69: The Unspeakable

In which experiential journalist Rak Razam dialogues with Professor Diana Slattery of the McKenna Chair of Xenolinguistics at the Institute for the Encouragement of Outrageous Ideas. Slattery is one of the world's foremost experts on the art of alien languages or xenolinguistics, and in this fascinating interview Razam and Slattery speak the unspeakable about the linguistic phenomena of the psychedelic experience. What if on some level we are made of sound? What if in the beginning was the Word? Is language itself a cosmic app downloaded and upgraded by higher consciousness? How can we translate and anchor multidimensional experiences into our baseline understanding, and can doing so transform our DNA and reality? Slattery's thesis, expounded in her forthcoming book: Xenolinguistics: Psychedelics & Language at the Edge of the Unspeakable, involves interior dialogues with the Other, whether framed as the voice of the Logos, an alien download, or communion with ancestors and spirits.  Sentient visual languages are encountered, their forms unrelated to the representation of speech in natural language writing systems. Slattery constructs a theoretical model of linguistic phenomena encountered in the psychedelic sphere for the field of altered states of consciousness research (ASCR). She has also received and anchored the Glide Oracle, a higher dimensional, gestural glyph language now available as an app on the iPhone. Turn on, tune in, and go translinguistic in this seminal interview. For more information see Slattery's website: Psychedelics and Language. Proudly supporting the Psychedelic Science 2013 conference. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.