Over some 3 and a half billion years, our planet has transformed itself from a lifeless mass of rock into a veritable metabolising organic matrix in which countless replicating patterns swarm about the Earth's surface, each pattern or organism an informational expression of Natural Intelligence. Yet, like the hour hand of a clock, science has failed to see the contextually directed movement of Natural Intelligence, claiming instead that evolution is essentially a pointless and mindless process. But this can only be a subjective inference likely drawn according to the perceived duration over which evolution works, a duration so great that the intelligence operating over such spans remains all but invisible. If we instead imagine viewing a time-lapse film of Gaia wherein 3 and a half billion years of information-gaining evolution are compressed into but one intense second, then modern electronic human culture and human consciousness explodes instantaneously into existence, bursting forth out of the earth's ocean of elemental constituents. This awesome pattern of self-organisation can be no mere accident. To those who would still scoff at such an assertion, I can only ask them this: if the aforementioned capacity of the Universe does not suggest a great intelligence at work then what sort of Universe would?- from the psilocybin solution

i find simon's musings on this topic very mind opening, this also comes to mind

yup. And as you said, a major component in this is personal experience with this intelligence (and taking into account the experiences of countless others)