Our chief activity in this world is ‘activity that seeks to make the unreal real’, which equals ‘struggling and striving in general’, which equals ‘activity that comes out of our thinking’, which equals our ‘purposeful or goal-orientated activity.’

Purposefulness means goals and goals are thoughts and thoughts don’t exist anywhere apart from in our own heads. Purposefulness is ‘the worship of the unreal’, therefore. It’s our ‘dark obsession’.

‘Striving to obtain our goals’ is our chief activity in this world. It’s ‘what we mostly do’; it’s the ‘socially-validated pastime’ and the highest accolades are bestowed upon those of us who manage to achieve high scores in this department. Great honour is theirs…

Success is something to shout about, something to be envious of, something to get excited about, and so on, and yet this whole business is profoundly unreal, profoundly meaningless. To be in love with ‘success’ is to be in love with an illusion.

Goals can’t exist by themselves – they are projections. The existence of a so-called ‘goal’ necessarily presumes the existence of ‘the seeker after the goal’, ‘the one who has conceived the goal’, or ‘the one to whom the goal is meaningful’. We say that the goal is ‘meaningful in itself; but it isn’t — it’s only meaningful because we say it is and this is the trick that we’re playing on ourselves.

When we strain ourselves to achieve the goal we are straining to achieve an unreal thing. What we are essentially trying to do is prove that there is ‘a seeker after the goal’; ‘a conceiver of the goal’, ‘a one to whom the goal is meaningful and important’. Proving this is all we care about, when it comes down to it – it’s our Great Obsession…

Our chief activity (which is the socially-prescribed activity, which is the repetitive or uncreative activity that we all engage in on a constant basis) equals ‘straining to create the plausible impression that ‘the one who is engaging in this activity is real’. Our over-riding aim in all things is to prove that ‘the one who defines themselves in relationship to the story that they are telling’ actually exists and is not merely a function of this story, a function of this made up narrative…

Or as Gregory Tucker says, the aim of ‘the dreamer within the dream’ is to prove to themselves that they are not part of the dream, that they are somehow external to (and independent of) the dream. The ‘Main Event’ in life – paraphrasing Greg Tucker here – is us ‘defending the impossible fiction’, the impossible fiction in question being that ‘we are real and not part of the dream that mind is dreaming’. We can’t get outside the dream because the dream has no outside.

Our overriding concern is to prove that the dream isn’t the dream (or that ‘the mind-created simulation isn’t a simulation’). However, as Tucker points out, the bottom line (irrespective of how much effort or time we put into our goal-orientated striving) is always that

…it isn’t possible for a dreamer in this dream to prove truth is false, and that this manifests in the dream as suffering.

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