Language and the extrasensory

I wish to address the topic of language and linguistics, which was dear to my heart, even before I knew anything about raw paleodiet or the extrasensory. My interest to the Sapir-Wolf hypothesis, that language influences perception. What I learnt from then on and will disclose down there, proved this early interest almost prophetic. Let us first go through the essential of linguistics, in so far as it relates to our concerns, namely consciousness and magic, the essencial foundations of the universe.

Saussure and Linguistics

The nature of language has been the subject of treaties and philosophical musings for all of written history.

Ferdinand de Saussure, le père de la linguistique moderne, définit le language ainsi:

Among all the individuals that are linked together by speech, some sort of average will be set up : all will reproduce — not exactly of course, but approximately — the same signs united with the same concepts.

Saussure argues that language is a ‘social fact’; a conventionalised set of rules or norms whose adoption allows for common understanding. When at least two people are engaged in conversation, there forms a communicative circuit between the minds of the individual speakers. Language, as a social system, is neither situated in speech nor in the mind. It is located in – and is the product of – the collective mind of the linguistic group.

He defined language, written or oral , as a series of related symbols following a syntax and refering unequivocally (in theory) to a series of equally related concepts following same relationships. Unambiguous sentence show a biunivoque relationship between that series of signs or signififiers (what we use to represent concepts) and signified (the mental notions we associate with things). Later we named morphemes Definition: smallest meaning-carrying units his signs, defining them as the smallest meaning-carrying units, applying to written as well as oral lanugages, in which cases signs correspond to a chain of sounds - bounded and structured by articulation and pauses - within the greater speech.

And while each person makes its contribution to language by its imperfect learning and making others used to those idiosynchrasies¹, individuals grow in those social conventions in contact with their parents, teachers, coworkers, etc.

Saussure posited two key posulates, which while arguably of limited practical interests in his science, have far reaching philosophical andontological consequences:

1. Concepts as learnt patterns:
   We create concepts as an exterior delimitation imposed on the stream of perception with the help of preexisting concepts. They are merely more or less defined patterns extracted from raw mental impressions, with the help of other concepts. While not completely arbitrary, they exist only through associations with each other. A conditioned, co-dependent arising.
2. The arbitrariness of signs:
   Due to the analogy between signs and signifiers, signs too (loosely speaking, written or spoken words) depending on a core of elementary words who definitions can not avoid involving each others in a circular fashion. These associations between concepts and words, are conventional, we could call all cats dogs and the other way around and be none the wiser, as know all those who’ve had to contend with several closely related idioms or patois… There is noting more fickle than the meaning of words. Ergo, the association of words and what they mean is purely accidental, conventional. It is arbitrary.

There are a fair share of counter-arguments, the first obvious one being onomatopea: the imitation of natural sounds to remind of a given situation or thing. However they are very few in number, and so low in information they most always form part of the paralanguage or vocalics, outside grammar and syntax, and not proper words. They don’t do more recalling a mental image of this or that, hence hardly influence language at large, as the overwhelming majority of concepts that constute our inner mental life are too abstract to remind of a sound. Beside, onomatopea aren’t nearly as direct a representation as most native speakers would imagine: _imitations of animal sounds, seemingly the least culturally-loaded kind of signs, vary so much from language to language as to ridicule any claim of immediacy or cultural neutrality moot.

However, we perceive more of the world through vision than sound, hence graphical patterns do allow for more instant, intuitive recognition or association to what they represent. Ergo analogic representations that would be understandable by anyone sharing similar cultural references should make a whole lot more sense in writing: we can literally draw the things we refer to.

But while some alphabet/syllabaries appeared abstract get-go and a certain number of writing systems did start off as pictographic, over time all such systems (Egyptian hieroglyphs, Chinese and various South-American Logograms, Summerian pictograms) eolved out of sheer practicality until nothing remained of their visual capacity for representation. The reason being, that we can not draw complex concepts, only the simplest naturalist elements like animals, rocks, houses, telephones… physical objects. Intellect concepts even as seemingly as primitive as the sun with its rays or arrows for directions, only cross cultural barriers with extreme difficulty.

