The world isn’t for making us happy.

But …

This will sound dopey, but try it.

Think about your houseplant across the room. Or think about your car. Think about a thing in your space.

Got it?

Now make a little imaginative jump, the way children do, and place yourself in that thing, or as that thing, beholding you. Silly as it sounds, make – or rather let – yourself see things from there. Go one better, if you can, and let yourself see things solely from that identity, and not your own. Let your selfness go away. Notice the difference between thinking about something and thinking as something.

Now do it with a person you know. Funnily enough, this might be harder. Pick a person. Abandon the encyclopedia of facts you think you know about them. Let yourself be them. It’s an experiential thing, not a calculation or a simulation. Just let yourself just move into their space, as it were. Take your time with it, and you’ll notice, with a little bit of surprise, that your awareness of your own self will have evaporated a bit. You’ll have forgotten you for a moment. You won’t be there, as it were. If there’s an emotional change that comes with this, it’ll probably be a sort of calm, a patience, a kind of poise, a feeling of generosity and expansiveness. It’ll feel like great love. It will be peace.

This is an exercise, of course, to demonstrate that our identities, whatever we may think, are not the same as our thoughts. (Yes, really.) But it’s something else, too.

Try the same technique now with the world, if you can. Try it with the entirety of what you know as Reality. Let yourself move into the totality of whatever you believe is around you, huge and minute, concrete and abstract. Don’t think about these things. Try to be them, without thought.

It’s a process of eliding with everything that is, not trying to understand it, and not judging any of it. Again, this is an experiential thing. It won’t work if you think about it. The goal is simply to participate in the being of the created order.

Something funny emerges from this, if you’re able to do it (and with practice you can). You notice that you’re happy, at least momentarily. Sometimes you remain, if not exactly happy, somehow freed a little bit, for the rest of your day, from the heaviness you’re used to feeling – the thoughts, the calculations, the hedging, and the fearing.

This is evidence that it isn’t the world that makes us happy or unhappy.

And I’m going to cut to the chase here, and suggest that making us happy actually isn’t the purpose of the world. It wasn’t designed and given to us to do that.

What the world is for – since we clearly have the option of relating to it in ways that are freeingly absent of self-obsession – is to make us conscious. Or if it doesn’t ‘make’ us conscious, at least it invites us to consciousness. Or maybe it forces us at least to try. It puts us in situations where we have to consider life outside ourselves. We’re too miserable inside. Too much attention to the confines of our own selfhood is, as we’re forced to learn eventually, is tormenting. And it’s a false reality.

So here’s something practical to consider doing – or rather, not doing. If the experience of existing is more important than what we think about that existing, if we really are something transcendant beyond the world in other words, then it doesn’t make sense to be too transactional with that world.

Put simply, true peace passeth all understanding. Instinctively, we are prepared to know this.