The point I’m making here is that the way to begin to understand this stuff is to focus on questioning the illusions you have about such things as life, death, birth, beginning, end, process, etc. Unless you are an enlightened buddha, anything you believe or opine about the subject of life/death/rebirth is wrong. Period. It’s better to focus on the illusions in front of us. When you truly start to question your illusory concepts, you will be surprised to discover just how much you had been credulously assuming without even realizing it.
We are the products of our perceptions of the world. Thus, we cannot say that the world “exists only in our minds.” The world exists, it is what it is. We do not determine what the world is, what things are, only how they are to us. It is we who are determined by our perceptions of the world, of the way things are. Things are the way they are—it is up to us to see them clearly, as they really are.
Most people do not see clearly, and thus are unable to see things as they really are, only as they currently appear to them and their fickle and egocentric points of view. Their vision is distorted by illusions—or, rather, reality is seen by them not as it really is, but as illusion; reality is distorted in their vision and thus they see an illusion, a distortion of reality. It is not necessarily as if an illusion is covering up or standing in the way of the reality behind. The illusion and its reality are one and the same. To see it clearly is to have the illusion dissolve, or fade, in our minds, where the illusion exists/resides, into the reality, for the illusion was but the reality seen in a distorted way. Think about an example like a mirage. Whether or not there is water has nothing to do with whether or not you see what you think is water.
Thus, it is possible that we actually do live in a world of “realities,” but we do not see them clearly, we do not understand things clearly, we experience and see them distorted. So, this way that we see things (in a distorted way)—this, then, is what an illusion is.
Our pedestrian understanding of an illusion implies that it does not exist, and this is not the case. An illusion does exist. There are no illusions out there in the world, independent of a subject to (mis)perceive them, but that doesn’t mean that when it comes to ourselves they don’t exist. An illusion exists as an illusion, in our minds. It exists, and it is not whether or not it exists that is important, but rather how it exists, how we experience (or “see”) it. The illusion is but (our) distorted (understanding of) reality. A reality is misperceived and seen not as it is, but distorted. How is it distorted? Through the prism of the ego-self and its army of illusions (beliefs, assumptions, certainties, systems of rationality).
So, this is what I mean when I say we see illusions. We are seeing the thing itself, but not as it is, not undistorted by our perceptions of it. Thus, we do not see reality, we see illusions of reality. Reality is thus only revealed when the illusion is broken, when the spell is broken, so to speak.
Thus, it is in this way that I say that people, in fact, live not in reality, but in a world of illusions. And since their illusory worlds are always going to be different than anyone else’s, it makes clear communication and mutual understanding difficult to varying degrees, which vary according to the degree of congruity between their systematic visions of the world. The disturbing possibility that arises out of this is that is we can never really communicate clearly, or really understand each other; that it is—ultimately, no matter how close we get, or think we get—impossible. But, remember that it is our illusions which cause us to be the way we are and communicate the way we communicate. We need not be controlled and determined by these illusions. It is to a choice of ours to remain so.
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From my personal notes, 11/15/99.
