There is a kind of substrate or inner order of intelligence whose activity produces astonishing constellations of connective meaning and inference. It is my strong suspicion that it is profoundly involved in dreaming. For most modern people, it is difficult to interact with these aspects of our minds directly in ordinary consciousness. For this reason, drugs and trance-inducing behaviors are common throughout nearly all human cultures. But they are, largely, unnecessary, and made necessary by the gross inhibitions foisted upon us by our common habits and cultures.

If you contact this strange inner intelligence directly, the experience is astonishing and enlightening — and it could easily be mistaken for a nonhuman communicant. Yet this is not properly our intelligence, or even its basis — it is merely one of its more interesting side-effects! The actual intelligence behind our intelligence is, as it must be, universal, and vastly beyond the human.

Perhaps this little side-effect is a local echo of that vast unities that comprise the sources of consciousness itself. In any case, I suggest that we begin to explore these matters directly, with and for each other, and without co-opting dogmas from religion or dismissive explanations from science. We cannot be truly human without understanding ourselves, and what we take for ourselves in the modern moment is so cripplingly impoverished that I am often surprised we can even survive our own myopia, let alone develop within its storms.