Inspirational Quotes & Stories about
Illusions in Life & Society

When you eventually see through the veils to how things really are, you will keep saying again and again, this is certainly not like we thought it was."

- Rumi

Cited in You Have Chosen to Remember, p. viii
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My friend, allow your brothers or sisters to experience the illusions they perceive as real. Often it is only when your brothers or sisters physically, emotionally and spiritually experience the emptiness of their actions and reactions that they realize their futility. Please understand that I'm not saying that you should not make an effort to guide your brother or sister in a positive direction. But be very aware of the subtle differences between guidance and control. These differences are more often than not very muddled in the ego's thought system. If asked, you may offer your brother or sister guidance, but refrain from attachment to its outcome. Be not attached to your brother or sister following your direction. Look within your heart, offer support and love, and trust that His will will be done. If they insist on falling, let them fall, for sooner or later they will land on their knees, and when they do they will not experience pain but relief. One of the greatest gifts you can offer your brothers or sisters is the loving space they need to fall, land on their knees and experience their perfection.

- James Blanchard Cisneros, You Have Chosen to Remember: A Journey From Perception to Knowledge, Peace of Mind and Joy, p. 3-4

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Imagine being born into a dream: a mass illusion transformed over thousands of years by billions of people into what today you call reality. The billions of people subdivided into territories they called countries, into belief systems they called religions and into groups they called races. Countries subdivided into states, provinces and cities, which then subdivided into neighborhoods that subdivided into buildings or single-family homes. Religions divided into conservative and liberal sects, which then grew into more conservative and liberal branches. Races divided themselves by all of the above, including color, tone, ethnic makeup, and financial status. Each group then teaches and defends that its way is the way and its truth is the truth, and each group creates its own reality out of what it believes. Each group then tries to sell you on its current forms and laws, telling you that this is what is "right." Each teaches you that the closer you are to following its form, the happier, more successful and peaceful you will be. And somewhere deep within, you know that it is your right to be happy and to be at peace. So you buy into it, and regardless of how little sense the illusion makes, you keep participating for if you stop you will be judged as an outcast, a trouble-maker, a bum. You are taught that if you stop participating in the group's way of life, your hopes for happiness, success and peace will also end. The group tells you that if you go against the norm, you will not find happiness, peace or success. So you buy into the illusion the group offers, believing that there is no other way. You carefully weave and contour the illusion into one you can live with for now. But my friend, regardless of how you choose to weave, contour and experience the illusion, it is still an illusion.

- James Blanchard Cisneros, You Have Chosen to Remember: A Journey From Perception to Knowledge, Peace of Mind and Joy, p. 8-9

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The ego promises you that if you follow its rules and laws, you will obtain peace of mind and joy. But in truth, the ego can only offer what it is. It can offer you what is unreal, temporary and unfulfilling. You have, as we all have, tried to fill yourself with the gifts (cars, houses, jewelry, higher paying jobs, titles, relationships) the ego offers. At first, the gifts were small but large enough to temporarily satisfy you. Yet, being temporary and unreal, the same gifts that once satisfied you ultimately become small and meaningless. Once your mind has digested the ego's gifts, you again have a sensation of feeling empty. The ego promised you fulfillment. It promised you that its gifts would bring you true joy and peace of mind. But after digesting its gifts, you again feel empty, and you begin to ask why. Then the ego, in order to protect itself from these questions, offers you bigger gifts. It knows it cannot continue to fool you with little illusions for they no longer fill the emptiness within. Thus, it offers you larger illusions, and at first your reaction is, "Wow!" For a short time, you believe that these illusions that you call real will satisfy the empty feeling you possess within. Yet, big or small, these are illusions, and illusions, being nothing, can by definition never fill you up.

- James Blanchard Cisneros, You Have Chosen to Remember: A Journey From Perception to Knowledge, Peace of Mind and Joy, p. 27-28

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There comes a time in the lives of all worshippers of junk when they must ask themselves why, after following all the rules the ego's world asks for, they are still not happy, and why they are not at peace with themselves and their world. In this society, such a time is usually referred to by the ego as a mental breakdown, depression, a mid-life crisis or burnout. These phrases are used by the ego to put down and sedate those individuals who dare to question this world's reality. For in this world, the ego knows when it is losing control of its slaves, and it will not stand idly by. The world is ruled by the ego. The ego has invested a lot of time in these people, and it does not want them to go free. But the worshippers of junk, the slaves of the ego, can only live in an unnatural state for so long before they begin to question how they feel. Soon they begin to wonder if this is what it's all about. When they finally realize that they are measuring their worth by how much junk they have acquired, sadness, lack of peace, a mental breakdown, a mid-life crisis, burnout, or depression may set in.

