We can evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality

To escape from the world means that one's mind is not concerned with the opinions of the world.

How fleeting is this world yet it survives. It is ourselves that fade from it and our ephemeral lives.

"In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion."

[The Minotaur]

I believe that we face incredible obstacles in our attempts to see the world. Everything in our nature tries to deny the world around us; to refabricate it in our own image; to reinvent it for our own benefit. And so, it becomes something of a challenge, a task, to recover (or at least attempt to recover) the real world despite all the impediments to that end.

Nature is wont to hide herself.

One of the main discoveries of meditation is seeing how we continually run away from the present moment, how we avoid being here just as we are.

We suffer: the external world begins to exist . . . ; we suffer to excess: it vanishes. Pain instigates the world only to unmask its unreality.

We are living in a world which seems to be founded on the refusal to reflect.

We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves.

The world steals us from ourselves and solitude restores us. The world is composed of a herd, which are ever flying from themselves. (p. 136).

And the idea of ourselves is our escape from the fact of what we really are.

Have we wanted, in order to render our separation from the world as perfect as the sanctity of our state demands, that the world have aversion to us, as we have aversion to the world, following the example the apostle has given us, “The world is crucified to me, and I to the world” (Gal. 6:14).

In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself.