234. Two Illusions

We want to know how the world works because such knowledge is practically useful. When we know how things work we become more capable of manipulating the world to meet our material needs. The unquestionable power of knowing how each part works logically leads us to a desire to know how the whole works. So we start looking for a system that can coherently bring all of the parts together. The system we desire is a narrative connecting past, present, and future through a complex array of causal links.

Our attachment to this desire for a unified theory leads us to also become attached to two illusions. The first is that we believe the elements brought together by our system are genuinely separate entities and not aspects of a singular whole. Without hard distinctions between the parts we cannot construct a narrative, so we naturally see these distinctions as primary and essential.

The second illusion is that we come to see both the entities distinguished and the relationships between them as permanent and unchanging. While we might allow for change to happen within the system, we make certain parts of the system fixed by calling them unalterable constants or laws of nature.

Burdened by these two illusions, it becomes almost impossible to fully understand our experience of the world and ourselves. The suffering we feel occurs because we believe ourselves to be wholly distinct from other people and objects, and because we believe some of these entities must be permanent and lasting when they are also impermanent and subject to change.

The solution to this problem is not merely to adopt the belief that non-distinction is somehow more true than distinction, or that impermanence is somehow more true than permanence, for this would just be to fall into another set of illusions.

To break free from our attachments to distinction and permanence is to see these features of our experience as no more or less real than their opposites. It is to accept that our experience is profoundly paradoxical and contradictory in all of its facets. It is to allow ourselves the emptiness of not this and not that, and by doing so, to grant ourselves the opportunity to transform our suffering into joy.