by Bill Cottringer

     Today I am graduating into my second year of my ninth decade of living life. So, I think I will venture down this rabbit hole for some profound insights into life, at least as far down the rabbit hole my current brain power will allow me to tiptoe. What I see now as the main challenge of life is to see and experience reality as it really is in the eternal now moment, without the contamination of fading past memories or quickly arriving future expectations. To do this, one has to see through the veils of the seven great illusions of life (at least according to ChatGPT)

    Here are the seven great, compelling illusions of life that collectively hide reality from us, at least until we learn the art of seeing past what we are looking at and understanding that “trying” is just a noisy way of not doing something. Or as Yoda would say, “Do or don’t.”

1. Separation. We see ourselves as distinct and separate from the rest of life through our perceptions and from all the sense of differences we observe. And of course, mirrors and other reflections help announce the clear, separate image of ourselves. This illusion takes forefront until we start to gain a sense of interconnectedness to the vast oneness that gave us birth and to which we return at death (Thermodynamics Law # 1). An introduction to the interdependence of this interconnectedness occurs with gaining a sense of the interaction going on between these illusions in collectively hiding reality from us.  

2. Control. We think we can control our destiny and the various situations we find ourselves in, if we just get smart and clever enough and work really hard to get results. And most of us do get enough results to reinforce this illusion in perpetuity. But after we fail enough trying to control others, finally realizing we can’t even control ourselves, we gradually begin to see past this control illusion with our emerging doubts about the permanence and reality of any “self” to do the controlling. Then by serendipity, we stumble upon an important insight—The best starting point with control, is with choosing how to react to the next situation life puts us in. The more we exercise that small part of our free will, the larger and more effective that ability gets.

3. Permanence. This illusion affects all the others by giving us the sense that we can capture something we experience in our lives and then immobilize it in time to think about it and understand it well enough to our satisfaction, all for the proper response. This is so we can use it to our benefit or throw it away as useless in our life goals. In reality, everything we see, hear and sense is in constant flux with no permanence in structure, time or space, because the self has already rapidly moved on once the thought occurs. The physics principle of uncertainty dismisses any realness of the certainty of permanence.

4. Self-Ego.  This compelling illusion is difficult to unpackage, being wrapped tightly by all these other illusions. Our accomplishments in controlling life to our desires are enough to keep our precious sense of a separate self to do all this alive and well. But of course, these other illusions hide reality further, at least until we finally realize there is no permanent self, but rather just a collection of quickly fading memories or even quicker future expectations of hopes and fears. The self changes with each new moment and never is the same with each new change, no matter how small it may be. The fact that all the cells in the body change in less than two years, should be enough proof of this particular illusion

5. Time. The illusion of time was even difficult for Einstein to see past. The sense of movement of things from the future to the present and then to the past is very much part of us as much as our skin. And getting rid of this time illusion is like an already naked man trying to disrobe his clothes. Once we start making some progress in dismissing the power that all these illusions collectively have in our consciousness, we become more prone to value the present moment by using the gift of mindfulness to become more aware of what is going on around us right now. Our end game here is to live more in the present now moment of direct experience and do less passive thinking about the past or anticipating the future.

6. Duality. There are obvious definitive dualities of yang and yins in living life such as birth and earth, night and day, pain and pleasure and hot and cold. But I think we take dualisms and polarizations of opposites to extremes when we make the artificial judgements of good vs. bad, right vs. wrong, better vs. worse, and smarter vs. dumber and so on. This habit is actually an extension of the separation and permanence illusions and probably a direct descendant of the early school exercise of identifying similarities and differences to things, maybe in order to see reality more clearly?  At any rate, at the end of the day we begin to see that all these “opposites” are really just different sides to the same coin.

7. Materialism. The hope that the acquisition of material things will make us happier than being without these things is protected from seeing it as an illusion by all these other ones. Like the separate, permanent self controlling the duality of having and not having in the future-present-past time sequence. But here again at the end of the day, there are not enough things to make our insatiable need for them to be fulfilled. Authentic happiness can only occur through good relationships, right behavior and experiencing reality without artificial judgments.

     Now please understand this is not a universal roadmap to seeing reality, just mine that I stumbled upon by good fortune. If you haven’t already found it, then it is just a matter of time until you find your own true path to see the reality that lies past what you are looking at. By the way, the “almighty self” is a collection of all our tiny little selves of the four categories of existence—minerals, plants, animals and humans—often know by the name, God.

William Cottringer, Ph.D., is retired from 55 years of criminal justice leadership roles in law enforcement, corrections, security and mental health. He is currently the Chairman of the Board for the Because Organization, an intervention program in human trafficking. He also serves as a member of the King County Sheriff’s Advisory Board and is Judge Advocate for the local American Legion Post in Snoqualmie WA and a member of the WA Department of the American legion Internal Affairs Commission and National Legislative Affairs Committee. Dr. Bill is the author of several business and personal development books including You Can Have Your Cheese & Eat It Too (Executive Excellence), Do What Matters Most and “P” Point Management (Atlantic Book Publishers), Reality Repair (Global Vision Press), and Thoughts on Happiness, Pearls of Wisdom, Christian Psychology, and Reality Repair Rx+ (Covenant Books, Inc.). Bill can be reached for comments and questions at 206-914-1863 or ckuretdoc.comcast.net