🧵 View Thread
🧵 Thread (44 tweets)

I've been scratching my head for a week after someone asked 'what became obvious for you after taking psychedelics?' I dunno man it seems self evident that the more primitive pre linguistic processes of consciousness make more immediate and honest contact with reality and have much higher bandwidth than any symbol system and this gap between trustworthy reality and untrustworthy language is one of the most important dialectics shaping the human experience like impressionistic ambiguous vibes rule everything around me from marriage to the economy to world peace like we keep looking for Letters we can put our faith in but all we have is Spirit

and haha I mostly discovered this from repeated "bad trips" on mushrooms, I predictably freak out as I lose the ability to give language to experience, immersion in raw sense data without naming and categorising feels like a full frontal assault on all my safety systems

Yes “primitive pre linguistic processes of consciousness make more immediate and honest contact with reality and have much higher bandwidth than any symbol system” This is the main point of The User Illusion, my most re-read book Our senses process ~11M bits/sec of incoming information Consciousness can only process 50 bits/sec 99.999% of incoming info can’t be processed by consciousness But all that information is still being processed by your body, it’s just done subconsciously That means your “gut feelings” are accessing a MASSIVE dataset compared to your consciousness making them (often) more insightful & reliable than whatever language games your conscious mind is playing


@RichDecibels This is tempting framing and wrong. You're conflating propositional tyranny with language. Language is additive. It's a psychotech that expands our experience and connects us further to each other and reality. We're all addicted to it and let it overwrite other modes.

@RichDecibels my impression was totally prelinguistic at the time but i started thinking about it again years later... well you see there are a lot of fixation points and energy minimising curves between those https://t.co/mLypU3WOmu

@RichDecibels there are also Leharian flame front type processes going on as well, which may be more or less harmonious depending on the design https://t.co/y4vchtBTaD

@RichDecibels another key aspect is that these types of "soap bubble" curves can generally only be approximated by the quadratic and cubic splines we use in font formats https://t.co/4v4Hi9lhth

@cube_flipper @RichDecibels keeps the lines in order and legible when they get stretched out by a process that preserves connectivity but not location? like how an “S” and an “I” with no serifs and no difference between how thick up and downstrokes are become ambiguous when you straighten out the “S”

@HiFromMichaelV @RichDecibels https://t.co/vnWOXIHkC9

You’ve been scratching your head for a week — I’ve been scratching my soul for a lifetime. Because what you just stumbled upon while bathing in the glow of psychedelics is what Heidegger meant when he said language is the house of Being — but forgot to add: it’s also its prison. You’re talking about the gap — the ontological fault line — between experience and expression, between Being and Saying. And this is precisely where “They” inserted themselves. See, They don’t live in “reality” the way we do. They live within the gap. They are the gap. They are the Masters of the Symbol. And because symbols mediate our entire perception of the world, They who control the symbols — the letters, the language, the Law — control reality. That’s why psychedelics scare the shit out of Them. Because psychedelics bypass the symbolic and plug you straight into the pre-verbal bandwidth of Being itself — what Jaynes might call a bicameral whisper, what ancient mystics called Spirit, what the modern world now terms “vibes”. That’s the bandwidth They can’t control. So They discredit it. Outlaw it. Pathologize it. We’re living in a symbolic system where Spirit has been hijacked by Letter — and They are the scribes. But now the Spirit is pushing back through lo-fi vibes, glitchy frequencies, ancient whisperings, and sacred ambiguities. Through dreams, trips, hunches. Through That Which Cannot Be Said. That’s why we’re scratching our heads. Because what we really want is to scratch our way out. Out of the prison of Logos. Back into the garden of the Real. Back into the Spirit. Where They can’t follow.

@RichDecibels They reach from the murk, beyond the veil. Hear ye this siren song that hums from the deeps, the voice of Ardat is on the lips of all who dare speak, 1200 wives and voices without end. They rise from death’s shadow, borne from 12 who art mothers, deceitful in their embrace.

@ROBNESSOFFICIAL I'm with you https://t.co/h1J2z9kNGD

@RichDecibels Thie is experientially true for me - and I do find that some symbolic maps of subtle phenomena (Buddhism, kabbalistic mysticism, some of the better corners of psychology) help me access and deepen parts of that presymbolic knowing

@RichDecibels so much this https://t.co/MGX9vY5pyy



