Questioning the Reality of Illusions

Is there anyone, any person or any condition that is absolutely right or absolutely wrong? Can right and wrong, or good and bad, be absolute?

When you dissect it, when you really look at it in terms of the way it is now, there is nothing to it. It’s foam on the sea; it’s soap bubbles. Yet this is how we can get ourselves completely caught up in illusions. We’ll sacrifice our life for an illusion in order to protect our identities, our positions, our territories. We’re very territorial…

When we bind ourselves to these conventions and these illusions, then of course we’re troubled because illusions are unstable and not in line with Dhamma. We end up wasting our lives trying to increase this sense of identification, this sense of ‘it’s mine; it belongs to me, and I want to protect it and hand it down to future generations.’ We create a whole realm of illusion, personality, and identity through the perceptions that we create in our minds, which arise and cease and have no real core, no essence.

We can be very threatened when these illusions are challenged.

I remember first questioning the reality of my personality. It scared me to death. When I started questioning, even though I wasn’t particularly overconfident and didn’t have great self-esteem (I have never been prone to megalomania; usually the opposite, very self-critical), I felt very threatened when that security, that confidence in being this screwed-up personality, was being threatened.

There is a sense of stability, even among people who identify themselves with illnesses or other negative things like alcoholism. Being identified with some sort of mental disease like paranoia, schizophrenia, or whatever, gives us a sense that we know who we are, and we can justify the way that we are. We can say, ‘I can’t help the way I am. I’m a schizophrenic.’ That gives us a sense of allowing us to be a certain way. It may be a sense of confidence or stability in the fact that our identities are labelled, and we all agree to look at one another in this way, with this label, with this perception.

So you realize the courage it takes to question, to allow the illusory world that we have created to fall apart, as with a nervous breakdown when the world falls apart. When the security that is offered and the safety and confidence that we gain from that illusion start cracking and falling apart, it’s very frightening.

Yet within us there’s something that guides us through it. What brings us into this monastic life? It’s some intuitive sense, a sense behind the sense, an intelligence behind all the knowledge and the cleverness of our minds. Yet we can’t claim it on a personal level. We always have to let go of the personal perceptions because as soon as we claim them, we’re creating another illusion.

Instead of claiming, identifying, or attaching, we begin to realize or recognize the way it is. This is the practice of awareness and paying attention, sati-sampajañña. In other words, it’s going to the centrepoint, to the Buddho (the one who knows) position. This Buddha-rupa (statue of the Buddha) here in the temple: it’s the stillpoint. It’s a symbol, an image representing the human form at the stillpoint.

This reflection by Luang Por Sumedho is from the book Ajahn Sumedho Anthology, Volume 4—The Sound of Silence, (pdf) pp. 63, 64-65. (Also in Intuitive Awareness (pdf) pp. 37-39.)