Living in the world in the original text actually does not mean all the bad things in the world, but the heart that judges the world.
One of the famous sayings of Huineng, the sixth ancestor: Bodhi has no trees, and the mirror is not Taiwan. There was nothing, so there was no dust.
This sentence can best explain its meaning. If there is no good and evil in one's mind, then there is no need to argue about good and evil. If there is no good in the world, there is no evil.
Therefore, the sentence "If you are a true Taoist, you have never seen the world" means that people who truly gain the Tao are often outside the Tao.
And the influence on society, this sentence is very meaningful to real monks, which is a state of mind. It is a negative attitude towards society itself. It is impossible and unreasonable to approach a person completely divorced from society. After all, you live in the world, how can you be outside the world?
As for the part taken out of context, it is not worth discussing at all. There are people in the world who love to oppose for the sake of opposing. The misinterpretation of the sentence "I have never seen the world" is simply ridiculous.
I have never seen this sentence in the world on the premise that one should also give up his own good and evil. How can a person who can't do anything wrong destroy the world and do lawless things?
As for the selfish part, the sixth ancestor Huineng advocated that family members should have no self. Since he has no ego, how can he be selfish? Only those who overestimate themselves and have a strong sense of self will have this selfish psychological state, and these people will never choose the road of becoming a monk, which means that it has nothing to do with the Buddhist precepts of the sixth ancestor Huineng.
Simply put, as a stone, it will never understand the meaning of being a cloud. As a mortal who doesn't want to be born, he will never know the mood of the person who was born.