Cyber-Shamanism

Thursday. Akiko is back at the desk with the PowerBook and I told her, “One more chapter. Maybe two.”

This one is not from the road. This one happened on Sunday.

She looks up.

“You said the story was over,” she says.

The trip is over. The question isn't. Six months in Babylon and I still didn't know if any of it had survived the flight home: the flow, the surrender, the whole practice. Then Sunday.

“Start at the end,” she says. “Start at the bench.”

It’s dawn. Radioactive pink highlights coat the bright white airplane exhaust trails etching the fragmented pale blue sky. Scattered white petals punctuate the dark concrete sidewalks, covered in the glistening grime of an early New York morning in May. The smoke from my cigarette hovers as if captured in a gel that moves in slow motion, weighed down by the peacefulness of one of those rare and quiet humid Sunday sunrises in the City.

“What were you doing on a bench at dawn?” Akiko asks.

Breaking a rule.

I had one rule when I came back from Brazil. No psy-trance in a club, ever again. Sao Paulo had settled that.

But I could not resist Hallucinogen. Simon Posford was a legend, and he never played in NY, plus I had not seriously danced or taken psychedelics in close to a year, and that internal itch to sweat out my demons had gotten unbearable. So I caved, broke my one rule, took two drops of beautiful white fluff, and danced all night. I was now waiting to get picked up by my friends who were going to give me a ride to midtown. My T-shirt was damp, but I was warm, cozy in my body. A stillness covered by a humming buzz, echoing the energy I had been channeling on the dancefloor.

I still could not understand it. How was it that they could control sound in such a way? Bend it, tweak it, and organize it to make us feel such powerful emotions of joy… and ecstasy… yes, ecstasy! I mean, it’s all electricity in the end, right? Passing through circuits, compressors, arpeggiators, LFOs, etc., etc. And the wave of the electric signal resonates at a certain frequency to provoke certain emotional responses when listened to. I understand the principle, but I am still always amazed when I connect the two, meaning how I feel on the dancefloor when truly surrendering and dancing in a trance state. Somehow in the early 20th century we managed to control electricity with such accuracy and fidelity that now electronic music producers were able to control, edit, and sequence these very precise frequencies and generate these transcendental feelings in their audiences. It came around full circle: the most advanced, sophisticated tools tapping into this eternal, ancient and mystical truth that is deeply intertwined with our humanity. It was as if the dancefloor was a collision of our ancient past and our aspired future.

The two worlds of night and day colliding. The coldest and darkest shades of the early morning, giving way to the power of the sun. Light cascades, reflects, and beams, washing away the secrets of the night. Drunken souls on their way home hide themselves from their reflection in their neighbor’s windows, and, stumbling on their doorstep, they fumble with their keys, eagerly waiting to lie in bed. Garbagemen proudly and efficiently toss the trash into their trucks, taking advantage of the empty streets, while shop owners spray down their stoops and roll up their shutters. The night people scurry home, with a vampirish fear of the dawning light illuminating the imperfections that night so stylishly cloaks in her shadows.

I know, I know… you are going to say I am tripping, sitting on this bench waiting for my ride… WTF? Right? … Wrong. Give me two more minutes of your time.

DJs and electronic music producers are essentially cyber-shamans practicing a form of cyber-shamanism. They use certain frequencies to trigger certain things in our emotional self, our psychological self, our spiritual self, call-it-what-you-want, but these sounds provoke certain specific, rare, and therapeutic feelings; I can tell you from personal experience. It's a form of catharsis. The sounds and the chemicals allow us to shed our inhibitions, and to surrender to the flow. The more we surrender our ego, our agency, our desire to control, the more we find this strange natural movement, a path of least resistance. Like puppet strings attached to the frame of our skeletons, they gently pull and push and let us fall into a flow that feels like the most natural and comfortable expression of our body at any given moment. This celebration of our uniqueness through body motion at our most free and when we have surrendered results in the form of ecstatic dance, a metaphor for how we dance through life. Our flow, our dance is a visual artistic performance, an interpretation of how we see and deal with the world.

For example, people who are uptight wobble like they have a broom up their ass. Self-indulgent liberals wave their arms and torsos frantically, unaware of their possible imposition on others. Traditionalists only dance to songs they know, while the adventurous only to songs they don’t, reveling in the spontaneous improvisational dance resulting from the cascade of unfamiliar notes. Dance is a distillation of our experience, translated into motion, using a medium we all intuitively know and feel: our body. When we find our flow, we purge the rust in our joints, we peel the scabs off of our psychic wounds and we transcend to the new chapter, shedding the skin of the previous cycle since our last shedding; we process and cathartically cleanse through the dance, and we move on through the performance of the body.

Yeah, that’s what I think anyway… How the hell do they do that with sound? Beeps and blops, and bangs and zaps, and our brain generates these internal images, our body moves with such incredible expressiveness and precision, and ecstatic emotions we rarely feel overcome us with awe-inspiring abundance. The most bizarre thing about that state is that once experienced, while completely new and unlike anything one might have experienced before, it also feels very familiar and easy to decode. It’s like a language not spoken for a long time that, once heard again, is remembered and understood. I am not sure the DJs truly understand what they are participating in, the profound impact of their music, sounds, sets and ultimately the energy they spread, amplified through the amplifiers and speakers. But I digress...

Akiko stops typing.

“So that's your answer,” she says. “Can the flow survive New York? Yes, if there's a DJ.”

Not the DJ. The ride home.

Now, through connecting with the collective consciousness, and the liquidity of the information flow, the party serves as a training ground for a new way of being, one that is unavoidably part of our evolution.

