‘What is the primary delusion?’ people often ask me, ‘what is the actual basis for all this samsara-type business, what’s the fundamental delusion – the delusion behind all the other delusions, if you will?’ I won’t tell them anything, though. I won’t entertain them. ‘Let them find out for themselves’, says I. ‘Don’t come bothering me about it…’
The spider was tiny – barely perceptible to the naked eye – but extremely evil at the same time and it sat in the middle of a vast, all-pervasive web, a web of darkness. That was one of my visions. The web was the Human Realm, of course. It was the human conglomerate of which we are all a part, of which we are all a part. We all go to make it up. In my vision each one of us was an extension of that little spider, a protrusion of it. We are all protrusions. We work away, as best we can, serving evil in all its forms, responding to evil’s prompts, acting according to its commands. That’s how it is with us – we have betrayed ourselves (along with all that is good and clean and honest), but we persist in believing that we have accomplished something truly great, something truly monumental. We are in fact convinced that we’re heroes, which is a perversity beyond all measure. Our perversity is grotesque in the extreme and don’t let anyone tell you it isn’t.
Yes, I’ll never tell them what the primary delusion is. I’ll never give them the satisfaction! They need to get off their lazy arses and find out for themselves. They need to put on their hats and coats and get themselves out in the Real World for a change, where nothing ever works out the way you want it to, where nothing ever happens the way you think it ought to. What a pisser, huh? You couldn’t invent a more annoying and frustrating universe if you tried. What we’re looking at here is a universe where nothing ever works out for you. Nothing works out for you no matter what lengths you go to and you are going to go to some lengths, I can tell you. I can promise you that. You will go to extraordinary lengths, desperate lengths and all to no avail. You’ll end up selling your soul to the devil and that won’t do you any good either. But I suppose I have to leave that for you to find out for yourselves…
Yes, the vision lingers yet. It lingers to this day. If I squint my eyes, I can still see that awful little spider, with its tiny red eyes glowing in the shadows, waiting patiently and malignantly at the centre of its web of evil. I can still see it, there at the heart of all things, governing every aspect of our existence. I can’t help seeing it and – at the same time – I also can’t help knowing that this hateful little spider is me, was me all along. That’s the nature of the game we’re playing, you see. This is the secret they don’t want you to know. Only there is no ‘they’, of course. That’s part of the conspiracy, part of the narrative they want you to believe. There never was any ‘they’.
