The Nature of Psychedelic Glossolalia?
Last weekend, 25 mgs of intramuscularly administered ketamine during the comedown of a 4-ho-DMT/4-ho-NMT trip had me surprisingly incapacitated, and in a philosophical mood. I’m wondering, “Why is sensation at all?” Then I ask, “Where is sensation?” At first it seems this second question can’t make sense, and then, in an almost irresistibly insistent flurry of sensations and images, I spit out the code:
“Where is the scarecrow? Under the carpet, felt fingers thatched your armpits.”
The response seems at first nonsensically comedic, but even my shallow analysis quickly reveals rich associations between its elements. These associations are predominantly drawn alone the lines of the fabric textures and coverings I had just felt the general sensations of (carpet, armpit hair, and felt), and overlaid patterns similar to those I had just envisioned (the straw bundle of the scarecrow’s body, the matted hair of the armpit, the pressed fibers of felt, and of course, thatching is a process of overlaying fibrous materials like straw with layers of further material to produce a covering, usually a roof). Additionally, a thatch, as a noun, is a tuft of hair, and hair is a body covering. Armpit hair is a thatch of hair under constant pressure from the weight of an arm. Felt is hair or other fibrous material fused into a fabric by matting it and applying pressure. The essential component of a scarecrow’s disguise is traditionally, and as I envisioned it, a felt hat that covers the top of its head, like a roof for its body. My memories of all these textural sensations are principally those I recall from having felt them with my fingers.
These sentences are ejected out of me after ~6 seconds of intense aesthetic sensations that follow the posing of the question. The various sensations feel as though they are being wrung together and fused under intense pressure (like the fibers that constitute felt). The combined sensations seem to overflow my mind and spill out in words, words that are a direct evocation of the fused sensations themselves. The sheer speed that such an elaborate array of associations is drawn in with, coupled with the dense associationistic compression of the sentence, is fascinating to me. It suggests that under certain conditions the human brain is capable of radical syntheses of mental contents, that these highly energetic syntheses could perhaps be studied from their output in intelligible language, and that such study may offer a new perspective on the psycho-spiritual states glossolalia is normally associated with.
Beyond this, there is some evidence that the response is truly an answer of sorts and not just a collapsed galaxy of semantic associations. A scarecrow is a façade after all, and the response to the question “where is sensation” is “where is the scarecrow?” suggesting that the response question is a rhetorical one. The deeply inter-associated jabberwocky that follows seems to be a demonstration of the dense network of compounding associations that lies under the surface (the carpet) of my thoughts about sensation, which, taken together with the first sentence, it suggests are ultimately merely associationistic or at best analogical, and whose philosophical "fingers" touch and work with nothing deeper than their own associationistic framework itself.
What are your thoughts on glossolalia? Have you experienced intelligible language psychedelic glossolalia (xenoglossy) that you’ve since analyzed? If not, many more have experienced the sudden evocation of neologisms (nonsense words that have a special meaning for the speaker) on psychedelics, and I would encourage any who have retained memory of the formation of these words to give their input as well. My first neologism was “sa-mast-tyerd” during an LSD and cannabis trip when I was a teenager. Its profound meaning: the sensation of viewing your two friends talking to one another and seeming to be an alligator and a flashing red pepper respectively.
Last weekend, 25 mgs of intramuscularly administered ketamine during the comedown of a 4-ho-DMT/4-ho-NMT trip had me surprisingly incapacitated, and in a philosophical mood. I’m wondering, “Why is sensation at all?” Then I ask, “Where is sensation?” At first it seems this second question can’t make sense, and then, in an almost irresistibly insistent flurry of sensations and images, I spit out the code:
“Where is the scarecrow? Under the carpet, felt fingers thatched your armpits.”
The response seems at first nonsensically comedic, but even my shallow analysis quickly reveals rich associations between its elements. These associations are predominantly drawn alone the lines of the fabric textures and coverings I had just felt the general sensations of (carpet, armpit hair, and felt), and overlaid patterns similar to those I had just envisioned (the straw bundle of the scarecrow’s body, the matted hair of the armpit, the pressed fibers of felt, and of course, thatching is a process of overlaying fibrous materials like straw with layers of further material to produce a covering, usually a roof). Additionally, a thatch, as a noun, is a tuft of hair, and hair is a body covering. Armpit hair is a thatch of hair under constant pressure from the weight of an arm. Felt is hair or other fibrous material fused into a fabric by matting it and applying pressure. The essential component of a scarecrow’s disguise is traditionally, and as I envisioned it, a felt hat that covers the top of its head, like a roof for its body. My memories of all these textural sensations are principally those I recall from having felt them with my fingers.
These sentences are ejected out of me after ~6 seconds of intense aesthetic sensations that follow the posing of the question. The various sensations feel as though they are being wrung together and fused under intense pressure (like the fibers that constitute felt). The combined sensations seem to overflow my mind and spill out in words, words that are a direct evocation of the fused sensations themselves. The sheer speed that such an elaborate array of associations is drawn in with, coupled with the dense associationistic compression of the sentence, is fascinating to me. It suggests that under certain conditions the human brain is capable of radical syntheses of mental contents, that these highly energetic syntheses could perhaps be studied from their output in intelligible language, and that such study may offer a new perspective on the psycho-spiritual states glossolalia is normally associated with.
Beyond this, there is some evidence that the response is truly an answer of sorts and not just a collapsed galaxy of semantic associations. A scarecrow is a façade after all, and the response to the question “where is sensation” is “where is the scarecrow?” suggesting that the response question is a rhetorical one. The deeply inter-associated jabberwocky that follows seems to be a demonstration of the dense network of compounding associations that lies under the surface (the carpet) of my thoughts about sensation, which, taken together with the first sentence, it suggests are ultimately merely associationistic or at best analogical, and whose philosophical "fingers" touch and work with nothing deeper than their own associationistic framework itself.
What are your thoughts on glossolalia? Have you experienced intelligible language psychedelic glossolalia (xenoglossy) that you’ve since analyzed? If not, many more have experienced the sudden evocation of neologisms (nonsense words that have a special meaning for the speaker) on psychedelics, and I would encourage any who have retained memory of the formation of these words to give their input as well. My first neologism was “sa-mast-tyerd” during an LSD and cannabis trip when I was a teenager. Its profound meaning: the sensation of viewing your two friends talking to one another and seeming to be an alligator and a flashing red pepper respectively.
