According to babbel.com, there are around 7000 languages that exist in the world today. Each of these languages is equally complex. This does not take into account idioglossia (a language only one or two people speak, such as twin speak), glossalalia (speaking in tongues) and who knows how many dialects and dead languages that have come and gone.
Each generation of humans seem to change the language in very subtle ways through slang and playing with words. Look back at english speakers one hundred years ago and you will find they speak very differently than we do today or those from 500 years ago, we are all speaking English but it has changed over time in very subtle ways. Language is so complex, it is constantly evolving and creating one novelty after the next. Each language used today is evolving in this fashion. This is a very complex system of communication. It's amazing! There is a guy named
John Austin who can speak and sing fluently backwards. Our minds a geared to use language, we pick up on language very easily as children, absorbing and memorizing something like 2 words a day for 17 years, that is a lot of words, something like 30,000 words. There are over a million words in the english language alone. We are language machines!
This is just a thought experiment about language. I am not sure how to communicate what is on my mind sometimes. I do my best but at times I feel that I am somehow locked in a language prison, limited in how I can express myself within the confines of in this case english. I attempt to describe my DMT experiences and find that when the words fall out of my mouth, they lose the meaning I was trying so hard to achieve. We psychonauts understand what we are describing but not those who have not had such experiences. Have we created another language?
Terrence Mckenna describes the DMT experience very well being the word smith he is, however, something is still lacking. When Terrence talks about jeweled, self dribbling basketballs in hyperspace, it does little to really describe this thing he saw. I get his meaning, I have seem something similar, some transcendental object at the end of time that seems to move in and out of itself revealing the secrets of the universe. It sounds crazy! Jesters, gods, demi-gods, demons, dwarves, elves and etc etc, these are good starting points for communicating what we have seen but it does indicate that what we see and what we perceive do not always translate well into language. Something is lost in translation. I sometimes think it was better for me to have discovered Terrence Mckenna after I had a few experience under my belt, as I feel it could have shaded or hued my descriptions of what I had experienced. I understand what Terrence means by the elves or little people he is attempting to describe, but I would not call them elves or little people. I don't know what to call them and that is my point. We don't have a language for these things.
I have had experiences where I swear I was having full on conversations with something in another language, hyper-spatial language, and when I came back I could not for the life of me remember what was said. It proceeds as follows, I forget me and english, remember this new hyper-spatial language, the effects wane and I forget this hyper-spatial language and then remember myself and the english language. Could you learn this language I wondered? Bring more back from these conversation. I never thought it was such a thing as glossalalia, it was complex, it was not just made up on the spot. I thought it interesting in the movie 'the fifth element', Milla Jovovich used the supreme langauge. It was created by Luc Besson who taught it to Milla and they refined it to 400 words. Big bada boom!
Is there a supreme language or hyper-spatial language? Interesting to think about. I don't think there would be a way to learn this language as I feel that you forget what you are suppose to forget and remember what you are supposed to remember. Can we bend our language? Can we agree to new words and terminologies and meanings to communicate more effectively regarding our psychedelic experiences?
Applying language to these experiences, is as Terrence said, like water on a ducks back, it just rolls off. It's frustrating to me. I wish I could describe these experiences in a better way. I thought maybe learn another language or learning everything I could about linguistics might help. I thought maybe I could start a new language but that seems crazy. I sure would like to hear your thoughts on this topic. I am learning more and more everyday and find that I bounce these ideas in my head and they never have anywhere to go and bounce off to someplace else. Perhaps a discussion on the matter could shed light into what is going on here with language. Have you heard a hyper-spatial language? I am not talking mind melds or telepathy, I mean spoken language.
I will leave it at that for the time being. Super interesting to me, obviously. Just throwing it out there.