This lead to some quite cosmic discussions at school in the cosmic 70s, such as "Like, how do we know that the colour we both call red, right, you don't see as what I'd call green." In fact we only have language as a common frame of descriptive reference for any of our sensory input, so the consensus reality we share is based on a rather fragile set of assumptions. Language itself can define reality; it's no mistake in the Genesis story that the first thing Adam does to assert his authority over the creation he's been given charge of is to name everything.




Also factor in our hardwired basic face-recognition programming (second only to our nipple recognition programming) and it's clear that we're biologically predisposed to make "sense" out of patterns and to detect when patterns don't quite make the sense we think they should - and maybe to come up with a "solution" for that discrepancy.




Altered mind states seem to be a core component of the shamanic experience, whether provoked by drugs, sex, pain, exhaustion, or eating the yellow snow.

I once knew a functioning schizophrenic who strongly resisted treatment for his condition (all his personalities agreed on this), arguing that in former ages he'd have been revered as a gods-blessed shaman for the wise voices he had counselling him. He/they pitied the rest of us who couldn't access those aspects of our mind.







To push that a step further, though, all physical and sensory experiences are in the mind. The question is whether perceptions of apparently paranormal phenomena are entirely self-derived or whether they're our minds trying to report things beyond the usual register of regular outside stimuli.