Essay: All is illusion.

All is illusion. (Via 'False Gods & football fixtures.)

People have often said to me "You're not living in the real world!" but by "real" they are actually referring to day to day life as they experience it - or as they think they do, never for a second questioning whether their concept of ‘real' is actually realistic. Remember that little ditty by John Lennon, ‘Strawberry Fields', in which the line ‘nothing is real' is used? Well, the phrase is a lot truer than ever you can imagine. Another phrase we are all familiar with is ‘labouring under an illusion' - which is exactly what we are doing, every day of our lives. The reality is, none of us lives in the real world, and wouldn't recognise it if it sat on our face; reality being something altogether alien to our modern, money orientated lives. Our bodies are owned and our souls are controlled by big business, thriving upon and dealing in imagery for its survival. Every waking moment we are bombarded with imagery. It is our stock and trade - the way we earn a crust or get rich quick. Companies will invest fortunes in creating the right image and advertisements to market their product, and even our politicians, at great expense to tax-payers, will employ the services of image-makers to disguise their wonton personalities and even write their speeches for them. "All is illusion." said the Buddha. The Nazarene in his own day tells us ‘The master of this world is Mammon': and don't we just know the truth of this!

Jesus left us in no doubt about how he viewed Mammon when he said ‘The love of money is the root of all evil.' But we chose to ignore his words then and have continued to do so ever since. "Oooh - no!" I can already hear you groaning, "Not more bloody religion!" Since when did religion ever do anything but set us at variance?" And of course you are right - it never did. So have no fear, this is not a call for religious revival; how can we have a ‘revival' of something we never knew in the first place. Actually, Jesus and Buddha were not ‘religious' men - there was nothing in either of them of the ritual and dogma we are drowning in today, and they would be horrified at what is being passed off in their names. In the ‘Christian' church, religion is just what we have had for the last two thousand years - not at all what the Nazarene had in mind, and of no great loss to us in its decline. However, what we fail to realise is that even with religion out of the equation, our society is nonetheless founded upon and floundering in the grip of a supposition - one which has led us further from reality far more quickly and efficiently than any religion ever could, into a bondage far more brutal than the Pharos could have conceived, and governed by a God more jealously demanding than any Old Testament idol.

World communities thrive in faith, but the faith which grips the minds and guides the feet of us westerners is a false one. The whole of our society, in its structure and motivation, is built on and dependent for its continuance upon the assumption of us having only one life. It is a notion which has been ingrained in us from birth, suiting the purpose of those who have held the reigns of power in every generation throughout recorded history. Widely accepted though this may be, it is for all that still only an idea, just as unverifiable as any religious dogma - and like any belief, it requires faith in it to exist at all. It is a idea reinforced by various theorists before and after Darwin, to the convenience of those with something to gain from its promotion. However, if a thing can be substantiated in neither one way nor the other, all the theorising in the world will not make it true. This of course also applies to any contradictory theory we may offer, but that being so, then is not better to believe in the continuity of lives, rather than our discontinuity in the face of all contrary evidence in the seasonal changes of nature, and the hope it offers thereby.

Mammon is not only God of Money, but Master of illusion, too. No, not the slight-of-hand trickery of a conjurer, but a profoundly wicked wizardry which keeps us under his complete command. It is he who tricks us into believing in only one life, with only one chance at happiness. Under his direction, in pursuit of our ‘one chance' at happiness in this cold and ‘only' life, in both social interaction and every sphere of business, the overriding motivation is to ‘profit' from each other - in this way making our short-lived lot as convenient and comfortable for ourselves as we can. It is a ‘devil take the hindmost' philosophy for people who cannot see past the pound signs in their bank account. ‘Since we have only one life', we suppose, ‘then why not make the most of it?' Thus we are herded and corralled by those who stand to gain materially from us. Mammon rules by the whip and the carrot. The whip he uses for the purpose is this belief in only one life, and the carrot he teases us with is the prospect of our becoming rich if we work hard enough. The reality, though, is that very few will rise above their servitude; fortunes are only ever accumulated from other people's money, and where one has plenty, another is in want. In this unjust system, unless we are born with a head start, or strike it very lucky, only a few of the clever, pushy and greedy will rise to the top of the money heap. Meanwhile every minute spent chasing the carrot helps maintain those already there, and keeps the Chancellor beaming. This is the treadmill of Mammon, Lord of Illusion.

Before you all interrupt with another "Get real, we've all got to work for a living!" - of course we do, without expending effort nothing is accomplished, and no-one can survive. But it is a question of where we direct that effort and to what purpose, as to how happy and fulfilled we can be. For most people our present daily grind achieves, apart from an attic full of junk and memorabilia and maybe a bit of property for the kids to squabble over, only a frustrated retirement with apparently nought but eternal oblivion to look forward to. Faced with such prospect, the best we can do is accumulate as many ever-depreciating dollars as we can, in the hope of a relatively worry-free retirement - unless we die beforehand. But if, instead of only one short life, we believed in an eternal, reincarnating life, what a tremendous difference this would make to the way we live it.

