The dream is removed, I say to you that you shall always and forever know exactly what you are, and just how little that means.
Neil Gaiman, Sandman: The Doll’s House
The world without stories, the deadly storyless void, where no human mind can survive. The cold unfeeling infinity of this world of flesh and bone in which we live. The so-called real world, the world of flesh and bone, the world of fact and science- the alien world so far beyond the capacity of the human mind that we created the Shadowlands again and again to escape it.
“The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the endeavor of science.”
-Carl Sagan
The human mind is a small thing, and fragile. The universe on the other hand is vast. Indeed, the universe is vast beyond human imagining. To say that the universe is beyond human comprehension is to undersell the scope of things quite spectacularly. The human skull runs over trying to hold the seemingly impossible scope of the universe. The concept of zero drove men mad. The idea of an infinity universe terrified the wise. The Catholic Church was so threatened that it declared heretical idea of earth as a tiny speck in a small galaxy in an insignificant corner of a universe so vast that light could only trek across it slowly.
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
-Carl Sagan
Excerpt
You were never in the Bonelands. Let’s get that out of the way. This book will explain why in due course, but to be clear, you have never lived in the so-called real world known as the Bonelands. And so to proceed, you must strip off the illusion that you live in some sort of objective real world and force yourself to confront the idea that the reality you experience is a construct of your mind and your assumptions; and that the Bonelands are a place that you can never directly experience.
How?
Well, to do this, you need to break down your psychological defenses and then mess with your senses. Grant Morrison, magician and comic writer, did this with drugs and/or religious ecstatic experiences. We don’t want you to rely on something as unpredictable as drugs with the unpleasant side effects involved therein. If that’s your preference find another book. We also don’t want to invoke existing religious or mystical scaffolding for reasons that you will discover in due course.
Where does that leave you?
We aren’t going to tell. What would be the point in that? You’d probably blame us when something went wrong or you did something stupid. We’ve pointed out where you need to go if you want to get where you’ve said you’re going. We aren’t going to be reasonable for every sprained ankle along the way, so figure it out for yourself.
– Excerpt from The Ars Holistica
Contributing Authors
Professor Harbinger's School for Villains 