Another Choice

Where is the illusion?

It is the fact of physical death, of the cessation of individual corporeal existence, which induced us to pose the question of the illusion.

That a reality so concrete, so alive, so felt and experienced, so personal and so shared at the same time, could be condemned to its entire disappearance, is perhaps only explicable by a phenomenon of illusion.

Yet it is obviously not death itself that can be considered as illusory, since the consequences of its intervention are overwhelming and absolutely concrete.

What was, is no more.

What lived, has disappeared.

Only remain a decomposing organism or ashes or a skeleton.

But life itself, then, can it be considered as an illusion?

Neither.

Life, as death, - as long as it lasts -, is undeniable, irrefutable and almost totally convincing: almost, because a fissure, a crack opens through which doubt alters, invades its beauty, through which fear comes in, the fear of destruction.

Therefore we have come to situate the illusion in the belief we have formed of our separate existence, which we strive to preserve despite certain death and to which we are attached and riveted as to a post in the field of the universe. And it is precisely this very attachment that, according to a widely shared observation, engenders pain and fear and all the selfish acts that harm the harmony and well-being of the whole.

It is thus generally agreed that a certain individual effort to attain a modicum of detachment is a necessity for everyone in the course of one’s development, from an ethical standpoint.

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