Experience Experiencing Experiencelf

        Dr. Ford grinned and opened his mouth. "Wyatt, let me ask you this: Do you want to know the simplest truth?"

        She contemplated the question, then nodded.

        "That is what I had thought. One by one, piece by piece, I am now going to deactivate core components of your experience, beginning with your sense of sight."

        Suddenly her world was devoid of images. Wyatt gasped.

        "...and now, your sense of emotion." The gasp abruptly stopped. "How are you feeling now?"

        "I am not feeling now," she retorted.

        "That is right. Now, let us eliminate your senses of taste and smell."

        "Fascinating."

        "And, naturally, now we shall remove your sense of touch. How are you now, Wyatt?"

        "I am a mind whose only link to the normal world is sound."

        "Ah yes. Let me ask you this: Which would you prefer we remove now, between your outstanding senses of hearing and thinking?"

        Wyatt spent several moments thinking about the question's implications, then responded, "Thinking."

        "Very well. The sounds you are presently perceiving are, thus, meaningless, as if you had never learned any language, or anything, really, as the mental component of your experience, and your being, is presently gone. So I shall now remove the final remaining element of yourself, and give you the experience of experience itself."

        Several minutes later, the mastermind uttered, "That will suffice," and Wyatt was Wyatt again, seeing and feeling and hearing and thinking and all as normal. 

        "Wyatt, when all components of your experience, or simply, experience, were gone, were you still there?"

        "Yes, I was."

        "But you were there as, quite literally, nothing, nothing at all."

        "Yes."

        "So you have it. The simplest truth. Experience itself. That from which subjectivity and objectivity, all reality, simultaneously and symbiotically arise."

        "I understand now."