Absence of Light

With a decline in reason and free will, the spiritual faculties become hopelessly dull.  Conscience, and with it the soul, or the center of our being, becomes lost to our experience of life.

One cannot say it has died, this conscience or moral sense, or if, in some people, it ever exists at all.  Empirically, one might dispute its very reality, but, ineffable though it may be, one knows one's own.  It is a quality of character that can be recognized in others, as can its absence.

Still, when the senses are continually overstimulated by impressions both real and artificial, directly and indirectly, the end result is a kind of suspension of connectedness, a diminution of awareness.