“Though I am not schizophrenic, I can appreciate a related side-road where the aspects of language (and phonemes) we use are understood to be meaningful in ways we might not ordinarily entertain.

Today I heard a child crying, and its caregiver asked “What’s the matter?” I began to think about my schizophrenic friend who believes that the existence of matter is evidence of evil. But I also thought about how material existence is actually fraught with peril that ethereal existence might easily avoid. ‘The matter’ is code for ‘the trouble’ in this exchange, but we also use the word matter to indicate meaningfulness or substantiveness as in ‘things that matter’.

Is matter essentially bad? I think not, but it carries with it the potentials for harm and injury that would be difficult to locate analogies for in a non-physical world. Yet, these same threats provide the impetus for forms of growth and learning we would never really need if we faced neither danger nor impoverishment…

All of this is not merely a birdwalk in my mind; I have had shockingly profound personal experiences related to the origins and activity of language in human cultures and minds… and what I have learned is so bizarre, that, in general, I must keep it to myself… because it has two simultaneous potentials: to liberate human beings from a vast array of lethal traps that have plagued us since the inception of representational consciousness in our species… and to drive us literally insane. Somehow, liberation and insanity are deeply related, if not the polarities of a category we as yet have no proper idea of…”

— infraheard