A magician pulls out a bit of rope and cuts in half. He ties the two pieces of rope together and pulls the knot taught. Then he puts a hand over the knot and incants the magic words and “voila” the rope is whole again. The audience is in awe. They know the laws of the universe makes what happen impossible, and yet it just happened. Everyone is delighted because what we know and what has happened to not match: which is true?
The reality is that through a series of rehearsed moves the rope only appears to be cut in the middle. It is really cut at the end of the rope, the knot is not joining two equal pieces of rope but a small bit of rope knotted around a large rope section. As the magician’s hands grasp over the rope he pulls the knot off the longer thread and “voila” the rope is whole again. When the illusion is executed perfectly, every step looks real and it challenges our perceptions.
Even when the audience knows how the trick is done, the mind rarely changes its perceptions. “People take reality for granted,” explained Teller from the magic team Penn & teller. “Reality seems so simple. We just open our eyes and there it is. But that doesn’t mean it is simple.”
Magic is a fraud of perception confusing and creating tension between what is and what seems to be. Our brains don’t see everything—our brains only process 40% of the information that is gathered by our senses. Our senses gather only a minute fraction of the information that in the reality in front of us. To make sense of it all, our brain creates shortcuts. We cognize constructions and rationalizations: this creates definitions of what is and what is not.
Magicians capitalize on those rules. “Every time you perform a magic trick, you’re engaging in experimental psychology,” Teller says. “If the audience asks, ‘How the hell did he do that?’ then the experiment was successful. I’ve exploited the efficiencies of your mind.”
Even when the mind is aware it is being deceived the conditioning of our reality is so strong that our intellect argues with our instinctive habits and responses. It is only possible to break through our habitual conditions of “what is” reality by investigating and reverse-engineering the rationalizations, deceptions and delusions.
The Buddha said, “ignorance is the leader in the attainment of unskillful qualities, followed by a lack of conscience and lack of concern. Immersed in ignorance, wrong view arises. In wrong view, wrong resolve arises. In wrong resolve, wrong speech arises, thus follows wrong action, wrong livelihood, wrong effort, wrong mindfulness, and wrong concentration.
As a child, my grandmother had put in a wall of mirrors in her house against one wall. Not paying attention, I walked full-force and straight into the wall. Who hasn’t walked into a glass door at least once in their life? We have all smashed our noses at some point, because our perceptions are often habituated and much of what we do in life is on cruise control. There is just too much information in our daily lives to be cognize every detail in every moment. We expect the world to react in a predictable way and are surprised when it doesn’t. “Bam!” We end up with our noses turned sideways wondering how we could have been so foolish not to see the door knob or ourselves in the mirror: details that become obvious after the fact.
The Buddha said, “From ignorance comes fabrications. From fabrications comes sense-awareness, name & form, the senses, contact, feeling (or value impressions), craving, clinging and the arising and passing all things.”
This is the dependent condition of who we are. All suffering exists because we exist. With the condition of birth, we suffer pains, discontentment, aging, sorrow, illness and death. Not just with the gross reality of our lives as a whole process, but as an infinite series of processes. From ignorance we form delusions of the way things are, we create opinions and cravings and eventually opinions and emotions about things. The arising of anger, love, sorrow, etc. all arise form their own dependent originations.
If you had asked a friend to give you a ride and they are late, what arises? Not knowing what happens we start to create the stories: he forgot, he blew me off, he is in the wrong place, he is in an accident, etc. Each story that runs through our head gives rise to different conclusions and emotions. Each is validated and fed by our own ego. And when our friend finally arrives, we still cling to stresses and frustrations created by our imaginations.
Without a proper foundation of how to recognize the arising and passing of phenomena, we continue to unmindfully live on “cruise control” in many aspects of our lives, which affect our overall ignorance of perception. We assume the door is open and do not look to see if it is a glass door and inevitably we find ourselves a painful reminder that life is not what is seems.
And even at that point of awareness, we may not be able to overcome our conditioning. Some of our paradigms and constructs of the mind are so rooted within us, that they seem integral to who we are. We know that what we see is reality, so we cannot resolve the conflict of our perception with our intellect when we see a magic trick in front of us: even when we KNOW it is an illusion.
The Buddha said, “There are three taints: the taint of sensual desire, the taint of being and the taint of ignorance. However, it is the taint of ignorance that all other taints follow.” With the cessation of ignorance, there is right view and understanding.
Ignorance is the source of the three poisons: hate, greed and delusion. Without an understanding of what is and what is not, we develop false relationships with the phenomena around us. We crave for some phenomena and reject others. With ignorance we are deluded into thinking that our conditioning created by habits and false view is true reality. However, when we understand suffering, the cause of suffering, and the practices to end suffering; we deconstruct the conditioned world we live in and start living in an unconditioned reality of wisdom and right view.
This isn’t as difficult as it seems. When the secrets of a magic trick are revealed, it is often amazing how simple they are, how blind our minds have become and how willingly gullible the universe is to its own constructed reality.
Ajahn Brahm said, “Buddhism is different than most other religions because it never asks us to make the facts match the dhamma. The dhamma must always match the truth or it is not dhamma.”
The world is a magical place, full of illusions and misdirections, rationalizations and delusions. It is through Buddhist practice that we develop the skills to exist beyond all of that.
