No, it is unnecessary to trip on massive amounts of LSD and Mushrooms to expand your consciousness.

I would urge you not to freak out about how language is meaningless because it's an abstract construction created by man. I would urge you not to let your mind go reeling on the fact that the act of speaking itself is unimportant because it is "just sound"; that we can live without the act of speech. But thanks, because I looked into it, and what I found wasn't disappointing. 

I found this insightful article the other day that helped me understand another profound facet of language - language not just for communication - but for it's ability to change our worldview. There have been some studies that show how language shapes the way people literally see and understand the world. For example, in English, nouns are mostly gender neutral. But what about German and Spanish? For example, the word "key" is denoted as masculine in German. However, in Spanish, "key" is denoted as feminine. In one of the studies, scientists asked a group of German speaking people to describe the word "key" using adjectives. They said: hard, heavy, jagged, metal, serrated, and useful. The group of Spanish speakers described the word "key" as: golden, intricate, little, lovely, shiny, and tiny. As an English speaker, I can see how this would change my view of a key, something I would normally understand as gender neutral. I can't imagine thinking of a key and immediately connecting it to masculinity or femininity. Actually, I would probably think of something that had to do with my own personal experience with keys. This takes the whole argument even further. While the article describes language through a priori knowledge, I might say that language can also be understood through posteriori knowledge. But I'll focus on the former for now. There is an even more interesting excerpt in the article about a group of aboriginal people from Australia who use the words North, South, East, and West, but never right, left, forward, or back. This completely changes how they feel and think about space, it gives them even more depth... both physically and temporally.

Fascinating. Here's a link to the article:

How Does Our Language Shape The Way We Think? by Lera Boroditsky

- F