My mind has recently developed the unpleasant habit of ‘skipping ahead’ like a fool and thinking that it has sorted out a problem merely by thinking about it. Then it straightaway relaxes and forgets all about the issue that still needs to be sorted. I’m sure you know the sort of thing that I’m talking about. It’s a common enough aberration, I believe. Possibly common enough not even to warrant being called ‘an aberration’. I think of some household task, like putting out the bins, and then I say to myself “Yeah, I’m gonna do that in a minute. I’m gonna do that for sure…” And straightaway I get this ridiculously unwarranted feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction and all of that type of stuff. I’m basking in it. Then of course I clean forget whatever it was that I was supposed to do. “Yes, yes, yes,” you are probably thinking, “what you’re talking about is the phantom realisation of all your wishes!” We all know about that. We’ve all read the Divided Self, after all. That’s not an unknown phenomenon at all, you inform me. It has been very well documented. Well documented or not however I can tell you it’s a real bummer all the same. It’s a real bummer having a mind that skips ahead and imagines that everything is already accomplished simply because you have thought about accomplishing it. I mean, you end up not doing a lot. Why would you after all – you’ve already done it all in your imagination. It’s old hat, old territory. Been there, done that, only not really.  Phantom fulfilment is a bit of a hollow disappointment really, as you might expect. Anyway, that’s one thing. I thought it was worth mentioning. ‘A problem shared is a problem halved’, right? But only a few days ago something else happened to me and it’s made all that phantom fulfilment business pretty much meaningless. I’m not going to be kept up all night worrying about phantom fulfilment any more anyway, I can tell you! I’m not going to be kept up at night worrying about it because I have become aware of another problem, although I’m not sure though that ‘problem’ is really the right word. ‘Problem’ is a very tame word, isn’t it? It’s very tame indeed. What happened is that I had what I can only call a revelation – it was like what happens when you take a hero dose of some highly potent psychedelic drug and then when the drug hits you, and hits you real hard, you suddenly realise that everything is completely different to the way you always had always thought it was. You’re having that moment. People look at you and they will say to themselves “You’re having that moment, aren’t you?” The revelation moment. They are nodding to themselves wisely, “Yeah, yeah, yeah – you’re having that moment for sure.’ Everyone’s a Shaman, right? We all know that moment. We’ve all been there. I’ve been there more times than I can remember – I don’t know whether I’m coming or going half the time. I don’t know what to believe in anymore. You tune into higher realities and the spirit world and all that kind of stuff. But anyway, this time wasn’t like that. What happened this time wasn’t that I had a revelation that was all about my neurotic veils, which are the psychological veils which seclude us all safety from reality and the challenges that it contains. Yes – those veils. Anyway I had this big flash of awareness and all of a sudden they could see the construct that I had put in place for myself, support system’, so to speak. This is a true story by the way – it isn’t just something making up for myself to pass the time. So what I did see was that I had created a number of invisible concentric rings around myself, each one of which was basically saying to me “You’re real buddy, you’re real buddy, you’re real buddy,” over and over again, in an encouraging and validating way. All the rings of self-validation are exactly the same in this respect – they are all either saying “You’re real buddy, you’re real buddy, don’t you worry about that – you’re real for sure…” or they are saying “Yeah, yeah, yeah, you exist buddy, you exist buddy, you really do exist, there’s no problem about that…” Self-validation, as I’ve said. And all this activity was happening by itself because I’d split it off that consciousness from myself so that I wouldn’t have to know that I was doing it, so that it could all take place on an unconscious level so I wouldn’t know about it. And then this revelation happened and so now I do know about it. I know all about my neurotic veils, which are the veils that I hide behind. That I supposedly hide behind, at any rate! This was not a pleasant revelation, you see. Far from it. No angels, no visions of Universal Compassion or feelings of Oneness or anything like that. Instead, the hideously vile and repulsive stench of putrefaction hangs heavy and horrific in the air…