The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (69 page)

One challenge for him was finding a way to turn his gift of gab into tangible products that would help him pay the bills. He began working with others to capture and market his raps on tape. One early example was the original version of
True Hallucinations
, an audio-book account of our trip to La Chorerra that he read aloud, released by a company called Sound Photosynthesis in 1984. That and other early recordings helped him garner renown and some royalties, which Sound Photosynthesis, for one, eventually stopped paying. Terence’s talks and lectures are now widely available for free on the Internet, which is great in one sense and heartbreaking in another. Unlike the ephemeral “works” of other legendary conversationalists, Terence’s talks will live on as long as people care to listen. On the other hand, once such creations are available to all in digital form, they cease to belong to their creators or their families, making it that much harder for an unaffiliated free thinker like Terence to achieve the kind of stability needed to make ends meet, let alone to step back and assess one’s work, or push it in new directions.

By 1990, Terence had fully assumed his role as the bardic, shaman-trickster figure that became his beloved (and occasionally ridiculed) public persona. In addition to his role as spokesman for the new psychedelic culture, he’d achieved some notoriety for his timewave theory and its predicted end of history. He had found his “shtick,” as he sometimes lightly called it, and that kept him on the public stage before a growing legion of fans. There was no real competition for his niche; Leary was still around, but by then he was old and boring. If the original sixties psychedelic message was about peace, free love, Eastern wisdom, and getting back to nature, Terence’s take, while deeply informed by all that, had is own distinct edge. His audiences were mostly younger inhabitants of the Global Village foreseen by McLuhan, and by the early nineties becoming a reality. They were far from Luddite back-to-the-landers; these were world-spanning techno-nomads of an emerging global tribalism, the enthusiastic vanguard of a new post-historical archaic revival. Two decades ago, the hyper-connected informational environment and global neural network that most of us inhabit today was still nascent. Terence was the perfect avatar to give voice and vision to that emerging shift. Cool, articulate, eclectically educated, funny, steeped in psychedelics and sci-fi, Terence channeled the logos of the age. Silver-tongued and a riveting speaker, he articulated the concepts that his fans groped for but could not express, and he did so in a witty, disarming way. He was the gnomic trickster and bard, an elfin comedian delivering the cosmic punch line, even as he assured us we were all in on the joke. You just had to love him, and many people did, and still do.

Another important step for Terence was his association with the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. In the late eighties into the early nineties, he spent time as a “scholar in residence” at Esalen during the summers. During those years, he also began to attract notice from publishers.
The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History
appeared in 1992. Terence was never one for the short, catchy title.
Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge and a Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution
was also published in 1992, as was
Trialogues at the Edge of the West: Chaos, Creativity and the Resacralization of the West
, the first of three published conversations with the mathematician Ralph Abraham and the theoretical biologist Rupert Sheldrake.
True Hallucinations
first appeared in book form in 1993; of all Terence’s writings during this prolific period, that work stands out for me as his most accessible and personal. Most of our contemporaries never embarked on such an adventure, but many could understand why we did; Terence’s account of it is a quest narrative at heart, imbued with the dreams and illusions of our time and of youth in general. The story’s broad appeal and his skillful telling of it resulted in what is arguably a classic of the era’s literature.

I always thought Terence was at his best when he spoke on topics that were not directly related to the timewave or psychedelics. He was extremely well read on a variety of interesting and obscure topics, partly because of his experience in the Tussman program at Berkeley, but mostly through the books he lovingly accumulated over years of creating his amazing library, which eventually numbered more than 3,000 volumes. He told me he’d read most of them, and I believe him. He was an astute observer of contemporary culture, and often prescient about many of the social, historical, and technological forces that have created our post-millennial world. That may explain why so many of Terence’s lectures survive on the Internet, and why people are still listening to them. Even though they date back to the eighties and nineties, they sound as fresh and timely as if they were uttered yesterday. As I’ve noted, Terence’s genius was that he could see the future that was immanent in current events, and then articulate that insight for the rest of us. He may have gotten the details wrong in places, and been hobbled by the assumptions of the metaphysics he constructed, but one only has to look around to realize that, basically, he got it remarkably right. If Terence returned tomorrow, he would be unsurprised by most of what has transpired since his death. He would, no doubt, have incisive thoughts to share about the world at present, and the future impending within it, invisible to all but the few with his gift of perceiving it.

Terence put his ideas out there, but he was never wedded to them, or inclined to present them as scripture. He was anti-dogmatic by nature. He always maintained a sense of humor and a bemused perspective about his theories, and that was part of his appeal. He insisted that people should think for themselves and make their own judgments about his “crazy” notions. His ability to keep those notions at arm’s length, so to speak, was an affirmation of his inherent stability. He was able to say, “Hey, here’s a whole set of really wild ideas that are fun to think about; maybe some are even true. What do you think?”

It was an irreverent stance for a guru, which he never wanted to be. He had no desire to tell people what they
should
think; he just wanted them to think, period. I believe he viewed himself as a teacher, perhaps in some respects an entertainer, but never a guru. Many younger people have told me that what they’ve learned from Terence was more relevant to them than any other part of their educations, which is an enormous compliment to him and his talents.

And yet for every charismatic figure there is a legion of people who are eager to follow, and a certain contingent of Terence’s audience viewed him in that way. He liked being recognized and admired, of course, but he never took himself that seriously, and had no desire to lead a flock. Most of the world’s religions are empowered by the human readiness to worship charismatic figures and seek solace in mass identification. Religious and political demagogues use these impulses to lure believers into relinquishing self-responsibility and the capacity for critical thought. Sociopathic or psychopathic personalities who achieve fame are usually quite happy to exploit their status, unburdened as they are by conscience, self-insight, or doubt.

