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 Post subject: illusions
PostPosted: Fri Nov 21, 2003 5:45 am 
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I just read an old comic book, Solar, for the first time. A co-worker loaned it to me. The title character gains extraordinary powers (through a nuclear-type accident). He becomes intimately familiar with the true nature of reality, spacetime, matter, energy, all that. Here's a brief conversation that he has with a woman when he transforms her so that she can understand.Quote:        “Where are we?”
        “Location is a null concept here. You might say we’re just outside everything. From here you can see that everything is energy. Spacetime is energy, organized into patterns. See the weave?
        “Yes, but… Is this real? I mean…”
        “There is a much closer relationship between imagination and the nature of reality…than we imagine.”
        “We imagine the world and it is?”
        “No. We fail to imagine and we are punished with reality. We fail to imagine and so there is matter, with edges and hardness, length, breadth and depth. We fail to grasp our oneness with spacetime, which is matter, which is us. And so, the world is imposed upon us. The organization of energy that constitutes our minds is the part that’s real. The corporeal part is the waste product of insufficient thought—our lack of understanding, congealed around us.”
        “We…are energy?”
        “All is energy. We give meaning to it… Or fail to. Science fools around way too much with the crusty surfaces and crisp little bits. This is the essence. Anything can be done. It’s all a matter of moving energy. It’ll come if you call it… Do you follow me? Pierce? Pierce! Be careful!”
        “Ugly. Ugly. Ugly.” (She starts to sort of shrivel up)
        “There’s nothing here to protect you from your thoughts. This is no place for low self-esteem…”
        “Whore. Whore. Horrible. Murderer.”
        “You’ve really lost it. I’d better get you back. Don’t worry. Everything will be fine. See? You’re better already. You’ll be good as new once I get you back to where there are limits.”
So there's one opinion of the illusory nature of the world we know. Here's a couple quotes from Eknath Easwaran. He has translations of the Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita. These are from the introductions.Quote:What does it mean to say that nothing is separate and God alone is real? Certainly not that the everyday world is an illusion. The illusion is simply that we appear separate; the underlying reality is that all of life is one.Quote:Later philosophers explained maya in surprisingly contemporary terms. The mind, they said, observes the so-called outside world and sees its own structure. It reports that the world consists of a multiplicity of separate objects in a framework of time, space, and causality because these are the conditions of perception. In a word, the mind looks at unity and sees diversity; it looks at what is timeless and reports transience. And in fact the percepts of its experience are diverse and transient; on this level of experience, separateness is real. Our mistake is in taking this for ultimate reality, like the dreamer thinking that nothing is real except his dream.

Nowhere has this "mysterious Eastern notion" been formulated more succinctly than in the epigram of Ruysbroeck: "We behold what we are, and we are what we behold." When we look at unity through the instruments of the mind, we see diversity; when the mind is transcended, we enter a higher mode of knowing - turiya, the fourth state of consciousness - in which duality disappears. This does not mean, however, that the phenomenal world is an illusion or unreal. The illusion is the sense of separateness.
And, of course, there's Richard Bach's Illusions. Great book. (Very short & easy to read too. ) ____________
Highdrake's mastery of spells and sorcery was not much greater than his pupil's, but he had clear in his mind the idea of something very much greater, the wholeness of knowledge. And that made him a mage.<i></i>


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