The paradise of the mother's voice.

Notes on science, mysticism, and mescaline.

What is Truth? This question is timeless and essentially unanswerable. And yet we must never stop asking it. Contrary to what postmodernists believed, truth does indeed exist. Moreover, it is our only guiding light in the dark land of totalitarianism.

First and foremost, we are going to listen to a newborn child, a child that has not yet been grasped by the world of illusion and the Ego. A child in that period is a being that – just like the mystic, the mescaline user, the seminal scientist, and the schizophrenic – exists in the land of Truth and the Real. That land was declared forbidden territory by the rationalist Enlightenment tradition; it is precisely that land we need to explore to understand the ailments and crises of our Enlightenment culture.

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A child already floats on the waves of the mother's voice in the womb. It registers the tempo, rhythm, and other sound properties somewhere in the fabric of its flesh. Immediately after birth, it will recognize the mother's voice from all other voices. Place headphones on the child's head during its first breaths; let it hear the mother's voice while sucking on the left breast and someone else's voice while sucking on the right breast; after a short time, it will suck much more on the left breast than on the right. And it can already somewhat reproduce the mother's voice. Its earliest cries and screams already show melodical similarities to the mother's voice. There is no other conclusion possible: it has learned the mother tongue in the womb.

After birth, the learning process continues. The child imitates the mother's facial expressions and mimics her sounds. While lying in its cradle, it sees a procession of maternal symbols at its zenith – facial expressions, body postures, and sounds. In its desire for union with the mother, it participates in that primordial symbolism. It observes her facial expressions with intense attention and makes rudimentary attempts to imitate them, it mimicks the mother's sounds in its earliest cries and cooing, and it experiences the deepest pleasure when it notices the mother responding by imitating the child in turn.

As the child creatively adopts the mother's language of forms and sounds, it simultaneously adopts something else: her state of Being. The child imitating the melancholy sound of the mother's voice feels her sadness; the child imitating the mother's smiling face feels her joy. In this way, it’s being merges with the being of the mother.

Language thus becomes a medium for union with the maternal being. Literally. Through the imitation of forms and sounds, the child feels one with her. This must be interpreted radically. The young child observing another child falling becomes that child. The observing child will mimic the painful grimaces of the fallen child and thereby feel its pain and often start crying itself.

Adults also still possess this ability. Watch someone hit their finger with a hammer, and you will often spontaneously pull back your hand and feel your face contort into a grimace. However, in adults, this empathic response is much more limited than in a young child. The reason is that adults, unlike children, are limited in their union with the Other by a veil of illusion that envelops them and separates them from the Other. This veil of illusion is called the Ego – more on that in a subsequent essay.

The young child has no Ego yet and, for instance, cannot yet assign meaning to words, but this does not mean that, in terms of language, it only negatively differs from adults, as a being that merely lacks something. In some respects, a child can do more than an adult. It has a learning and absorbing ability that an adult can only dream of. For example, in the earliest months of its existence, a child has an astounding ability to distinguish sounds from each other. In two weeks, it can learn to distinguish all the phonemes of all the languages in the world from each other. In comparison, an adult could not achieve this in years.

And the most interesting part is this: this rapid learning process only occurs when the child listens to a physically present Other. It will not occur when the child listens to audio or video recordings. Under those circumstances, the linguistic sounds do not seem to really interest the child. The reason why a child directs its attention and interest so much to language is that it sees a gateway to the body of the Other in the sounds. It wants to connect to that body. Imitating its sounds is a way to achieve that. In a sense, the child uses language for the same purpose as football supporters when they sing together: to experience the pleasure of resonant connectedness. This shows us (again): language is originally a medium used to connect animated bodies with each other.

Here we see a radical difference from the transhumanist view of language. Transhumanists see language merely as a means to convey information in a rational way. ‘Humans became the most powerful animals on earth because they could exchange information more efficiently through language’ (see Harari).

