Now various thoughts may enter your head.
You may think immediately, "that is completely crazy". You see yourself, you can touch things around you and what is more make things, change things and even destroy things. Everyone sees the same things, even animals respond to these phenomena that are there and easy to accept.
To say that nothing exists is crazy.
At the other extreme, perhaps with a superior knowing smile, the intelligent and maybe academically trained person will think, "Aha, I know that".
Yet he is as far away from knowing that this is true as the person who declares the concept to be crazy.
ENERGY... ENERGY... AND MORE ENERGY
If we were to declare that all is energy then there would be no argument from anyone. That is because everyone has learned to accept the fact
that everything is made up of variations of the same set of energy elementary particles.
Now what is an elementry particle?
Elementary particles are particles with no measurable internal structure; that is, they are not composed of other particles. They are the fundamental objects of quantum field theory. Many families and sub-families of elementary particles have been identified. They are classified according to their spin.
Now that you know momentarily you can forget it.
So you, now believing in energy, trust that all things are made up of these elementary particles and although we may not in a fundamental sense exist, those particles that build all things do exist.
There are said to be "Quarks" called Up, Down, Charm, Strange, Top and Bottom and of course anti-quarks that carry the opposite charge.
There are said to be "Leptons" which are termed Electrons, Electron-neutrinos, Muons, Muon-Neutrinos, Tau, and finally (for the moment) Tau-neutrinos and anti-leptons which carry the opposite charge.
There are said to be "Bosons" termed Photons, W Bosons, Z Bosons, Gluons, Higgs Bosons and Gravitons.
There are Partners to these called Neutralinos and Charginos, Winos, Zinos, Higgsinos, Gluinos and Gravitinos and the others are not forgoten for their partners are Sleptons, Sneutrons and Squarks.
As if that we insufficient there are composites of these and other hypothetical particles. Now, so that you will be less confused we can say:
None of these elementary particles exists either.
They are just names given to elements that have been perceptually separated from the whole.
Imagine that you have basket of fruit which has been accepted and called 'apples'. Now you detect slight differences in appearance and perhaps how they taste. So you call each apple by a different name, but more than that, you call each of the skins a different name, each of the sorts of pulp a different name, the cores different names and by the types of seed contained by different names.
But you know that really they are all apples.
But you have separated all apples from oranges, pears and other different fruits.
But you know really that they are all fruit.
You see all that has been done is to call things by names that have been detected as different. If a theoretical Martian came down to earth with a different set of senses he would separtate them all differently... There perhaps would be for him no Quarks, Leptons, or Bosons.
But we would agree that there is something out there that is seen and named differently. But what is out there? We don't know. Even the word "energy" is just a name.
THE SENSORY EXPERIENCE
Al those names we have and the sensory experiences accompanying them we call "illusions" of the particular minds that grasps them. What each sees or touches with whatever senses that are available is not "real". That is to say, nothing that is named has real individual existence.
The illusions are useful to manipulate, use and understand things in a common way that permits interactions and communication, but if one believes all these things to be "real" then that is not only an error, but has debilitating consequences that we will explain later.
An interesting question then is, "how does an animal, for example a dog, perceive all these things?" It sees them according to the characteristics that its sensory system is capable of receiving.
It has no self-consciousness so there is no consciousness of being different than all other things, nor is it important. It has no capacity to give names to things and invent their real existence and yet it deals with everything perfectly.
Now that is interesting. It has no names for anything. It has no sense of being. Then how does its internal system work, for our system uses names, words, concepts and asociations between them?
INTERNAL EXPERIENCES
It uses the language of internal experiences which can be stored and associations made with that language, different than ours, as a base.
Do we then have that internal language of Experiences. Yes we do, but it is not the same set of experiences which we generate as Cognitive Experiences.
Suffering, for example is for us a cognitive experience. Other animals do not suffer with cognitive experiences. They have certainly Natural Experiences which are not cognitive that we can consider as noxious, but they certainly do not suffer. That is a human experience that accompanies our mental folly.
