Spirituality Made Simple

If it hasn't occurred to you in the spiritual traditions everyone comes to this essential question of What is illusion But it's not illusion Buddha spoke of all of this being an illusion that even the sense of I the I-ness that's perpetuating this sense of continuity inside ourselves that itself is an illusion of perception that perception has been formed and has continued like a wave throughout time and space as waves somehow self-referencing each other and giving an apparency of an I state of being And in the Buddhist traditions they call this an Atman a no- Self There's no-Self here Certain schools of Indian philosophy of the idea Advaita that there is no duality there is no actual I center that alone in itself is an illusion Now what's interesting is there are other schools of Indian philosophy let's say it is not an Atman meaning that there is no center Self no apparency of Self There actually is a Self and in that Self Atman is a divine aspect of the absolute divinity a spark of the divine And that this spark of the divine somehow forgets or becomes alienated or separated out from its unity and wholeness with the grand Atman Paramatman the divine absolute God Self And somehow gets mired in illusion thinking that it's a separate Self not God that this is not God that this is all just bits and pieces of a universe And that they are in the middle of this universe And somehow through time that we live and die learning lessons of greater consciousness Or somehow we get even more deluded in the illusion and delude ourselves thinking that we're physical being with this mind this thought this feeling this emotion this history And that the path of awakening is recognizing that we are actually not this physical stuff we're not our minds our thoughts We re not just our feelings and emotions we're not our actions In fact we're not even our stories We're not our histories All the things that we so hold on to tightly to make ourselves into an apparent self is actually all and even the mechanism to make ourselves into an apparent Self it s an illusion I posed this question once to one of my spiritual teachers in Egypt his name is Hakeem And he was a wisdom keeper of this ancient Egyptian wisdom commission wisdom school indigenous wisdom from ancient Kamath which is what they called Egypt back then And I'm right there across the Sphinx with him in his home that we could see in a little window the pyramids and the Sphinx He called it Tefnuti the spit of the goddess And we're there in this divine realm with him and he's passing around his hookah myself and my crew were there sitting with him speaking for hours about so many philosophical topics And I say Hakeem what is this What's the absolute truth if you know it Is there Atman meaning is there divine Self and that the apparency of this is the illusion but not the divine Self Or is there no divine Self no Self at all And that's the absolute truth He looks at me with this deep smile he had this face smile ear to ear and this deep voice of the Egyptian wisdom keeper And he says to me he looks at me and he goes with this piercing eye of humor It's the same experience - two different viewpoints For him though all the philosophies of India all the philosophies of Buddhism all the philosophies of Hinduism Yoga Advaita Vedanta Tantra - you name it we can go on with all these schools - there were just points of view He had reduced everything down to someone you or me and all of us taking a point of view of infinity And then we're the ones that are choosing or somehow ascribe This is real you're real I'm not real this is real not real One of the foundational practices is to look at real and unreal what is illusionary what is truth and to feel for the truth of each one of those in your life as a navigation system As a continuous self-inquiry as a continuous keeping yourself honest practice It is what I'm doing my actions my thoughts even my goals my philosophies my personal viewpoints - how real are they How do I know they're real What are they standing on Are my viewpoints and ideas standing on knowledge that perhaps might have holes in it Or is it standing firmly It's up to us to really discover the truth of what is illusionary what is true In my experience they're the same thing from two viewpoints For me what's true is this right here right now without any qualification without adding any thoughts about this circumstance this moment Without taking a viewpoint and narrowing down this whole experience into an opinion I like to start to find those lodged opinions in which I have triangulated and circulated and corralled a vast amounts of idea and put them into a firm knowingness Perhaps an entrenched way of being -- perhaps becoming an old dog that can't learn new tricks

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