Someone said language was invented to lie; well, in a way, that’s true, because of the problem of noncommunication. As soon as you have something to communicate there’re places where you don’t want the message to go, so this creates a very interesting problem. - Terrence McKenna - from “A talk given at the invitation of Ruth and Arthur Young of the Berkeley Institute for the Study of Consciousness” (1984) collected in The Archaic Revival (1991)
“…linguistic truth, or the truth of language and the illusions that language weaves. Because someone quite intelligent said language was invented so that people could lie. In other words, it gives you that fudge factor of obfuscation where someone says, you know, why did you do that? Well, the best approach is, I didn't do that. You know, you thought I did that. What you thought you saw, you didn't see. In other words, I suppose that lawyers are probably the people who have done the finest work with language and behind them, politicians. And the true potential for language to elevate and to unite the community was early on betrayed into the production of illusory ideological goods which could then be marketed among the people and to spread confusion. Psychedelics reflect on this because psychedelics stretch and pull and melt and recast the illusion-producing machinery of language. I mean, I think that if you had to say the one thing that psychedelics do for everyone, whether they have a good trip or a bad trip because it's up to them to interpret what they make of this, is it shows you the relativity of your cultural viewpoint. You know? That it's just your point of view. You inherited it from a geographical area, a culture, a set of parents. It has no relationship whatsoever to anything anchored in some kind of metaphysical super-space. It's just your cultural point of view.” - Terrence McKenna, Taxonomy of Illusion
“But the corrupting or curious thing about language is that like all tools it shapes its user in ways that are not suspected until it's too late. So for instance the way in which Western civilization is totally obsessed with the subject-object relationship and it's the basis of our science, our polity, our relations to commerce, the concept of product, all of these things come out of the subject-object relationship which is an aspect of language. So I point all this out because in talking about my new book somebody said that I had gone too far. And I was amused because it implied from what, you know? It's not like there is a King's X where gray beards in white coats tend the sacred vestal fires of reality. There is no reality. There are only people who know this and people who don't know this and are therefore being manipulated by the people who do know it. This is true or true enough!” - Terrence McKenna, Taxonomy of Illusion
We have a symbiotic relationship with a non-material being that we call language.
The new vision of nature is not as matter or energy, but as information, and information is expressed in the DNA. It’s expressed epigenetically in culture. What’s happening is that information was running itself on a primate platform, but evolving according to its own agenda. In a sense we have a symbiotic relationship to a nonmaterial being which we call language. We think it’s ours, and we think we control it. This isn’t what’s happening. It’s running itself. It’s time-sharing a primate nervous system, and evolving toward its own conclusions - TM. [The Evolutionary Mind].
The world is made of language.
The world is not made of quarks, electromagnetic wave packets, or the thoughts of God. The world is made of language. Language is replicating itself in DNA, which, at the evolutionary apex, is creating societies of civilized beings that possess language and machines that use languages. Earth is a place where language has literally become alive. Language has invested matter; it is replicating and defining and building itself. And it is in us [The Archaic Revival].