Good luck drawing an emotion, state of mind, industrial process or concept like sanctity or the present past and future. And if you could, doing so outside cultural references nor necessiting over ten minutes to decipher each symbol would kinda defeat the point of immediacy.

As an illustration, many Chinese and Egyptian symbols read like a rébus with smaller elements only used for their phonetic value. Arguably, both alphabets and specialized systems (mathematical and musical notations) designed from the get-go for ease of us and conciseness, have been a huge improvement in that regard. And even in a rather naturalistic/primitive world without much of a material culture and its artificial objects, the intricacy of human thoughts still demands a complex grammars to which non-abstract drawings are not conducive, making the development of syntactic elements void of semantics and conventional symbols an historical inevitability*.

Yet Saussure and everyone else, were wrong, and I will demonstrate it.

The Esoteric Side of Culture

The errors lie in two hidden assumptions:

• the conception of people as social beings first and foremost, born with little to no inborn representations (fantasies) and mental categories.
• their materialism (the inexistence or insignificance of extrasensory perception)

Let us start in order. It is proven and relatively acknowledged now, that we are born with innate representations regarding natural life, the conditions within which we evolved and which helped us survive in so far as we had no yet straw away from nature, through civilization and sedentarity. Of course sound and sight of predators, sexual scenes, intuitive understanding of body language. Our genetics, or so it seems, contain computer-like programs of untold subtilities, able to determine (when denatured molecules do not disturb the brain functioning) the precise course of action in human relationships and matters of leadership, with little input from mere experience. We are born with hardwired categories which while not being concepts in and of themselves, limit the range of ideas we are susceptible in any given situation, to those put to the test and proved useful by the very survival of our ancestors for thousands to millions of years. Therefore, it is no wonder than many concepts throughout the world, without any cultural interferences, come to mirror one another.

However, if our thoughts are limited by our hardware and factory settings, it doesn’t mean the we express them would be any less arbitrary or bear similarities from one culture to another, nor that these factory settings would be sufficiently precise in our head to serve as the basis of a purely symbolic language. Not alone, that is.

But visions, and extrasensory perception in general, have proved that a direct mental connection to the essence of things is possible, and even the most important purpose of human existence, for those who developped sufficient affinity with energy and the metasexual instinctive program. Traditions all over the world have talked of the mystical power of words and language, beliefs collectively categorized as prerational, magical superstitious thinking, and are traditionally thought as the hallmark of primitives, before the light of reason had instated science as the new god. But in truth, in many cases those we call primitives were very much aware of the difference between experimental, practical knowledge, and mystical acts relating to animist spiritual forces, in a word: magic.

What if there was a truth to that, and if so, what would be the consequences ?
What if knowing “true” names of things was more than a myth ?

The idea certainly pervades all inspired cultures, in Asia and the West, in the Bible, Plato and Tolkien alike. While it appears many writing system own their development from the needs of an evergrowing bureaucratic machine and comptability, a good many also seem linked to religion and stayed religious for long, if not their whole existence, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs and many african scripts. At the surprise of specialists, when attempting to translate them, Linear B tablets (script used by Mycenians, ancestors of ancient greeks, between c. 1400 BC – 1200 BC) fortunately burnt within temples and thus preserved until, showed scores upon scores of religious prose instead of administrative records in service of a very imposing bureaucracy as supposed believed until then !

A superficial look at history suffices to prove discourses carry a timeless energy, in speeches or books, like a radio program whose waves could reach receivers instantly, beyond time and space. This energy pushes peoples into action, enacting metapsychic order onto to reality. Be it from one lovely Math teacher or Hitler transfigurating untold millions, inspired people transform mere words into proper archetypes, imbuing them with an inherent meaning which seems to jump at your face on its own, speaking directly to the heart and greatly facilitating comprehension.

