Tao Te Ching
Delusion
Our problems don’t arise nearly as much from delusion as from our lack of knowing how much delusion engulfs us, how much falseness we believe, how much illusion we take as real. Thoughts aren’t so much the problem here; it’s our believing the thoughts that creates so much pain and suffering. When we realize and see the delusion in our own mind, in our society, and in the culture surrounding us; we become humble, open, childlike and receptive. We can learn and understand more when we realize that we don’t already know everything with such certainty.
Quotes (86)
“Of all the world’s wonders which is the most wonderful? That no man, though he sees others dying all around him, believe that he himself will die.”
“No gossip ever dies away entirely, if many people voice it: it too is a kind of divinity.”
“People who foolishly cling to words and phrases are like elephants in a quagmire.”
“When people laughed at him because he walked backward beneath the portico, he said to them: ‘Aren't you ashamed, you who walk backward along the whole path of existence, and blame me for walking backward along the path of the promenade?’”
“How do I know that love of life is not a delusion after all? How do I know but that he who dreads death is not as a child who has lost his way and does not know his way home?”
“Indeed, what is there that does not appear marvelous when it comes to our knowledge for the first time? How many things, too, are looked upon as quite impossible until they have actually been effected?”
“People of this world are deluded. They're always longing for something - always, in a word, seeking.”
“If you love the sacred and despise the ordinary, you are still bobbing in the ocean of delusion.”
“The flame of pure awareness burns away all delusion.”
“Going from one to two is the origin of all delusion.”
“In the interlaced net of principle and phenomena, true emptiness appears. Shining to obliterate the fundamental delusion.”
48. Unlearning
59. The Gardening of Spirit
4. The Father of All Things
“Face whatever appears before you… enter the current of the world and join with the delusion.”
“It is only belief in oneself as an island that creates the delusion of others apart and this split is the cause of anxiety.”
“Enlightenment always comes after the road of thinking is blocked... if not blocked, whatever you think, whatever you do, is like a tangling ghost.”
“Ordinary mind is seduced by trivial sense objects in all their variety. Beings are deceived by misconstruing what is not dualistic as dualistic.”
“There is no ice which does not return to water. So you will understand there is no difference between ordinary beings and Buddhas except for one thing - delusion. When it is dissolved they are identical.”
“Seeking the Buddha and Dharma outside our minds is like cooking sand in the hopes of producing rice.”
“Anything that is understood is a delusion. Anything that is a delusion is an affliction. Understanding is not the affliction. It is the understanding of understanding that becomes the affliction. To understand what is the affliction is to cure the illness without medicine.”
“Leave something to wish for. That way you will not be miserable from too much happiness… If one possessed all, all would be disillusion and discontent… Surfeits of happiness are fatal… when desire dies, fear is born.”
“While deluded, one is used by this body; when enlightened, one uses this body.”
“Clear are the workings of cause and effect. You become deluded, but don't know it's something that you've done yourself... what's called self-centeredness.”
“Originally, thoughts have no real substance… if they arise, just let them arise; if they stop, just let them stop. As long as you’re not attaching to these reflected traces, delusions won’t be produced.”
“There can be no greater Hypocrisy than for us as a People, to refuse to bear Arms and yet purchase Slaves at a very great Price, thereby justifying their selling of them, and the War, by which they were or are obtained;”
“One day everything will be well—that is our hope.
Everything's fine today—that is our delusion.”
“. . . in no instance has a system in regard to religion been ever established, but for the purpose, as well as with the effect of its being made an instrument of intimidation, corruption, and delusion, for the support of depredation and oppression in the hands of governments.”
“The world has always been the same — an endless farce, an antic game, a universal masquerade!”
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
“Delusion and enlightenment produce one another… You get rid of this, then grab hold of that. Don’t you see how stupid it is!”
“The only vice that cannot be forgiven is hypocrisy. The repentance of a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy.”
“Celia, whose mind had never been thought too powerful, saw the emptiness of other people's pretensions much more readily. To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.”
“When a pickpocket sees a saint, he sees only his pockets; when a saint sees a pickpocket, he sees only his innocence.”
“Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.”
“Like gold hidden in its matrix, buddhahood is hidden by the tendencies created by mental poisons and then reinforced by the actions that those disturbances have produced.”
“Most of the greatest evils that man has inflicted upon man have come through people feeling quite certain about something which, in fact, was false.”
