Reality and Illusion

The ego mind paints its own picture onto reality and we then judge “good” or “bad” on the basis of this hallucination. Our ego mind cheats us by projecting its own hallucinated view of reality, in which we believe. – Lama Yeshe

The mind of an individual is a part of the cosmic universal mind. You must understand that your individual mind is part of the universal mind. The space in this room is an individual space, but it is also a part of a greater space. Because you have four walls around it, you call it your room space. Similarly, the individual mind is a concept and not a reality. – Swami Satyananda Saraswati

The idea that our reality is an illusion runs through many spiritual traditions and has cropped up again as people attempt to interpret quantum physics.  Absolute reality (and face it, what other kind of reality matters?) is not to be found in the circumstances that we seemingly find around us.  The sensory world albeit how indisputably real it seems is not it.  Instead it is the mind that constitutes our reality.  “It’s all in your mind?”  Actually, it is all in our mind. 

Our symbolic mind can be seen as a conceptual overlay of reality.  It is an attempt at describing, encoding and interpreting reality symbolically, whether linguistically, mathematically or otherwise.  This is a wonderful capacity but the problem is that we come to live in a world that is primarily conceptual.  We take the map to be the territory.  As one of my favorite writer-teachers, Robert Anton Wilson, said, “We all see only that which we are trained to see.”  We see our world through the eyes of our own experience based upon our cultural conditioning. 

Absolute reality is beyond concepts, beyond interpretation and more immediately present as the tip of your own nose.  True reality is not something that we need to seek but that which is already ever-present.  It is the unified field of consciousness underlying the illusory separateness of our experience.  Absolute reality is not involved in our space-time continuum.  However it is ever-present.  It is foremostly within us although it is also projected without.  It is immanent as well as transcendent.  Our primary problem is that we focus entirely on the manifest circumstances of our experience rather than resting in the reality of our unified being.