All mental illness derives from getting this wrong. And much physical illness also.
The mind has both abilities to explore what is unreal and also what is real. We normally live in the world of the Unreal because it is so much more varied and easily graspable.
Consider the humble apple, the object of attention for so many artists.
As far as a child's book is concerned, or a dictionary, or a discussion about what to buy at the market, or for that matter the grocer selling bags of apples: as apple is just an apple. All apples are the same. Plato concluded that this is what is real. But he had it the wrong way around.
When you go to the market and chose an apple, chances are you will examine each one to some extent to ensure that it is not damaged. It is at this moment that you engage with the reality of the apple. What you probably do is ensure that the apples you buy conform to the unreal image you have in your mind, and reject those which have a reality that is different. But to do this you are engaging with the reality.
Quite obviously where Plato is wrong is that you cannot eat the unreal apples of your mind. The apple that you eat is the real one, and that experience of eating the apple is unique in time and space. This is the apple that gives you nutrients today, quite different from all other apples.
Meditation is the exercise where we examine in detail the difference between our ideas of apples and the actual apples that we see and eat. The former is unreal and the latter is real.
What Buddha noticed is that suffering only occurs in the unreal world. There is no suffering in reality, because things are what they are. It is only suffering when compared with the unreal world. But we don't have the unreal world, we only have the real world. This is the trick played by the devil. He makes us believe in the unreal. All our memories, our ideas, expectations and beliefs become real when we get this wrong and we lose touch with reality.
Its a very special state of mind to be present in reality, and it is the key one required to live properly, and not waste our time in unreality.
General vs Particular
To recap on the above. Its extraordinary how something so everyday and simple has been so misunderstood at least in the West. Here are some apples:
We are correct to call them all "apples" this is the word in this language. But when it comes to a meal we have to chose an apple. You could indeed eat them all, but to do so would involve eating each one, and it is each one--and not the apples--that provide the food.
Now it is true that any apple will do, and usually we are happy with any of the apples. But this is only one way to look at things. When we switch to being aware of what is real we don't miss "the wood for the trees" but instead we see what is there, which if we are eating an "apple" is the apple. When we examine the apple like a painter we will see it different from any other apple we have known, we will in many ways find it unfamiliar. It is this unfamiliarity which is reality, and a painter must relish this because it is the connection with the unfamilar aspects of an apple which provides the inspiration for a painting. Thus you have Monet painting what to the mind is just the same lily pond again and again, but to those interested in reality each painting captures a different version of that lily pond, under different lighting, under a different experience.
So it is often said that each thing is unique. Heraclitus said that you cannot dip your toe in the same river twice, and commonly this is taken to mean that the river, being fluid, has flowed a bit and changed between dips and so is not the same. But this is still an unreal thought. This is not what Heraclitus really meant. What Heraclitus meant is that were you to dip your toe in a river it is something you can never repeat. You can do it again, but this is a different event. That original event is gone. And it means that each time you do it, it is unique. It draws one's attention away from the "apples" and toward the apple that we currently posses and which we will eat today. It makes today special as this is the day we are really living. We are not living yesterday or tomorrow: these are only ideas that we can at best imagine. They are unreal, while today is real. We are familiar with the idea of "my life" and being a "unique person", but often this comes just an idea by which we justify ourselves and which we fight for. In reality these things are always true, because we only have our self and our life. What else could possibly be true? There is nothing to justify we can't have ourselves or our life ever separated.
It's important to realise that the mind can do both reality and unreality. We can just as easily absorb into a film and occupy that reality for a while, before switching our attention to reality. Religions the world-over ban entertainment for this very reason. Books and films are diversions from life, they are not real and while we are absorbed into them we are not experiencing our life. We could spend our whole life immersed in films or games and never actually live one moment. Religions warn strongly against this. God (as they call it) resides in the present and in the reality of our life, not in imagination, books or intellectual speculation. Organised religions fail when followers replace their own life with that dictated to them by others. This is a stage in religion, but if the religion becomes nothing else but losing oneself then it fails. What does God want with a collection of zombies who have lost themselves in stories and unreality and can't see for themselves His reality as it is right now?
Enlightenment and Liberation are none other than being absorbed into reality in such a way that we can no longer be confused by the unreal. The devil (as they call it) can no longer tempt us away from what is real, can no longer get us to waste our life in frivolous false realities.
So why do we spend so much time in false reality, or the unreal: what is the attraction? It is ego. Like superman we can imagine that we are a superhero, we can imagine we have special powers, or can fantasise about what we want or will achieve. We can, as the Americans like to say, Dream. But Dreams are unreal, and they waste our time. Our true life is now. But "now" may seem overwhelming with many things we have been avoiding. It may be boring, it may be unsatisfying, it may make us depressed, it may be quite a shock to see how different our reality is from our fantasies. For so long we believed we were an immortal god, but then we discover we are just an ordinary person with a limited life span, and will die soon. It is a lot to take on board, so we retreat into unreality to block it out.
