language vs reality

In post-structuralist literary theory, meaning is a central concern. By meaning, I am not referring to some grand purpose for an individual or for humanity, but rather the simpler and more prosaic concept discussed by linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. The connection between a signifier and its signified, between a word and its referent, is the issue.

Be tentative with words, value them well, take safe words, words without catches, do not spin them with one another so that no webs arise, for you are the first who is ensnared in them.197 For words have meanings. With words you pull up the underworld. Word, the paltriest and the mightiest. In words the emptiness and the fullness flow together.

Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, the influential phenomenological sociologists, have written that our sense of the universe in which we live is held together by conversation. When I say to an acquaintance whom I meet in the morning, “Nice day,” I do not convey primarily meteorological information—which would be redundant anyway, since he has the

These are the terms amateur and dilettante. Nowadays these labels are slightly derogatory. An amateur or a dilettante is someone not quite up to par, a person not to be taken very seriously, one whose performance falls short of professional standards. But originally, “amateur,” from the Latin verb amare, “to love,” referred to a person who loved

Culture is a uniquely human trait, and it arises from, and depends on, language. This is the critical connection to the psychedelic state. Human language originates from inner ideation (which can be understood as another term for imagination). It is image-ination, the making of images, the interior representation of something thought or perceived,

If hallucinogens function as interspecies chemical messengers, then the dynamic of the close relationship between primate and hallucinogenic plant is one of information transfer from one species to the other.