How Language Participates in Reality Rather Than Just Describing It

John Vervaeke's concept of the 'dual aspect' of language identifies a fundamental cognitive structure: every linguistic sign possesses both referential existence (what it designates) and vehicle existence (its material, sonic, graphic instantiation). Literacy and habituation render the vehicle transparent — the Stroop effect being the clearest empirical signature of how thoroughly the vehicle has been subordinated to the referent. Psychedelic experience, contemplative practice, and ritual enactment function as forms of Sati — a remembering that language is not merely a pointing device but an instantiation of fundamental properties of reality: nowness, togetherness, temporal flow.

David Bohm's RheoMode project sits squarely within this framework. By restructuring verbal grammar so that the word in the saying points to the action taking place in the saying of it, Bohm was not refining language as a transparent tool but deploying it as a mirror of cognitive process — making thinking visible to itself through speech. This recursive self-reference echoes a universal pattern: virtually every religious tradition opens with a cosmogony of language, a story of how primal telling works. The Protestant Reformation's privileging of scripture over sacrament represents the religious expression of a broader drift toward propositional tyranny, accelerated by print culture and left-hemisphere cognitive dominance.

Invocation practices reveal the dual function with particular clarity. Incantatory speech — mantras, liturgical formulae, divine naming — demonstrates that language can alter the interior state of the receiver, not merely transmit propositional content. This is the magic function that pre-modern cultures recognized as fundamental to religious operation. Alongside this, religion expands the range of accessible affect: figures like Cthulhu, the unfathomable Jehovah, or dark Aztec deities serve as placeholders for affective ranges ordinary cognition cannot reach. This points to an implicit but rarely named distinction within religious communities: between those who need a grounding cosmogonic narrative and those whose vocation is generating new versions of such narratives as reality complexifies.