Well, for Vervaeke, peak states are superhuman. It’s like Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception: ordinary consciousness has the doors open only partway, whereas when we enter a peak state we can see further and more clearly. In Vervaeke’s Daoist terms, the peak state is like being “in the groove,” in that we’re flowing and flourishing in our environment as opposed to struggling within it due to mismatches between our models and the challenges we’re presented with.

Pragmatists have a more grounded view of truth in that they take truth to be heuristic and a provisional marker, not a cosmic lever or a mirror of nature. But the strangeness of truth and of the meaning of symbols generally stems from the strangeness of consciousness, which in turn stems from the anomaly of life in a mostly-nonliving universe.