“Language is a trick that allows the mind to question itself; a magic mirror that reveals to the mind what the mind thinks; a handle that turns a mind into a tool. With a grip on the slippery, aimless activity of self-reference, language can harness a mind into a fountain of new ideas…we certainly wouldn’t think the way we do. If our mind can’t tell stories, we can’t consciously create; we can only create by accident. Until we tame the mind with an organizational tool capable of communicating to itself, we have stray thoughts without a narrative. We have a feral mind. We have smartness without a tool.” - Kevin Kelly
Language must be understood as a constant state of flux by all those who bear it. And in that understanding, people should be far from hesitant to rip, remix, burn, mutate, splice, confound, and mangle new words into the colossal body of churning verbal suggestions. For creating new phrases, dictionaries, and syntaxes are one of the primary means by which new potential realities are downloaded into the status quo. An entity's particular quality of being and their vocabulary constitute the signal flares and the landing pad for the whole future. Your own limits are the bandwidth, the constraints, on that future.
And though indeed language is indispensable, we mustn't fear lengthy departures from it. I think the appropriate word for moments in which the conscious awareness is removed from the psychological demand to read off the ticker-tape of spontaneous verbiage is 'the ecstatic.' I think McKenna used this in a similar context as well. We've all had moments like this. Whether it was an orgasm, a twinkie, an lsd trip, a walk in the woods, a car ride--or looking at a stain glass window or a webpage or a wall, and boom a the stop sign has a meltdown. I've enjoyed communicating this sensation with the phrase: If you ever really stopped and looked at that which has just given these shapes meaning--a bomb would go off in your life.
Everyone has had a moment when the volume on the often hysterical internal commentary runs profoundly down, while the cosmos language constantly refers to takes a kind of vertigo-inducing center stage. This, I think, is where we should be spending more time. Though rearranging the available play blocks of language and words are necessary and extremely desirable, I think the most radical, the most creative, the most necessary, and the most worthy future for our species lays just beyond the flashpoint of the known. Thus, my personal advice to all those reading this: enter the ecstatic, by any means necessary. This is what's worth your time, more so than any media-induced hyperreality, more so than any cultural virtual reality, more than any verbal communication. Go for a long walk. Walk until it's not walking anymore, but the history of the cosmos amongst itself--hand in hand. Then you'll start schmoozing outrageous possible tomorrows into each other ears. This is the turf of Goethe, Galileo, Gandhi, Gysin, and The GZA
Language must be understood as a constant state of flux by all those who bear it. And in that understanding, people should be far from hesitant to rip, remix, burn, mutate, splice, confound, and mangle new words into the colossal body of churning verbal suggestions. For creating new phrases, dictionaries, and syntaxes are one of the primary means by which new potential realities are downloaded into the status quo. An entity's particular quality of being and their vocabulary constitute the signal flares and the landing pad for the whole future. Your own limits are the bandwidth, the constraints, on that future.
And though indeed language is indispensable, we mustn't fear lengthy departures from it. I think the appropriate word for moments in which the conscious awareness is removed from the psychological demand to read off the ticker-tape of spontaneous verbiage is 'the ecstatic.' I think McKenna used this in a similar context as well. We've all had moments like this. Whether it was an orgasm, a twinkie, an lsd trip, a walk in the woods, a car ride--or looking at a stain glass window or a webpage or a wall, and boom a the stop sign has a meltdown. I've enjoyed communicating this sensation with the phrase: If you ever really stopped and looked at that which has just given these shapes meaning--a bomb would go off in your life.
Everyone has had a moment when the volume on the often hysterical internal commentary runs profoundly down, while the cosmos language constantly refers to takes a kind of vertigo-inducing center stage. This, I think, is where we should be spending more time. Though rearranging the available play blocks of language and words are necessary and extremely desirable, I think the most radical, the most creative, the most necessary, and the most worthy future for our species lays just beyond the flashpoint of the known. Thus, my personal advice to all those reading this: enter the ecstatic, by any means necessary. This is what's worth your time, more so than any media-induced hyperreality, more so than any cultural virtual reality, more than any verbal communication. Go for a long walk. Walk until it's not walking anymore, but the history of the cosmos amongst itself--hand in hand. Then you'll start schmoozing outrageous possible tomorrows into each other ears. This is the turf of Goethe, Galileo, Gandhi, Gysin, and The GZA
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