we are made of the stuff we perceive. as matter formed around replicating structures and accumulated through time, some aspects of the environment perceived itself; we call such aspects living organisms. different organisms developed with varying perceptual capacities, relative size and permeability, and they tend to overlap with other lifeforms, though there is no rule that they do so. experience is always a limited view of reality; no being gets the entirety, except through a special kind of non-sensory perception.

expanding the range of perception through entheogens or other techniques is fulfilling and certainly worthy of doing some of the time, but visionaries can easily go to far and fall into a kind of fetishistic regard for non-ordinary perception. i think we can't overvalue the special skill of making the ordinary magical. this is probably a more valuable "goal" than exploring non-ordinary consciousness in and of itself, though perhaps it takes one to do the other for many of us.

in sum, we need to naturalize these phenomena and not cast them overly in new agey language that decouples us from nature.