I spent much of my life wondering what it might be like to have direct relational contact with a nonhuman intelligence. Of course, I never suspected such contact might actually occur. So I read anything I could find that even hinted at such a possibility. Surprisingly, I found that even in the many stories of people who seemed to have experienced such contact, the good stuff was missing: the other beings didn’t -teach- the people anything interesting.

How could you meet a nonhuman intelligence and not learn like mad? It never made sense to me. In fact, most of the people who claimed to have had such experience -didn’t even ask questions- during the experience?

What?

Of course, I always believed that I would require special equipment, status, or incredible luck in order to have such an opportunity. I was wrong, since this is the sort of thing that can happen anywhere at all. With no equipment, and no preparation. You do not have to travel. It can happen wherever you are at this moment. To be completely blunt: it is happening to you right now, but you are not aware of it. Yet.

When the event began, and it lasted some 9 months, the initial exchanges were about identity. Introductions, if you will. Strangely, however, this was an entirely new -form- of identity; a form whose ‘tokens’ (like ‘words’ in our language) were explosively dynamic. Exposure to them actively ‘educated you’, -moving your mind and intellect- in a way that bears no real resemblance to our common experience of language.

So to ‘introduce’ oneself would be to directly communicate one’s -meaning-of-self-in-relation-. Around here we call this a vocation. Over there, they accomplish their vocation in every moment of communication, but perhaps especially in introduction — which comprises something like a peculiar ‘simple school’ for those unaccustomed to these forms of relation. The introduction thus effects an introductory education, not merely an exchange of tokens of reference or ‘names’.

Every moment of contact was fire-of-learning. My mind was reforged from its roots. Their intelligence is so unlike our own as to render what we call intelligence suspect.

In any case, what I want to say is this: there are obvious signs of contact with nonhuman intelligence in other people. Some, but not all of these can be mimicked by certain forms of prodigy or psycho-emotional fugue, ‘madness’, extreme stress, hallucination/delusion, etc. But I know and recognize them from my own experience.

1. The person has extraordinary models of identity, meaning, relation, and may possess and use categories which do not otherwise exist within their language. Some of these may refer to language and communications capacities. Efficacy is a key here: if the models are bizarre, they are probably mental. If they are profound and efficacious… they work, demonstrably, closer attention is warrented.

2. They may demonstrate unnatural awareness of flaws in common human activity or thought, particularly when these directly involve relation. They may possess and demonstrate unusual relational capacities with other life forms.

3. They will have probably acquired nonordinary perspectives on numerism, identity, how meaning is acquired, language, consciousness, and, particularly communication. Some of these will have resulted in demonstrable skills and paradigms.

4. They may demonstrate nonordinary skills or awareness capacities. These can vary through the entire range of ‘paranormal’ abilities and beyond, into terrains we are not yet equipped to discuss or imagine.

5. Some of the features listed above can be contagious in the right context; which is to say that discussions of them cease to be merely discussions and begin to actually effect what they describe within the direct experience of the participants during such discussions. This is an emulation of the experience of mind-to-mind communication which is common to many such situations. This allows some degree of direct skill-transfer, although cognitive skills are particularly suited to this.

6. Although the varieties of such nonordinary experience are vast, in general, someone who has nothing to demonstrate, and did not learn anything they can communicate, and does not display any of the above mentioned criteria has probably had -some other form of experience- which was masquerading as contact.

If you’ve been talking with another order of intelligence… the result isn’t going to look much like what humans think, sell each other, talk about, or expect. That’s what -nonhuman- means. So when I hear people talking about this matter I often find it very confusing. They are talking about -something-. Yes. But not what they think they are talking about. It sounds more like a left-brain sci-fi narrative than actual contact. A space religion or something. Some aspect of the mind, perhaps. Possibly in some cases, an encounter with transcendental space, or a twilight moment. But not an encounter with another intelligence.

See, the thing is this: other intelligences -are intelligent-. And an encounter with one will change yours… obviously, dramatically, forever…