Anxiously, I tried to anticipate what was going to happen next. This was difficult though because I was in the void! This just wasn’t going to work. This just wasn’t the right thing to do, as I’m sure you can appreciate. After all, anything can happen in the void, anything at all. There’s absolutely no precedence for anything in the void – it’s a wide open situation, obviously. You couldn’t get a more wide-open situation than the void, you just couldn’t. It’s no good saying that you could because you couldn’t. There’s no saying what might happen, or what mightn’t happen. It’s stupid to try. But nevertheless I did try. I tried to anticipate it – I tried to ‘second-guess the void’! Not very wise of me, you might say. Not very wise at all, the void being what it is and all. A lunatic strategy, you might say. But the thing about this was that I was acting on reflex, I was acting out of force of habit. Out of blind reactivity. And anxiety. Not to forget the anxiety. And the other thing about this was that when I started I just couldn’t stop. It got the better of me – I just couldn’t help myself. I pitted my pitifully limited imagination against the void, trying to figure out what was going to happen before it did happen, and before I knew it I was catapulted into a hell-world of my own making.

I hope you never fall into this trap. What followed was pure insanity.  Calling it insanity is missing the mark – insanity is a walk in the park compared to what I went through. Give me insanity any day. I mean, I had nothing to go on. Not a thing. I had no way to know. No grip on the situation at all. No angle to play. So what I was guessing was pure nonsense. I don’t know where I was getting it from, to be honest. Where did I get that stuff? It beats me where I got it from. It makes me cringe to think about it. What kind of a lunatic was I anyway? What was I playing at? Nevertheless, I pulled stuff out. I came out with cracked notions. I came out with freaky ideas. I grasped at straws – and the straws didn’t even make a bit of sense, when it came down to it. They were surreal. Worse than surreal, they were just plain stupid. They weren’t properly thought out. It was all a jumble of half-baked ideas – even to say that they were ‘half-baked’ is being kind, is giving them more credence then they deserve. They weren’t baked at all. They weren’t anything. They were – I don’t know what they were. But no matter what they were – or weren’t – I came up with them. And as soon as I came up with them they became true, they became real. They manifested for me. This – needless to say – didn’t help matters in any way. It made things a lot worse in fact because upon being confronted with my projections I straightaway reacted to them – either with revulsion or desire. I didn’t know what was happening! I was a mess. I was a complete and utter mess and that mess was feeding on itself.

As well as driving myself crazy trying to second guess what was going to happen next, I was tying myself up into knots in the attempt to either to avoid or corner my projections. Which is the very worst thing to try to do with projections, as I’m sure you know. You should never do that because they rebound on you from unexpected angles. This as you might imagine put me into a terrible spin: things were getting right out of hand. Things were getting out of control. The situation was running away with itself. It was all going pear-shaped. I was rapidly heading to a very bad place, and that’s being euphemistic about it! I did however have bits of insight as all this was happening. Little flashes of understanding. I could see that what I was essentially trying to do was to grasp what was going on. I was trying to suss out what was happening so as to give myself a bit of control in the situation. The big problem was, however, that whatever I ‘grasped’ turned out to be no more than my own confused expectations being reflected back at me. I could see this quite clearly, from time to time amongst the rest of the insanity. It was as if all I could ever do was catch a glimpse of my own hideously distorted face reflected back at me, only for the most part I never recognized it. I didn’t see that it was my own face – I thought it was something else. What exactly, I don’t know.

Every now and again I could see something else too – something that really gave me a funny turn. Something that racked up the whole experience to a whole new  level of strangeness. I could see what the problem was. I could see my own stupidity, my own insanity, in a teacup. I could see that who I was, essentially, was the attempt to grasp what was going on. Who I was was the attempt to be in control. Who I was was the attempt to anticipate what was going to happen next. Even though I never could anticipate what was going to happen next of course! That’s the insanity of it. Pointless grasping was all that I was. I wasn’t anything other than that. I was just the grasping, simple as that. I was the anticipating. I was the confused attempt to do something that couldn’t ever be done!  I was the attempt to do something that was actually completely impossible to do. I could also see – again, quite clearly – that if I stopped trying to do this impossible thing  (if I stopped trying to anticipate what was going to happen next, if I stopped trying to be in control, if I stopped trying to get a handle on what was going on) then I would no longer exist. Because I wasn’t actually anything else other than this dreadful frantic panicked confusion. Clarity was there all the time,  but the clarity just wasn’t me. It was the not-me, it was something else, something forever out of reach…