Illusion unleashed

After reading Ilona Ciunaite and Elena Nezhinsky’s book, Gateless Gatecrashers (2012), which in a nutshell asserts that there is no self at all, I have to conclude that the West is willing to pay the heavy price of admission to stay in the distorted world of illusion.  

Unbeknownst to many, the price of admission into the world of illusion is also about a loss of memory (avidya) of the substance or essence of reality, including the sense of self.  With such a loss, which is also the loss of our Buddha-nature, we wrongly identify with the illusory psychophysical body we’ve been chained to since conception.  In so doing, we have lost not only any direct sense of self, however small, but also any sense of transcendence.  We live, accordingly, an inverted life: denying what we should affirm; affirming what we should deny. 

For people like Ilona Ciunaite and Elena Nezhinsky, this illusory world is their only reality while the self, according to them, is an illusion.  This illusory world and the day to day life in the psychophysical body is the only reality they wish to know—not anything transcendent.  They always claim that they have searched for the self but didn’t find any such thing.  For them, there is nothing outside of this life of appearance—or so they believe.  But what they fail to see is our world is a distortion of the absolute just like an elephant made of clay is a distortion of clay.  While enlightened beings understand the self to be the very first-person immediacy of the absolute, or pure Mind to be the very substance of the absolute, ordinary beings are only capable of perceiving the distortion.  They don’t realize that it takes much more effort to cut through the bewitching power of the distortion to eventually confirm the presence of the absolute substance.   

Buddhism, unfortunately, has only been helpful to the West in perpetuating the erroneous teaching of no-self despite the fact that the no-self doctrine of early Buddhism only meant that the psychophysical body is not to be regarded as our self!  The Buddha is asking us to stop clinging to the illusory world, including our psychophysical bodies.  The moment we put down these burdens, the true presence of who we really are is beheld.  This presence is not the absence of self—far from it.

Comments

[Ilona]

"For people like Ilona Ciunaite and Elena Nezhinsky, this illusory world is their only reality while the self, according to them, is an illusion. "
Interesting assumption.
We point to no separate self, using whatever pointers are needed at that moment, no need to assume, that you know how we see the world. It's just another distortion.

Regards.
Ilona

[Harry]

If I understand correctly you are saying identification with the body is part of the illusion, yet I've had remarkable experiences moving into my body. However I'm not identifying with my body as self (mostly) so that might be an important distinction.