We are cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings. Marlow says that in Heart of Darkness. Its my favorite quote from that book. Our minds are our over-protective parents and existence is the real world. We go through our day to day activities and our minds guide us through them, our thought patterns, our interactions, though spontaneous, quite planned and predictable. The sheer magnitude, the force of that which exists is hidden away, shielded from us by our conventions, our concepts, our thoughts. We don't have to look immensity and eternity in the eye, we are spared that "trouble." That veil is not designed (at least by thought) to be broken. Convention must be shattered, the flow must be quite jarringly interrupted, and there has to be space. One cannot simply jump into the next role, the next stream of thoughts. Maybe something happens to give someone a glimpse of immensity--crushing fullness and deafening silence--a little push out of convention, or maybe someone is shoved out of the circle entirely and enveloped. I wouldn't know about that. I saw it though. For several several minutes I felt it, I was jarred out of convention, and it is not at all unpleasant or scary... it is unexpected and interesting. It was not a hard enough push to push me all the way out, but I felt it.  It faded, shielded once again by thought, but then the next morning it was brought briefly back again by yet another jarring, still not enough. My aunt is in a mental hospital. My calm, zen-ny aunt who was always so nice and grounded, she got too wrapped up in digressing exploration or something, diving deeper into unhealthy solitude and dogma instead of escaping it, and lost control of her mind, that's my guess. She's doing much better now, she'll be out after the observation period is over, she'll hopefully recover in time, maybe find a purpose again. And all this was only REAL to me for about an hour or two, then it slipped into routine. I'm stuck back there now, just hoping sometime I can break out again and feel reality excite me and mystify me in all ways indescribable, like it did. Break's almost over. And then the final push and... finally done. Lines in the sand... reality has no lines, and it will always be waiting there for our daily rounds to die--even for us to die. Company... real company... to actually BE with another person, helps in being alive, or at least, in feeling so.