Illusion, truth and reality (Part 7)

I’m about to take a class in a first year unit I used to teach at the UNE. At the time I was teaching in three separate units; the Great Traditions of Asia, Introduction to Religions, and Islam in the Modern World.

    ‘I’m an academic schizophrenic,’ I said time and again, ‘because although I teach in cultural history and religions, my post-graduate students are all in the field of Asian modern politics and history, or the social phenomena spawned by them, like child labour, or women and child trafficking.’

    But here I am in this posting, inching my way towards some sort of personal explanation of illusion and reality – because without this, the study of any religion, or comparative religion is as pointless as comparing footballs with butter. Is it important? When you think of everything that’s done in the name of religion this day, too right it is.

    I tried to lay some groundwork for this in earlier postings, but it’s a tall order. Maybe the conflict between illusion and reality in my mother’s last months of life has helped. I don’t know. It was a while ago when I wrote it. You may decide to go back to it.

    ‘I want you to use your imagination here,’ I say. ‘Think of a stage magician – a very good one, like you might see on TV, but think of them firstly in front of a theatre audience right here on campus.’

    ‘If you’re like me, you watch magicians perform amazing feats and if they’re really good you can’t work out how they do them all. Maybe we have an idea how they did some tricks, but other illusions just seem to beggar rational explanation.’

    ‘Yet even if I don’t get how it’s done, there’s one thing I don’t believe. I don’t think for one moment that they’ve performed a feat of magic. I don’t believe that they made a flock of pigeons materialise out of thin air, even though the hat that they came from was so obviously empty a moment ago. Neither does the rest of the audience, I’m sure!’

    You know it’s an illusion. A trick. Sleight of hand or a distraction at the right time. You see things as you think they are, even though that other part of your brain tells you that you’ve been fooled. If only you had more information on what was really happening while the trick was being performed, you’d see it for what it was – something perfectly rational and explainable.

    It’s not a miracle at all. We comfort ourselves with that.

    ‘Now,’ I say, ‘imagine that same magician goes to an island and performs these same feats even we sophisticated people can’t understand. This island is totally isolated, and the local people have never before seen a stage magician. He performs his show for them. His audience is ignorant and uneducated by our standards, and have never seen anything that comes from modern civilisation.’

    ‘What would they see? They’d see him perform truly miraculous feats, there in front of them, right before their eyes. Why would they not believe what they’ve just seen?’

    Nothing is more believable than what’s appeared before you like this, as in my mother's case. How could they doubt it?

    ‘I haven’t said this to make another group look stupid. On the contrary, they have a clear explanation for what they just saw, and it’s this. He can perform magic. He has mysterious power. Maybe there’s nothing he can’t do, with that sort of power....’

    ‘And yet we feel content in our own knowledge of this magician, comforted by the knowledge that he’s a fraud; an entertaining one of course, but we know him for what he is.’

    We have him neatly labelled in the right part of our brain.

    ‘What we don’t understand is that the world we inhabit is just like that, full of illusion, and we accept that illusion just as easily as those folk on the island. It fools us constantly because we interpret things as rationally as we can, and though it might satisfy us, we still come up with a faulty explanation; one that might be fine until it reaches the limits of our understanding.’

    ‘There’s nothing wrong with the idea of a flat earth if you live out your life in a small village in the middle of Oxfordshire in the twelfth century. It’s only when things fail to add up on the high seas and you find there are no edges to the world, and that if you go in the same direction you’ll end up where you came from that you have to think about the earth in a different way.’

    We sophisticated humans think we’ve got a fair grasp of it all, even when we know we don’t understand something, but we’re deceived all the time by our ignorance of the nature of what’s around us.’

    ‘We’re trapped in illusion.’

    Some of the students look quizzical. Others believe in their own form of magic and think I’m making an issue of nothing.

    This time we’re sitting round a table in a tutorial room. I want to hear what they’ve got to say, not to harry them constantly.

    ‘Let’s do a thought experiment. I want you to imagine that today I’ve brought a large box into the room and it’s in the centre of the table. Around the sides of this box are ten small holes an equal distance apart through which you can see what’s in the box. There’s ten of you here today. I want you to write down in one sentence what you can see of what’s in the box through your one little window, given the fact that the object has shape and colour.’

    They get into the spirit of the exercise. Let’s go round and see what they’re seeing.

    ‘It’s red and square and is made of metal.’

    ‘It’s black, round on one end and pointed on the other.’

    ‘It’s made of wood and rough and brown.’

    ‘Maybe it’s alive and fluffy,’ says the jokester. There’s always one, which can be a relief in a tutorial sometimes.

    ‘Let’s not complicate things too much right now,’ I say. But you get the idea. All have their turn at describing the object.

    ‘What have we learned from this?’

    Everyone interprets things from their own viewpoint. Each person has their own window to look at the same thing but it looks different from where they are. Each person has just their own version of something, unique to them. If we could look through more of the windows we’d get a better idea of what the thing really is. If we could take away the box covering it altogether we’d understand what it is much better. Maybe we could all agree much more about it in that case.

    ‘Does it mean if we all see it differently that the thing in the box doesn’t exist?’

    ‘Of course not!’ They are almost indignant at the suggestion.

    'I’m glad you said that. So are we all right?' 

   'Not really.'

   'Are we all wrong?'

   'We're all partly right, but we can only see it through our window and interpret it from the info we've got.'

   'Bingo! That's how we always see the world. In Hinduism, there’s a term for all this. It’s called maya, and that can be translated as illusion. Hinduism says that a characteristic of existence is maya. Sometimes people have said that if the world is maya, or illusion, then it doesn’t really exist, and you have to look elsewhere for reality. But of course it exists. Confronting maya is an awareness that human understanding is partial, or relative - that maya is an integral part of reality, not the opposite of it.’

    ‘If part of what’s in our box is religion, then this helps us understand what the problems are when it comes to discussing it. And there’s one other vital thing in understanding why we have such a problem with religion.’

    We have to think about what religion really is. Who can say, maybe it’s alive and fluffy after all.... But in trying to do that, we run into yet another problem.

pt 1 | pt 2 | pt 3 | pt 4 | reality? | pt 5 | pt 6 | pt 7 | pt 8
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