Stephen Harrod Buhner

Once you come to understand, in your experience, that you are just one life-form among many, that you can meet the other life-forms here in moments of tremendous intimacy, it enable one of the most wondrous of explorations possible. To leave the human world behind, the surface identity of the self, and swim, only one life-form among a multitude, deep into the metaphysical background of the world is to enter a place where we meet there as living beings, identical in nature at the core, similar intelligences, all given birth by Earth, all expressed out of the Ocean of Being into form. And in those moments of touch, we look back at each other with luminous eyes and tell tales of the lives we have lived and the lands we have seen and speak of the commonalities of what it means to be alive on this Earth, kin, all of whom came from common ancestors long ago.

And then…sometimes, in unique moments, deep inside the experience, we slide completely out of our frame and totally into the other’s…and they into ours. We then look onto each other’s eyes - my eyes through your eyes, your eyes through my eyes. Touch with our hearts, your heart, my heart, and mine yours. Here, we experience the deepest possible intimacy that any living being can know. There is a communicatory interblending of soul. Something of the other then resides inside me and something of me inside the other. Like the viral blending of genomes, we become in that moment a part of the other and they a part of us. And when we return to this world, something from the other remains inside us. It makes us truly barbarian, no longer civilized. We are no longer presentable in polite company.

Still…it is possible to go even deeper yet. It is possible to move inside the scenario itself, the place from which all life-forms emerged. It is the place where background becomes foreground, the place where environment is the intelligence encountered, the place where communication of a very different sort begins