A CONSPIRACY TO FOOL ONE'S SELF

I was the fastest sprinter in school. I’d race myself against the clock. Nobody else stood a chance. It was my claim to fame, that nobody could catch me never mind pass me. As soon as people started passing me I stopped sprinting. I didn’t see the point. As my claims to fame grew less and less, I stopped competing. If I couldn’t look back from the front, I’d make my own way off the beaten track. Let others battle it out. I’d fight my own wars with winning and losing, judge my own victories and losses. It seemed the right way to go, no matter the many times I felt I’d gone wrong, I knew I was the only one who could ever make it right again.

From an early age I realized that no matter how much of myself I exposed to the world, my own self would remain a secret to myself. And if it was true for me, the same is true for everyone. So in truth the world I was experiencing outside myself would always remain a labyrinth of secrecy, whatever parts of it should appear to be exposed. If the world was conspiring against me, it was conspiring against its own uncertainties, doubts and fears that it wasn’t fully party to its’ own secret and that any other secrecy compounded that uncertainty, those doubts and fears. If anyone chooses not to believe there is secrecy afoot, in truth they are denying their own secret, that one will never fully know the truth of how this world works. So whenever somebody tells me I’m not living in the “real” world I know they are too self-importantly, vainly or desperately trying to convince me that they are party to a truth outside of myself that somehow I need to learn to come to terms with. So humanity concocts a consensus matrix of winners and losers, success and failure, facts and fictions and ultimately only circumstantial evidence that everyone should assume their own secret self is but a minor blip and even a flaw in the great fabricated mystery that only greater selves than our own can possibly fathom!