The Prison World vs. the World Outside
Our mind, if we were to make a comparison with the world, is a perpetual prisoner, like a person born in jail who lives in jail, behind bars, with no chance to get out to see the outside world — someone who has grown from childhood to adulthood entirely in a prison cell and so doesn”t know what there is outside; someone who has seen pleasure and pain only in the prison and has never been out to see what kind of pleasure, comfort, and freedom they have in the outside world. We have no way of knowing what kind of happiness and enjoyment they have there in the outside world, how they come and go, how they live, because we are kept in prison from the day we are born until the day we die. This is a comparison, an analogy.
We have only the pleasure and pain that the prison has to offer, with nothing special, nothing obtained from the outside world so that when it enters the prison we could see that, ”This is something different from the prison world — this is from the outside world, outside the prison;” so that we could make comparisons and know that, ”This is like this, that is like that; this is better than that, that is better than this.” There is nothing but the affairs of the prison. However much the pleasure and pain, however great the deprivations, the difficulties, the oppression and coercion, that”s simply the way it”s been all along from the very beginning — and so we don”t know where to look for a way out or how to free ourselves. We don”t even know where the outside world is, because we have seen only the inside world: the prison where we have always been locked away, oppressed, starved, beaten, tortured, deprived. Even our bedding, food, belongings — everything of every sort — is like that of a prisoner in jail. And yet people like this can still live this way because they have never seen enough of the outside world to be able to make comparisons as to which is better, which is more pleasant, in order to feel inclined to search for a way out to the outside world.
A mind controlled by the power of defilement and mental effluents is like this. It has been imprisoned by various kinds of defilement for aeons and aeons. For example, in our present lifetime, the defilements that hold sway over the hearts of living beings have been with us since the day of our birth. They have kept us in continual custody, never giving us any freedom within ourselves at all. For this reason, we have difficulty imagining what sort of pleasure there could be above and beyond the way things are, just like a person who was born and has always lived in a prison.
What sort of world is the world outside
Is it a good place to visit
A good place to live
The Dhamma proclaims it loud and clear, but hardly anyone is interested. Still, there are fortunately some places where some people are interested. In places where no one proclaims it, where no one speaks of what the outside world — a mind with Dhamma in charge — is like, no one knows what the teachings of the religion are like. No one knows what the happiness that comes from the Dhamma is like. Such people are so surrounded by darkness, so completely drowned in attachment, that not even a single limb shows above the surface, because there is no religion to pull them out. It”s as if the outside world didn”t exist. They have nothing but the prison, the defilements, holding the heart in custody. Born in this world, they have only the prison as their place to live and to die.
A mind that has never known what could give it greater pleasure, comfort, and freedom than it has at present, if we were to make a different comparison, is like a duck playing in a mud puddle under a shanty. It keeps playing there: splat, splat, splat, splat, splat. No matter how dirty or f…
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