There is a type of person everyone will recognize.
Everyone recognizes him because there is one of him at all times in every social circle.
This kind of person wakes up one day and realizes that this truth and this reality which seems so spatially, temporally, metaphysically capacious is the slenderest experiential thread, fed through the tiniest eye of a needle: I, here, now.
This allegedly infinitely capacious and enduring universe, filled with so many people, places, things and events, is just a film reel, and at each moment, the entirety of reality is confined to one celluloid square made entirely of mind. We watch square after square after square, and our memory creates a vast world of space, time, truth and history.
As tiny 6-year-old kids we go to school and sit in desks, and are trained to perpetually remember (re-member) a world where brains are the organs of mind, where history happened in the past, where science and mathematics precisely describes what actually exists and how reality actually behaves, where some actions, beliefs and attitudes are bad and other actions, beliefs and attitudes are good, and so on and so on.
The thread glides through the needle’s eye. The celluloid squares are projected upon the screen. Soon we are fixated and immersed in a story that is so real to us that we stop noticing our own role in that story. We lose ourselves in an infinite eternity of reality.
Inevitably this person we all know gets really excited, starts talking loudly and rapidly and obscurely, striking prophetic poses and their company becomes intolerable* — and this goes on indefinitely, until that person finally realizes that this happens all the time to huge numbers of people, and each one of them is the first to whom it has happened in the story they are living.
Note: I call this phenomenon “metannoying”. See what I did there? Metanoia + annoying? I need to submit this word to my nonexistent newsletter dedicated to disseminating newly minted words of this kind. The newsletter is called The Reportmanteau.