SMOKE AND MIRRORS

Present consciousness (now), anticipation (future), and memory (past) create the illusion of a self. Krishnamurti said, “Could it be that you identify yourself with a merely abstract ego based on nothing but memories?” There is this physical body, this happening, sure enough, but it is all that there is. There is, furthermore, no self separate from the rest of existence as our egos would have us believe. There is no little person sitting at a console in our head, "driving" our bodies. It is the difference between having a body and being a body.

Hormones contribute to the illusion of a self. This is the lie of hormones. It is not until testosterone recedes in men in their fifties, to give an example, that they realize the extent to which they have seen the world through a veil.

There is as well the lie of mental states. We are conditioned to view the world and ourselves in a certain light, which may be false. This includes the lie of symbolic thinking (e.g. thinking about thinking and the problems that thinking creates), and the lie of language (e.g. words about words and problems that words create). We don’t know what we are looking at half the time and then we go on to communicate about it using symbols which are merely approximations of what we mean. Alfred Korzybski noted, “Whatever you say something is, it isn’t,” with Alan Watts adding, “nothing is really describable.” Compounding this, we identify ourselves with our thoughts. We think we are our thoughts.

Also there is the lie of feeling states. We are conditioned emotionally to react to the world and ourselves in certain ways, which may be false. When one is lonely, he misses his family, friends, and God. Loneliness, though, like all other feelings, comes, as Krishnamurti explains, from thoughts, and thoughts are impermanent, transient, and unreliable. So, feelings likewise then are impermanent, transient, and unreliable. Yet we identify ourselves with our feelings. We feel we are our feelings. We feel we are our moods.

Our lives are just these smoke and mirrors, called “maya” in Buddhism, meaning to be enchanted, spellbound. What we actually are is just consciousness, the watcher, so-called. We are a conscious body. In Vedanta the watcher, or consciousness, is called the Atman, which is the immanent form of the Brahman.

Buddhism holds that the individual is merely a temporary collection of momentary events that are constantly in flux in their causal relationship to each other, with a consciousness that expires when the individual expires.  In Vedanta, relative consciousness expires, but transcendental consciousness, the Atman, does not.