DiscoStu Posted July 20, 2015 Psychoactive plants have been consumed by many cultures, cults and groups during religious rituals and ceremonies for centuries and they have been influential on the eruption of many images, secret and religious symbols, esoteric geometrical shapes, archetypes, religious figures, and philosophy of religions since the dawn of Homo sapiens. Some of the psychoactive plants used for religious purposes were: narcotic analgesics (opium), THC (cannabis), psilocybin (magic mushrooms), mescaline (peyote), ibogaine (Tabernanthe iboga), DMT (Ayahuasca and Phalaris species), Peganum harmala, bufotenin, muscimol (Amanita muscaria), Thujone (absinthe, Arthemisia absinthium), ephedra, mandragora, star lotus, Salvia divinorum etc. An important property of these natural chemicals is to induce the human psyche to perceive optical forms and shapes that are existent in the subconscious and presumed collective unconsciousness, and which emerge during certain trance states and ASCs (altered states of consciousness). Some of these simple geometric forms are called entoptic images and phosphenes. Entopic images and phosphenes have been found in various cultural works of art and in the drawings on cave walls, which were formed during shamanic religious rituals since Neolithic times. Also entoptic images exist in many folkloric, traditional and cultural geometrical shapes. Long before the creation of languages, visual perception and information were the only source for mankind, alone of the primates, to perceive the outer world. This article reviews the possibility of an ancient forgotten language of visual signs and symbols, which is genetically existent in the human brain and emerges during ASCs, trance states, and consciousness altered by psychoactive plants. Does the Nervous System Have an Intrinsic Archaic Language? Entoptic Images and Phosphenes.pdf Does the Nervous System Have an Intrinsic Archaic Language? Entoptic Images and Phosphenes.pdf Does the Nervous System Have an Intrinsic Archaic Language? Entoptic Images and Phosphenes.pdf Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
ThunderIdeal Posted July 20, 2015 Noam Chomsky showed that grammar is intrinsic and since then elements of maths have been shown to be intrinsic. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
DiscoStu Posted July 20, 2015 are you talking about universal grammar? also not sure about the universality of mathematics, some cultures do not use numbers which kind of disproves that. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Fenris Posted July 20, 2015 Jungian archetypes, I think a lot of the shared visual signs and symbols are congruous with his ideas of the collective unconscious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungian_archetypes Our wetware does after all revolve around the same operating system, which must be 100k years old. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
ThunderIdeal Posted July 20, 2015 Everybody counts, even infants. There are a few interesting bits and pieces to show innate number skills but since it isn't the topic in not chasing them down Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Anodyne Posted July 20, 2015 There's a big difference between saying that unrelated cultures share common imagery because we have the same visual processing systems, and saying that those images represent a "collective un-sub-conscious" (their phrase). It seems to me that if the authors were right about these images being the language of the collective unconscious, shouldn't the images evolve over time like any other language? Why would trippers today be seeing the same patterns as shamans from 100,000 years ago? If there really were a "collective unconscious" encoded in our genes, what would be the point of a "read-only" system? And if the common imagery is the remnant of pre-vocal-language visual communications, then why did later people not all assign the same meanings to the same symbols? And how did this ancient "language" become encoded in the first place - if cavemen managed to embed their symbols into our brain/eyeballs/unconsciousness so that we still experience them all this time later, why have subsequent generations not managed the same trick? I do like their idea that the brain has the same innate predisposition to tripping as it does to language. But the rest of their paper could pretty much be summarised as "We think psychedelics are pretty impressive, although we have no idea how they work. And we know a chick who sees stars when she comes!" 2 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