Energy simply demands exposition to symbols, and although the more immersive - intimate - the better, writing carries the same energy-information just as easily. Energy lets us to choose the right concepts with the right words in the exact same order to impart understanding not explained by mere simple textual meaning or logical coherence, producing a properly magical effect.

And a culture of overall inspired people, closer to true love, produce inspired languages which in their very grammatical structure and vocabulary, reflect that proximity to the archetypes’s eternal reality, more than do other languages.

Surely, uninspired languages can stay useful in day to day life, but only rarely overcome social conventions, the culturally-conditioned ideas we form about things. They hardly ever have that effect of short-circuit cultural boundaries and concepts themselves, to open our mind to the unchangeing core of human experience, even less transcendent reality. Communication itself looses much of its strength and such a culture strays away from sane paths, into excessive intellectualization or empty emotionality.
Languages has become truly Saussurian with its utterly conventional and arbitrary nature.

An Original, Instinctive Language

As this excellent author describes, the idea of an original language of a time when men could freely talk with gods and spiritual forces, pervaded our culture since before Christianity. Many tried recreating it, either in all seriousness by scientists (Dr James Cook Brown, L.L. Zamenhof, philosophers (Leibniz, Charles K. Bliss, L.L. Zamenhof) through visions by occultists or merely suggest artistically some primeval origin in fictional works (Tolkien or more recently Star Trek’s plethora of authors), series or Japanese animes, often with aliens standing in for angels².

• Atlantean script from Nadia and the Secret of Blue Water

• • 

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Alien writing, from Roswell the series

The loss of that original language in many a culture, often comes from some event signing humanity’s Fall from God’s grace, being tainted by arrogance, pride or another fashionable sin.

While the overwhelming majority of those artificial languages hardly tried to hide their taking inspiration from older and/or more inspired languages such as Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphs (see the obvious Egyptian influence in Fushigi no Umi no Nadia), the same force has been pushing forth for all of written history.

X-files, episode 22, Biogenesis

Daniel Belrichard, at 18 years, between 1979 and 1980, one of Mr Burger’s lovers at the same of the Trois Noyers in Switzerland (a community before much of the theoretical development of metapsychoanalysis had taken place), received a series of vision totalizing adding up to six pages of thirty symbols, so about two hundreds of them, only stopping due to incoming stops due to unfortunate events.. Mr Burger thinks it would have gone into the low hundreds. All different signs, of various complexity, made of curved and straight lines and dots or circles. As dishonest a tale as it may sound, the notebook that housed those visions was lost in the mayhem surrounding the Swiss trial for staturory rape (relationship with a minor, a mixed race girl named Maffalda) which incidentally saw the judge acknowledging the affair as a loving relationship, far from a violent rape.

Fascinated by this story I tried to come up with facsimile shamelessly taking inspiration from the X-files series, with limited results. These second-hand copies made decades after were acknowledged as good approximation of some glyphs, the simplest ones that is.

The closest graphical equivalent, are not found in any real life script, but in a few TV series and Japanese animes, whose authors manage to channel and breath metapsychic power into his words. While no concept nor syllabe or word appeared to come along these symbols, their numbers would rather match a grammar-less completely composable ideogrammatic system in which new or advanced (perhaps less natural) can be created. It cannot be overstated, how that loss not truly appreciated at the time, was ruefully felt years after.

The best all-round approximation in all litterature (fictional and historical), in fact complex than what was received, appeared in One Piece, with the Poneglyphs, indestructible rocks inscribed with the history of the world for future generations by a hyper-advanced lost civilization to which science and technology were one and the same, but which lost a war and was erased from all records by their enemies.

