I was in thrall to the world of form. My mind was mechanically enslaved. I had become involuntarily enthralled by the world of form – the world of form had a hold on me and it wouldn’t let go. It had a death-grip on me and it was dragging me down. Alas, I thought – full of despair – I’m in thrall to the world of form. I’m a concept in a world of concepts; I’m a thing in a world of things. I’m all messed up. I’m having a bad time. I’m experiencing suffering. I’m freaking out. My thoughts went around and around like a windmill. Slowly at first and then faster and faster, becoming a blur. I’ve become an ego, I lamented, I’ve become a self. I was full of pity for myself in my plight. Right now I’m a slave to the forces of illusion, I thought to myself. I’m the helpless puppet of blind mechanical laws, jerked this way and that by my involuntary attachments to mind-created hallucinations. I am heir to unbearable anguish, anguish without limit. I am like a little bit of cork bobbing up and down in the stormy sea of samsaric existence, tossed from wave to wave without respite forever and ever. Thinking like this I grew very fearful. I found myself imagining all the various torments that lay in store for me – these torments were already mine. “I have become an ego, I have become a self” I wailed out loud, and now nothing awaits me but endless sorrow and confusion. What am I to do?” The question was rhetorical because there was no one there to help me. I started running then. I was running down the street screaming. I had lost the plot. Only the street wasn’t really there – it was only in my mind. It was only an hallucination. I was only an hallucination. I felt as if I had take a large dose of LSD. It was as if I was tripping right out of my brain on pure LSD 25, straight out of the lab. An absolutely massive dose – maybe eight hundred mics. And now I was tripping right out of my skull. Only LSD never made you trip out as much as this. Thinking this made me freak out more than ever. “How am I ever going to escape” I asked myself, full of heedless panic. I was blubbering and crying like a hysterical fool. I was feeling unbearably sorry for myself – my mind darting this way and that as I tried to think of what I could do to get out of this mess. The terror was rising uncontrollably within me like milk boiling over in a saucepan. Hissing and burning as it hit the red-hot ring. Then I remembered that I didn’t exist anyway and that there was no one who needed to escape… It had all been just a bad trip!