A ramshackle collection of coincidences

You see, dear reader, speaking frankly and without any intention to offend, you are a ramshackle collection of coincidences, held together by a desperate and irrational clinging. There is no center at all. Everything depends on everything else. Your body depends on the environment. Your thoughts depend on whatever junk flows in from the media. Your emotions are largely from the reptilian end of your DNA. Your intellect is a chemical computer that can't add up a thousandth as fast as a pocket calculator. And even your best side is a superficial piece of social programming that will fall apart just as soon as your spouse leaves with the kids and the money in your joint account, or the economy starts to fail and you get the sack, or you get conscripted into some idiot's war. To name this amorphous morass of self-pity, vanity and despair self, is not only the hight of hubris, it is also prove, if anyone needed, that we are above all a disillusional species. We are in a trance from birth to death. Brick the balloon and what do you get? Emptiness. Take two steps in the divine art of Buddhist meditation, and you find yourself on a planet you no longer recognize. Those needs and fears that you thought were the very bones of your being turn out to be no more than bugs in your software.

John Burdett: Bangkok Tattoo