The question was whether it came out the door with me, whether the thing I found on the road could sit in a Honda Civic at dawn and still be there at the red light.

Type this part slowly.

An old small 1996 Honda Civic hatchback pulls over, I get up off the bench, the door opens, and the sweet fragrance of the post-party sunrise joint billows out into the street, like a smoky carpet inviting me into the car. The West Side Highway had no traffic, so we zoomed up it letting the cool early morning breeze circulate wildly in an otherwise silent drive to midtown.

Our little car was the only car on the road as far as we could see. The City felt strangely empty. I stared out west toward NJ, wondering about the nature of sound, frequencies, emotions and how music has the power to move us so deeply and transport us to other planes of being that allow us to evolve our consciousness. We stopped at a red light and in my line of sight I noticed the Intrepid Aircraft Carrier. A big gray metal museum, a temple to worship our war gods, a place to reflect upon the brilliance of the military-industrial complex, and the fruits of its legacy and imperialism. I turned to my friends and said out loud:

“Look what they did with technology! They build these death machines so that they can exert deadly force across the globe with precision and efficiency. Machines to create hell on earth! Look what we do with technology! Give us a few circuits, amps, chemicals, and speakers, and we build these crazy machines that let us manipulate sound with such precision, that we figure out which of those frequencies make us feel truly amazing. By combining electrical and electronic engineering, with designer chemicals, we create temporary utopias, places for people to have mystical experiences, and transcend in ways that were unknown before.”

One of my favorite ways to visualize a DJ at a party when tripping is seeing them as a cartoon squeezing this little box, with hundreds of knobs and levers, and as they squeeze this box, synesthetic beams of positive energy pulse out, mimicking the music like audio fireworks. The cartoonish face of the DJ is concentrated and delighted as they are wringing the box, and the box is our technology.

When I came here I would look at people in the eyes, in the subway. And people would look at me and think: why are you looking at me? You are invading my space. And I felt this, I can’t imagine what my face looked like, on 57th st and 5th ave. I got here in the summer. I had long hair. I’d wake up in the morning I was unshaven, it would be like 10 o’clock in the morning. I’d walk onto the street and everyone is hustling and bustling and running around. I had this naive childish innocent attitude toward life. I guess that reflected in my face. I’d walk around the city and people would be like, what are you doing here? Why are you acting this way? I don’t know, it is a very different frequency. Slowly that fades away. How can you maintain that? Is it even possible?

When you find your flow you are constantly in that zone. You wake up that day and you are having a great day. As soon as you get to the subway the subway is there, and you get a phone call and it’s the right moment for them to call you. You don’t have to wait in any lines, and you think of someone and they call you two minutes later.

Then you read your horoscope at the end of the day. Maybe astrology is bogus, maybe it means nothing, I don’t even read that, but today I was looking for a movie, my eyes crossed over, and it said you will meet an old friend today, and you do. And why did I read that? I could have not bought the newspaper.

And you see today was a special day. And maybe all you need to do is say thank you, and say I hope tomorrow is like this. I hope I can be worthy of having this tomorrow.

And I’ll try and try and get muddled and just as I’m about to give up something will happen and it will reencourage me. Sometimes that cycle is slower to a point where I don’t have to be reminded and I’m running and the world is a magical place. Then suddenly I’ll stop and there’s a moment of doubt. And just as I’m about to leave someone says: hey dude keep it going.

Akiko wants the theory without the trip in it. As short as I can make it.

Cyber shamanism.

You can invite someone to give you their attention or you can take it from them. And that is the difference between white magic and black magic. Good spellcasters versus bad spellcasters. Manipulators of public perception, and people who inspire.

Akiko asks which one I am trying to be. “The one who invites.” I had already written it down, so I read it to her off the page.

We live in one of the most interesting and self-destructive times, with the evident potential of irreversible qualitative consequences to our planet, waiting to dawn in the near future. In a paradoxical unification of idealistic hopes and the glum, crude reality plaguing the political, environmental and cultural landscapes, I wish to inspire others into believing that the co-creation of a collective dream is the only way we are to survive the rupture we are currently transcending.

Technology, reason, the compartmentalization of knowledge, mediated us so far from our essence that we forgot about nature. Driven by a fear generated by loneliness, we armored ourselves with metal machines to protect us from our neighbor whom we no longer knew in the modern madness of the newly urbanized world. We had to drop two atom bombs on our heads to realize that we have to tolerate subjective approximations of truth as being legitimate paths towards fulfillment. We were also taught another sacred lesson, that being the necessary wise use of technology, due to its accumulated potent power.

We need to embrace paradox into our schema of thought; it is only through this embrace that we are capable of transcending the dead-end presented to us through the dominant rational perspective. We must have faith in our intuition, and trust the unfolding of our collective paths according to our projection. Spontaneous creativity is the way this path is honored, and as it is pursued, it reveals to the individual his or her unique positioning in the world. This process facilitates the cleansing of the individual and collectively addresses the crucial interests of our time. Automatic writing, surfing, skateboarding, dance, and many other activities can serve as a vehicle for exploring the structure of the flow, and allowing the individual to pursue their uniqueness of style within the available parameters.

I thank the muses who have kept me from giving up on the path and who have made it so much more rich and meaningful for me.

In the fringes of enantiodromia

Paradox keys, unlock the dead-ends of our rigid heritage

Forgive the previous generation and evolve through them

Faith, courage, discipline, persistence

Dance consciously unconscious

And allow the projection of your ethereal archetypal will,

Manifest into reality fluctuating between the 0 and the 1

Gratitude