Illusion that sustains Reality

Meher Baba's book God Speaks is dedicated:

To the Universe— the Illusion that sustains Reality.

Here's my best understanding of this - using my own words.

In The Evolution of Perception & the Cosmology of Substance, I explain everything away as a mere perceptual illusion, except the act of perception itself. The act of perception, I argue, is necessarily real. Everything else is an illusion.¹

Concrete objects and their concreteness, energy, gravity, special relativity, language, thought, and number - even space and time - all can be explained as illusions of perception - explained in terms of evolved perceptual schemata, i.e. ways of perceiving, and shown to be illusions.

But there is a caveat to this.

Self-awareness (consciousness), while it too can be accounted for in this way, or better said - it can be shown to manifest out of this evolutionary process, cannot be an illusion.²

This is because, if perception is real (as stated above), and perception comes to perceive itself (becomes aware of itself, i.e. becomes self-aware), then self-awareness becomes a brute fact by definition - and is not an illusion.

But - and this is the irony - this real self-awareness (consciousness), which is the very purpose of Creation, comes about as a result of illusion. It supervenes upon a set of illusory perceptual schemata that can then be discarded.

This is why God Speaks is dedicated:

To the Universe— the Illusion that sustains Reality.

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Notes

1. In this instance, by "everything" I don't mean the real EVERYTHING, but the everything in its ordinary sense. Baba also distinguishes two senses of the word "everything."

Out of THAT NOTHING MIND CAME

Out of Mind came this everything

Out of Mind came Energy

Energy holds this everything

Out of Mind came this Matter

Matter means this everything

This everything is also NOTHING

coming out of THAT Everything

— Meher Baba, from Stay With God by Francis Brabazon, 3rd ed. p. 13

2. In God Speaks Baba refers to the "factory of evolution of consciousness" (p. 23 of PDF version).