“It may seem difficult to understand, but the methods you use and sense in yourselves as ‘thought’ comprise crude structural approximations of something we use the way you use language.

What this means is that when we ‘speak’ to you, mind-to-mind, the structure and content of our expressions become involved in dynamically organizing the the activity of your mind, including the faculties associated with insight and understanding. The resulting ‘communication’ directly presents to your comprehension powerful approximations of our meaning that contain literal, metaphoric, symbolic, poetic and transcendental aspects of associated content.

You experience our communications gestures as something more profound than either thought or dreaming, and involving both. We can thus -give you direct experiences- of forms of thought, experience and information that your languages cannot hope to even point toward. This is because our languages are not merely representational. They directly involve what minds are comprised of in the way yours directly involve phonemes.

You have never had any experience like this, and cannot do these things (yet) with your own mind, so it seems miraculous every time it happens. And it seems like telepathy to you, but it is merely the effect of our mode of expression on your cognition, whose nature is directly, rather than referentially involved.”

— an anonymous nonhuman intelligence, circa 2002