Hallucinating Anger, Hallucinating Blame

“This is one of those 2 mugs of coffee starts to the day,” I said out loud to the only person in the room: me. It was 7.20am and still gloomy. The thick February cloud cover tempered the post-sunrise light, and my home office was dark. The kettle made early signs of life as it began to heat the water for my first caffeine hit. The ceiling light was on in my office, but it didn’t seem to be doing much good.

I’d worked late the night before, having unplugged my laptop and taken it into my living room to get through a heap of admin in front of the TV. I flipped the laptop open, attached the power cable and switched it on. It’s one of those face-recognition gizmos that lets the computer know it’s fine for it to open all the software. It saves me remembering a password which, on sleepy, dank mornings like that, I’m always grateful for. When it works, that is.

The “Checking It’s You” alert flashed on the screen. So either the camera lens was dirty, the room was too dark to recognise me, or I’d swapped faces in the night. I dismissed the third option without too much sci-fi paranoia, wiped the camera lens with the sleeve of my fleece jacket and waited. No joy. “Checking It’s You” flashed at me again. Before I checked the mirror to see if my face was the same face as yesterday, I switched the halo light behind the laptop on, to shine beams onto this face that I was in (whichever face that was). Bingo!

The computer came to life, proof I was in the same skin as yesterday. At least my computer worked. And the kettle worked. I heard it reach boiling point and switch off, so I got up and went into the kitchen to make my wake-up potion of choice work on me. The Aero-press contraption I use takes about 5 minutes to go from pouring water in, to having a ready to drink coffee, so I ambled back from the kitchen to my office and sat down. Everything still looked so dark. My e-mails on the screen, dark. The walls, dark. I looked to my left towards the garden, dark. Not midnight dark, but not daytime light either.

Yup, it was a 2 mugs of coffee kinda morning alright. Coffee one was drunk outside, in the garden, in the grey mist and within a big coat. Coffee two would be after I’d showered and with client call number one. The morning shower always wakes me up into the day. Almost always.

Not today. I was back in the office, and still something was ‘off’. Darker than normal. Still. I opened Zoom a minute before the scheduled time my client and I had arranged, in case I had to fix whatever wasn’t working that kept everything looking so gloomy. My face came on the computer screen. There was definitely something wrong; it was waaaay darker than normal. I looked up at the ceiling light. Maybe the bulb was dying. It looked ok. Maybe it was the halo light on its way out. That also looked ok. I couldn’t put my finger on it. Wait! Maybe it was me! My eyes were messed up. But I’d washed my face and used my usual eyelid foaming cleanser stuff in the shower. Oh well!

My client logged on, and I got the alert on Zoom to let them in. His face was darker than normal too. Maybe the sun was dying. That was the only way to explain it being dark in his house in France and in my house in the UK.

Wait! I’d used the laptop the night before in the living room, unplugged it from the power, and used the PC’s battery. For hours. And hours. To below 20% battery life. To the point where ‘Power-save’ mode kicks in, dimming the screen to lengthen that decreasing battery life.

I blinked at that thought, leant forward and pressed the ‘increase screen brightness’ button on the keyboard.

All became well in the world.

The light bulb in the ceiling was fine again. The halo light regained its luminescence. The light in my client’s room got brighter. The sun got its strength back. The solar system was saved! The only thing needed was the brightness button on my laptop to be pushed.

We got on with the call. In the 30-minute gap between that meeting and my next, I laughed and scribbled down that dystopian falsehood start to my day. Me: looking in the wrong places to solve a problem in front of my face.

I then remembered loads of other times I looked in the wrong places for the cause of how things looked or felt. A week or so earlier, while in a peaceful coffee break in my garden, I felt angry. Angry at the people in a car rental place who had charged me for something I’d already paid for. And it took loads of e-mails to resolve. Angry at them. Angry at something that happened 4 months earlier in a place 5,000 miles away. Angry at people who were not there in my garden. Hallucinating anger.

Did the event happen? Yes. Should I have been charged the money? No. Could they have handled it all better? Yes. Were they to blame for how I felt in that moment? No.

But darn it, it looked like they were the cause. That what happened was the cause of my anger. And it could not possibly be. The people weren’t there, and the event was not happening.

All. In. My. Head.

I was having a ‘now’ thought, and I was feeling the effects of it. I’ll never tire of remembering the quote from physicist David Bohm: “Thought creates the world and says ‘I didn’t do it!’”

Realising the illusory nature of thought has changed my life. It’s a big statement. And if anything, I’m UNDER-estimating the effect that one realisation has had on my life. Every single feeling I’ve struggled with has only been caused by thought appearing real. A thought in my head. A thought that, when left alone, goes away. Without me needing to do anything about it. As natural as Monday turning into Tuesday. As I remember saying to a group at a retreat once, as one of the people was grappling with a feeling about their past and their life and wanting to resolve it: “What do you need to do with a temporary illusion?”

No blame. No judgement. Nothing to solve. It’s just how thought works in human beings.

With love and thanks,

Wyn