WORDING-OUR-WAY TOWARD ALTERED STATES

Abstract

Three linguistic themes or elements inform this narrative: virtual reality, philosophical Taoism, and altered states of awareness. The initial purpose of this symbolic experience is to enable us to become mindful of symbolic experience through exploring the three themes or linguistic elements of this essay. Ours is an excursion of words and words have their ways -- ways essentially self-referential so that written and spoken discourses speak first of themselves. Consequently, the three linguistic elements (the word "elements" used here to keep us aware of the language space we are momentarily inhabiting) of this narrative reside most fundamentally in the symbols of their expression, where the relationships between them (i.e., the symbols) hold more firmly, if less transparently, than the meanings we ascribe to their referents. In other words, when we use the linguistic elements "virtual reality," "philosophical Taoism," and "altered states of awareness" referentially, we first depict the nature of language and then, perhaps, something about the nature of the referents themselves referred to by the symbols. Thus, to think and to depict what is thought can be largely symbolic experience. ALTERED STATES By making apparent the transparency of linguistic expression, we anchor personal experience in the symbolic world and the symbolic world in personal experience. To make apparent the transparency of linguistic expression opens the way for the transformation of personal experience and the possibility of atypical perspectives and altered states of awareness. The process of changing the cognitive chemistry of my language (i.e., symbolic expression in the wildest sense symbolically possible), spins my reflexive self in an ineffable space of semiotic potential that far exceeds the possibilities of conventional discursive practices. tgrffffffffffff fffffffffpoik (Motley, the cat, just stepped on the keyboard.) It does seem to be the case that I can word-my-way to different ways of knowing and transcendent realms of experience and realization. One way to word-my-way is to encounter the conundrums of linguistic expression and symbolic experience. To acknowledge the centrality of linguisticality and to reside fully in this acknowledgment while simultaneously recognizing the limits of my language, leads me, paradoxically, to other worlds of symbolic space -- metaworlds of meaning and making real. Words and other kinds of texts are ubiquitous mediums for other kinds of worlds that may transcend what seems ordinary and transform me when I encounter them. If the limits of my language are the limits of my world (Wittgenstein, 1961), then this borderland, this luminal and marginal place/space, may be a testing ground for experimenting with symbolic behavior and escaping the bounds of the prosaic. A conventional semantic way in may be an unorthodox way out, an escape through the very limitations that normally restrict me. When I word-my-way, when I call my world into existence by virtue of the symbols and rituals of my calling, I also make possible my liberation from the very domain I have called. I embark on new and personal terrain of pristine, symbolic realization. I enter a riddle that sets me free. The philosopher Colin McGinn (1994) depicts an instance of this symbolic experience and consequent liberation through the course of his commentary about the mind-body problem -- the "deep metaphysical question about how mind and matter meet" (p.67). McGinn believes this conundrum is outside the capabilities of our thinking, that it is solved by realizing it is not solvable. He writes: Our modes of concept formation, which operate from a base in perception and introspection, cannot bridge the chasm that separates the mind from the brain: They are tied to the mental and physical terms of the relation, not to the relation itself. This solves the metaphysical problem in a way, because now we are under no pressure to think that the world contains something heavy with intrinsic impossibility: from the fact that we cannot make sense of something it does not follow that it makes no sense. …