Something like that would have extreme density of information, ease of writing by hand and a great composability to coin new glyphs for new concepts on the fly. And paradoxically, a simple but completely extensible, fixed and non-ambiguous grammar like that of Bliss would fit computers and AIs very well, not unlike the Culture’s own writing in Ian Banks’ books.

I can think of one graphical system was invented, which might ressemble remotely in its overall principles (clearly not the symbols though !) and strangeness what we envision:

Blissymbols

The 900 individual symbols of the system are called Bliss-characters; these may be ideographic – representing abstract concepts, pictographic – a direct representation of objects, or composite – in which two or more existing Bliss-characters have been superimposed to represent a new meaning. Size, orientation and relation to the skyline and earthline affects the meaning of each symbol.

A single concept is called a Bliss-word, which can consist of one or more Bliss-characters.

In the case of multiple character Bliss-words, the main character is called the classifier which indicates the semantic or grammatical category to which the Bliss-word belongs.

To this can be added Bliss-characters as prefixes or suffixes called modifiers which amend the meaning of the first symbol.

A further symbol called an indicator can be added above one of the characters in the Bliss-word (typically the classifier); these are used as grammatical and/or semantic markers.

Such a means of communication would embody the rébus principle to the fullest but without the detriment of being too precise… by using abstract representations of universal logic concepts at the basis of human cognition, and bypassing completely the reference to orality thus the use of a constraining syntax (In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structural constraints on speakers’ or writers’ composition of clauses, phrases, and words). The absence of grammar in the usual sense also permits the concentration of the totality of semantic content in the vocabulary, the symbols themselves, which can then be freely shifted from one place to another without any alteration to produce an infinitely varied amount of meanings.

Most often, a stream of consciousness from the Collective Unconscious does preside at their inception, but then runs out and the author continues the development regardless on the basis of a dry formal intellectual pursuit, or a sense of duty perhaps. With time (or immediately !) this leads to the gradual misunderstanding of the author’s original intents, misuse of the system, tools or school of thought he brought up, and eventual degeneracy of said inspired products by the successive generations, until nothing remains of its original value.

This is precisely how languages evolve, that is to say, degenerate. Successive generations understand less and less what their parents and grandparents thought or the world they lived in or what they felt, or the meaning of their words. As an example the French word étonné now conveying a slight disappointment or surprise, originally meant (in the XVIIth century) feeling as if struck by lighting (from tonnerre, thunder). A very common case of erosion of meaning.

The history of most languages provide a sorry display of that tendency. Philologic studies show how the anterior state of many high culture languages were actually superior to their later states, even if those civilizations often reached their material and territorial peak afterwards. Cases in hand, the number and distinctiveness of grammatical cases, aspects and tenses in Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, going up and not down as we go back in time, alluding to more sophisticated and intelligent forebears. Modern grammars find blurry, incomprehensible concepts that were perfectly clear to contemporaries such as the middle voice³.

In reality, Ancients’ IQ was just that higher.

But how can we know those particular concepts chosed as primitives, really correspond to that of the human brain ?
Beside, originators can well be outstanding inspired individuals, but that doesn’t mean just anybody can use or appropriate their creation as they wish, with good intentions or not, lacking the same connection to the magical connection, even when the endproduct is intellectual in nature, we can not disconnect that tool from the stream of consciousness that possessed the inventor, and which might permeated its structural characteristics, resulting in improved functionality (ease of communication in that case, alleguedly).

Plato’s thoughts went far and wide, but centuries later neo-platonicists didn’t understand a damn thing of what he said, nor did anyone else for the matter, including his closest disciple, Aristotle, who was the flattest materialist of the time, not getting a single thing about love, mediumnic abilities, divine intelligence or anything his master taught with pristine clarity. He even explained sexual inclinations in mechanical, pneumatic terms. The intellect requires a level of inspiration to hit at a target, even from the borrowers of a thought or tool.

