Of course, this was not unique to humans.
For example, lions and tigers would not attack other animals after they had eaten their fill, but humans were not merely like that.
After humans had eaten their fill, although they created room for other living beings to survive, they would still seize resources unsatisfiedly, ensuring their continued prosperity afterward.
Although everyone knew the saying, "You brought nothing into life and take nothing with you in death," no matter how many resources one fought over, they only met such simple needs as food, clothing, shelter, and transportation.
Yet because of the complexity of human thought, desire kept expanding. With ten thousand, one wanted a hundred thousand; with a hundred thousand, one wanted a million.
Seeing others drive cars worth hundreds of thousands made one deeply envious. Once one owned such a car, one began envying those who owned million-dollar cars.
That was the competitive mindset. I could not say it was bad, because human ambition and the desire to compare oneself with others often went hand in hand.
Because one wanted something, one worked hard toward that goal.
I said in the previous chapter that humans were creatures who lived within their own cognition. Sometimes your efforts were called ambition; sometimes they were called a competitive mindset.
This was not determined by the individual's own judgment, but by how outsiders judged what you did.
If you had one hundred thousand yuan and bought a twenty-thousand-yuan car, others would say that was perfectly normal. If you had a million and bought a two-hundred-thousand-yuan car, they would also say that was perfectly normal.
But if you only had one hundred thousand and bought a one-hundred-thousand-yuan car, they would say you were putting on airs.
If you believed that sort of talk, then you would become the person they claimed you were in their eyes.
I felt that being able to take this one journey through the world as a human was a fortunate thing. But if you constantly lived according to what others thought you should be, rather than living for yourself, then you had truly come here for nothing.
Many people lived their entire lives in a muddle. They did not know what they should do or how they ought to live. They gave for their families, friends, and so on, only to receive in the end the judgment that they were incapable and good for nothing.
Say they were incapable, yet they supported an entire family through physical labor. Say they were capable, yet they had not created any particularly good living conditions.
Speaking objectively, whose fault was that? In truth, it was no one's fault. Every person's life had its destined course.
The environment you were in, the things you experienced, and the cognition you acquired all determined what kind of outcome you would have afterward.
People said that only by enduring the bitterest hardships could one rise above others. Everyone believed that suffering would bring great happiness or a prosperous life.
Yet they did not know that the hardship in question was not the hardship of physical labor, but rather the hardship of learning.
Only by studying tirelessly and improving one's cognition could one change certain things.
There was a saying that put it very well: people could not earn wealth beyond their cognition. Conversely, only by continually raising their cognition could people possibly create wealth they had never possessed before at some point.
That saying was, "Wealth is compensation for cognition." But that applied only to ordinary people, not to those born into good family circumstances, because their fathers' generation possessed cognition above that of ordinary people. Thus, they had already stood in Rome from the moment they were born.
In truth, I did not think that was necessarily a good thing, nor did I think it was a bad thing.
What was gained must be lost; what was lost must be gained.
Perhaps we experienced far more hardship than they did, and perhaps it was difficult for us to rise and change our lives. But once enlightenment came, we could see the various laws of the human world more clearly.
Those born in Rome, on the other hand, had to go through a long stretch of life before they could understand such laws.
For example, yesterday I leafed through a book by kung fu superstar Mr. Li called Transcending Life and Death. I only read a short passage, but I discovered that what he had understood only after decades of cultivation was the relationship between the heart and heart-nature.
Yet I had needed less than two short years.
You would say Mr. Li had lived an impressive enough life, right? But in cultivation, he was instead painfully slow.
In his book, I even saw matters of worldly social dealings. For instance, when he went to some place, people saw that his family was rather devoted to cultivation or something of the sort, and gave him and his family separate instruction.
But he had not considered that if he did not possess such immense fame and wealth, then no matter how devout ordinary people were, even if they were more devout than him, they still would not receive such special treatment.
It was precisely because of this that I did not continue reading that book. From the perspective of my own cognition, Mr. Li was merely borrowing Buddhist cognition to break worldly cognition. Put simply, he was using appearances to break appearances, yet still remained within appearances and had not leaped free.
If he truly understood the relationship between the heart and heart-nature, perhaps he would not need a Dharma master to give him private supplementary instruction.
The phrase "Seek inward; you are complete from the beginning" could entirely explain everything.
Before the gates of hell, monks and Daoists were many. The reason was that cultivating appearances through appearances could not escape the suffering of reincarnation; it merely bought a momentary release.
Because one dwelled in cause and dwelled in effect. Your desire for liberation was a cause; learning from a master in order to attain liberation was an effect. Yet these two were simultaneously causes and effects of other things.
But within these interlocking causes and effects, that itself was a form of reincarnation.
So he was still turning within reincarnation. In terms of my cognition, he was one step short, but that one step was harder than climbing to heaven.
He needed to shatter all his previous cognition, even the cognition he had learned from Buddhist studies, because things instilled into him were not innate, but acquired. To achieve attainment, one had to discard acquired things and wield innate power.
In truth, the great cultivators I had come to understand could leave this world at any time, or lengthen the time they remained in it.
Because everything in this world was an appearance. After the soul-consciousness, or the Primordial Spirit, continually rose, it could selectively return to the source of consciousness.
That was what people called universal consciousness, or the collective unconscious, or perhaps the Heavenly Court and the Land of Ultimate Bliss, or other worlds and higher-dimensional universes.
But these things still remained within human cognition.
Speaking from my own experience, when I was in my teens, there was a period when I had lucid dreams every day. Lucid dreaming was also called clear dreaming, or dream control.
It meant knowing you were dreaming while in a dream, then being able to freely control the dreamscape and do whatever you wished, capable of anything, within that dream.
Many cultivators also entered this state while meditating. They could merely alter a few changes within the realm, yet considered themselves extremely powerful.
If you said you could alter things freely and do anything, they would forcefully explain that meditation was different from your dream control.
What fucking bullshit about it being different. I could even hear changes in the surrounding environment and choose to wake up at any time, or not wake up. I could also block out all manner of bodily conditions or shut off my perception of my surroundings.
It was the same kind of realm. Scientifically speaking, in a state of absolute relaxation, consciousness rested while the subconscious acted instinctively. What cultivators practiced was secretly merging consciousness into the subconscious so it could operate while the subconscious was unaware.
This was also called Primordial Spirit detachment! In other words, consciousness was what immortality cultivation called spiritual sense, while the subconscious was the Primordial Spirit. Merging consciousness into the subconscious through cultivation and entering other dreamlike realms was called Primordial Spirit detachment.
And in everyday life, through constant self-cultivation, allowing self-consciousness and the subconscious to be used together was in fact cultivating innate power.
The power of the subconscious was innate power!