Quotes About Illusion

Reality … cannot be put into conceptual form.

Neatly packaging everything gives us the illusion we … know something.

H]ow can something cease to exist that has no solid existence in the first place?

We imagine that things come into existence, endure for a while, and then pass out of existence

Just as we conceive of a self and counter this notion with a non-self, … we are also taken in by another set of opposing concepts – existence and non-existence.

T]he self is … a concept formed out of our desire to get a handle on things rather than accept … experience as real but ungraspable.

There is only … eternal arising and ceasing – but … no thing that comes or goes.

The issues of what a self is, how long it will last, what will happen when our bodies decay and consciousness flickers off, are all based not on what we actually see but on what we imagine.

Consciousness divides Reality. It conceptualises it, packages it, and explains it to itself. Then in our ignorance, we think it's taking readings on things 'out there.

When we just see … , the concept of non-existence doesn't occur. Our belief in non-existence arises only as a result of holding the notion of existence in the first place.

To a buddha … there's no habitual overlaying of perceptual experience with concepts, … ideas, … beliefs, notions, pre-formed habits of thought, that are used to explain existence.

I]t's through our obsession with meaning that we create meaninglessness.

When we fancy ourselves to be a particular thing with a name, we see ourselves as we would a cork in a stream. What we do not realize is that there is only stream. What we fancy as particular is, from the first, only movement, change and flow.

Truth and Reality are … not found in the way we frame our thoughts.

W]e reject … experience in favour of what we think.

There are no overwhelming questions such as 'Where do I go after I die?' because it becomes clear that such questions, doubts, fears, and anxieties are based on buying into an illusion – the self.

We tend not to realise the extent to which we make up … the world, that is, the world of relative truths. We set boundaries, we make definitions. We determine what is good, what is bad, what ought to be, and what ought not to be – all out of inclinations of our mind.

Conscious experience is very much like a movie. It's just one moment – one still – after another. But because these seem to occur in rapid succession, we adopt the contradictory belief … there are … persistent things out there that nevertheless change.

Reality is not going to change with your perception of it.

Why would anyone want to awaken to the Reality that they're not even here in the first place?

If we're human, we habitually conceptualise our experience, thus conceiving a self. … [T]his self 1) is unlocatable, 2) contradicts direct experience, 3) is … impossible[.]

Try as we will, we'll not find any workable, definable thing in actual experience for this 'I' to refer to.

Whenever we conceptualise, we create contradictions that we can't escape.

I]t's not conceptualisation that's the problem, but getting caught up in it, mistaking our concepts for Reality.