Tao Te Ching
Illusion
As Pascal wrote, “Human life is only an endless illusion. Men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does when we are gone. Society is based on mutual hypocrisy.” Most of us have illusions that we’re far better and more capable than reality suggests. We genetically believe that our tribe, our group, our political party is much better and worthy then is actually the case. This same dynamic projected onto a political campaign led millions and millions of people to believe that a decadent, playboy, reality TV star could run a country. Hopefully, seeing this president crash down in flames of incompetence, decadence, and duplicity will also lead his followers to a deeper, psychological seeing through of this widespread hubris, the fantasy that they and the world are what they want to believe rather than who and what they really are. To bracket this thought with another Pascal quote, “Once your soul has been enlarged by a truth, it can never return to its original size.”
Quotes (95)
“He could not look farther than the moment… He met the event as it came and so events buffeted him and blew him about”
“Blessed are the man and the woman who have grown beyond their greed and have put an end to their hatred and no longer nourish illusions.”
“The body is ownerless, the product of a variety of conditions. Impermanent, fragile, and feeble it is like a magical illusion, consisting of falsifications like a ball of foam, unable to bear any pressure like a water bubble, not remaining very long, like a mirage, born from the appetites of the passions. Wise men do not rely on it.”
“Seeing the meaningful as meaningful, and the meaningless as meaningless, one is capable of genuine understanding.”
“The most powerful form of deception is to create the existence of that which does not exist in order to create the nonexistence of that which exists.Thus he can hide in front of people's eyes”
“Gods manifest themselves in many forms,
Bring many matters to surprising ends;
The things we thought would happen do not;
The unexpected occurs.”
“Do not think that by avoiding grand passions you are missing the delights of Venus... Lovers' passion is storm-tossed, even in the moment of fruition, by waves of delusion and incertitude.”
“Conflicting emotions, deeds and bodies, actors and results are as castles in the sky, a mirage, an optical illusion and the moon's reflection in water.”
“Knowing is illusion; not-knowing is blankness. If you really attain to the Way of no-doubt it is like the great void, so vast and boundless.”
“Having the Buddha-Eye means perceiving that there is nothing to perceive, that perceiving as though an objective existence only creates illusion.”
“Man is wise only while in search of wisdom; when he imagines he has attained it, he is a fool.”
“Thickly o'er the jasper terrace flower shadows play;
In vain I call my garden boy to sweep them all away.
They vanish when the sun sets in the west, but very soon
They spring to giddy life again beneath the rising moon.”
“For in and out, above, about, below,
’Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow-show,
Round which we Phantom Figures come and go.”
“Desiring external things harms our bodies. Sages… choose internal reality over external illusion.”
“The thought of death prevents us from losing ourselves in the illusions that constantly surround us, brings us back to our true selves, and reminds us of the importance of this very moment.”
“In simply arising, forms are by nature empty. From what is unborn there manifests what seems to be born, but even as it manifests, nothing whatsoever has been born... These are illusory expressions of emptiness. Even with abiding there is nothing that abides.”
“And what is all this life but a kind of comedy, wherein men walk up and down in one another's disguises and act their respective parts… Thus are all things represented by counterfeit, and yet without this there is no living.”
“The majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.”
“Usually those who have limited understanding think they know more, and those who have no brains, think they know everything.”
“Human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.”
“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.”
“All fools are fully convinced and everyone fully convinced is a fool.”
“Human life is thus only an endless illusion. Men deceive and flatter each other. No one speaks of us in our presence as he does when we are gone. Society is based on mutual hypocrisy.”
“Truth has to be repeated constantly, because Error also is being preached all the time, and not just by a few, but by the multitude… happy and comfortable in the knowledge of having Majority on its side.”
“The highest problem of every art is, by means of appearances, to produce the illusion of a loftier reality.”
“Those who regard universal suffrage as a guarantee for good choices are under a complete illusion. Universal suffrage has other advantages, but not that one.”
“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
“young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.”
“The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn't indicate or promise, and which the other kind of eye couldn't detect.”
“People don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.”
“Whenever a man does a thoroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest motives.”
“Science is no illusion. But it would be an illusion to think that we can get elsewhere what science cannot give.”
“of all the illusions that beset mankind, none is quite so curious a that tendency to suppose that we are mentally and morally superior to those who differ from us in opinion.”
“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
“The judgements of value made by mankind are attempts to prop up their illusions with arguments.”
“Fortunately, some are born with spiritual immune systems that sooner or later give rejection to the illusory worldview grafted upon them from birth through social conditioning.”
“To be bewitched is not to be saved, though all the magicians and aesthetes in the world should pronounce it to be so.”
“The fact is, you are working for a dream, and living on dreams... How do you know that you are ever going to be old?”
“Moral uncertainty is an even greater cause of inexact visual perception than is defective eyesight.”
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”
“What philosophy should dissipate is certainty, whether of knowledge or ignorance.”
“If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.”
“The human merry-go-round sees many changes: the illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years to unmask the same illusion the the West has labored just as hard to maintain and strengthen.”
