[horus_the_cat]

Wilson, despite his willingness to take on some really far-out stuff, really is something of a lesser light and a product of his time... his work seemed dated when i was interested in it, and that was a long time ago.

Wilson's persistent fascination with the occult and hidden potentials of "consciousness" (which he accepts as being a sort of fixed thing in all of history)--and his relative willingness to accept without much criticism the authoritarian elements of a huge swatch of that milieu--does lend itself to this explanation.

OTOH his tendency to resort to epicycles in explaining his theories (which are usually postulating, rather than explaining, something) is more the sign of an undisciplined thinker. On edit, Wilson seems like the hippie answer to J.G. Ballard, whose essay on the "half-educated man" seems relevant for what Wilson stumbles towards. Granted, in the wikipedia era, that's all of us.

Lifeforce is a great movie, though. Definitely better than the book.