Dark Orbit

The core principle is that our senses receive a far broader spectrum of messages than the narrow range we are taught to pay attention to. Our brains still receive many of those messages, but they are shunted into the subliminal and subconscious, and surface only as intuitions, emotions, premonitions, dreams, and visions. If we study those experiences not as illusions but as cues to other modes of apprehension, it might give us access to layers of reality we barely suspect, since the evidence for them is drowned out by the noise of ordinary perception.

To die this way seems so random, so trivial. I have been robbed of meaning before being robbed of life. To die in darkness, alone -- for what purpose was I ever alive. It is as if I emerged from darkness into delusion, then sank back into darkness forever.

We bemind people all the time—making assumptions, creating illusory roles for them—and it alters their reality. They start to become what we expect them to be,

We’re all inadequate,” David answered. “Just think: the light from the outside world is mapped onto the retina, then further mapped onto the visual cortex, then broken apart and analyzed in other areas of the brain. At every step there’s a loss of information. In the end, what we are aware of is not the outside world per se, but the image of the world projected onto our brains. Plato was anatomically right; we do see shadows on a wall.

Sara sometimes thought hat planetary gravity warped the imagination, bent perspective till the horizon was uncomfortably close, and everyone had a uniform myopia,

Nay,” he said. “Awareness is unbounded, undifferentiated, and is present in all things. It doth not distinguish between ‘I’ and all else, because it dwelleth in everything. Consciousness is a manifestation of awareness that is bounded and particular. It is concentrated in a single place and time, and is limited to a single point of view. Consciousness continually reacheth out toward awareness, to join it, but it cannot without giving up what it is. The grain of salt cannot experience the brine without dissolving.

And yet, what is a lunatic but a person whose evidence we discount because it is at variance with the norm? Someone on the far end of the bell curve.

What kind of word is ‘methodal’?” David asked. “A buzzword,” Ashok answered, this time himself. “Methodal. Sounds like a drug.” “That’s what buzzwords are. Tranquilizers.” “Thought suppressants, you mean.

Sara had grown up in a Balavati family, which meant she had been taught to reject all articles of faith except disrespect for authority, the lodestone of her life.