The way we automatically see things (the only way we ever possibly can see things when we believe – without paying attention to the fact we do – that the Designed World or MCVR is the only world there is) is that when our ‘coping strategies’ (whatever they might happen to be) let us down then all is lost and there is no hope for us. This is the ultimate disaster, in other words. Loss of control is the ultimate ‘bad outcome’.

But if it isn’t true that the Designed World is ‘the only world there is’ – if it is actually the case that the world that we know and implicitly believe to be ‘the final reality’ is only ‘a runaway construct that has consumed us’ – then to have the Positive Reality become ‘uninhabitable’ for us gives us a chance to see beyond it, as we argued in Part 2. We will then be in a position to gain the precious awareness that the type of life which relies on the Designed World acting as a sort of ‘life-support machine’ for us is ‘a life not worth living’. The type of ‘life’ that the machine gives us is a life not worth living – it is Plato’s ‘unexamined life’, it is ‘the generic life that we have passively accepted and unreflectively bought into’.  Or as we could also say, the unconscious life is a life worth not worth living – it’s not worth living because there is no authenticity in it, and if there is no authenticity in it (i.e. if we ourselves are not in it) then what on earth is the point? The type of life the Designed World gives us is a ‘designed’ or ‘generic’ one, and as such it isn’t really any sort of a life at all, but only a ‘very poor substitute’, just like cheap industrially-manufactured margarine is a ‘poor substitute’ for butter.

When the Designed World becomes ‘uninhabitable’ for us due to there being too much pain or stress in it (i.e. when the Positive Mind-Created Reality ‘turns on us’ or ‘lets us down’) then this is the universe doing us a favour! It’s not as if we are going to die when the life-support machine fails – we’re just going to find ourselves in a position where there’s nothing else for it but for us to learn to stand on our own two feet (i.e. learn to live life as who we are rather than continuing to live the Designed World’s sanitised version of life via the one-size-fits-all ‘generic analogue of who we are). Having said this, it is of course not an easy process that we’re looking at here – of all possible processes, this process of living authentically in the real world (rather than continuing to live inauthentically in the perfectly vacuous Positive Reality that is routinely generated for us by the DW) is without any doubt the most difficult thing there ever could be. A good analogy will be that of a person who has become addicted to drugs such as heroin or alcohol – the only ‘cure’ is to go cold turkey and cold turkey is the roughest of all possible roads. It isn’t just ‘rough’ because it’s so unrelentingly arduous, [+] it’s rough because our mind itself has been taken over by the addiction and will turn against us at every opportunity. The ‘operating system’ itself has become the enemy…

The Designed World is an addiction therefore. It makes itself indispensable for us – it makes it so that we can’t survive without it. Actually, to say that the Designed World makes ‘itself indispensable’, to say that it ‘makes it so that we can’t survive without it’ is very much understating the matter! The designed environment subsumes us and turns it into its own hapless obedient creatures, creatures that are totally dependent upon something that only it can provide. It provides us with our very reality (albeit a reality that is artificial rather than real), and so how are we supposed to get by without this? Society – we might say – consumes the individuals that make it up and causes them to be dependent upon a drug called ‘acceptance’ or ‘approval’ (which Anthony De Mello likens to heroin) but the Designed World makes us dependent, for our very existence, on something that only it can provide it with us with, and that ‘something’ is its own particular brand of ‘virtual reality’, of which we are a part. This goes beyond mere approval or acceptance therefore – the DW provides us with everything.

This is where we are caught: we need this particular brand of virtual reality as badly as we do, as desperately as we do, because that’s what we are constructing ourselves out of. This system’s own patented brand of substitute ‘margarine-type’ reality is the ‘plasticine’ that we are modelling ourselves with – take away the plasticine, take away the modelling clay, and there can be no more models. There can be no more modelling and there can be no more models. In the same way then, take away the ‘false version of reality’ that the DW provides us with and we no longer have any way of knowing ourselves to have any existence as who we imagine ourselves to be. Saying that we are addicted to the DW is therefore equivalent to saying that we are addicted to the fake type of security that the Mind-Created Positive World provides us with. This sense of ‘security’ – fake as it may be – is everything to us! This sense of security – misleading as it may be – is the Alpha and the Omega, the ‘be all and the end all’ to us. We cannot aim any higher than this; we cannot believe in any ‘greater good’ than this. We do not want to know any more than this. This exclusivity is where the false sense of security that we need so much comes from. The Designed World is – we might say – ‘a jealous god’ – it is a jealous god because it will not tolerate any other views of reality; if there were any other possible takes on reality then there would of course be no security in it and this would mean that it would no longer be able to perform the function that we want it to. For this reason the ‘slaves’ of the Designed World are always zealous when it comes to defending it against heretics and heresy of any kind.

Although the ‘special product’ that the DW provides us with is both the ‘greatest good’ to us, it is also at the same time (as any psychotherapist could tell you) the greatest of all evils. This is our predicament in a nutshell – that we ‘cherish the very thing that hurts us the most’. But aren’t all addictions like this? Don’t we always cherish and nurture the very thing that is making our lives miserable? This becomes most obvious when an addiction ‘goes all the way’ and gets an extreme hold on us, but this doesn’t mean that we aren’t all involved in the very same perverse business of ‘denying ourselves’ as the more obvious addict is – we’re all addicted, we just don’t see it because our addiction has been normalised. It is been ‘sanctified by the authorities’. No matter where we look we see people doing the same sort of thing as us, living the very same type of life as we are, and so we don’t see any addiction. Not for a moment would we even begin to imagine that we are all ‘slaves to an addiction’, and yet this is exactly our situation. We are invisibly (or secretly) addicted; we are addicted to the consensus reality, addicted to the ‘obvious’ world that we have all agreed to believe in without admitting that we have agreed to anything.

