Preface

By Jiang Lan

Many years ago, I wanted to package this book as an "ancient lost manuscript" that I had stumbled upon by accident. I did not believe people would take seriously a half-grown young man writing about "choice" and "cost." Even the phrase I coined, "Human choice brings misfortune, heavenly choice brings blessing," was designed to spread more easily, and the cost followed at once. My story with all of you began when I chose misfortune as blessing for the sake of circulation.

My father was a reader, and under his influence I grew up reading a great deal. By the age of fifteen I was already thinking about writing a book of my own. At the time I kept wondering why so many people were willing to study the Heart Sutra, the Diamond Sutra, and the Tao Te Ching, while only a very small number were willing to read Zhuangzi or the Nirvana Sutra. In the end I came to feel that whether a thought is easy to circulate is the core factor in whether the public will accept it. The Heart Sutra and the Diamond Sutra are short, easy to memorize, easy to copy out. The Tao Te Ching has lines such as "The way that can be spoken is not the constant way," phrases that are easy on the tongue, easy to read, easy to remember. As for Zhuangzi, even now there are passages in which I still cannot pronounce many of the characters. For the sake of circulation, I proposed the slogan "Human choice brings misfortune, heavenly choice brings blessing." Because it was catchy, it was also widely misunderstood. It even led directly to my sitting here now, typing at this computer and bringing Human Choice, Heavenly Choice into the world ahead of time. So the first thing I should do here is apologize to the people I caused to misunderstand.

Because of that, I will not present this book in the form of classical Chinese aphorisms. Nor am I in a hurry to make you see its value at once. Let us begin instead with the world as I subjectively understand it, and I invite you to step inside that world with me.

I subjectively believe that the world operates within laws, and that the universe is deterministic. The transition of electrons, the structure of crystals, the motion of planets, chemical reactions, human evolution: none of these are the result of choice. They are the necessary result of law. That is to say, from the point of origin of the universe, everything has already been one book. Time is only the order in which we turn the pages and read it. Time is only the ruler by which we measure the phenomenon of change. Human thought is the same. Neural response and genes are merely the manifestation of law.

Strictly speaking, in the material world, human beings do not possess free will either. The fact that I am writing this preface to Human Choice, Heavenly Choice here, and the fact that you are reading these difficult lines right now, are both predetermined at this very moment.

And yet after thinking hard about it, I came to believe that a human being must "pretend" to have the right to choose. Because if you truly believe that everything is already fixed, then why strive? Why renounce anything? Why choose at all? So we must live in a simple condition: knowing perfectly well that everything may already be decided, yet still acting in the world as one who chooses. We are born to die, and yet we do not give up on living.

Many people misunderstand "Human choice brings misfortune, heavenly choice brings blessing" as some kind of fate-reading. In fact, I do not believe the future can be predicted or interfered with. This touches on what I call the "breaking the painting" principle: no matter how much strength a figure inside a painting possesses, he cannot tear the painting open. In scientific terms, observation itself is already part of the variable.

This is the front side of my coin: the material world.

Now let us look at the reverse side: the inward world.

In my heart, no object truly exists in the world as such. It exists only as a projection inside the mind. To make this concrete: while you are reading Human Choice, Heavenly Choice, you probably know that I am still alive, you have some vague picture of what I look like, and you probably know I am supposed to livestream tonight. All of these things exist in your mind; they do not exist in that form in the world itself. Say I am killed by a car before the livestream. No one updates anything after that. In time everyone forgets me. But if at some later moment, in the midst of one of your own choices, you think of me, you might guess that I have withdrawn from the world, or grown disappointed with it. At that moment I am alive in your mind, until one day you see the news: "Famous shipbuilding blogger Lu Fei dies in car accident." In that instant I die. I die in your mind. Of course, all of it might equally be a story I staged myself, while I am really in Antarctica watching penguins. When one day you see a video of me skiing in Antarctica, you are delighted: I live again in your mind. You think the news was wrong. Then you notice in the lower right corner: "video possibly AI-generated." I die once more inside your mind. Perhaps I added the AI label myself in Photoshop.

