It's all an illusion

Wise men, sages, philosophers, even the occasional misguided scientist, have all said this about life and everything material at some point or the other. I’ve read my fair share of books that talk about how everything around us is a product of our own imagination, we make our own reality, as we visualize, so we become, and so on.

One of the hardest hitting visualizations of a related theory, of course was The Matrix series. The only difference being that in the said movie, an external entity had created an illusionary world for human beings.

Recently, I read “Hypnotizing Maria” by Richard Bach, and as has been his habit, he made me sit up and carefully evaluate life as I know it. The book takes over where his “Illusions” left off, and leads us into a journey of life evaluation, which, I might add, is never pleasant. Questions like “who am I, really?”, “what is life, really?” etc, start cropping into one’s mind, waking one up from the carefully orchestrated slumber that one prefers to be in the state of.

Confusing, to say the very least, is my state of mind when I think of all this “illusion” business. Afterall, enough people in the world have written about it, the wise old men have spoken about it – surely there must be some truth to the concept, right? And then I look at my life – if I pick up a stick and hit myself really hard (let’s keep that hypothetical, shall we?), I’m pretty sure its going to cause me physical pain – very very real physical pain. Of course, the prophets of the “illusions” theory would say that I have been bombarded with suggestions since I was a child, accepting that if a stick hits me, it will cause the sensation of pain, and further, that pain is an unpleasant situation. They would say that these suggestions that I have accepted, are now so deeply ingrained in the fiber of my being that it is almost impossible to “un-accept” them. Or as Morpheus tells Neo in my favourite movie, “we never free a mind once it has reached a certain age – the mind has trouble letting go”. But the plot is that Neo does manage to let it go – takes a bit – namely, him dying, but he does…

And this brings me to my next question – does it need to take something as drastic as the end of the physical life in order to realize that life’s an illusion? Can’t say about that, but once I die, my life wouldn’t be very real to me, will it?

All in all, though I am still undecided about how illusionary life is, next time someone suggests this theory to me, I’ll probably pinch them quite hard and ask if it felt real…really, only so that they don’t get me thinking!