For a magician to fool his audience his deceit must go unseen, and to this end he crafts an illusion to avert attention from reality. While the audience is entranced, the deceptive act is committed, and for the fool, reality then becomes inexplicable built upon on a lie. That is, until the fool wakes up and recognizes the Truth in the fact that he has been duped.
However, it is more comforting to maintain the suspension of disbelief in the illusion than acknowledging the magician's secrets.
In the same way we live in a world of illusion. So many of the concerns that occupy the mind and the tasks that fill every day of our lives arise from planted impulses to become someone or something that we are not. This is not accident. We are indoctrinated into this consumer culture that now dominates the human race. We are trained to think that certain aspects of our society are untouchable truths, and because of that implantation in our thinking process, particular ways of being and behaving are preferred. It blind us with never ceasing barrages of suggestions and absolutes that are aimed at the shattering of our self-confidence and at the same time the confidence in what really is going to happen with us in the future.
Advertising is just the tip of the iceberg. When we look further we see that the overall organization of life is centered around the pursuit of illusions and automatic obedience to institutions and ideas which are not at all what they seem or pretend to be. We are in a very real sense, enslaved to an illusion of life in the material World.
Many call this an intangible feeling of oppression that comes from a system designed only to the purpose of obtain the total control of our minds, programming individuals to pattern themselves in accordance with a mainstream based on an extreme feeling of conformity with the version of reality presented to us, regardless how wicked it gets.
Law, Order, and Authority, is considered a moral obligation to many of us, and gladily we follow it, even though corruption, scandal, and wickedness repeatedly demonstrate that the law is flexible to those who has the muscle to bend it. When the law itself does not follow its nature, there is no law, there is no order, and there is no justice. It is just an illusion of it.
Prosperity and happiness is not just adorning ourselves in expensive clothes and amassing material possessions, it just is the substitute for genuine prosperity. Maintaining the illusion, though, is critical to our economy, because its foundation is built on consumption, fraud, credit, and debt. The banking system itself has been engineering to create this illusion for the benefit of a few while we are being taxed until the day we died. True prosperity is a vibrant environment and an abundance of blessings bringing thanksgiving, health, happiness, love, and good interrelationship between members of the communities. As much as people come to perceive the material goods as an illusion of wealthiness and self-identification, we will slip farther and farther away from the experience of true prosperity.
Freedom is about having choice. We are not free, because choice has come to mean a selection between available options, between the confines of a corrupt legal and taxation system and within the boundaries of culturally accepted and enforced norms. The illusion of choice and freedom is a powerful oppressor because it fools us into accepting chains and short leashes as though they represent the hallmarks of liberty.
Truth has become an illusion based on what we have been programmed to believe from the information that comes from the demigods of media, celebrity, and government. If the news declare something to be true, then we are heretics to believe otherwise.
Time is being said that represents money, but it is a lie. Time is our life in this material World. Looking beyond the 5 sense world, where we have been trained to move in accordance with the clock and calendar, we find the truth that our spirit is eternal and that each individual soul is part of this eternity.
The reinforcement of the idea that the present moment is of little or no value, that the past is something we cannot undo or forget, and the future is more important than the past and the present, carries our attention away from what is actually happening right now. Once we are completely focused on what is to come rather than what it is, we are easy prey to advertisers who muddy our vision of the future with every possible worry. Forfeiting the present moment in order to fantasize an illusion of the future is a trap.
We are happy when life does not box us in, when spontaneity and randomness gives us the chance to know more about ourselves. The immense, timeless moments of spiritual joy that are found in quiet meditation are proof that time is totally a construction of our mind as humans and not necessarily mandatory.
We are programmed to believe that as individuals we are in competition with everyone and everything around us, even mother nature, denying the truth that life on this planet is infinitely inter-connected.
Without clean air, clean water, healthy soil, and a global sense of community we are not able to survive.
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