PROLOGUE -- WHOSE WORLD IS IT ANYWAY!


In the Rishikesh teahouse, before their trek up into the mountains and the hermitage, the one-time professor from Benares Hindu University said, “People do not understand that the world they see does not exist without them". The professor went on to explain how easily this could be understood if one only imagines the nerves of the eyes being connected to the 'hearing cortex' of the brain, and the nerves of the ears being connected to the 'seeing cortex' of the brain. Such a person's world would have strange melodies coming through his eyes, and visual psychedelic patterns entering his ears.

"Can you now see how your cortex connections have made your world?” the professor asked with eyes glittering in the cold Upper Ganges air.

The sunburned man had the unblinking interest of a child as he listened to the old man, who had abandoned academics for 'reality', as he called it. The foreigner had once been a tired-faced London commuter, but now in mountain clothes bought at the Rishikesh bazaar, that same face registered the unmistakable inner feeling that at last he was going to come to terms with his life. He scratched the mole on his cheek.

"What you’re going to learn," the old man finished, "is how to tweak your nerve-endings to modify your world?"

A year later the man with the mole made two long-distance calls to England; one to Janice, his divorced wife, and the other to his estranged partner. It was the start of a journey in a different dimension and both of them played a vital role in what happened next.

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