I think I’ve finally got this. When I did it was so obvious that I hesitate to blog about it! But then I thought if I didn’t get it before, others haven’t yet either.
So often I’ve heard, seen or read about this ‘wise’ men who answer questions, “No, no illusion, you are living in an illusion” or “This is concept, not reality” and not got what they were driving at.
So in a nutshell: Reality is the world as it is, Illusion is all we place on it in terms of interpretation and labels. The path to self awareness suggests we understand the two clearly before we act.
On a simple level this is fairly easy to grasp. A person who cuts you up on the road is neither a good person or a bad person. They are neither selfish or unselfish. How so?
Because you as the person who was cut up feel that he is a bad and selfish driver. He, and perhaps his passenger, thinks he is a good driver for getting somewhere faster and what he did was not so bad as to make him feel he is selfish.
The reality is that you were cut up and that is all. The illusion is all that we interpret from that and the labels that we then assign to it and the people involved.
Let’s take a more difficult example: Nazi Germany. Nazi German was. It was neither good nor bad. It cannot be one or the other because some people viewed it as good and some people still view it as good although most people view it as bad. But the simple fact that there are differing views mean that we as humans interpret it. The interpretation is that it was good or it was bad – this is the illusion part. The reality is simply that it was.
Initially that sounds strong and it sounds like an excuse to be passive about these sorts of events but it is neither. Recognizing what something is and the illusions that surround it makes a far better and more effective foundation for resolving it.
Consider this. Over 26,000 people die on the roads of Europe every year. Since the year 2000 well over half a million have died this way while more than 2 million have been permanently disabled. Most have the illusion that this is bad but not so bad that car travel should be banned.
If a government killed half a million of its own citizens this would be interpreted as so bad that there would be very vocal demands for regime change.
In both cases over half a million people have lost their lives but how we interpret those deaths is completely different even though in both instances many of the victims were totally innocent.
These interpretations are our illusions, the deaths are reality.
So should an enlightened person who can step out of illusion be passive. Not necessarily. In fact understanding the difference between the two can actually help.
What we actually aim to do most of the time is to try and persuade people that our illusion is superior to theirs. Occasionally we go to war when verbal persuasion does not work as was the case with Nazi Germany.
But these illusions can also be destructive. The borders of countries are illusions but people will die to maintain them or remove them. Less dramatic, but potentially damaging, is the way we try to maintain them on an every day basis. Societies create the illusion that a state is made of people with specific characteristics which in turn breeds nationalism.
In order to stop parts of a country drifting off to join another country society sometimes has to generate the illusion that it is in some was superior to other nations.
I say sometimes – not always. An area might decide it wants to remain part of a country because of economic stability, access to justice, etc. But where these things fail and the grass looks greener on the other side nationalism is used, as can be seen in modern day Russia.
Here is a country that suffered huge humiliation at the end of the last century when numerous parts of its ‘Union’ wanted to, and did, leave. This drift is still continuing with Ukraine as the latest area attempting to make that move.
Russia does not have certain aspects – be it economic wealth, freedom of speech, etc. – Some geographical areas were and are under the illusion that these things are desirable.
See how I call the view that freedom of speech is good an illusion. Things like this are tough to come to terms with because they have been hammered into us since the moment we could learn.
But when someone uses freedom of speech to advocate that refugees should be machine gunned because they are cockroaches we suddenly see freedom of speech as bad, but somehow we know it is also good, and suddenly we are in conflict. Freedom of speech is reality, we suffer conflict when our illusions of it (thinking it is ‘good’ or ‘bad’) are challenged.
But back to Russia. It does not have some of the characteristics that some people view as good so it has to compensate and it does so through nationalism, through pride in being Russian even though both the pride and the concept of being ‘Russian’ are illusions.
We might scoff at the people who buy into that illusion but on a trip to Poland in the mid nineteen-nineties I met many people who yearned for a return to the Soviet days. Their illusions were completely ignored by a press that wanted the Western illusion of what is ‘good’ to prevail. Here we enter the more obvious illusions that most recognise as propaganda.
Religions are also illusions sometimes breeding people who will kill others that do not share their particular illusion. But religions are neither good nor bad – that is once again our label.
Perhaps the only area where I would veer of is in how we define a ‘good looking’ person. I don’t think there is much argument here in terms of the role media plays in this but remove this and I believe we would still find definitions of who is ‘beautiful’ and who is not that are not illusions.
Yes, a person is. One person can be viewed as ‘pretty’ or ‘ugly’ by others so surely beauty is an illusion. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” as Margaret Wolfe Hungerford penned in the 1870s.
This goes so far but we are breeding animals and we, woman especially, must choose our breeding partners carefully because our instinct is to protect and pass on our genetic line.
That means we are looking for healthy, strong partners – not ones who appear to be suffering from some ailment or appear in a particular poor state of health.
The rest, of course, is illusion and I await the time when the media push the illusion that balding middle aged men are the definition of beauty ;).
To say someone is deluded sounds like an insult but we are all deluded, it is just some recognise it and are able to separate if from reality and others aren’t.
If more people could do that we would dramatically reduce conflicts (and deaths) and become far more effective by channelling our energies into resolving realities – like reducing road traffic deaths.
My aim is to try more than ever to see, in every situation, what is reality and what is illusion.