Hi Peace Hawk

I very much recommend ‘The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size’ – by Tor Norretranders It’s a philosophical and scientific study of the idea of life experience being an illusion

In Much of Buddhist philosophy you will hear the words that are similar, that the life is an illusion.

“We live in illusion and the appearance of things. There is a reality. We are that reality. When you understand this, you see that you are nothing, and being nothing, you are everything. That is all.” ― Gautama Buddha – That is of course a paradox and so difficult to understand but I believe it to be a truth.

Our ability to “see” and be fully conscious of each moment, each now, is limited and so we fill in the gaps through the filters of our desire, fears hopes, beliefs, faith… and create illusion, a user illusion. A goal of Buddhism is to become conscious (Enlightened) were the now is experienced as it is without filters. (If we do so we become enlightened and maybe conscious of the unconscious (another paradox) and know that everything we ‘though’ was real was not real but an illusion of our own making)

In scientific terms, ego Conscious is limited. Ego Consciousness can process about 8 to 16 bits of information a second where as our body (unconscious) process millions of bits of information a second. We see more then we ‘see’, hear more then we ‘hear’ know more then we ‘know’….  If ego concourses had to be aware and control everything the body needs to live we would all die.  (the unconscious is capable of multi tasking, ego consciousness is not – go ahead try adding two numbers together while reciting a singing a song, you will see that ego consciousness divides time into slices – time division multiplexing. Ego consciences is always directed so you will go from one task to another. You can train yourself to do this so quickly it might look like multi tasking but its not)

So Ego conscious also is linear – to understand and operate in the world the ego conscious breaks down each moment of now into cause and effect. In the Quantum world, everything happens all at once and there is no past, present or future just the now which is not a moment of time but a moment of time and space (not the same thing as time does not exist by isself).  “…for us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one.”.” ― Albert Einstein – (sound familiar there is only the now and everything is one we are all one)

Ego conscious as well as being linear is also slow. It takes 0.5+ seconds to process the bits of experience that our consciousness focuses on. In the 0.5+seconds (an eternity) the experience is processed though our filters, our hopes, expectations, dreams, fears, desire…. most of which are unconscious.  This means we never experience the now as it is but only after they pass through our filters and thus create illusion. Interestingly communication technology takes advantage of the fact that we create illusion and fill in the gaps.

Anyway, if one accepts that they are only conscious of a very small portion of the now (of all the now’s occurring simultaneously around the globe) and that they are filling in the gaps, one cannot help but become more compassionate. One realizes that one’s judgments are perceptions, information only, influenced by filters most not of our choosing.  One must continue to act on one truth as one knows it to be in the moment but with compassion and in this way we learn and become. Life is a illusion though we are the reality of it – co-creators with the divine –  If you want to go down the rabbit hole further.