It is not possible to believe in nothing. Nature deplores a ‘nothing', and hurries to fill it with something. Man really doesn't live by bread alone, and cannot live without belief in something - even though that belief be one of our discontinuity after only one lifetime of futile struggle for supremacy. It is the predominant conviction in today's world - now usurping even the Eastern acceptance of reincarnation. "Get real!" our ‘experts' will say when we offer anything other. In everything we say, do and even think, this ‘one life' illusion is insinuated so deeply in our lives that none of us are actually our own persons. The manner of our dress, the way we apply our makeup, what we buy and where we buy it, and even what we think, is governed by agencies other than ourselves.

Mammon is the enemy of life - a black hole in human society, swallowing all who stray within his reach, and no place in the world remains free from his grasp - even in the wild we can see evidence of his influence, in discarded branded containers and wrappers, rubber tires and rusting machines. Consider this: take away all our films, plays and novels, game shows and fascinating adverts on TV, and what we are left with bears only the vaguest resemblance to reality. Every day of our lives is lived under the spell of illusion. And we are all so hypnotised by it that we cannot identify the real from the fiction in the guise of reality with which we are daily bombarded. So addicted to it we are, we would find it impossible to extricate ourselves from its insidious spell. Most people are happy to live with this illusion - they neither wish to question it nor have it questioned by anyone else. The familiar is always a happier place than the untried, and the shattering of anyone's illusions can be a traumatic experience for them; it changes their world, bringing narrow, woolly perspectives into sharp, altered focus from which there is no return. Any other than commonly held belief unsettles - even frightens them, and they will either immediately retreat from the perceived threat to their status quo, close their ears and pretend is isn't there, or fight like a terrier to defend their corner. It is our our animal instinct to do so - but without questioning those perspectives how can we hope to escape their confinement.

Without our even realising it, the fear of discontinuance moulds our minds and motivates our every movement. In a furious ‘Let's make merry, for tomorrow we die' approach, every conceivable diversion is employed to distract us from the thought. The clothes we wear, the hairstyle we adopt, the makeup we apply and even the perfumes we dab about ourselves are affectations to veil our naked, embarrassingly human animal, mortal self. Women in particular will apply a daily mask to this purpose - using the expression ‘putting on' or ‘fixing' their face. Some will even avoid seeing themselves in anything larger than their compact mirror, and of course, growing ‘old' is absolutely forbidden. Being just a finite human animal acutely embarrasses us - we just cannot come to terms with it, so we employ every manner of adornment and accessory we can lay our hands on to camouflage our shame. But the problem is we can never know our real identity until we are reabsorbed in the cosmic purpose from whence we came. Buddha called this cosmic purpose ‘Nirvana' - the true state of being to which we should attain. Jesus called it ‘Love', and urged us to strive to demonstrate it in our lives. By ‘love' he did not mean the infatuation, physical attraction or sexual lust we mistake for it in our misdirected society; his kind of love was no ‘one night stand', but a forever commitment.

Almost every role we play in our dizzy lives is held in support of, or as a consequence of the illusion. For twenty four hours every day, in work and in play, in the way dress, think, and earn our daily crust, we ‘productively employed' citizens are promoting, being affected and motivated by, and surviving in this many layered illusory state. The masks and roles we adopt in the accomplishment of our ‘duties' are woven so tightly about us, we are hardly aware of them - until they become too uncomfortable. Mammon is a hard task-master, demanding every ounce of sweat and every gram of blood with his pound of flesh. It is the way our society operates. Our dilemma is, we are expected to believe that this stress-plagued existence is quite normal and natural. "This is the real world. Cope with it!" those who drive us will direct, while in every walk of life in the ‘free world', the streets of our towns and cities are littered with those who cannot. It may be the world we have created, maintain, and raise our children to become ‘good citizens' in, but ‘real' it is certainly not. Stressful, however, it is: ignoring the alarm bells which keep on ringing in our heads and bodies, we plod on anyway, trying to turn that fast buck and rise to the top of our particular heap. The incidence of drug use is an ever-growing problem, to which there is no solution as long as society remains thus motivated in the grip of a monster. Drug reliance is not an attempt to find a fantasy world, as an escape from the real, but an effort to escape the unreality of this illusory world which binds us tightly in its spell, into a reality and refuge far kinder than can be found in the brutal order of Mammon. It is a cry for help from those burdened in his cause.

"Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." said the Nazarene - all this was patently obvious to him in his day; God only knows what he would say about it now. We ‘enlightened' westerners live the whole of our lives behind layers of illusion, and if this veil was in Buddha's day thick enough for him to be concerned about, then today it is like swimming through a sea of mud - of which we are quite unaware. In the way we blunder about banging into and rubbing painfully against each other, while working against the clock to accomplish goals set by the state, our employers, or even ourselves, most of us can sense there is something amiss, but cannot understand what, or why. Continually stressed and worried, from rising in the morning to falling into bed at night we walk about with images in our heads, and everything we see, hear and feel, every decision we make and thing we do is affected by illusions promoted by profit motivated institutions. "Lost souls", the Nazarene could have described us as. "Lost in illusion", the Buddha would have agreed, knowing well that stress and worry are not what living is about. A more modern term for us might be ‘zombies'.

Buddha and Jesus were two of the most gifted, far sighted men ever to have walked this earth. Can they really have been so wrong about our society?

© Misfit.

(Read 'Competition versus Conservation' 'Malady l'amour' 'Where is Love?' Visit WakeUp! )