We have been lied to about the nature of human cognition. Fundamentally. The lies have come in two forms. The first form comprises endless arrays of inexplicably insipid metaphysical models that dress up a single principle in thousands of toxic ways, and attempts to sell a broken version of it back to those starving for its peculiar fruits.

The second form is a kind of literalistic denial that is common to the branch of philosophy known as eliminative materialism. This aspect refuses to allow anything inexplicable to exist or be discussed. Yet all that is explicable therefrom rises.

Now what I want to make clear is this. Living beings are an extraordinary material phenomenon and that phenomenon is, by nature -incompletely specified-. You cannot cram it into a description, except as a convenience of discussion or learning. If you pretend otherwise, your intelligence turns to snot. Because we are incompletely specified, when we come together in a kind of agreement, a wide range of unusual effects occur quite naturally. In fact, the range is infinite, since it is our nature to constantly expand it when we are allowed to freely explore and pursue these abilities. These effects occur in part because, in coming together we ‘bridge the circuit’ of incompleteness, and ‘new opportunities’ emerge during that arc of inspiration, wonder, discovery, and invention.

The basic fact is this: our species is transentient. That means that we can -directly participate- in the experience, intelligence, history, and identity of any being or group of beings, living places, even in some ways inanimate objects. Whatever the ‘mechanism’ of this fact, it is not much like our models, eccentric or literal. It is our nature, not our description. All that we count as ‘psychic’ we have lied about. The psychic is less than half the equation and masquerades as its source.

The boundaries of our transentient nature cannot be easily discerned. What we can do, however, is set down both our certainties and our religions and begin to ask new, clearer questions about the nature of sentience itself, what it means or can mean to be alive, and the sources of the incredibly sophisticated and fallible intelligence we have inherited and so poorly understood. We are not like the models we have believed. It is time to emerge from our childhood of selling ideas and fantasy religions in the same way it is long past time that science returned to its proper contexts and stopped proclaiming the identities of unknowns to us.

Transentience is our birthright. And it is nothing like our stories. Don’t trade it for them. Get some. Now.