I had been sniffing the funny stuff again, which proved to be a bad mistake. It is set up a reverberation in my head that wouldn’t go away. A bad reverberation. ‘I’m the man’, I said, ‘I’m the dude…’ Then the reverberation would come to bite my head off. The reverberation was my own echo, and it was ruthlessly negating everything about me. Before long I was trembling with fear, afraid to make a move lest I be punished. This too was an action however, this was also an action and as such it too was punished, instantly and irrevocably. That was the way of things, in this new and terrible reality that had now come my way.

‘The Great Negator is biting my head off’, I said to myself. It’s biting my head off every time I think a thought. Every time I think a thought (a thought like this one, for example) the reverberation comes to punish me. I am in the Hall of the Dead, undergoing the trial that awaits us all. I had misspent my life, I realised, I had spent my time lying to myself on what can only be called an outrageous scale. Somehow, I had chosen this as my preferred life activity, the activity of lying to oneself on an industrial scale. ‘Sounds good to me, good buddy’, I told myself, ‘I like the cut of your jib. You’re going to go far young man. You’re going to go far for sure. Good buddy good buddy good buddy…’

In my defence however, I never knew I was lying. I swear to God I didn’t. I lied to myself about my lying you see – I told myself that I wasn’t lying, I told myself that I was telling the truth and I believed what I told myself. I believed it without question. I believed this story in all innocence – I had no way of knowing that the whole time I was lying. I had no way of knowing that the whole time I was stitching myself up like a kipper.  ‘You’ve played a blinder there my friend’, I told myself, ‘Please permit me to shake you by the hand!’

Echoes in my head, echoes in my head. Everything is just echoes in my head. Nasty, mocking echoes, you understand. All echoes are nasty and mocking but we don’t see it this way. We think the echoes are good and that’s why we chose to live in the Echo World. That’s why we choose to live in a world that is made up of them. Stale, rotten echoes – frighteningly hollow echoes. Sinister echoes. We all echo each other on a constant basis, and this is called society, this is called ‘fitting in’. Who can echo the best, we ask? Who will win the prize? Who will gain the kudos?

We echo each other’s echoes and that makes us feel better about ourselves, that makes us feel good about the ‘life’ we lead. We find someone who is good at telling lies – better than we are, perhaps – and we hang around with them, applauding their words, applauding ourselves for our good taste in friends. Applauding ourselves for being on the right path. We are drawn instinctively to the ones who are most convinced by their own lies – this is what passes for truth in the World of Echoes, after all. That’s how we get to be a leader or a guru you see, that’s how we get the wonderful adulation that we desire so much…