Is the Universe Really Just an Illusion?
What does illusion even mean?
The perspective that the universe is an illusion is not only part of ancient traditions such as Advaita Vedanta and is often quoted by spiritual people, but it is also shared by some great Western thinkers.
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” (Albert Einstein)
Is this true? And if so, what exactly does it mean? In what sense is reality an illusion?
Follow me as I bring clarity to this.
What is an Illusion?
The word illusion originates from Latin in (= at, upon) and ludere (= to play) and is used in the sense of “deceptive appearance.” Something is an illusion if it is not what it looks like. An example is the following optical illusion where you see a cube, even though there is no cube:
A cube is a three-dimensional object, but this is a two-dimensional image, so it can’t be a cube. It is simply a configuration of twelve line segments arranged to suggest a cube. In fact, the image even suggests two versions of a cube, one with the lower-left square as the front and one with the upper-right square as the front.
You see a cube because the image suggests a cube and you are familiar with cubes. You are familiar with cubes because you have seen countless cubes and other rectangular objects in your life. Your eyes supply the brain with information, and the mind interprets that information based on your familiarities, which are the patterns in your life history. In other words, you perceive through the filter of your life history.
An illusion is created when the mind misinterprets. How is the universe/reality, which we experience as matter and space, an illusion in this sense? From where do we look at the universe and what kind of deception are we exposed to?
More Than the Universe
Your perspective depends not only on how your mind interprets the information gathered by your senses, but also on your location. When you climb a tree as a woodworm, your perspective of the tree differs from the perspective you have when you look at the tree from 100 feet away.
To get the most objective perspective, we should look at the universe from a “distance,” ie from “outside” the universe. To find such a “place,” let’s do a thought experiment in which we remove the universe, which includes removing space.
The universe is the world of things, because the word thing means stretch, and all components of the universe, space and spatial phenomena such as matter, have stretch. This is the same as reality, because this word comes from Latin res (= thing). If you remove all things, no thing remains. The result is aptly called NO-THING or non-universe. The characteristic of the universe is separateness, which is the essence of space, matter, etc. Therefore, the characteristic of the non-universe is non-separateness, another word for it is entanglement. I call the non-universe EL as an abbreviation of ‘entanglement at large.’ (This was the short version of the thought experiment; a more detailed version can be found in my article “Thoughts are Not Products of the Brain.”)
In this graphic, the universe is enclosed by a box because there is more than the universe, namely the non-universe as its opposite/complement. The non-universe is “on the other side” of the universe — whatever that means in no-space. So there is some kind of “boundary” between the universe and the non-universe. This does not contradict the possibility that the universe is spatially infinite. Let us consider a sphere for illustration:
The surface of a sphere is two-dimensional. It is infinite, ie it has no end. No matter where you are on the surface, you can travel in any direction and will never come to an end. If you travel long enough and never change direction, you will come back to the place where you started and can continue the journey by looping around the sphere. However, the three-dimensional sphere is finite and thus limited. In the same way, our three-dimensional universe could be the surface of an enormously large four-dimensional sphere. In this case, the universe (space) could be infinite, although it is finite and limited in a higher dimension.
The Illusory Universe
The essence of the universe is separateness. Therefore, from the perspective of the universe, the non-universe/EL is the complementary “world” that is separate from it.
Imagine that you leave the universe and thus enter EL. Once you are in EL, look back to where you came from.
Since the essence of the non-universe/EL is non-separateness, there is nothing separate from it. Therefore, EL has no complement/opposite. There is no “non-EL”. There is no “non-non-universe.” When you remove the double negation in this sentence, it becomes: there is no universe. All in all, from the perspective of EL, there is no universe. There is only EL. EL is all there is.
It’s like standing on a seashore, facing the water, stepping in, then turning around, looking back at where you came from, and realizing there is no shore anymore — just an endless sea.
This seems paradoxical, but the disappearance of the universe as a consequence of the change of perspective is a logical consequence of the properties of EL, which were also logically deduced.
Is the EL perspective only a philosophical game? Quite the contrary. As I explain in “Thoughts are Not Products of the Brain,” EL is pure information. It is the fabric of thought. The EL perspective is knowing. It is our natural (and only) perspective.
From the EL perspective, there is no universe. Yet you see a universe consisting of space and matter. It is like the optical illusion where you see a cube, although there is none.
The truth behind the illusory three-dimensional cube is a two-dimensional image with twelve line segments arranged in such a way that your mind interprets them as a cube.
Likewise, there is a truth behind what you perceive as space and matter. And since EL is all there is, this truth is made of EL and your mind interprets it as space and matter.
How the Illusion of Space and Matter Occurs
What do you see in this picture?
You may say, “I see a house and a tree.” How do you know that there are two distinct entities of matter, a house and a tree? Could an alien life form that knows neither trees nor houses know this picture shows two different objects? It could not, no matter how intelligent it was. From the picture alone, you can’t tell. The picture shows blobs of color. They create the illusion of a house and a tree for those who are familiar with houses and trees. You are familiar with houses and trees because you have seen countless houses and trees in your life. You have learned that trees and houses are entities of matter. You have learned that space is the gap between two distinct entities of matter. All you see in the above picture are blobs of color — and you have learned to describe that experience using words like matter, space, tree, house, separate, etc.
When you were very little, your perception of the world was probably very different than it is today. Because you grew up among people who saw the world in a certain way, you were inevitably programmed to see it in the same way. The concept of separateness, which underlies the concepts of space and matter, develops along with the concept of ‘I,’ which is the distinction between you and everything else: I versus Not-I is the root of the experience of separateness. The details of this learning process are technical. You can find them in my book “Consciousness : Its Nature, Purpose, and How to Use It.”
But you are not separate from anything, not even from other people. To illustrate this, imagine a puppeteer with countless hands and a total of 8 billion fingers, with a finger puppet on each finger. That is humankind. Your body is one of the finger puppets, and the puppeteer is your higher self, which is also the higher self of everyone else. (See my article “Thoughts are Not Products of the Brain” for a discussion of the lower and higher selves.)
Application
The essence of being human is the ability not to follow one’s programs. (I explain this in “This is Exactly the Difference Between Humans and Animals”). Therefore, you can free yourself from the programs that create illusions.
Exercise 1: Look again at the picture that suggests a cube. You now know that this picture has three perspectives: the left-down cube, the right-up cube, and the two-dimensional pattern of twelve line segments. Learn to switch among these three perspectives at will. How easy is it for you to see the truth, the two-dimensional pattern? It may not be easy at first, but when you practice, it gets easier.
Exercise 2: In the following picture, you can see a white square partly overlaying four black disks. However, there is no square in this picture because there are no four line segments of equal length with 90° angles between them. The picture just shows four incomplete black discs that look like Pac-Man figures. Try to see not a white square, but four Pac-Man figures. How can you achieve this? Practice.
Exercise 3: Make it a habit to question what you perceive. Ask yourself: What other interpretations are possible?
Further (supplementary) readings:
Article “Thoughts are Not Products of the Brain”
Article “This is Exactly the Difference Between Humans and Animals”
Book “Consciousness : Its Nature, Purpose, and How to Use It”
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