Editor’s Note: The Autobiography of Satan (Authorized Edition) by William A. Glasser is available here.

Do you understand what I am saying here? Throughout your life, you have been sensing the physical matter, the molecular motions, and the photons that have touched your surface. They have all stimulated neural currents within you that were sent to your brain. Your brain then turned those currents into something rather remarkable, a representation of each source that had set them off. But that representation was not a window opened directly onto the world. Your brain, at best, was offering you, from out of its own intricate workings, useful mental images of what is actually out there. But what is actually out there, the real world, has been keeping its distance.

It has remained such an elusive, taunting reality, existing somewhere out there just beyond your sensory grasp.  What, indeed, is the real world? Why has life emerged within it? What does it all mean? Do those questions make you at all uncomfortable? They should, for you do not yet have any ultimate answers. They are often called the eternal questions, for they have persisted throughout the history of humankind. And whenever they arise, in every age, they have never failed to bring forth a gaggle of spoon‑feeders waiting impatiently to give you the same command.

“Open wide!”

And you thought I was the one deceiving you?  Ha!