What we do in society is that we compete for stupid, meaningless prizes. We compete for stupid, meaningless prizes and we can get quite nasty about it. We can get very nasty indeed, and we regularly do!

Competing for meaningless prizes and knowing that this is what we’re doing is one thing, but the point is that we don’t know it. For us, ‘the end justifies the means’, which means that we will quite happily involve ourselves in all sorts of ugly and questionable behaviour and think nothing of it. The evidence for this is all around us – our whole way of life is ‘ugly and questionable’!

Somehow, we imagine that the prizes we’re competing for will benefit us so much that we don’t care what we had to do in order to obtain them, but this just isn’t true – what we’re competing for are empty tokens, nothing more. They don’t mean a thing. It’s all a horribly empty game and there’s no benefit to playing it, not for us nor anyone else. Far from benefiting us, the game we’re playing so determinedly can only ever bring us protracted and unrelenting misery.

What’s happened to us is that we have become confused in a fundamental way – we’ve completely lost sight of what the tokens stand for and as a result we think that ‘the token is the thing itself’. This is Mara’s illusion. It’s not actually possible to be more confused in this, which is why we can refer to it as fundamental confusion!

We have absolutely no clue as to what the tokens for which we scrabble so greedily stand for – if we don’t actually realise that the tokens are only tokens then of course we won’t have a clue as to what is being tokenized! We couldn’t be any further from having a clue and this is why we are forever looking in all the wrong places. To be ‘forever searching in the wrong places’ is our doom.

The prizes that we’re competing for are mere things – they – in themselves – cannot do us any good at all. Far from ‘doing us good’, fixating upon these tokens (as if they actually are the value that is being tokenized) causes us a sort of mental cramp. We become ridiculously small-minded when this isn’t actually our true nature. Because the prizes we have in our sights are so petty, we become petty by pursuing them. We become every bit as petty as the prizes we covet…

We compete for mere things, for mere externalities, and because we have become so superficial, so petty minded we can’t see anything odd or incongruous about this. We don’t see the utter, screaming absurdity in the type of life that we have adapted ourselves to. If we stopped to reflect on what we’re doing then we would see the absurdity, but we never do stop. Someone might say that we are lazy, or lacking in ambition or motivation if we were to do this! We won’t gain any kudos by dropping out of the Great Collusion that is society.

The hollow tokens that we are so fixated upon (in our characteristic humourless / concrete way) stand for what we have lost but do not know that we have last. What we have lost is our true, spontaneous nature – we had it to begin with, but somewhere along the line we lost it. Somewhere along the line we were cheated out of it. We became what society told us we had to become, in order to ‘fit in’. We did what was expected of us.

When we become what society tells us to become then we do ‘fit in’ – this is how ‘fitting in’ works, after all – but because we have lost our true spontaneous / creative nature (which is who we actually are underneath all our conditioning) we are always going to be ‘searching for we’ve lost without knowing that this is what we’re searching for’ and this makes us infinitely manipulable. Once adapted, we become putty in the hands of the impersonal, mechanical forces that drive the mass-collusion which is society.

We’re hungry, but we don’t know what we’re hungry for and that is our confusion. Being as gullible as we are (since we have been separated from our native good sense and have been taught from the very beginning to distrust ourselves) we are now the ideal prey for any shyster that might come along hoping to con us. Since the only way we can apprehend the universe is in the narrow / superficial / concrete way that we have been taught, we look for the answer to our essential dissatisfaction in concrete things, and our obsession with the concrete, our fixation upon the trivial, means that we will never ‘look up’ to see what the what it is that we’re actually missing.

We grub around in the dirt because the dirt is all we know. We grub around in the dirt because we don’t know the dirt to be dirt. We don’t recognize virally reproducing hyperreality to be ‘virally reproducing hyperreality’ – we think it’s the real thing, we think it’s the real deal. If someone were to come along and tell us that there is something else, something great we don’t know about, some ‘transcendent reality’, we would laugh at them, we would take them for fools…

We’re afraid to let go of the game that we are playing (the Game of Unconscious Tokenization) precisely because we don’t know that it’s a game, precisely because we don’t ‘know the tokens to be only tokens’. We are infinitely reluctant to give up our obsession with the concrete, our fixation upon the trivial, because – for us – the concrete and the trivial is all there is. That’s why we can’t see the trivial to be so trivial, the absurd to be so absurd – because we’ve lost all perspective. We’re in ‘a fallen state’ but we don’t know that we are; we don’t know that we are because to be in a fallen state is not to know it. When we’re unconscious we don’t realize that we are.

In order for us to gain the perspective we need we would first have to stop what we’re doing; we would have to ‘stop playing the game that we don’t know to be a game’ but how are we going to do this? For us this would mean – in pragmatic terms – ‘letting go of everything we know and believe in’. This is ‘the ultimate risk’ as far as we’re concerned therefore and because our (conditioned) state of mind is so petty, so superficial, taking a risk like this is simply something that we’re never going to be prepared to do. Naturally when we are in this ‘petty state of mind’ we’re not going to have the courage to let go of it – courage doesn’t come out of pettiness, after all…






Image – pxfuel.com