The bad side of it is that I’m little more than a wreck, both physically and mentally. That’s the price I have paid. I’m coughing the whole time, I am constantly suffering from severe bouts of fatigue, and my mind is given to rambling in the strangest of ways. The good side is that I have gained some kind of insight, some kind of clarity with regard to what it means to exist in this world of ours. What it’s all about, I suppose you could say. About how we’re all in this kind of cosmic trap, and what we have to do to get out of it. If we want to. I now have the knowledge, but the only thing is that I’m far too weak to go about using it. I’m spent. I have the key in my hand, so to speak, but I’m not able to do anything with it…

 

All I can do is put my knowledge down in writing in the hope that it might be some sort of help to someone else. If there’s anyone that gives a damn, that is. Which I very much doubt. In my experience people have no time for the type of understanding of which I speak. They have no time for it at all – they have neither the time nor the interest. I know I sound very cynical, if not down-right disparaging, but I’ve been around the block a few times at this stage and I have few illusions left about humanity. People don’t care for what I’d call ‘true philosophical understanding’ – they wouldn’t know what to do with it. They’re only interested in whatever can give them the advantage in whatever scurrilous little game it is they happen to be playing at the time. Try to talk about the bigger picture to someone and they just look at you blankly. Who gives a shit about the bigger picture? Are you some kind of fool or what? There is nothing that excites contempt and incomprehension in the average guy as much as any talk about philosophical inquiry does.

 

I know I very probably sound very cynical if not downright disparaging – no, wait, I’ve already said that haven’t I? My concentration isn’t what it used to be. The old mind wanders. It wanders here and there and it doesn’t really know what it’s looking for. And even if it found what it’s looking for it would it wouldn’t recognize it! It would walk on right by. It is doomed to wander pointlessly forever and ever, the everyday mind. That tired old thing. Like a senile old collie dog herding imaginary sheep. Its doom is utter futility. Its doom is to engage in time-wasting for the sake of time-wasting, and yet never see this! Our doom – if I may continue with this strand of discussion – is that wherever this wretched time-wasting mind goes we are bound to follow! This is our station in life – blind obedience to an insane master. That’s our bag. That’s our thing. Everyone has to have ‘a thing’ and that’s ours.

 

So let me come back to my insight, which is what I wanted to talk to you about. Before I lose sight of it entirely. The basic gist of my insight is that there are two worlds not just the one as everyone usually thinks. There is the True world and there is the Copy Cat World (which I also call Garbage World). Degraded information from the Garbage World bleeds off as result of some sort of cosmic accident and turns into the Garbage World. The Garbage World is an insult to the True Cosmos – it is a hideous and grotesque mockery. It’s a defamation. The Garbage World is a stinking abomination when all is said and done. It’s like making an obscene gesture at God, if I may put it like that.

 

I’m glossing over something very important here but what happens next is that degraded information from the Garbage World infiltrates the True Self, contaminating it, and this contamination results in the True Self being converted into the Garbage Self. This transformation is however totally undetectable as far as we are concerned because at the same time the True Self is converted into the Garbage or Copy Cat Self the True World is converted into the Garbage World and this means that the essential relationship between the True Self and the True World is effectively analogized….

 

This means in other words that we have no way of knowing that anything has happened because the relationship between the Garbage Self and the Garbage World is an analogue of the relationship between the True Self and the True World. The former is a substitute for the latter. Only the thing being of course that it’s an inferior substitute, a degenerate substitute. I should have said that to start off with because it’s kind of the main point here. The degenerate analogue is what you could call ‘a redundant relationship’ because it’s a relationship between two meaningless things. Everything about the Garbage World is redundant – it’s pure redundancy. It’s all pure garbage but we just don’t know it. We can’t know it because we’re garbage too!

 

The thing is – as I have already said – that the world we live in and take so seriously is really just a caricature. It’s an insult thrown in the face of the Divine. It’s an obscene gesture, an exercise in crass vulgarity. It’s a mocking jeer… And yet, perversely, we take it all absolutely seriously. We pay solemn lip-service to it, we say how good it is, how great it is. Deep-down, we don’t actually believe this – we don’t really believe it but we think we should do. We feel bad about not believing it. We pretend that we believe it. We say in public that we believe it and we treat anyone who doesn’t go along with the lie like a pariah, like an outcast. We spit on them, we vilify them. We crucify the poor bastards. Or maybe we give them antidepressants and a few sessions of therapy. To teach them to love the bullshit and be happy. Isn’t that a great slogan now – love the bullshit and be happy. Oh yes. Love the bullshit and be accepted by your fellow man. Or woman.

 

Isn’t that the way it is? Don’t even pretend to argue the point. You know that this is the way it is. You know it alright but you just don’t want to admit it…