Illusion can be tricky to understand, but not impossible. It means that the referent is not the same as the representation. When something isn't an illusion, it means the referent is the same as the representation. We have different words for different kinds of illusion. I can show you an actual, physical chair, or a picture of a chair. The first is not an illusion, while the second is.
You watch a real television show on a real television. The television is designed to create visual illusions of real things. But the television is itself real. The show is a dramatic rendering, an illusion, of real-life situations.
So there's three elements needed to make illusion. A referent, a representation, and a type.
Consciousness is real, but its contents are illusory, thought represents things that are not those things.
> I can show you an actual, physical chair, or a picture of a chair. The first is not an illusion, while the second is.
If the picture of the chair is so good that one mistakes it for a real chair, yes, otherwise I wouldn’t classify it as an illusion.
On a tangential note, people enjoying this discussion might enjoy the beginning of chapter two[1] (or even the whole book) of Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics”[2].
Enlightenment is the destruction of the perception that there is a separate watcher apart from the watched. Non-duality. Not-two. Just one. Since illusion requires three elements, the non-dual is just one element, there is no illusion.
Any time you step 'outside', like if you look at a chair, you're dwelling in illusion. Mind generated a 'tag' for the thing you're seeing. It's not really a chair, it's a bundle of atoms. But there's no bundle of atoms, that's also a tag generated by mind. The mind itself isn't what you think it is. Everything is an illusion.
Tricky to understand until you realize there's no such thing as enlightenment, it's just a religious dogma. Enlightened yogis are no different than the rest of us.
One can train the mind to perceive fewer distinctions, this is yogic practice. You can even arrive at a state of mind that you can call enlightenment. But the lie is revealed any time you open your mouth. The state of mind that is being trained is an illusion like everything else.
Real yogis understand this and do it anyway. Fake yogis try to fool you into believing that you can truly get rid of everything and 'merely exist'. It's not an illusion at this point, it's a lie.
You watch a real television show on a real television. The television is designed to create visual illusions of real things. But the television is itself real. The show is a dramatic rendering, an illusion, of real-life situations.
So there's three elements needed to make illusion. A referent, a representation, and a type.
Consciousness is real, but its contents are illusory, thought represents things that are not those things.