There
is a strain of thought, a strain of thought like a lethal bacteria, one that
has permeated all the great philosophical and religious traditions since the
advent of writing, and the composition of dogma; this pathogen suggests that
everything we think of as real and true, that life and selfhood are merely
illusions, that everything we experience is Maya,
that we are steeped in the illusion of the floating world.
This
is false. The world is real, and we in it. It is only our perception that is at
times misconstrued.
While
it is wise to consider with care the notion that there are some things (most
things) that we can never know with certainty, that there are questions we
cannot answer fully, that there are circumstances whose antecedents we cannot
completely fathom, and that there are choices we make whose consequences we
cannot accurately project or predict, nevertheless, the world we live in is real,
our experience of it is real, we are, each of us alive, self-purposive agents
operating in the eternal and infinite field of being.
This
is true, we may be acting in the dark, without the full knowledge of who and
what we are, but the dark is real.
Why
would we want to believe otherwise?
The
claim that all things are illusion is fundamentally flawed, it is beyond the
pale of logic. It may be a comforting way of setting aside anguish, pain and
disappointment, or even a convenient was to justify our transgressions, but the
claim is false.
If
the real nature of all things is in fact, that all things are illusions, the
nature of things not according to our perception of them, but on the level of
their ontology, of their being, if they are illusory in a manner that is
independent of how any person perceives it, then we would not be talking about
illusion at all, which is un-reality masking itself as reality, we would be
talking about reality itself, not its masking, but its real nature, the
fundamental essence of what is.
This
would be the true state of our affairs and therefore not illusory at all, but
actual.
It
would serve no purpose to speak about the conditions of our existence in any
other terms, than to speak of them as real.
At
the foundation of our experience there is always a true state of affairs. The
true state of affairs includes the experiential set of things, together with
their inherent values, which include the antecedents by which the true state of
affairs obtained the condition of reality, things we can never fully know, and
because of that they are conditions which may easily be labelled as illusory
but are really just manifestations of the unknown.
The
experiential set includes the phenomenon of mystery, it includes the reality that
things can appear to our thoughts and senses in ways that are illusory, that a
thing, or a set of things may appear to be-other than they are.
When
we approach our experience with the assumption that there is no truth in it
whatsoever, then we are living in a place of perpetual uncertainty.
In
such a system of beliefs, a person could never come to know their own-self,
because the self does not exist, it is deemed an illusion, an unreliable
referent.
The
consequence of this is grave.
Without
knowledge of self we have no means of knowing any other and all of our
relationships become void of meaning.
In
such a system of beliefs we stumble through life, blind and unfeeling, with the
value of our experience subject only to the capricious appetites of the human
will, when everything is seen as an illusion, then nothing matters, because
nothing is real.
By
cleaving to the truth that we ourselves are real, occupy space in a real world,
are living in a real time, by cleaving to this we remain grounded, and the
mystery of life begins to unfold through our experience of it.
