The Shamen — Re:Evolution lyrics

Lyrics

«If the truth can be told so as
To be understood it will be believed»
Human history represents such a radical break with the natural systems of
biological organisation that preceded it, that it must be the response to a
kind of attractor or dwell point that lies ahead in the temporal dimension
Persistently, western religions have Integrated into their theologies the
notion of a kind of end of the world, and I think that a lot of psychedelic
experimentation sort of confirms this intuition. I mean, it isn’t going to
happen according to any of the scenarios of orthodox religion, but the basic
intuition that the universe seeks closure in a kind of omega point of
transcendence is confirmed. It’s almost as though this object in
hyperspace—glittering In hyperspace—throws off reflections of itself,
which actually ricochet into the past, illuminating this mystic;
inspiring that saint or visionary; and that out of these fragmentary glimpses
of eternity, we can build a kind of a map of not only the past of the universe
and the evolutionary ingression into novelty, but a kind of map of the future
This is what shamanism has always been about. 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 spacetime and casuistry, and actually seen the wiring
under the board; stepped outside the confines of learned culture,
and learned an embedded language into the domain of what Wittgenstein called «the unspeakable»: the transcendental presence of the other, which can be
sectioned in various ways to yield systems of knowledge, which can be brought
back into ordinary social space for the good of the community. So,
in the context of 90% of human culture, the shaman has been the agent of
evolution, because the shaman learns 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 the fear of the mystery (I believe), and what shamans are,
are people who have been able to de-condition themselves from the community’s
instinctual distrust of the mystery, and to go into it, to go into this
bewildering higher dimension, and gain knowledge: recover the jewel lost at the
beginning of time, save souls, cure, commune with the ancestors,
and so forth and so on
Shamanism is not a religion: it’s a set of techniques, and the principal
technique is the use of psychedelic plants. What psychedelics do is they
dissolve boundaries, and in the presence of dissolved boundaries one cannot
continue to close one’s eyes to the ruination of the earth, the poisoning of
the seas, and the consequences of two thousand years of unchallenged dominator
culture based on monotheism, hatred of nature, suppression of the female,
and so forth and so on
So, what shamans have to do is act as exemplars by making this cosmic journey
to the domain of the Gaian ideas, and then bringing them back in the form of
art, to the struggle to save the world. The planet has a kind of intelligence,
that it can actually open a channel of communication with an individual human
being
The message that nature sends is: Transform your language through a synergy
between electronic culture and the psychedelic Imagination: a synergy between
dance and idea; a synergy between understanding and intuition; and dissolve the
boundaries which your culture has sanctioned between you; become part of this
Gaian supermind
I mean I think it’s fairly profound; it’s fairly apocalyptic. History is ending.
I mean, we are to be the generation that witnesses the revelation of the
purpose of the cosmos. History is the shock wave of the eschaton;
history is the shock wave of eschatology, and what this means for those of us
who will live through this transition into hyperspace is that we will be
privileged to see the greatest release of concresced change probably since the
birth of
The universe
The 20th century is the shudder that announces the approaching cataracts of
time over which our species and the destiny of this planet is about to be swept
If the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed.
The emphasis in house music and rave culture on physiologically compatible
rhythms, and this sort of thing, is really the rediscovery of the art of
natural magic with sound
That sound—properly understood; specially percussive sound—can actually change
neurological states, and large groups of people getting together in the
presence of this kind of music are creating a telepathic community,
a bonding that hopefully will be strong enough to carry the vision out into
the mainstream of society. I think the youth culture that is emerging in the
nineties is an end-of-the-millennium culture that is actually summing up
Western civilisation, and pointing us in an entirely different direction:
that we are going to arrive in the third millennium in the middle of an
archaic revival, which will mean a revival of these physiologically empowering
rhythm signatures, a new art; a new social vision; new relationship to nature;
to feminism; to ego. All of these things are taking hold and not a moment too
soon