A technoshaman is essentially a
shaman living in the 21st century. To
ver,
technology is a living being, manifesting all the
evolutionary,
self-replicating processes that
organic lifeforms exhibit. The computer is recognized as the culmination of a long human/machine
co-evolution and technoshamans feel a personal affinity with it, often becoming hackers or programmers. To them, surfing the internet is a very serious thing, and they often have an uncanny ability to do so.
Everything is a haven for this kind of lateral thinking. Furthermore they are, to varying degrees,
cognizant of the
impending total transformation of the world.
A shaman is
someone who has been to the end; it's someone who knows how the world really works. And
knowing how the world really works means to have risen outside, above, beyond the dimensions of
ordinary space, time, and casuistry, and actually seen the wiring under the board... The shaman has been the agent of evolution, because the shaman learns the techniques to go between ordinary reality and the domain of the ideas, this higher dimensional continuum that is somehow parallel to us, available to us, and yet ordinarily occluded by cultural convention out of fear of the mystery.
- Terence McKenna, Re:Evolution