Funnily enough this issue marred Blissymbolics’ development history, providing an adequate case in point. While the man had his character he clearly ambitioned something unique, a purely symbolic system that would help children with learning difficulties because of its unique take on communication, instead of being built as a clutch for English and English only. A new way of thinking discarded by petty-thinking, narow-minded therapists.

Since the 1960s/1970s, Blissymbols have become popular as a method to teach disabled people to communicate. In 1971 Shirley McNaughton started a pioneer program at the Ontario Crippled Children’s Centre (OCCC), aimed at children with cerebral palsy, from the approach of augmentative and alternative communication (AAC). According to Arika Okrent, Bliss used to complain about the way the teachers at the OCCC were using the symbols, in relation with the proportions of the symbols and other questions: for example, they used fancy terms like nouns and verbs, to describe what Bliss called things and actions (Okrent, Arika (2009), In the land of invented languages). The ultimate objective of the OCCC program was to use Blissymbols as a practical way to teach the children to express themselves in their mother tongue, since the Blissymbols provided visual keys to understand the meaning of the English words, especially the abstract words.

In his work Semantography Bliss had not provided a systematic set of definitions for his symbols, so McNaughton’s team might often interpret a certain symbol in a way that Bliss would later criticize as a misinterpretation. For example, they might interpret a tomato as a vegetable —according to the English definition of tomato— even though the ideal Blissymbol of vegetable was restricted by Bliss to just vegetables growing underground. Eventually the OCCC staff modified and adapted Bliss’s system in order to make it serve as a bridge to English.(2009, p. 189) Bliss’ complaints about his symbols being abused by the OCCC became so intense that the director of the OCCC told Bliss, on his 1974 visit, never to come back. [See here for the full story]

One Brain, One Reich, one Language

But the biggest flaw underlying all others, is the lack of extrasensory.

It is true that the human brain is wired with predetermined categories, tendencies to process events things and feelings in certain ways. But human instincts are enormously complexity, compared to most animals. And humans’ absolutely unique attribute is to tackle all problems with symbolic manipulation. We are not wired for specific, concrete situations, but to encompass any new one with our big brain’s ability to make sense of everything, while other species might very much beat us in some tasks with twenty times less resource (in term of brain weight, volume or number of neurons) but only there. Such intelligences make use of highly honed instinctive and incredibly sophisticated neural pathways tailored for their specialized lifestyle since millions of years, while we went another route, developping a general abstract intelligence.

Our brain is made to tune in to a continuous stream of absolute, immanente knowledge. We should not try to figure out the truth via a trial and process, it should reveal itself with total certitude, from the vintage point of God. Because this is our highest, most evolved and unique ability (not the extrasensory per se, but its channelling through abstract, symbolic thinking) it stands to reason our genetic instincts and hardwired brain settings would expect the organic development of such abilities.
Even in a functioning system the flaws of replacing immanente intuition with systematic but artificial rules to derive meaning appear rather obvious:

Blissymbols were an “invented” system with a specific logic on how to derive meaning, it was unrealistic to expect a response from a naive subject that matched the Blissymbolics Communication Insti- tute’s (BCI) derivation. In addition, earlier studies (Yovetich & Paivio, 1980) suggested that for naive subjects, the hit rate increased if synonyms of the BCI derivatives were accepted.

… Thus, symbol guessability decreases as a function of the stimulus attributes. That is, Blissymbols rated high on representativeness and representing highly concrete words (HRHC) were correctly named significantly more often than symbols rated high on representativeness, but representing low concrete (or abstract) words (HRLC).

… The psychological variable of concreteness of the word label was studied because it has been previously demonstrated that the concreteness of a stimulus correlates positively with performance on a variety of tasks that are relevant to memory studies

That simply highlights what we said, that only truly picturesque glyphs can be representative.

Abstract base glyphs are purely arbitrary, while concrete ones might make a lot of sense but afterwards, when we learn their definition. it still helps with remembering vocabulary though, a key goal of Bliss’ design, although how much is debatable.

