they opened carry on his important legacy, and that's why his contribution is so significant, not because people want to parrot his schtick, but because he freed some minds.

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I'd never have thought stoners capable of coming up with a coherent religion, everyone seems to believe something different. That's when they can think, of course.

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believe me some people parrot his schtick. everyone is guilty of parrot-style now and then, i mean humanity has been learning and growing for many thousands of years, so if we all started on page one we'd never progress past cave paintings. with our own poo i mean, painting our cave house with poo.

give stoners credit, they're likely to have an original thought and not get swept along with popular opinion.

creating a coherent religion is impossible. even thor spaghetti lotus, creator of israel and the universe, was unable to scribble a coherent, consistent set of beliefs.

creating a religion or any immutable set of beliefs is contemptible. it shows a lack of appreciation for the immense feats of intellect that went before you, a lack of imagination for the staggering, glorious mystery that still surrounds us, and generally just a lack of thought, perception and humility. highest degree fuckwit, basically. ignoramus.

creating a religion based on the the ideas of somebody who, unlike you, has a brain, demonstrates that you at least want your religion to be slightly more advanced than cave poo paintings, and this is where you belong if you want to worship mckenna as a holy prophet and enshrine his words.

i wanted to do a paragraph about the insidious way that ideas get into your brain, sometimes without you even realising, sometimes even altering your mind a great deal, but that's just gonna lead me back to religion, which probably works through that very mechanism, like hit songs on the radio. brains are hungry, hungry hippos, if you can feed it enough of your custom gruel it will be captivated.

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It was a joke, TI. I saw firsthand the start of stoner religion when I was living in Byron, with the whole 2012 business. José Argüelles and his followers of the 13 moon calender. People get hold of an idea and follow it blindly, no matter how loose or impossible to corroborate. I witnessed this at first hand, a type of cultism that I couldn't subscribe to, very disturbing.

I enjoy Terence Mckenna's works a great deal, but if you listen closely he warns against such worship - makes me like him more! But there it ends, for me, just as appreciation of certain journalism and books doesn't make me worship the author. It's a real lack of ability to think for oneself I think,

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i thought you were dead serious. dissing stoners is all the rage! come to the other thread, i swear, their self-justifying belief that pot addiction is comparatively benign will make you feel better about your own dangerous habits! plus calling them out makes you feel like a big man.

i did have a paragraph how even open-minded subcultures can build a house of cards and enforce it amongst themselves, i wanted to say many things but i had to maximise the thrust of my message. saying that people are dumb made me feel smart so i wanted to really grasp a portion of humanity with tweezers and really pin them down, and write 'super dumb' all over them with atomic letters. it made me feel smart without actually being smart or even trying. the thing about ideas soaking into the brain and springing out at surprise moments would have been more informative but i can't be bothered, i'm too high on horse. my high horse.

did anybody else experience this automatic adoption of ideas, particularly with mckenna? without changing my conscious belief system much, for a while i found myself analysing trips through his books, as though it got the first crack at filtering the experience, because it was a recent addition to my mind. from the first one it was so natural to conclude that X experience was machine elves, Y experience was the cosmic other etc, even though my own filters still drew their own conclusions. this could happen with any ideas you've been ingesting, but particularly ideas that you associate with tripping (which must have been mckennas favourite topic), so when people quote mckenna to describe their dmt trip, maybe that is driven by some kind of mentality (sounding impressive, fitting in, whatever) but quite likely their mind didn't have much of an existing framework to interpret the DMT trip so it used terence

and voila

a textbook terence trip

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I don't think stoners created the thing. Just like any person who stands up and pronounces something and then tries to get followers, sell books, fuck the women, they're all slightly deranged. But then you get the people who accept it, become the worshippers, buy the books, get fucked by the guru. It's all the same thing. You can lead or be led. Or you can stand aside and be lonely, and even sneer if you can be bothered wasting your time on it all.

I can't be arsed any more. Not unless it's fun. Most of the time it isn't. That's why I pretend TM is still alive, a voice of sanity in a world of complete bollocks. But now I'm even beyond that.

My brain is closing down. The fresh challenges I face are just so fucking boring I'm shitted to tears.

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Think about it, there’s probably hundreds of thousands of depressed drug addict young people spread all around Australia, who have been shat on all there lives and who have nothing to really live for, filled with hate and rage and with complete contempt towards authority.