The inward world is vast. The material world and the world of mind are like the two faces of a coin: they coexist, but they cannot be observed at the same time. Yes, this part is difficult. But it has to be said, because the later chapters will deal with its details. As a preface, I only want to make clear what kind of book this is.

Out of these two subjective worlds arises a subjective idea, and that idea is also the aim of "Human choice brings misfortune, heavenly choice brings blessing": in life, we cannot determine the result, but we can choose what cost we are willing to bear. We cannot avoid pain, nor can we guarantee that we will get what we want. Life is not about getting or losing this or that. What we truly need to build is a structure that can remain stable over the long term. You may think of it as my own lifelong pursuit of a good ending.

Person A makes a great deal of money, yet lives in anxiety, fear, and insomnia. He has gained much, but his structure is unstable. Person B earns an ordinary income, yet lives with clear order and stable relationships. He has gained less, but his structure is stable. It is a clumsy example, but what I mean is this: to me, a stable structure takes priority over everything else.

Over the years I have seen many lost and suffering people. Some were poor, some financially free. Some had read many books, some had done many things. Some were very beautiful, some very ugly. But they were all in pain. And the more I observed, the more certain I became that suffering is not the specialty of one particular type of person. It is something all people must face. All sentient beings suffer.

At the core, suffering falls into two broad kinds: not getting what one wants, and having already lost what one failed to cherish.

When I was sixteen, Wenjie and I stole money from our parents and ran off to Shenlongjia. Muyu Village was beautiful, and we walked beside a small stream. The water was clear, the stones looked special. Yet when I crouched down to look, I could see the water but not the stone. The current was swift. Water folded over the stone, and the surface kept rising, flashing, twisting. The water looked shallow. I reached down to pick up the stone from the riverbed, but halfway down I jerked my hand back. The water was truly cold. In that instant it felt as though thought itself had frozen.

The next day we went back to the stream. Wenjie saw that I was afraid of the cold, so he went to fetch the stone from the bottom for me. The moment I saw it in his hand, I realized it was not nearly as beautiful as I had imagined.

Most people seek blessing. Wherever there is gain, they move toward it. Wherever there is risk, they immediately step away. They look clever. But in my subjective world, the world never rewards anyone. The world only collects cost. Whatever choice you make, you pay for it. Some payments are immediate; some are settled many years later.

Many people believe there is a ledger of causality between misfortune and blessing. Endure a little now, and one day you will be repaid. Lose a little now, and fate will compensate you. But the world is not a bank. Between misfortune and blessing there is no account book you can go back and reconcile.

So later on I distilled many things into three words:

Human choice.

Misfortune.

Heavenly choice.

Human choice is the choice you make in the present. In the world of human choice, there are only the human and heaven: the human is yourself, and heaven is every variable other than yourself. Misfortune is not disaster; misfortune is cost. Heavenly choice is the outcome. You can decide what to choose, but the outcome never belongs to you alone.

People often ask: then where has blessing gone? Blessing is a stable structure. The main text will explain that.

Many people like to use a single word to explain all this: luck. That is because luck makes it far too easy for people to stop thinking and reconcile themselves too soon. To me, much of what is called luck is nothing more than the stacking up of choices you cannot see. The only thing you can decide is your own choice; everything else, all the choices made by things beyond you, belongs to heavenly choice. Heavenly choice cannot be predicted. Countless choices interweave and finally form a result. You cannot see every path, so you call it luck.

So in this book I will say, again and again, something very subjective: there is no luck in this world. There is only choice.

Of course, if you keep going deeper, a larger question appears. If everything in the universe belongs to law, and if human consciousness itself may only be one part of that law, then what exactly counts as a choice? I do not avoid this question. I am even willing to admit: perhaps we really are only figures inside a painting.

Craving is wanting to take the beautiful stone. Fear is recoiling from the cold. What is already lost is the stone's mysterious beauty. What cannot be obtained is the stone I wanted in my heart.