And through merging with technology, humans can optimize that ability. With a Neuralink in the brain, humans will communicate perfectly. No more eternally incorrect human language, no more endless sources of half-understanding and complete misunderstandings. No more stuttering and stammering of people with limited verbal capacities, no more gossiping of fishwives and jealous neighbors.

And no more poetry and endless chatter of lovers. That pathetic happiness will no longer be necessary. Implanted hormone pumps will be able to manipulate the state of the blood 24/7 – Homo Deus will spend his life in a state of constant, biochemically induced happiness. Want to experience the intoxication of love, the ecstasy of gazing at vast mountains, the tenderness of a young mother nursing her child – it is merely a matter of pressing the right button, and the right pump will be activated.

Transhumanism, in its ideological fanaticism, overlooks something. It even overlooks the essence of language. Information exchange is not the primordial function of language. In the beginning, language carries no meaning at all and refers to nothing. In the beginning, language is the bearer of the Soul. It is pleasure and love. It is primarily a sonic phenomenon that creates connection through resonance. In the mother's voice, the music of paradise sounds. The door to paradise opens by singing along with the mother's song.

And the mistake of transhumanism goes beyond that. Transhumanism sees all life, every form of exchange of an 'organism' with its environment actually as a form of  ‘information exchange’ or 'data exchange.' The phenomenon of 'life' is seen as an algorithmic process in biological hardware. An organism that eats actually exchanges information or data with its environment. The organism transforms the food according to a certain algorithm.

Harari coined the term ‘dataism’ for this ideology. Every organism, including human beings, is a kind of processor that performs algorithmic transformations on its environment. And that processor can be reprogrammed; humans are 'hackable animals.' Just wait a little longer, and we will have fully mapped out the laws of the data stream of life and will surpass ourselves by reprogramming ourselves – much better than nature programmed us.

The experiential world of the young child shows us a completely different universe, a universe that is not an electronic crackling of data streams between processors, but a universe that is a gently undulating sea of love and connectedness between singularities that are one with the All. And the destiny of humans is not to become a sort of hyper-efficient, information-exchanging cyborg, but a being that resonates with the mystical form language nature, a being that relates more or less harmoniously to the All from which it originated.

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Back to the child who can learn to distinguish phonemes from one another at an astounding rate. Where does this spectacular learning ability of a young child come from? Simply put: the child learns to distinguish sounds so quickly because it does not yet have an Ego. The Ego is only born between six and nine months, at a very precise moment that we will discuss when exploring the world of Appearances.

It is this Ego-less state that allows the child to subtly and directly let the strings of its body vibrate with the sounds made by the Other. An adult can hardly imagine this Ego-less state of the child, except in a few specific states. One of these states was masterfully described by Aldous Huxley in his book 'The Doors of Perception' (after which the sixties group The Doors was named).

Mescaline is a substance derived from the root of the peyote cactus. The Indians of Mexico and the Southwestern United States have used the root since time immemorial and revered it as a deity because it led them to a state in which they recognized both their origin and their destination. Those who use the root experience a state of deep union with the soul of all objects around them. One no longer looks at light; one becomes a light particle. One no longer observes other people; one becomes the other person. And so on.

This great Union is paradisiacal in nature. The Soul is completely absorbed by the shapes and colors of certain objects. The folds in velvet, the deep blue of lapis lazuli – Huxley noted that one would certainly die of hunger if the mescaline trance did not stop. The endlessly wide calm and unfathomably deep satisfaction that the Soul experiences in its contemplation are such that no one would be able to turn away to, say, look for food.

Huxley broadly equated the mescaline experience with the mystical experience. The great mystics like Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, and Hildegard von Bingen described the essence of the mystical experience in the same way: one becomes one with the All, one with the universal Soul. It is from the experience of Unity among all singularities that the great religious principles self-evidently emerge. 'Love your neighbor as yourself' – you are the other; what you do to another, you do to yourself.  

To the series of experiences described by Huxley, we can add another: the near-death experience. The term itself had not yet been coined when Huxley wrote his 'The Doors of Perception', but every description found of it fits seamlessly into the series of experiences Huxley mentions.

