How do I see the physical world for the illusion that it is, without suffering?

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Start with things that are easier to see as illusions and work your way up.

Allow me to define for you the concept of illusion. Next time you’re watching television, marvel at just how much human effort went into creating the illusion of people and events happening right in front of you. Illusion isn’t what you think it is, illusory things are made out of real things.

The concept of referent is needed here. If I talk to you about chairs, the referent is easy to determine. You probably have a picture in your mind of a chair right now. You can roam your mind all over the whole space of chairs and start looking for physical objects that are close to being chairs but aren’t quite.

If I talk to you about the ego, that’s a much harder thing to find the referent for. What’s ego and what’s not ego? You probably also have ideas for what ego is and what ego isn’t. I guarantee with about five minutes I could poke holes in those ideas and make you question everything you know about everything. It’s not that ego isn’t a real thing, it’s just that there’s a bunch of illusions getting in the way of seeing it.

Illusion clouds your vision, keeping you from seeing true. The referents are the real concepts hiding behind all the fakery. To return to television, you have to make a mental effort to see past the things depicted on the screen so that you can consider what a television actually is, a carefully manufactured panel of plastic, silicon and metal.

“But Vincent!” I can hear you asking. “that’s not the truth I was hoping to see here!” Well what truth do you want to understand? We could look at the television show itself, which is another product of immense amounts of human labor all to entertain you. Many actors and actresses spent many hours in makeup chairs with bright lights shining right in their faces in order to bring you this story.

To see through illusion properly, you need to understand and grasp a whole mountain of layers, all with the aim of fooling your conscious mind into ignoring them. You have to want to see through it because the illusion itself is actively deceptive. And there’s a good chance there’s not a whole lot of point in doing it. Your spiritual health isn’t going to get any better if you look at the machinery generating your television picture. But it just might get somewhat better if you can look at your own mind and what makes it want to watch pretty actors doing pretty thing.

Once you’ve improved your spiritual health by examining your own interests and motivations and self-generated illusions, you can start to examine those of the physical world. You’re done looking at the television picture, now your mind is free to contemplate the underlying machinery.