I was contemplating what it meant to partake in the essence or nature of reality. It was a solemn moment. Yes indeed my friends – a very solemn moment. ‘What does this mean?’ I asked myself solemnly, ‘what does it mean to partake in the essence or nature of reality?’ I am often shocked by the profundity of my own thinking. I have to take a step back, shaking my head in amazement. ‘What does it mean, what does it mean, what does it mean, what does it mean’, I mutter restlessly to myself, pacing up and down. My mind is a restless mind you see – it is unceasingly restless.

Contemplating what it means to be partaking in the essence and nature of reality – you can’t beat that, can you? How fine that is, how exemplary. That’s what I call true magnificence! That’s what I call being magnificently exemplary. I could talk about how magnificent reality is all day long. How splendid it is. You bet I can. Do you know the thing where you’re in the meat market and you’re buying meat? You’re buying meat, you’re buying meat. ‘I must buy the meat’, you are thinking, ‘I must buy meat because meat is good…’ That’s a metaphor, of course.

There is a certain type of awareness that can come along which immediately causes you to realise certain things about your environment that other people – people who have not been visited by this special brand of enhanced awareness – will never ever realise. Not in a month of Sundays will they realise it! When this type of awareness comes calling then you start to realise – with painful clarity – that you have absolutely no idea about what other people are thinking about you. That is unavailable information as far as you’re concerned. They are smiling and laughing and acting all friendly but you have absolutely no way of knowing what’s going on in their heads. You have no way of knowing what lies behind the mask – it could all be a horrible trick.

That’s awareness for you anyway. Or we could say that it is a particular type of awareness at least. We’ve all been there, right? It’s the Territory we’re talking about here and all of us here are familiar with that old Territory, aren’t we? That old, old Territory… That bad old Territory. Most people know nothing of it of course but we do. We have learned the hard way, which is the only way anyone can learn about it…

‘New improved comfort,’ I crow happily, safe in my own private imaginary world, ‘comfort the like of which you have never seen – wall-to-wall comfort, seamless comfort, tailor-made comfort that has been designed by a team of experts exclusively for you! Words are contaminating of course and a true poet will never allow themselves to be sullied by them. The rest of us haven’t a clue, however. The rest of us are quite content to wallow in filthy generic verbiage from morning till night like the pigs we are, becoming contaminated to the very core in the process. We couldn’t degrade ourselves if we tried and yet somehow we seem to think that this is just fine! Somehow, we all seem to think that we are wordsmiths of the very highest calibre…