Reality gets created through acts of observation

Most people who've never experienced non-ordinary states of consciousness and only hear them described tend to try to describe them in terms of the logical, rational way of looking at things, the so-called scientific explanation, which often leaves a lot lacking and doesn't really fulfill understanding the experience at all.

When you start to try to understand everything in terms of words, the understanding of the words becomes the experience, and the experience gets lost.

That's sort of the idea that if we, in attempting to explain away that which is experienced, the experience itself is diminished.

It's very frustrating if you've never had an experience and somebody comes up to you and says, "I've just been on a flying saucer." Your tendency is to think, "Oh, this guy must be wacko, nuts, having an hallucination. None of that can be true because none of that has ever happened to me."

I believe, or sense, that the universe has not been constructed from a purely mechanical, logical, rational point of view, but there is a magic afoot in the universe, that God can be looked at as a kind of a magician in which we get to perform tricks ourselves, without knowing that we're doing so.

We all get out, maybe for longer than we wish, because we all pass this mortal coil more or less and so we certainly get a chance to experience it again, and we've experienced it before we were born. So it's more or less our natural place of being, unless you believe that the only time you're conscious is when you're alive.