Sometimes it occurs to me that I want to talk about my experiences and open up about them and blog about them and all that sort of thing and at other times I think that I must be mad to be even considering this.  I recoil in horror from the idea. None of these thoughts are mine however. None of the thoughts I have belong to me any more – they happen all by themselves, they have nothing to do with me. They aren’t my thoughts and this is me talking – it’s all just my mind running off automatically.

My mind is basically a ghost. It’s the ghost of who I used to be, the ghostly summmation of all the experiences I thought that I’d had back when I was, or seemed to be, who I thought I was. Things used to be so simple back then – so very simple and yet at the same time so fantastically absurd. It was an entirely invisible form of absurdity however – invisible to me at any rate! Completely invisible to me. Looking back on those days, which admittedly seem rather unreal to me now even at the best of times, the one thing that I can remember is that I took it all very seriously. I took my life as I understood it very seriously. Why wouldn’t I, I suppose? Why wouldn’t I…

There is an anomaly here that I can’t come to terms with, however. I won’t say that I ‘wrestle with it daily’ (because that would itself be rather an absurd not to mention pretentious thing to say) but it is something that I keep coming up against. Who was this person who took their life so very seriously, and what was this ‘life’ that they were so very fixated upon? Given the fact – that is – that the person in question didn’t really exist (and therefore wasn’t me), and given the fact that the supposed life they were living didn’t really have anything to do with anyone (and certainly not me). What was it all about, I ask myself? I can see that all of this talk would probably be intensely irritating to most people, and would be seen as nothing more than a self-indulgent waste of time, but this is nevertheless the point that I keep coming back to. There’s an image in my head – the image of a tight knot of energy spinning in space. I can see a cluster of tightly-knit field lines constituting some kind of force-field within which was trapped this idea of a person and this idea of a life that that person was having. And yet at the same time this ‘force-field’ of which I speak was responsible for creating that idea of a person, creating that illusion of a personalised life.

I’m perfectly aware that this type of convoluted discussion is going to be highly irritating for most people…   …no, wait – I already said that. So anyway my initial impulse was to go public and talk openly and freely about my experiences and I do sincerely believe this to be the most helpful thing anyone could do, but then almost immediately after coming to this decision I felt myself swinging around to the opposite point of view. But – as I have said – none of this was me, it was only my mind trying to stick its oar in the same way it always does. The ghost of my mind is trying to reassert itself, trying to re-establish itself. Trying to reintroduce itself into the picture. It’s too late for that though – things have changed in some fundamental way and they can’t change back.

It occurs to me not for the first time (but as if it were the first time) that what I’m talking about is the Literal World and the process of escaping from the Literal World. The Literal World is a horror we have no appreciation of, generally speaking. We have ZERO appreciation of that horror, curiously enough… It’s a very frightening thing, only we’re not frightened of it! We’re not frightened at all… There are so many false escapes from the Literal World aren’t there? So many false escapes, so many false escapes. Every time we think that we have escaped then that’s a false escape. Every time we have a narrative about ourselves escaping then that’s a false escape. The Literal World is such a Vile Hideous Thing, isn’t it? So very vile, so very hideous. It’s the most loathsome thing I know! I feel shame about all the time I’ve spent there – so much shame, so much shame. What was I doing there, I wonder? Just what the hell was I thinking? That’s just my little joke, of course. Just my little joke…