Thought began circling inside me at once. I asked Wenjie not to disturb me for the time being, and I began to think through the relations among these things, writing them into my journal. The journal became very long. It dealt with the relation between rivers and knowledge, the speed of thought and the efficiency of thinking, ways of observing craving and fear within oneself, excuses, self-reconciliation, and much more.

I compared craving and fear in the human heart to two stones in the riverbed, one white and one black. I compared excuses and self-reconciliation to the disordered surface flow produced by those stones. Craving makes one reach out. Fear makes one pull back. Wanting to obtain is craving. Fearing loss is fear. Many of the decisions in a human life are made between these two stones.

But the problem never lies in craving, nor in fear. The question is whether there is still some structure between the two within which choice remains possible. That is what I call heavenly balance. If craving and fear can still restrain one another, a person can remain steady. If one side completely crushes the other, the person is driven toward extremity, sinking into pathological depression and anxiety. Very few people are left with nothing but craving, or nothing but fear. Most people swing between the two.

So, in a subjective way, I came to divide the human condition into five simple states:

Lostness: heavenly balance collapses, and one keeps escalating while also retreating.

Seeking blessing: heavenly balance wavers, pursuing advantage and avoiding harm.

Seeing the opening: heavenly balance becomes visible, and one clearly sees one's own choice, cost, and result.

Holding the balance: heavenly balance comes under control; one understands that life cannot avoid cost, and willingly bears misfortune by choice.

Mutual forgetting: heavenly balance dissolves; there is no craving and no fear, so the two are forgotten together, and heavenly balance is no longer needed.

But no one remains in one state forever. The heart is like water; it moves with circumstance. A person may be lucid today and foolish tomorrow. One moment of clarity may be dragged away by desire the next second. These states are only momentary conditions.

I know that right now some of you are already asking which state you yourselves are in, and which state Jiang Lan is in. The main text will deal with that later. For now I can only say that I neither dare nor am qualified to claim entry into mutual forgetting. At present, I even doubt whether anyone can truly arrive there. This is connected to something I have long said about using the biggest hook and the biggest bait to catch the biggest fish.

I must say another word about "breaking the painting." You cannot jump out of destiny, but you still must answer for your own life. Many people spend their lives trying to avoid pain, but they do not know that pain cannot be avoided. Joy and pain are always split in half. The only thing you can truly decide is the way you are willing to bear them.

So this book is not meant to teach success. It is not meant to teach people how to obtain "blessing." It is not written so that you may gain something, nor so that you may avoid losing something. It is written to establish a structure: a structure that does not collapse easily, even while the world keeps changing.

Human beings cannot pursue eternity, because eternity itself is an illusion. What is truly stable is never what does not change. It is what can bear change.

If this book has any value at all, I hope it is not that it helps you defeat anyone. I hope that the next time you stand by that river again, you may see a little more clearly than before: why you reached out, why you stepped back, why you chose, and why you bore what you bore.

If one day you can finally see the two stones at the bottom of your own river, then this book will not have been written in vain.

All right, dear reader. Let the collision of our inner worlds begin here.

Jiang Lan

The complete text of this book will be published online. It mainly explains the author's own cosmology, worldview, and sense of value.

This part mainly describes how, by learning the signs of craving and cost within people's choices, one may establish what I call heavenly insight, and with a certain probability judge and predict the inner world of a person or a situation, though the cost is immense. By using heavenly insight to observe heavenly balance, you will discover that heavenly balance repeats itself in a cyclical movement of opposition, division, and reunification. The true chance to alter environment and structure appears precisely at the key nodes where heavenly balance is either unifying or splitting apart. At such moments the feedback efficiency of human choice and heavenly choice becomes exceptionally high. When the structure of heavenly balance is stable, no one can alter it by will alone, and no matter how hard one tries, the efficiency of feedback remains low. But remember this well: the rise in feedback efficiency, and the opportunities we hope for that come with it, can only be used to build more stable structures and regulate heavenly balance. Otherwise one will pay an enormous cost in the result.

This part mainly explores the search for a ledger of cause and effect, the thought of observer-deception, the possibility of moving toward mutual forgetting, and certain peering assumptions within an inward, mind-centered framework.