Everything is perfect in being what it already is, and it does so without the least bit of effort or straining, without the least bit of impediment from anything. Everything is perfect at being what it already is (as Longchenpa says), and when it is what it already is – which it never isn’t – then this is a greater and more marvelous thing than we are capable of imagining!

 

 

 

We are oblivious to this however – this observation is quite lost on us! Instead of seeing that things are already better than we could ever possibly have hoped for them to be (without any effort or ingenuity whatsoever on our part to make them be so) we make a huge deal about ‘struggling against the odds to change things to be the way we want them to be’. We want to have ‘a hand in things’, so to speak. We want to have some input. This is all we care about – we think that actualizing our goals in this way is ‘what it’s all about’ and we get very excited indeed about the prospect of being able to do so.

 

 

 

This is a very funny thing – if we are unable to change things to be the way we want them to be then we think badly of ourselves and experience great shame and humiliation on this account. When – on the other hand -we are able to pull it off then we are completely chuffed, and we go around blowing trumpets and loudly congratulating ourselves. The ‘funny thing’ about this is that no matter what or how we change things to be, the result is only ever going to be a reflection of our crassly mediocre way of thinking about things. and as such not really worth all the song and dance we make about it.

 

 

 

This might seem like an odd angle to take on things, as well as being rather unfair to us and our activities, but it isn’t. It’s perfectly fair! What we’ve made for ourselves isn’t just a random collection of artifacts but an actual self-consistent world – with our ideas about what is good and what is not good we have engineered a total environment for ourselves, a complete artificial environment (both physical and mental) which we proceed to completely immerse ourselves in. For us, this artificial environment is ‘all there is’; for it NOT to be ‘all there is’ we would have to be able to see beyond our own thinking and we can’t...

 

 

 

The thing about creating an artificial world for ourselves in this way is that what we have created is always going to be vastly, hugely, spectacularly inferior to the actual genuine thing, the world we didn’t invent, the world didn’t make up ourselves. We have trapped ourselves in our own inane guess about what the world is, and yet we nevertheless feel that we have done rather a splendid thing. Our cleverness has landed us in a particularly insalubrious hole however; it’s not just that the world we create for ourselves with our own efforts is inferior (because saying this implies that there is a basic parity of some kind at least) it’s a parody, a caricature – it’s just plain ridiculous. It’s just plain ridiculous but because it was us that made it, and because we ‘can’t see beyond it’ (because we can’t see beyond our own guesses, beyond our own assumptions) we have to keep on taking it seriously. This is what is called ‘being hoisted by one’s own petard’!

 

 

 

This then is the problem with the world that we ourselves have made – it’s always going to be rubbish! It’s always going to be rubbish no matter how much effort we put into it. It is always going to be ‘rubbish’ because there is never any freedom in it, there isn’t the freedom that we would need not to take it seriously and that’s why we get trapped in it. There is never any freedom in the world that we ourselves have made because we can’t make freedom – freedom can be discovered, but it can’t be created or constructed. This is why we can say that the Designed World is a ‘parody’ of the real thing – it’s a parody because reality itself is full of freedom, whereas the simulation of reality that we have blithely created for ourselves is completely devoid (necessarily devoid) of even the slightest whiff of it!

 

 

 

We can’t help trapping ourselves in an assume or projected world just as long as we are busy thinking – to think is to be trapped in our thinking, to set limits for ourselves (to say what we are. or what the world is) is to be trapped within those limits. Thought can’t function (can’t even exist) without limits and so what seems on the one hand to be a helpful, useful, or beneficial thing is it the same time extraordinarily restricted. Thinking is – in a way – our superpower, but it is a superpower that comes with a very drastic price tag. Our ability to make mental models of what’s going on and extrapolate on this basis (our ability to obtain positive knowledge of the world and then control on the basis of this knowledge) sounds great on the face of it, but what we don’t see is that this ‘ability’ only holds good within the dehydrated world that we have created with our thoughts. It only holds good within the game that we are playing, in other words; when we win at this game this is cause for celebration, but we shouldn’t infer from all this celebration that the game is actually real!

 

 

 

So, we can control stuff, and know stuff (which is what we absolutely want to do) but only at the price of living in an unreal world. Obviously, being able to control stuff (being able to be generally efficacious in our goal-orientated activity) and being able to know stuff (which is to say, ‘have rock-solid positive knowledge about the world’) is very important to us! It must be extremely important to us in fact; it must be extremely important to us because we are willing (more than just willing) to pay the price of living in an unreal world in order to have it! We are more than willing to live out the course of our lives in a dismally unreal world just so long as we can have all that positive knowledge, all that purposeful doing…