In this week’s episode, Dianna Slattery speaks with Joanna about: xenolinguistics, new species of language; meeting the Other/s, presences larger than life; playing the maze game; communication with a living language; going to school in a different realm; the work of becoming more conscious of our human and spiritual possibilities; outer and inner support systems; the balance between taking risks and safety; healing with psychedelics; entheogens: at the beginning of a vast exploration; ex/plaining the visionary experiences; the essential religious impulse, without intermediaries; the freedom of forming the future, personal and collectively; the primal, wave-like language of energy; a living laboratory for human creativity.

Diana Reed Slattery was born in time to compile a full 60s resume: civil rights photojournalism, peace marching, communes. Social justice, self-exploration, and LSD went hand in hand. She went on to co-found an ecologically oriented K-12 school with working farm, dairy, livestock, and forestry that held the first renewable energy conference in Oregon. She later continued her career by founding, funding, and managing a series of not-for-profit organizations. In 1999, in an altered state of consciousness, she acquired a strange, alien script, Glide, beginning a ten-year psychonautics investigation of linguistic phenomena in the psychedelic sphere. Out of this solo – and secret – adventure came a novel, “The Maze Game”, a million words of session reports, software to work with the language, and a PhD in xenolinguistics. Slattery lives in california, and has presented her work at numerous art, technology, consciousness, and psychedelic conferences over the past 15 years. Her newest book is “Xenolinguistics: Psychedelics, Language, and the Evolution of Consciousness”.

Xenolinguistics

“I Can’t Sit Still”, original music by Evarusnik