More about Illusion

  We had a very thought provoking discussion in our study group tonight about the role of dreams in daily life, and how the life of sentient beings, at least from a Buddhist perspective, is very much a prolonged kind of dream. It's not that each individual is 'locked' into their own state of being. Rather, it's that collectively, communities create shared dreams. To use one example: people grow up believing that a red light means 'stop'. Over time, that signal is internalized to mean danger, or caution, even when it is only a red colored light and nothing more. It's only because many people collectively agree on the shared meaning of the light that there can be a meaning to begin with. The same is true for miniature communities. From an outsider's point of view, a Star Trek or Comic Con convention may seem a bit strange, especially if the members invent new terms for alien languages. But is that any different from the everyday languages we are using today?
    One of the members talked about her understanding from Chan teachers: everything in daily experience is using supernatural powers. This is not easy to understand, but the concept is something like: when I raise my hand, is there really a 'me' raising the hand? The entire experience of the body is a kind of complex creation. The body is not simply something I am born knowing, but as some philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty have suggested, it's a felt sense that is developed through certain repeated behaviors and choices. There is nothing solid or even particularly unified about this repertoire of sensing and responding that is then called a body. Really, it is quite an amazing conjuring trick, to feel that there is this 'body' that is originating the experiences of lifting or perceiving a 'hand'. But it is truly a creation that is being sustained day after day. There is even an experiment called the 'phantom arm' which shows how easy it is to train our minds into believing that a fake plastic arm is really 'our arm' and has the ability to feel pain. This is why a person often recoils when the phantom arm is hit with a hammer. It's not that I feel pain at all, but the mind conjures up the possibility based on a set of previous encounters.
      I guess the idea behind supernatural powers is that there is no end to the possible illusions that we operate under. But once we explain the relationship between dreams and what we think are 'real facts' about those dreams, we just fall into further illusions of an underlying truth. While it's said that H2O is the universal formula for water, this does not replace the taste of water, or the fact that it is used to cook noodles. All these things are functioning in some way to create a limited reality. But there is no ultimate fact about water, because everything one can think of with regards to anything is only relative to the signs and conventions we have agreed upon to refer to it.