You know that thing where you can only enjoy life in that old conditioned way, that old, old conditioned way? It’s a funny old business isn’t it? It’s funny and yet it’s sad at the same time. Funny, and yet so very sad. We’re always in the midst of all this sadness, aren’t we? We’re always in the midst of it. We’re always in the thick of it, always in the heart of it. We’re wading turgidly through all this sadness, making whatever progress we can, making whatever slow and painful progress we can.

So there you are, enjoying life in the only way you can – that old creaky ‘conditioned’ way – and perhaps one day it happens that you can’t enjoy it anymore! Perhaps it happens that things just aren’t working out for you. There’s a fly in the ointment, a spanner in the works. Everything grinds to a halt; the machinery isn’t working as it should do anymore. The gears are all jammed up – you’ve come a cropper, you’ve hit a snag. You’ve come up against a brick wall. You know how rotten that feels, right? We all know how rotten that feels. Let’s agree on that much, at least…

You have your familiar ways of doing things of course. You have your old ways and you know them well. How well you know them! It’s a wonder you manage to get any enjoyment out of them at all when you know them so well. It really is a wonder! You go through the whole creaking routine of it and somehow you’re still supposed to be getting some fun out of it. It’s more of a myth than anything else at this stage I’d say! You’re living the myth, isn’t that right, my friend? You’re living the myth, you’re living the creaky old myth…

The more we reflect on it the more we realise what an appallingly dreadful business this is, as I dare say you’d agree. It’s no wonder we don’t want to look into it; it’s no wonder none of us want to open this particular can of worms. It’s no wonder at all! It’s no wonder we all get upset and panicky (like chickens in the coop when they can smell the fox) when things get too close to the bone. We just don’t want to know, and that’s fair enough in my view. You couldn’t blame anyone for that. It’d be unfair to blame anyone for that. I suppose the thing is that we know well enough (on some level or other) that it’s all going to come to a bad end. Deep down we know it only too well and that’s enough to upset anyone. Why wouldn’t it, for God’s sake? Why wouldn’t it?

Do know that thing where you’re stuck in the poor old creaky conditioned ego and you’re getting cranky and out of sorts and in rotten bad form because things just aren’t working out for you? Because you can’t get things to work out for you the way your conditioning needs for it to work out? You know that feeling well enough, I’d say! Of course you do. Don’t we all know that feeling well enough, for God’s sake? Of course we do. We know it intimately. We knew it was coming all along. The ‘bad end’, that is. What else would you expect anyway? There’s no other way things could work out after all – it was never going to work at any other way and on some level or other you always knew that very well. We all knew that. We all knew that it was always going to screw up badly in the end, and can anyone blame us for not wanting to face that?