The initial clues to the existence of an accessible nonordinary reality did not arrive through drugs, counterculture or religion. They came through dreaming, illness, anomaly, accident, crisis, and adoration. These were not significant enough to overcome the extant gravitational pull implicit in the promises and demands of cultural (and sub-cultural) participation. But eventually, I experienced events whose fundamental structure forced me to question elemental assumptions about the nature of reality, relation, consciousness, and separation.

Again, the kinds of incidents mentioned above were fundamentally catalytic. But more predictable and common problems began when I started having precognitive experiences with technology. As a Mac tech, I began to be able to predict problems with equipment before they occurred. I could also determine causes and solutions from extremely little or no actual data. A brief contact with the user, for example. Or the machine. The first few anomalies like this intrigued me, but I brushed them off. Two years later it was happening many times each day — with witnesses. It was no longer possible to laugh it away as arbitrary.

Of course, one of the standing implications bothers me… that machines participate in consciousness somehow (an idea I fundamentally resist). Yet there is a more salient explanation: that consciousness is capable of reaching directly into mechanical existence. This latter idea seemed more likely, so I began to examine its obvious antecedent: that my consciousness could directly touch (and learn from) that of other beings, living (at first) and no longer or yet-to-be living (later).

So far as I can determine, the facts are these: any person who is conscious is participating directly in a field of relation whose actual dimensionality, dynamism, character, activity, and embodiment defy all possibilities of exposure through description. All minds touch, even those not yet born. Our minds are meant to be the access credentials that open this opportunity, but our representational habits shut this down, as they have been doing in an ongoing fashion approximately since the advent of language, which, by and large, buried the more organic originary intelligences and relationships which largely organized the ordinary waking experience of our distant ancestors… and some few remaining people today… not to mention many if not most young children.

Do me a favor. Don’t make religions or systems or maps about this. That’s actually evidence of -the other intelligence attempting to take over-. The nature of this situation is analogous to kissing. You’re not supposed to build libraries and math and simulations about it.

It’s about kiss and be kissed.