Revlin is presently receiving a living transmission from the jungle knolls of Petaluma (via RoseX).
'Read' the following with your ears and hand, as well as your eyes to recieve this most pressing 'news':
-Terence McKenna
'Read' the following with your ears and hand, as well as your eyes to recieve this most pressing 'news':
Shall we talk about language?
First of all lets talk about ordinary language which is probably the closest thing to a miracle in the natural world. It's the major neurological manifestation of difference between ourselves and other animals and primates and it's not a physiological difference it's a difference in behavior. Language represents the most complex behavior ever observed in any animal and certainly it's the most complex thing any of us ever learns to do. We're born into what William James calls a blooming buzzing confusion, but by the aquisition of words we mosaic over various sectors of this blooming buzzing confusion with words. We replace the unknown with the known through the substitution 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.
First of all lets talk about ordinary language which is probably the closest thing to a miracle in the natural world. It's the major neurological manifestation of difference between ourselves and other animals and primates and it's not a physiological difference it's a difference in behavior. Language represents the most complex behavior ever observed in any animal and certainly it's the most complex thing any of us ever learns to do. We're born into what William James calls a blooming buzzing confusion, but by the aquisition of words we mosaic over various sectors of this blooming buzzing confusion with words. We replace the unknown with the known through the substitution 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.
-Terence McKenna
These demos by Revlin John are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License, 2009-2020