My friend, do not buy into the world's fantasies and negative connotations. This moment should become a time of great joy and celebration, for you have, in some manner, finally realized that junk has truly nothing to offer. You now have the opportunity to realize what the worship of junk and illusions has truly offered you, and how its worship has made you feel. For a moment, thank yourself for the worshiping of junk, for it has brought you to the recognition of what it has to offer. It has offered you a sense of separation from your trueself. It has offered you sadness. It has offered you pain. It has offered you stress, confusion, depression, doubt, emptiness, fear and regret. It has offered you nothing you ever truly desired.

- James Blanchard Cisneros, You Have Chosen to Remember: A Journey From Perception to Knowledge, Peace of Mind and Joy, p. 45-46

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In the world of illusions, success can be measured a hundred different ways, and failure a thousand others. In truth, you achieve success through your simple participation in the life experience. You experience growth, and that is what you have come to do. If you accomplish what you have come to do, then you have succeeded. In that sense, there is no more need to ever talk about being a successful human being. Yet, the ego offers people the opportunity to set different parameters around the idea of success, and they usually bite at those offers. Trying to set parameters around an illusion of success simply leads to confusion and disillusionment. For how could you ever succeed at putting parameters around something that does not exist? So you end up having many different ideas of what having a successful life really means. All these ideas are judged against each other, each chipping away at the other's views. Yet part of what the ego tries to sell you about success is that you cannot really be a complete success unless others also view you as a success. Due to the many individual perceptions of success, this makes the task even more difficult and confusing. To add to your confusion, the ego-self so narrowly defines success that many times there is no place for also achieving happiness. The ego-self very often sets success and happiness so far apart that you must sacrifice one to achieve the other. Finally, even if others perceive you as a success, deep within, the ego will try and convince you that you are lying to yourself and others, that you are really just a fraud who will soon be exposed.

- James Blanchard Cisneros, You Have Chosen to Remember: A Journey From Perception to Knowledge, Peace of Mind and Joy, p. 80-81

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"If a man walks in the woods for the love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer, but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making Earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen." ⁶

- Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle

Cited in You Have Chosen to Remember, p. 95
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As you continue to work on yourself, understand that if something is causing you anger, stress, unhappiness, regret or any other "negative" emotion, you are, by definition, experiencing an illusion. You will experience the illusions you still think are real. You will do so because you have made the unreal real and the best way to understand that what you see as valuable is actually valueless, is to experience its valuelessness. Many times, when people awaken from a particular illusion, they hold themselves in judgment for having so viciously defended it. I gladly and gently remind them that they should not judge themselves, but should be grateful for the experience, and proud of their awakening. My friend, it is an awakening once you realize that the unreal, regardless of how real people want to make it, is unreal. The greatest gift any illusion can offer is the opportunity to let you see it for what it truly is.

- James Blanchard Cisneros, You Have Chosen to Remember: A Journey From Perception to Knowledge, Peace of Mind and Joy, p. 107

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Let's discuss these points one by one. First, at the height of its control, the ego would have you believe that to give is to lose. It tries to convince you that if you give, you will also lose something and there is no way to get it back. If you lose something, then you become less than you were before, or you will have less than you had before. You have fewer things, thus you are a lesser person. The world teaches that when you give something away, you lose it, and if you don't get anything in return, you are less complete, less whole. The world also teaches that, when you lose something, you must become upset. So it is not a stretch to say that the world teaches you that becoming upset is a normal and proper reaction to giving something away and not getting anything in return. Yet, we know that being upset is not the natural reaction of a child of God, because a natural reaction of the child of God is to be at peace. Therefore, there must be another way of looking at the beautiful offering of giving.

- James Blanchard Cisneros, You Have Chosen to Remember: A Journey From Perception to Knowledge, Peace of Mind and Joy, p. 118

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On your journey toward achieving peace of mind, it is very important to understand that there is a difference between an action and a brother or sister. An action happens at a moment in time and regardless of how you have been taught to see it, it is an opportunity. The opportunity shows you where you are within your mind. It teaches you who you truly believe yourself to be. You can choose to react with peace now, or you can choose to react with peace later. Sooner or later you will find peace. Because of free will, you can choose when it is you want to experience peace. Also understand that your belief that peace is not immediately available to you does not in any way interfere with the fact that peace is always available. The time it takes you to react with peace is up to you, and will be measured not only in time, but in pain. For pain is the time it takes you to react with peace to any situation.

