There is a very big problem with adapting ourselves to fit the conventional world, with adjusting ourselves to what we might call ‘the conventional life’, and the ‘problem’ – to continue using this totally inadequate word – is that we are being spoofed. We have fallen victim to a trick, to a hoax and we are being led on, step by step, with promises that are totally hollow, totally empty, with the ultimate result that we are now too ‘too far gone’ to turn around and reverse our steps, ‘too far into it’ to come to our senses and reverse our trajectory…

The conventional world is made up of a whole bunch of propositions which we buy into without giving any consideration to the matter. We buy into these propositions without even realising that we are buying into anything, but the thing here is that these propositions only make sense when we look at them through the lens of the conditioned mind, which is how we look at everything, which is the only way we have to look at things. If we don’t want the conventional world to stop making sense (which we don’t) then that therefore means that we can’t ever look at life directly, without the distorting lens (i.e., the conditioning) that society has provided us with.

By looking at things exclusively through the conditioned mind we create what we take to be an actual independent or self-existent world and – naturally enough – we end up being very relaxed, very comfortable about sojourning here. All our biases are catered to here, after all. We end up being lulled into a sense of false security; this is ‘false’ security because there is actually no security there at all, no matter how reassuringly routine (or even downright banal) our daily existence might seem to us. We’re living in a ‘castle in the clouds’, there’s only ever going to be one outcome to this, and it’s not going to be a happy one…

The spoof we’re talking about is precisely this therefore – the spoof is that what we take has been utterly reliable (as reliable as the very ground under our feet, so reliable in fact that we never give it first look, never mind a second one) is completely without substance, just as the early morning mist hanging over a river valley is without substance. When it goes, it goes forever, leaving no trace behind. No matter how solid this mundane world of ours might seem – no matter that it seems appears as if it’s going to be there forever – one day it’s going to explode in our faces, so to speak. That is of course how it always is when we allow ourselves to be lulled into a sense of false security.

Needless to say, the more lulled we have been, the greater the shock will be when it all explodes in our face, and when it’s the Conditioned World that we’re talking about then we arelulled to the maximum.it’s not actually possible to be lulled (or – as we could also say – anaesthetized – anymore than we have been. The reason being that we are incentivized once we have bought into the conventional life call my which we do very quickly to adapt ourselves several more closely; we’re strongly incentivized to optimise our game and the thing about this is that the more we optimise our game the more concrete it becomes for us. By playing the game, wereify it – we make it seem like an actual genuine honest-to-goodness ‘thing’ to us (since by putting all our efforts into optimizing our performance in the game we are we are ignoring anything that has no bearing on this highly demanding task).

When we buy into what we might call ‘the proffered reality’ we straightaway fall under the sway of this thing that we’re calling optimization; this is what it’s all about in society – seeing who can play the game the best. We throw ourselves into it no matter how stupid it might be. We ‘do what everyone else is doing’. It’s a competition, in other words – those who succeed in the game ah those who learn to play at the best and when we’re playing the game all we care about is success, all we care about is trying to be better than anyone else. As we have just said, winning is what it’s all about nothing else counts. Winning is the goal and ‘trying to attain the goal’ is the only meaningful type of activity there ever is as far as we’re concerned. We laugh at anything else. Anything else is scoffed at, anything else is seen as foolishness, as an irresponsible waste of time and effort.

Our cleverness is our undoing, therefore. Our own cleverness (or our own ‘success’) is our undoing because in adapting ourselves to the game that has been given to us to play then we have – as we might expect if we thought about it – made ourselves useless at everything else. We’ve narrowed our attention down, and narrowed it down again, and again, until we have reached the exalted position of knowing ‘everything about nothing’ (as it is said). When we become experts in this way then society honours us, society places us on a pedestal and listens attentively to what we have to say, even thought what we have to say is the purest nonsense. The higher up the ladder of social status we get the emptier our words become; ‘the game is validating itself’ (which is of course all it can ever do) and self-validation is a redundant act. It’s like some guy with a giant ego telling himself how great he is, telling himself what an awesome winner he is – what else do guys with giant egos ever do?

Another way of looking at what it means to ‘succeed at the game’ is of course understandable in purely monetary terms – to be successful in society is to be rich, is to be affluent, is to be wealthy. This is why we admire people with lots of money (it’s not because of any other consideration, clearly). If we really ‘make the grade’ then we get to be billionaires and this is therefore the ultimate in winning; it is universally considered that this must be most fulfilling and rewarding experience life has to offer. What’s more fulfilling than having an unlimited power and have everyone looking up to us? The downside of successful optimization (which no one ever talks about) is by so doing we have narrowed ourselves down so much that we no longer have any relationship with reality. Games only work when reality is excluded and so to be a winner at the game is at the same time to be alienated from everything that really matters, alienated from reality itself (which is hardly going to play out in our favour). The Conditioned Realm is infinitely narrow – narrow to the point of being two-dimensional – whilst reality itself is ‘as broad as broad can be’. The CR is vanishingly superficial whilst the world we ignore (as we play our self-validating games) is endlessly deep, endlessly mysterious.

All of this is of course very familiar stuff – ‘What will it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’ we read in Mark 8: 36. It’s true to say that this line has been read out millions of times from  the pulpit for the last two thousand years, but it is also true to say that the message hasn’t taken. It is also true to say that this teaching hasn’t made the slightest impact on us – if this is the teaching, then not only is it the case that that we have failed to learn it, but – rather – it is undeniably true that we have gone most determinedly in the opposite direction. We have doubled down on optimization, doubled down on ‘adapting compliantly to the game which we have been given’, which is – in this particular instance – the game of life the game of acting as if we are living the religious life, the morally pure life, the ‘Godly’ life. We compete to see who can be the most pious and we viciously persecute anyone who gets caught out.

The ‘formal representation of virtue’ (the instructions for how we are to live the proper religious life and avoid the temptations of the material realm) translates into ‘just another game to play’. It’s a game just like any other game (which is another way of saying that it is an exercise in ‘reality avoidance’). What we’re looking at here is what Chogyam Trungpa calls ‘spiritual materialism’, which – he says – is where we’re ‘hoping for something’ (i.e., we’re trying to improve ourselves, we’re trying to reach what we imagine is a more ‘spiritual’ state). We’re trying to pull ourselves out of the foul-smelling mud of unconscious living. What happens then – says Chogyam Trungpa – is that we –

…forget about the pain altogether and get involved in looking for something other than the pain. And this itself is pain…

Whenever we act according to the dictates of some external authority we are playing a game. Whenever we all get together and agree on a formal description of the ‘pious life’ we are playing a game. What we’re doing here – as we keep on saying – is that we are ‘optimising our performance in accordance with the rules, in accordance with what the ‘external authority’ is telling us. We’re trying – as always – to win an ‘imaginary prize’ by getting ‘ever-closer to the formal description of reality’, by ‘slavishly conforming to the authorized account of what is said to be the correct way to live life’, and this is how we are being spoofed, this is how we are being tricked into missing life entirely…





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