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 - I do agree with you.
 I think the difference between the 1960s and the 1990s
 in terms of these psychedelic compounds
 is that the 60s entirely lacked any awareness of shamanism
 or the historical role that these substances had played
 throughout human history and prehistory.
 The 60s believed they were inventing this reality
 for the first time.
 Now that we have been able to compare
 the psychedelic experience to the way it is done
 in the Amazon, in West Africa,
 in areas where these things have been used
 and understood for a long time,
 we now have a model,
 and it's the model not that you take low doses
 and go with your friends to a rock concert,
 but that you take high doses in a situation
 of sensory isolation, such as a quiet, dark room,
 and make an inward journey into the self
 that parallels the journey the shamans have always made
 to recover lost souls or to cure
 or to discover the whereabouts of lost objects.
 So in a way, psychedelic exploration
 has gained power, respectability, and legitimacy
 by discovering that its own roots
 were in a paleolithic religion
 of great power and wide distribution.
 In other words, psychedelic voyaging is not something new.
 This is how religion was done for the first million years,
 not the last 2,000 years.
 This is really the only exception to this rule,
 and I agree with what you also said
 about how vast this domain seems to be.
 Serious psychedelic voyagers can agree
 the further in you go to this realm,
 the larger it appears to be.
 Really, what we are doing is we are discovering
 the inner richness of organism,
 that the richness of the human world is not in owning stuff.
 The richness of the human world lies
 in being able to access what is within us.
 Our minds are not blank slates
 or merely repositories of traumatic memory.
 Our minds are doorways into an infinite labyrinth,
 a kind of Borghesean library of infinite possibilities,
 and we can choose to open these doorways
 in whatever sequence or fashion we wish.
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 >> So should we talk about language?
 Well, first of all, let's 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 that 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 acquisition 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 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.
 Well, 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 transformation of the physiological impulse towards
 syntax into a final product, speech, which is not heard with the ears,
 but beheld with the eyes.
 And 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.
 Well, 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 and 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 negotiating corporate takeovers, in other words, in areas where
 communication, clear communication, clear expression of intentionality was
 very important, that people would actually go into the virtual reality to
 use the virtual language because its capacity for conveying intent would be
 much greater than ordinary spoken language.
 In other words, it's not for nothing that Plato connected up the notion of
 the good, the true, and ultimately the beautiful.
 And 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 you see, 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.
 Like that.
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 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
 vehicles, and 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 120 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 ferroconcrete 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.
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 Yes, well, 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 circoliberal octopi.
 Now these are animals that are divided from the human, from the line of
 development that leads to human beings over 600 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 octopi have chromatophores
 all over the exterior of their bodies.
 Chromatophores are cells that can change color.
 Now many people know that octopi can change color, but they think it's for
 camouflage, for blending in with the environment.
 This is not at all the case.
 The reason octopi change colors in a very large repertoire of stripes, dots,
 blushes, traveling 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 octopi not only can change their color because they're soft-bodied
 creatures, they can also change the texture of their surface from smooth to
 rugose and folded.
 They can also, because they are 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 octopi, 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 that 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 directions 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 grammar and syntax of squids and octopi.
 Yes, that's right, because 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 urshbra, this
 primal language of the animal body, and can explore the real dimension of
 feeling that a 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 transformative parophany 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, iridescent, transformative
 mystery is collapsed into the word.
 All mystery is gone.
 The child learns that 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.
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