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Related to Ordinary Language, Visible Langu...

Ordinary Language,
Visible Language &
Virtual Reality
by Terence McKenna

Language
Shall we talk about language? represents the
First of all lets talk about ordinary language which is probably
most complex
the closest thing to a miracle in the natural world. It's the major behavior ever
neurological manifestation of difference between ourselves and
other animals and primates and it's not a physiological
observed in any
difference it's a difference in behavior. Language represents the animal and
most complex behavior ever observed in any animal and
certainly it's the most complex thing any of us ever learns to do.
certainly it's the
We're born into what William James calls a blooming buzzing most complex
confusion, but by the aquisition of words we mosaic over various
sectors of this blooming buzzing confusion with words. We
thing any of us ever
replace the unknown with the known through the substitution learns to do.
of words and by the time a child is two or three they have
completely created a cultural mosaic of words that is interposed
between them and reality. Reality from that point on is only an unconfirmed rumor brought through the
medium of language and every culture accentuates different parts of reality so that in a sense every
culture is a different reality. Language is the stuff of the world, not quarks or wave-packets or neutrinos,
but language. Everything is made of language. All the constructs of science are actually interlocking
constructs of syntax. So that's ordinary language which seems to define reality through a kind of process
of lying about it. For instance by creating subject-object distinctions which are, in fact, not true to the
matter, but somehow operationally necessary for us to navigate in the kind of lower dimensional space
that we inhabit.

Then there is the phenomenon of non-ordinary, or what I call

visible language and this is very interesting to me. This is where
technology, virtual-reality, cybernetics, human-machine
interfacing can actually make an impact and explore a frontier.
Visual language is a transormation of the physiological impulse
towards syntax into a final product, speech, which is not heard
with the ears, but beheld with the eyes. It's very interesting that
all our metaphors of clarity of speech are visual metaphors. We
say, "I see what you mean, he spoke clearly." This means that at
the organismic level we associate a higher signal clarity with
visual input, and on DMT and other tryptamine psychedelics you
actually experience the field of language both heard and self
generated as something that is visibly beheld. It's almost as
though the project of communication becomes high-speed
sculpture in a conceptual dimension made of light and
intentionality. This would remain a kind of esoteric performance
on the part of shamans at the height of intoxication if it were not for the fact that electronics and
electronic cultural media, computers, make it possible for us to actually create records of these higher
linguistic modalities. In other words it's possible to imagine a virtual reality that was driven by a speech
operated synthesizer where the various parts of ordinary speech adjectives, modifiers, subjects and
objects were interpreted by the cybernetic environment as topological manifolds of various shapes so
that speech would then generate a visibly beheld topology and it's possible to imagine a future world
where in setting up marriage contracts or in negotiating corporate takeovers, in areas where clear
communication, clear expression of intentionality was very important, that people would actually go into
the virtual reality to use the visible language because its capacity for conveying intent would be much
greater than ordinary spoken language. It's not for nothing that Plato connected up the notion of the
Good, the True, and ultimately, the Beautiful. The beautiful of those three concepts is the primary
concept because it is visibly beheld, because it is seen. This is the great convincing power of the
psychedelic experience. That it ultimately appeals to us through the sense that we value most. That we
existentially relate to as the most authentic and that is the visual. Visible language is a kind of telepathy
because if I make a statement in visual language and then you and I regard my statement, we are
somehow, in the act of regarding, made one. Because meaning is not being created out of interiorized
dictionaries which we each consult in the privacy of our own mind but rather
meaning is a visible manifold in the public domain. Meaning goes public and the
differences between people then decline toward being insignificant. It's a kind of
final confirmation of the McLuhan apotheosis and I think visible language is coming.
Life in the imagination is to be the life of creativity carried on through these virtual
environments driven by linguistic engines.

The starships of the future, in other words the vehicles of the future, which will
explore the high frontier of the unknown will be syntactical. The engineers of the
future will be poets. This is what virtual reality holds out to us—the possibility of
walking in to the constructs of the imagination. In a way culture is that. I mean our
cities, bridges, highways, airliners and art galleries are condensations out of the
imagination, but at tremendous cost because we must make them out of matter.
Once we can make them out of light, out of electrons, then we won't build
skyscrapers a hundred and twenty stories high, we'll build them as high as we want.
Roof height will no longer be a factor ruled by cost effectiveness and gravity, it will be a parameter ruled
by the imagination as will all other parameters and then we will discover what man truly is—when we are
able to erect, stabilize. share and explore our dreams in a kind of virtual hyperspace that, carefully
analyzed, is seen to be linguistic. That's what its connectors are made out of, that's what its ferro-
concrete and steel is, is the edifice of language. This is what the stuff of the imagination is made of and I
think this is what we're moving toward. The psychedelic shamans have always known this. Now the
psychedelic underground art community points toward this goal and leads the way.

