Language and Psychedelics

i had a strange thought today. i'm just curious if it would be possible to deconstruct the English language, or any language while tripping on like shrooms or lsd. i don't know, just what if you could somehow do that and suddenly you couldn't understand what anyone was saying to you because your subjective idea of the language has been wiped out and you just became fucked for life. possibly then you could "recreate" the language as you pay attention, it would be like how it was when you were a small child and didn't understand everything everyone was saying.

or possibly you could elaborate and go deeper into language than you ever imagined possible. i like this option the best, i would like to think that it wouldn't be possible to deconstruct a language and never be able to understand words anymore.

this is all obviously very hypothetical...

 

Well I believe it was mckenna who suggested that people developed language because of mushrooms and entheogens

 

Your having some pretty deep thoughts today. They are actually making me think.

 

^^^i wonder about this shit all the time. i tend to drive myself crazy because of my paranoia about things like this. but the other half of the time i love thinking about these things. as long as i hold on to nothing, it's a great time, but as soon as i grab onto and cling to my thoughts i get frustrated.

 

I have lost the understanding of language before. It was a very difficult experience on a high dose of mushrooms with 2 hits of DOC. I was in a room with a 2 other people tripping and 3 other people that were sober. The enviroment was getting very... cramped, so I went for a 35 minute walk outside to clear my head and get some fresh air. I came back in and they were all talking, I could hear what they were saying but it sounded like chattering jibberish. My whole world was getting flipped inside out and I was experiencing ego death for the first time. I could not communicate with them at all, so I layed on the bathroom floor, totally faaaar from the bathroom floor. I did this for well over an hour.

 

Did you try to talk?

 

Yes. I had control of vocal cords but I could not speak words. The whole concept of language completly escaped me. Its like I KNEW I was missing something but I didnt know what it was. I could only manage groans and pathetic noises.

 

This kind of stuff freaks the hell out of me. I was once really high and I fell asleep and when I woke up the lights were off and I thought I was blind and I started crying. I know tripping and being high are different but you catch me drift.

 

Its not scary at all. Its like, you dont know that you lost touch with language because you dont know what language is. Something like that. Its just scary when your around other people who have NO IDEA whats going on in your head, and you have no way to verbally express it.

 

I have thought about this and its pretty intresting...i like to think that we are the aliens haha if you have ever actually looked at a human, body, weird eyes, weird mouths, everything just says alien....Also i like looking at wording and see how it would look if i was from another country...Its all really awsome

 

Language becomes absolutely meaningless when I trip.
I communicate through energy and direct relegation of thoughts.
When I'm forced to use my vocal chords to talk to someone, I feel like I have to concentrate to lower myself down to talk in such a primitive way.
It's sort of difficult.

 

i've lost language on lsd, mushrooms, ketamine, shit, even herb.

it's quite a shallow construct if you really, really, really delve into it. Dive hard into it and you'll smack headfirst into the concrete bottom 3 feet below the water

 

is it possible to ever lose language? i wouldn't like that. like what if you just forgot in the recognition of its shallowness?

 

ive never lost language...But i have tried

 

You still know how to talk.
It's just more difficult to bring yourself to do it, because you have discovered higher, more evolved ways to communicate.

 

yeah, it's like in order to structure a sentence, you actually need to lower your being to a lesser level of sorts. that's a bad way to phrase it, as for one i don't believe in 'levels of being', but thats sort of what it feels like.

like sometimes to talk it feels like youre trying to explain something very profound to a child, even though what you're saying could be 'yes ill have another slice'. you're just operating on such a different level, one where language has little to no domain.

 

Agreed. In trying to explain the phenomenon, you lose it's essence entirely. Which is what's happening here because...it can't be described.
There's a certain feeling I get sometimes, which I first experienced on shrooms. I've experienced it a few times now, just at seemingly random intervals, sometimes sobre, sometimes not. I don't tell anyone when I get this feeling, and I don't talk about it afterwards, because to try to hammer it into some sort of thing which can be described by words would to be to destroy it completely.

 

I've actually been thinking about this alot within the past few weeks. My normal thought patterns are like fast holographic multidimensional things that i understand but have such complexity it is really difficult to bring it down into the human language, which i kind of lost. I'm working on it and once you begin to put them into language you can actually expand on the idea, but its like a slower process.

 

once while peaking I couldn't read english at all, it looked like chinese scribble to me; I unlearned what each character symbolized and any synaesthesia in relation to the symbols

 

haha yeah shit, if we're just talking about 'unlearning' language, i unlearned how to eat and sleep, too.

think about it. what the fuck is sleeping?! imagine explaining sleeping to someone who's never slept. You lie down and close your eyes for 8 hours, and you slowly lose touch with reality and go to a different world in your mind, one which you normally have trouble remembering.

Ummmm . . . so . . . how much for this 'sleeping', and do i smoke it or snort it?