Technoshamans: Between spirituality and technology - a journey to the end of the world to cure a chronic backache

Technoshamans is a humorous, illuminating narrative non-fiction book in which the author roams the world searching for places where technology and spirituality intersect. The driving force of the book is the narrator’s quest for relief for a bad back which has tortured him for twenty years. Armed with his notebook and an open heart and mind, Carlo Pizzati embarks on a spiritual and medical quest taking him from a medical office in Northern Italy, where a “posturologist” glues tiny white dots to his front teeth, to the mountains of Boulder, Colorado, where he tries Rolfing massage and yoga. From there, it’s only a hop and a skip to California, where he is hooked up to the cutting-edge of computer diagnostics: a fancy high-tech toy which uses tiny energy pulses to “read” his orthopedic problem. The diagnosis, fittingly for California, is “a karmic social crime committed in 1685 by a prior incarnation.” Thus begins the second movement of Technoshamans. He flies back to the mountains above Portofino to attend several trance music raves designed to induce visions through electronic music. In Argentina, he experiences the famed indigenous shamans, but also aura-photographing computers and miscellaneous high-tech channeling gadgets. No mystical question would be complete without a passage to India. Whether he’s in an ashram in Tamil Nadu, practicing Ashtanga in Mysore, meeting the Big Enema ayurvedic doctor in Kovalam or chanting mantras at dusk, or on the beaches of the experimental township of Auroville, being led through a tearful, explosive revelation about his past lives, he continues to dwell on his fundamental themes: Can spirituality coexist with the Machine? Are we going to download ourselves into androids? Will spirituality and technology do away with humanity? Technoshamans, through a compelling and closely observed first person narration, asks these questions and more.