“You locate the membrane of your habit, your ignorance, your fears, your laziness, and your entitlement. You seek blindly within for the bounding membrane, until it begins to appear to your inward senses — and then, as when you were born, you tear it. You rip it. You make holes, sometimes like music, sometimes like war — because you can sense, that just beyond everything you believe and understand, there exists a place so shockingly profound, dangerous, and beautiful that you would rather die than fail to achieve it. You must pierce the amniotic sac of human culture and believe, you must be born again, beyond all human thought and idea, into the embrace of the beings and relationships which all our earthly trials are but the estranged shadows of. Like a salmon defying the waterfall’s fact, it’s force, ‘it’s gravity, you must achieve that ancient pool, that starry pasture, from which all soul and intellect inherit their form, their natures, their purposes, and their wonder. The second birth: it’s not just for Christians anymore.”

— an anonymous informant