The title of this post also reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
Just searching for "* is an illusion" returns
- consciousness - choice - spacetime - the world - physical reality - certainty - memories
It makes me feel disgusted.
You watch a real television show on a real television. The television is designed to create visual illusions of real things. But the television is itself real. The show is a dramatic rendering, an illusion, of real-life situations.
So there's three elements needed to make illusion. A referent, a representation, and a type.
Consciousness is real, but its contents are illusory, thought represents things that are not those things.
If the picture of the chair is so good that one mistakes it for a real chair, yes, otherwise I wouldn’t classify it as an illusion.
On a tangential note, people enjoying this discussion might enjoy the beginning of chapter two[1] (or even the whole book) of Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics”[2].
[1]: https://rhetoricsuperhero.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/mcclou...
Any time you step 'outside', like if you look at a chair, you're dwelling in illusion. Mind generated a 'tag' for the thing you're seeing. It's not really a chair, it's a bundle of atoms. But there's no bundle of atoms, that's also a tag generated by mind. The mind itself isn't what you think it is. Everything is an illusion.
Tricky to understand until you realize there's no such thing as enlightenment, it's just a religious dogma. Enlightened yogis are no different than the rest of us.
One can train the mind to perceive fewer distinctions, this is yogic practice. You can even arrive at a state of mind that you can call enlightenment. But the lie is revealed any time you open your mouth. The state of mind that is being trained is an illusion like everything else.
Real yogis understand this and do it anyway. Fake yogis try to fool you into believing that you can truly get rid of everything and 'merely exist'. It's not an illusion at this point, it's a lie.
I don't understand what the title has to do with avoiding forms of "to be"? It contains the word "is".
In a pedantic sense, it’s all an illusion, but there are particular illusions where the difference is readily demonstrable — when the magician shows what was hidden in his sleeves, as it were.
In some sense, most of science is exposing the method of various tricks our own consciousness plays on us. We want to know, for example, why metal appears to be shiny— when the phenomenon we’re studying ‘shininess’ only exists in our own minds. There’s no innate ‘shiny’ property in nature.
Time is one of those things where there is a persistent feeling that it must be illusory (which is to say, something created by our minds), but we’re not quite sure exactly in what way or how to prove it.
To say something is an illusion means that something is a map that doesn’t match the territory.
But it assumes there IS a territory to map! While often simultaneously denying its existence. That’s the contradiction.
Its possible for a word to have more than one meaning.
This idea has been extended to say things like reality could be an illusion (Matrix scenarios), or something we take to be fundamental to reality such as the flow of time could be an illusion, in that our mental experience of it is misleading us into thinking it's fundamental.
That we can be fooled by our experience of the world is not controversial. People thought the world was flat and that the moon and sun rose around a still Earth, which was the center of the cosmos. Because that's how it appeared to them.