So why then if reality is so hard to face, is meditation so successful as curing depression and other mental illnesses? Isn't the cold hard face of reality what causes depression, anxiety, drug abuse and other avoidances. This is exactly the work of the devil. The Devil makes the Unreal look attractive and makes us think that the Real is fearful, boring or worthless. Particularly in today's busy world of news flashes and mobile phone notifications the Real seems worth no attention. But this is exactly the nature of the Illusion of unreality itself. These ideas of worthlessness are not based on reality but upon what we expect from reality. It is actually the apple we are eating that nourishes us not the brand, restaurant name, the crowd we are with or the Twitter stream we are reading while eating. These are distraction from reality. The reality is that we are reading Twitter, not whatever we are reading. The reality right now is that you are reading, what is said here is not real. How can it be real? It was written a while ago, but a complete stranger, and is just marks on a computer screen that need to be turned into meaning by a reading mind. How can what is said be real? The real is just that all this is actually happening as you read these words.
So we stop thinking about what is happening across the world, or what our friends are doing, or what we have to do in the meeting this afternoon, or what happened this morning, or what we think about our self, whether we think we are good or bad, or successful or failure, or liked or disliked, or worthy or unworthy, or whether we are well or unwell or any unreal imaginations or thoughts we can conjure up in the cinema of our mind. We leave the projector running, but we at least look at the edge of the screen and see the illusion, or out of the cinema window at the real world for a second. This will probably be us sitting in a busy room with the sound of chatter in our ears, hopefully we are warm and comfortable of perhaps we are near the door and get the draft when it opens. Light will probably be streaming in through the windows. There will be the smell of coffee and food in the air. Like a writer we examine all our senses to see what is Really going on. We can even examine our mind to see what is going on there. What is it thinking, is it peaceful or unset? It doesn't matter what the answer to any of these inquiries is there is no right answer but just what is the case. If we are unhappy for example it doesn't matter there is no scoring system and no top and bottom. There is only what is: if that is unhappy then that is unhappy. In fact that is the same as happy in Reality. Whatever we are is what we are. But it is a very special state of mind that we rarely explore.
Perhaps we have a big meeting or presentation to give in an hour and it is really important. When we examine ourselves and realise we have doubts and don't think we can do it. This is the crux of Reality and Unreality. The Reality is that we have doubts, the Unreality is that these doubts are true!!! When we examine our mind we look only at what is going on i.e. what is showing on the cinema screen. We don't actually start watching it! This is how mental illness starts. We must train ourselves by continual practice to know the difference between the fact that our mind plays a film and the actual contents of the film. So we have play a film of our failures in the Past, with lots of sad music and people criticising us and when we watch it we can really believe it is true. It is just a film it is unreal. What is Real is the fact we are playing that film! This is the only reality. It takes considerable meditation practice to see clearly the difference and be able to distinguish the two all the time.
In Pali the distinction is between Nama and Rupa which translate as Name and Form. The distinction is so simple yet it has alluded almost everyone in history so there is no crime in not being clear the difference. Wittgenstein notes how odd the connection between the experience of something red and that word "red": "what actually is the connection?" is a mysterious and very odd question. It is not something we can answer in language because words can never become what they name.
What we can do is watch closely the Reality of language and mind. In breathing meditation which is the foundations meditation we have the simple training of watching our own breath. Nothing particularly special about the breath other than we will definitely have one to watch all the time! The first thing to notice is that while we have a breath all the time, we are almost never aware of it. Note the power of awareness to bring things into reality! But the issue which gradually emerges as we watch our breath is wondering whether we are looking at what we think is there compared with what is actually there. We observe the in breath and the out breath and know the difference. But soon we will just see an "in-breath" and an "out-breath" and will no longer be seeing each breath as it is. We will be looking at the pile of apples rather than each apple. We know there is a real breath, we can feel it and we know we are really breathing this isn't complex, but when we come to identify it we get caught in the fog of thoughts and reality: where is the real breath rather than the imagined breaths of what I expect. It is a constant struggle of long practice to keep the mind fresh and subtle and able to interact with each breath as it is. In fact this is the hardest task there is. But at some point we begin to let go of the labels (the Nama) and can see the Rupa which is the actual breath free of names and labels and existing quite unique. This may be the first time we have ever seen Reality. The first time we have shaken off the veil of ignorance cast by the Devil and the first moments of our life we have actually lived! If we perfect this we begin to live the enlightened life, free from the trickery and unhappiness that plagues the imaginary life of Unreality.
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