Now, once you see a small, juvenile insect about as long as the top joint of your index finger, fling a pin-tip-sized droplet of standing moisture from the apex of its backside directly (and intentionally) into the pupil of an adult human male standing some 4 feet off such that this male, as though struck by a bullet, is propelled backwards through the air landing prone and hard upon his back… well, at that point you simply realize that human beings are confused.

I don’t mean slightly confused. I mean they are stark-raving blind. They are shouting their stupidity at the universe and demanding that it take on the likeness of their preferred delusions.

Yet, the patient and obviously intelligent creature who slung a speck of water into the eye of a man (from its perch upon my own fingertip) just turned and looked at me quizzically as if to say ‘See? Can you see? Do you understand now?’.

I didn’t, quite. Not yet. But at that moment I began to become able to. And I needed to. I realized that I was out of my league. That, here in my friend’s hallway, with others of my kind, I was meeting a nonhuman intelligence of incredible sophistication. I was experiencing something that is ‘only available in stories’, but this wasn’t a story, and the humans around me had about as much chance of understanding or participating in what I was experiencing as a goldfish has of riding a giraffe to the top of Mt. Everest. It would not be possible, even though they had experienced what would appear to be precisely the same stimuli. Their minds were simply not capable of the perspectives that would admit their awareness.

I am glad a few of those creatures took me under their tutelage, for what I learned from them was hopelessly beyond anything available to me in any existing human culture. And still, it is only beginning.