This ‘invisible agreement’ is the same thing as the Big Secret that we started off talking about in Part 1. It’s a ‘big secret’ that we have all agreed to see the world in the same way – no one is ever going to make reference to this point, and even if they did no one would understand – it’s a tacit understanding that we don’t actually understand to be there. The thing is of course that if we were aware that we have all agreed to see the world in the way that we do see it (i.e. if we see that we have all colluded in creating the consensus reality) then this is the same thing as seeing that it isn’t the ‘real’ reality. When we see the rule as something that we have agreed to follow then it is no longer a rule. The arbitrary nature of our way of life is therefore something that we are not supposed to ever think about or dwell upon. The ‘official story’ is that the presented world, the world which we believe in, is the only world that’s on offer. Needless to say, no one ever says this because if they did then the ‘odour of rodent’ would immediately become overwhelmingly obvious. As we have already said – the Designed World has to be ‘the only possible world’ or else there would be no security in it. We wouldn’t be able to get the product that we’re addicted to then.

We’re dependent upon the Designed World for our very existence, and yet there is a glitch here – an irresolvable problem or flaw – because what we are being provided with isn’t existence at all; we’re dependent upon a ‘fake type of existence’; we addicted to what is actually a ‘false version of reality’. We need the Mind-Created Virtual Reality to construct ourselves out of because our dependence/addiction to that reality’ we have been rendered completely incapable of having any awareness of the ‘unconditioned reality’. This conditioned blindness causes our dependence, and it’s also the result of it. We are caught in a ‘causal loop’ therefore – we’re going around and around in a circle that we can’t see to be a circle because for us this ‘loop of logic’ is the whole world. For us – as we keep saying – there simply is nothing outside of the causal loop and that’s the only way it gets to function as an actual ‘world’.

The circle that we talking about here is the ‘Designed World’ – this is the self-negating, self-devouring loop of logic that improbably turns into ‘The Whole of What’s Possible’. The DW is a conundrum in that there is no way into it and no way out. We can’t ‘enter’ the Designed World because this world is not real and it’s not possible to enter an unreal world, for obvious reasons! But when we are in that world then we can’t ever get out; if we try to get out then we end up running into the ‘stopping paradox’ when we intend to stop intending (because we have to stop intending if we are to leave the Purposeful Realm) then we find that intending not to intend is also intending. The goal to have no goals is still a goal, the agenda to have no agenda is still an agenda, and so there is no way to purposefully exit the simulation. We can’t ‘purposefully exit the simulation’ because purposefulness is what creates the simulation…



So we can’t enter the DW (because there’s no such place) and yet we can’t leave it either, which sounds of course like a rather contradictory thing to say! How can it be the case that we can neither enter nor leave the simulation? The resolution to this self-contradiction – as we have said before – is that we don’t enter into the DW. No one enters the simulation; that simply can’t happen! As odd as it might seem to say so, one ever did enter the simulation and no one ever will. What does happen however is that ‘the simulation of us’ enters the Designed World (or rather exists ready-made in the DW) and we completely believe ourselves to be that simulation. We believe ourselves to be the simulation of ourselves as a result of a catastrophic loss of consciousness, or ‘Fall’.

Once we believe that we are the simulation then this – of course – means that we can’t ever leave the DW. That’s just not going to happen. How can the simulated version of us ever leave the simulation? We can hope that we can leave of course; we do hope that we can leave but there was never any chance of such an escape. Once we ‘check-in’ we cannot check out – the picture cannot walk off the TV screen. The pattern cannot leave the cloth into which it is woven. This might seem to be a grave limitation as regards ‘life in the Designed World’ (clearly it is a fairly grave limitation) but at the same time it constitutes the ‘engine’ which keeps the all the wheels turning in the mechanism, and keeps the whole thing going. Within the simulation there exists the possibility of ‘false escaping’, which is when we ‘unconsciously imagine’ that we’re going to be able to leave the simulation and get somewhere with more possibilities in it. We don’t articulate this consciously because we don’t know that the simulation is the simulation, but the ‘hope’ is there all the same and certain things that we do (or try to do) carry this hope with them, even though we don’t recognize the true nature of our motivation to engage in these things. As a general rule of thumb, we can say that there are two possible types of ‘goal’ that we can have – one is a pragmatic (or ‘honest’) goal, which is where the goal in question is exactly what we say it is and nothing else, and the other type of goal is the ‘loaded goal’ which will still have a perfectly practical or pragmatic aspect to it, but which will at the same time signify – on an unconscious level – the highly attractive possibility of ‘escaping from the simulation’.

We can go further than this and say that whenever we get excited or euphoric about the prospect of achieving some goal or other, then this is because we are engaged in ‘pseudo-solution’ – we’re trying to solve some problem that we won’t let ourselves know about whilst keeping up the ‘cover story’ that there is some everyday, perfectly pragmatic reason for what we are doing. ‘Escaping from the simulation’ is not a pragmatic kind of a goal because – as we have just pointed out – it is completely and utterly impossible! We can therefore bring in the notion of ‘false escaping’ and say the motivation that keeps us tied into life in the simulation, or life in the Designed World, is this motivation that we don’t know about or recognize which has to do with our fervent but entirely unacknowledged desire to escape from the restricted mode of being which is the simulation. The ‘key’ to escaping from the simulation thus appears to be contained within the simulation, which is to say – the routines and protocols that will help us to ‘escape’ from the system (even though it is not expressed like this) are part and parcel of the system so that if we want to escape (and we absolutely do, even if we don’t know that we do) then we have to buy into the simulation all the more. We have to buy into the simulation in order to escape from it therefore, only this won’t ever work…