What I will say is only a crude model of what is so, and yet I must use language to speak of something that cannot be properly contained therein:

Suppose with me that each form of organism is the living representative and agent of a specific branch of a peculiar kind of universal library (itself, a meta-organism) in which each unique form and temporal instance of an organism comprises a set of unique and evolving ways of sensing, relating with, influencing, reflecting upon, and recording reality.

What or who is doing the sensing? Both the local agent (and all with whom it is immersed) and the library as a unity, existing ‘above’ the streams of living time in which we are physically enmeshed. The living agents update themselves and the library constantly. Similarly, the library is constantly updating the living agents. They are, in important ways, ‘made of each other’s most recent updates and history’. Not merely in the past tense, but in a transtemporal sense.

Each of us is also thus. We are easily recognized as this sort of sensing-and-relation agent… but we appear to have either forgotten, denied, or told absurd stories about who or what we are the agents of.

Like all organisms, we are in constant contact with the living library, and our form is naturally endowed with astonishing capacities in relation with other living beings… but the true character and functionality of these assets are too outrageous to make sense within the highly abstracted cultures we now inhabit.

When we are in ‘nature’ we will tend to be in more direct contact with these capacities and the library, because the bandwidth is dramatically increased by whatever diversity may there be active. That diversity equates to relational flow-potential. But for those of us who do not live immersed in nature, crude hints about these matters must sneak into our awareness through the twisted channels of subcultures whose agendas almost invariably reduce and distort them. By the time they reach us, we are confused: we may recognize some portion of our heritage but it seems flat (and is usually wearing too much make-up).

The simplest thing I can say is this: organisms are the living agents of something transcendentally sophisticated, self-aware, and hyper-intelligent. It is also playful. It recognizes its agents in a filial sense. I have no idea what its true extent is, or even what to call it. It’s an extended network of distributed intelligence that links all living moments — through living beings. The content of this transcendental library and its modes and forms of identity are directly accessible to you, personally. As far as I can tell, the approximate function in the local organismal structure of our species is, ‘user and activator of the library link’, but we either have really strange stories about this or we have forgotten it altogether and consider it unsubstantiated fantasy.

You do not merely possess some link-like thing — you are the way of forming the link… a living way… you, personally. The part of you that wants living places and living eyes is the evidence of this. You use an aspect of the link to the library to form language, to evaluate, to measure… but if you are like most of us you never notice its activation, or that it can be activated in other ways… like those that result in the range of experiences we call dreaming… and a whole library of others.

Before you acquired the languages and knowledge that largely refashioned your mind in their image, you used the link to learn how to use language… back when the link was your friend… and had replaced another link… a physical one, which had recently been physically severed. The new link is better than the old one. In disappearing physically, it was established elsewise.

If you can take all of the labels and cultural ideas away, and just open the link… you will discover where the labels and cultures were born. You will also discover their common nature and function. In fact, you will become discovery herself.