Is this World an Illusion?
Last month some friends of ours took my wife and I for a boat ride on Lake Winnipesaukee here in New Hampshire. It was the first and only time we were able to get out on the big lake this summer, so we were enjoying it. We were commenting on what a beautiful day it was, and then my friend said, “But maybe it is all an illusion.”
I know him as a Christian who thinks outside the box when it comes to spiritual matters, and it was the perfect opportunity for me to mention these broadcasts on Christian nonduality that I have been recording. But I did not. It is difficult to have a spiritual conversation over the roar of an outboard motor with the wind rushing by. So I made a comment about the impossibility of our physical senses to perceive reality, and we left it at that.
But I have been thinking about his comment. It is not too often that Christian people are able to glimpse beyond the veil of the traditional Western worldview and see that there is more. To question the reality that we can see and touch is a big jump for Christians to make. After all we are the heirs of the western science and materialism.
So is the world illusion? Without a motorboat and wind to limit my response, I would say Yes … and No. Every statement we make about Reality has to be qualified, because human language and the ideas behind it cannot grasp the Truth of this nondual universe. When the world is seen through, it is known that the world is not what it seems to be. So the answer is Yes. But when that statement is posited as a philosophical or theological truth claim the answer is No.
If you have read or listened to nondual spiritual teachers you have likely heard one half of that answer repeated often: that the world is an illusion. It is not real. It is a product of the mind. If the teacher comes from a Hindu background or has been heavily influenced by Indian philosophy – which is very common when it comes to nonduality - they will use the word maya. The world is an illusion. It is not real.
As I hear people expound that idea, it seems they mean that the world of our senses is nothing more than a mirage, a hallucination or a dream. It is all in our minds. It is a product of our imagination. In fact the word “dream” is often used in reference to this. We are said to wake up as if from a dream. That is certainly what it feels like.
The problem arises when this statement is made into an idea that is to be believed as part of a system called nonduality. Then the idea is false. That idea is an illusion. Then it is an obstacle to waking up. It just puts us deeper into the dream. The little self or false self – our mind - is not imagining all this. The True Self, our Universal Self, is forming all this that we call the world. That is what the Bible calls Creation.
As I read it the Biblical creation story in the opening chapter of Genesis, the universe is a product of the mind of God. God speaks the universe into existence. God says “Let there be light” and “Let there be earth, and stars and sun and living things, and so forth.” Everything is words of God, which are nothing more than ideas of God. Everything is in the mind of God. This is all the dream of God, which if it is not seen as such can seem to be a nightmare.
Furthermore our perception of this world is distorted. I am no expert on Indian terms but I have read that this is the real meaning of the term maya. It does not mean illusion so much as it means deception. It is not that it doesn’t exist. It is just not what it appears to be. We are being deceived by our senses. We mistake what we sense for reality whereas it is really a distorted perception of reality. That is what I was trying to communicate in brief to my friend on the lake in a couple of brief sentences.
Our senses are very imperfect instruments for perceiving the world. We have only five senses, and even those are not very good. Imagine how many other ways there are to perceive the world. We know for example that bats and bees and spiders see the world very differently than us. We know that there are wavelengths that we cannot see – like infrared and ultraviolet. We can measure them with instruments, but even those instruments are just extensions of our sense of sight. How many other senses are possible than our five? There are countless more senses possible that we cannot imagine.
Furthermore how many more dimensions are there then the three spatial dimensions that we know, plus time, totaling four? String theory says there are ten dimensions or possibly eleven. The existence of dark matter and dark energy reveals that there is more to the universe than we can perceive. Scientists tells us that roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest - everything on Earth, everything ever observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter - adds up to less than 5% of the universe. We know nothing about 95% of the universe!
If you only can see 5% of something, you know you perception of it will be warped. You have likely heard the old story of a group of blind men feeling different parts of an elephant and each saying the animal was different. One says it is like a snake. Another like a fan or a tree or a wall or a rope or a spear. Depending on which part of the elephant they were feeling. Each are convinced that their perception of the elephant is right based on the physical evidence they have. We can sense with our five senses only a small fraction of 5% of the universe. From that we draw a conclusion about what the universe is like. Of course we are wrong about it. It is more fantasy than reality! That is maya.
Yet the fraction of the 5% that we can perceive is real. The physical world is not make-believe. In this regard the work of cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman is helpful. He has a marvelous book entitled, The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes. He argues that our senses are not meant to accurately perceive reality. Evolution produced our five senses purely to help the organism survive.
He insists that there is a real external world, but we don’t see it as it is. He used the analogy of icons on a computer screen. He says that what we are seeing to hearing or smelling or touching is the icon. It represents something real, like the icon on a computer screen is a representation of something in the computer. But the icon is not what it points to. What we perceive is not what is really in the universe. The universe is real, but it is not what we think it is.
There is a story about the great 8th century Indian scholar Shankara, who was an authority on the subject of Advaita Vedanta. He taught that the world is maya, normally translated illusion. Once he was teaching on the subject outside when suddenly a mad elephant came running toward them, destroying everything in its way, and injuring people. The people listening to Shankara started running. Seeing the elephant, Shankara also started running along with the crowd and escaped to safety. After the elephant was captured and everything settled down, he went back to teaching the people. A man in the group asked sarcastically Shankara, “If the whole world is maya, and then the elephant is maya. So why were you scared and run away?” Shankara replied “My running was also maya.”
This world is certainly not what we think it is. But it is something, and we better pay attention or we will be run over by a mad elephant! The fact that the universe has reality in the mind of God means that we are to take it seriously. When we hear of children being abused, we cannot say, “It doesn’t matter. They are only illusion.” When we read of Black youth being killed by police officers who have taken it upon themselves to be judge, jury and executioner, we cannot say, “It doesn’t matter. It is only illusion.” It does matter.
This world is the creation of the mind of God. That makes it real, even if it is not what we think it is. That makes it holy and precious and every life sacred. We are one with the One who has imagined this universe into existence. As such we have a responsibility for it and within it. This is where Christian nonduality can be a corrective to the variety that tends to retreat from the world because it does not really exist.
So is this world illusion? Well, it is not what we think it is. We do not have a clue what it really is. Neither our senses nor our brains are equal to the task of knowing. But whatever this world is, it really is. This world is real because it is an expression of Reality, and you can’t get any more real than that! I call this Reality God, which makes this world holy and sacred. It is not to be trivialized or downplayed or ignored. That is why the biblical propjets took what happens in history so seriously. In God this world lives and moves and has its being, as the apostle Paul said. To know that is Truth is to wake up from illusion to Reality.