Hi Kim,

You wrote, "Please explain the difference between that kind of illusion and the kind of illusion that life challenges us with."

The things we're challenged with in life are real. The illusion is when we invest too much in them. What's real is the experience. Only mind and experiences are real. What we choose to believe about them is the illusion.

For example, if someone is stricken with cancer, the experience of having cancer is real. However, believing having cancer is terrible, fearing death from cancer, and giving up on living because of the cancer are all beliefs that are entirely illusory, based on assumptions about life that illusory. It is entirely illusion to believe that having cancer is terrible, that death is to be feared, and that life is only worth living if you don't know when you're going to pass from the Earth plane. The person who believes the worst is living life based on illusion. That's what is not real.

You wrote, "People think this world is physical because they do not take enough time to look at it deeply?"

Yes, that's true. We're given our belief system by the society in which we're reared. The prominent teachers of these beliefs are our family of origin, people with whom we have regular contact, and today electronic influences, especially television. We go from infancy with no beliefs into adolescence and young adulthood with the beliefs given to us. They aren't our beliefs. They're society's beliefs.

Then, when we reach maturity, we're able to make choices about our beliefs. We can choose to cling to the beliefs given by society or we can learn about the real reality that is beyond society's beliefs. We then have to throw off the yoke of the old beliefs and form new ones based on what we learn is true for ourselves. Some people live their entire lives never doing that.

Joseph Campbell tells a story from Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra that is an analogy for this break with the teachings of society that has to occur for us to become fully spiritual selves. The child is a camel, burdened with what it must carry, wandering through the desert without questioning the loads placed on its back. As the child matures into young adulthood, it becomes a lion. As a lion, it can be aggressive and make choices about the burden it is carrying. A dragon comes. The primary task for the lion is to slay the dragon. On every scale of the dragon's body is written the words "Thou shalt." These are all the rules society has given to the young person. If the person growing into adulthood, now a lion, slays the dragon, he casts off the thou shalts and becomes what he will of himself. At that point, the person transforms into a little child. But it isn't a little child in ignorance; it is a little child in openness.

We all must slay the dragon of thou shalts and make free will choices about our beliefs and lives. Then we can become the spiritually mature people we are to grow into at some time in our eternal lives.

That also means when society is more spiritual, with fewer thou shalts and more encouragement to make free will choices based on love, compassion, and brotherhood, the struggle to slay the dragon and leave behind the teachings of society is much less. Eventually, it could be seamless. Society could be so spiritually mature that there is no need to abandon its teachings, but the person will reexamine them and re-adopt them as his or her own. Today, society is far from spiritually mature, so each of us must slay the dragon of thou shalts and turn away from the teachings of the world. Only then can we become the eternal spiritual self we are destined eventually to become.

Love and peace, Craig