The game is on.

Are you suggesting that the drive towards spiritual realisation or enlightenment is actually no different than an all-consuming drive towards, say, one's football team? One is not necessarily higher than the other? The process is the same?

Yes, exactly.

OK, I'll go and watch the football now! But it's curious, isn't it, with this enlightenment thing, how it can seem to be higher, to be something that is of tremendous value and significance.

Yes, but enlightenment or liberation or whatever doesn't stop the dream of being. It doesn't get 'you' out of the dream. It's merely another happening within this dream, this play of life. The idea is, of course, with this enlightenment or liberation business, that this 'me' is to be escaped. But this 'me' - it's only a dream itself! What is there to escape from? Who would escape?

And yet to the seeker that can seem such bad news, because this whole striving towards the goal and the benefits that one can apparently get from it through meditation and the feelings of enlightenment … It can seem very bad news, very bleak news, that this dream is just a dream.

You say 'to the seeker': but what constitutes that seeker? You're talking about 'the seeker' as though it's some kind of concrete entity. As soon as that assumption arises - that the seeker is an actual entity, a 'someone' who is in need of release or whatever - then the game is on, isn't it?