
“We're here to awaken from the illusion of separateness”
Source: How Can I Help? Stories and Reflection on Service
“We're here to awaken from the illusion of separateness”
Source: How Can I Help? Stories and Reflection on Service
“Our separation from each other is an optical illusion.”
“We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions.”
Preface
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961)
Context: We suffer primarily not from our vices or our weaknesses, but from our illusions. We are haunted, not by reality, but by those images we have put in their place.
The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Twelve, Human Connections: Relationships Changing
“We cannot be rid of illusions. Illusion is our natural condition. Why not accept it?”
The Deception: The Ultimate Dream (p. 81)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)
Wholeness and the Implicate Order (1980)
Context: The notion that all these fragments are separately existent is evidently an illusion, and this illusion cannot do other than lead to endless conflict and confusion. Indeed, the attempt to live according to the notion that the fragments are really separate is, in essence, what has led to the growing series of extremely urgent crises that is confronting us today. Thus, as is now well known, this way of life has brought about pollution, destruction of the balance of nature, over-population, world-wide economic and political disorder and the creation of an overall environment that is neither physically nor mentally healthy for most of the people who live in it. Individually there has developed a widespread feeling of helplessness and despair, in the face of what seems to be an overwhelming mass of disparate social forces, going beyond the control and even the comprehension of the human beings who are caught up in it.
George Herbert Mead (1926). "The Nature of Aesthetic Experience." International Journal of Ethics, Vol. 36, No. 4 (Jul., 1926), pp. 382-393; p. 382