This is a segue from yesterday's discussion about visible language. The notion being that, well let me
review what yesterday was about. It was about the idea that if we could see language, if language were a
project of understanding that used the eyes for the extraction of meaning rather than the ears, that it
would be a kind of telepathy. There would be both a fusion of the observer with the object observed, and
with the person communicated with. The place in nature where something like this has actually evolved
and occurred is in the cephalopods; the squid and the circoliveral (sp) octopii. These are animals that
divided from the line of development that leads to human beings over six hundred million years ago.
They're mollusks, they're related to escargot, it's an organism very different from ourselves.
Nevertheless, one of the things that evolutionary biologists always talk about is the convergent evolution
between the eyes of cephalopods and the eyes of higher mammals. This is because the cephalopods live
in an extremely complex visual environment and in fact, they have evolved a form of communication that
approximates this visible language that I'm talking about because these octopii have chromataphores all
over the exterior of their bodies. Chromataphores are cells that can change color. Now many people
know that octopii can change color but they think it's for camoflage, for blending in with the
environment, this is not at all the case. The reason octopii change colors in a very large repatoire of
stripes, dots, blushes, travelling shades and tonal shifts is because this is for them a channel of linguistic
communication. In other words they don't transduce their linguistic intentionality into small mouth
noises like we do. Small mouth noises which then move as sound across space in the form of vibrations of
the air. Rather, they actually change their appearance in accordance with their linguistic intent. What this
boils down to is they physically become their meaning, and one octopus observing another is watching
the unfolding of internalized neurological states within the organism being reflected in color changes on
the surface of the skin. Now these octopii not only can change their color because their soft-bodied
creatures. They can also change the texture of their surface from smooth to rugose and folded. They can
also, because they're soft-bodied, fold and unfold and reveal and conceal, very rapidly, different parts of
their body. So they're capable of a visual dance of communication that is an extremely dense kind of
visual signal and in the so-called benthic octopii, the species that have evolved in very deep water where
very little light reaches, they have evolved light-emitting phosphorescent organs, some of them with
membranes like eyelids over them, so that even in the darkness of the abyssal depth of the ocean they
can carry out this dance of light, self-enfoldment, color change and surface texture which is their
linguistic style. In fact the only way an octopus can experience a private thought is to release a cloud of
ink into the water into which it can retreat briefly and hide its mental nakedness from its followers. This
kind of biologically intrinsic wiring into the potential of language is something that we may be able to
mimic and achieve using psychedelic drugs as the inspiration for the direction given to a virtual reality
development program. In other words we might be able to create kinds of visibly beheld syntax that
would be the human equivalent of the dance of light, texture and positioning that constitutes the
grammer and syntax of squids and octopii.

Operationally what these psychedelics do is they dissolve cultural conditioning. Cultural conditioning
is like software, but beneath the software is the hardware of brain and organism and by dissolving the
cultural conditioning to speak English, German, Swahili or whatever, then one returns to this ur-sprach,
this primal language of the animal body and can explore the real dimension of feeling that culture has a
tendency to cut us off from. Culture replaces authentic feeling with words. As an example of this, imagine
an infant lying in its cradle, and the window is open, and into the room comes something, marvelous,
mysterious, glittering, shedding light of many colors, movement, sound, a tranformative hierophany of
integrated perception and the child is enthralled and then the mother comes into the room and she says
to the child, "that's a bird, baby, that's a bird," instantly the complex wave of the angel peacock
irridescent transformative mystery is collapsed, into the word. All mystery is gone, the child learns this is
a bird, this is a bird, and by the time we're five or six years old all the mystery of reality has been carefully
tiled over with words. This is a bird, this is a house, this is the sky, and we seal ourselves in within a
linguistic shell of disempowered perception, and what the psychedelics do is they burst apart this cultural
envelope of confinement and return us really to the legacy and birthright of the organism.

Terence McKenna Land

The Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension

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