The Big Fucking Monkey Game

I was on holiday, on the last day, doing what every relaxed and well-adjusted person does.

Questioning every authority figure I have ever absorbed.

Spiritual teachers. Parents. Teachers. Politicians. Media people. Business people. AI people. All the gods, old and new.

Very restful.

It started with spiritual leaders.

There is always this question with them. What are they on? What are they actually talking about?

Because there are moments where you taste something. A feeling. A chemical reaction. A softening. A bit of spaciousness. Some little shift in the body. And you think, ah, maybe this is the thing they are pointing at.

Then five minutes later, everyone is playing another game.

The teacher game. The student game. The authority game. The special state game. The “I have seen what you have not seen” game. The “follow me out of the illusion” game.

A higher level ego game, maybe.

Still a game.

So I started messing around with an experiment. I had AI help me cartoonishly rip up the spiritual authority figures. Not literally, obviously. More like pulling apart the spell.

Tony Robbins. Eckhart Tolle. J. Krishnamurti. Osho. The Buddha. Hinduism. Naval. Kapil Gupta. Anyone I had made into an authority over the last ten years.

Then it widened.

Parents. Teachers. Media. Politicians. Culture. Everyone.

For four or five hours I kept going. Breaking down every authority. Looking for the absurdity in it.

A lot of the lens came from UG Krishnamurti, who is useful because he basically takes a hammer to the whole spiritual marketplace.

But then the joke got better.

Because UG is playing a game too.

The anti-guru game.

The “all gurus are full of shit” game.

The “I am not selling you a dream, I am tearing the dream down” game.

And there is definitely a shadow pleasure in that. The pleasure of cutting everyone else down. The pleasure of being the one who sees through the whole circus.

So then I had to turn the same lens on him.

Which is when the whole thing became hilarious.

The anti-guru is still a monkey.

The guru is a monkey.

The student is a monkey.

The AI god people are monkeys.

The politicians are monkeys.

The parents are monkeys.

The media people are monkeys.

The person trying to destroy every authority figure is also, unfortunately, a monkey.

A biological creature. Nervous system, hormones, impulses, status games, fear, desire, memory, story, hunger, tiredness, weird little chemicals doing dances in the dark.

A monkey with language.

A monkey with robes.

A monkey with a podcast.

A monkey with a startup.

A monkey with a doctrine of no-self.

Different levels of monkey, maybe.

Very sophisticated monkey sometimes.

But still monkey.

And I think I got to the point of exhaustion with it. Questioning every argument. Questioning the people who question the arguments. Questioning the people who question the questioners. Looking at the whole thing until the mind got tired of eating itself.

And the thing that was left was strangely simple.

Maybe just accept that this is a monkey game.

A big fucking monkey game.

Not in a nihilistic way. Not “nothing matters.” That is another boring monkey game.

More like: laugh and accept it.

This creature has impulses. It wants things. It fears things. It makes authorities. It kills authorities. It wants certainty. It wants rebellion. It wants someone to tell it what is real, and then it wants to tear that person down for trying.

Fine.

Monkey.

The question is not: how do I become not-monkey?

That seems like the oldest monkey trick in the book.

The question is: what monkey games does this monkey actually enjoy playing?

Not the games that win approval.

Not the games that make the monkey look spiritual, intelligent, successful, detached, profound, or above it all.

The intrinsic monkey games.

The games this monkey enjoys for the act of doing them.

Writing. Building. Playing. Laughing. Loving. Moving. Noticing. Making strange little things. Following curiosity. Hitting the ball. Having a stupid thought and seeing where it goes.

Maybe that is enough of a north star.

Not enlightenment.

Not final truth.

Not the perfect authority.

Just this monkey learning which games make it more alive.

And then playing those.

Very advanced spiritual technology, obviously.