Hello,

Terence Mckenna once said that the world was made of language, that reality was "tiled-over" by language.

Language certainly is like a interlinked web of symbols and metaohors, with a more or less direct connection to whatever reality lies behind them. But language has also allowed for a transmission of ideas/theories that has allowed for a much better understanding of the world, bringing us closer to reality.

From personal experience, I know also that all of my most amazing psychedelic trips were indescribable (language broke down), and to some extent it may be the breakdown of language itself that was the main cause of such an extraordinary experience.

Would the mundane be rendered more extraordinary if there were no words to describe it? Would we perhaps become like children surrounded by a "blooming, buzzing confusion"? To what extent does language remove the novelty of our surroundings?

I look forward to hearing your ideas on this. It's a very trippy line of thought

Thank you for reading!

I don't know if language itself somehow blocks 'direct experience', but i think we humans dó have a tendency to look at everything man-made as something that's simply a given...something that could not have been any other way. Whatever way we look at things, we Always tend to think that this way of looking is the only way.

When language is viewed in this manner, it runs much deeper than the words and syntax we use to communicate with one another. Our human brains decipher what is taken in through the senses in terms of language. Symbolism and representations tend to dominate human thought patterns and this is the core of what language is. We simplify and generalize constantly and this is what allows us to have such a rich and complex relationship with our environment. Different people do this in different ways. Some people are more visual and some are more auditory, etc.

The next step in this is assigning vocal patterns to concepts so that we can quickly and effectively communicate between each others brains where there is no neural connection, but just a mass of air that connects us. When this communication is learned and employed as the brain is still developing, it becomes intrinsically part of our internal language. It doesn't entirely replace our internal language, but in most cases supercedes what would have been our own personal internal language.

There are of course parts of this internal language that cannot be displaced. We all get imagery from certain experiences and smells seem to be intrinsically linked with memory. Smells are essentially chemical signatures that become very unique imagery for recalling very specific memories/information.

Vocal/written language has a profound effect on how we see the world. Our native/first language as well as culture has a filtering effect on the way we interpret not only communications but raw sensory input. For example, the word "water" can evoke many different images. These images are the true core language that is used in our cognitive abilities to pull meaning from our environment. one might think of drinking water, or a stream, or a lake, an ocean, irrigation for crops, rain brought by the gods, coolant for quenching your steel, steam to drive your turbines, etc.

Language in the sense of communication does have some cons in terms of cognitive filtration, but they are far outweighed by the richness it brings to our lives and our ability to live in a complex and evolving society. We just need to be fully aware of how this filtration works and how our languages can be upgraded not only to allow for efficient communication, but to have a fully functional cognitive awareness of our environment.

Censorship in my opinion is the most evil portion of language. It is not only a form of limiting communication, but a form of limiting our thought processes. When our internal dialouge is suppressed, it is not only subtractive but distorts our perception of reality.