Earthquakes, tsunamis and illusions...

Many of us like illusions. We like to be fooled by the likes of Copperfield, Burton or Pen and Teller. They are exciting and they have a way of changing our perception of what we see. We watch the magic and all of a sudden that which we know can not be true, all of a sudden is true. In our minds, we know it's a tick, and illusion, but we suspend reality to enjoy the sensation and the experience. We clap and hail the experience of being fooled.

Experiences of late have convinced me that illusions come in many forms, and not just through the medium of magic. Illusion is created by our own human short comings, through the trickery of those less trustworthy, by taking advantage of a weakness in our vision, in our perception and exploiting it. Our emotions and preconceptions can also create illusions that are hard for us to understand. It seems that just like Magic, we clap at the illusions life presents us, and hail them all to often as amazing and some mystic source of truth. All this in spite of the fact that to those not invested in the illusion, it's clear that it is just that, a lie.

In real life, such things plague us. The problem is that we don't have the benefit of knowing that there is a magician working a trick to our amusement. Instead, we are fooled by the illusion, often unexpected, and we actually begin to believe that which we know can not possibly be the truth. We embrace the illusion as a truth in our life, when in fact it's just a construction in our mind.

It's sad what some will believe, when properly pressured. When we trust someone, it's hard to accept that what we are being told is not true. When we love somebody, even the most unlikely story we will tend to believe. This makes truth that much harder to ferret out in the long run. Truth is a two sided sword.

It's difficult to divorce emotion from truth. Often, emotion leads us to the story we want to hear or need to hear, rather than the story that we really should be hearing. Pressure from others will reinforce the illusion that we accept, such that it's nearly impossible to turn our back on that illusion in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

The illusion also is improved in the face of emotion. We need to put emotion in it's place so that we can properly understand the truth. Yet both are very strong creatures.

In the history of humans, illusion has robbed many a person of happiness and joy that they might have otherwise have. Illusion has indited and jailed the innocent in many cases. Illusion had destroyed lives, broken hearts and taken a future that could be and disassembled it in the interest of a lie.

And yet... in spite of the destruction born on the heels of these illusions of life, there can be such positives at the end of the day. It may be that after the smoke fades from the devastation heaped upon us, that we may well give thanks to those illusions for the beauty that remained after it's all over with. For in the tsunami, opportunity is created for something new and greater. While it takes us time to recover from the devastation that illusions impact on our life, perhaps it was for the better, and perhaps the end result of the one who is impacted by the illusion is better in the end.

Some will never recognize love when they see it. Some will always find an excuse to push away love, to allow an illusion to confirm to us what we already believe, that we don't deserve love. Some are always waiting for the shoe to fall, and when it does, they don't question it because they always knew the shoe was going to fall. The illusion simply confirmed what they already knew. When you believe in your heart that you don't deserve to be happy, or that life will always take away from you what  you want, you will find that these things become self-fulfilling prophecies. If you expect failure, it's even easier to be fooled by illusion.

So it is, that the illusion is complete. The trick has been performed and that is the source of the Tsunami... and the earthquakes... in our lives. We blame others, when the blame is our own. We lean on the illusion, even if we know, deep in our heart, that is all it is. Until we can face those illusions in our life, and face ourselves and the truth, what we truly want will be just a dream. At the end of the day, we have to face the truth, and the impacts of believing the illusions, before we can truly move on and be who we want to be. Otherwise we remain mired in the destruction of lies, impaled upon us by the great illusions that surround us.

Love and truth conquers these illusions. Everything else is simply an excuse to continue to believe in that which is not real. That which is illusion. Which do you want? Truth or illusion?