If aliens came to our world from another planet, an enlightened planet, they would be shocked and saddened by how we live. Because we are completely wrong about everything we think is good.

Instead of trying to figure out where things really come from, instead of trying to find out why good things end, we simply and blindly work our lives away, to get things that we all know cannot and will not last. Houses, cars, positions, friends, families, death.

We spend billions of dollars on soaps and creams and cosmetics and clothes to drape over something that is already beginning to rot.

Our attempts to seek pleasure or rest are often only painful, and the few pleasures we do manage to obtain always end in pain.

These are ignorance, yes, but again at the bottom of them all is root ignorance: the fact that every single thing we ever see is not what we think it is. Things are not themselves—they are ourselves.

All living creatures, even ants, make this mistake about things. Ignorance at this first stage is a seed that lies within us, before we are even born.