The illusion
When I go to the movies and watch a love story, I see human feelings; I experience emotions, actions, and motion. However, if I think about what I have just seen, I realize that all those things are simply an illusion. When I watch a movie, what I am looking at is a sequence of still frames, one after the other. Therefore the question is: where are those human feelings, the actions and the motion I have experienced? The only possible answer is that I have created them without knowing it.
This is somehow disturbing; at some point I have been fooled, I saw something completely different from what was really happening. Once I realize this and accept that there are cases when I experience something that is not “out there” but I think it is, how can I be sure that what I experience in other occasions is real and not just another case of deception?
If I take a magazine with a picture of someone, again I am being fooled. When I look at it closely, that someone disappears and becomes a bunch of colored points; if I look even closer the colors of those points are not even there, they are composed by dots of different "primary" colors, but I step back and the face is there, the expression of the face is there, the feeling that person transmmits is there. Is it?
Depth, that feeling of space all around me, is just another game played by my stereoscopic vision. Every single perception that I get from the “real world” is made-up; this illusion is so strong, that I assume its existence and operate and act inside it, taking its absoluteness for granted.
I am trapped in it; every time I look around I see the “out there” and it is obvious, unquestionable and yet… I know it is an illusion. Even my language to describe reality is fooled by this illusion: “out there” implies its existence.
My reality is tied to my culture and my anatomy which are my context. Because I can’t modify this context easily and it remains pretty much immutable through out my life and because this context is my means of perception, I don’t see it. All I see is its byproduct, my reality, as an absolute independent entity outside me.
