Luminarium Read Online Free Page B

yours.”
    She turned her head to one side, and pointed at the upper back portion of her skull. Her eyeball swiveled to the corner to regard him as she spoke.
    “The parietal lobes are located about here in the brain. Their main job is to orient you in space. In order to do this, they’ve got to know where you end and everything else begins.” She faced him again. “It may sound like an easy job, but it’s not. To do it, the lobes require a constant supply of impulses from the senses. What monks can sometimes do through meditation, and what we’ve done here through the application of electromagnetic signals, is to block that stream of sense data from entering the region. The lobes continue looking for the self-boundaries, but with no information coming in, they can’t find them. And so you perceive a porous, expanded, possibly even a limitless sense of self.”
    She watched him, gauging his reaction.
    “Does that answer your question?”
    Was there mockery in the words? He couldn’t quite tell. There was a flatness to her tone. But her look was dead serious.
    He smirked, the way he couldn’t help doing when he was embarrassed. He felt like a child. He wanted to throw a tantrum. An absurd reaction, he knew. He’d walked into a laboratory and had his head stuck in a helmet full of solenoids. What kind of explanation had he been expecting?
    Maybe just not so precise an explanation. Maybe he’d been expecting her to say that they didn’t know how it worked, just that it did. Thus leaving at least a shred of the mystery in place.
    “So what’s the point of giving me this experience at all? What could it possibly mean to me, now that you’ve explained that it’s a trick?”
    Jerked around as he felt, he was even now trying to will back that illusory connection with her.
    “We’re not out to trick you, Fred,” she said softly. “Quite the opposite. We need you to know how everything works here.”
    “And why is that?”
    She sat forward an inch.
    “Because we believe that the emotional power of the experiences and their rational explanations will counterbalance each other. And that over time, you’ll learn to weave both into a larger tapestry.”
    With his fingertips, he explored the bunched threads of the chair arm, searching for an opening, a way to envelop them. Her tapestry image was beguiling—clearly, she’d prepared it in advance. Turning it over in his mind, though, he found the flip side not so picturesque.
    “So you’re saying that I’ll end up tricking myself? And you’re so confident I’ll weave myself this rosy fantasy tapestry that you don’t even mind telling me in advance?”
    Her voice rose, if slightly, for the first time in the interview, and there was a new fierceness in her look. “It’s not fantasy we’re hoping you’ll find. Not at all. It’s a more informed kind of faith.” He got the feeling she almost thought better of it, but then, with a breathy self-defiance, she added, “I think of it as a faith without ignorance.”
    For a while, neither of them spoke. He looked off, toward the bookshelf, into that miniature kitschy skyline, pickled in its brine.
    “Would you like to continue, Fred?” she asked, her tone even again.
    His eyes wandered to the black briefcase on her desk. His own was in the hall closet. She hadn’t so much as glanced at it while showing him where he should stow his things upon arriving for his sessions.
    What say you, George?
    No answer. Inner George was as torn as he was.
    Lest his voice crack, he didn’t speak, simply nodded, at which point Mira Egghart got up, placed her computer next to the briefcase, and came over and switched off the lamp. A moment later, she appeared crouched at his feet, having just plugged a nightlight in the shape of a fat little star into the wall.
    “Before you leave,” she said, the little star setting her knees and face aglow, “I’m going to give you a visualization exercise, a little story with some images.