I was interested in obtaining the Supreme Benediction. My whole life became the search for the Supreme Benediction: I travelled the world asking all the wise people I met how I could go about obtaining it, what steps I could take, what strategies to employ, and so on. Some laughed in my face, some pelted me with garbage and shouted me to go away, whilst others tried to sell their patented fail-safe method or enroll me on their mickey mouse bullshit courses. No one had anything useful to say however and I wasted many years in this fashion, wandering from place to place, getting abused, beaten up or just plain ripped off. Boy was I fed up but yet I still wouldn’t give up. I was obsessed you see; I was driven. I could think of nothing else. Then eventually I make this one old guy who everyone seemed to think knew a thing or two and he neither laughed at me nor tried to con me in some way. ‘Look,’ he said, in a serious, no-nonsense way. ‘I think you’re missing the point here. It’s not about the ‘how’ at all, that’s a red herring. It’s about the one who is seeking the Benediction, it’s all about the searcher. What you have to ask yourself is does the searcher deserve the Supreme Benediction? Does he or she really deserve it or are they just assuming that they do? It’s no good seeking the Supreme Benediction if you’re a total gobshyte, after all.’ He sent me off to think about this and come back to him in a year’s time to let him know what thoughts I had had, what conclusions I had drawn. I didn’t need a year however – the answer came to me after only a few hours – how could a pure gobshyte such as me ever hope to get any sort of the benediction from the universe at all, let alone the ‘supreme’ one? What sort of a jackass fool was I? All gobshytes deserve is a good kick up the hole and I think that’s pretty much universal knowledge! If it was a kick up the hole I was looking for rather than the Supreme Benediction then I might stand a chance! Quite a good chance, in fact. So a year later I went back to see your man – who had long white hair and a pure white beard, as you might imagine – and I told him that I had realised that I was (of course) just another dumb-ass gobshyte roaming the streets, ruled in all things by the force of illusion, and that as such I had no chance of receiving any sort of benediction, and so my question was now ‘How do I stop being a gobshyte?’ The old guy looked at me impassively. ‘You can’t,’ he told me flatly, ‘the activities of a gobshyte are only ever the activities of a gobshyte and so – as such – how can such activities ever result in a gobshyte ceasing to be a gobshyte? Can a gobshyte, by being a gobshyte, by enthusiastically and persistently engaging in the characteristic activities of a gobshyte, magically transform themselves into a non-gobshyte? What do you think?’ I agreed with him that this seemed unlikely, to say the least. ‘Off with you then,’ he told me, ‘and accept your life as a gobshyte…’