The primary illusion, the illusion behind all other illusions, is that we see everything from the point of view of the self. This might not seem like such a big deal, but it is. It’s a very big deal – it’s such a big deal that we can’t actually see how big it is.
This is something like Adolf Hitler’s famous ‘Big Lie Principle’ which states that a big lie has more credibility than a small one. When an illusion is big enough it becomes impossible to question it. The illusion has swollen up so much that it has become everything and so – in pragmatic terms – it is no longer just an illusion but the world itself.
So when the illusion becomes the world, and we have become incapable of perceiving anything that is not the illusion, where does this leave us? What type of a world is this exactly, we might ask? Although, on reflection, this is a question that we won’t ever ask just so long as we accept the illusion as the world. We won’t ask any big questions then – we will only ask those questions that the illusion allows us to ask! We will only be able to ask illusory questions, in other words…
How extraordinary is this, therefore? We ask all these questions during our life but none of them are real. They only make sense within the context of the illusion that we accept as the world, which means that they don’t actually make any sense at all. They are completely senseless questions and yet very often we agonize over them and punish ourselves unrelentingly when we think we have made the wrong decision, when we think we have come up with the wrong answer rather than the right one. We lie awake at night troubled by our inability to come up with the right answers to these unreal questions, when we could be getting a good night’s sleep instead!
We place great stock in the decisions that we make, or feel we have to make, and yet these are decisions that only make sense within the context of the illusion that we have accepted as the world. These are deliberations that are made within a dream and the thing about deliberations or decisions that are made within a dream is of course that all the effort we put into them is wasted effort. All the effort we put into them is wasted effort because all outcomes in a dream are always going to be equal in the end. All outcomes in a dream are simply ‘the dream’ and the dream can never be more than the dream, no matter how much deliberation we put into it. Everything we do in the dream is still ‘just the dream’, no matter how efficiently organized we are, no matter how much effort and attention to detail we put into it…
People say ‘don’t sweat the small stuff’ but we might be better off saying ‘don’t sweat the dream stuff’. Don’t get all het up in the dream; don’t let it put you in a tizzy. Don’t beat yourself up for doing one thing in the dream when you think that you should have done another! This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t give a damn about anything though, or that we don’t have any responsibility for anything we do. It doesn’t mean that we might as well all run amok because ‘nothing matters’. The world isn’t our imagination after all – it’s just our particular personal picture of the world that is an illusion, not the world itself…
The ‘illusion’ comes about, as we have said, because of the way in which we always see everything from the point of view of the self. This utterly distorts everything. It’s not just that seeing everything from the point of view of the self utterly distorts everything but rather that it creates a completely false picture of reality, as we have already said. It creates a completely false picture of reality because we see everything in terms of what it means it means to us personally, which is without any question at all an utterly absurd way of seeing the world!
Seeing the world like this is of course totally crazy because – as we all know perfectly well – the world doesn’t have anything to do with us at all. The world is the world not an extension of our ego. The world is what it is in itself, quite independent of our views. It is what it is of itself – it has its own ‘self-nature’, and we don’t come into this at all. And yet – even though we know this perfectly well and no one is going to claim otherwise (apart perhaps from a few die-hard solipsists) – the way we see the world in practice is via our habitual narrow modes of perception, via our ‘private personal and data-processing biases’.
So what happens when we see everything solely in terms of our habitual narrow modes of perception, exclusively via our private personal prejudices and data-processing biases is that we create an illusion. We create something that isn’t there. What’s more, we create something that isn’t there and we spend our whole lives acting as if it were there! This ‘thing that isn’t there’ is all that matters to us; nothing else can matter to us because we don’t acknowledge anything else as having any existence. Everything – as far as we’re concerned – hangs upon this thing that isn’t there. Are we getting somewhere in this world or not, we wonder? What’s our standing in this world, what is our status? Are we going to be able to make it in this world or not? Are we succeeding or failing? These are the questions that are constantly concerning us – the questions that are slowly but surely burying us…
Rashid Dossett
Well said Nick. The independent existence of other people out there – and their social structures – is something that our brains will recognise instantly. There is no rocked science needed to figure this out. What worldly people, however, do is to fill up an emotional thirst for security – that is why by default worldly people look at the external world in terms of ‘themselves’ (how they can use or exploit the environment to avoid discomfort/danger and keep comfort). This is what creates the illusion of the ‘self’ and all the drama that comes along with it.
The ‘self’ works in constructed situations – and when these situations work out (as society) we get self-validated for the ‘self’ we identify with. This validation, however, needs to be maintained by the inn-group (often friends and relatives or those on ‘our side’) at the expense of everyone else (the out-group, strangers). This is the formula that makes society and every cult (big or small) work. It is also the formula that, besides providing short-term ‘security’ also trapped us mentally and emotionally in this mind-maze that we can’t see through anymore. We then want the ‘final solution’ to all the insecurity we face – not realising that the whole deal was insecure to begin with.