![[Everything Shii Knows]](../mediawiki/skins/common/images/wiki.png)
Notes for an essay.
The grand illusion of our time is a thing that can be neither touched, seen, smelled or heard, and which we nonetheless call "reality". "Reality" is beyond your personal conception: it is something out there, existing in the form of statements that are true regardless of how they relate to your experiential knowledge. This illusion perverts the very language we use to describe the world: for example, the word "exist" in the sentence "Trees exist even when nobody is looking at them" implies a state which cannot be sensed and yet is assumed to have some truth to it.
This sounds like sophistry, but it's the basis of bad decisions. The metaphor our minds create for the vast expanses of non-sensory reality is a sort of blank slate waiting for us to occupy it, and with little effort we draw this metaphor into real world decisions as well.
- A vocabulary of images alienates humanity from itself as easily as any world-denying asceticism.
- Images are not reality but we talk about them and remember them as if they are.
- Think about that when you watch YouTube.
Safe and dangerous language
Words are not created equal. Some word choices, depending on culture and context, are more dangerous than others. Example:
- Safe language: "The pagan community anthropomorphizes their natural environment."
- Dangerous language: "Humans can listen to trees if they learn how."
These two statements have the same meaning, and as unlikely as it might seem, the latter is not an religious claim. (Maybe trees have nothing to say.) But the former has been toned down to make it sounds like comforting milquetoast to people who aim to deny their animal nature.
To give another example, I recently had a friend tell me, while she was sharing her mind with an entheogen, that she sometimes talks to God. If she had said this at all while sober, it would have been downplayed into something like "I hallucinate voices". The word "hallucination" is a recent invention in English. It serves no purpose but to make a dangerous sentence more safe and prevent people from questioning the existence of non-sensory reality. There was no need for the word "hallucination" when people generally understood that there is no reality outside experience, and just if one person saw something doesn't mean another did.
If you have an idea to convey, the only reason to prefer safe language over dangerous language is the fear that the truth will be rejected. But there is a good reason to be dangerous: sometimes people need to be disturbed and wrenched from their seats to understand the depth of their error. Safe language can be brushed over with little discomfort.