The word technoshamanism is redundant but it is useful. “Technoshaman” suggests that somehow a shaman using technology is no longer just a “shaman”. A shaman, in its most basic definition, simply communed with nature and the direct experience of the world – both inner and outer – to change reality. It is now clear that technology is the latest expression of nature and is a part of the natural evolution of consciousness. Therefore the technoshaman is simply a modern shaman communicating with modern expressions of nature. This explorer has updated the shamanic world view to work within, and even synergize with, scientific constructs.
Shamanism at its core is not about knowledge or healing. It is about Creation. The universe can be seen as a pure stream of data. To the Shaman the quest is not simply to collect data, but rather to synthesize, understand, transform, and utilize data. All explorers of the inner spaces eventually find that simple descriptive language is often not enough to spread the seed of understanding. So we use metaphors to represent our ideas. The all encompassing, the nothingness, the unity, the trinity – it may be understood in its linguistic meaning, but its expression, the pure gestalt of experience, is not so easily communicated. Still the metaphor serves to bring an idea out of the individual mind of the Shaman into the greater world at large.
The crucial distinction in my mind is that the Technoshaman realizes that some ideas once communicated in metaphorical anecdotes can now be communicated in mathematical and scientific terms. What is science but a metaphor - often accurate but sometimes unpoetic – for objective reality? While the true meaning, and the innate elegance of the idea never changes, science makes the idea easier to communicate and ultimately makes the idea more useful. When modern physics suggests that the universe is simply vibration, an adept in the mountains of the Himalayas is laughing. He has never seen a physics book, let alone a vibrator, but the ancient texts of his faith and his meditative excursions have revealed this fact – not just to him, but to his ancestors going back thousands of years. Still, to say his understanding is truly on the level of a physicist is asinine. Its one thing to have knowledge of a fact, but its a whole new level of understanding that allows the fact to be made use of.
Science is a useful addition to the metaphor and it provides a better means to communicate and utilize understanding. Still, it is not science that creates the idea. Beauty will always be in the eye of the beholder and love can never be described, but sometimes experienced. Even in the realm of the tangible, we find that the airplane was not “discovered” and the the internet was not created in a lab. There was an journey- a dream, an experience, and an excursion into the mind – from which sprang forth a metaphor. It was science that moved the idea from the womb of the metaphor and gave it life in the world of objective reality.
Behind this simple fact lies a startling truth. Science is enabling the human species to claim its destiny – but we have to dream it first. The Technoshaman realizes this – for the Technoshaman has not just updated the shamanic world view within scientific constructs. When the Technoshaman journeys, it is towards a meeting that transcends the notion of a gaian mind. The journey always suggests a cosmological and exopolitical purpose. To the uninitiated, it is a meeting of the minds between the explorer and the alien. However, to the adept it is no alien sitting across the ether, it is the Self – the Self of the future. And it is this Future Self (or conception of the future self) who aids the adept in guiding our evolutionary destiny and enables him to pave the way for technological Singularity – the path to transcendence.
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