Whether one wants to consider this experience purely materialistically as a kind of biochemical convulsion of the brain or as a mystical experience of a Real state of being is irrelevant here: here too one finds the paradisiacal experience of unity with the All; here too one finds the experience of unfathomable beauty of colors and sounds; here too the Soul is absorbed by the things it perceives, and so on.

Just like the young child, a person in a near-death experience has remarkable knowledge that transcends any form of rational insight. An engineer friend who had a near-death experience after an accident described to me that he saw the world below him and all the algorithmic laws of nature became crystal clear to him. He 'saw' them with the greatest obviousness and could only marvel that he had not always seen them. When he descended back into his pain-scorched body and the mind was sucked back into the force field of the Ego, he had to admit that, as before, the eyes of his mind were too cloudy to discern the crystalline structure of reality.

In the mescaline experience, the mystical experience, and the near-death experience, we encounter a state in which knowledge is revealed directly through a form of feeling one with reality: “In the final stage of egolessness there is an 'obscure knowledge' that All is in all—that All is actually each. This is as near, I take it, as a finite mind can ever come to 'perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe'.” (Huxley, The Doors of Perception).

It is also relevant to mention Einstein's reflections on the origin of scientific knowledge. Einstein aptly referred to a 'cosmic religious feeling' as the ultimate source of science. In a preface to a book by Max Planck, he stated that people mistakenly believe that scientific insights flow from rational thinking. According to him, they flow from intuition and an ability to 'einfühlen', a German term that literally translates to 'feeling one' or 'empathy':

'Thus the supreme task of the physicist is the discovery of the most general elementary laws from which the world picture can be deduced logically. But there is no logical way to the discovery of these elementary laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance, and this einfuhlung is developed by experience' (Einstein in 'Where is science going?', p. 12).

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In 'The Doors of Perception', Huxley thus explores the counterpart of the totalitarian paradise he described in his iconic novel 'Brave New World'. Totalitarianism always fanatically believes it will create a paradise for humanity. Hitler believed so much in the paradise of his racially pure Aryan society that he deemed it justifiable to make millions of victims; Stalin thought millions had to be sacrificed to realize the 'rule of the proletariat'. The hallmark of the totalitarian paradise is always that humanity believes it can realize it itself, particularly through the ruthless application of a rationalist ideology. In the case of Hitler, it was a eugenic theory; in the case of Stalin, it was Marx's historical materialism.

Today, Harari presents us with this totalitarian paradise. This time, it is the transhumanist ideology that provides the plan for it. Humanity will enter it by merging with technology. And it will be centrally coordinated – even the cyborg needs a state. Someone must coordinate and direct. Preferably not a human. A central computer, constantly getting smarter through Artificial Intelligence, will monitor and optimize the psychological and physical state of the citizen via nanoparticles in the blood.

Freud thought that governing is one of the impossible professions, but the Great AI statesman will change that. The society – that writhing, chaotic heap of bodies – will become a flawlessly functioning 'internet of bodies' through the triumph of reason. No more depression and anxiety attacks. Anxiety and stress hormones, serotonin and oxytocin will be kept at the perfect level by hormone pumps in the vein walls. Also, no more crime – criminal neural patterns will be detected and neutralized at an early stage. And if necessary, the bionic joints of cyborg beings with hard-to-manage blood values can still be remotely locked.

The cyborg human will finally transcend its existence tormented by irrationality. It will flawlessly register reality through cameras that replace the always cloudy lens of the eye and microphones that are not bothered by selective deafness and tinnitus. The hyper-accurate data stream thus provided will be stored in its hard-drive-augmented memory and communicated perfectly rationally and without bias to other cyborg humans via an embedded brain chip.

This paradise will be eternal. If a part of the cyborg human wears out, it is simply replaced. And the human mind and soul, meaningless by-products of the biological hardware of its brain, are stored on a hard drive and, if really necessary, uploaded into a new, laboratory-grown cyborg body. Hannah Arendt already pointed out: the only problem with that totalitarian paradise is that it looks so suspiciously like hell.

