Quotes About Illusion

All delusions begin in the mind. All delusions are based on various ways we're talking to ourselves and then believing what we are saying.

Whatever the image of yourself, it's a mask and it's hiding emptiness.

The greatest dream that we can have is to forget that we are dreaming.

Whatever you think you are, that's not it.

Our minds may believe that we need subtle and complex spiritual teachings to guide us to Reality, but we do not. In fact, the more complex the teaching is, the easier it is for the mind to hide from itself amidst the complexity while imagining that it is advancing toward enlightenment. But it is often only advancing in creating more and more intricate circles to walk around and around in.

It's important that meditation is not seen as something that only happens when you are seated in a quiet place. Otherwise spirituality and our daily life become two separate things. That's the primary illusion—that there is something called "my spiritual life," and something called "my daily life." When we wake up to reality, we find they are all one thing. It's all one seamless expression of spirit.

To you your dream is real because all of your thoughts confirm that it is real. But what is is more real than a thousand thoughts about how things should be. Life will conform neither to the story you tell yourself about it nor your interpretation of it. Believe a single thought that runs contrary to the way things are or have been and you suffer because of it. No exceptions!

What is required after a glimpse of awakening is radical honesty, a willingness to look at how we unenlighten ourselves, how we bring ourselves back into the gravitational force of the dream state, how we allow ourselves to be divided.

All of these are labels. All of them are fine. There is nothing wrong with any one of them, until you actually believe they're true. As soon as you believe that a label you've put on yourself is true, you've limited something that is literally limitless, you've limited who you are into nothing more than a thought.

you don't die; the illusion of a separate self dies. Still, it may feel like you are going to die. Only when you are willing to die for the sake of truth can that grasping truly and authentically let go.

The freedom that's discovered isn't, "I have attained enlightenment." The freedom is, "My God, there is nobody here to be enlightened. Therefore, there is nobody there to be unenlightened." That's the light. Only the concept "me" thinks it needs enlightenment, freedom, liberation, and emancipation. It thinks it needs to find God or get a Ferrari—it's all the same thing when you get right down to it.

We've become trapped in a world of dreams, a world in which we live primarily in our minds.

I can't do that." Those belief structures are by their very nature based in unreality.

Spiritual people always think the Truth is hidden from them. It is not hidden. What gets in the way is the idea of what it is going to be.

Thinking is something and then feeling it are two different reference points for most human beings: If I think it and I feel it, then it is real. But it does not take much reflection to acknowledge we have all thought and felt things to be true that later found out were not.

It's as if you wake up from the dream of thinking that you're already awake in your ordinary waking state. When you are spiritually awakened, what you thought was an awake state now seems like a dream.

Otherwise spirituality and our daily life become two separate things. That's the primary illusion -- that there is something called "my spiritual life," and something called "my daily life." When we wake up to reality, we find they are all one thing. It's all one seamless expression of spirit.

Bronze in the mirror of the form, wine of the mind.

The seed of mortals broods o'er passing things, and hath nought surer than the smoke-cloud's shadow.

Beware that you do not lose the substance by grasping at the shadow.

Appearances are often deceiving.

Appearances often are deceiving.

Appearances are deceptive.

What a splendid head, yet no brain.