If I were to write an autobiography I would call it ‘The Fantasies of a Deluded Ego’. What else would I call it, after all? What else is anything I think or believe other than a painfully and grotesquely distorted ego-fantasy? I mean – let’s get real here! ‘What a world it is that this ego of mine creates,’ I marvel, ‘what an extraordinarily twisted and bizarre caricature of life it is. What kind of a connection does it have with anything real?’ I realized then that it had no connection whatsoever.
I wanted to find someone to share my insight with but as usual no one wanted to know. As usual, no one seemed to care. They were all too busy with their own twisted-fantasy worlds. ‘Doing what exactly, though’, I wondered. ‘What’s so very important about what they’re busy doing in their own grotesquely distorted version of reality that they don’t want to hear about my insights?’ That could have upset me a lot but I let it go. It could have upset me an awful lot.
No one ever gives a damn about anything I have to say, I realized. They’re too busy with whatever they mistakenly think is important – they don’t realize that actually they’re only deluded idiots. ‘What would they do if they had to come face to face with this fact so that they couldn’t actually deny it any more’, I asked myself, ‘how would that make them feel?’ I decided that it would make them feel pretty stupid and I amused myself for a while imagining just how bad they would feel then…
‘Am I allowed to BE?’ I wondered then. ‘Will I ever be allowed to BE? Please tell me that one day I will be allowed to BE!’ It was coffee break at work and I was queuing up by the coffee machine with a lot of other people. I was thinking about how crap my life was, which is a topic that tends to preoccupy me a lot these days. Then I realized that it was my turn and everyone was looking at me wondering what I was doing, why I was just standing there. As I pressed the button to get the machine to make me a regular Americano I found myself playing a kind of fantasy game. I often do this in order to make life more interesting for me because otherwise it can get quite dull and repetitive. It almost always gets quite dull and repetitive.
I was wondering in my fantasy what it would be like if what coming out of the machine, in dribs and drabs, wasn’t coffee at all but the Elixir of Eternal Life. The Elixir of Immortality, in other words, so that it would cure all my ills and fix all the various health problems that I have been having. I threw myself into this fantasy and it became real for me. I watched the coffee dribbling into the cup in state of utter bliss. I had never been so interested in getting coffee out of a coffee machine before!
Every drop that came out of the nozzle of the machine meant so much to me. I was willingthe machine to come out with just one more drop of the super-precious elixir and I didn’t want to walk away from the machine and move on to the counter and pay for my coffee, suddenly frightened that all the goodness might be in the last drop and that someone else might get it instead of me. I was so frightened of this happening that I didn’t want to move and the people who were behind me in the queue were getting annoyed with me. This convinced me all the more that they were trying to steal the last precious drop off me and the situation grew quite nasty. I started saying bad things to them.
An ugly scene developed at that point and I thought I heard someone say something about calling security. I had to make a run for it then and in the process ended up spilling most of my coffee so I guess the fantasy didn’t work out so well for me in the end! That is – I suppose – a good example of how an apparently harmless fantasy can end up turning quite unpleasant. This illustrates a kind of a ‘Fundamental Cosmic Principle’, I would say. The Fundamental Cosmic Principle I am talking about here says that whilst departing from reality can be very sweet, returning abruptly to it often tends to be painfully humiliating…
