··· Tags pointing to: illusion ···

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.

— Mary Wollstonecraft  <link>

The great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances as though they were realities.

— Machiavelli (via)  <link>

More persons, on the whole, are humbugged by believing in nothing than by believing in too much.

— P.T. Barnum  <link>

Power is always temporary.

— Martin Firrell [via]  <link>

Balance is always elusive.

— Author unknown  <link>

The greatest of all illusions is the illusion of familiarity.

G.K. Chesterton  <link>

Solitude is the furnace of transformation. Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self.

— Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude  <link>

Perhaps an Illusion that We “Live”

Does not one of our elementary errors lie in imagining that we “do” things, for it seems to be equally probable that things “do” us? We believe that we perform an endless series of actions, but the truth may be that an endless series of actions performs us. We think that we manipulate events, but are we not rather manipulated by events? We think we go to meet that which we experience, but that which we experience may come to meet us. It is perhaps an illusion that we “live”: we are “lived”.

— Wei Wu Wei, Fingers Pointing Towards the Moon  <link>

We ourselves are not an illusory part of Reality; rather we are Reality itself illusorily conceived.

— Wei Wu Wei, Fingers Pointing Towards the Moon  <link>

The Illusion of Me

You align yourself with the form [of the moment]. Don’t fight the form. The moment you fight the form, the form of me gets strengthened in yourself. The me that is based on my thought forms gets stronger through the struggle, the reaction, the reactivity of what is. Ultimately, the illusion of me gets strengthen by fighting what is.

— Eckhart Tolle, Through the Open Door  <link>

Identification with your mind creates an opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words, judgments, and definitions that blocks all true relationship. It comes between you and yourself, between you and your fellow man and woman, between you and nature, between you and God. It is this screen of thought that creates the illusion of separateness, the illusion that there is you and a totally separate “other.” You then forget the essential fact that, underneath the level of physical appearances and separate forms, you are one with all that is.

— Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now  <link>