# Who is this wacky nutjob? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [November 12, 2006, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-this-wacky-nutjob/380133 "2006-11-12T19:19:27Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Mindfield](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mindfield/32/19759_2.png) [@Mindfield](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mindfield)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2006, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-this-wacky-nutjob/380133/1 "2006-11-12T19:19:27Z")
So a couple of years back when I started getting into the music of Antiloop, there was one song that used a sound bite of someone who sounded like the author of a nutty book on music and its magical properties. The sound sample was short, and he spoke in a slow, deliberate manner, like he was chillin’ on quaaludes or valium or something. The sound bite, found in"Theme of Antiloop (B&B Remix)" on Antiloop’s 2000 greatest hits album, was simply this: > [@Nutty!](#): > > 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. It was strange and mystic enough to fit right in with the Trance music philosophy, and I paid it little mind. However, I recently acquired the CD single for Re:Evolution by The Shamen, released in 1993. The first track, “Re:Evolution (Shamen Vocal Mix Edit)” contains this same guy, with the same slow and deliberate monologue with often halting speech and weird emphasis on certain dentives – kinda like the Man In Black from the Half Life games, in a winding monologue around which the song wraps itself. This monologue is what I felt painted him as a bit of a wacky nutjob, and it goes on about some wildly drug-induced view of the nature of time, the art of shamanism, and how it’s all tied together by the use of psychedelic “plants” and music. The monologue goes thusly: > [@Nuttier!](#): > > 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 organization 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 built a kind of map of not only the past of the universe, of 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 space-time and causality, and actually seen the wiring under the board, stepped outside the confines of learned culture and learned and embedded language into the domain of what Lichtenstein called “The Unspeakable,” the transcendental presence of the other which can be ascentioned 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 ancient of evolution, because the shaman learns the techniques to go between ordinary reality and the domain of the idealist. This higher dimensional continuum that is somehow parallel to us, available to us, and yet ordinarily occluded by a cultural convention out of the fear of the mystery, I believe, and what shamans are, are people who have been able to decondition 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 principle 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 2,000 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 to 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 that 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 genration that witnesses the revelation of the purpose of the cosmos. History is the shockwave of the Eschaton. History is the shockwave 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 compressed change probably since the birth of the universe. The 20th century is the – the shudder that announces that approaching of the cataracts of time over which our species and the destiny of this planet is about to be swept. 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, especially 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 of bonding that hopefully will be strong enough then to carry the vision out into the mainstream of society. I think the youth culture that is emerging in the 90s is an end-of-the-millennium culture that is actually summing up western civilization 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 between a revival of these physiologically empowering rhythm signatures, a new art, a new social vision, a new relationship to nature, to feminism, to ego. All of these things are taking hold, and not a moment too soon. So who is this loon? ---
**Author:** ![Q.E.D](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/q/51bf81/32.png) [@Q.E.D](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Q.E.D)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2006, 7:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-this-wacky-nutjob/380133/2 "2006-11-12T19:22:19Z")
[Terrence McKenna](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terence_McKenna). ---
**Author:** ![Squink](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b5e925/32.png) [@Squink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Squink)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2006, 7:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-this-wacky-nutjob/380133/3 "2006-11-12T19:25:18Z")
[T e r e n c e M c K e n n a L a n d](http://deoxy.org/mckenna.htm) ---
**Author:** ![jjimm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ba8739/32.png) [@jjimm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jjimm)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2006, 7:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-this-wacky-nutjob/380133/4 "2006-11-12T19:58:20Z")
Oh God, I accidentally read part of one of his books once, given to me earnestly as a scientific treatise on the influence of psychedelics on evolution, and possible symbiotic evolution of psychotropic plants and humanity. It started off promisingly, but I confess I cast it aside roughly when I got to chapter two and the guy started prattling on about being talked to by the spirits of interplanetary dolphins. ---
**Author:** ![Mindfield](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mindfield/32/19759_2.png) [@Mindfield](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mindfield)\ **Post date:** [November 12, 2006, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-is-this-wacky-nutjob/380133/5 "2006-11-12T21:56:15Z")
Thanks. I didn’t think it was some in-house studio mouthpiece rambling on just for the song – especially because bits of his monologues have been in more than one song – I just had no idea who the guy was or what he must have done to achieve enough notoriety to be either the subject of, or a sound bite for, songs by popular music groups. I suppose maybe if I was having a really good trip on some top-shelf Acid I might be able to dig this guy’s vibe, but as a sober and drug-free individual, just the long monologue reproduced above was enough to make me think this guy must have spent the vast majority of his time stoned on some really good shit, because no sober individual could possibly hope to make sense of it. Hell, it couldn’t possibly make sense to a stoned individual either, but I suppose the main benefit of such drugs are that things don’t _have_ to make sense – they just _are_, man.