Somebody should start recruiting them, make them feel like they belong to something by brainwashing them with LSD and ayahuasca, build an army and make an attempt to over throw the government. Not because of any ideological belief against society mind you, but just out of pure boredom.

Probably on some list now that gets ya kidnapped off the street by some government agency that nobodies ever heard of, never to be seen again, lol.

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I have a hunch that this type of thing is not that uncommon among the global psychedelic community (regardless of whether of the disinfo post shared above is true or not).

More on the notion that government intelligence and law enforcement agencies want to keep tabs on what's going on but not actively pursuing on busting people unless it's either going to create a significant enough dent on drug distribution or seize a lot of money.

I believe this is more because they are aware that psychedelic culture does not have the same criminal attributes associated with drug dealing and addiction from the big 3 narcotics. We're a bunch that tend to stick to our scene, have a lot of highly intelligent people, and stand firmly against violence ideologically.

The fuel for our 'mind expansion' may ultimately come down to the money made from distribution on the supply end but even then are still not the type for guns and violence... plus hippies don't want their acid tainted with 'energies' of that shit.

With these factors in mind, if a high profiled personality who shamelessly advertise their actions and promote people to use psychedelics got arrested with the ultimatum of jail time versus intelligence and allowing to still continue doing exactly what they do - in my eyes it's a no-brainer deal for them.

Particularly in cases like Leary or McKenna where the go-ahead to continue their 'mission' freely in trade for intell from their perception could be viewed as for the greater good.

It is ignorant to think that our government agencies are not fully aware of what goes on with the ethnobotanical and psytrance movement in this country.

Sure busts occur, but if they really wanted to shut us down they would have already - and we all know a few instances of certain people who have flaunted DMT and psychedelics in the most public manner they could think of yet still walk away without consequence time and time again (and not from lack of trying)

We're not worth the effort overall because there are bigger fish to fry with the cok\met\her trade being linked to the shootings we hear on the news every other week, yet it's stupid to think that they do not keep us on the radar.

All they need to find is a big scene player with a psychedelic mission getting faced with jail time who believe that their cause is worthy enough to preserve for the benefit of humanity - and all they have to do is provide intel so they can continue their mission... and there is no shortage of trippers who think it's their divine responsibility to start a psychedelic revolution.

If the stories that certain members have come out with re: ACC are factual, then the manner in which they operate in terms of arresting, detaining, and dealing with people of interest is a prime environment to force people into giving intel.

Please understand I'm not one to believe in conspiracy theories, more because the people speaking out about them time and time again demonstrate their lack of credibility versus the general scientific consensus against them.

But my hunch on this matter, whether true or not, is really not so hard to believe... I've heard plenty of Chinese whispers depicting scenarios involving a few people where the so called 'facts' of what went down do not match the complete lack of repercussion. I treat these things as rumours... yet I've also been told first hand accounts that didn't match up with them being free and telling me about it. But who knows really?

The only alternative explanation is that these people really are on divine missions that protects them no matter how public they strive to be. Which is still a possibility I will never rule out.

There is too much paranoia and conspiracy shite in the scene I reckon.. people should stop worrying about chemtrails or interdimensional time traveling agents shaping the existence of mankind, and focus on all the messed up shit that we now know our Western governments are proven to ACTUALLY be doing.

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I recently wrote an article debunking the "Agent McKenna" theory. I found an audio recording of Terence McKenna clearly saying that he was actually 'deputized' by 'the mushroom,' and not the FBI. I also have a quote taken from Dennis McKenna's (Terence McKenna's brother) new book "Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss" (A book about his and Terence's life together) that undoubtably explains how Terence easily resolved his legal problems with the FBI. You can read the debunking here: http://thepsychedelicist.blogspot.com/2013/09/my-response-to-jan-irvin-of-gnostic.html

Jan Irvin's (GnosticMedia) rebuttal to my debunking can be read on the Duncan Trussell Forums here for those interested: http://duncantrussell.com/forum/discussion/4080/jan-irvin-magic-mushrooms-a-tool-of-the-elite/p2

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Stearing someone's energy towards a desired outcome is 'mind control' :)B)

We experience it forming our opinions, accepting certain reality and acting accordingly..

It's the world and our decision how to interprete the events..

There's nothing else but mind control, when you're in search of power over yourself or others..

There is no such thing as mind control when you're in love .. wnen you're in love with your world as well :wub::wub:

Edited by mysubtleascention

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