Reality was a great big bouncing ball and it was tiled over most intriguingly with the little cartoon faces of my various egos. There was the grumpy ego, the sour ego, the cheerful helpful ego, the socially correct ego, the nasty psychopathic ego, the bored ego, the spiritual ego, the religious ego, the heroic ego, and so on and so forth. You get the picture, although describing it in the matter of fact that I just did describe it doesn’t really convey the shock one experiences upon seeing all of those faces. Because they’re all me, you see. They’re all me. It was personal for me, which it wouldn’t be for you, listening to it as you just have done. ‘What’s the big deal?’ you might be wondering at this point, ‘why can’t he just get on with it and move on to something more interesting?’ It’s the shock factor that does that you see – the shock makes it hard – if not impossible – for me to move on. For the time being, at least. The great big ball that was reality was bouncing its way down a steep rocky incline and each time it landed at least six or seven of the little cartoon faces would be crushed between the ball and the rocks and each one of them would squeak in desperate agony. It’s very hard for me not to identify with these little egos – I am them, after all. ‘No, don’t crush the egos!’ I cried out every time the ball landed down again, but my protestations did no good – do you think the ball would stop bouncing just because of me? Nothing stops that ball bouncing, obviously. Not the particular type of ball that we’re talking about here. Not that ball. This ball bounces forever, and deep down we all know that. The egos are resilient however, just like the familiar cartoon characters that you might have watched on TV get squashed flat by steam rollers and then reinflate themselves afterwards, in that special way that cartoon characters have. This doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hurt them of course because it clearly does; it just means that whatever happens to it the little squeaky ego is always going to get immediately rejuvenated so that it can then get squashed (or whatever else) all over again. Endless regeneration. Sometimes immortality isn’t quite so much fun after all, I guess. Although – to be fair – it doesn’t seem to bother the cartoon characters unduly; they have an awfully short attention span and this makes them immune. Immune in a kind of a way, at least. They are immune to the horrors of this kind of immortality as result of their special type of stupidity. Being stupid is what saves them. Being stupid is what saves us all really, isn’t it? Being too stupid to know what’s going on is the key. Being too stupid to know what’s going on is what protects us and enables us to lead the charmed lives that we do. To look at us you wouldn’t think there was a bother on us, would you? There was no  bother on me either until I had this revelation about reality, the particular revelation that I’ve been telling you about. Revelations about reality are good, aren’t they? Except when they aren’t of course – except when they aren’t…