It is as if there were a ‘living conduit’ within which streams of universal intelligence are transported and elaborated by all who participate in it. Impossibly ancient, and materially transpresent… a being whose intelligence is of such catastrophic profundity that the merest of conscious exposures to its vague proximity drives us into fits of clairvoyance, spontaneous cascades of technically prodigious insight, visionary ecstasies, and inexplicable nonordinary abilities.

Human culture largely (but never completely) masks it, emulates it, and delivers relatively pathetic substitutes for it. We remain, just as we always have been, terrified of it. We have no idea what it is. As this itself is terrifying, we masquerade as masters of Nature, in the hope that this will somehow encompass it.

But again, we have no idea what Nature is, either. Most of our stories are too absurd to admit consideration, nevermind celebration. But the conduit I spoke of exists. And it involves relationships with place, other living beings, and the activation of latent relational and sensing potentials we all carry within ourselves.

I am no longer terribly concerned with whether there may be life on other worlds or not. It turns out that that the whole situation is far more interesting than that. Every portion of timespace is shot through with streams of nonordinary living intelligence that connect worlds. And some of them are so precocious that they will actually introduce themselves, given proper circumstances.