Mckenna on Language

"Communication is real; it allows one mind to flow into another; it allows viewpoints to leap from one soul to another.

If you wanted to look for the thumbprint of the goddess on being, the phenomenon to look at is human language. Notice that it's a behavior. If someone's keeping their mouth shut you can't tell whether they're a verbal person or not. But once someone starts to talk, it's the most extraordinary kind of human behavior. It's that thoughts are downloaded into a symbolic notation composed of little mouth-noises, which then sail across acoustical space and are reconstructed in the brain of the listener, so that these thoughts are magically reconstructed in the brain of the listener. We take this for granted, but when you analyze it, it's an extraordinarily mysterious, almost, you could say, a supernatural power, that we exercise all the time."

-Terence Mckenna on Language, transcribed from a talk given upon the release of his book, "Food of the Gods"

mp3's here