Quotes about Delusion

"Death makes your entire life bullshit. Don’t you see? That’s the problem. The body is going to die, every relation of the body is going to die. You can’t even depend on it continuing for another moment while you’re . . . associating with it. That’s the situation you’re in, but you use fabrications of mind and so forth, individually and collectively, that distract you from the fact of it, so that you won’t feel it profoundly. And so you build up this whole lifetime of endeavors, of attachments, of things you own, things you do, things you’re known for, things you know, things you know about — on and on and on. And it all passes. But in the meantime. . . you bullshit one another, effectively.

The Great Matter doesn’t confront you merely in death. It’s just that in death you are disarmed and you have no choice. While you are alive, you delude yourself! You fabricate a reality that’s not altogether true, in order to give yourself a sense of permanence, continuation, certainty — as if life is about being enthusiastic, about fulfillment of the next desire. In fact, you could easily drop dead in any moment. All kinds of people drop dead every day. And a lot of them haven’t lived a very long life beforehand. All kinds of terrible things are being done by human beings to one another and otherwise by the situation itself.

So you can participate in the round of desires and consolations as much as you are able for a lifetime, however long that lasts, and then be necessarily confronted by profundity at the point of death. Or you can go beyond even right now and exist in that profundity right now. . .

True religious life is a great profundity. But the religious life that people propose for themselves and propose to one another, generally speaking, is the life of consolation, of distraction, of arbitrary beliefs that suggest some kind of continuation (or even permanence) of the present pattern.

"The prince of this world blinds people who then walk like blind men, feeling their way and because of this they are constantly falling into one bog after another.  Science is fraud when its facts are taken as something absolute, for tomorrow's scientific knowledge will contradict today's; most art is a deliberate distortion; politics has always been full of deceit, lies, crimes.  Here everything must be understood in reverse---what they call life is but superficial, horrible pettiness, emptiness, lies with out end; in a word, it is the 'age of falsehood,' the kingdom of the prince of this world."

from Abbot Nikon: Letters to Spiritual Children

It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

 For when delusion is gone and the truth is realized by means of inquiry into self-nature, when the mind is at peace and the heart leaps to the supreme truth, when all the disturbing thought-waves in the mind have subsided and there is unbroken flow of peace and the heart is filled with the bliss of the absolute, when thus the truth has been seen in the heart, then this very world becomes an abode of bliss.

One finds that no matter how sincere one's intention to be attentive and aware, the mind rebels against such instructions and races off to indulge in all manner of distractions, memories and fantasies....The comforting illusion of personal coherence and continuity is ripped away to expose only fragmentary islands of consciousness separated by yawning gulfs of unawareness....The first step in this practice of mindful awareness is radical self-acceptance.

Such self-acceptance, however, does not operate in an ethical vacuum, where no moral assessment is made of one's emotional states. The training in mindful awareness is part of a Buddhist path with values and goals. Emotional states are evaluated according to whether they increase or decrease the potential for suffering. If an emotion, such as hatred or envy, is judged to be destructive, then it is simply recognized as such. It is neither expressed through violent thoughts, words or deeds, nor is it suppressed or denied as incompatiable with a "spiritual"life. In seeing it for what it is - a transient emotional state - one mindfully observes it follow its own nature: to arise, abide for a while, and then pass away.

If humans are essentially self-enclosed or self-interested or idiotist psychological systems (a la Freud), then "love" is just the name for a kind of psychic imperialism among psyches (the visceral irrationalism of the Id/libido being rationalized and executed by the otherwise-vacant Ego and presided over by the irrational authoritarianism of the Superego). One bag of appetites and emotions (he) tries to arrogate control over another bag of appetites and emotions (she -- or vice versa), all for the first bag's own benefit, like a war between oversized amoebas. If human beings are conceived strictly in terms of what finite-banausic or finite-doulic mentalities can comprehend, then "love" will necessarily look like a "magical" or illusionistic pseudo-cure for our necessitated animalistic (and deterministic bourgeois-"rationalist") natures. Our natural power of self-centered delusion projects for itself a cure for its self-enclosure, and calls this fantasy "love." Uncountable are the times that this grandiose fantasy has failed, and actual finite human beings could not live up to the narcotic infatuation or "salvation from self" that they needed out of one another.

