\section{Inner and Outer Worlds}

\lettrine{I}{s} it not strange that we seem to inhabit two worlds at once? An outer world of matter, and an inner world of consciousness?

We have our exterior world --- the one we share, the one that pushes back, the one we can measure with rulers and clocks. 

And we have an interior world --- the one we inhabit alone,
immaterial, in which memory, grief, beauty, longing, and wonder unfold.

Modernity has trained us to assume that the exterior is more real than the interior.

Says who? More real --- how?

If a tree falls in the forest, and there's no one there to hear it --- who cares?

Our interior world is not some decorative fog floating outside ``real reality.'' It is one of the places reality becomes most unmistakably itself.

I have floated in a sensory deprivation tank 
--- a chamber designed to reduce sensation of the outer world almost to nothing. No light. No sound. Floating in warm salt water so even the sensation of gravity nearly disappears. And what struck me was not emptiness, but the opposite. The exterior world was muted almost to zero, and yet the interior world remained vivid, active, insistent. The inner hum did not abate in the slightest.

I'm not saying our interior world is ``more real'' than our exterior world, or any claim like it. Only, that to \textit{me}, to \textit{all} of us, our interior world is of paramount importance. 

``I'm conscious, ergo I'm alive!'' (With apologies to Descartes.)