"Stephen Kenson - Technobabel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kenson Stephen)

or like me, trying desperately to gather the strength to cry out, to yell "I'm
alive!" in hopes someone will hear them?
The thought hits me: is this what death is like? Maybe I really am dead and
just don't know it. Maybe when you die all you really do is become a helpless
prisoner in your slowly decaying body, aware of the world around you but
unable to move or communicate in any way. Maybe your mind hangs around until
your body rots away in the ground or you get the quick and merciful release of
cremation. The thought of this paralysis as the afterlife nearly makes me
scream and collapse in terror, but another thought bubbles up into my mind
from somewhere. I know I'm not dead. I just know it somewhere deep down
inside. I know I've been dead before and this isn't what it was like. I'm
alive, reborn, and I have to figure out how I'm going to stay that way. Be a
shame to start my new life only to end up dead again.
An engine rumbles to life and we start to drive. The meat-wagon slowly pulls
away from the place of my awakening and heads out into the city.

2


The initiatory experiences of shamans the world over are remarkably similar,
which we can now account for in the universal nature of magic itself. The
proto- shaman falls into a trance or profoundly deathlike state, often as a
result of an illness. While in this state, the candidate's spirit leaves the
body behind and travels or is taken into the other world. In this spirit
world, the candidate's spirit-self encounters and speaks with the various
spirits dwelling there, learning certain secret words, names, and songs. The
candidate's spirit form is then torn apart or devoured by the spirits, reduced
to nothing more than a skeleton. The spirits introduce something new to the
shaman's skeletal form, something symbolic of the shaman's awakened magical
talent, like a magic stone or bone. The spirit-body is then reconstructed
better than ever before. This death/rebirth experience awakens the shaman's
magical potential and the candidate returns to the physical world with an
awareness of the spirits and the power of the spirit world. This traditional
form of shamanic initiation continues even into our modern magical age.
-from the lecture "Shamanic Traditions in the
Twenty-first Century," by Nobel Prize winning
shaman Dr. Akiko Kano, Cal-Tech, 2044
I lie on top of a pile of corpses for I don't know how long. Time seems to
drag without destination or origin. We sway and weave through the traffic like
a funeral barge slowly

making its way downriver to the sea. I try to let the gentle movements soothe
me instead of making me sick to my stomach while I concentrate on trying to
find a way out of this situation. The smell inside the meat-wagon is awful.
The hot, organic smell of death mixed with the sharp bite of chemical
cleansers and overlaid with the strange smell and taste of the rubbery vinyl
of the body-bag surrounding me like the cocoon of some kind of strange insect.
A thought passes through my head about how body-bags are not exactly designed
with comfort in mind, and I have to force down a bout of hysterical laughter
at the idea.