There are occasional points in my bouts of contemplation where I have noticed I seem to go “too deep,” where normal human things begin to look stranger and stranger until I get to the point that the only way to return to feeling normal is through an uncomfortable rehabilitative process.

These tracts of my life where I go “too deep” can last hours, days or weeks (although the point at which my mind is actually getting the benefit of it is quite a bit shorter). Usually after a week or so of human life feeling unfamiliar, I can’t stand it, so this tends to be the limit of the endeavor.

However, returning to normal is most often far more painful than sustaining the experience. Sustaining the experience in the right context is often when I feel I am experiencing the fundamental nature of my intelligence, perceiving reality without my human eyes and, without many assumptions, I take for granted as a result of my physiology.

I believe a number of people are familiar with the experience, although they are probably used to it in the context of too much marijuana or LSD or something. I have found that it can be achieved, with a little discipline, without such psychedelic substances. This is good because when you reach this territory, using drugs is terrifying. When drugs take you to this place you will usually feel like a stranger in a strange place, unsure what you are there for but scared to see a life that now looks like oblivion.

People occasionally feel these protrusions of perspectives among things purely in everyday life; perhaps some idea makes you lose your appetite, like realizing an egg is an unhatched chicken. What makes this possible is humanity’s distance from nature. If we were in more of an animal state, we wouldn’t think about it at all, nor would the idea disgust us. These occasional little peccadilloes of our species are when we get a little uncomfortable with human reality.

Perhaps that is the defining point of our species: we are the only ones who feel uncomfortable doing what should come naturally to us. But in any case, to me this seems to come from a similar place where I go when I meditate. It is certainly not so directed as my meditation, nor useful. It is the mental equivalent of swamp gas rising from a bog, usually a useless notion that rather than making us more independent of our idiotic human trivialities tends to just make daily life uncomfortable.

Although it is a romantic notion it is not unattractive, the idea that this is the true spark of human intelligence and the seat from which our creativity and perspective come from. Perhaps it is not, but the place does indeed exist.

My level of self analysis has not progressed to the point where I can yet say exactly how another may get there. Perhaps it is easy, and I am magnifying the “Achievement” (if it may be called such), but I can tell you that if there is truth to be found in the recesses of our own minds it is here.

My paths are usually a process of fundamental deduction and questioning.

Questioning my own assumptions is usually the way I get here, questioning and questioning until it is not a conscious effort but the shape of my thoughts for hours. Sometimes I can even pursue parallel activities that give me the appearance of outward activity. Questioning will lead you there, but don’t be tied down trying to do everything consciously, some of your subconscious levels can take care of the lion’s share of the work, but only so long as it is your primary concern to leave the conscious levels of thought and outward activity as secondary and around purely for appearances.

I have been on many journeys here, and although in the humdrum of everyday life they may as well not have taken place, I can still feel that they happened. It’s rather strange because I realize that this may seem to most like the kind of wishy washy garbage so many people cook up, but I hope this is more me seeing a glimpse of the truth and wanting to better understand it rather than me simply grasping at motes floating in the ether.