“. . . passion paralyses good taste and makes its victim accept with rapture what a man in his senses would either laugh at or turn from with disgust.”
“We are solitary. We many delude ourselves and act as though this were not so. that is all.”
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.”
“By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, when in fact we live steeped in its burning layers.”
“Such are the visions which ceaselessly float up, pace beside, put their faces in front of, the actual thing… taking away the sense of the earth”
“Progress in knowledge, science, comforts, and power is only progress in means; if there is no improvement in ends, purposes, or desires, progress is a delusion.”
“Obsessed by a fairy tale, we spend our lives searching for a magic door and a lost kingdom of peace.”
“Yes, your appreciation of yourself blinds you. It is the biggest obstacle to a new life.”
“Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.”
“Power worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue.”
“Once you are in the middle of delusion, there is no end to delusion. You will be involved in deluded ideas one after another.”
“Romance only comes into existence where love is fatal, frowned upon and doomed by life itself.”
“Why should neurotic, selfish, immature people suddenly become angels when they fall in love?”
“This mind, unlike enlightened mind, is always being carried away by one delusion after another.”
“Sentient beings, self and others, enemies and dear ones-all are made by thoughts. It is like seeing a rope and mistaking it for a snake… We have been deluded by our thoughts.”
“We look at the present through a rear view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
“any man-made environment is a conditioner that creates non-perceptive somnambulists.”
“it is notorious that most revolutions establish worse tyrannies than they destroy. To be free from convention is not to spurn it but not to be deceived by it. It is to be able to use it as an instrument instead of being used by it”
“When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a Religion.”
“Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future and renders the present inaccessible.”
“Hence the futility of revolutionaries who have no gardens, who depend on the very system they attack, and who produce words and bullets, not food and shelter.”
“The average American suffers from two delusions, one that God is dead and the other is that there is a difference between brands of cigarettes.”
“The Buddha advocated a 'middle way' yet this was only after a preliminary course of extremes... As to the way of escaping delusion, there is no division of opinion: Go to extremes. That is the first necessity.”
“If someone thinks he doesn't depend on others, he is like a sick person who thinks he doesn't have to go to a doctor because he can cure himself with poison, or like a poor person who says he doesn't have to depend on richer people even though he has an empty wallet.”
“It is essential to the identity of a society to forget that it has forgotten that society is always a species of culture.”
“Society is where we prove to parents qua audience that we are not what we thought they thought we were.”
“In MacKay’s classic, The Madness of Crowds he points out that historically people more easily believe extreme views (tulip mania, the Crusades, the witch trials) when the society is experiencing abrupt and frequent change. Extreme views tend to be more clear and simple than the truth which is more messy, paradoxical, and multi-layered. So when populations struggle to deal with too much change, latching on to a foolish but strong and clear message becomes much more tempting.”
“Race, gender, ethnic, national, age, handicap, appearance-based prejudice are all ways of substituting something trivial and unworthy for real merit and ability. Prejudice means trying to preserve unearned privilege and advantage.”
“most people are drowning in their delusional ignorance without knowing that their suffering was created by themselves.”
“In trying to fight for a grain of sesame seed each day, we lose track of our sky.”
“All lies and jests, still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.”
“every painful feeling is caused by a prior thought... the only thing that an interrupt happiness is an untrue thought.”
“if you are deluded about your own nature, who you are, and act on the basis of that delusion, you will constantly suffer repercussions.”
“In our unconsciousness we take credit where no credit is due, oblivious to the real source of everything we pretend is ours”
“All emotions are basically a form of prejudice.”
“Siddhartha’s path does not ultimately lead to happiness… it’s a release from the the straitjacket of delusion… a direct route to freedom from suffering and confusion.”
“To mistake our habitual misperceptions for the whole of reality is what we mean by ignorance, and these delusions define the world of confusion, or samsara.”
“from torment and agony to dissatisfaction, distress, agitation, and annoyance.. Every variety reflects a mental disturbance that arises when we substitute reality as-it-is for what we wish it to be.”
“Capitalism's belief in perpetual economic growth flies in the face of almost everything we know about the universe. A society of wolves would be extremely foolish to believe that the supply of sheep would keep on growing indefinitely... Banks and governments print money, but ultimately, it is the scientists who foot the bill.”
“When we see the world through the lens of desire, reality becomes fractured into what we want and what we do not want.”
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