The moral and the political are twisted together in all this like a torqued Moebius-strip: we define our political duties toward others or our rights of expectation from them in terms of the highest moral values and obligations and principles conceivable to us. But these highest moral values etc. are themselves ideologically stunted things, a bonsai-ethos that has been deformed by the contraceptive culture of the democratist Many. Do human beings have a positive and universally recognizable right to be left alone as ingrown idiotes, as self-gratifying swinish consumers, as pathetic sacks of illusions and delusions? Are ultimate rights something that the least cultured and least reflective are fit to define for themselves, much less for everyone in general? Can any civilization afford to leave its most vital principles to be framed and legislated by the least philosophically aware? When a society organizes the entire thrust of its energies and institutions to mass-produce such obtuse types, and when malleable human nature makes this organized stupefaction all too easy and efficient, how can any mere exceptional individuals do anything about such a Malthusian dynamic?

Should a reasonable person not demand that philosophy should not be foolishly purveyed before people incompetent to see the point of it, as pearls before swine? For Nietzsche is utterly correct: philosophy is only for the healthy and whole-minded, the sick it has always only made even sicker. By means of philosophy they dig themselves even deeper into their pathetic delusions. 

"A soul mate is one with whom you have a graceful affinity and while allures, too profound to value as anything more than chance. They may reappear from time to time as a delusion when indeed they are reality."

Every principle or virtue or form of intelligence and insight is always liable to peripeteia, i.e. to an utter reversal in value-polarities:  "freedom," "rationality," and all other banausically graspable and desirable "goods-in-abstracto" inevitably and eventually slue around to become malignancies, mind-eating and personality-snuffing cancers and obsessions.  Contrary to the delusions of Christian fideism and authoritarianism, values are inherently incapable of being presented or comprehended in an ABSOLUTE form:  a malignant or delusive mentality, a malformed personality or character, can SUBVERT anything-and of course conceal from itself utterly that it itself has such a warpage or privation.

It is essential that you examine with the eye of spiritual insight these faults … you tend to exaggerate them and thus interpret your way of living as foolish and evil conduct. You would imagine faults where there are none and see a disease in what is really a cure.
~ Ibn ’Abbad of Ronda, 1332-1390 ~

A primary cause of suffering is delusion: our inability, because of a subtly willful blindness, to see things the way they truly are but instead in a distorted way. The world is in fact a seamless and dynamic unity: a single living organism that is constantly undergoing change. our minds, however, chop it up into separate, static bits and pieces, which we then try mentally and physically to manipulate. One of the mind's most dear creations is the idea of the person and, closest to home, of a very special person which each one of us calls "I": a separate, enduring ego or self. In a moment, then, the seamless universe is cut in two. There is "I" -- and there is all the rest. That means conflict -- and pain, for "I" cannot control that fathomless vastness against which it is set. It will try, of course, as a flea might pit itself against an elephant, but it is a vain enterprise.

I was pleased long ago, and even moreso now, to be achieving connections between polemics and more profound forms of philosophy--partly because I agreed with Thomas Mann, that "the destiny of man in our times presents itself in the form of politics," and because I agreed with Nietzsche that mass-slavishness and nihilistic hybris were combining to form a danger of "Great Politics" the like of which the world had never seen (a prevision clearly of Nazi imperialism and nihilism), but even moreso because political culture presents everywhere a concrete profile of the actual "values" and "dysvalues" of any given society. Politics is our aggregate or collectively effective character, replete with delusions and murderous predilections for irrealities and deceptions. The state, as Plato remarked, is the soul writ large.

Unable to be true to their innate natures and being, they still saw themselves as sages. Is this not shameful, that they were not ashamed?