- James Blanchard Cisneros, You Have Chosen to Remember: A Journey From Perception to Knowledge, Peace of Mind and Joy, p. 169

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The value of an illusion is to have the opportunity to realize that it is an illusion. The one value of all illusions lies in understanding and acknowledging their lack of value. The more you value an illusion, the more you defend it and try to protect your belief. If you do not physically experience its lack of value, then you will truly never believe that it is valueless. How many times in our lives have we tried to explain something important that happened in our lives only to resort to the phrase, "you really had to be there." For most of us, this is how we learn that our illusions are valueless. We have to experience them ourselves to learn that they have no value. A guru or spiritual teacher can tell you that to find peace, you need to forgive and release your anger, but it is only by holding resentment that you can truly experience, appreciate and acknowledge its valuelessness in your life. It is only through holding onto such resentment that you can experience its full weight, its energy drain, the absolute worthlessness that such emotions bring to your life.

- James Blanchard Cisneros, You Have Chosen to Remember: A Journey From Perception to Knowledge, Peace of Mind and Joy, p. 172-173

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If you do not experience peace in the present moment, it is because you have substituted the ego's illusions for the present moment. The ego will invite you to believe in a thousand different ways in which you can lose your peace of mind. The ego will also offer you a thousand different solutions. Yet, if one of the ego's illusions or solutions is unreal, then all the ego's illusions and solutions are unreal. For the ego's illusions and solutions in and of themselves are nothing. And regardless of how many times you multiply nothing, you will still get nothing.

You might ask for an example to clarify this point. The manifestation of that example might clarify a small number of similar illusions. This is exactly what the ego would offer, because it gives more than enough wiggle room to offer you a thousand different illusions and a thousand solutions to those illusions. And as long as you have use for the ego, it can remain alive, well and in control of your perceptions. And so I offer no specific examples to cloud your thoughts. I do offer that all illusions, regardless of their manifestations, will result in a loss of peace. There is really only one illusion, one problem, which is that you are experiencing the illusion as real. Call it your spouse's impatience, your boss' ruthlessness, traffic or your job. Call it what you will. If it takes away your peace, it is because you have seen the illusion as real. In their essence, all illusions are the same because all illusions are not real.

- James Blanchard Cisneros, You Have Chosen to Remember: A Journey From Perception to Knowledge, Peace of Mind and Joy, p. 185

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Today I observe an expansion occurring. An expansion of all we think we are. Although this is an illusionary expansion, it is a necessary expansion. This expansion will simply teach us the following: all that we think we are, we are not, and all that we ever wish we could be, we already are. There is a great strength and energy in the people leading this expansion into what I know we are not. For it takes great strength and energy to live out an illusion of our life on a daily basis. It takes great strength and energy to live out a lie and to keep expanding on a lie. The world of illusion, for those who believe in it, is hard, very hard. It is hard because it is unnatural, and because it is an unnatural way of living, it takes a great amount of strength and energy to simply get through such days.

- James Blanchard Cisneros, You Have Chosen to Remember: A Journey From Perception to Knowledge, Peace of Mind and Joy, p. 212

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In an instant, he decided that on the way to the post office, each and every snowflake that hit his face would bring him joy; that those snow flakes would no longer cause him grief, that they would no longer make him curse the weather, or in any way negatively affect his state of mind. So after finishing his coffee, off he went walking to the post office.

As the first snowflakes hit his face, interestingly enough he also experienced his first smirk of the day. And as the snowflakes increased in volume, so too did his smirk, which turned into a smile. Soon joy became an actual thought in his mind. He began to sing "snow flakes are falling on my head" as he walked by so many other souls who had chosen, in their own way, to see the day and their walk as a hassle, inconvenience and a hazard. At first, he sang the song in his mind, then just loud enough for himself to hear it. As the snowflakes increased, so too did his volume. There he was, singing joyfully as other pedestrians probably wondered what this poor schizophrenic person was doing out in this kind of weather. The snowflakes kept falling on his face and now that his rendition of the song was a number one single in the charts of his mind, he could sing it loud, proud and with joy.

- James Blanchard Cisneros, You Have Chosen to Remember: A Journey From Perception to Knowledge, Peace of Mind and Joy, p. 215-216

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It is your beliefs and perceptions that will drive your focus; it is what you focus on that you will experience. If this is still difficult for you to grasp, take, for example, two types of people we have all met: optimists and pessimists. Spend an entire day with both of these types of people. If you do this once, you will never again question that a person's reality, how he or she sees and reacts to the world, is mainly in that person's mind and has little or nothing to do with the outer physical world.

- James Blanchard Cisneros, You Have Chosen to Remember: A Journey From Perception to Knowledge, Peace of Mind and Joy, p. 232

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Footnotes / Acknowledgments

Every effort has been made to provide accurate source attribution. Should any attribution be found to be incorrect, the author welcomes written documentation supporting correction for subsequent printings. For material not in the public domain, selection was made according to generally accepted fair-use standards and practices.

6. Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle, Copyright 1997 (Folcroft Library Edition).   >> back to quote

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