'Language permits its users to pay attention to things, persons and events, even when the things and persons are not present and the events are not taking place. Language gives definition to our memories and, by translating experiences into symbols, converts the immediacy of craving or abhorrence, of hatred or love, into fixed principles of feeling and conduct.
In some way of which we are totally unconscious, the reticular system of the brain selects from a countless host of stimuli those few experiences which are of practical importance to us. From these unconsciously selected experiences we more or less consciously select and abstract a smaller number, which we label with words from our vocabulary and then classify within a system at once metaphysical, scientific and ethical, made up of other words on a higher level of abstraction.
In cases where the selecting and abstracting have been dictated by a system that is not too erroneous as a view of the nature of things, and where the verbal labels have been intelligently chosen and their symbolic nature clearly understood, our behaviour is apt to be realistic and tolerably decent.
But under the influence of badly chosen words, applied, without any understanding of their merely symbolic character, to experiences that have been selected and abstracted in the light of a system of erroneous ideas, we are apt to behave with a fiendishness and an organised stupidity, of which dumb animals (precisely because they are dumb and cannot speak) are blessedly incapable.'
['Education for Freedom' - from Brave New World Revisited]

When we interact with the world, we do so through our senses - yet we very rarely truly interact with the world.

Our immersion in (mostly unconscious) reactive, habitual, erroneous and largely irrelevant thought processes initiated in childhood (and reinforced collectively and reciprocally as a mass, ingrained habit of repetition and trivia at almost every turn) - the incessant and infernal 'internal dialogue' trance-fixes us in illusion, illusion perpetuated by our own internal noise. As awareness of this (largely unnecessary) illusion grows we move increasngly into sensory contact with the ground of natural reality.

Realising that the description, any description of anything, is symbolic and as such never exists or existed as the described; we are indeed fools to engage, manipulate or enter into bondage with such, other than by practical, physical need.

We encounter the real when we cease imaging and blurring 'what is' with unnecessary symbol. Coincidentally we become free of the psycholgical or 'effortful' desire process that arises as a consequence of the images created in the noise.
Conception conditions perception...

Scary stuff:
"a carefully built up erection of statements, which whether true or false can be made to undermine quite rigidly held ideas and to construct new ones that will take their place. It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. What after all are a square and a circle? They are mere words and words can be moulded until they clothe ideas in disguise."  - sounds like the Fox News / Limbaugh crowd