“We used a prosthesis to get us into space, and one of the rewards was the visual experience of the world as a unity. This changed the nature of human cognition forever. Immediately, from this perspective, we could see how futile our aggressions and object fascinations are. We could see how precious and delicate our place in the universe really is. And so much more that cannot be said. We are still changing from this. And not all of the changes are good, precisely because although we had the physical technology to get into space we lacked the relational and cognitive technology to truly capitalize upon the rewards.

What we need is a similar experience with our own minds. We need to reach escape velocity and look back upon the whole of the human cogniscium from the next order upscale, as we did, finally, with our world. We must find a way to see the structural biases of our own cognitive habits and traditions clearly enough to understand how to reforge them, how to produce, from these crude and often toxic precursors, the actual aids to intelligence, insight, wonder, learning, and fellowship that we have long dreamed our minds to be.”

— an anonymous informant