“One of the worst illusions we have is thinking that negative emotions are produced by circumstances. All negative emotions come from within us, not from an external source.”
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
“Dionysus shatters individuation... Men and beasts become brothers, death itself is seen as one of life's masks, the multiform stalking-blind of illusion rips in two, and we find ourselves in breast-to-breast contact with truth. What truth? The truth that we all are one, that all of us together create God, that God is not man's ancestor but his descendant.”
“we give too much time to news about the transient present, too little to the living past. We are choked with news, and starved of history.”
“And do not choose a fool only because she has a pretty face. Some day he might kill a woman like that out of anger at her witlessness.”
“The aim of Western psychiatry is to help the trouble individual to adjust himself to the society of less troubled individuals—back to a normality, which is defined [as] to be a member of the majority party... Statistical normality is perfectly compatible with a high degree of folly and wickedness.”
“Successfully (whatever that may mean) or unsuccessfully, we all overact the part of our favorite character in fiction.”
“that sadness, that refusal to yield to illusion, is the beginning of a wise philosophy of living.”
“There is no birth there is no death… it’s all a concept, it’s all an illusion.”
“The principle enemy of freedom is illusion... the illusion of the importance of the sie or quantity, the illusion of our technical superiority, the illusion that we don't dare to think. and there is the illusion related to all these illusions—the illusion of progress.”
“The map is not the territory, and the name is not the thing named.”
“the goal of a college should be to create people who are not lost, to create sages—people without doubts or illusions... But colleges today are different... the more one studies, the less one comes to know the world at large... They don't understand what it means to understand”
“Nor is it a new thing for Man to invent an existence that he imagines to be above the rest of life; this has been his most consistent intellectual exertion down the millennia. As illusion, it has never worked out to his satisfaction in the past, any more than it does today.”
“The very nature of our practice is to see through the expectations and illusions in our relationships.”
“Plato described ordinary life as unthinking, lived in a dim cave of shadowy reflections, but said that it is possible to leave the cave and see things in sunlit clarity as they actually are.”
“Psychoactive drugs may produce religious experiences. ...it is far less clear that they can produce religious lives.”
“The mind spends most of the time lost in fantasies and illusions, reliving pleasant or unpleasant experiences and anticipating the future with eagerness or fear. While lost in such cravings or aversions, we are unaware of what is happening now, what we are doing now.”
“We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.”
“Sports are another example of the indoctrination system because it offers people something to pay attention to that's of no importance, that keeps them from worrying about things that matter to their lives, that might give them some idea of doing something about.”
“Nietzsche was, in short, a religious mystic... Nietzsche understood that society is a hall of distorting mirrors.”
“The message of television as metaphor is not only that all the world is a stage but that the stage is located in Las Vegas… the nature of the medium is that it must suppress the content of ideas in order to accommodate the requirements of visual interest, the values of show business.”
“One of humanity’s most persistent and damaging illusions is that happiness and suffering are caused by external factors.”
“the illusion was embraced that man's life can be morally and materially perfected mainly through external changes involving, among other things, external forms of government and social order. This illusion was our illusion, and some time ago it became the whole world's illusion.”
“What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.”
“Everybody is a caricature of themselves… as well as everything having its own basic fullness. You represent yourself not by name but by being. So there is a sense of completion.”
“Meditation in action is… awareness of how we... create our basic perceptions out of our preconceptions… and the games going on do not become big games but simply illusory games.”
“the essential nature of an illusion is that it does, in fact, appear thoroughly real; it has to be convincing or it cannot be called an illusion. In Buddhism, this is called relative or conventional truth.”
“Illusion, once you’ve got an illusion going, it can function on the market like any other product. Advanced capitalism churning out goods… give it a pretty name, a pretty package, and you can sell it.”
“By looking at things from the point of view of natural selection, we see why the illusion would be built into us, and we have more reason than ever to see that it is an illusion.”
“This isn't about what is . . . it's about what people think is. It's all imaginary anyway. That's why it's important. People only fight over imaginary things.”
“Like a child at the cinema, we get caught up in the illusion. From this comes all of our vanity, ambition, and insecurity. We fall in love with the illusions we have created and develop excessive pride in our appearance, our possessions, and our accomplishments. It’s like wearing a mask and proudly thinking that the mask is really you.”
“Our ego-mind and emotions are a dramatic illusion… we create elaborate scenarios and then react to them but there is nothing really happening outside our mind.”
“People are masks, with masks under those masks, and masks under those, and down you go.”
“Despite appearances, no aspect of life ever stays the same. The construction of any one object—no matter how dense it appears, such as an ocean liner, our bodies, a skyscraper, or an oak tree—will reveal the appearance of solidity to be as illusory as permanence.”
“I am seeking to let go of the illusory hats that I am wearing on this illusory head and that live inside this mind that is falsified by confusion and muddled by misperception, hats that have never existed, all of them fake identities, created by a fake-identity mind, affirmed by warped perceptions, held n place by habit”
“What we normally are to be 'reality' is often just fictions in our own minds. People may wage entire wars, killing others and willing to be killed themselves, because their belief in this or that illusion.”
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