I think you put your finger on it. I'm something of a believer in the concept that it's not possible to convey mental states with 100% fidelity. I can tell you how I feel, but it looses some of the isness in the telling, because I'm conveying the information through representation rather than somehow dumping the actual sensation into your head.

This probably applies just as much to complex sociological insights as it does to psychedelic experience. If I had been reading this sort of thing for a long time, I'd have a better idea what things in my head should match the things they were saying, in the same way that if I had done DMT, I would know what people mean when they talk about fractal machine elves.