Or you think you are always gentle, yet look at how viciously the world strikes at you nonetheless! This idea of your victimization is merely cynicism turned inside out and made more impenetrable to insight. You are clever enough to disguise your addiction to gloom in protests of innocence. The good news is that you may never be effectively challenged by others about this routine; few friends have enough wisdom and chutzpah at the same time. The bad news is that you will probably never walk your way to forgiveness in sensible steps. You will have to leap your own well-built defenses, disowning your morbid vanity in mid-flight.

All the darned fools in the world believe they are actually doing what they think they are doing

God works in mysterious ways. Things may look good outwardly, but there may be evil contained inside. Let no one be deluded by pride that he himself has conceived good ideas or done good deeds. If everything were as it seemed, the Prophet would not have cried out with such illuminated and illuminating perspicacity, "Show me things as they are! You make things appear beautiful when in reality they are ugly; You make things appear ugly when in reality they are beautiful. Show us therefore each thing as it is lest we fall into a snare and be ever errant.

The outer world in all its variety and our inner world of thoughts and emotions are not as they seem. All phenomena appear to exist objectively, but their true mode of existence is like a dream: apparent yet insubstantial.

As we practice, we begin to know the difference between our fantasy and reality.

Still others commit all sorts of evil deeds, claiming karma doesn’t exist. They erroneously maintain that since everything is empty, committing evil isn’t wrong. Such persons fall into a hell of endless darkness with no hope of release. Those who are wise hold no such conception.

People who don’t see their own nature and imagine they can practice thoughtlessness all the time are liars and fools.

But when you first embark on the Path, your awareness won’t be focused. You’re likely to see all sorts of strange, dreamlike scenes. But you shouldn’t doubt that all such scenes come from your own mind and nowhere else.

The awareness of mortals falls short. As long as they’re attached to appearances, they’re unaware that their minds are empty. And by mistakenly clinging to the appearance of things they lose the Way.

When you love someone, you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet, this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of time and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible in life, as in love, is in growth, in fluidity – in freedom. The only real security is not in owning or possessing, not in demanding or expecting, not in hoping, even. Security in a relationship lies neither in looking back to what it was, nor forward to what it might be, but living in the present and accepting it as it is now. For relationships, too, must be like islands. One must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits – islands surrounded and interrupted by the sea, continuously visited and abandoned by the tides. One must accept the serenity of the winged life, of ebb and flow, of intermittency.

Do not allow yourselves to be deceived: Great Minds are Skeptical.
... There is nothing more necessary than truth, and in comparison with it everything else has only secondary value.
This absolute will to truth: what is it? Is it the will to not allow ourselves to be deceived? Is it the will not to deceive? ... One does not want to be deceived, under the supposition that it is injurious, dangerous, or fatal to be deceived.

Clear mind is like the full moon in the sky. Sometimes clouds come and cover it, but the moon is always behind them. Clouds go away, then the moon shines brightly. So don't worry about clear mind: it is always there. When thinking comes, behind it is clear mind. When thinking goes, there is only clear mind. Thinking comes and goes, comes and goes, You must not be attached to the coming or the going.

There is nothing so absurd that it cannot be believed as truth if repeated often enough.

Be aware of yourself and know yourself. No matter how much you have learned and how much you know, if you don't know yourself you don't know anything. Indeed, if you don't know yourself you cannot know anything else. People who don't know themselves criticize others from the point of view of their own ignorance. They consider what agrees with them to be good, and hate whatever doesn't go their way. They become irritated about everything, causing themselves to suffer by themselves, bothering themselves solely because of their own prejudices. If you know that not everyone will be agreeable to you, know that you won't be agreeable to everyone either. Those who have no prejudices in themselves do not reject people, and therefore people do not reject them.

If aspects of the person remain undigested--cut off, denied, projected, rejected, indulged, or otherwise unassimilated--they become the points around which the core forces of greed, hatred and delusion attach themselves.

That you carry yourself forward and experience the myriad things is delusion. That the myriad things come forward and experience themselves is awakening