Terence wanted no part of that sick dynamic. He was keenly aware of the difference between how some chose to see him and who he really was. One of his thoroughly sane admirers told me a story that revealed Terence’s healthy perspective on his celebrity. The moment occurred at an appearance he made with the spiritual leader Ram Dass, who has had his own issues with guru-worship and cult followers. It happened during the nineties, at a time when Terence was dealing with his share of personal setbacks. In their dialog, Ram Dass said, “Your life is your message,” a typical guru-esque pronouncement; Terence replied, “My life is a mess. My
message
is my message.”

So that was Terence, as I saw him, at the zenith of his creative powers and career. I dare say those years, especially later on, were not his happiest. By the time my family and I moved from Bethesda back to the Bay Area in 1988, Terence’s marriage was already under strain. By the time we left for Minnesota in late 1992, he and Kat had decided to get a divorce. The end of their marriage would affect my ties to both of them in profound and lasting ways. Terence visited us in Minnesota in late 1993, and we thoroughly enjoyed his company. With my new job and comfortable home life, it was a good time for me. After his recent publishing successes, Terence had much to be proud of as well. I may have thought we were adjusting to the fact of his pending divorce, which would be finalized in the year ahead, but I was underestimating its impact on both of us.

Though he sometimes railed against monogamy in his lectures, Terence was basically a serial monogamist at heart. Multiple partners and free love didn’t work for him. He may have had a few short affairs in the period of emotional turbulence after his separation, but what he was looking for was someone to share the next phase of his life. Eventually he found her, or so he felt. Terence met Jill at a conference near Palenque, the famous Maya ruins in southern Mexico. Known as the Entheobotany Seminars, the event, hosted annually by the Botanical Preservation Corps, had become the place to see and be seen by everybody who was anybody in the psychedelic world. Terence had actually met Jill’s mother, a Jungian psychologist, years earlier when she invited him to give a workshop she was organizing in Los Angeles. Jill had been busy raising her own young daughter at the time and had not attended. Terence and Jill dated for several months and then moved in together on the Big Island in mid-1994. They parted in late 1997.

In retrospect, I realize that by 1994 Terence was dealing with one of the most difficult periods in his life. His separation and eventual divorce had left him depressed. He was regularly suffering migraines, a malady that had plagued him off and on since adolescence. He was also feeling the pressures of maintaining a public persona, the constant travel it required, and the effort it took to meet the expectations of his audience. Jill was one of the few people he could turn to for emotional support, and their relationship became a refuge from the demands of his work.

My sense is that Terence had a growing ambivalence about his career. One event that may have contributed to that feeling occurred at the Palenque seminars in early 1996. Prior to the conference, Terence had been corresponding with a young mathematician named Matthew Watkins, who wanted to discuss what he believed to be flaws in the calculations underlying the timewave. The two agreed to meet in Palenque and talk it out.

Watkins later said he didn’t set out to “debunk” the timewave. In fact, over the conference, the two men had several friendly conversations about what Terence later dubbed “the Watkins Objection.” During their chats, Watkins more or less deconstructed the timewave theory, to the point where Terence conceded that his challenger had identified some critical flaws. The sessions amounted to a cordial but serious exchange between two serious thinkers discussing the merits of a fairly arcane and abstract set of concepts.

Nevertheless, I believe the encounter deeply affected Terence. Watkins’s critique was perhaps the first time anyone with mathematical expertise had questioned the tenets of his theory; as such, it carried more weight than previous criticisms, including my own. To make things worse, Terence had been suffering such severe migraines that he was barely able to leave his room much of the time. Once back home in Hawaii, he posted a response to Watkins on his website Hyperborea (
www.levity.com/eschaton/hyperborea.html
) but took it down when Watkins declared it unsatisfactory. He then allowed Watkins to furnish his own response, which Terence linked to under a title he’d given it: “Autopsy for a Mathematical Hallucination?” The statement remains posted to this day (
www.fourmilab.ch/rpkp/autopsy.html
).

There was a brief flurry of revisionism by certain timewave supporters, which according to Watkins, in a 2010 recap, failed to produce a better version. Much of this history is recounted from a different perspective on Peter Meyer’s website (
www.fractal-timewave.com
). Meyer is the computer programmer who worked with Terence during the mid-eighties to develop the Timewave Zero software program that he still sells on CD-ROM. Back in 1996, the Watkins Objection remained front and center for a while on the Novelty List, an email forum devoted to timewave-related topics, devolving at certain moments into objections aimed at Watkins himself. While eventually the contributors moved on, the impact lingered for Terence. I believe the affair shook his confidence in the validity of the timewave, a project that constituted a major part of his life’s work.

At the time, I was living in Minnesota, tending to my own career and family. It was a difficult period in my relationship with Terence. Whether my perceptions were accurate or not, I wasn’t happy with the way he’d been dealing with the fallout from his divorce. I also challenged him for not “walking his talk.” He was active on the lecture circuit promoting psychedelics but taking them only rarely, just at a point when I thought he should have been taking them to facilitate insight and self-reflection. He disagreed and resented my efforts to engage him on it. For me, the emotions tied to these events stirred up a lot of turmoil and memories dating back to our earliest childhood. We didn’t overtly argue, but tensions between us were definitely high.

Looking back on that period from a distance of fifteen years or so, I can see now that I failed to appreciate how depressed Terence was at the time, and how badly he felt about the failure of his marriage and the challenges of his career. I should have had more compassion for him. I am chagrined and a little ashamed to admit that I was not there for Terence at a moment when a brother should have been.