Reifying Illusion

“Reifying”—An uncommon but important word. It means being confused about the nature of something fundamentally not real, but we believe it is. For example, we firmly believe our identity is substantially real, yet it changes as life ebbs and flows. 

Imagine that you go to a movie. When you enter the theater, you have no doubts about the film’s nature. You know that what appears on the screen is pure illusion. The movie might be quite involving to the point that you actually get swept up and affected, but never do you think you are actually in the movie. If you cannot distinguish the unreal nature of the movie from your normal reality, you would be called delusional and would be guilty of reification.

Our normal understanding of reality is that we are not “in the movies,” and we can thus compare this “normal” condition against other states of consciousness to establish whether or not they are real. It never occurs to us that the conditions we perceive are no better than what we see on the theater screen, yet there is very little difference between the two. 

The only difference is where the movie screen is located. The real movie screen is actually in our brains. Even the movie screen in the theater can only be perceived in our brain—we see two movies: One which we assume is in the theater and the other, which is actually a projection in our brain.

We have learned through modern neurology the same as what the Buddha said 2,500 years ago—That what we take for granted as real is actually an illusion. It is impossible to perceive anything without a brain, and our sense of objectivity is the result of projected images. Not knowing this, we then reify these images: Believing that the abstractions are real. If that is not bad enough, we assume that our real self (e.g., true Self) is nothing more than a perceptible object and label it a self-image (ego).

Our entire sense of reality is upside down. It turns out that what we have understood as real is actually nothing more than illusions and what we have thought was unreal (our true nature) is actually the only reality that exists. Our perceptions have fooled us and left us with a genuine mess. The result of this glitch is that we end up clinging to vapor and then suffering as it slides through our fingers. Little did we know that The Buddha has been right all along.