' The world is a bubble '...

We have now to ask, "How do we come to look upon the snake as real?

What persuades us to take such illusions on their face value?"

When we examine the position of perception--upon which they are based and within whose sphere they appear objectively--we find that we always see the world in clothes of four dimensions, three of space and one of time.

Kant has laboriously demonstrated how the mind superimposes these two characteristics on its vision of the world;

that is to say, they lie within the mind and not outside it.

It is therefore perfectly possible for mental constructions to be extended in space and occur in time, thus assuming all the characteristics of conventional reality, and still remain nothing more than mental workings after all.

Buddha's ultra-keen insight noted this illusoriness of the spatial relation and so he likened the world to a bubble.


- Paul Brunton