It is striking: the paradise Huxley explores in The Doors of Perception is in most respects precisely opposed to the totalitarian paradise. The totalitarian paradise is the result of rational thinking. It arises when rational understanding is complete, and the ability to control and manipulate reality is maximal.

The paradisiacal experience Huxley explores, on the other hand, befalls humanity when it leaves its rational thinking behind, transcends its Ego, and abandons any urge to control and manipulate 'reality'. The person merges with Being, to the extent that any attempt to know rationally can only detract from the awareness of it. The knowledge that humanity receives in this paradise is not rational knowledge; it is an empathetic knowing that essentially arises from a direct experience of the Being of things.

What is experienced thereis the Real ground of things that great painters like Vermeer and Braque captured on canvas; it is the mystical essence to which Blake devoted his oeuvre. 'Things without pretensions, satisfied to be merely themselves, sufficient in their Suchness, not acting a part, not trying, insanely, to go it alone, in isolation from the Dharma-Body, in Luciferian defiance of the grace of God' (Huxley, The Doors of Perception, p. ).

Crucial in the context of this series of articles on the act of speaking: language has a completely different status in Huxley's paradise than in the totalitarian paradise. In the totalitarian paradise, language is purely an exchange of information. In the experiences described by Huxley, the exact opposite applies. He describes it vividly: in the mescaline experience and in the mystical experience, one does not care about the meaning of words and symbols.

That does not mean that language in that state becomes indifferent. On the contrary. Another dimension of language comes to the forefront. Words come in directly, they do not need to first go through a mentally laborious process to gain meaning and be linked to perceptions: "To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours, the outer and inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended directly and unconditionally by Mind at Large—this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.” (Huxley, The Doors of Perception).

In a certain sense, consider the way poetry speaks: the less you think and the more you let the poem come in directly, the more intense the poetic experience. Just as a young child can learn to distinguish phonemes extraordinarily quickly, an adult under the influence of mescaline becomes extraordinarily sensitive to minute differences in (colors and) sounds: “All colors are intensified to a pitch far beyond anything seen in the normal state, and at the same time the mind’s capacity for recognizing fine distinctions of tone and hue is notably heightened.” (Huxley, The Doors of Perception).

In the Ego-less state, language is thus not so much a system for exchanging information; it speaks rather through its sound-musical dimension, through its formal characteristics. In this state, language is stripped of all meaning; it wells up directly from what lives in the animated body; it testifies in its rhythm, sound, bouncing, and stuttering to the Soul, as it slumbers in the tensions of the fibers of the speaker's animated body. The child listening to the mother and receiving her sounds feels the mother in its body, pulling her Soul inward through the sounds. And the child who speaks itself transports its own Soul to the Other through the sounds it makes. This pure, emotional dimension of language largely disappears as soon as words begin to carry meaning and refer to objects.

From this exploration, we derive a core characteristic of sincere speaking: in a sense, sincere speaking takes us back to the core of our Being, before it was covered by social conventions and meaning. Sincere speaking is done primarily from the feeling, animated body; much less from the head; it is an emotional speaking rather than a thinking-rational speaking. One who speaks before thinking is more sincere than one who first surrenders too much to considerations about what is right to say, about what must, may, and can be said.

Practicing the art of Sincere Speaking largely comes down to this: connect with what slumbers and vibrates in the fibers of your animated body, let it form words and speak those words before they are distorted by thoughts and censored by social conventions. You certainly cannot follow this rule everywhere and always, and it is certainly not enough to define 'truth,' but it does touch on a core aspect of it.

It is this kind of speaking that penetrates through the Veil of Appearance and literally perforates holes in the Ego through which resonating connections between animated bodies are established; it is this kind of speaking that realizes a true human bond; it is this kind of speaking that increases the intuitive sense of the human being.