I’ll never forget the day I looked inside myself. I don’t remember what made me look inside, what gave me the idea to look inside, but I sure as hell won’t ever forget what I found when I did! What I found was that there wasn’t actually anything inside of me – there was nothing in there. All there was inside me was this strangely empty buzzy electric kind of a thing going on. There was nothing else, just this electric buzzing. No me, just the buzz. I don’t know quite what I expected to find there, but it certainly wasn’t this! I guess that it’s just that I thought that there would be more in there than just this empty buzzing. I guess I thought I’d find me in there…

There was no me there. Instead of finding me in there I just found all this buzzing. The buzzing wasn’t me at all. It wasn’t anything like me. It had nothing to do with me. All it did was buzz, buzz, buzz. All it did was to keep on buzzing away, like swarm of angry bees. It wasn’t as if there was something there that was doing the buzzing – there were no bees. There was nothing there buzzing, there was only just the buzzing happening all by itself. To start off with I found it all rather fun – a bit weird perhaps, but fun. I couldn’t tell if I was seeing the buzzing or hearing it or feeling it. Sometimes I felt that I was smelling it. It was all the senses at once, and yet it was elusive at the same time so that when I looked for it in one place it appeared somewhere else. The buzzing was as I have said a kind of electric thing – I could feel the electric energy of it, like getting lots and lots of little shocks in the brain. Weirdly enjoyable shocks… Shocks that made me feel peculiar – like I wasn’t me at all. Like it was a joke that I was me.

In another way the buzzing appeared to be made up of vibrating visual patterns that kept snaking around and changing colour as they did so. There was something strange about these patterns because when I tried bring it into focus it would straightaway slip away. I could never see the buzzing patterns when I looked at them, only when I didn’t look and I found this very tantalizing. It didn’t make sense. I kept on trying but something strange happened to me when I did – it was as if I had forgotten how to look. Or maybe it was that I had forgotten what it meant to look. I got confused about what I was doing, my head started to hurt from the effort, and I had to stop.

The problem with looking grew worse because I really didn’t know how to stop trying to focus on what was happening with all the flickering vibrating sensory patterns. Trying was not working yet I didn’t know how not to try. This same thing kept happening over and over again: I could almost see something wonderful and then just as it was getting close there was a switch-around and it was if I was the thing that I was trying to look at. The more I tried to tune into the buzzing the more I got the feeling that I was the buzzing and that there wasn’t on this account any me there trying to tune into it. There was only the buzzing and I wasn’t in it. It wasn’t in me either because there was no me. There was no me in the buzzing and the buzzing was getting louder and louder all the time. It was building up to some kind of crescendo, some kind of climax. I had the uncomfortable feeling that there was something I had to get to grips with, some sort of problem that I had to understand but which was forever getting away from me. I was trying to solve the problem of the buzzing but there was no me in the buzzing and so no one there to solve the problem.

The problem was me trying to solve the problem, I realized. I was the problem that I was trying to solve. And yet at the same time I wasn’t there at all and so the problem of me trying to solve the problem that was myself wasn’t really there anyway. It wasn’t there in the first place. This was the problem that I was wrestling with in my head. This was where my thinking was taking me – around and around in circles. I say this but the truth was that I couldn’t really think about anything very much because as soon as I started to think anything it straightaway became totally senseless to me. What I was trying to think about made no sense at all to me. Thinking made no sense at all to me. I didn’t know what it meant to think. “Thinking is nonsense” I thought, and then this thought too became nonsense. All my attempted thoughts just turned into the buzzing, buzzing, buzzing. Everything turned into the buzzing and the buzzing made no sense at all…

It occurred to me that I really didn’t want to be having this experience. I couldn’t seem to disentangle myself at this stage however. It had got into me too deep. Or I had got into it too deep – I wasn’t sure which way around it was. There was a ringing deep in my head that wouldn’t stop: “There’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz, there’s just the buzz…”

This refrain wouldn’t stop – it was getting louder and louder all the time and consuming me in the process. The buzz had got very big at this stage – it had become Everything. As I tried to tear myself away from it it turned negative. “There’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you, there’s no you…” the buzz kept saying.

Eventually I got out of the buzz. I got away. I came out of it. How I managed it I don’t know – things had gone pretty bloody far, buzz-wise. These days I never look inside anymore. I don’t want to look inside. I just don’t want to know. I want to forget about it. I just don’t want to know anything about the buzzing inside of me and from that day on I’ve made sure to stay very much on the outside.

If there’s one thing I’m absolutely sure of it’s that I’m never ever going to look inside myself again. I may not be sure about much else in life but I’m sure about that much…