From my point of view the difficulty in writing and reading with any measure of speed seems big, both practically (characters not being nearly as streamlined and quick to type or write than an alphabet) and conceptually, the latter owning partly to the lack of culture. Unlike natural ideographic languages like Chinese, the number of acknowledges words (both primitive symbols and combined ones, their words) is small. To convey new information is always to pour new water into old vases. The more we discard extralinguistic cues (let alone extrasensory), the less context we provide, the more borrow common, conventional speechs patterns - and the corresponding thought patterns - to communicate. But this issue may be amplified many times over with Bliss or similar attempts for two reason:

• the lack of common patterns to borrow when there is no written culture to draw expressions and styles of speechs from
• and worse here, the very freedom and open grammar ingrained in its design might slow understanding considerably, because natural language includes a lot of contextual information in the choice of styles, synonymes and alternative (differing as to complex connotations, not in the primary sense) grammatical constructs, all stemming closely from the language’s constraints.

Forcing. constraint-free systems not backed up by its own expansive litterature, to literally spell it all out in potentially a very unnatural way, lest for vagueness and ambiguity slowing down reading considerably for anything more than surface level exchanges, far from the incredible force of a poem, erudite discourse or a lawyer’s plea.

The solution - if indeed a solution it is - consists in reinjecting a big dose of extralinguistic context through the extrasensory, providing - theoretically - both the total adequacy of a message made in literal heaven for its intended purpose (the hallmark of archetypal symbols, fitting) and the access to an infinite repository of idioms and styles. We would not rely anymore on a finite and often potentially antidated list of writing patterns most of us forgot where we took them from, on the instant symbolic resonance between the situation and the message needed.

Because archetypal symbols are both the lock and the key, the cipher and the code, just like the genetic code encodes in itself the very rules to read it. Giving by the way an almost unquantifiable density, but unlike with DNA storage space in the soul is really infinite⁴. The fundamental difference between inspired speeches and normal ones, is that even if the length of page, size and resolution of characters, or duration of speeches are all limited, but the information does not lie in the physical medium nor in our brain.

But these only serve as triggers to pull it out of the other dimension, to remember it - as Plato would say - from our memories of tomorrow.

Hence while animal languages (save for dolphins and maybe elephants) are entirely determined genetically, with a fixed number vocalisations (even an elementary grammar) inherited and fixed at birth (hence, limited to the range of predators/preys/situations the ancestors encountered) our languages and precategories must be strikingly different, not less precise but infinitely more flexible and polyvalent, relying on the extrasensory to fill them in.

And so, visions should provide the names, nouns verbs or what ever kind of linguistic concepts we should be using, and the understanding of such a mystical script would make greater use of psychic abilities than ordinary languages, in order to evoke the ultimate reality behind concepts. In effect, a form of telepathy through a medium, finally breaking the shackles on the human mind.

We think this essential part of us nearly obliterated since the mesolithics (cooking), the reduction in brain size and completely so since the Industrial Revolution, coupled with our intelligence then much higher than now, allowed Neanderthal ancestors to speak the true names of things, sharing a single language throughout the planet since this one would stem directly from our genetic data and deep brain structures, which Neanderthals and most likely their equally long-lived closely related Denisova cousins shared all around the planet.

Thus, one can speculate, that language maybe used to evolve not on the scale of centuries, but tens if not a hundred thousand years, along with our genetics, the planet’s cycle and species’ Collective Consciousness. As the pure expression of our brain’s creative faculties, such a language (for lack of another word) would be able to encompass the totality of possible human experience, by relying on visionary interpretation.

Now, whether this used to apply to complete languages or only a big common linguistic substrate making translation and learning much easier if not downright instantaneous due to both higher IQs and what amounts to telepathy, or if it included written symbols the kind of Mr. Burger and Daniel Belrichard received, further instructions are awaited. But that these symbols were true and a gift from the gods to help mankind ascend to their former self, is a certitude to us.