They respond correctly and naturally to those Natural Experiences. We respond to our Cognitive experiences and as a consequence suffer.
NATURAL EXPERIENCES
Now what is the difference between the Natural Experiences and the Cognitive Experiences? The language of natural experiences is a more primitive set of experiences. What does that mean? It means that the experiences are not modified by conscious ideation based upon words, phrases and concepts.
Now we come to a point difficult perhaps to understand.
Let us return to that apple.
The apple has a natural experience which is below the level of normal consciousness. Now let us change that original natural consciousness by attaching the word-sound "apple".
Now you have made that word-sound and as a result that sound is conscious.
Furthermore you can invent a way to write that word-sound down.
Now the muscles that made that sound generate an experience. That experience is conscious. Your ears capture that sound by using a set of
receptors that are physical. That experience is conscious. You touch the apple and feel its roundness and that experience is attached to the other two experiences. With the senses you are building an elaborate conscious experience. Futhermore, you can make that experience more complex by adding invented names for color, contour, shape, its source, its function and a thousand other things.
So while the Natural experience generates the capacity to make a correct response, the new set of word experiences generates what we can term "knowing" the apple.
Furthermore we invent a word and concept experience of ourselves, creating "Me" and "I". We can then build around that apple the association of that particular apple with that particular me... and generate "mine". Another word-formed sensory experience.
With the Natural experience, the fox can respond to the "apple" with natural intentions and actions.
With word-sensory-experiences we respond to the apple with hundreds, perhaps thousands of associated ideas and possible responses at the centre of which is "me" and "mine".
The Identity possessor is born. Responses are no longer dictated by the Natural experiences but by the "me-mine" cognitive experiences.
What has happened is that we no longer sense and use as the important factor the natural experiences, but experience instead what the thing is that we have invented by word-experiences. Furthermore, we believe that what we have invented is real.
Identity expectation is born and there is Craving and Clinging.
Suffering is born.
Who is it that suffers? Another "illusion" that we believe is real?
There is nothing wrong with the word-experiences in and of themselves if they can aid the natural experience and meld with them. The word-experiences are not the virus. The virus is the "me and mine" that separates the natural experiences from the cognitive word-experiences that can be possessed.
The Natural experiences have contact with the unknown external world and react correctly to it. The Cognitive word-generated experiences divorce themselves from the Natural experience and generate a false "real and concrete separate existence" for everything that can be classified as "mine" possesed by "me" and everything that can be classified as "not mine" which is not possessed by "me".
If something is seen as mine, possessed by me, then there is clinging, for the "me" wants to continue possession.
If something is seen as "not mine" then the "me" craves its possession.
If you fully understand this then you may have passed from that thought, "that it is crazy," to considering that "nothing exists and that all is illusion", though perhaps with cautious acceptance that it is probably true.
But the only thing that you will have done is understand intellectually. In order to be "liberated" one has to pass beyond that point, even to understanding that "the idea of there being illusion and there being a state where the illusion has some unknowable real substance" is itself illusion.
You can see that that idea would send us into a spin ad infinitum, if it were not for the fact that it actually is posible to end the last conceptualization of "illusion" and generate a final Experience that is not cognitive of that illusion.
TWO TRUTHS
We call this an understanding of the Two Truths. We must in ordinary life accept the Daily Sensory Illusions as True and balance them with the Truth of No-illusion.
Then and only then can one touch the final Cognitive Illusion of both as a whole, accepting that as also True conceptually. The two truths become three and then one.
That then opens the gate to the Non-Conceptual experience in which one can no longer be trapped into believing in the "Illusion" as dominant, nor being trapped into the dangerous belief that "No-illusion" is the greater truth.
Now that is where Wisdom starts.
That is where the path of Introspection and Insight begins.
If you then follow the path understanding this, then eventually with teachings, contemplation and daily vigilance, both illusion and no-illusion cease. This takes great energy, calmness, diligence, determination, perseverance and a mastery of meditation and contemplation.